by Jess Kidd
At Bridlemere cats startle and hiss at nothing, bouncing down the hallway with their hackles lifted and their ears flat. Or else they rub themselves, purring, against patches of air.
At Bridlemere spiders spin webs like Baroque masterpieces. They hang all through the house like coded warnings.
But it doesn’t do to dwell on it.
Sam Hebden, Senior Care Worker, no doubt dwelt on it and that is how Bridlemere broke his nerve. Mr Flood’s attempted assault with a hurley would have been the final straw; the house would have got to Sam first.
Sam Hebden was armed with an NVQ in Social Care and a diploma in Geriatric Conflict Resolution. He didn’t need an induction; he merely glanced at the risk assessment. He worked alone. Some said that Sam was a tall man with a topknot like a Samurai. Some said he rode a Ducati and had a tattoo of a cobra on his neck. The truth is, only Biba had seen him and she spoke his name low and with a barely contained excitement. Sam was the human embodiment of a care plan successfully coming together; he was untouchable.
Then he came to Bridlemere.
Then he was gone.
Maybe he climbed on a homeward-bound motorbike. Or maybe he was detained at a local mental-health establishment, frothing at the mouth and ranting about sentient rubbish.
Who knows?
It wouldn’t do to take the fate of Sam Hebden lightly. Here are working conditions the likes of which have not been seen since Charles Booth’s day. Whole days trapped in a maze of clutter with a bockety old maniac liable to rear up at any moment, all clacking dentures and spittle-flecked gizzards. Despite his age, with his speed and long legs he would run me to ground in an instant, if today was anything to go by. My only defence is a constant vigilance and a willingness to kick an octogenarian right up his hole.
As I close the gate, I catch sight of a sudden movement in the garden. Mr Flood is emerging chin-first from behind the bushes. He throws a furtive glance towards the back door and limps across the path holding a length of rope and a sink plunger. I thank the saints in heaven I’ve made it out alive.
I don’t thank St Dymphna (family harmony, madness and runaways) specifically, although she is waiting outside the gate for me, as she does most days, shimmering dimly. She is chewing the plait that hangs down inside her veil. She does this when she’s bored; it gives her a ruminative look and leaves the ends of her invisible hair spiky. St Dymphna catches sight of me, widens her eyes in mock surprise and blesses herself in an ironic kind of way. Framed against the verdant backdrop of Bridlemere’s hedge, she glows and is beautiful. They always paint her with fair hair, but it’s brown. She resembles a very young Kate O’Mara, only transparent and world-weary (which is remarkable considering Dymphna was consecrated to Christ at fourteen and dead by fifteen).
I ignore her, hoping she might just dissipate, but she hitches up her robe and trails behind me. I can hear the faint slap and saunter of her sandals. From this sound I can tell she’s affecting her jaded gait.
St Dymphna won’t set foot in Bridlemere. She refuses to come any further than the gate. The only other time she balked this badly was during a trip to the National Wax Museum in Dublin. She said the place was too bloody heathen for her; there was no way she’d go inside, even though she was mad to view the likenesses of Wolfe Tone and de Valera. She flew up onto the roof and waited it out with the pigeons, sending invisible spits down onto the heads of visitors. Faced with Bridlemere St Dymphna narrows her eyes and sucks air in through her teeth like a plumber condemning a boiler.
I glance over my shoulder at her as I walk to the bus stop. She wanders through pushchairs and litterbins. She makes a beeline for every pedestrian to drift through them. I see them shudder and look around, like someone has walked over their grave. It is not a pleasant feeling. I’ve felt it.
At the bus stop St Dymphna draws level and flicks back her veil. ‘What’s that about?’ she points at my bag. ‘In there?’
‘A message in a bottle washed up in the downstairs cloakroom. Under strange circumstances.’
St Dymphna frowns. ‘Don’t.’
‘Almost like a kind of haunting.’
‘Just. Bloody. Don’t.’
St Dymphna is all talk: all dark flashing eyes and righteous swords and sulking and bluster and challenge. But underneath this she is terrified by anything out of the ordinary, or overly mundane, or pitiful, or unpleasant. Death scares her, as do people who are terminally sick, crying loudly, or depressed. She is frightened of the dark and of enclosed spaces and will barely even hazard an alcove. St Dymphna likes very little other than bagpipe music, stories about herself and dirty limericks.
‘I feel like this job could kill me,’ I say, more to myself than to her.
‘Jobs are very dangerous.’ She closes her eyes. ‘Disappointment, lung disorders, boredom, stress, futility, suicide, heart disease, disillusionment, diabetes, strokes.’
‘And you know this, how?’
She shrugs, keeping her eyes closed.
‘So I am in danger at Bridlemere?’
She opens her eyes. ‘How the hell would I know?’
We wait in silence for the bus.
Her voice, when it comes, is weary. ‘Occupationally or spiritually?’
‘Both. Either.’
‘In that house?’ St Dymphna pouts. ‘What do you bloody think?’
‘Then I should leave?’
‘Do what you want. I wouldn’t bloody stay there.’
‘Why?’
She hesitates.
‘What’s in there? Ghosts? Demons?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘There’s no such thing.’
‘Just hoary old Mr Flood and his cats up at the house?’
She says nothing.
‘Go on, give me a hint,’ I say. I tap my bag. ‘This photo—’
‘Don’t even bloody ask.’
We stand in silence for a while.
‘They have the look of siblings.’ She gestures towards my bag with a flap of her arm.
‘And you’d know that how? One of them doesn’t have a face.’
St Dymphna steps out into the path of a man in a cheap suit with a carrier bag in his hand. He falters as he moves through her, as if he’s tripped on a crack in the pavement. He looks around himself, glancing at me briefly with hunted eyes. Then he’s off down the road clutching his bag a little tighter.
St Dymphna wears a pleased expression. ‘It’s in the way they are standing, you know, for their picture to be taken.’
‘How do siblings stand?’
‘Oh, I don’t bloody know.’ She inspects the end of her tattered plait. ‘Like they are part of the same suite of furniture. Sort of unaware of each other, like a table and a lamp.’
‘There’s only one child in the care plan, the boy, Gabriel. The Floods only had the one son.’
‘And they put every bloody thing in the care plan? What about all the stuff a family leaves out?’
Cars go past but no buses.
‘All the skeletons, you mean?’
‘I warned you.’ She straightens her crown pettishly. It sparks and glows a little brighter in the places touched by her fingertips. She has no visible halo, although in dim light, when her veil slips back, you can sometimes see a glow radiate from her centre parting.
‘So I shouldn’t go back then?’
St Dymphna rolls her eyes. ‘Jesus, I told you: do what you like.’
I tap the bottle in my handbag. ‘What if this is a cry for help?’
‘So what if it is?’ she mumbles.
‘It’s strange though, a little girl with her face burnt out of a photograph.’
She pulls her veil around her ears. ‘I don’t want to hear it, all right?’
‘What if I found this photograph for a reason?’
‘What bloody reason? Drop it,’ she says. ‘Walk away.’
‘But someone might need my help?’
‘You’ll only cause bloody trouble. Like you did before.’
I stare at
her.
With a sour glance over her shoulder, St Dymphna steps out through the bus stop and into the path of the oncoming bus.
Chapter 3
There is a photograph that lies inside the flyleaf of a book, under old coats and school reports, at the bottom of a suitcase, on top of my wardrobe. Two girls, in summer dresses, at the beach; both have faces and names. Turn the picture over, there is nothing written on the back, but these facts I know:
Names (left to right): Deirdre Drennan, Maud Drennan
Place: Pearl Strand, County Donegal
Date: July or August 1989
This photograph wasn’t found furled in a milk bottle in a handbasin in the Gothic lair of a geriatric hoarder in West London. Its finding was far less extraordinary but just as inexplicable. The guards came across this photograph on the road to Ballyshannon in Jimmy O’Donnell’s car, under the passenger seat.
It is as ordinary and complicated as any family snapshot.
A girl, no more than fifteen, stands on a boarded walkway flanked by sand dunes. She leans against the railing with her hip jutting out, her mouth unsmiling. Beside her stands a smaller girl, no less than seven. Her hair is tucked behind her ears and she is wearing an uncertain smile. Their hair is brown and they wear the same white sandals. Otherwise they hardly look related. It is a day of warm skies and settled winds. I can tell this because the marram grass that fringes the mounds around them is upright and they do not have that brittle look of people frozen to the bone.
I have no recollection of this photograph being taken. In fact, it couldn’t have been taken because we never saw another soul on that beach through the whole of that summer.
It was a wild empty place, that beach. A place where the ocean met the sky and the seabirds screamed and reeled in wide, wide, borderless blue. The dunes were three storeys high or no bigger than an anthill, great ancient breakers or new little hillocks. It was a place of shifting sand, singing sand, sinking sand, hard-packed made-for-running-on sand. Sand with a sheen to it, a certain lustre in the right light (moonlight, starlight, dawnlight). A long crescent swoon of a beach, even its name was magical: Pearl Strand.
My sister said that when the tide was out you could walk all the way to America; the waves pulled back that far. So far that the starfish forgot there ever was an ocean and stiffened with dismay. So far that the seaweed wept itself dry on the rocks with nostalgia.
Pearl Strand was a place of great beauty and great treachery.
You needed to know where to put your foot, which direction home was in, and where to take shelter when the wind blew horizontally. The tides were fickle and the weather could change at any moment. Sometimes the wind dropped down and hid behind the dunes, sometimes it sent playful handfuls of sand skipping. Sometimes it raised colossal storms to scour your arse all along the strand. A gyre of needles abrading your cheeks and legs and arms. Closing your eyes and ears and mouth, plugging them shut.
You could escape into the caves.
These were not kindly, welcoming caves. They were purse-lipped, sinister fissures. Squeeze and duck, plash through freezing rock pools, over surfaces perilously slippery or rough enough to cut the feet off you. Follow inlets of wave-ridged sand into dank, secret places with fierce briny smells – the armpits of the sea!
Sometimes you found the empty throne room of a mermaid with bum-tail hollowed-out rocks and starry limpets studding the ceiling. Sometimes you found the mermaid’s salty larder, littered with dismembered crabs and frayed rope, and once a floundered eyeless fish.
Ten paces on, the cave might open up to a cathedral. An echoing masterpiece carved by the sea’s savage love, with ledges and striations and a year-round mineral winter.
Only that summer the caves were out of bounds, Deirdre said.
Chapter 4
I rarely make it up the stairs to my first-floor, purpose-built, rented maisonette in the arse-end of Whitton without my landlady emerging like a New Age butterfly from her ground-floor cocoon. Although she doesn’t quite emerge; she rather sniffs the air with her heavily powdered proboscis from just inside the doorway.
I’ve long given up trying to sneak by her. The front gate, kept rusty, heralds my return with its grating alarm. What happens next is a well-rehearsed dance. I walk down the path. She raps on her kitchen window with a knuckle full of dress rings. I nod in a polite and faraway manner or put my head down and run. The result is the same: the kitchen window is thrown open and Renata’s voice issues forth with a velvety authority.
‘Maud, darling, come inside.’
Each word glides out, enrobed in plush. Delivered with the precisely modulated, perfectly intonated accent usually found in the BBC archives. The speech equivalent of ‘Rule Britannia’ at Last Night of the Proms: a cut-glass, cannon-firing, wave-ruling, plummy stridency. A stridency Renata employs in arguments with the meter man. I’ve seen him edging away, bowing and grimacing with involuntary class deference.
One would never believe she came from Rotherhithe.
As I round the house I see Renata at the bathroom window, bobbing up and down behind the frosted glass. By the time I reach her door she’s standing there, wearing a rueful scowl and a kaftan.
‘Maud, darling, come inside.’
I don’t mind visiting. Renata’s home provides the antidote to Mr Flood’s apocalyptic squalor that my own flat doesn’t offer. At Renata’s, tea towels are ironed and the carpet is mown in straight lines. Renata once told me that housework was the only way her sister, Lillian, can express her love. Lillian comes twice a week to demonstrate her affection and they argue until Lillian slams the door in disgust, taking the washing with her.
I follow Renata into the hallway. The outdoor shoes she will never wear again are lined up on a rack. The twin icons of her life, Jesus Christ and Johnny Cash, look down from the wall, bestowing their mixed blessings.
Jesus Christ reveals his Sacred Heart: a rinsed orb of holy light. His eyes are gentle with mercy and his bright curls fall softly onto his robed shoulders.
Johnny Cash reveals nothing; his face is dyspeptic. He purses his lips against life’s fairground ride of moral vicissitude, damnation and the dwindling hope of redemption.
Our money is on Cash.
‘The kettle is on; will you step in?’ Renata widens her eyes, which are already theatrically wide with a feline stroke of eyeliner along her top lashes.
Renata favours the more is more approach when it comes to make-up, but it is artfully applied. It’s the make-up she wore all her working life, only modified to create a kind of off-duty screen-goddess look. It isn’t natural but, as she says, it gets off one stop short of destination drag queen. Renata’s greatest fear, amongst all her other great fears, is to die without make-up on. In the event of an accident or congestive heart failure I am to administer make-up before I even call the ambulance, although Renata fears the effect will be more Pablo Picasso than Vivien Leigh.
She pulls up her sleeve and points to the place her watch would be if she lived a practical existence, ruled by anything other than the moon and her whims. ‘Do you have time?’
I always have time. ‘Go on and sit down. I’ll finish making the tea.’ I slip off my trainers with a respectful salute to Johnny Cash.
She frowns. ‘What about the ginger twins? You know, if you finish making the tea another individual has started? The risk of red-haired babies?’
I have taught her all the Irish superstitions I can think of. She likes them very much. She has added them to her own cockeyed beliefs and now the universe has become even more fickle and absurd.
I nod sagely. ‘There’s always a risk. Did you measure the tea leaves into the pot already?’
She shakes her head.
‘It should be fine then; anyway, I haven’t had a ride for years.’
‘And I’ve never owned a uterus,’ she says with a lurid wink and sashays off down the hall, leaving a trail of frangipani behind her.
‘Good for you.’
&nb
sp; Renata has the tray ready in the kitchen. I love the way she does it properly, with the little milk jug and tongs, although neither of us takes sugar. When I carry the tray in she smiles up at me from the sofa.
Even when she’s smiling Renata has a formidable look about her, despite her gentle Aquarian soul. Her cheekbones are brutal, and her dark eyes, an unexpected gift to her mother from a Portuguese sailor, have a simmering tarry depth. In Renata’s eyes there is the creak and pitch of a thousand ships and the moon on the water and the song of a sad drunken deckhand.
Amongst friends, a wry half-smile is common to Renata and a candid grin is not rare. With strangers Renata has the countenance of an occupational hangman or locum doctor: knowing, dour and vaguely resentful. I have seen many a tentative smile flounder and break against her foreboding expression, for Renata only smiles when she wants to and never to make friends.
Renata draws her eyebrows on by hand, giving them the devastating curve of a committed femme fatale. She wears a headscarf tight to her forehead, with the tail ends twisted at the back to form a kind of dancer’s bun. Sometimes she trades her headscarf for a felt turban. Occasionally she adds a beret or a fedora. In the spare room three wigs perch on disembodied polystyrene heads. They are called Liza, Rita and Lauren and are black, red and blonde respectively. These are worn rarely and only when she has guests. For everyday wear she chooses a kaftan or kimono, enjoying their carefree bohemian glamour. She inclines towards fabulous prints and startling colours.
Although her passport puts her at sixty, Renata will admit to no more than forty-five. Born Lemuel Sewell, she was working on a building site and wearing frocks in her spare time when she met Bernie Sparks in a pub in Catford in 1972. She spent the remaining years of Bernie’s life as his wife, sexpot and magician’s assistant, as the occasion demanded. For Bernie she shaved three times a day and forsook friends, family and her own name. Bernie’s magic act guaranteed a lucrative summer season at holiday camps and seaside theatres. In winter Bernie took to the betting shop. He drank perennially.