by Anna Wharton
She goes through the kitchen and out into the hall. The house feels still. She stands at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Hello?’ she calls again.
Nothing.
Maureen told Chloe that Patrick took early retirement from an engineering firm in the city before they moved out here, and coupled with the sale of their house and a decent pension, they have enough to live on. Renting this room gives them a little extra so they can afford treats, and when she’d told her Chloe had resisted the urge to look around their shabby kitchen and wonder what they might be. It’s not a glamorous place, she knows it never will be. A little sign hangs on the wall beside the clock, in the kitchen. Another hope sign. This time it’s an acronym: H.O.P.E. Hold On Pain Ends. She’s seen Maureen straighten it once or twice as if each time she does might bring her closer to believing it.
Chloe goes upstairs to her room, familiar now with each floorboard that creaks on the landing. Out of the window at the top of the stairs, the flat Fens spread all the way back to the village and miles beyond the willow tree. She’s learnt over the last week that wildlife is their neighbour out here. Just last night a barn owl flew right into the back garden and perched on the edge of the outhouse roof. She and Maureen had got up and watched it from the patio doors. It sat there for at least ten minutes, blinking back at them with big black eyes.
‘In the old house I used to find white feathers every now and then,’ Maureen had said quietly, so as not to disturb the owl. ‘Just out of nowhere, you know?’
Chloe had nodded.
‘They say they’re left by angels, but if that’s so and it was Angie leaving them . . .’
Her sentence trailed off and Chloe had reached for her hand because that’s what people do in films. She knew what Maureen was trying to say but Chloe found it hard to think that she really thought Angie might be dead. She’d never given that impression in the cuttings.
Maureen talks more about Angie now. It’s as if Chloe being here has brought her daughter back to this new home. The dead flies are gone from this windowsill, and now there’s a little photograph of Angie in a mother of pearl frame. As she reaches the top of the stairs, Chloe picks it up. It’s one she never saw in the newspaper cuttings. She’s aged around three or four. Her finger runs the length of her orange summer smock dress with mustard-yellow flowers, then across the child’s smile. She puts it back and it falls face down. For a moment she thinks to leave it there, then walks back to return it to standing.
She looks out the window; from here she can see all the way up the lane to the willow tree. Maureen and Patrick will be back soon, their blue car will appear down this long straight road. The house feels different without them. Exposed, vulnerable even. Chloe looks towards the room next to her own, the one that is always kept locked, and that’s when she notices – the padlock is missing again.
From the wall, the crucifix watches as she crosses the landing. Surely it would be a wasted opportunity if she didn’t take a peep inside? It’s not really snooping, not if you’re investigating a disappearance. At least, if this were a police investigation, a chance like this would not be overlooked.
She glances over her shoulder, then tiptoes back to the top step to check down the road for Patrick’s car. Nothing. She looks back at the door. Just a look, that’s all she’ll take, a peep inside then she’ll close the door again. No one will know, and why would it matter anyway? It’s just a room. A room that is usually locked. Locked from both doors.
She takes a step closer, then another. The floorboards creak underfoot. She stops, listens. Hears a sound downstairs, a click – she holds her breath – the back door?
No, it’s just the fridge in the kitchen.
She takes another step, then another. The handle is almost within reach. A second later her hand is on it. She takes it within her grasp, turns, feels the click of the lock releasing. She pushes the door, waits to feel it swing open.
Just a look, that’s all.
But it doesn’t budge. She pushes again, harder. Nothing. She turns the handle – perhaps it’s stuck? It turns inside her palm, this way and that, but the door remains tightly shut. How can it be locked from the inside? She rattles it then, leans her shoulder into the wood, tries to push. The door resisting against the weight of her.
That’s when she hears it, a sound from the road, the crack of pebbles under tyres.
Chloe lets go of the handle and rushes to the window in time to see Patrick’s car pulling up on the driveway. She darts into her room and shuts the door behind her. Across the room her eyes fall on the connecting door through to the spare room – the identical padlock still in place. To lock the door to the landing from the inside, someone must have been in here. She scans her room – nothing looks out of place. But then a terrifying thought lands deep in the pit of her stomach. She is down on the floor in a second, searching underneath the bed among the dust and – there it is. Her archive. The panic stills inside her.
She sits back on her bed, hears the back door open, Maureen and Patrick’s voices downstairs. She looks back at the wall that separates her from the room next door. She has to see inside.
It turns out Maureen and Patrick have brought fish and chips home tonight.
‘We got you cod, I hope that’s OK?’ Maureen asks.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Didn’t know if you liked mushy peas, though.’
Chloe guesses takeaways are the little treats they can now afford.
The three of them sit at the kitchen table, eating out of the chip paper. They eat in silence for a while. Maureen gets up every so often to butter bread for Patrick. He fills it with chips and folds it over in one hand.
Chloe can’t stop thinking of the room upstairs. The room they’ve never mentioned. Who needs to padlock a door from the outside unless there’s something in there you don’t want someone else to see?
‘You’re a bit quiet tonight, Chloe,’ Maureen says.
‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Just a bit tired from work, you know?’
‘What is it you do again?’ Maureen says. ‘I haven’t asked you much about your job.’
She tries to think of something that sounds as boring as possible so as not to invite further questioning. For some reason Hollie’s boyfriend, Phil, pops into her head.
‘Insurance,’ she says.
‘Oh right,’ Maureen replies. ‘Pass the salt, will you, Pat?’
She’s thought about asking them, of course she has. But they’ve already told her that the room is for storage. Why wouldn’t she believe them? Would a detective believe them?
‘Are you sure you’re OK, Chloe?’
‘Would you stop fussing, woman!’ Patrick says between mouthfuls. ‘She’s said she’s fine.’
‘I’m only asking, Patrick.’
He sighs and gets up from the table, putting a plate underneath his wrapped fish and chips. He heads into the living room, then comes back for the ketchup. In the silence he squirts some onto his plate. He leaves again and a moment later, the last of the evening’s news filters through into the kitchen.
‘I was only asking,’ Maureen says again, this time into her chip paper.
The two women eat for a while in silence. Chloe chews her food but there’s a question she can’t swallow. She looks to the open doorway, wanting to be sure Patrick isn’t listening.
‘There is something . . .’ Chloe says.
‘Yes?’ Maureen looks up from her food.
Chloe hesitates. ‘The room next to mine . . .’
Maureen’s eyes flicker back to her plate.
‘I just wondered why there is a padlock on it? I just wondered why it’s always kept—’
‘Patrick doesn’t like me going in there,’ she says in a whisper, looking quickly to the doorway. She is suddenly nervous in a way Chloe hasn’t seen before.
‘But why?’ Chloe says. ‘If it’s just storage . . .’
Maureen picks up her plate from the table. ‘It is storage,
Chloe, but . . . it’s best left, that’s all.’
‘But—’
Maureen scrapes the last of her food into the bin and puts her plate in the sink. She wipes her hands on a tea towel, then follows Patrick into the living room. Chloe hears her offering him a cup of tea, adopting a much lighter tone than a second before. Then nothing for a while except for the sounds of the TV. There’s been a big fire somewhere in Essex, two firefighters have been killed. Another is still missing.
Chloe makes an excuse to go to bed early that night. She yawns from the sofa to make it seem convincing, not that anyone protests.
After she’s turned out the light in her room, she lies back in the darkness, the muffled sounds of the television creeping up through the house. She turns over on her pillow, once, twice, then sighs, switching on her bedside lamp. The duvet twists around her legs and she shakes it off. On the bedroom floor, she reaches for the box under her bed. It’s pushed all the way to the back wall, and her hand fishes for it in the dust and darkness. Her fingertips find the cardboard sides of it and she pulls it out from under the bed. The box is black, or at least it once was. Now it is scuffed and scarred, having travelled with Chloe for years. Inside it is filled with envelopes, each one of them named. She pulls out the newest looking one. She sits back against the bed frame, the cool of the wooden floorboards under the back of her knees, her feet on the rug. She opens the envelope and empties it into her lap. She hasn’t brought all the cuttings here, just a selection, in case she needs some reminders. The rest are back in her bedroom at Nan’s. She knows she will need to go back for them, but when she thinks of Nan’s house, she feels awkward and unsettled inside. She unfolds one photocopy after another, surprised how old photos that she had come to know so well now feel strange to her. She can’t remember which cuttings she’d brought, and so each that she unfurls is a surprise, although none offer new clues, not even from this vantage point.
Raised voices filter through the floor. Chloe stops, the cutting in her hand. She can hear Patrick.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, woman . . .’
She shuffles closer to the floorboards, pressing her ear to a warm one where she had been sitting to get closer to their conversation. She holds her breath, the wood between them stealing much of what’s being said in the living room, only tiny snippets floating up towards her.
Patrick continues: ‘. . . treating her like . . . turned up out of nowhere . . . know nothing about . . .’
And then Maureen interjects, her pitch higher, harder to decipher.
‘Please, Patrick . . . know more than anybody . . .’
Patrick’s voice cuts her off. Not that Chloe can hear what he says. Instead it’s the way he says it, a coldness to his tone. She lies there, pinned to the floor. She waits for Maureen’s response. But there is nothing, just fuzzy sound from the television. Her heart thuds against the floorboards. Should she go down? Has he hit her? Is that why she’s suddenly silent? She listens closer for the sound of crying, but she can’t pick up anything through the thickness of the oak between them. What had they been arguing about? She’s read stories about this, women controlled by angry men, shocked into silence by the fear of them lashing out. Was this Maureen’s life with Patrick? Is that how he appeared to her?
She finds a pen in her bag and writes down the date along the side of the cutting she’s holding: Patrick angry. Maureen frightened into silence.
A few minutes later she hears the click of the television going off in the living room, the soft pad of slippers mounting the stairs. She gathers the cuttings up quickly and pushes them back into their envelope. The one she’d written on is the last she puts away. She notices the headline then:
ANGIE’S FATHER IN SHOCK ARREST
She folds it up and gets back into bed. By the time she sees a pair of feet pause outside her door, she’s already turned off the light.
TWENTY-SIX
There is a change in the atmosphere in the morning, she can tell before she’s even reached the kitchen. Chloe lingers at the bottom of the stairs, listening out for Maureen and Patrick’s voices, but there is only silence. From here her eyes settle on the front room, a room kept purely for storage at the moment and one she’s never been in before. The door is still ajar, just as it was that first day Maureen showed her around. She can see through the gap in the door that it’s filled with nothing more than boxes, each labelled with a different room in the house, but as she passes, she makes a note to take a look inside when she can.
She enters the kitchen, her flat heels clapping on the black and white lino.
‘Morning, Chloe, love,’ Maureen says, quieter than usual.
Patrick sits behind his newspaper at the kitchen table, his curly hair more unkempt this morning. He rakes his hand through it without looking up at Chloe. He is reading a story about the missing fireman Chloe had overheard on the news last night. He looks up and sees her watching him and turns the page of his paper.
Chloe goes about her usual routine, taking a bowl from the cupboard for her cereal, crossing the kitchen to take a spoon from the drawer. Its runners grate in the silence.
At the table, Chloe looks between Patrick’s newspaper and Maureen, who stirs her tea slowly, looking down.
Outside, bare trees sway in front of a pale sky. Chloe spoons cereal into her mouth, watching Maureen when she gets up from her chair to cut Patrick’s sandwiches slowly with a sharp knife. She wraps them in clingfilm and leaves them on the worktop. She steps back, returns to her chair. On cue – as if the pair of them have been choreographed – Patrick gets up and scoops his sandwiches from where she’s left them. He hesitates then, as if, for a second, he forgets the steps. He goes to give Maureen a kiss as he usually would before he leaves for work, but she gets up and leaves the kitchen, his kiss hanging in the cool of the air she leaves behind. He glances at Chloe then and she quickly looks down into her bowl, then he leaves.
Maureen doesn’t return to the kitchen until Chloe hears his car start.
What’s gone on between them?
Chloe wonders whether she should ask about the argument she overheard last night. She eats her breakfast slowly while she considers how to put it. But Maureen is now setting up her sewing machine at the table, and Chloe feels the moment has passed. She watches Maureen as she gets ready, pulling a length of material from her sewing box that Chloe recognizes, although she can’t say where from. Perhaps she’s just seen Maureen working on it over the last few days.
She pretends to read the cereal packet, one eye on Maureen as she winds orange thread onto the bobbin. Chloe lifts her bowl to make more room for her. Maureen thanks her quietly.
Across the table, Maureen picks up the material and breaks the silence between them by humming, winding the thread through the machine. Neither woman speaks, not even when Chloe gets up from the table and taps the contents of her bowl into the swing bin.
Chloe leaves the kitchen and goes upstairs to shower. She stands under the water, trying to piece together Maureen and Patrick’s argument from the night before with the snippets she had heard. Whatever it was they had argued about had rolled into this new day.
She turns the water off and dries herself with a towel. Once she’s put on her bathrobe, she opens the bathroom door to allow the steam to escape; it rushes out onto the landing, curling towards Maureen and Patrick’s bedroom. Chloe watches it in the mirror on the bathroom cabinet. She stops still, listening carefully for any noise from downstairs, and hears the sound of the sewing machine going. She gently pulls the cabinet door open. Inside, the usual medical remedies are stowed away neatly: indigestion tablets and ibuprofen pain relief gel, spare tubes of toothpaste and extra toothbrushes, and four different bottles of prescription medicine, each with Maureen’s name printed on them. One is out of date, the label faded, with only one or two tablets left inside the bottle, so Chloe puts that back on the shelf, but the other three were prescribed just ten days before Chloe arrived. She picks these up, one at a time. Diaz
epam she has heard of – isn’t that some kind of sleeping pill? But the other two, sertraline and mirtazapine, she’s not so sure about. Why would Maureen need all of these? Listening out again, the gentle hum of the machine gives her the cover she needs. She quickly returns to her room and grabs the pale blue notebook that she’s not yet replaced in her black shoebox. She hurries along the landing back to the bathroom and quickly scribbles down the name and dosage of each pill alongside her other notes. She’s concentrating so hard on the spelling of each that she only realizes the sewing machine has stopped downstairs when she hears Maureen’s footsteps on the tread of the stairs. Chloe quickly pushes the bottles back into the cupboard and shuts the door just in time to see the top of Maureen’s head as she reaches the landing. She shoves her notebook inside her bathrobe, tucking it between her bare skin and her sleeved elbow, and desperately tries to rearrange herself into someone who looks less guilty.
‘You’re having a slower morning today,’ Maureen says as she appears on the landing. ‘Ooh, those stairs, they don’t get any easier, do they?’
‘Oh, it’s my boss, she’s in a bit later this morning so I don’t think anyone would mind if I . . . well, you know?’ Now Chloe is aware of herself panting a little. As a distraction she grabs her pink hairbrush and starts pulling it through her hair, stumbling on a particularly stubborn knot. Maureen watches her from the landing and sees how she struggles. She steps forward.
‘May I?’ Maureen says. She holds out her hand, and Chloe hesitates for a second, knowing that just inches from her nose those bottles of pills may be standing in a haphazard fashion behind the small mirrored door – had she even remembered to put them back where she found them in her panic?
‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ Chloe says.
She hands the brush to Maureen, who steps into the bathroom and takes her place between Chloe and the shower cubicle, still opaque with steam. Chloe pushes her hair back behind her shoulders as Maureen starts to tease the knot out of her hair silently.