by Alison Moore
Jessie still saw Eleanor’s name in the papers from time to time, along with her own, though less and less now. Life carried on, and in a way that was the worst thing.
She moved out of her parents’ house and into a cheap flat in another county. She married Brendan and took his name.
Visitation
I wake in my hotel room in Bruges to find that I have been bitten, perhaps by something that flew into the room or perhaps by bed bugs; I have been bitten terribly in my sleep.
I keep finding bumps, tight bumps that itch. I try not to scratch them while I eat my breakfast. I try not to scratch them while I travel on towards the Channel where I will cross. They keep coming up, these bumps, more and more of them, or perhaps I am only just noticing them all. I worry that I might be somehow bringing the bed bugs – or whatever it was that bit me – home with me. Perhaps I will carry them into our bedroom; I will find my own bedsheets infested.
I cross from Belgium into France. When I was a boy, I always wanted stamps in my passport; I wanted a record of where I had been. Now I like the way it feels to cross a border without documentation, without the thud of an ink stamp; I like to slip through unobserved.
I approach the ferry terminal in Calais. When I was here with Jessie, we could see the camp from the road: the tightly packed tents on the far side of the mesh fence. Now, the camp is gone; I don’t know where they are, the thousands of migrants who had to disperse. The army, in camouflage with big black guns strapped across their bodies, looked in through the windows of our car and through the windows of all the vehicles that rolled by.
Now, here again without Jessie, I’m a foot passenger, with very little luggage, walking onto the boat that will take me home.
In the lull between Christmas and New Year, Jessie packed her travel bag ready for her journey south. She stripped the bed, even though it was not the weekend: she would sleep on fresh sheets and go home to her family feeling clean. She put the bedding into the laundry basket and carried it down to the washing machine. When she had emptied the bedding into the machine, she found, right at the bottom of the wicker basket, the missing piece of sky, the missing corner of her dad’s jigsaw puzzle. She could not think how it had got there. It hardly seemed possible that she should find it just there, when it had last been seen in the childhood home she had rarely visited since leaving; and how many times had she emptied her laundry basket in the meantime? And yet there it was, down at the bottom of the basket, wedged in the weave, a bit of blue sky. She put it into her travel bag, into a little pocket where it would be safe.
She took the dog for a longer walk than usual, and came back past the fish and chip shop, stopping to get herself a fish supper: battered cod, without the pickled onion. She ate it back at home, sitting at her kitchen table, eyeing the windows, looking for any new cracks. She finished an open bottle of wine, not wanting to waste it.
After locking up, she went upstairs, pulling the spare room door to as she passed on her way to the bathroom. She soaked for a while in a hot bath and then got into bed, in between the layers of clean cotton, and tried to sleep.
Awake in the night, she listened to the thumping and scurrying that might have been the cat chasing after a mouse, and the wet slapping sound that was probably just the dog licking its private parts. She was regretting the fish supper, which was lying rather heavily on her stomach. But what was really keeping her awake, she decided, was that creaking sound and, faintly, a knocking sound, coming from the spare room.
She got out of bed and, in the dark, made her way out onto the landing, where she stood and looked at the spare room door, which was ajar. Will had always referred to the house as settling, or trying to settle: it must have been trying to settle for decades, from one century to the next.
She pushed the door a little further open. The room, with its parted curtains, was moonlit; the blue carpet looked like undisturbed water.
‘Eleanor?’ she said. She glimpsed something, felt the faintest touch of something against her leg. She looked to see if the cat was darting away down the hallway, but it was too dark to tell.
When she stepped forward over the threshold, when her foot touched the carpet, she almost expected to see ripples. She crossed the room slowly, carefully, making her way to the far end, to the bed, where she sat down.
‘Eleanor?’ she said.
She saw The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse standing in the doorway, watching her. She clicked her fingers, but the dog did not come. She said its name, but it did not come. In the privacy of their house, in the dim room, she used its full name, but it did not come.
Jessie lay down on the narrow bed, on which she was a little bit cramped. She watched the darkness, while the sash window trembled in its frame.
When she woke in the morning, it was after seven. The radio had come on in her own room, and she had not heard it.
She had wanted to leave the house early, but she also wanted to have her shower and straighten her hair and have her five-a-day for breakfast, so that she would feel all right on the journey. She wanted to wear her watch, and spent some time looking for it but could not find it.
She had meant to catch a bus before eight o’clock and to be at her parents’ house that afternoon, but in the end the bus she caught left well after eight and her plan went to pieces. It was gone ten by the time she reached Carlisle: she had missed the train she’d had her eye on and would not leave Carlisle now until after eleven; she would not reach her parents’ house until the evening. Her mother would put out a tea at five o’clock, but she would wait for Jessie to arrive before starting to eat; the tea would spoil. Even though Jessie would call ahead to warn her mother that she would be late, still at five o’clock her mother would put out the tea because that was teatime, that had always been teatime, and they would wait for her, terribly quietly, with the inherited retirement carriage clock ticking, ticking. Her mother would say that she had done it on purpose: perhaps not consciously, she would say, but subconsciously you wanted to miss that train.
Killing time in Carlisle, Jessie had a cup of tea in the same cafe bar that she had been to previously. She found herself watching the entrance, looking for Robert, who did not appear.
Someone said, ‘Look what you’ve gone and done,’ and Jessie turned to see the spilt juice, and a child sitting looking at it, so sorry but not knowing what to do about it, other than wanting to touch it, as it spread across the table.
Jessie kept reaching for her travel bag to make sure that it was still there, patting the side pocket in which she had put the piece of sky that was to be returned to her dad.
She caught the late morning train. She favoured the route that had only one change, minimising the likelihood of her missing a connection. She would change at Birmingham New Street. There had been sinkholes in Birmingham, and elsewhere. She had seen them on the news: giant sinkholes in roads and driveways and gardens. Something shifted beneath the surface, and then the ground just collapsed; you went to step outside your door, or you came down the same road you always came down, and found that, where there had been solid ground, there was just a vast hole.
From Birmingham, the train headed vaguely east. As if dithering, procrastinating, it veered up to Leicester before turning towards Cambridge again. When Jessie had moved with Brendan to the Midlands, Gail had promised to visit her, and she had kept her promise. Jessie had gone to meet Gail’s train at Loughborough station. As the train from Leicester pulled in, Jessie stood on the platform scanning the carriages, looking for a familiar face through the orange doors’ long windows, not entirely sure that her sister really would be there, that when the doors opened, her sister would step out, would come forward and hug her. She still could not quite believe that Eleanor would not be there.
Normally, they would have gone to a museum. Gail had been a history student and had always loved museums. She had included Jessie in National Trust excursions; she h
ad family membership. But now, Jessie did not like to suggest it, and was left not knowing quite what to do.
Recently, Jessie had been to Leicester Cathedral to see Richard III. When she had first heard the news about this king, whose remains had been missing for centuries before being found beneath a council car park, she had had to think which one he was: he was the bad one, she decided, the one who had locked those two young princes in the Tower of London, those two boys who had then disappeared. She did not know exactly what the king had done, the extent to which he had been responsible for the disappearance of those children, but he was generally thought to have done something wrong. Now his bones had come up. They had found the boys as well: workmen had found two small human skeletons in a box in the keep. In Leicester Cathedral, Jessie saw the king’s brand new tomb, which, she read in the promotional material, was made out of fossil stone: Within it are long-dead creatures immortalised now in stone. A crucifix was carved into the tomb, cut deep to allow light to flood through it, symbolising that death is not the end. In the gift shop, she bought a postcard to keep.
One museum to which she always meant to go but to which she never had been was the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. It was possible to see, in this museum of crime and punishment, such things as a victim’s bathtub (‘I don’t know why you’d want to see where she died,’ said Gail), a cell door, and the gibbet irons used to display the condemned while they died of thirst, or to display them even after execution. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, thought Jessie. One of these days, perhaps on her way home, she would go.
In Cambridge, she caught a bus, which took her deep into the Fens, where it was so flat, where you could see for miles, though not everywhere of course; in a city, for example, there were any number of hiding places.
The bus took her out to the suburb in which her parents now lived. Their sheltered accommodation was inside a gated community, although, whether the gates were to keep out undesirables or to stop the residents wandering off, they were wide open and Jessie was able to just walk through. There was no kind of gatehouse, just a lamplit sign asking visitors to report to reception, which Jessie ignored. She could see her parents’ front door and made her way towards it. Not having been there before, when she knocked on their door she felt like a stranger; she was not sure that she had not made a mistake. She looked again at the signs at the entrance and at the number on the door of this house that was her parents’ but which was not her home. She got ready to apologise to whoever answered the door, to say sorry for having disturbed them. The door opened and there was her mother, saying, ‘It’s rather late.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jessie.
‘Well, come inside,’ said her mother. ‘I’ve got tea ready. We’ve been waiting.’
Jessie came into the hallway and put down her travel bag.
‘You’re not staying here, are you?’ said her mother. ‘I haven’t got a bed ready for you.’
‘No,’ said Jessie, ‘Gail will come and fetch me.’
‘There is a spare room,’ said her mother, indicating one of the closed doors, ‘but your dad uses it for his jigsaw puzzles.’
In the front room, their family photographs were displayed against unfamiliar wallpaper. Their old living-room curtains were hanging at the bungalow’s bay window, though they did not quite fit. Her dad was waiting in his favourite armchair next to a fireplace, with his carriage clock ticking away on the mantelpiece, and the standard lamp with its faded shade standing like a sentry beside him.
‘Hello, Dad,’ said Jessie.
‘It’s about time,’ he said.
Jessie sat down on the sofa, and the ancient cats appeared from nowhere to wind around her ankles. There was an exchange of Christmas gifts – Jessie received a set of stationery and a set of bath salts – and then her mother said, ‘Are you hungry?’ The five o’clock tea was laid out on a table in the corner.
‘I’m starving,’ said Jessie.
‘You’re not starving,’ said her mother. ‘You’re just hungry.’
She took Jessie over to the table. The tea was like the food at a children’s birthday party. The triangular, white-bread sandwiches had their crusts cut off – ‘You still like jam, don’t you?’ asked her mother – and the little cakes were iced and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. They filled their plates and sat back down.
‘What time’s Gail coming?’ asked her mother.
Jessie, through a mouthful of tomato sandwich, said, ‘Soon, I think.’
‘I put the crusts on the bird table,’ said her mother.
‘Do you get many birds on it?’ asked Jessie. They would not be out at this time, she thought; they would be safely up in the trees, away from the neighbourhood cats, away from her parents’ own cats.
‘None yet,’ said her mother, ‘but they’ll come when they’re hungry enough.’
‘We’ve got a family roosting in the eaves,’ said her dad.
‘Your dad wants to stop them nesting there,’ said her mother.
‘They make such a mess,’ said her dad.
‘Well I like them,’ said her mother.
‘I might have something nesting in my eaves,’ said Jessie. That might be all it was, that scratching sound: birds in her eaves. It was a common problem.
‘Are you going to get rid of yours?’ asked her dad.
‘Leave them alone,’ said her mother.
‘I think it’s birds, anyway,’ said Jessie. ‘My neighbour says if it isn’t birds it’s a ghost!’
Her mother looked at her. ‘What time did you say Gail was coming?’ she asked.
‘Soon, I think,’ said Jessie.
They all heard the sound of a car outside and turned their heads towards the window, but it wasn’t Gail; the car went past.
‘It’s an old house, of course,’ Jessie went on. ‘You know it’s the same house Lenore lived in, my great-great-grandmother?’
‘No, it’s not,’ said her mother. ‘That house is long gone.’
‘No,’ said Jessie, ‘it’s the same one you pointed out when I was little, when we were driving back from Loch Ness.’
‘You must have been looking in the wrong direction,’ said her mother. ‘Your great-great-grandmother’s house was knocked down a long time ago, in the late eighteen hundreds. They’ve built something else there now. You’re on the other side of the road.’
‘How old’s the house you’re in?’ asked her dad. ‘Is it old enough to have ghosts?’
Jessie did not know how old it was, and besides, she saw no reason why a modern house should not also have its ghosts; perhaps a modern house would come with the ghosts of whatever had stood there before, ghosts that might resent the new house and the living.
‘That’s enough,’ said her mother. The sound of a car engine outside made her turn to the window again. ‘Is that Gail?’
When she saw that it wasn’t Gail, Jessie’s mother stood and began to collect the tea things onto a tray, while Jessie, trying to help, got in the way and spilt the milk.
‘Where’s Will?’ asked her dad.
‘Didn’t Gail tell you?’ said Jessie.
‘She said something to your mother. I can’t say I understand,’ he said, as if they had been playing the game in which something reasonably sensible was whispered from one person to another and then to another and somewhere along the line became unfathomable.
The third car was Gail’s. Their mother, on the doorstep, said to her, ‘Are you coming in?’
‘Not today,’ said Gail. ‘We’ve got Michael and Linda with us, and I promised I wouldn’t be gone very long.’
Michael was a cousin of theirs, once removed or twice removed. Jessie did not quite understand the meaning, but she had always found it an unsettling term: when she was a child, she had found the idea of him – the idea of him being removed – disturbing.
> She had not seen him for years.
While Jessie got her things together, her mother carried the tray of leftovers from the living room into the hallway. ‘These can go on the bird table,’ she said.
‘You shouldn’t be giving the birds white bread and cake,’ said Gail. ‘It’s bad for them.’
But their mother, as if she had not heard, carried on towards the kitchen with her offerings.
Gail turned to Jessie and said, ‘Are you ready then?’
‘I’m ready,’ said Jessie, reaching for her travel bag. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I nearly forgot.’ She unzipped the side pocket and took out the piece of sky. Her mother came back into the hallway, and Jessie, showing her, said, ‘I found it.’
‘Where on earth did you find that?’ asked her mother.
‘It was in my laundry basket,’ said Jessie.
Her mother wanted to know how it had got in there, but Jessie could not say. ‘Show your dad,’ she said. Her dad was already coming closer, putting his glasses on, wanting to see what all the excitement was about.
‘I found the missing piece,’ said Jessie, holding it out so that her dad could see it.
He took the corner of blue sky carefully from Jessie and examined it like a jeweller assessing a diamond. For a terrible moment, she thought he might say that wasn’t it, that it was not the piece he had been looking for. ‘You’ve found it,’ he said. ‘Good girl.’ He turned away, going down the hallway and into the spare room, closing the door behind him.
‘He’ll be able to finish it now,’ said Jessie’s mother. ‘We’ll be able to put it away in its box. He can start another one.’
‘You’ve eaten, then?’ asked Gail, as they drove away from the bungalow.
‘Yes,’ said Jessie. ‘Mum made her five o’clock tea. I’ve had jam and tomato sandwiches.’