by Jess Kidd
When I look up she’s gone.
* * *
Mr Flood has been tucked away in his workshop all morning. I’ve not heard step nor roar from him. The National Geographics present a solid wall today. I could have dreamt the land beyond, where stuffed stoats play cards, four-headed taxidermy angels keep watch and paperweights move of their own volition.
The house has a locked-down, shuttered, tight-lipped vigilance today.
The cats feel it: they are acting skittishly, flattening their ears and thrashing their tails, skulking low and jumping at nothing. I stand at the kitchen door, listening, watching. Not knowing what I’m listening or watching for.
The house is ominously quiet: it’s holding its breath.
I turn to put the kettle on and then I hear it.
My blood stops flowing.
A girl is singing in the hallway, her voice high and lovely, with the hint of a caught sob. Half a phrase, four words at the most, and I understand none of them.
Then: nothing. Only ringing silence.
The crack in the Great Wall of National Geographics has reopened, wider than before, and I am stepping right through it. Just watch me. I am a beaver. I am tenacious in the face of stacked odds and singing ghosts.
Botticelli’s Venus winks at me as she unravels her duodenum. The glass eyes spin and the stoats smirk into their playing cards. The raven is nowhere to be seen and the shrunken head smiles as if it’s nursing a nasty joke. The four-headed angel appears to be looking in any direction but mine. I stand at the bottom of the stairs, biting my lip, hesitating.
‘What now, Mary?’ I whisper and survey the staircase.
The staircase Mary Flood fell down.
Did she hit the floor headfirst and black out? Or did she lie at the foot of the stairs drifting in and out of consciousness? A wheezing bag of broken bones and haemorrhages. Perhaps she landed right here, where I’m standing?
Does her ghost fall still, over and over again in the afterlife? Reliving, in perpetuity, those terrible moments? The accusations, the look in his eye, the step backwards, the brief tussle—
Where do schoolgirls go when they disappear? Into a cave, into the sea, into a basement with the windows boarded, into a bedsit in Rhyl?
It’s a vanishing trick.
I imagine Mary standing next to me at the foot of the stairs, an urgent, silent presence. She turns the melted hole where her face once was to me. I can see right through it. She points up the staircase.
I am a fecking beaver, and so, with my breath held and my heart beating backwards, I climb the stairs.
The flood of objects flows to the top step, then stops and laps there, rising no higher. Before me is an empty landing. I count six doors obstructed by nothing and a table that holds nothing more than a silk-shaded lamp.
I survey the hall below and I’m staggered.
I am Ariadne: I have made it through the maze, without even a ball of string. Through an ocean of glazed cases and taxidermy, polished wood and medical curiosities. I have eluded the raddled old Minotaur.
The air is different up here at the top of the stairs. Neutral, unused, as if no one has ever breathed it. I have the strongest feeling that if I go any further I will be trespassing somewhere secret, somewhere private.
The light changes; the sun shines through the stained-glass window. Dappled colours, sudden and dazzling, fall on the wall opposite.
A woman in black is watching me.
The portrait is life-sized and painted in astoundingly beautiful hues. Skin the colour of chalk and copper hair so vivid it looks lit from the inside. Her chin is tilted up, defiantly, so that she stares down the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are large, green, alarmed. Dots of bright paint capture their liquid brilliance.
Despite her stern grandeur she is an untamed hare: long in limb, her gaze crazed with panic. She is frozen, captured in mid-flight – one naked heel lifting. Nerve alone holds her; she wants to turn and run.
In one hand she grasps a posy of red and white roses, the other plucks at them. The petals are scattered behind her, a trail of blood and snowflakes.
I suddenly realise: I am now in the domain of Mary Flood.
I sit on the top step stroking Samuel Beckett. I have never seen him before but naming him is the work of a moment. He is a Siamese beauty with a forthright expression in his powder-blue eyes. I wonder if he’s a neighbour’s cat, attracted by the herds of mice that run along the skirting boards.
Beckett looks up at me and yawns.
‘You’re an intelligent feline, should I go any further?’
He blinks at me disdainfully and, as if sensing my cowardice, flounces across the hallway. Mary Flood’s portrait shows no reaction. The sun has gone in and the colours are muted now. She is still scattering rose petals but no longer looks alarmed, just vaguely bored.
Beckett flicks a succession of question marks with his tail, then walks over to a door on the right. If he were a dog he would paw at it and whimper, but being a cat he nonchalantly runs his flank along it.
I take this as a sign and get up and walk over to the door. I touch it carefully, pressing my palm against it, like a firefighter feeling for heat, trying to guess what’s behind it – perhaps the ghost of a blazing-haired woman, perhaps a long-lost girl?
I try the handle. The door isn’t locked but there’s resistance. The stickiness of a door unopened for years, then the sigh of something pent-up undone as a whisper of air rushes past me.
A genie let out of the bottle.
Beckett pushes in front of me and weaves inside.
The room is large and dark; the air is cold. Heavy curtains are drawn over the windows, shadowy shapes of furniture huddle. The light switch doesn’t work, so I cross the carpet, thick underfoot, to open the curtains.
Daylight and dust motes set in dizzying motion.
The room is lovely, with a faded opulence that still dazzles.
On the wallpapered walls snowy doves coo in cages against an oyster background. In the spaces between, repeated at intervals, twist love knots and delicate nooses. The carpet is deep and soft and aged to off-white.
In the centre of the room is a bed fit for a princess. Stacked with feather mattresses, cushions and bolsters. Dressed in velvet and brocade, in shades of vanilla and magnolia, seashell and bone. Beckett jumps up on the bed and spirals around, blissfully kneading the counterpane with his paws. Above the bed is a silver-framed picture. I draw nearer and see that it is exquisite and horrible in equal measure: a dozen pale moths, splayed and pinned. At the centre, a beast the size of a teacup with black-spotted wings as plush as an ermine cape. She is flanked, either side, by smaller beauties with wings of creamy gauze or crenulated lace.
Opposite the bed, in front of the window, is a dressing table with a stool. Along the wall, on a striped grey and white chaise longue, legions of china dolls look on in watchful stiffness. Some are the size of toddlers, bonneted in blanched straw with dusty curls falling onto pale sprigged cotton. Others are smaller and dressed in white coats with pearly buttons and fur-trimmed hats. Without exception they are sinister: their expressions ranging from blank spite to thin-lipped malice.
One of the line-up catches my attention. She is hatless and bootless with a high-necked lace dress and pale hair. Her face has a look of thwarted evil. Her lips reveal sharp porcelain teeth. Frayed bandages hang from her tiny wrists, like an escapee from an asylum. I have no doubt she’s the ringleader.
I ignore her and her friends and sit down in front of the dressing table and its ancient liver-spotted mirror, a triptych thick with dust. I see three hazy Mauds, loitering and blinking, peering and nosing, in their polyester tabards with their dark hair scraped back. Their expressions are uneasy but there’s a resolute set to their jaws, fair play to them.
I open the drawer and see a long velvet box. I lift it out carefully; inside, there is a delicate pearl necklace nestled in satin. The clasp, a crescent moon set with opals. I close the box and put it back. Next to it there is a m
other-of-pearl backed brush and comb set and some silver-topped bottles, their contents solidified.
I get up and walk over to the door to the right of the room and try the handle. It is not an en suite as I expected but a dressing room, painted white with fitted wardrobes along one side. There’s a mirror and a silver bentwood chair.
I glance back into the bedroom. Beckett is cleaning his backside with one leg sticking vertically in the air.
I open the wardrobe door.
For Mary Flood I envisaged tweed skirts and raincoats, low-heeled shoes and headscarves. Here are dresses of vermillion and emerald, indigo and magenta, in satin, silk and lace. And here is the scent – not of mothballs or stale old clothes – but of summer air.
These clothes are as inviolable as the bodies of saints.
I hesitate. I daren’t touch.
But then I do touch – a dress of blue slub silk.
I lift it out and hold it up and see that Mary Flood was as slim as she looked in the painting, but less tall.
Here are several lifetimes of dresses, on padded hangers, shrouded in plastic. There is a silver 1930s flapper dress with a scalloped hem, heavy with beadwork. A knee-length, sugar-pink 1950s ballerina with a stiff tulle skirt and a bodice dotted with roses. There are drawers full of gloves and stockings and rows of bags: jewel-studded opera purses and tiny golden clutches.
It is like a girl’s dressing-up-box dream.
The final door conceals a wall of shoeboxes. I open box after box of shoes, finding black kitten heels and gold sandals, nude pumps and ruby-red slippers.
My heart leaps. I lift the ruby slippers out with awe; they shimmer just like Dorothy’s. The same magical glitz, the same irrepressible sparkle.
I turn them round; they catch the light from the window. They have little bows on the toes and look like they could fit me.
Knowing how treacherous red shoes can be, I think for a moment before I slip them on. They could dance me to death or take me all the way home. Which would be worse?
I will be careful to not think of home and not click my heels.
I have one trainer off when I notice, at the bottom of the wardrobe, a shoebox different from the rest. It’s battered and bound round with string. I take it out. Neatly packed inside are rows and rows of cards.
I sit down on the chair with the shoebox on my lap. I take out a card and look at the picture on the front: the Virgin and Child.
A Mass Offering
I open it; neat ink fills the gaps between printed copper-plate:
At the request of MARY The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass will be offered for the intentions of GABRIEL.
I flick through the cards, finding Mass after Mass offered for Gabriel, until:
At the request of MARY The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass will be offered for MARGUERITE.
Marguerite? I touch the name. Who is Marguerite?
I hear a noise, a faint scratching in the other room. I grab handfuls of cards and slip them into the pocket of my tabard. Glancing out of the door I see Beckett crouching on the bed; his ears point forwards and his tail sweeps across the counterpane. His fur stands rigid along his back.
When I follow his gaze my heart stops. Traced in the dust on the dressing table mirror are two letters:
M F
I collide with Cathal in the hallway just outside the kitchen door. He has a broken television aerial in one hand and a bicycle inner tube in the other. He looks down at them as if he’s trying to work out the relationship between these two objects, as if each holds the clue to the other’s potential.
‘You went through,’ he says, gesturing over my shoulder at the Great Wall of National Geographics.
It’s a statement, not a question.
I nod.
Close up I realise the size of him. When he’s creeping or watching he has little presence. He is insubstantial, invisible. But right now he is immovably solid, as undeniable as a slagheap or a piano. He bares his massive tarnished dentures, making a snapping sound with his lips like a disgruntled horse.
‘No one goes through,’ he says. ‘Do you hear me?’
‘I went through to find the bathroom,’ I say, in my defence.
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘It’s like a museum, all that stuff—’
‘And you didn’t think to ask first?’
I look down at my trainers. ‘I thought you’d have said no.’
‘I would have,’ he says sourly.
‘Then I’m sorry.’ I venture a smile of reconciliation.
‘You’re not sorry at all.’ Mr Flood’s face is expressionless, his voice flat. ‘You broke in.’
‘I did not. There was already a gap there; I just went through.’
‘You’re lying again.’
‘I’m not, I swear to God . . . ’
He looks at me coldly. ‘You have the kitchen, the scullery and the pantry. No more. If I catch you going through there again you’ll be gone.’
* * *
I’ll be gone. I ponder this with an opened tin of corned beef in one hand and a knife in the other.
What’ll he do?
I think about it. He didn’t appear malicious, just practical and even a little jaded. What he was saying is that he wouldn’t want to kill me and chop me up, but he’d have to. I slice the corned beef, arrange it on the lettuce and pick up a radish. I cut its whiskery tail hair off and quarter it.
If I catch you, you’ll be gone.
There it is then. If he catches me he’ll have to kill me and if he doesn’t he won’t. So in a way he’s given me his blessing: as long as he doesn’t see what I’m up to I can come and go as I please without being murdered.
Like Mary Flood.
Like Maggie Dunne.
Turning back to the sink, I see him out of the corner of my eye, leaning against the dresser, watching me. And then I smell it. The sudden stink of fish. He has an open can and is hooking out sardines with his fingernails. Oil flecks his grizzled chin. I stare at him with revulsion.
A decrepit, fish-guzzling giant with feet as big as dustbin lids and I didn’t even know he was there. Melting into the plates and the saucers and the milk jugs, half-invisible.
How?
‘Can I help you, Mr Flood?’ I sound abnormally bright.
He must have seen me jump. I quickly wash the knife, dry it and put it in the drawer, in case he’s tempted to start right away with the murdering.
‘I’ll paint you, Drennan.’
My heart is in my mouth. ‘I don’t know—’
‘Wear your hair up,’ he says. ‘We’ll start tomorrow.’
I’m halfway down the garden path with a bin bag in each hand when I see Gabriel Flood up ahead. He’s in jeans with a white shirt tucked in over the bulge of his stomach. He is still wearing loafers.
‘Let me take that for you.’ He smiles and holds out his hand. ‘How’s the old bugger today?’
‘He’s grand. I’ll leave you to go in and see him now.’
Gabriel walks ahead, gallant with the rubbish. ‘Actually, it’s you I came to see, Maud. I wondered if we could have a word.’
‘I need to be somewhere.’
He puts the rubbish into one of the wheelie bins and follows me out of the gate. ‘I could give you a lift.’
‘No, thanks,’ I say.
‘My car’s just there.’
Renata’s voice in my ear cautions me against accepting a lift from a man in loafers. ‘The bus is fine.’
‘But a lift would make a nice change? We could go for a quick coffee on the way.’ He motions at a brand-new black BMW across the road.
I’m surprised. I had my money on something more prudent for a lecturer. A Škoda, perhaps, with tweed upholstery, hot-wired to Radio Four.
‘I’m sorry, Gabriel, but—’
‘Please, Maud.’ He fixes me with a desperate, harassed kind of look. ‘I need to talk to you about something. Something that concerns Dad.’
I assess the likelihood of
Gabriel Flood driving me to the yard of a disused warehouse, bargaining for illicit sex and then beating me to death with a car jack.
Then I narrow my eyes and speak like a woman armed with a dangerously sharp crossword pencil, a swift right knee and a Wing Chun taster session.
‘All right.’
At the coffee shop Gabriel takes a seat in a corner away from the window and waves the waiter over. He orders coffee and an all-day breakfast sandwich without looking at the menu. He’s making an effort to seem calm and controlled, but the red face on him and the wet top lip betray the real state of affairs.
He scans the room surreptitiously, then leans towards me. ‘I need a favour, Maud. It’s a bit sensitive.’
I watch his fat fingers as he plays with the top of the ketchup bottle.
The waiter brings the coffee over. Gabriel looks pained by the interruption. He runs a hand over his thinning hair, as if checking it’s still there, a quick frisk. Then he fiddles with the sugar bowl until the waiter walks away again.
He lowers his voice. ‘I need to find something, in the house.’
‘Oh yes?’ I sound disinterested.
His top lip is becoming wetter; he dabs at it with a paper napkin. ‘Nothing of any material worth, only sentimental value.’
‘Can you not just ask your father for it?’
He frowns. ‘You saw what the old man was like with me the other day. He hardly lets me step foot in the door.’
He looks crestfallen for a moment, then he licks the back of the spoon with his fleshy tongue.
‘I’m not quite sure how I can help, Gabriel.’
Gabriel takes a sip of his coffee and pretends he’s just had a thought. ‘Is it too devious to ask if you would take Dad out of the house for the day? Then I could swing by and search for it myself?’
I smile at Gabriel, wondering if he realises that I have the advanced bullshit warning system which comes from working with the mad, bad and cantankerous day in, day out. This is how I can tell that someone is lying about eating the last custard cream, wilfully shitting their knickers, or hiding my handbag.
‘I wasn’t aware that your father ever went out.’
‘You could convince him, surely; you are so good with him.’