There wasn’t a great deal within the glass: not even much of the light from the lamp overhead. Where she ought to have been seeing her Clouds Like Dreams poster in reverse, she saw a dim surface of bare brick, crawling with trickles of moisture whose movement she had originally glimpsed and flickering with the glow of some flame. Her bed wasn’t in the mirror, nor was the crowded top of the dressing-table. To give herself a view of the rest of the cell she would have to venture away from the door.
She took one reluctant step, and saw the bare wall draw back to accommodate her, revealing more of its glistening bricks. Another step, and she saw how she was helping the unsteady dimness in the mirror to expand so as to draw her in, the image of the cell taking on more depth as her sense of her room shrank. One more step would take her to the bed, but she was suddenly afraid to find that since it was apparently incapable of producing a reflection, she wouldn’t be able to feel it if she tried to touch it with the hand that so far was the only part of her trapped in the mirror. Then her room would be the cell in the mirror—her cell.
Except that was still just an image, she told herself, so long as she didn’t let it take hold of her mind. If she turned her back on it, it couldn’t do that—if she turned she would see her poster, not bare brick. The poster had been at the edge of her vision all the time she’d been trying to unscrew the hinges, she was almost sure it had. She closed her eyes to ward off the sight in the mirror, and swung towards the door, and forced them open.
The Clouds Like Dreams poster hung on the wall beside the door, the four androgynous faces framed by tents of curly hair. She rubbed her free hand over them to convince herself, though she wished she couldn’t feel a hint of brick through the layers of poster and wallpaper and plaster. She made herself crouch to the lower hinge while with an effort she stopped herself from wondering what more of the cell she would see if she looked up at the mirror. Once she was out of the room, and not until then, she would look back. She dug her trusty comb into the third screw and concentrated all her mind on the promise she wanted her actions to be.
At first the screw absolutely refused to budge. She had to lean her weight leftward over it, a position which felt dangerously close to sprawling on the floor. If she was as helpless as that for even a moment, she knew she would be bound to glance at the mirror. She crouched forward, leaning her right shoulder against the slippery wood, and just as she concluded that it was supporting her too much for her weight to affect the buried helix, the screw yielded with a screech and dumped her on her knees.
The door had scraped her shoulder through her jacket and sweatshirt, and the carpet might hardly have been there, her knees felt so bruised. Nevertheless she remained on them with her eyes shut, willing her father not to have heard anything through the door. A mumble escaped him, and then there was silence except for her heart in her ears. She was attempting to arrange herself into a position in which she would be able to keep still if she should hear his chair creak and his footsteps approach the door when he snored once, then again less emphatically, and rediscovered his rhythm. At once she gave the screw a full turn which allowed her to fasten the tips of her finger and thumb on the edge.
She was so relieved to have the screw in her grasp that she almost turned to throw it on the bed. She let it drop beside its predecessor, which at some point had fallen from her hand, and redoubled her grip on the comb. The lowest screw would be the hardest to extract, but merely hardest, not impossible. She lined up the tooth of the comb in the nearly vertical groove of the screw, and lowered herself into an awkward crouch that started her legs shaking, and freed a hand to mop her wet fragile throbbing forehead. She thought the smell of stony damp had returned, but she wasn’t going to let it deter her. She took a breath that felt like metal in her chest, and closed both hands around the comb, and the doorbell rang.
This was so unexpected that for an irrational moment she found herself wishing away whoever might be at the downstairs entrance so that she would have a chance to deal with the last screw. She heard her father give vent to several syllables which sounded unrelated to any recognisable words, and then he began to waken. ‘Wait till I come,’ he protested, and his voice lurched past her door. ‘My legs are prickled. Why must you rouse me? What is here that anyone would wish to see?’
He sounded even less like her father, and by no means fully awake—perhaps insufficiently so to realise that not only he would be audible through the intercom. Amy pressed her ear against the door and closed the eye that might have glimpsed the mirror. She heard his footsteps stumble to a halt, followed by a silence that seemed ominous, especially when he demanded ‘What device is this?’
He’d forgotten how to use the intercom, she thought in a panic. By the time he remembered, if he did, the caller might have decided it was too late or too early, whatever the time was, to call. She tried to clench the whole of herself around a silent wish. As her sight began to pulse with the pressure of her closed eyelids, her father said ‘Who’s there?’
He was answered by a burst of static which, as Amy let her eyelids rise and dropped the comb that was biting into her palm, became a voice. She couldn’t tell whose voice it was or the name it announced, not through all the static and her door, but that didn’t matter. Someone real and alive and surely unconnected with Nazarill was within earshot, and the moment her father spoke again she started to kick the door and pound on it with her fists. ‘Help,’ she shouted. ‘I’m locked up in here. He’s imprisoned me. Come and let me out or he’ll do worse.’
25 - Nearly there
Before dawn on Tuesday morning Rob found he couldn’t sleep. He kicked off the quilt and eased his curtains open on the view of Partington. A low mist had gathered at the edges of town, dousing the lights of Little Hope Way and Nazareth Row and almost blotting out Nazarill. Only the oversized chimneys were visible, deformed emblems of lifelessness which the crouched hulk was brandishing. At least, Amy might have seen them in such terms, but that was no reason why he should. He turned away and headed for the bathroom.
While he was dressing, his gaze kept drifting to the bedroom window. If he faced away from it he was confronted by the Clouds Like Dreams poster she’d bought him in Hedz Not Fedz, not that he had ever liked the band as much as she did. The mist was shrinking in anticipation of the dawn, though Amy might have thought Nazarill was drawing the concealment around itself. Rob dragged a black polo-neck over his head and brushed his hair in front of the mirror, feeling compelled while he did so to keep trying to decipher the word EKIL. He turned away at last, only to be confronted with the book he’d perched on top of his school rucksack in the hope of knowing what to do with it today. He couldn’t make that decision until he’d at least glanced through the rest of it, and so he took it down to the living-room.
It was much as he’d expected. Mercy Steadfast, the indomitably hopeful widow, made her way through the administrative labyrinth Nazarill represented, each chapter introducing a functionary yet more grotesque than his predecessor, while the widow’s slow but honourable, not to mention increasingly ragged and down-at-heel and weather-worn, son Humble allowed himself to be exploited without, as it kept transpiring, any pay at all from a series of horrible jobs he undertook in the belief that he would be able to add to washerwoman Mercy’s pittance. Rob had had enough as soon as he learned their names, but he skimmed onward to confirm that the son did indeed attempt to set fire to Nazarill with his late sister’s treasured tinder-box on Christmas Eve, only to be caught in the act by a kindly white-bearded stonemason on his way to give the Cemetery Placements overseer a generous helping of his mind. What could apparently be simpler, once he’d refused to quit Gustus Highstool’s cell until he obtained permission for the widow’s stone as well as those he’d planned to argue for, than that he should donate a stone to her and carve it and raise it on the grave just as the bells began to peal for midnight mass? ‘Right,’ growled Rob with all the incredulousness he had in him, and rubbed his cheek beside his eye, and s
hut the book so vigorously that he drove out a few specks of dust it had held in reserve. Slamming it didn’t help him determine its fate, however, and he should.
He dropped the book on his chair and stared out at Nazarill. The mist was allowing such windows as were lit to hint at their colours, but he could see no trace of light in the Priestleys’ apartment; perhaps her father was visiting her after all. Apart from the odd coincidence, the novel had absolutely nothing to do with Amy’s stories, but why should that have any significance for her? Rob watched the corner of the top storey for signs of life as the chimneys caught the dawn and deadened their portion of its glow. The mist was sinking into the grounds as the glow was lured down the pallid facade when his mother found him.
She said nothing until she’d completed her journey to the kitchen to start coffee, and then she came to him and put her arm as much around him as he’d let her since he was about thirteen. Her white towelling robe smelled like all the bathtimes that went with the second earliest of the photographs of him. She glanced at the prone book and out of the window, and said ‘It just takes time, love. I remember how it was with somebody I knew before I met your father.’
‘You kept remembering how you’d felt together, you mean.’
‘I won’t go into the gory details if you don’t mind.’
‘I wasn’t asking you to,’ Rob said, wondering instead why people of her generation referred to gore when they meant sex. ‘Only it isn’t like I suppose you meant. I keep thinking it’s my fault how she’s gone.’
‘I’m sure it’s not, so don’t.’
‘You can’t know.’
‘Aye, that’s true,’ she said, and took her arm away from him. ‘I’m a parent, and we don’t know anything.’
‘You don’t know how she is now. You haven’t spoken to her since you wouldn’t let her in the house.’
“That should have been enough,’ his mother said, and prolonging her accusatory tone after it might have seemed inappropriate: ‘So what are you feeling to blame for?’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have started believing her and then turned against her like that.’
‘It can’t have been much to believe in if it was only you that did. You mean her tales about up there.’
‘Stuff she thought she’d found out, that I thought she had.’
‘You know where the clothes-pegs are, but I’d have to say imagining all that about the place she lives it’s no wonder she went, well, we can’t say mad or crazy these days. But I believe with all my heart it wouldn’t have mattered what you did, not when a girl like her gets an idea into her head.’
A smell of coffee strayed into the room as though to represent good sense with one of the cliches Rob most loathed. ‘Come and have a mug and whatever you want for breakfast,’ his mother said, ‘so we can get you off to school.’
Just then a window of Nazarill bared its light. Without the mist to soften it, the uncurtained spark seemed to pierce straight into his brain before he realised that it wasn’t in Amy’s apartment but in the one next door. He had to blink away the afterimage as he followed his mother. He sat on a chair which appeared to be an undernourished relative of the dining-suite and accepted a mug of coffee, into which he stared until his mother said ‘What are you having?’
‘I’ll get it. Just some cereal.’ He rather hoped his undertaking to eat would send her on her way so that he needn’t do so, but before he could mime any intention of serving himself she was shaking Sticky Rotters into a bowl. She planted the bowl and a jug of milk in front of him, and watched as he drowned the sugary cylinders and fed himself a spoonful. If she intended to supervise him to the last mouthful, he thought, she could listen to him as well. ‘I wish I knew where she was, that’s all,’ he said.
His mother ducked over her mug. When she’d blown on her coffee and sipped it she said ‘Was when?’
‘Is now. She’s not at home.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I tried to call her at the weekend, but he said he’d sent her away and wouldn’t tell me where.’
‘I expect he knows best,’ Rob’s mother murmured, and scrutinised her coffee.
‘That isn’t what you’re thinking.’
‘It most certainly is. He’s the only parent she has.’
Rob’s mother lifted her gaze to him, and he was resigning himself to having fallen foul of parental solidarity when his father wandered into the kitchen. ‘I take it we’re talking about Amy’s dad.’
‘We are,’ Rob’s mother said, ‘but I think we’ve finished, haven’t we? What can I offer you while I’m being the chef and the waitress?’
‘Sorry. I wasn’t… Sorry, sorry’
Rob might have thought he was apologising for somehow having implied he meant to take advantage of her if it hadn’t been for the fierceness of her glare which cut him off short. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘It wouldn’t have been anything worth the breath, old chap. I don’t know what your mother was saying, do I? You sit down, Marge, I’ll get my own—’
‘She was talking about Amy’s dad always being right like you and her.’
‘Well, I’m sure you must have had enough of him,’ Rob’s mother said.
This was one attempt too many to do away with the subject. ‘Have you spoken to him since I did?’ Rob demanded.
‘I’d have said if I had,’ his mother assured him, and managed to appear as offended as her tone, but Rob saw his father turn away too quickly to the coffee-pot. ‘You’ve… you’ve been in touch with someone,’ Rob pursued, and all at once knew. ‘It was Amy, wasn’t it? You spoke to her.’
‘Why on earth would I have done that? Eat up now or you’ll be late for school.’
‘I’m driving. No rush.’ If Rob hadn’t been sure of himself by now, his father’s reluctance to face the two of them would have convinced him. ‘When did you talk to her? Why didn’t you tell me?’
His mother pursed her lips and breathed so hard her nostrils flared while she narrowed her eyes at her father, whose back was exhibiting signs of besiegement. When none of this rid her of Rob’s questions she muttered ‘I shouldn’t think you’d want me to after what she said.’
‘I won’t know if I do or not unless you tell me what it was.’
‘You know.’ It was clear she intended this to be sufficiently reproving to forestall further enquiries if it hadn’t conveyed her answer, but since Rob shook his head she went on ‘The thing she told you to do that made you come home not wanting anything to do with us. You needn’t think I’m repeating it.’
In other circumstances he might have been touched or amused. ‘How do you know about that?’ he said.
She went through the routine involving lips and breathing hard and glaring at his father. At last she said ‘I picked up the phone when your friend thought she was talking to the machine.’
‘And did you say anything to her?’
‘What would you want your mother to say to a girl who’d just used that word?’
Before Rob could insist on a real answer, his father abandoned his defensive posture. ‘The point is, son, it sounds as though the poor girl’s even worse than she was when she sent you packing, even more out of control.’
‘Thank you, Tom. Well done.’
‘Did she say where she was?’ Rob said.
His parents didn’t quite look at each other. At last his father said ‘Maybe she doesn’t know, the way she is.’
‘I’m sure her father has to know what he’s doing.’
‘But did she mention a place?’
Rob’s mother gazed straight at him, and he had so little idea what she was thinking that he felt he no longer knew her. ‘No,’ she said.
‘What did she say, then?’
‘I couldn’t make head or tail out of most of it. Look, Robin, we’ll discuss this tonight if we must. You’re going to be late for school.’
‘Then don’t keep holding me up by not telling me things.’
It seemed that a look of rebuke might be her sole response. At last she said ‘I think she wanted to say she was sorry for making a scene. Now will you please eat that up if you’re eating and—’
‘Will one of you phone her father and ask where she is?’
Rob’s mother turned an incredulous stare on her husband, who apparently misinterpreted it. ‘To be honest with you, son—’
‘Tom’
‘I can’t see what harm it will do, Marge. You aren’t going to charge off to see her, are you, old chap?’
‘Shouldn’t think so. I just want to know how she is.’
‘I expect her father can tell you that,’ he said, and shrugged a shoulder at Rob’s mother. ‘From what Marge heard her saying, it looks as though she’s at home.’
‘Then why did he say she wasn’t?’ Rob demanded.
‘Maybe she’s come back since you spoke to him.’
‘But the idea was to get her out of there. She wouldn’t want to come back, not this soon anyway.’ When his parents failed to disagree with him, Rob dropped his spoon in the soggy cereal and stood up. ‘I’m going to phone.’
‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ he heard his mother say, and his father protesting ‘We couldn’t have gone on keeping him in the dark.’ As Rob lifted the receiver his mother came to the kitchen doorway and folded her arms, pointing her elbows at him. ‘Don’t start one of your half-hour conversations. School’s more important, especially this year.’
‘Not to me,’ Rob whispered into the mouthpiece, having turned it and himself away before dialling Amy’s number. It occurred to him that if her father refused to speak to him he could ask for one of his parents to be told any news of her. Except that the voice which responded before the phone could ring wasn’t her father’s but a woman’s, intoning ‘The number you have dialled has not been recognised. Please check and try again.’
Had he misdialled while attempting to ignore his mother? He spun the creaky dial again, and was raising the phone to his face when the indifferent voice cut in. ‘The number you have dialled—’
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 38