by Kim Newman
‘Talk about peace and quiet,’ said Ben. ‘Listen to that.’
A few birds. Tiny tree-shifting sounds. Kirsty pottering about in the house. No traffic, no voices, no car alarms.
‘And breathe the air.’
Steven took in a lungful and didn’t choke.
‘Wait till someone spills a load of cow’s muck on the road,’ said Trey. ‘Then talk to me about your effluents.’
‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Mr Naremore,’ said Jimmie. ‘This isn’t the city.’
‘True,’ said Trey. ‘No clubs, no cinemas, no tube trains, no Saturday nights. Prob’ly can’t get espresso for a hundred mile hereabouts.’
‘Oh yes I can. I’ve brought my own machine.’
Trey laughed, dreads shaking.
‘We’re here to escape from Saturday nights,’ Steven said.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ said Jimmie.
‘I’d go mad inside a week,’ said Trey.
‘Just be careful,’ said Jimmie. ‘Shadows can be deceiving. You need to shine your light all around.’
* * *
Kirsty put a bowl of apples, which Tim had gathered, on top of her new chest of drawers, the Weezie chest. She remembered how it went, and recited to herself.
‘“The top drawer always had the same thing in and the bottom drawer never had the same thing twice and the middle drawer was always a jumble of surprises.”’
She pulled open the top drawer. It was empty. And the bottom drawer. Empty too. The middle drawer was stuck. She had to scrape a seal of paint with a nail-file before she could jiggle it open. It was crammed with bent, rusty wire coat hangers. A jumble, certainly, but not really surprising. She took out the hangers and twisted them into a modern artwork which she shoved into one of the Sainsbury’s bags they were using for the rubbish. Hanger-hooks speared through the plastic like claws.
So much for Weezie’s magic chest of drawers.
When she was a little girl, Louise Teazle must have had more imagination than Kirsty’s children. Of course, she had grown up to be a writer. She had to have imagination. Sometimes Kirsty wondered what was wrong with her kids. Shouldn’t they be crazier? They were both far too responsible. At Jordan’s age, she’d been a wild woman, with biro-tattooed knuckles and safety-pin piercings. Her daughter’s watchwords were ‘neat’ and ‘nice’. There was hope for Tim, though, when he grew out of this military thing.
A magic chest of drawers shouldn’t be empty. She pulled out the bottom drawer and popped in an apple. She hadn’t noticed but there was an old newspaper lining the drawer, faded to match the brown of the wood. The headlines were about Chairman Mao and Christian Barnard. She shut the drawer.
Pleased with herself, she put apples in the two other drawers.
Weezie, she remembered, had to feed her chest of drawers with cake, to keep it magic. Louise’s mother (‘Mama’) must have gone spare if she really did that, left pieces of cake in with the linen to mould.
She looked out of the window.
Jordan sat in her rocking chair in her own bedroom window, in the opposite tower. She looked like Norman’s mother in Psycho, which made Kirsty giggle. Steven was in the drive, bonding with the removal men over beer. Tim was in the orchard, creeping up on an invisible enemy.
From here, she could see her whole family.
Knowing where everything was calmed her. Vron said Kirsty was deathly afraid of letting things get away from her, that she needed perspective. That was one of Vron’s metaphors, but here it was literally true. All along, what she had needed was not Temazepam or primal scream therapy but a tower tall enough to look down from, to be sure everything was all right.
She wanted an apple. An apple from the orchard.
There were some still in the bowl, but she decided to take one out of the chest.
She opened the top drawer. There was no apple.
She felt inside, reaching and finding that the drawer had no back. The apple must have fallen.
The middle drawer was stuck again, so she pulled out the bottom drawer. Two apples lay on the newspaper. She laughed, realising the magic had worked. The top drawer, which had been empty when she first pulled it out, always had the same thing in it. Nothing. The bottom drawer, which had also been empty, never had the same thing twice. First it was empty, then it had one apple, now two apples. Of course, there was an explanation. The apple had fallen from the top drawer to the bottom. All magic was like that, she supposed: it came with an explanation.
She gave the middle drawer a wrench, not really expecting a jumble of surprises. The drawer came open, and she looked down at a pool of apple sauce.
* * *
Time to make a full report to the PP. Tim snapped off a salute, and ran down the intel he had gathered from his recce.
Dad nodded. Usually, he barely took in Tim’s reports. Today, first day of the new mission, he paid attention.
‘There are no hostiles within the perimeter,’ Tim reported. ‘This is a safety zone.’
‘That’s good to know, Timmy.’
‘The IP is friendly.’
‘International pachyderms?’
‘Indigenous population.’
Dad flashed a proper smile. ‘Of course.’
‘I’ll run information-gathering sorties over the next week, so we know what animal life we’ve got around the place.’
‘Did you run across a little girl in a straw hat?’
‘No, PP. Should I have?’
Tim was genuinely puzzled.
‘Not really. You can stand down now, Timmy.’
Tim let his breath out and slumped a little.
‘You look tuckered out, soldier. Better hop off to the bathroom and get that camouflage off before the MP catches you. There’ll be an inspection later. Best not have dirt under the fingernails.’
Tim recognised Dad was playing along. The PP only half-understood the mission. Brass were like that everywhere, Tim supposed. But they were over him for a reason. His job wasn’t to question authority.
He made his way to one of the bathrooms.
He would be careful to look out for this little girl in a straw hat. She was probably not hostile, but he couldn’t be sure until he’d cleared her himself.
In the bathroom, he methodically cleaned his face, hands and arms. Then he changed into civvies.
* * *
How could that happen?
It wasn’t exactly apple sauce. There were pips and a stem in there, and shredded peel. She touched it, but didn’t dare taste. It was as if a whole apple had been put in a blender and given a couple of minutes.
A jumble of surprises?
She shut the drawer and pulled it out again.
Still apple sauce, but she found out why the drawer kept sticking. One last hanger-hook, broken off, was caught in the runner. It had come loose now and lay in the apple mess.
She looked in the top drawer. Still empty.
The bottom. No apples, no newspaper. A shiny copper coin. A 1948 half-penny. She shut the drawer and pulled it out again. No apples, no newspaper, no coin. A single, limp, white glove. She took it out and slipped it on. It was elbow-length, with a pearl button at the wrist. It felt warm, as if it had just been worn. She liked the glove. It was elegant, seemly, fitting, and it fitted.
She closed and opened the drawer again, hoping for a match. This time, there was a dried, pressed flower. A rose. That gave her pause. Rose was her middle name, and Vron’s. A word of power between them. When they signed messages ‘Rose’, it signified something of paramount importance. They had called their music venture Rose Records. She picked up the rose with gloved fingers.
It was as if she was being spoken to, with symbols. A very Vron-like way of going about things.
No. She was being silly. The chest must be a conjuring prop. There were hidden blades in the middle drawer, and a false back to the whole thing. When she opened and closed the drawers, she was tripping tiny levers, shifting objects around. It was no su
rprise Louise would have such a thing. She wrote about magic, so people would have given her magical presents. Had it been made for one of the television adaptations of Weezie?
She opened the top drawer, the one that always had the same thing, nothing. It did not disappoint her. She took the plastic bag of bent coat hangers and jammed it in. The bag barely fitted and she had to bend and break the hangers further, ripping the bag to uselessness, to get the tangle to lie flat enough for her to close the drawer.
She counted slowly up to five and opened the top drawer.
Nothing.
She closed and opened, closed and opened, closed and opened.
The hangers were gone for ever. This was better than a kitchen waste-disposal unit. She found other things that needed to be thrown away – bags and wrappers and ruptured cardboard boxes – and disappeared them.
She picked up the chest of drawers. It wasn’t heavy. It couldn’t contain an intricate mechanism. It wasn’t connected to any hidden chute. She’d humped it here from Jordan’s room and knew it was just a piece of furniture.
It was magic. That was all there was to it.
* * *
Steven was in charge of the family’s first proper meal at the Hollow. Kirsty had produced a bean salad in Tupperware and a joint of cold ham for lunch, which had been eaten outside with the removal men. Now the family were alone together and could break bread – Delia’s pasta carbonara, actually, but with warmed French bread on the side – at their own table.
Tim set the places. Jordan picked the wine and the music (she had to tell Steven who it was, Julie London). The children collaborated on the carrying-out of bowls and bottles from the kitchen to the big room, which he realised now was to be called the Summer Room. Never before had Steven cooked in a room different from the one where they ate. It meant a whole new tier of jobs to be parcelled out.
Kirsty came down from the tower, in her backless cream evening dress, with one white glove. She had put her hair up.
Steven was stunned.
Tonight, when the kids were in bed, there was another inaugural ceremony to be seen to. When they had got their first flat together, they had christened all three rooms in one night, with dozes between bouts of lovemaking, and had enough left over in the early morning for afterplay in the tub of the tiny bathroom.
Counting the inside toilet, the secret passage, the larder and the foyer but not the outside toilet or the barn-garage (which might bear investigation), there were sixteen rooms at the Hollow. Maybe more, if some of the wardrobes were reckoned and further exploration of the unused store-rooms disclosed secret nooks. At thirty-eight, Steven wasn’t sure if he was up to it in a month, let alone a night. And there’d be awful complications with Jordan’s and Tim’s rooms.
Looking at Kirsty, though, he wondered.
These last years – God knows how many? – their lives had been changing. Properly looking at her had sometimes been difficult. There were always people – the kids, Vron, others – and things – work, craziness, medication – in the way. They had both turned into strangers.
His wife was still a stranger, but not in a frightening way. Behind her, the moors were twilit. A moon hung up high, light scattering in through the wall of glass, falling all about the Summer Room. The view was spectacular, endlessly changing but eternally the same. From this room, the landscape they saw was exactly as it would have been to a Monmouth rebel or a Roman legionary standing on the same spot. Only the occasional winking red aeroplane light among the stars let slip that this was nearly the twenty-first century.
And his wife was the same. Eternally the same, eternally a surprise. He remembered how she had been when they met, and understood that in recent years she had just channelled her wildness into other things. Now, it was being directed back at him and his mouth was dry with excitement.
‘Where’s the other glove, Mum?’ Jordan asked.
‘Does everything have to be symmetrical, darling girl?’
Kirsty made a flourish with her fingers.
Steven was suddenly very hungry indeed.
They all took their places at the table, clustering at one end around a candelabrum Jordan had found in one of the unexplored rooms. Candles dripped on white cloth. The big bowl of pasta had to be passed from person to person. It was almost too heavy for Tim.
Steven hadn’t had to say grace since school and wasn’t about to start now. But something had to be said. He could not let this moment pass.
He lifted a glass of wine.
‘A toast, I’m afraid. We have to have one. Jordan, pour Tim some wine.’
No protest came from Kirsty, whose eyes and earrings sparkled with candlelight. Tim put aside his orange juice and Jordan grinned at her brother as she decanted a half-measure of Chilean red. Steven was determined to do this properly.
‘To us, to the Naremore family, and to our new home. We would like to thank the Hollow for having us, and we hope that it will keep us always.’
‘Here here,’ said Jordan, chinking her glass against Tim’s.
The sparkles in Kirsty’s eyes were tears. Steven’s chest tightened with unbidden memories of other tears. The glass in his hand was crystal, very easy to shatter with too heavy a grip.
Kirsty dabbed her eyes with the back of her new-old glove and touched his glass with hers. She mouthed ‘I love you’ at him and took a deep drink.
‘Magic,’ she said out loud.
They ate.
* * *
Jordan lay on her old mattress in her new bed. She was a little tipsy. Halfway through the meal, she realised her parents were looking at each other the way she and Rick looked at each other. It was the feeling she associated with Peggy Lee singing ‘Fever’, that finger-snapping, languid beat of mutual desire.
Right now, in the other tower, her parents were having sex. She was more aware of it than she ever had been in the flat, though her room there had adjoined her parents’. One or other of them had been sleeping out of the flat or on the front-room sofa for what seemed like three-quarters of the time.
She supposed it was a good thing, Mum and Dad making love. But, still, well… ugh!
The landline wouldn’t be hooked up until tomorrow and she hadn’t been able to exchange more than a few words with Rick’s father on Dad’s mobile. She gathered Rick wasn’t at home. She hadn’t expected him to stay in, missing her, though that would probably have made her feel nice.
When she had a phone in her room, she would be able to talk to Rick every night. She tipsily pondered this phone sex thing. How did it work exactly? Like Rock Hudson and Doris Day in their split-screen baths in Pillow Talk?
She didn’t feel alone or lonely.
There were tiny movements in the room. The chair by the window was rocking, not vigorously, not noisily. It was a comfort. The rocking was in time to ‘Fever’.
All at once, she fell asleep and dreamed.
* * *
She kept her glove on, enjoying the feel of him through satin, hooking her arm around his neck. In the dark, they were new people, without all the baggage of a marriage. Kirsty forgot everything beyond the bed.
Afterwards, she was too exhausted to sleep. The rhythm still beat in her body, and she still felt him close, pushing gently against her, pressing down tenderly. He had most of the duvet but she was warm enough, wondering if her skin was glowing with the heat she felt inside.
Steven had dropped off and was sighing in his sleep. He only snored when he had the flu.
She slipped out from under his arm and rolled off the bed, landing like a cat.
Perspiration dried on her back.
The moon shone through the curtains. She crawled across the floor, feeling the bare boards between the rugs, relishing the scent of the old wood, and sat cross-legged in front of her magic chest.
‘Thank you, Weezie,’ she whispered.
She peeled off her glove, finding her arm and hand slick with sweat, and popped it into the top drawer. She made the glove go away, pad
ded back across the room, and slipped into bed. She gently wrestled a stretch of the duvet onto herself, snuggled against the comforting presence of her husband, and surrendered to night and darkness.
* * *
The family all dreamed the same dream. They were together, at the Hollow, on the crazy paving patio beyond the French windows of the Summer Room, looking at the orchard, which was crowded with more trees than they had imagined. The sun was high but its light was as gentle as the moon. Everything was alive and moving lazily: the trees, the birds, the house, the grass, the streams.
From out of the orchard came a little girl in a straw hat and a white sailor suit, with blue ribbons around her hat and waist and knees. She was solemn beyond her years but bright and friendly and all that they could wish she was. She was a friend and a sister and a daughter and a comfort.
With her, hanging back cautiously in the green shadows of the orchard, were playmates. The little girl looked at the family, fixing on each in turn, seeing right into their hearts. She understood at once that they were not what they had been in the city but were reborn in this place, at the Hollow.
Once she had decided that it was all right, her playmates came out of the trees.
The family were seized with joy.
Settling In
As weeks passed, the family settled, explored, discovered. They filled the Hollow, fitted in nicely.
They lost their city pallor and began to tan. They ate healthily and never got tired of apples. They were not bothered by insects, even at dusk. Midges swarmed in pestilential clouds across the moor but turned aside at the ditch-moat of the property.
In tune with their surroundings, the family were at last in tune with each other. They listened, they cared, they were tolerant, they loved and were loved.
They were constantly surprised, but never shocked.