by Abigail Dean
‘Should I open it now?’ I asked, and she laughed.
‘Lex, you open it whenever you want.’
I picked at the Sellotape and folded back the paper. Inside, there was a new, hardback book of illustrated Greek myths.
‘Those are your favourites,’ she said. ‘Aren’t they?’
I didn’t know what to say. I nodded, and opened the book in the middle. There was a picture of the Underworld, and Charon ferrying Persephone down the Styx. She gazed back at the reader from the dark watercolours.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I made as much space in the bag as I could, and eased the book inside.
Miss Glade nodded, then reached down and hugged me, quickly and hard. When she let go, she looked surprised, as though she hadn’t intended to do that.
‘You look after yourself,’ she said. ‘OK?’
‘OK.’
‘Off you go. Your mother will be waiting.’
I set off down the school corridor, past the bright displays and the class photographs; past handwritten narratives of field trips and families and What I Did On My Summer Holidays. At the end, just before the door to the playground, I turned around. Miss Glade was still standing by the classroom door, her arms embracing her own body, watching me. I waved, and she waved back.
Hollowfield was stuck at the base of three tors, and hardly a town. The plughole of the moors. The welcome sign provided that it had a twin town, Lienz, in Austria, which I wondered about each time we drove past. How had the arrangement come about? Had anybody from Lienz actually visited us, to understand what they were welcoming to the family?
We moved house on a Saturday, in a van owned by one of Jolly’s acquaintances. Mother was unwell, so Father, Ethan and I carried our belongings to the car. ‘Do a last check,’ Father said, before he would allow us inside, and Ethan and I walked from one vacant room to another, talking little. We had left only our rubbish, and dirt. The landlord recouped the cleaning fees five years later, when he sold photographs of the end of our tenancy to the press. The sad, stained spaces. As with most empty rooms at low resolution, it was easy to imagine that something terrible had happened in them.
We drove to Hollowfield through the gloaming. Clouds sagged over the hills. We passed the old factories, with their spindly chimneys and every other window kicked in. There was a functional high street with a second-hand bookshop, and a cafe just closing. Grey men stood at the door of the pub, their collars turned up.
‘Is our house close?’ Evie asked.
‘Five minutes,’ Father said. ‘Maybe ten.’
He pointed out the site where he would build the new church. It was a dilapidated clothes shop with mannequins still sprawled in the window, but the footfall would be good, and he could always resurrect the dolls as statues – as part of his performance. We were driving out of the town, now, and we turned over the river, past a rotted water mill and a garage, and onto Moor Woods Road. The first few properties were cottages, neatly kept and gathered together, but as the road climbed, the houses dispersed and mutated. There was a dark barn, and a bungalow with a guard of rusted machinery. Evie opened the window of the van, counting down the numbers. ‘The next one!’ she shouted.
Number 11 was set back from the road. It had a grubby beige front and a garage, and a garden at the back. It was – as they would later say – a very ordinary house.
Father had purchased the house on Moor Woods Road from an old member of Jolly’s congregation. She could no longer manage the garden, or make it up the stairs without a break in the middle. Jolly had led negotiations. It was a house for a family, he said, and she had been happy for us to have it.
Her furniture still occupied the house. Under covers, chairs and tables and beds took strange, monstrous shapes. We tailed Father from room to room, guessing before he unveiled them. A boat, a body. A walrus. Before our first dinner at Moor Woods Road, Father arranged one of the furniture sheets over his head, and staggered into the kitchen, wailing. He said grace with a broad smile and his hand on Mother’s thigh, and the sheet still hanging from his shoulders.
After dinner, Evie and I unpacked. In the moving boxes, our belongings had melded with everybody else’s. There was a series of stern, ill-fitting outfits which we had both suffered, and we took it in turns to model them for one another. We traded T-shirts with Gabriel and Delilah, hurling them across the hallway. I had wrapped the book of Greek myths inside a jumper, partly to keep it away from Father – there were stories of the pagan gods, which was basically blasphemy – and partly to keep it away from Delilah, who would find some way to destroy it, or to make it hers. Once the house was quiet, I slipped the bundle to Ethan’s room.
Ethan had his own space, but not enough belongings to fill it. Tired items had been given odd prominence. There was a crowd of plastic disciples on the windowsill. He had hung a poster of the human skeleton, dispensed in Year 6 science, on his wall. Father had already requisitioned a corner of the floor for his sermon notes. ‘I think he hopes that I’ll read them,’ Ethan said, and nudged them away with his toe.
‘Let me show you something really cool,’ I said, and unwrapped the book. ‘Miss Glade got it for me,’ I said, ‘but we can read it together.’
Ethan touched the cover, but didn’t turn it.
‘It’s a children’s book,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to read that?’
I peered at him, waiting for his face to crack. He looked blankly back at me.
‘You like those stories,’ I said. ‘I only know them because of you.’
‘And what good have they ever done for me? I’d throw it out, Lex, if I was you.’
Evie was more impressed. We would need to wait for another month before an additional bed arrived, and so that night, the first in our room together, we lay side by side on a stranger’s mattress and held the book between us. I started at the rhythms of the house: water hammering through the walls; the creaking trees at the back of the garden. The floorboards seesawed beneath new, buoyant weight. ‘In the beginning,’ I read, ‘there was nothing.’
I expected that things might be different in Hollowfield. I had mistaken the fact that nobody yet knew us for the hope that we could be whomever we wanted to be.
Jolly was often in the house, unannounced, wielding a tool, or eating with Father at the kitchen table. The conversations started clandestine; they exchanged glances when we wandered into the room. But in the evenings, voices rose to our bedroom. They used words like opportunity and beginning. Mother played the hostess, bearing delicate plates and topping up the men’s glasses, and picking pastry from beneath her nails. There were some nights when I heard a third voice at the table: softer, less certain. Ethan had started to greet Jolly with a firm handshake, and call him ‘Sir’.
Ethan joined in the tricks which Father and Jolly played on Gabriel, too. They enlisted him to assist them with fictional tasks or secret missions, each of which ended in his confusion. ‘Hold this nail,’ Jolly said, halfway up the stairs. ‘Don’t drop it – that’s keeping your house standing.’ And an hour later Gabriel was still there, clutching the nail determinedly in his fist. In the winter, Ethan sent him into the garden, to search for treasure buried by the last proprietor. He, Father and Jolly gathered in a coven at the kitchen window. ‘Look, Lex,’ Ethan said, and beckoned to me. I ignored him. At dusk, Gabriel returned bone-white and dejected, mud in the cracks on his palms. When they laughed, he laughed too. He laughed like he had been in on it, all along.
When I could avoid Jolly and Father, I did so. I still left for school early, in time to wash, and I took my time packing up my desk at the end of the day. I collected Delilah and Evie and Gabriel, and we ambled home together, stopping at the bookshop and at the watermill, and at the two mangy horses at the bottom of Moor Woods Road, who surveyed us with great suspicion. Mother didn’t come down to the new school; she and Father had been talking of a new child, and she was conserving her energy.
And the days at school weren’t so bad. The mos
t surprising consequence of our move to Hollowfield was that I made a friend – a real one – who had arrived in Hollowfield a few months before, with braces and a southern accent, and who was almost as awkward as I was. Cara liked books and talking about them, and played the violin in assembly, standing timid and nervy at the front of the room right until she picked up the instrument. She played with a sway, which the other children mocked, and when she finished she had the expression of somebody who had just woken up. Cara never tittered when I was speaking, and there was nobody with whom she could share a side-glance. She didn’t seem to mind that I was quiet in the classroom, only responding to the teacher’s direct questions. All the same, I was careful about what I said to her. My parents worked away, I said, and when I described our house on Moor Woods Road, I was vague.
‘I know it!’ she said. ‘The one near the bottom, with the horses?’
I nodded noncommittally. Cara sighed. ‘I’m terrified of horses,’ she said, and I smiled.
I was faring better in Hollowfield than Delilah, who didn’t comprehend why she was no longer one of the most popular girls in her class, and better still than Gabriel. News had reached me from the younger classes that Gabriel was stupid, and easy to fool. The early years learned to read by narrating tins of words, and the majority of Gabriel’s class was on Tin 6, which included DOLPHIN and PENGUIN. Gabriel was stuck with CAT and DOG, in the dull domesticity of Tin 2. When it was time for him to read, he held the paper a few inches from his eyes: there were opportunities to be gleaned from that. You could poke him from a distance, like a bull in the ring, and he might not be able to identify you. You could write something about him on a worksheet, and he wouldn’t be able to read it, even if you waved it in his face.
‘I don’t get it,’ Cara said, surveying him across the playground. He hovered beside one of the dinner ladies, as if he was anticipating an attack. ‘You’re pretty much the smartest girl in the school.’
That, I concluded, was why I couldn’t interfere. In Hollowfield Primary School, I had crafted a precarious rung on the social ladder, tempered with a companion, and the begrudging respect of my classmates. In the evenings, I read to Evie or listened to Ethan, and at the weekends, we assembled in the Lifehouse, to sand the pews, or paint the walls, or pray for success. There was only ever enough time to make myself normal. This reassured me when I saw Gabriel alone at lunchtime, or sitting in the kitchen with that same tin of words, tracing the letters with his finger. Alone in the night, in a stranger’s bedroom, it didn’t reassure me at all.
Late in spring term, Evie and I waited on the school grass for Delilah and Gabriel. Going-home time had long passed; the last few parents were dispersing, holding school rucksacks and tiny hands.
‘Maybe they’ve gone,’ I said.
‘Why?’ Evie said. ‘They always wait.’
‘So – do we go and look for them?’
She was spreadeagled in the grass, squinting into the sunshine. ‘You’re closer.’
‘You’re younger.’
She threw a handful of grass in my direction. ‘You’re grumpier.’
She glanced away from me, then, over my shoulder, and straightened her face. ‘Lexy,’ she said.
The headmistress was coming across the playground. She stopped at the edge of the grass, stranded by her heels, and beckoned us.
‘There’s been a serious incident,’ she said.
The incident was this: the night before, Delilah had packed Father’s Authorised Hardback Holy Bible with Cross-References and Notes in her school rucksack. During afternoon playtime, she had retrieved the tome from her peg in the cloakroom and approached the cruellest of Gabriel’s tormentors. ‘Read this,’ she said, and brought the book down across the boy’s face. A corner had ruptured the globe of his eye. Teeth were loose. Father was on his way.
We waited for him on the chairs outside the headmistress’s office, which were usually populated by the very worst children in school. Gabriel’s hands were clutched in prayer, a gunge-nosed supplicant. Delilah sat with her chin up and shoulders back, the way Father liked us. ‘What did you do?’ I said, as soon as the headmistress had closed the door, and she snapped to face me.
‘Drive out the mocker, and out goes strife,’ she said. I wondered if she had shared this with the headmistress, too.
You heard Father before you saw him. His footsteps were heavy and unhurried, and each brought him closer than you expected from the last. When he arrived at the threshold, Delilah stood to meet him, offering herself for whatever punishment he might have derived on the drive. He would take his time with that, too. He stepped around her and handed me the keys, and rapped on the office door.
‘Get out,’ he said.
We walked in quiet procession to the van, and sat inside in silence. A few minutes later, the school door opened. Father picked his way across the playground, past the climbing frame and the little children’s benches. He closed the door behind him and took the wheel, but he didn’t start the engine.
‘Next time,’ he said. ‘Leave the vengeance for God.’
With that, he started to laugh. He roared with it. He slapped the wheel, and the whole car quivered. Delilah smiled, first tentative and then wider. She had been suspended for a week, and she was to write a formal letter of apology, but at home she paraded around the house like a small, triumphant angel of justice. Raguel in miniature. In her days off, she was allowed to varnish the cross for the Lifehouse, while Father stood over her, telling Jolly the story.
The children woke me, bursting into the garden, and I was at the hospital early. Gabriel was at breakfast, no visitors permitted, so I waited in the chair at his window. His room looked out to the car park and was entirely absent of decoration. Little acts of preservation dulled the place. Every corner was rounded, and the furniture was bolted to the floor. A little band of children passed under the window, escorted by nurses. One of the girls was holding a bear in one hand and pushing an IV trolley with the other.
‘There’s a children’s ward,’ Gabriel said. He left the door open and settled himself on the bed. ‘This was the place for us,’ he said, ‘right from the beginning. That way, we might have stood a chance.’
‘We weren’t crazy,’ I said.
‘Oh, come on, Lex. How could we have been anything else?’
‘Is Oliver coming today?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘Does he come every day?’
‘He needs me. You don’t understand, Lex.’
‘So, OK. I don’t. Explain it to me.’
So began the happiest years of Gabriel’s life. Even now – even knowing how they would end – he was grateful for them. Oliver introduced Gabriel to his friends, a ragtag troupe of outcasts, who lived across the city in dark flats and industrial communes. Blake owned a photo studio in Soho. Kris was the girl who had been crying in Oliver’s waiting room when Gabriel first travelled to London. ‘God,’ she said, when they were reintroduced, ‘that was a terrible day.’ Pippa had been on Big Brother; ‘Season six,’ she said, which meant little to Gabriel. Many of them had worked with Oliver in the past, Gabriel noted, but none of them did so now.
They collided on nights which fast became their own folklore. There was the time when they ended up in Blake’s studio in the early morning, prancing for his camera in outfits prepared for a leather magazine shoot later that day. There was the time when Gabriel careened into Delilah as the clubs were throwing them out, stone-cold sober and handing out water bottles, of all things. He had faint memories of trying to discuss with her what had happened to them – all of his memories from this time were faint – but each time he did she would hold a finger to his lips and shush him: ‘Let’s not talk about that right now,’ she said, and left her number in his phone. There was the time when, still awake at Sunday lunchtime, they drove up the M40 in Oliver’s Audi and raided Ethan’s house. Sighting Gabriel outside – Ethan’s television in his arms and his hair Gracie-white in the summe
r sunshine – a neighbour waved, and Gabriel nodded back. Each of them offered their unique perspective on this moment on the way home, bawling with laughter.
(‘Is it still stealing,’ asked Gabriel, ‘if you steal from a psychopath?’ ‘Yes,’ I said.)
The diversification was not what he had expected. Oliver had explained it to him the first time that he had visited Gabriel’s flat. At that time, he had only a mattress, a toaster, a television and an armchair, and they made love on the floor by the doorway; he hadn’t been able to wait. ‘I’ve been working on it,’ Oliver said, ‘and some of it won’t be easy.’ One of his hands was in Gabriel’s hair, and the other traced the lines from his hips to his groin, down and up and back down. ‘Some of it may be undignified,’ he said.
Gabriel, wanting to please him, smiled. ‘Dignity’s overrated,’ he said.
It would only be temporary, Oliver promised. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘your career really can take off.’
No. The work was not what he had expected.
Most of it involved waiting. He drove small, silent girls to hotel addresses, then waited for them to re-emerge. He was abandoned in houses devoid of furniture to wait for a courier to drop something off. In a haggard flat in Croydon he delivered a rucksack to a man with the look of a shaved cat, who invited him in and locked the door. ‘I’d like you to dance for me,’ the man said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Just a little dance. And then you can go.’
A second man appeared, then, smiling at the first. Gabriel understood from the smile that they knew one another well. There was something about the second man that frightened Gabriel more than the first, an authority in the way he moved through the room. He checked the rucksack, took a beer from the fridge, and lay down on the sofa.
‘Is this the errand boy?’ he said. ‘Oliver’s?’
‘Yes. He’s going to dance for us.’