by Abigail Dean
‘There was a limited choice. Anyway – the sunshine breaks tomorrow.’
‘Well, that sucks.’
The driver behind us leaned on his horn.
‘Can’t he see,’ Evie said, ‘that we’re busy discussing the weather?’ She waved an apology and bundled her rucksack into the boot. The car behind us honked again. ‘Jesus,’ I said. Evie landed in the seat beside me, just as the driver shouted something from his window.
‘Dick,’ Evie said, and we pulled away.
‘Next stop Hollowfield?’ I asked, and she groaned.
‘You know, we could go anywhere from here. We could be in Hong Kong, or Paris, or California—’
‘All of our old atlas targets.’
‘I don’t know if I’d trust it,’ she said. ‘It was so old.’ She spoke about the book like a mutual friend, one whom we missed. ‘I’m pretty sure we intended to visit both parts of Germany.’
‘Have you been?’ I asked.
‘West or East?’
This was Evie’s approach to questions: she dodged around them, as she had danced between the cars in the traffic. Her life in Europe was uneventful, she said, but she maintained a casual mystery about her days. Her friends had first names and no backgrounds; she called from the city or from the apartment or from the beach; she had boyfriends and girlfriends, but never anything serious. Whenever I asked her about returning to England, she became quiet. ‘I’ve spent my whole life,’ she said, ‘travelling away from our room. I can’t stop now.’
Thinking of the house, she flinched. It was one of the reasons that I had resisted her arrival. Hollowfield still held its scrawny grip on her, tighter than it had on the rest of us. Sometimes she called in the middle of the night, late into the New York evening, and narrated a night terror. They always started at the front door of 11 Moor Woods Road, but inside there would be some strange landscape of Father’s design: the family in crucifixion, or a biblical plain, with plagues on the horizon.
But in the daylight she was quick and freckled and light on her feet, and with one of her arms around my neck, and her smile radiating from the passenger side, I felt that our time in Hollowfield would be tolerable, at least. We would meet with Bill and representatives from the local council, and we would present our proposal to obtain funding for the community centre.
‘Will there be a cheque?’ Evie asked. ‘One of the huge ones?’
‘If I wanted a photo opportunity, I would have brought Ethan.’
‘I’m not interested in the photo,’ Evie said. ‘I just want to know how it works. Do they take it to the bank?’
‘Why don’t you do less talking and more directing?’
Evie laughed and turned on the radio. ‘We’ll lose it in the hills,’ she said, ‘so we might as well enjoy it now.’
‘Turn it up, then.’
We arrived in Hollowfield just after seven. There was a moment in the journey – I couldn’t identify the exact point – when I began to recognize the landscape. The bends of the road were familiar, and I knew the number of miles to each of the next towns, promised on square blue signs. Already some of the moorland was purple with heather, spreading on the land like a new bruise. Daylight lasted longer here than in London, but the darkness would be dense and difficult for driving, and we were short of time. The moon was on the windshield, fingernail thin. We descended into the valley.
Hollowfield idled in the last stale summer light. The sun sunken behind the moors. The grass in the gardens and churchyard had receded, exposing graves like old teeth. A blank-faced girl rode a horse towards Moor Woods Road, pinching its dumpy belly between her legs. I turned onto the high street. It was difficult to distinguish between what had changed and what I had forgotten. The bookshop was still there, flanked by a bookie’s and a charity shop. The Lifehouse had last been a Chinese restaurant; it was boarded up, and for sale again. There were still a few shrivelled menus taped to the inside of the window.
Evie and I had booked into a twin room at the pub on the corner. I parked beside a tip, in the shadow of the building, and we looked at one another. A waitress sat on a bottle crate, smiling at her phone. My fingers left dark prints on the wheel. Evie took my hand.
Inside, locals guarded the bar. This had been one of Father’s recruitment grounds, and I glanced at their faces, looking for members of our congregation. The floors were coated in a tongue-pink carpet, and there were photographs of old demolitions on the wall. The pub, perhaps, or Hollowfield in its early days. All of their occupants humourless and male. The landlady, laden with jewellery and holding her own glass, looked at me strangely when I mentioned our reservation. We were foreigners in this land, as we had been many years before. She led us to our room in silence, letting each door slam behind us on the way up.
‘Well,’ I said, when we were alone, ‘she was friendly.’
‘Come on, Lexy. She was fine.’ Evie nudged me in the ribs. ‘You,’ she said, ‘with your fancy hotels and your New York expectations. I want to hear all about it, by the way. New York.’
‘Let me take a shower. I’ll tell you over dinner.’
Like lovers, we talked as we undressed and dressed again. There was nothing of my body that she didn’t know. Our room had two single beds, one against each wall, and without speaking we pushed them together.
At some point I dipped into sleep, and Evie woke me a few minutes later. She had rolled across the divide, and pressed her body into mine: nose in hair, arm against ribs, her ankle twisting around my shin.
‘I’m cold,’ she said.
‘It’s boiling. Are you OK?’
‘Maybe it was the flight.’
‘Come here,’ I said, and turned to face her. When I wrapped my arms around her, her skin was cool. I tugged the duvet up to our eyes, and she laughed.
‘How will the house look?’ she whispered.
‘Insignificant,’ I said.
‘I hope so.’
‘What we really need here,’ I said, ‘are the Greek myths. They were much better than the Atlas.’
I liked to exaggerate the importance of Miss Glade’s gift to my and Evie’s survival. We had, after all, paid a high price for our stories.
‘Do you know why I think that we liked them?’ Evie said. ‘They made us feel better about our own family.’
‘You’ve told us little about this time,’ Dr K said. ‘When you were fourteen. Fifteen.’
‘I don’t remember as much of it.’
‘That’s understandable. Memory’s a strange thing.’
This was a month after we first met. I remained in the hospital, but I had started to walk. I had an earnest physiotherapist called Callum, who looked like a Labrador. He celebrated each of my steps with an enthusiasm which I found difficult to take seriously. In each session, I scrutinized his face for mockery, but I never found it.
Dr K and I sat in the hospital courtyard. The square scrub was still frozen at mid-morning, hemmed in by the wards. The sun somewhere unseen above us, bleaching a corner of the sky. I had walked here myself, lurching on the crutches, and now I was tired and quiet.
‘The things that you’ve told me about,’ Dr K said. ‘The lighting. The absence of any point of reference for the date, or the time. They’re old disorientation techniques. It’s OK to be confused, Lex. But you’ll need to try.’
One of the detectives hovered around us with a notepad open in his hand. ‘It’s the critical period,’ he said. ‘Those last two years.’
‘We’re aware of that,’ Dr K said. ‘Thank you.’
She stood from our bench and knelt down before me. The hem of her dress touched the soil.
‘I know how difficult it’ll be,’ she said. ‘And your memory won’t always help you. You see – it protects you from the things that you don’t want to think about. It can soften certain scenes, or bury them away for a long, long time. A shield, of sorts. The problem, right now, is that it’s protecting your parents, too.’
‘I want to try,’ I said
. Ever eager to please. ‘But maybe not today.’
‘OK. Not today.’
‘Did you bring any books?’
She straightened up, smiling. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
But she was thinking of something else. Her hands were encased in black leather gloves, and she twisted and unravelled them, as if she was weaving.
‘It’s a particular interest of mine,’ she said. ‘Memory.’
The detective was watching us.
‘We’ll be able to use it,’ she said.
The crawl of somebody else’s hair against your skin. It was the first thing I was aware of, before the room unfurled from the darkness.
The ceiling in Moor Woods Road was white, too.
And in the first few moments you might try to stretch, forgetting that you couldn’t. And then you could begin the first checks of the day: for new pain, and secretions in the night, and the rise and fall of your sister’s ribs, shallower some days than others.
I lifted my arms, waiting for the present to return to me.
The walls were papered with flowers; Father would never have entertained wallpaper like that.
Evie was awake. She lay on her side, watching me. ‘Hey,’ she said. So much older, now.
She rolled across the division between the beds and rested her head on my chest. It had been a few years since I had shared a bed, and there had been times when it felt like my whole body craved the comfort of it. To sleep, I would twist my limbs together, pretending each belonged to another person. There had been a time – after I first moved to New York – when I had tried to stop this exercise. It wasn’t possible. It was the kind of indulgence which I allowed myself: the only person to witness the humiliation of it was me.
Breakfast was included with our stay. ‘Typical Lex,’ Evie said. We sat in a dim room beyond the bar, facing one another, with a view to the car park. A dim concrete light fell across Evie’s face. She tucked her legs beneath her on the chair and traced the crescents of last night’s drinks on the table. She wasn’t hungry.
‘You’re sure?’ I said, when the food came. There were cold triangles of toast assembled in an elaborate silver structure, and a pool of grease on my plate, which shifted with the tilt of the table. A smile blinked across her face.
‘Positive. But thank you.’
‘OK. Let me know if you change your mind.’
She was still looking at the table. ‘You always worried about me far too much.’
‘Somebody had to.’
She looked up. ‘Do you remember Emerson?’ she said.
I had forgotten, but I remembered then. Emerson was a mouse. This was in the Binding Days. He appeared at odd intervals, scuttling across the Territory or beneath our bedroom door. We named him after the editor of our dictionary, Douglas Emerson, whom I always imagined bespectacled and hunched, in a study full of books. Whenever I’ve seen a mouse since – flashing past the threshold of my office, in the early hours of the morning – I’ve thrown a document in its direction. But we weren’t afraid of Emerson. Day after day, we hoped that he’d visit us.
‘I still gather the strays,’ she said.
A feral cat had appeared outside her apartment. A temporary place, in Valencia. Close to the beach. The cat was old, she thought, and skeletal. She could trace its ribcage, protruding through the fur. One of its back legs was contorted. She cornered it in the communal courtyard and took it to a veterinary surgery.
‘It was furious,’ she said. ‘Even the vet thought so.’
The animal underwent several hours of surgery to correct its leg, and required an overnight stay with the vet. Evie paid over five hundred euros for the treatment. Two weeks after the animal was discharged, it died peacefully, in Evie’s bed.
‘My friends think that I’m crazy,’ she said.
I looked down at my plate, saying nothing.
‘Lex?’
I started to laugh.
‘That cat,’ she said. ‘God.’
She reached for my tea and took a swig, laughing too.
But after breakfast she was tired. She spent half an hour in the bathroom, and emerged slumped and clammy, with her hands nursing her stomach.
‘This place,’ she said, smiling. ‘We should never have come.’
‘You should never have come. But I already told you that.’
‘I’m sorry, Lex.’
‘Let me do the meeting. You stay here. Rest up.’
‘But it’s why I came.’
‘It’ll be boring anyway. I’ll be fine.’
I had packed my most serious work suit. Slate jacket and cigarette trousers. From her bed, Evie watched me dress, her smile widening.
‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘Ready to take over the world.’
My documents were stored in a neat leather sleeve which I had taken from work. I checked them, then tucked them beneath my arm.
‘I’d say that your parents would be proud,’ she said. ‘But let’s be honest—’
I kissed her on the forehead.
‘I’m proud,’ she said. ‘Does that count?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s better.’
The ceiling in Moor Woods Road was white, too.
Beneath it, Evie and I spent our months. I had once monitored the dates in my journals, but over time I missed a Tuesday, then a weekend. My last entry didn’t help me: my recordings were so banal that the days were impossible to distinguish. Had these events taken place two days ago, or three?
Together, we sank into the sludge of time.
Our lessons were disarrayed. We’d start on Sodom and Gomorrah, with a focus on the sin of homosexuality and its increasing prevalence in the modern world. (‘The men of Sodom are at our gates,’ Father said, with a conviction that made me glance out of the kitchen window, expecting a mob.) Father had little to say about Lot offering his daughters to the crowds – ‘Protecting angelic guests,’ he said, ‘requires great sacrifice’ – and then we were onto the death of Lot’s wife, metamorphosed for turning back towards home.
‘Why would she turn back?’ Father asked.
I thought of Orpheus, turning back on the edge of the Underworld. ‘With concern?’ I asked.
‘With longing,’ Father said. Lately, longing for the past was one of the worst sins of all.
It seemed impossible that Cara and Annie still met for lunch beneath the gymnasium. Along the school corridors, behind closed classroom doors, knowledge continued to be imparted. The bell still rang. Beyond Moor Woods Road, I imagined acquaintances discovering sex; driving; exams. Love, even. Their world hurried on, while we were stunted at the kitchen table, children for ever. It was one of the few thoughts which still made me want to cry, and I didn’t want to be turned into a pillar of salt, so I tried not to think about it very much.
Exercise was curtailed. There were inherent risks in being outdoors, and besides, we needed to conserve our energy. The fact was, there had been an incident. One afternoon, Delilah had stopped running in the very centre of the garden and turned towards Father, watching us from the kitchen door. Her mouth moved, as if there was something she wanted to say. An empty speech bubble of breath suspended over her head. Her eyes flicked to white, and she fell back onto the ground with a thud. It was just like Delilah, to faint the way people fainted in fiction.
Father lay her on the kitchen table, like a feast. Gabriel took her hand. Mother dipped a soiled kitchen cloth beneath the tap and wiped her face. Somewhere above us, Daniel was crying. Delilah coughed and squirmed. Her eyes were still damp from the cold, and she wrung out a few tears, reaching for Father. ‘Daddy,’ she said. ‘I’m so hungry—’
Impatient, he stepped out of her reach. He opened his mouth to speak – to send us back to the garden – and stopped. Mother looked at him over their daughter, across the table, with an expression that had its own language. Father took Delilah’s hand. It seemed entirely possible that Mother’s face had moved his bones.
Delilah ate well th
at night and the next. Over her plate she watched me, fork sliding between her lips. A smile small enough to get away with. At night, she was free to wander between the rooms, and she opened our bedroom door in the late evening. Light exposed the sullied mattress, and Evie curled away from it, closer to my chest. Delilah remained at the threshold, back-lit, so that I couldn’t see the expression on her face.
‘What?’ I said.
She stood there for a minute, then two.
‘Delilah?’
‘Goodnight, Lex,’ she said, and left us together in the darkness.
Always back to the bedroom. Father had procured a bed for Evie, but there were many nights when she slipped from the bindings and picked her way across the Territory. The slight compression of the mattress, ghost-light. I was usually awake, to welcome her into my arms, but sometimes she arrived when I was asleep, and our bodies collided happily in the night.
Other evenings, Evie and I ventured into the Territory and established a world there. Ithaca, maybe. The interior of a Mustang, heading for California. I found it easy to suspend the events of the day and slip into my self-appointed role. But as the months passed, Evie was more weary, and less convincing. She didn’t want to play Penelope; couldn’t she be Eurydice, where you got to stay in bed? She couldn’t hold a plate at shoulder-height, and would let it fall into her lap; you could never do that with a steering wheel. I tried to compensate. My performances became more maniacal. There was some embarrassment to that, I thought, being five years older. All the same, I knew that we couldn’t stay in the room. Not every night. There had to be some world apart from it.
Bill waited for me outside the council office. He had a supermarket bag looped around one wrist, and half of a sandwich in his hand. Everything about him was soft: his stomach and his eyes, and the place where his face met his neck. He was smiling, as if he was thinking about something special and specific.
‘Hello,’ I said, and he blinked.
‘Alexandra. I didn’t recognize you.’
‘It’s good to see you,’ I said, and meant it.
He held out a hand, and I shook it.