I felt a strange coldness on my shoulders, as though the sun had gone behind a cloud, but the sky was still clear and empty, the same opaque blue it had been for weeks. I felt silly for thinking it, but it was as though talking about Petra had summoned her up and I wondered fleetingly if she was somewhere, watching us, waiting to make her presence known. Was the telephone ringing a reminder of the circumstances of her death—a little joke? A sign from her that she was here with us, after all, exactly like my mother had said?
I could see that Lorry was becoming more and more disturbed, and was crying now as well as rocking and clamping his hands to his ears. I forced myself to stand up and walk to the house.
The white plastic telephone was still ringing, the trilling engulfing the hall, and I found myself expecting the handset to start vibrating, like in a cartoon. I made myself reach out to lift it, but another hand slammed down and grabbed it. My dad.
His frown was replaced with a smile after a couple of seconds, and he turned away from me, facing the stairs. He was holding the receiver close to his mouth, his lips almost touching the mouthpiece. Then he went red and smiled and put his hand round the handset so I couldn’t hear much of what he was saying.
‘Alright, in a minute,’ I caught, and he put the receiver gently back on the cradle. There was paint on his hands and he rubbed them on his grubby jeans and muttered something about idle hands making work for the devil. Then he went outside and a couple of minutes later I heard the tell-tale squeak of the gate.
In my bedroom, I tugged on the only clean t-shirt I had and sniffed myself, thinking I should have had a wash when I’d taken Lorry to the stream that morning. I picked up the crow’s skull from the altar on the mantelpiece and stroked the smooth arc of the cranium. The beak was glossy and black, reflecting the sunlight that poured in through the little window. I looked across at Mally’s window, but the curtains there were closed. Down below I could see my dad and Janet, standing either side of her fence, our lawnmower lying discarded on the ground.
Janet was a good head shorter than my dad and she was looking up at him, her neck craned, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. She was in her pink bikini again, a lipstick kiss against the parched yellow handkerchief of grass that was her front garden. She was like one of her flowers, the ones that thrived in the herb garden at the back of the house, a splash of vitality against a dull and barren background. Her other hand was on her hip. I could see the string from her bikini digging in to tanned flesh. She had no strap marks or anything on her shoulders, just bronzed, gleaming flesh. She must have been sunbathing topless.
I could make out the shape of her nipples through the fabric of her bikini top, and I watched, transfixed, as her hand went from shielding her eyes to playing with her hair, the fingers winding round and round the blonde tendrils, teasing them. She was smiling, then suddenly looked serious and began biting her lower lip.
My dad had his back to me, and he’d taken his shirt off and tied it round his waist, like the boys at school used to do with their jumpers. There was a peculiar intimacy to these two semi-naked people standing so close to each other, only a picket fence stopping them from touching, and for a moment I thought of my mother, asleep in her bedroom, pale and oblivious.
Janet stopped playing with her hair and her hand fluttered to the edge of her bikini top. Her fingers teased the fabric gently, stroking it, caressing it. I could tell from the way my dad was standing that he wasn’t talking anymore. He was standing still, watching Janet. She was looking up into his eyes, but I didn’t think he was looking at her face. Abruptly, as though waking suddenly from a dream, my dad shook his head and stepped backwards. When he turned around I could see that he was smiling to himself, and when he walked back towards the house, he kept on smiling and shaking his head.
Janet stood there for a few moments, watching him go, and then turned and went into her house. The lawnmower lay abandoned by the fence.
I was making a sandwich in the kitchen when my dad came back in. He looked surprised to see me, but busied himself by folding up the dustsheet that was under the window. He’d found some paintbrushes and paint in the shed and had made a start on painting the window frame. Fresh white gloss had taken the place of the wood he’d exposed and the window looked incongruous, the newness of the paint stark against the ancient glass. He cleared his throat.
‘We’ll need more water tomorrow, Nif. Can that be your job again?’
‘S’pose so.’ I thought of the climb up the hill, the heat on my back, the clinging sweat beneath my breasts. Then I thought of Mally. ‘Yep. I can do that.’
‘Can you make sure you go early, love? The Christians will be out in force, it being a Sunday and all, and it’s probably best if you can go under the radar, so to speak.’
I nodded and crammed the sandwich into my mouth so I wouldn’t have to say anything else.
I hadn’t heard my mother coming into the room, but when I looked round she was standing in the doorway. She’d washed her hair and it lay in folds on her shoulders, glossy and smooth. She was wearing make-up, eyeshadow and a slick of lipstick that made her look younger and fresher. The dress she wore was one of her old ones that I hadn’t see her wear for months, a long, silky white one with embroidery around the neckline. As she stood in front of the window, the light gathered around her, and it was like she’d regained her old radiance, that luminescence she used to have that made people flock to her. That contemplative, placid smile had found its way back to her lips and for a fleeting moment, I thought she looked like an angel.
My dad looked surprised to see her. ‘I was just…making you a sandwich, love,’ he managed, and held out a hand to gesture at the loaf of bread and the cheese I’d discarded on the sideboard. He picked up the knife.
My mother nodded, but didn’t say anything.
‘Cheese or ham?’ My dad was really struggling now, but my mother just shook her head.
‘I don’t need food.’ She spoke in a whisper, and her words hung smoke-like in the still air.
My dad put the knife down. He put his hands very gently onto my mother’s shoulders, and steered her to a chair. He pushed her down and she complied, all the while with that strange smile on her lips.
‘You’ve got to eat, love. Keep your strength up. You know what the doctor said: a healthy body equals a healthy mind.’ As soon as he’d said it, my dad looked embarrassed, and he shuffled back to the sideboard and started making the sandwich. The butter had melted and he was scooping an ooze of yellow against the flabby bread.
‘I don’t need food. I already have all I need.’ My mother had raised her voice slightly, but it still came out as barely a whisper. I saw my dad’s shoulders tense, but he carried on scraping the liquid butter onto the bread. He didn’t turn around, and when he spoke it was as though he was addressing the sideboard in front of him.
‘Yes? And why’s that then?’ There was a deliberate lightness to his voice, but at the same time I could hear a new harshness, like the scrape of a knife against a plate.
‘You know why, Clive. You know as well as I do that she’s here.’ My mother’s voice was calm and smooth, but it also sounded smug, as though she was goading my dad. ‘Janet says she can feel her as well. She says she has a way about her for things like that and she thinks Petra’s here as well.’
My dad’s shoulders twitched a little bit and I knew he was struggling to keep his temper. In the end, it was too much for him. He swung round, and little drops of liquid butter flew off the knife and spotted my mother’s dress.
‘Petra’s…not…here.’ He punctuated his speech with little jabs of the knife into the air in front of him, and he enunciated every word, speaking slowly to make sure she heard everything. ‘You think our dead daughter is here, in this house? You think that she’s come back to tell you that she forgives you? That everything’s OK?’ These last words were spat out, and when I looked at my mother I saw that the smile had slipped from her mouth and her lips were thin and
straight. She’d made a spindly knot of her arms across her chest, and she looked as though she’d sunk into herself, made herself tiny.
When my dad spoke, there was a finality to his voice, a firmness, like that of an adult speaking to a truculent child.
‘Just stop saying these things about Petra. You’re making yourself ill and it’s not fair on the children.’
My mother’s face was white, and her smugness had turned to belligerence.
‘Should I just keep quiet then? Not say anything? Is that what you want?’
My dad turned on her and there was real fury in his eyes.
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I want. For once I would like you to just shut the fuck up!’
My mother was stunned into silence. She placed her hands on the table in front of her, twining her fingers together, the knuckles forming bony white nuggets.
I waited for the drama to continue, but neither of them spoke. In the end my mother reached up one hand and pushed her hair behind her ear, the action a full stop punctuating the end of the conversation.
My dad stalked off in the direction of his studio, and I knew we’d see no more of him that afternoon.
Sixteen.
Sunday 8th August 1976
I woke up very early the next morning after a solid, dreamless sleep and got straight out of bed. I checked the relics. The sun wasn’t quite up yet and in the pale light they looked unreal, the eggshells taking on a pearly glow, the crow’s skull gleaming as if it bore a light of its own.
I was surprised to see that the curtains were already drawn in Mally’s bedroom window and I half expected him to appear, but there was no-one.
I got dressed in a hurry. My t-shirt from the day before, my sole mini skirt that I’d worn that night to the pub, when Janet had flung her arms around my dad and had to be carried home. I thought there was probably something going on between them, but I didn’t really care. Good luck to them, I thought, and where there should have been a pang of shame at my disloyalty to my mother, there was nothing. She was welcome to her fantasies about Petra. I was numb to her.
There was nobody in the kitchen when I went down, and the water bottles weren’t there either. I thought they must be in my dad’s studio. In the darkness of the back hall the temperature was comfortable but I was stunned by the wall of heat that met me when I pushed open the door. The clear plastic roof had been assaulted by the sun all the previous day, and the heat had built up like a furnace.
The bust of my mother stood on the wheel in the middle of the room. The hessian had been removed, and only the plastic remained, a transparent film made semi-opaque by smears of clay and a frosting of condensation. I went to open the window and my arm brushed against the plastic sheet. It floated to the ground, gliding elegantly. My mother’s face looked back at me.
The forehead was high, the hairline arched. My dad had not yet carved out the detail of the eyes, and they remained blank, staring through me. The nose was long and aquiline and the sharp cheekbones gave way to the spaces below them, which were hollow and shadowed. And the mouth was gone. The lips had been removed, brushed away, no doubt by the strength of my dad’s thumbs. Instead there was merely a space where the mouth should have been, a blank area between nose and chin, the clay there flat and smooth.
Outside, the lane sat quiet and empty. Day came slowly to this little corner of the world, and the sun peered over the horizon a little later than it did at home. As a result, it seemed that life was suspended, and that while darkness lay on the village, its heart temporarily stopped beating. The silence was absolute.
The gates at the front of the chapel were padlocked, an admonishment to intruders and outsiders. Like me. Like Mally. I crawled through the hole in the hedge, scrabbling my way up the bank, and into the field next to the chapel. Janet’s field.
I chucked the bottles down next to the well. The plywood was still lying on top, the blue bucket next to it. I wanted to get to the top of the hill, to see the village before the sun came up. Already there was a shimmer of red on the horizon, and a sheen of orange that would soon become a flaming ball of sun. I wanted to see the village while it slept.
It didn’t take me long to get to the top of the hill. I walked backwards part of the way, enjoying how the perspective changed as I got higher. The roofs of the houses became flatter, the windows grew squat and low, and even the fields became smaller, the squares of scorched grass making up what I knew would soon be a yellow and brown and ochre-coloured chessboard, but which in the early morning light looked blue and grey and opalescent.
Walking backwards up the hill meant that I stumbled a couple of times over divots in the baked earth. Finally, I reached the top and I sat, breathing heavily, waiting for the sun to come up. The sky was streaked with red by then, and a few meagre clouds sat above the horizon. I knew they would be gone in an hour, baked off by the sun’s heat.
I didn’t hear him until he was a few feet behind me, the crunch of the dried-out bracken making me turn around. He was wearing his usual tatty jeans, and the picture on the Bowie t-shirt he had on was partly obscured by the camera slung around his neck. I wasn’t surprised to see him, and pleased that he’d come. He stopped walking when I turned around, but he didn’t look at me. He stared at the other side of the valley, and when I turned back I saw that the first glimmer of the sun’s sphere was sparkling over the horizon.
‘It’s magic, isn’t it?’ he said, still not looking at me, but with his eyes fixed straight ahead on the other side of the valley. ‘The way the sun disappears at night and then comes up again the next morning. Every day. Every single day. You can depend on it.’
‘It’s not magic,’ I said. ‘It’s physics. The earth turns as it goes round the sun, the sun disappears from view, the earth keeps turning and the sun reappears again. It’s not like it’s vanished, it’s only moved. It’s always daytime somewhere in the world.’
‘And it’s always night-time somewhere else.’
‘Tell me a secret,’ I said, and he laughed.
‘Another secret? Now that’s a big ask. I don’t think I have any more secrets. Not ones I could tell you, anyway.’
‘Why not? I told you about Petra.’
‘Yeah, but I already knew about that ’cause your dad told my mum. You’d need to tell me something I don’t know already for this to be worth my while.’
‘Like what?’ I said.
‘Like…’ he paused, as if trying to think of what to say, but I could tell he’d already decided on something. He sat down next to me and unhooked the Polaroid camera from around his neck and put it carefully on the ground. ‘Like what do you think about when you’re lying in bed at night, in that little attic room of yours, with no curtains and a nosy neighbour.’
I could feel the heat on my cheeks and looked at my feet. I tugged at my skirt.
‘What do you think about when you wake up in the middle of the night, when the light has gone and the darkness is everywhere?’
The sun was halfway over the horizon now, and a great band of orange drenched the sky around it. I took a deep breath.
‘I think about Petra,’ I said. ‘I think about my little sister and how she drowned that day in the bath when my mother went to answer the phone and left her on her own. And when she came back she started screaming and screaming and I ran in and there Petra was, her body completely still, but the water still moving, still washing over her.’
Before I could think better of it I started speaking again.
‘And I think of how much I hate my mother and how it’s her fault that Petra died. I think about who it was on the phone that was so important that she left Petra in the bath to go and answer it. And I think of how hard my dad’s trying to make things right and that selfish bitch just lies there, off her face on Valium, staring at the wall or crying or screaming or just with that stupid smile on her face. And it’s her fault. She let it happen.’
‘What about the police? Didn’t they get involved?’
&n
bsp; ‘Yeah, they came round and asked us all a bunch of questions. They asked me if I’d seen anything and what I’d been doing and everything like that. But in the end, they decided it was an accident and they didn’t press charges. They said it wasn’t my mother’s fault for leaving Petra alone in the bath, that she was four by then and could sit up by herself, so they didn’t really know why it happened. They decided it was an accident. My mother still blames herself, though, and so do I.’
‘And the dreams?’ Mally’s voice was low, calm, steady.
‘I can never remember the dreams, but I know there’s water and a phone ringing, so I know it’s something to do with Petra. When I wake up I’m aware that I’ve had one of those dreams. It’s like déjà vu or something. It’s a feeling of…of…inevitability, I suppose. Of something that’s happened that’s important but I can only remember the feeling of it, the outline, and not the detail of it. It’s a shimmer. A shiver.’
‘Like someone walking on your grave?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And Lorry. What about Lorry?’ Mally was sitting forward, his forearms resting on his knees, and he was looking at me intently. ‘Why is Lorry…like he is?’
‘He’s always been that way,’ I said. ‘I suppose it has something to do with what happened when he was born—him and Petra, I mean.’ I looked at Mally, but he was fiddling with his plimsoll.
‘I don’t remember much about when Lorry and Petra were born. My dad’s told me a few things, and Mrs Akhar who lives next door to us, but I’ve kind of pieced it together over the last few years.
‘I think my parents must have been trying for another baby for ages. I don’t know how I knew that, it was just something that was always there, always around. Like, in the room there’d be me, my dad, my mother and this unborn child they wanted, and that was how it always was. I think I must have been about eleven or twelve when I first overheard them talking in the kitchen. They were excited and they were whispering about this baby they were going to have and what they’d call it and how they’d do up the spare room as a nursery. They didn’t actually sit me down and tell me about it for another few months, when my mother got so big they couldn’t hide it anymore.’
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