‘It’s all dark,’ Pete says, struggling free. ‘Don’t look like there’s anyone home.’
Drover looks out cautiously, around the tree. There are no lights burning in the house, even though the afternoon sunlight has started to weaken. He can see inside quite clearly. Through the window he sees what looks like a kitchen with wall cupboards, a door and a passageway beyond. But the place is still. There is a feel of abandonment, like no one comes here, like no one’s been here for a while.
There’s no car, though there is a long brick wall that looks like the side of a garage. And above this is a smaller room, taking up half of the space of what’s below. Definitely a flat garage roof with an extension above, Drover thinks. Curtains are drawn up there as they are across the whole of the upper floor windows.
And on the ground floor he sees that there is a small porch on the side, with a glass-panelled back door leading into the kitchen.
The kitchen.
‘Drover,’ Pete whispers.
‘What?’
‘Why are there no birds singing no more?’
Three
THERE IS A FAMILY IN A CAR, driving to somewhere. They leave the main road and head across country, towards the woods. It will be some time before they reach their destination. The man who is driving turns off his mobile phone and gives the woman next to him a concerned look. Neither of them is happy.
But that comes as no surprise to the painfully emaciated and ill looking girl in the back seat.
Lily is eighteen today. She shares her birthday with her grandfather. She thinks there might be cake later. She hopes so. She has not eaten properly in weeks. That’s by choice, but not her choice. Her parents have been starving her. She has not been allowed out of the house. She has been kept at home getting weaker and weaker and more and more hungry, and all as a kind of preparation. For today. For the birthday party her parents say her grandfather is going to give her.
‘It will make it all the more worth waiting for,’ her mother had said.
Some birthday.
She runs her tongue around the brace that clamps her teeth straight and that will one day, maybe, actually come off, and stares at the seat in front. She wonders what the plastic would taste like. Better than nothing, she guesses. She can see her mother’s head over the top of the seat: severe hair, cut, trimmed, styled, coloured, everything. She can also smell her perfume wafting back as the slightly open window blows air in. It’s not a nice smell. There’s orange in it somewhere and that’s making Lily feel sick. Not that there is anything to bring up. Just bile and water. She wonders what that would taste like if she sicked it up and then ate it. Better than nothing.
Dogs do it.
Her eyes stay fixed on the back of her mother’s head as she listens to her yapping.
‘Take it easy, Myles, we want to arrive in one piece. Watch out for that… what was that? A dead hedgehog?’
That’d be better than nothing, Lily thinks.
‘Did he really say that? I mean, how long have we been trying to persuade him? I know, a long time. Stupid man. Stupid man! What does he do with it? Nothing. Why does he not do something with it? It’s criminal.’
Lily’s father laughs, briefly, suddenly, out of nervousness more than anything else. Her eyes dart across to him. Gentle man, soft man, greying around the temples man, a face with more lines than a rail network. Stupid man.
‘Not funny, Myles! Things could have been so different if he’d not been so… so…’
‘Well, what do you expect, Pam?’ Myles’ voice is, as always, soft yet confident. He can take in any amount of abuse, any amount of heckling and bickering, and let out only calm compassion and considered thought in return. ‘I mean,’ he goes on, ‘what do you expect him to do with it?’
‘Help us out for a start,’ Pam barks back. Her yapping has been driving Lily mad all day, but now it’s started turning to louder, shorter, shriller barks. Is there a word such as ‘shriller’, she wonders? She says it over in her head some more, shriller, shriller, shriller, and it sounds like exactly what is coming out of her mother’s mouth.
‘I shall be so glad when this whole thing is over with,’ she’s now shrilling, as if everything was Myles’ fault. It possibly is, thinks Lily. After all, it comes down through Myles, doesn’t it?
And then she thinks of the word ‘shrilling’ and decides it is the opposite of ‘thrilling’ which is what today was meant to be. But isn’t.
‘But it is not up to us, is it?’ Myles is now reasoning.
‘Not yet.’
‘Not necessarily.’ He almost chided her then. That was a bit daring.
Lily is staring at the back of Pam’s head, but now her eyes are narrowing. Lily wishes she would just talk about it rather than hide it away. As if the car was bugged, as if she knew nothing about it and her mother was trying to keep a secret from her. But, no. Pam is undercover, in some kind of un-thrilling thriller where she’s shrilling her way through today like the bossy, clacketty old wind-up witch she is.
Lily decides to twist her mother up a notch.
‘Now I’m eighteen,’ she says in her clear, confident voice, ‘I can have a boyfriend.’
‘Oh, my God, no!’ Pam shrieks and turns to face back as if Lily had just suggested she open the car door and leap out into oncoming traffic. She’s waving a hand towards the back seat, almost reaching Lily’s knee, flapping it down as if trying to swat a mosquito. ‘No, no, no such thought, girl. We have spoken on this. No.’
Lily smiles back at her calmly. She knows Pam is terrified of Lily having a boyfriend. She’s not even allowed school friends, or she wasn’t when she was at school. She’s been home educated for a few years now, ever since that day when her father found something in a book.
That was when Lily started to think that there might be something not quite normal about her family.
It was summer, she remembers (as Pam calms and settles to face front again and badger Myles). Lily wonders what badger would taste like and then her mind wanders to the past again.
It was in the summer holidays when she was, she reckons, ten. She was in the sitting room, her back to the sofa, on the floor and playing with a drawing book, colouring in between the lines. Her dad was on the other sofa staring at a book, reading and re-reading the same page. She never saw him turn the page, that’s how she knew it was important. That’s what caught her attention. And then Pam came in, straight from work.
She had come into the room fast, as if she was expecting to catch people out, like she was playing a part in a cop show. She threw her mobile phone on the sofa and it bounced. Lily listened as her parents discussed something she didn’t understand.
‘So it is true?’ Pam was asking, and Myles was nodding. ‘We’ve always suspected.’
‘I’ve always lived with it,’ he said, and that made Lily raise her head as her father had actually said something like he meant it. He sounded upset.
‘We’ve both known it, really,’ Pam said, and looked across at Lily. She carried on staring at her as she went on. ‘And you’re sure?’
‘It’s all in this book,’ Myles said, and showed her a page.
‘It’s just a book.’
‘It’s one of dad’s. I saw him this morning. We talked about it, and we have to make up our minds.’
‘It kind of limits him, doesn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. He doesn’t have to do it, and, on the day, he decides when. He decides if he wants to, right up to the last moment. The only other way is…’
‘Will he? Did you ask?’ That sounded like an interruption. Pam looked down at Lily and smiled. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ she said. Lily’s skin bristled.
‘No.’ Myles shook his head. ‘It’s eight years away now. No point in winding him up about it yet. The ti
me will come.’
‘But, meanwhile, we starve?’
Lily remembers Pam taking the book, reading for a while and then looking over at her again. Her father leaned over and looked as well. She felt uncomfortable and felt like they were planning something.
‘We will have to take special care of her,’ Myles said.
Pam just grunted and started biting a nail; a sure sign that she was thinking and not to be disturbed.
In the car, watching the back of her mother’s head, Lily knows that they have been planning something ever since, but she had never known exactly what until recently. Things have been building to this date, her eighteenth birthday.
The furtiveness of her parents, particularly her mother, the starvation diet and control had all been unnerving Lily and so she created a plan of her own. She is not sure how she feels about her plan, but she knows how she feels about the alternative.
Actually, she is sure how she feels. She decides there and then. She knows how she feels and she is determined. She felt the same last week as she feels now. She knows what she has to do and she knows she wants to do it.
It’s the only way she’s going to get to eat.
Lily has a dream and it doesn’t involve her parents, or her grandfather. Or even his house. It involves someone she has dreamt up but not yet met; someone who can hold her hand, someone who won’t mind her brace, someone she can run through the woods with, lie in the grass with, someone she can eat with.
She thinks of food and holds her stomach. There’s hardly anything there. How long has she been on water only? What are they starving her for? She thinks she knows. She has an idea put together from overheard snippets of conversations, but when she thinks about what they might have planned, it seems all too ludicrous.
Thinking that way leads to painful thoughts of food so she fantasises about someone she can spend her life with, away from these two, these so-called parents who keep her locked away, who rule her life, keep her weak.
Why doesn’t she just run away?
She will. But not yet. She has not found ‘him’ yet.
They won’t let her have a boyfriend. They say they have one in mind for her when she is older. They have chosen the man Lily will marry and yet she’s not met him. She doesn’t mind that they have arranged this as she knows it is planned for a long while ahead yet.
And by then it won’t actually matter.
Lily feels in her secret pocket, the one she sewed into her oversized coat last week, the one no-one but she knows about. Her fingers play with the small, secret thing and she smiles, her heart pumping with anticipation.
Not long to wait now.
She notices her mother scratching through her handbag. Myles glances over.
‘Did you bring everything?’
‘Of course.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes!’ Shrilling.
Lily sits back and watches the wide fields slide past outside. Up ahead she can see the rise of a hill and the approach of a long line of trees like a force field. It’s like they are driving from one world and into another.
Lily raises her hand and forms the shape of a pistol with her fingers. As Pam shrills on about watching the road and getting their own way, Lily fires her fingers and imagines her mother’s brain hitting the windscreen.
Thrilling.
Four
IN THE KITCHEN, a wall clock ticks peacefully, the cooker shows the time, the single glass sits on the dry draining board, the door to the garage is closed.
The soft carpet beyond the kitchen in the hall is warmly lit by the light that filters through the glass of the front door. Light that is growing weaker as the day dies. The dining room door is closed. That room is only used on special occasions. The door to the front room stands open, the lazy clock ticks more sluggishly within, as if time moves more reluctantly there. It’s waiting for something to happen, this large room that looks out onto the drive, gravel and greenery. It’s not a view exactly, but an outlook onto sheltering trees, deep and encasing, forming a barrier, a way of keeping everything out. Everything except the sun which is now just starting to dip behind the tallest of the trees.
The living room is silent, apart from the clock. There is nothing remarkable here. Pictures on the walls are of scenes, landscapes, more trees. The walls are painted white, all very simple and straightforward. The furniture is a mad mix of old and modern.
A large sofa faces the big window and sits up on wooden feet; it is long and one colour of green with three big cushions. It is pulled away from the walls slightly so that it’s possible to squeeze behind it to reach the pictures on the wall, or serve drinks to guests over their shoulders. Not that the room sees many guests. Kathleen and Janet don’t entertain from the record player anymore. But there is a rosewood table beside the picture window that hosts a tray of bottles. Someone likes to vary their drinking diet. There is even an ice bucket, but with no ice.
The old clock ticks half-heartedly away, still waiting for something to happen.
The carpet is the same in here as it is in the hall, and as it is on the stairs that rise up with a white painted banister to the first floor.
Upstairs, the sound of the clock dies to silence. Real, thick, plush-carpeted silence. The den door is closed; the passageway that runs from that end of the house to the other has four other doors and the stairwell leading off it. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, a cupboard, it’s a modest house. Nothing out of the ordinary. It smells of new carpet, and the passage floor is soft under foot if you walk on it. Not many people do.
At the end of the corridor, just past the door to the master bedroom, there is a hatch in the ceiling. This leads into the loft via a ladder that drops down, just like many other houses. Nothing special. The bathroom was re-done in the 1980’s and so could do with being turned back to white, rather than the strange green colour it is, but, other than that, there is nothing to see here.
Nor is there anything to hear as the sun sinks lower behind the trees casting an uneven line of shadow that reaches the house. The eerie darkness creeps in through the windows and up the walls, slowly, silently, like a rising tide of pointed heads straining up to see what’s happening inside.
The house grows colder.
And then from downstairs comes the tiniest tinkle of breaking glass.
Drover’s hand reaches in through the broken pane of the back door and turns the handle. The door gives, and he holds his breath expecting an alarm to sound.
The door just clicks open. It doesn’t even creak as he opens it further and steps inside.
‘Drover?’
Drover shushes Pete with a look, a finger to the lips. He signals for Pete to wait where he is and Pete nods obediently.
Drover avoids the broken glass on the floor, steps over it and moves further into the kitchen. He turns to check that Pete is staying still and realises that the door wasn’t locked. There is no key in the keyhole and no bolts. Someone is very trusting.
Directly ahead is a kitchen table, pine he thinks, looks new. Oddly, there is only one chair drawn up to it. Drover looks towards the cupboards on his right and then to the sink on his left. Through the window above it he sees the woods, close. The room is darkening. It’s a pretty long kitchen with a door at the far end and another off to the right. He sees light coming in that way and figures that must be the hall, facing the sunset. And, by that door, is a tall, white fridge freezer.
He takes another step into the room and towards the fridge. He’s listening all the time, his ears tuned in for the sound of any movement upstairs or in another room. Listening for a radio, a television, a phone conversation. Nothing but the kitchen clock. It’s ticking in time with his heart rate. Fast.
Tightening his grip on the shotgun, he peers around the door frame into the hall. Just a pas
sage, stairs up on his left, a door into a cupboard beneath them. A large front door with opaque glass glowing yellow with the weak rays of sunlight. A closed door to the left, an open one to the right. And no sound, but, perhaps, another clock ticking somewhere. He looks up. No sign of anyone on the stairs, no one creeping down. He moves into the hall, always listening and always looking up. The upstairs curtains were closed, he remembers, and there are no lights on.
He peers into the front room through the crack of the door; looks nice, plush but cluttered, and there’s no one in it. No sign of a car out front, nothing to be seen through the window but a drive heading off between the trees and then turning about fifty yards down the lane. A lane that is cut as close to the trees as the house is. It’s like the whole place wants to be kept hidden.
He presses his ear to the other door. Nothing. Still no sound from above.
He moves more confidently back into the kitchen, and, with even more assurance, puts his shotgun down on the table in the middle of the room.
He signals for Pete to come in quietly and Pete does. Almost like a cartoon character he takes big moon-walking steps, making Drover smile. He puts a finger to his lips and goes to the fridge.
As he opens the large white door Pete comes up beside him. Light spills out onto both of them. Their jaws drop and their eyes open wide when they see what lies inside.
‘We hit the jackpot, Pete,’ Drover says in awe.
‘But, Drover, this is stealing.’
‘It’s not, Pete. We’re desperate, right? Whoever lives in a big house like this won’t mind if we take a bite to eat. They can afford to fix the glass in the door an’ all, I should think. If I’d known it was unlocked I’d never have broken it.’
Lonely House Page 4