‘Gareth’s father took so long about sorting it out I thought he was going to leave me there for good.’
‘They’re nice paintings,’ she said. ‘Very vivid.’
‘Have you ever held a changeling? They have a cry that could scour the heart from your chest.’
Wishing she’d never mentioned the paintings, she looked down at the magazine as though concentrating on an article about the island’s kipper industry.
His mum collected their plates and left the room, but her voice came through from the kitchen, ‘Just because a thing’s happened once, folk think you’ll be safe from it happening again, but life isn’t like that. There are old patterns to follow.’ She returned with more tea. ‘Kaye’s such a lovely woman. She knew what she had to do.’ Cold, milky water sloshed from the cup as she set it on the table, her hand shaking. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to speak to you. He’s a good boy, though, my Gareth, I won’t have you thinking otherwise.’
‘What if we booked into a hotel as a treat for our last night?’ His mum was in the kitchen, but she wasn’t trying to keep her voice down.
‘What about Mum? She would be devastated.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s just… this is our first time away together. We’ve hardly done anything. I’ve spent most of it in your mum’s living room…’
‘I told you I’m sorry, the errands took longer than I expected. And you know what, Mum’s done everything she can to make you feel welcome.’
‘There are photographs of you with your ex all over the place.’
He lowered his voice at the sound of pans clattering in the kitchen. ‘You know I was married. I’ve never hidden that from you.’
‘Kaye’s your ex. Your mum talks like she’s… and where is she anyway? Does she live on the island?’
‘She’s away.’
‘Were you seeing her today? Is that what you were doing?’
‘No.’ He headed for the kitchen and his mum, forcing her into silence.
* * *
He was asleep with his back to her, or feigning sleep. The light through the curtains woke her at dawn. She waited as it brightened a little in intensity and then slipped out of bed. She dressed in yesterday’s clothes without washing for fear she’d wake either him or his mum. Taking an apple from the bowl in the kitchen for breakfast she crept out into the empty lane. Giddy with the sudden sense of freedom she half-ran down the street into the next. He would wake and find her gone, just like she had with him the day before. He’d realise how out of order he’d been. He’d try to make it up to her. He’d explain what on earth was going on with his mum. She’d stay out just long enough to make him worry, but return in time for them to spend the afternoon together before the ferry home.
In the window of a grimy-looking cottage a crosh cuirn leaned against the glass. There were leaves caught in the old wool that had been used to tie it. She passed an antique shop and a pretty little café, but both were closed. The thick dust on the vases in the antique shop window made her wonder when it had last been open. She wandered the long lanes until the early morning damp started to make her bones ache. Another café she passed was closed, but the door to a quaint-looking bookshop stood ajar.
Inside, the shelves were dense with browning books. An elderly man was half-hidden behind piles of books on the counter. He didn’t seem to notice her come in. The titles on the spines of many of the books were too faded to read. She picked out a slim book that was the blue of the sea, Fairy Tales of Mann.
‘Have you a special interest in…’ the man looked up and nodded at her, ‘because if so I’ve a number of titles you might like.’
‘Do you mean fairy stories? No thanks, I’m just looking.’ She flicked through the volume and stopped halfway. There was a story with blacked-out letters: he wh-stled a soft tune, and touched her shoulder, so that she would look round -t him, but she knew if she did that he would have powe-over her ever after.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen another book with letters blacked out like this. Is it some kind of traditional thing?’
‘No, I’ve only seen it twice before.’ He held out his hand to take the book. ‘It’s a story about a lhiannan shee too, apt choice…’ Her expression must have shown her ignorance because he went on as if telling a story to a child. ‘If you so much as glance at one of Themselves you’re under their spell for good. They’ll have you dancing off into their fine halls under the hill.’ He looked up at her as if considering whether to carry on or not. ‘From time to time some of their things turn up. I think they let them slip through for mischief. They look just like our books, our paintings, our records even, but there’s always an extra story, or a curve in the hill that you’d swear isn’t actually there, or a tune you’ve never heard before – something not quite as it should be.’ He shut the book and put it beside the till. ‘I’ve gone on too much. Forgive me, they’re old tales, and I’m an old man who spends far too much time shut up with only books for company. Are you with us on holiday?’
‘My partner’s from the island. It’s the first time I’ve visited.’
‘And have we treated you well?’
‘Yes, thanks.’ She pulled her coat around herself, readying to go.
‘Have you been to see the Laxey Wheel?’
‘No. I’ve not seen as much as I’d wanted to and we leave this evening.’
‘Well we’ll see you again, I’m sure.’ He picked up the book. ‘Would you like this wrapping?’
* * *
There was no sign of Gareth back at the house. His mum was in the kitchen baking. The parcel remained in place on the dresser. She pulled the book out and worked her way through the pages: w…e…w…a…n…t…t…o…c…o…m…e…h… o…m…e. She shoved the book back into the envelope and dropped it on the dresser, setting off the tune for ‘Three Blind Mice’. It had to be some weird trick his wife was playing. And that’s where he kept sneaking off to: he was seeing her. She headed upstairs to pack. She pulled open the top drawer. Her clothes had gone. Her bag wasn’t under the bed. Her washbag wasn’t on the windowsill. His stuff was all still there. His rucksack was in the wardrobe. Had he packed for her?
She ran down the stairs and into the kitchen. ‘Where’s Gareth?’
His mum didn’t look up from her mixing. ‘He’s just nipped out to finish sorting something.’ She stirred faster and faster. The bowl was full of broken eggshells.
Out in the lane there was no sign of him. She didn’t know where to begin looking. At the end of the street, just as she was about to turn into the next, she heard whistling behind her. She’d never heard Gareth whistle. It was the same lilting tune she’d heard from the book the first time she’d opened the parcel. She turned, furious, ready to yell at him, but everything within her stopped. The stranger held her there with his gaze. She took his outstretched hand and let him lead her away.
CLAIRE DEAN
Claire Dean’s short stories have been widely published and are included in The Best British Short Stories (Salt, 2014 & 2011), Spindles (Comma Press), Beta-Life (Comma Press), Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds (Two Ravens Press) and New Fairy Tales: Essays and Stories (Unlocking Press). Marionettes and Into the Penny Arcade are published as chapbooks by Nightjar Press. Claire lives in the north of England with her two sons.
“I still have the book Conrad sent me for this project. It’s in its envelope in a box under my bed. I think I made it more unsettling for myself when I wrote about it, so I don’t want to see it but I can’t get rid of it either…”
BUYER’S REMORSE
ANDREW LANE
Even before the letter arrived I’d been interested in strange place names, lost villages and ambiguous locations. The letter just gave me an excuse to give in to that interest. Looking back, perhaps I should have just stuck to reading about these places and not tried to visit them.
I remember picking the letter up from the mat by the door and looking at it, puzzled. The envelope
was covered with greasy stains, but it looked like my address on the front:
The handwriting was blocky and old-fashioned, and there was no postcode, no county listed. The stamps were American and the postmark appeared to be ‘Dunwich’, or perhaps ‘Dulwich’. The red ink had been blurred by one of the greasy stains and I couldn’t be sure.
I turned the letter over. There was no return address on the back.
A smell wafted upwards from the envelope as I handled it: a strange, slightly fishy odour, like a freshly opened packet of smoked salmon. Not unpleasant, but not quite what you expect from a letter on your doormat. Fortunately I don’t have cats, otherwise they would have been all over it.
I was about to open it when my fingers brushed against something on the front. I turned the letter over again and looked at the address more closely, realising that the last three letters of ‘Abbas’ were obscured by some kind of sticky substance and a few fragments of adhering dirt. My brain had just filled in the missing bit without me realising. Automatically I brushed the dirt off with my thumb. Removing the residue made the address clearer. The ink was still blurred by the stains, but it was obvious now that the letter had actually been sent to Winterbourne Abase, rather than Winterbourne Abbas, which is where I happen to live.
As I stared at the words I wondered whether that was a mistake. I’d never heard of the place. ‘Abase’ also seemed a strange partial name for a town. Perhaps, I thought, as I stood there, it had some devout religious connotation – a bit like those American fundamentalists who used to choose their kids’ names by opening the Bible at a random page and letting God guide their finger to an appropriate word, like ‘Charity’ or ‘Perseverance’. There is a town near Winterbourne Abbas named Whitchurch Canonicorum, so I was prepared to believe that ‘Abase’ was correct. Of course, now that I knew the letter was intended for the occupant of another 7 Vicarage Close in another village, I couldn’t really open it, not if I wanted to preserve my moral integrity, but I did wonder how I could get it to its intended recipient. Writing ‘Return to Sender’ on the front probably wouldn’t work – the Post Office was unlikely to send it all the way back to America. I suppose I could have underlined the Abase to make it clearer and just put it back into the nearest postbox, but I was intrigued now. I wanted to find out where Winterbourne Abase actually was.
One of the things I love about England is that you can find so many towns and villages with the same name. Take ‘Whitchurch’, for instance. There are at least thirteen of them around, just based on a quick look at Google Maps. Most authorities think that the preponderance is due to there having been a clutch of churches built of white stone around the countryside, and the phrase ‘the town with the white church’ having mutated over the centuries to ‘the town of Whitchurch’. An alternative explanation that I have seen suggests that the churches were actually built in honour of St Wite – although nobody seems sure who St Wite actually was. Whatever the explanation, the sheer number of Whitchurches can lead to some confusion. For instance, I was once invited to a wedding in Whitchurch, Shropshire, but accidentally ended up going to Whitchurch, Hampshire instead and wondering where everyone was. The answer was that they were cheerfully quaffing champagne a hundred and sixty miles away, but by the time I discovered that it was too late.
Winterbourne is another good example. A ‘winterbourne’ is the old name for a stream that’s dry in the summer, but comes to life in the winter. That’s why there are places called Winterbourne everywhere you look in England, from Winterbourne Abbas to Winterborne Zelston.
My fascination with lost, ignored or otherwise ambiguous places probably started with my parents’ place. They owned a terraced house in a town in Cornwall whose garden backed onto the garden of the house in the next road, but there was a little patch of ground separating the two fences, barely six feet across. Most of that space was taken up with the trunks of two large trees whose foliage cast shadows over the ends of both gardens, but nobody had ever cut them down or trimmed them because nobody knew who owned that little strip of land. The local council denied all knowledge, and the title plans were no help at all, so the trees just got larger and larger, the gardens got darker and darker and the lawns became paler and paler thanks to the tree roots that extended beneath them, sucking up moisture from the ground. From that unpromising start I became interested in those little unowned alleys and paths that you can see separating houses in roads everywhere, and from there to the various places that have dropped off the maps over the course of the years, from those villages on Salisbury Plain whose inhabitants had been moved out because the houses had been taken over by the British Army for training purposes to the hamlets on the coast that had been lost to the encroaching waves and whose church bells could, allegedly, still be heard sometimes, pealing beneath the surface of the sea at low tide.
That’s why, instead of putting the envelope back into the nearest postbox with some clarifying amendment scrawled on it, I went to my computer and looked up ‘Winterbourne Abase’ on Google Maps. It wasn’t there, of course, which didn’t really surprise me. I tried Wikipedia next, but there was no listing for the village there either. After half an hour of browsing I gave up and went back to where I should have started – the library of old books that I had scavenged from second-hand bookshops, car boot sales and jumble sales across the length and breadth of England. I eventually found a mention in one of the forty-six volumes of Pevsner’s Buildings of England. Apparently it is, or was, a small hamlet in Devon, right on the coast, that had become absorbed into another nearby village for administrative purposes at some stage in the 1960s, around the same time as the Beeching Report led to the closure of several thousand small stations and the rail lines running through them. Its sole item of appeal seems to have been a rather fine church with an apse which has features – including wooden pegs rather than nails used in the construction – dating back to Saxon times.
I was intrigued, of course. It wasn’t so much the church that had caught my attention as the idea of a place that existed once, within living memory, but which appeared to have vanished from modern consideration and modern maps.
Perhaps it should have occurred to me to wonder why a writer in America should expect a postman in England to know the old name for an English village. Perhaps things might have been different if I had.
Devon wasn’t that far away from where I lived. I could probably drive there within an hour. I wasn’t doing anything that day, so I decided to get my scooter out and head off down the A35 to deliver the letter in person.
I don’t drive a car. I don’t like the enclosed, bubble-like feel of them. Then again, I don’t like motorcycles either – too fast, too brutal. I own an Italjet Velocifero scooter, which is like a Vespa, only bigger and faster. It looks like it was built in the 1950s for Audrey Hepburn’s older brother, but it’s actually of 1990s construction and just looks classic. It certainly makes heads turn as it buzzes down the road. I like it because I can feel the wind in my hair, and I can smell the fields and the riverbanks and even people’s gardens as I pass by. Also silage pits and fertiliser being spread across fields, but you have to take the rough with the smooth.
There was a low cloud base across the south-west as I set out, casting an oddly sombre pall across the landscape. The road rose and fell as it crossed the ridges that extended like fingers towards the coast, and I found myself either driving through the mist where it touched the high ground, with visibility reduced to a few tens of feet, or driving so close underneath it that I felt I could reach up and make a trail in it with my hand.
There were no road signs pointing to the village formerly known as Winterbourne Abase, of course, so I was navigating purely based on what I could remember of the map in Pevsner. Several times I took wrong turnings off the A35 and ended up in places like Seaton and Colyton, or travelling along the banks of rivers with strange names, like the Yarty and the Char, but eventually – and more by luck than judgement – I decided to try a narrow, u
nmarked track that led off a minor B-road. After twenty minutes of winding around the edges of fields and copses of trees, I discovered an old grey metal sign on a post. It was half-covered in moss, and tilted crazily over, but I could see the words ‘Winterbourne Ab---’ engraved into it. The last three letters were covered with the moss, and I had to brush it off before I could see the ‘ase’ at the end.
I set off again, down the winding track. It was barely wide enough to get a car down, and if I came across a car coming towards me then I wasn’t sure we could get past each other without scraping our respective paint jobs. The foliage closed in overhead so that the track was mostly in shadow. I had to put my headlamp on so that I could see where I was going. As I slowly navigated the ruts and holes in the road, anticipating the way it twisted without warning, I found myself glancing sideways, trying to identify the large leaves, mottled in red and dark green, which covered the bushes. They were the size of my head, but they looked more like grasping hands: five separate lobes curling together into sharp points that were tipped with crimson, like claws. Beneath them, close to the track, were clusters of gnarled white vegetables, like cauliflowers, that looked like misshapen babies’ heads nestled in leaves so dark green they were almost black.
Something ran across the track, startling me. I twisted my head to follow it, but all I could see was something thin and blue-grey, like a shaved greyhound. It turned its head to look at me as it vanished into the bushes, and I caught a brief glimpse of a thin face lined with sharp teeth, and little red eyes that seemed to glow in the light from my headlamp. I felt a shudder run through me, but it was gone before I could do anything.
I was relieved when I finally got to the village of Winterbourne Abase. It was a motley collection of perhaps ten or twelve old houses spread out on either side of the dirt road. The paint on them was peeling, hanging off in dry scabs and scales. I could smell that particular odour that people always say is the smell of ozone, but which is actually rotting seaweed. Past the last houses, I could see that the road finished at a stone jetty which extended out into the grey sea at a shallow angle, so that its far end was hidden by the greasily lapping and scum-covered waves. Its sides were covered in bladderwrack seaweed and barnacles. There was nobody around, but the place didn’t feel deserted. I had the strangest feeling that I was being observed from behind the grey lace curtains that hung like cobwebs in every window.
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