by Jess Kidd
Instead, all around me stand Bridlemere’s dead.
I can’t see them but I’m sure they are there. Mary Flood, relaxed in a shirt dress, puts a steadying hand on my shoulder. Maggie, standing a little apart, flashes me a quick grin. Cathal raises the still-dark caterpillars of his eyebrows.
And the others?
There are no others. There are some fires even the dead can’t survive.
* * *
I lay flowers at the gate alongside wilted bouquets and teddy bears. Marguerites for Maggie. Roses: red and white for Mary, and for Cathal, a single perfect yellow bloom.
Lillian had cleaned it and wrapped it up until I was ready to look at it: the frame I had taken from the wall of the white room as the fire brigade fought to save Bridlemere, as the staircase fell, as the sparks shot up into the night.
The moths were intact, pale and pristine under glass. I worked the back free and found what I was looking for: the counterpart to the envelope hidden in the red room. Inside, on three sheets of paper, executed in small neat handwriting: Mary Flood’s confession.
She had read the story on her son’s face before he even opened his mouth. She had lost one child. So she promised not to tell.
But she began to fear that she would. That in a moment of weakness it would burst out of her. She’d be at church, or talking to Mrs Cabello, and out it would come.
She had kept secrets before but this one was different. It festered and suppurated. It pressed against the sides of her skull. It was a dark mass at the back of her tongue. It strangled her heart and soured her stomach. She felt it lodged there, heavy and corrupt, like poison. Mary was consumed with the urge to tell, to vomit the whole story up.
She couldn’t tell her husband and she couldn’t tell her priest; she couldn’t tell her doctor and she couldn’t bring herself to tell her god.
So Mary wrote it down.
She would sit and stare at her reflection. Sometimes in the red room, sometimes in the white; it didn’t matter. Both belonged to Maggie really, not to Mary. Furnished for a princess, not a queen. Neither room had been used by the girl; Cathal had readied them against visits that never happened. For the father doted on the child, despite everything. She was his fairy-tale girl, she could have everything, twice.
Rose Red, Snow White became Alice and fell down, down, down the rabbit hole.
Mary would sit for hours. Sometimes in the white room, sometimes in the red; it didn’t matter. For both mirrors showed the same woman: sealed mouth, hair of dust and eyes of stone.
Soon enough there was another face at the mirror alongside the woman’s.
Everywhere Mary went Maggie followed, drifting behind, from room to room, twisting the end of her ponytail and staring accusingly.
Every night Mary took a tumble into the well. Her nails scrabbling against blasted brickwork. Her hands grabbing at the strange subterranean plants that grew from the cracks. Her lungs breathing the cold, earthy smell of the bottom of the world as she turned. Every night she was shattered by the impact.
Every morning, when she woke, Mary wondered if she could last.
Stella is asleep on the sofa, snoring softly. Her legs twitching as she chases the cats that slink and hiss through her dreams.
We see Frank Gaunt out and go into the kitchen and sit for a while drinking krupnik how it’s meant to be drunk, with a steady hand and a grateful brain.
Mary’s confession, the confession we didn’t show Frank Gaunt, is on the table between us.
‘What do you want to do with it, Maud?’ Renata’s voice is low, gentle.
I think about Mary, a proud broken fire-haired woman. Signing her name, sealing the envelope. I think about Maggie, safe now in the police morgue, raised from her unquiet slumber under rubble at the well’s end. Soon she’ll sleep in the family plot, only this time her rest will be eternal.
I think about Gabriel and Stephen, trapped at the foot of the stairs, their exit blocked by fallen debris. The cause of the fire: faulty wiring on a set of fairy lights.
Mostly, I think of Cathal sitting at the kitchen table at Bridlemere, whistling through his dentures, swearing amiably.
He pats down the wild white mane of his hair and smiles. Then he’s off, scudding down the cluttered hallway of my mind’s eye.
I get up and search the kitchen drawer for matches.
It catches. I hold the paper as it burns, dropping it into the sink when the flame gets too near my fingers.
I wait for a dim figure to step through the wall, with a glowing corona and a muttered prayer. With a cloak, or a robe, or a wall-eyed wink. But nowadays there are only two undaunted women in a maisonette with a bottle of krupnik.
‘You’ve packed your passport then?’
I smile. ‘I have.’
‘Of course you have.’
‘Will you be all right?’ I say. ‘I’ll be back in a week or so.’
‘You’ll do no such thing.’ Renata looks me in the eye. ‘You’ll come back when you’ve found her.’
I nod.
‘And you will find her, Maud.’
I raise my glass to Renata and she raises her glass to me.