by Jess Kidd
He opens his present, making pleased noises, and carefully folds the wrapping paper and puts it in his pocket.
I tie the cravat for him.
‘Well now, Maud, how do I look?’
‘A fine figure of a man.’
He smiles up at me, gratified, in the dead man’s cravat. On a whim I reach over to one of the vases and break off a blousy yellow tea rose. To his amusement I thread it through his buttonhole.
‘Now you’re perfect, Cathal.’
He grins and holds out his hand.
We take to the floor with Louis Armstrong.
Even the cats feel it: the sense of something ending, the slow sinking of the ship. Meanwhile, the music plays on and the lights twinkle. A cold inky blackness waits offstage, lapping at the edges of our scene, starting to trickle in. We will be swept away. But not in this moment, not right now.
All of the felines have turned out for the occasion. I see Beckett, a pale blur snaking under the table. The others prowl on the outskirts or lie along the table. There is a pattering of claws on metal and I look up to see the snout of a young fox peer over the roof of the caravan.
‘What will you do with them?’
Cathal looks around him. ‘They’ll find their own ways. The rest is in Gabriel’s hands now.’
‘But your house?’
‘We weren’t going to talk about this.’
‘I know.’
He smiles. ‘It’s only a house. All things come to an end, Maud. The trick is to go with the flow.’
I shake my head. ‘Is there nothing we can do?’
‘Do? No. Unless it’s to have a wee bit of that cake.’
I set the candles on the cake without counting, figuring that if there’s enough years you lose count anyway. I pour him a drink in a plastic glass and we have a toast.
‘To you on your birthday, Cathal Flood.’ I smile.
‘To you on my birthday, Maud Drennan.’ He smiles.
‘Now make a wish,’ I say.
As seriously as a child he closes his eyes, then he nods. He’s ready. I hold the cake near him and he blows out the candles.
‘Will you come and see this creation you’ve inspired now?’
‘The painting, is it finished?’
‘It is. You’re a fine muse, Maud.’
‘Am I not a little on the square-jawed side for a muse?’
‘I made do.’ Cathal stands up. ‘It’s inside the house. You’ll come in?’
I’m halfway down the garden path before I remember the pepper spray but I don’t even think about going back.
The house has a different quality at night. The fittings cast a flat tungsten light that is far less mysterious than I thought it would be. There are dark corners, but they are dark in an unswept kind of way. The smell is heightened, as if the rubbish, slumbering, is freely giving off its noxious fumes.
I follow Cathal’s impossibly tall form down the hall. His walk is faltering tonight, his body a little hunched in a suit older than days. His jacket swings short of his backside and his trousers end shy of his ankles.
The gap in the Great Wall of National Geographics is wider than ever. I can move through it touching the dusty strata on either side with my hands outstretched. Cathal has to duck his head and turn sideways.
He fumbles for a light switch and we are in fairyland again. Strings of tiny lanterns weave amongst the display cases, the instruments and taxidermy. There is a clanking and a whirring of curiosities coming to life, welcoming their master. Stoats throw down losing hands, the raven, back on her podium again, ruffles her wings. The glass eyes spin delightedly and even the shrunken head looks happier: the sewn pout has become a smile.
We carry on past them and past the four-headed angel at the foot of the staircase who wrinkles her snouts in greeting.
We continue down the hallway, further than I’ve gone before.
‘Look at this wee fella,’ he says.
Together we peer into a dimly lit fish tank – the face of a startling creature smirks back. The creature leans on one elbow in a sea of painted waves with its tail outstretched. It appears to be smoking a pipe.
‘The Feejee Merman.’ Cathal smiles. ‘Half capuchin monkey, half salmon: a work of genius; you can hardly see the join.’
‘It’s something else.’
‘Over here,’ says Cathal. ‘Have you a strong stomach?’
‘It depends.’
He pulls a string and a set of curtains open.
‘The Flayed Man,’ he announces.
A life-sized man sits cross-legged in a glass case resting his elbow on his knee and his head on his hand. His skin has been planed away from the right side of his body. Gory ribbons of flesh are still attached to his wrist and ankle. In some places the cuts have gone deeper, revealing muscle, nerves, bones and subcutaneous layer. One side of his face is unremarkable, on the other a naked jawbone grimaces and an eyeball lolls in an open socket.
‘Merciful Jesus.’
Cathal looks at me proudly. ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’
‘In my fecking nightmares I have.’
He grins. ‘The Hunterian Museum has been after this for years. Made by an Italian master of anatomical wax modelling.’ He opens a long wooden case. ‘But this is what started it all off.’
Inside, nestling in corresponding depressions of faded velvet, is a saw, knives, chisel and tourniquet.
‘This amputation kit belonged to my great-grandfather, Thomas ‘Butcher’ Flood, a surgeon in the Crimean War.’
‘That’s some heirloom. Did you not think of taking after him?’
‘I drop at the sight of the real stuff.’ Cathal frowns. ‘Will we go and see your portrait?’
He takes a bundle of keys from his pocket, searches through them and opens the last door in the corridor.
It’s a beautiful room. Long and narrow, with paintings ranged the length of it on forest-green walls. The gallery, Cathal calls it. The floor is polished wood and the bigger paintings are lit with brass lamps attached to the wall. There are landscapes and seascapes and even the odd still life.
I turn to Cathal in surprise. ‘None of them are by you.’
He gives me a bitter smile. ‘These are Mary’s paintings; she bought each and every one of them.’
Something else strikes me. ‘And there are no portraits.’
‘She didn’t like the eyes looking at her.’ He gestures at the easel. ‘Are you ready?’
In the middle of the gallery stands a square ghost: the canvas on an easel with a sheet pinned over it.
Suddenly I feel nervous. I’m an unwitting Dorian about to face my true self captured in oil paint. I wonder what it will be like, my true self. Maybe it will be a wizened strip of a thing, as spare as a fell runner. Or maybe it will be like one of those nocturnal mammals, round-eyed and unprepared, shocked-looking and a little otherworldly. I glance up at the old man and nod.
Maud stares out of the canvas. She sits with one leg folded under her and her head resting on one hand. At first sight she is still, self-contained. But when you look closer you see the clenched set of her jaw. And there’s a rise to her shoulders as if her hackles are up. Her hair is half-pinned, half-falling, giving her an unravelled look. Her mouth plays with a tense smile. For all her wariness she is tired, dog-tired and bone-tired; I can see it in her eyes. Like a soldier who has never been told to stand down, she has kept it all at bay for so long.
I start to cry.
Cathal upset is a broken toy, an old tin soldier, wound-up and wobbly headed. His eyebrows waggle as he tries out different expressions. He fixes on a sad frown. He holds me awkwardly to his chest as I cry, patting my back as if trying to wind a baby with colic.
I cry for the people who are dying from bowel obstructions and car crashes, heart attacks and lingering diseases, unhappiness and fluke DIY accidents. I cry for old rogues holed up in their clutter and brave souls too scared to go out. I cry for dead wives and bad sisters and disappear
ed schoolgirls. I cry for those who can’t remember and those who can’t forget and those who are stuck somewhere in the fucking middle.
As all the sadness in the world swells around me Cathal Flood holds on. But he is all smoke and mirrors, roar and bluster. For now I feel how fragile he is, how dry-boned and thin-skinned, made from paper and dust. Just like those big blousy moths flailing in the Belfast sink in the pantry of the Bridlemere of my imagination.
‘Come on now, Maud,’ he says. ‘What in the world have you got to cry about? Is it the painting? Do you not like the look of yourself? Is it your jawline?’
I shake my head.
‘I didn’t think so,’ he says.
But the tears are abating and knowing this, Cathal lets me go and takes the ancient musty handkerchief from his pocket and wipes my nose and eyes with it, roughly, brusquely, as you would a child late for school.
‘There.’ He smiles down at me. ‘You’re grand now.’
Cathal Flood walks me to the back door; Bluebeard willingly lets me leave his castle. He no longer wishes to kill me, if he ever did, for we are friends now. He opens the door and we watch the moths race each other, breakneck, to the strip light.
‘I’ll visit you, at the home,’ I say.
He shakes his head. ‘Ah no, Maud. I’d like you to remember me how I am now: fine, fierce and fighting.’
Suddenly I realise that this is the last time I will see him.
‘I need to find out what happened,’ I say quickly.
A raised eyebrow, a hint of a smile; he doesn’t quite catch my meaning.
I keep going. ‘To Mary and Maggie.’
I watch for his reaction: the beginnings of a frown perhaps, a drawing down of the mouth. Nothing dramatic.
‘Mary kept cuttings on the case of a missing schoolgirl called Maggie Dunne. I found them hidden in the red room upstairs.’
The old man stares at me with an expression of disbelief. ‘You’ve been searching the house? Going through her things, my wife’s things?’
I try to keep my voice slow, composed. ‘I didn’t go looking, not as such; they came to me. As if they were being shown to me.’
‘You’re touched.’
‘The missing girl lived at Cedar House at the same time as your daughter. Mary must have known Maggie; either way she wanted to find out what happened to her.’
‘You’re cracked.’
‘Just tell me, please, before they take you, before you go. Is she alive? Is Maggie here?’
He stands in front of me with his head bowed, strangely expressionless. Shut down and blank, like a seaside shopfront in winter. ‘You’ve said your piece and now I’d like you to leave.’
‘You knew her, Cathal. Don’t deny it.’
‘Good night and good luck so.’
I can hear my voice rising and feel a surge of indignation. ‘Look, I’ve respected you, considered your feelings, tried to help you.’
He shifts in his carpet slippers. His old hand goes up to his chest, bumps along where his heart might be. ‘Is it a medal you want? For not asking me things that are none of your business?’
‘It is my business if a crime was committed, if a young girl has been taken, to be held against her will or even killed.’
‘Jesus, would you ever cop yourself on? There’s no crime, there’s no one taken, there’s no one killed.’ He stabs at his head. ‘It’s all up there.’
‘You can talk to me, Cathal.’ I speak gently, calmly, as if I’m coaxing him back from a ledge. ‘You trust me, don’t you?’
His face falls, crumples. ‘You little bitch. Ingratiating yourself, is that what you’ve been doing? To get the senile old bastard talking, get him to admit to some shit you’ve dreamt up?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’ I shake my head. ‘Please, Cathal. I need to know.’
‘So that’s the reason you came here tonight. Last-chance saloon. Before the old fucker is carted off and anaesthetised, propped up in a chair drooling.’
‘Please.’
He looks me dead in the eyes. ‘You think that I could hurt Maggie Dunne? You think I could kill her or keep her here? You think I’m a monster?’
Maybe my eyes tell him I do, for his expression is one of slow-dawning disgust.
‘You sat and drank with me, you shared a meal with me, thinking I was capable of that?’
‘If you’re scared I can help you. We can go to the police together.’
He holds up his hands, palms out, as if he’s stopping a horse, as if he’s holding off a siege. He is beyond rigid. But behind the savage blue glare of his eyes he is breaking up. I see it in his mouth; it shapes the start of a sob.
‘Please let me help you, Cathal.’
The gates are stormed and the castle falls. Cathal Flood withers. His eyes brim with sudden tears. There is no anger. Here is only pain, his old face says, and betrayal, and love extinguished.
He closes the door. I hear him slide the chain across, then the bolt: sound effects with the right kind of finality. I bang on the door for a while and shout. Then I knock on the door and plead. Then I give up and stand silent in the garden and watch as the lights are put out one by one and Bridlemere sinks into blackness.
I imagine him tottering back through the house – wasted limbs and scarecrow suit. His old head wobbling and his eyes in it bewildered, the backs of his big gnarly hands brushing over the surfaces of his hoard.
Hot waves of remorse run through me. My stomach is a pit of shame. What have I done?
I fight the urge to get down on my knees.
Chapter 38
If you really want to repent, make self-mortification your friend, along with piety and hardship. Familiarise yourself with all three by having a good hard kneel. This is supplemental to the prayers you will already be doing for the absolution you know will never come.
I had been on the gravel for twenty minutes the day Granny caught me. I told her I was doing penance but she made me get up and took me inside and sponged my knees with disinfectant. As she dipped the sponge in the bowl she glanced up at me from time to time with a strange expression on her face, like she was trying to work out a difficult sum.
She dried me off with a clean tea towel while the boiled sweet in her mouth made a series of quick clicks as it ricocheted around her teeth. I never knew Granny not to have a sweet in her mouth and I could usually gauge her mood by her consumption of it, for she sucked sweets faster when riled and was known to crunch them when furious.
Granny straightened up and pulled down the hem of my skirt and patted my leg. She told me it wasn’t my fault that Deirdre had disappeared, that I should know this and remember it. Granny sounded exactly the same as she did the time she lied to Mrs Walsh over the church flower rota.
Deirdre was gone but that wasn’t my fault. I had been left behind but that wasn’t my fault. None of it was my fault.
The guards would find her. Or Deirdre, being Deirdre, would slouch through that door any minute now, scowling and saying, ‘Surprise! It was all a joke.’
I sat up at the table and Granny gave me a tub, a scraper and a pile of carrots. Then she stood by the sink looking out, at the empty bird feeder, the weather and the road leading up to the bungalow. The sweet in her mouth clicked faster and faster as it reached warp speed – soon it would disappear too.
Chapter 39
It’s late but Renata is up waiting for me.
‘Don’t let me think,’ I say. ‘Just talk.’
‘What about, darling?’
‘Anything.’
And she does. For almost an hour Renata holds forth on subjects as diverse as mail-order kimonos, the wonder of Steve McQueen and fondue. I look down at my hands on the kitchen table.
I feel Renata’s eyes roaming over me for signs of attack: pulled hair, slapped face, unbuttoned clothes, bruises and bite marks and fractures, snot and tears.
St Dymphna wanders up and down the hallway. Now and again she casts me a look; I’m not sure whether it’s
pitying or mocking.
Renata keeps talking. Halfway through an in-depth analysis of the merits of the tanga over a full brief I start to cry.
Renata takes my hand in hers and waits.
Then, in an easy, downy voice she says, ‘Tell me about it, Maud. Tell me everything.’
Everything.
Lightly, quietly, she says, ‘This is not just about Flood, is it?’
‘No.’
St Dymphna looks up at me from the hallway; an expression of dismay streaks across her face and she’s gone.
I don’t have to look around to know where she is: she’s right behind me. Quick as a ghost. So real I can feel her standing next to my chair; her robe brushes against my arm, her breath moves my hair.
She holds her hand an inch from my mouth. I see it before me.
I smell that medicated soap Granny always bought, and perfume stolen from the chemist, and the sickly strawberry sweetness of bubblegum.
If I try to speak of it, she’ll stop me with the pale flat dead palm of her hand.
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ I say. ‘Nothing happened.’
Chapter 40
I follow her, the red-haired woman. She leads me across a furrowed field, through a wooded copse, and on, deeper, deeper, into the trees, her white feet sinking into the loam. Above me, light-dappled branches, leaves saturated with colour – a vivid living green – and beyond a sky of cloudless blue. I wade through bracken and stumble over tree roots.
I am not frightened while I hear birds sing. For I remember that birds fly away when something bad is about to happen: they sense what’s coming. And the birds are singing all around us, brightly, persistently.
Here’s a clearing and there’s a stream. On the bank opposite, two children play in the water, sailing acorn cups. When they hear me they look up and smile. A dark blond boy and a bright blonde girl with the same slow, wide grin.
As I smile back I realise that the birds have stopped singing.
Chapter 41
St Valentine sits next to my weekend bag in the back seat of Sam Hebden’s green Golf with a dented passenger door. We’re making good time down the M3; with St Valentine’s intercession we will no doubt be in Langton Cheney by lunchtime. The saint travels with his head out of the window like an excited dog, blessing vehicles travelling below the speed limit and gesticulating at van drivers as they pass by texting.