Get away, she thought. Back to the house? She didn’t know, was only sure that she needed to be gone from here. She pushed through the hedge, stumbled onto the lane.
Sara heard the hiss of tyres, the whine of brakes. She saw only an impression of the car, a wall of colour, and held her hands out as if they could stop it.
Damien’s BMW halted, its grille inches from her knees, and her legs betrayed her. She fell forward, her hands on the car’s bonnet, hot on her skin. Through the windscreen, she saw her husband stare back at her, eyes wide, lips moving. She heard his voice, muted, but the anger cut through. He threw off his seat belt and opened the door, climbed out, already shouting.
“. . . the fuck’s going on? What are you doing out here? I could’ve killed you.”
She tried to speak but there wasn’t enough air. All she could do was open her mouth and watch as he walked around the car to her. He seized her arm and dragged her to the passenger door, opened it, and bundled her inside.
His questions continued as he climbed into the driver’s seat and set off towards the house. She had no answers, only the image of ribbons reaching out across the water to her, inviting her into their tangles and swirls of scarlet.
14: Esther
Esther spent hours in thought, sometimes drifting on sluggish tides of sleep, but more often awake. She wondered about the two women, their ratty hair and dirty faces and fingers. Their missing teeth. The smell of them, their low and stale odours mingling with the damp and rot of the cellar. Sweat and urine, excrement and worse. Their dull and thready clothes. She watched them that first morning as they lit the lamps with thin and grubby fingers, made their toilet, went about their ablutions. All of it had the banality of routine and the urgency of ritual. The men summoning them from above, like heathen gods, taking the women up into the light.
How did they come to be here? How long ago? She wondered if their stories were like hers, grasping for a handful of kindness, and being dragged into this. And the strange little girl, so small, so watchful. Even after she had left her side, Esther still felt the girl’s eyes on her back, seeking. A girl who had never known any place but this.
It was still daylight up above when the door opened, and the two women descended the steps. One carried a jug, the other a bowl. The girl took the jug, drank from it, leaving a white film of milk on her upper lip. The bowl was set on the middle bed, and Esther turned to see what it contained: scraps of bread and cheese, and leftover beef from the night before. The two women and the girl dipped their hands in, brought food to their hungry mouths.
“Take some,” one of the women said.
Esther shook her head and turned back to the wall.
“You need to eat.”
“Don’t want to,” Esther said.
She felt the weight of another person on her bed. A hand on her back.
“Come on. No sense starving yourself. It’ll do you no good. Sit up. Eat.”
Esther closed her eyes and wished herself away from here, knowing it was futile. But then her belly grumbled with want. She turned and pushed herself upright.
“Here,” the woman on the other bed said, and reached out a piece of cheese rolled in bread.
Esther took it, saying nothing, and as she bit into the food, tasted the salt, her stomach growled again. She shoved the rest into her mouth, barely chewing, swallowed it down.
“More,” she said.
This time, the woman wrapped some beef in the bread. Esther snatched it from her and palmed it into her mouth. The little girl passed her the jug of milk, and Esther took a long swallow. It was warm and sweet, thick with cream, and now her stomach threatened rebellion. She covered her mouth and burped, then swallowed again.
“It’s fresh from the cow,” one of the women said.
They had told Esther their names the night before, but she could not pick them out from the tangle of images and emotions in her mind. It was as if the woman had read her thoughts.
“I’m Noreen,” she said.
“I’m Joy,” the other said.
“Esther. Esther Mooney. What is this place?”
Noreen and Joy exchanged a look, an ache of sadness passing between them.
“It’s a farm,” Noreen said. “Cattle, for beef, mostly. They keep a couple of cows for milk, but just for the house.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know,” Joy said. “Twelve or thirteen years, maybe. I’m not sure.”
“A bit longer,” Noreen said.
Noreen was missing at least one tooth, and her scalp showed pink through her hair. Two fingers of her left hand were bound together with a piece of wood, their flesh puffy and bruised. It crossed Esther’s mind to tell her she should see a doctor, but she caught herself.
She became conscious of the smell once again, the entwined murky odours of this place and these women. Her stomach lurched, and she swallowed bile.
“How can you live like this?” she asked. “Like animals.”
Noreen’s face darkened. “We didn’t choose this. No more than you did. You wait, give it a few weeks, you’ll be as filthy as we are.”
Esther realised she had found the hard nub of pride that remained in this woman. Good, she thought, glad of anything at all she could grasp to. That meant she hadn’t been broken. Not yet.
“Who are the men upstairs?” she asked.
“My Daddies,” the little girl, Mary, said.
Esther looked at her now, once again shocked at how small she was, how dark her eyes. “They can’t all be your father.”
“We don’t talk about that,” Noreen said. “We don’t want her to know too much. To get attached to anyone in particular.”
Joy cast her eyes down, hugging her own elbows. Esther noticed, and understood.
“How did you get here?”
“Probably same as you,” Noreen said. “I was desperate. I needed a place to go, and I took what I was offered. I didn’t know what was happening till it was too late.”
“George told me they needed a housekeeper,” Joy said. “I had nowhere else to go.”
“Have you tried to get out?” Esther asked.
“What do you think?” Noreen said, her voice sharp. “Course we have. I don’t know how many times. And I don’t know how many times I’ve been dragged back by my hair, or worse. There’s been others here. Others that tried to get away. They died. We’re the lucky ones.”
“Died?”
“Aye. They died. But we’re alive.”
Esther felt her anger ebb, dampened by the fear.
“There has to be a way,” she said. “There’s more of us than them.”
“And they’re stronger than us.”
“There’s knives upstairs, I used one yesterday. We just need to get one and—”
“They have guns,” Noreen said. “A knife’s no good against a gun.”
“We have to try,” Esther said. “What else can we do?”
“We can live,” Noreen said, leaning forward, her voice rising. “We can bloody well stay alive, and maybe we’ll outlive them. That’s what we can do. Just get by, just try to get through the day without making them angry. And they’re always angry. All we can do is survive, one day after another. Stay quiet, keep our heads down. You try to do anything else, and they’ll kill you. They’ll kill us. They’ve done it before, and they’ll do it again. We’re no better to them than the cattle in the fields. We’re less than that to them. You’re right, we live like animals, because that’s what we are to them. The best we can do is cook for them, clean for them, and please them when they want pleasing.”
Noreen got to her feet and marched in circles around the floor, her fists and her jaw clenched, her nostrils flaring. Esther played the words over in her mind.
“What do you mean, please them?”
Nor
een stopped, stared at her. “You know what I mean.”
Joy glanced at Mary. “We don’t like to talk out loud about it.”
Esther remembered the man in the car, his sticky hands, his tainted breath. Her walking away with her underwear in her hand, swearing to herself that she’d never allow such a thing to happen again.
“No,” she said. “They won’t touch me. I won’t have it.”
Noreen sat down again on the bed opposite. “They don’t care what you’ll have or you won’t. They’ll take what they want.”
“Not from me,” Esther said, meaning it. “And I won’t die here. I swear on my mother and my father’s grave, I will not die here.”
Noreen and Joy could not look at her. But Mary could. Her eyes deep and black and seeing into Esther’s very soul. Esther could stand to hold her gaze for no more than a moment, then she had to look away.
15: Mary
I was doting on that girl from the moment she came down them stairs. Or fell down them, I suppose. Most of the time I couldn’t wait to get upstairs into the light, even if I had to work like a dog, it was better than down there in the dark and the damp and the smell. But when she was there, that’s where I wanted to stay. The only thing I wanted was to be with her. I near wished she’d cry more so I could cuddle in and comfort her. And it wasn’t just that she was awful pretty and that she smelled clean and good and she didn’t have the filth under her nails that we did. It was because she was from out there, from the real world, where real people lived.
Sometimes I thought out there was just in my head. A place where people could go wherever they wanted whenever they wanted and no one was bating them and they could eat all the food they could fit in their mouths and they could drive cars and go to the seaside or the big city and all those things. Sometimes I felt like none of that was real, it was just stories Mummy Joy and Mummy Noreen telt me, and there was nothing further away than I could see from the windows or the yard.
And now here, wasn’t there someone from out there, and that made it real, and that made her special, and I wanted to know everything about it. So when the Mummies was upstairs working again, I asked her.
Says I, What’s it like out there? What’s the real world like?
Better than this, says she.
Do you live in the city, says I, or by the sea?
The city, says she, Belfast. We had a nice house, I went to a nice school. Before my father died, and then my mother. We lived on a nice road with lots of other big houses. I thought I’d have that forever. And now I’m here.
She cried again, quiet tears, not like before. I knew I shouldn’t go to her now. I should let her be.
I asked her about cars and buses. She telt me she got the bus into town sometimes, and other times her daddy took her in his car. I asked her about aeroplanes. She’d never been on one, but she telt me one time her and her mummy and daddy got on a big boat and crossed the sea to the Isle of Man. She said the sea was rough and everyone on the boat was sick. I tried to imagine that, being on a boat on the sea, and it going up and down and up and down. I tried to picture it, but I couldn’t. I’d never seen a boat.
I asked her about school, and she telt me she had lots of friends, boys and girls, and they all wore uniforms and they learnt to count and to read and they learnt about things that happened years ago all around the world. And how things work in the world, what makes the wind blow and why rain falls. And I had a terrible feeling inside me just then: I hated her, just for a wee while, but I hated her because she’d had all those things and I never heard tell of them before then. I was jealous of her, and I hated her for it, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to know about televisions and radios and picture houses and all those good things. But she didn’t want to talk about it any more, she was getting tired of me asking her things, so she helt her whisht and lay down again.
I don’t mind what time of day it was, but the Mummies had been upstairs at their work for a good long while, when Daddy Tam opened the door.
There’s cleaning needs doing, says he. Get changed out of thon dress and put on something from the wardrobe. The child’ll help you. The fireplaces need cleaning out. The child’ll show you what to do.
Says Esther, Let me go. I won’t say anything to anybody, just let me go.
Daddy Tam said nothing and closed the door, let us alone.
You should do what he tells you, says I. He’ll hurt you if you don’t.
I mind she stared at me for a wee moment, then she seemed to get smaller in front of me, like the air had been let out of her. Then she got up and went to the wardrobe. It had no doors, just a rail inside with dresses hanging on it. They were plain auld things, not like the dress Esther had on her. They might have been white at one time, but now they were grey and raggedy. She lifted one down, then another, and helt them agin herself to see which would fit best. She chose one and set it on her bed.
I watched her as she undid a button at the back of her dress, at her neck, then reached up between her shoulders and felt for a zip. I didn’t know that was what it was called then. I’d never seen one before. Everything we had was buttons. She pulled it down and the dress fell off her shoulders, and I couldn’t breathe. She lowered it down to the floor and she stepped out of it and I couldn’t lift my eyes from her. The Mummies, when they got changed, I could see the bones of them, their ribs, their shoulder blades. Not Esther. Her body was full and her skin was white and she had no scars and no sores, only a lock of bruises from falling down the stairs. She was perfect. I don’t mind if I knew that word back then, but I know it now, and that’s what she was.
Just perfect.
She lifted her dress and she laid it on the bed, smoothed it out all flat, spread out the skirt of it, the arms. She ran her fingers over it, touched the hems and the stitching and the pleats. Like it was a precious thing, like a treasure. And then she noticed me watching her, and she covered herself up, like she was ashamed. I wanted to tell her not to be ashamed, not to hide, because she was perfect, but I didn’t have a breath in me. She gathered up the dress she’d taken from the wardrobe and pulled it on over her head. Then she looked down at herself and cried awful hard. I didn’t think she could have any tears left in her, but she did.
Says I, We should go up and get started before Daddy Tam comes looking us. He’ll be thran if he has to come and get us.
She followed me up the stairs, still wearing her good shoes. The door at the top was open, and we went out into the kitchen. Daddy Ivan sat at the table, writing numbers in his big book, counting money, sorting it into piles. I lifted the shovel, brush and tin bucket from beside the wood stove, which still wasn’t lit because it hadn’t been cleaned out yet. Mummy Joy was washing clothes in the sink. Mummy Noreen was cleaning the floor.
We start at the top, says I, in the bedrooms.
There were three rooms upstairs, one for each of the Daddies. We went to Daddy Ivan’s first. I lifted the fireguard away from the hearth and knelt down. Like this, says I, sweeping the ashes out from under the grate and onto the shovel, and pouring them into the bucket.
Says she, I know how to clean out a fireplace. Where are the others?
The Daddies? says I. They’ll be out in the fields or in the cowsheds, doing their work.
So there’s only him, says she, the older one.
I was finished cleaning Daddy Ivan’s hearth, so I went to the next room, Daddy George’s. Esther followed me, and this time she lifted the fireguard away, got down on her knees and did the sweeping out. We didn’t talk any more, but I could see she was thinking, thinking, thinking.
When we’d done all the fireplaces upstairs, Esther carried the bucketful of ashes down to the kitchen, and I showed her where to empty it out in the yard. She stood there for a minute and looked around her. The only way out was through the gate at the far side, the one that led to the fields. She stared at it, her hands maki
ng fists at her sides.
They’ll catch you, says I.
Maybe, says she, maybe not.
They’ll hurt you.
Not if I hurt them first.
Come on, says I, we have the stove to do.
I thought for a second she wouldn’t follow me back inside, that she’d try to run, but she came ahead. She cleared out the stove, brushing the ashes into the bucket, while I folded old sheets of newspaper into criss-cross shapes, just like Mummy Noreen had showed me how to do. When the stove was emptied, I filled it with wood and newspaper, and then I put a match to the paper. I tended it a while, just to be sure the wood was lit, then I closed the door, opened the vent wide to help it take. I turned my head and saw Esther over by the sink.
I saw what she was looking at: the knives laid out on the draining board. Big ones and wee ones, all of them like razors. Her hand moved to the biggest of them, with its long blade and thick handle made of wood.
I whispered to her, Don’t.
She didn’t hear me or she didn’t listen, I don’t know, but she lifted that knife in her hand and my heart dropped down into my stomach. She turned around to face Daddy Ivan, the knife in her hand, helt out in front of her. Mummy Joy stepped away from her, soapy water dripping off her fingers. She put her back into the corner as far as it would go, afraid to look at anybody. Mummy Noreen stayed down on the floor where she’d been scrubbing.
Daddy Ivan looked up from the numbers in his book. He squinted his eyes at her.
Says he, What have you got there?
Esther lifted the knife higher, turned it so the blade shone in the light from the window.
Says she, I’m going. I’ll cut you if you try to stop me.
Daddy Ivan sat back in his chair and watched her, his mouth tight shut.
Esther says to Mummy Joy, Come with me.
The House of Ashes Page 9