by Abigail Dean
‘Good evening,’ Father said, ‘to our little audience.’
He gathered his notes and closed his eyes, and I tried to get underneath his lids. He was delivering an address to the Lifehouse, with hot crowds pressing around him, and children held aloft. Stragglers spilled onto the high street, so that they had to divert the traffic.
He opened his eyes.
‘We are so incredibly alone,’ he said. ‘That’s inevitable. If you’re not shunned, you’re not living according to God. If you’re not questioned, or isolated, or persecuted, you’re not living according to God. That’s the burden we bear. But, you know, truly – I have never had to bear it by myself.’
He pressed Play. There was the rustle of the cassette turning, and then a sad, beautiful song adjusted the room. It wasn’t religious, but an old love song, a vestige of a world outside the house, which was still turning. It had been so long since I had heard music that I gave in to the lull of it, and when he glanced to the door, I saw that Father was crying.
Mother came slowly from the hallway. She wore her wedding dress, which I knew from cheerful yellowed photographs. The dress had yellowed, too, and now her flesh bunched over the top of it. On her way past, chiffon brushed my foot; until then, I hadn’t been convinced that she was real. She didn’t look at any of us. She kept her eyes on the altar, and she returned to him.
At the top of the aisle, Father enveloped her hands in his.
‘We’ve been married twenty years,’ Father said, with fissures in his voice. ‘I loved you at the beginning. And I’ll love you right to the end.’
He took her unresisting into his arms. He covered her. Her face moved in and out of the lamplight, gold and then grey, and things moved across it, each of them beneath the surface, failing to emerge into an expression.
Again and again, Father played that song. ‘Everybody,’ he said. ‘Everybody up. Everybody together.’ Evie and I stood and danced, clicking our fingers and twirling the material of our skirts. She kept having to retreat to the sofa for breaks. Delilah spun between our parents, stroking Mother’s rags. I danced as close to the threshold as I could, squinting to see the locks on the front door. Five footsteps. A second, to flip the latch. Two more for the chain.
I swayed closer to the hallway. Four footsteps, now. Father’s eyes were closed against Mother’s head, and her hair was stuck to his lips. He was rotating away from me, on a slow pivot. I would have my seconds.
I stepped out of the room, into the darkness between the kitchen and the door. Here it was: the body-clench, belly-thump of adrenaline. I looked to the locks.
‘Lex,’ Mother said. ‘Oh, Lex.’
As they turned in the dance, she had come to see me. My parents’ bodies came apart, and something sour filled the space between them. Father reached to cut the music. Mother held out her arms, palms up, and waited for my hands to fill them. ‘Why don’t we stay here,’ she said. ‘Like this.’
Father was surveying the route of my dance, as if I might have left footsteps on the carpet. His smile was starting to change.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think that it might be bedtime.’
He nodded to Ethan, who started to gather us, first me and then Evie, who was holding the sofa, breathing hard.
‘Come on, Eve.’
He guided us from behind, scruffs of skin in his hands. Just before we were through the door, Evie stretched out an arm and wedged herself in the room.
‘Where’s Daniel?’ she said.
‘He’s sleeping,’ Father said. Mother nodded, as if the music was still playing. Not assent, but an old song, on repeat: Yes, yes. He was sleeping.
We slept more and more. The scant light in winter compressing the days. Evie woke herself in the night, coughing, her body bucking against the chains. Go back to sleep. What else to say? Go back to sleep. My mind had started to betray me: saviours came from the blackness, bearing water, blankets, bread. Miss Glade or Aunt Peggy, whispering in strange, gentle languages which I didn’t understand.
Sometimes, it was Mother. I thought of how she had loved us best, when we were inside of her, silent and entirely hers, and I allowed her to care for me. Sometimes she brought milk, or scraps of food. She fed us by hand. Other times, she brought a towel and a plastic bowl of water. She knelt by my bed. She talked to herself quietly, as if she, too, was a child. All the time, the towel moved across my body, between the collarbone and the ribs, over the empty pockets of skin at my chest and buttocks, still distended, anticipating flesh, and down between my legs, where there was always a mess, an embarrassment, my body unable to stop its attempts to be human. In these moments, softened by her tenderness, I understood what defeat would feel like. Not to think of escape, or protecting Evie, or the requirement to be clever. The pleasure of that. I would slip into it, like clean sheets.
Dark, flimsy dreams. I woke up cold with old sweat and reached across the bed, waiting for my hand to touch Evie’s body. Further; further. The other edge of the mattress. I sat up and fumbled across the covers. A cold, tidy space. She was gone.
‘Evie?’ I said.
I tore from the bed and across the room and hit the one switch I knew, by the door. The hot little room, empty and exposed. Everywhere the warm, sour smell of the bar. The bathroom was dark, but I opened the door anyway, and the shower curtain after that.
‘Evie?’
I started to dress.
Downstairs, the landlady was at the cash register. The overripe smell of yesterday’s drinks.
‘Excuse me,’ I said.
She glanced up, said nothing.
‘Has my sister come through here?’
There were little stacks of change spread along the bar. She frowned. I had interrupted her calculations.
‘My sister,’ I said. ‘I arrived with her. She was here at breakfast, today.’
‘What?’
She looked at her hands. Her palms were grubby from the notes. It was as if she was trying to grasp something – some final sum – before she could give me her attention.
She shook her head. ‘Nobody’s come through,’ she said.
I checked the breakfast area. I walked to the toilets and opened the three cubicle doors. I returned to our room. The crumpled duvet, and no sign of a note. I thought of the streets to the house. The curve of Moor Woods Road, as it rose towards the moor. I pulled on my shoes.
I stood in the empty road. There was the tap of water dripping from the rooftops, and a rivulet of it somewhere beneath me, in the drains. Dark but for the streetlamps. Two o’clock in the morning, and the whole town asleep. Even the drunks had retreated.
‘I need to go back there,’ she had said.
The hired car was still in the car park, glinting. She had left on foot. I contemplated her, ill and confused, fixated on the house. I could be there in twenty minutes. Half an hour, maybe. She was unwell. I could catch her before she reached Moor Woods Road.
I set off in the centre of the street, following the white lines. Jolting at the movement of myself in the black windows. At the end of the shops, I followed the road down across the river. I could hear the noise of it before I saw the bridge. There was a straggle of limbs caught between its banks, the water lumpy over boulders and a few stray shopping trolleys.
I passed the mill which marked the edge of the town, and began to climb.
It was still drizzling beneath the trees. On either side of the road were empty fields, extending fast into darkness. Everywhere the damp, fleshy smell of the earth, like long-dormant things coming to life. I scanned each turn of the road for her: a thin figure, bent into the night. I had expected to catch her by now.
Moor Woods Road rose ahead of me. I passed beneath the final streetlamp and paused at the edge of its light.
Everything more frightening at night.
I thought of small, mundane comforts: the phone in my pocket, and drinks with Olivia and Christopher, early the next week, where I would narrate this story over the last spritzes of summe
r. ‘And then,’ I would say, while they watched me – mouths agape, providing me with just the right reactions, the way that good friends do – ‘I headed for the house.’
With the phone, I lit a ring of road ahead of me.
It wasn’t far. When I remembered the day of our escape, I was sure I had been running for ten minutes or more. In fact, it was a few hundred metres to the house. I passed the field where the horses had lived, and cast the feeble light over the fence. It lit a patch of cracked earth, then faltered against the darkness. It was an absurd idea, I thought; the horses would have died years before.
‘Evie?’ I called, across the field.
I turned back to the road. It had always been so quiet here. Too quiet for anybody to come by accident. The community centre would need extensive advertising. We would need to ensure that there were funds for that.
The house waited, silent, the rooms of it looming behind the long-rotted wood. I stood at the end of the driveway, facing it.
‘Evie,’ I said, and then, as loud as I could: ‘Evie?’
The front door was long boarded-up. I stepped over the flowers and pushed at it, first with my hands and then with my whole weight. Scratches of paint shed in my hands, but the door held.
The kitchen, then.
I waded through the wet grass, following the walls of the house. There was a padlock looped between the back door and its frame, but it was rusted and severed, and came away in my hands. I let it fall onto the grass and swung the door open.
There are things that your body doesn’t allow you to forget.
In the late afternoon, Father came to our room. The noise of the key in the lock. He had been outside, and he smelt of the cold. His face was flushed and happy. ‘My girls,’ he said, and touched each of us on the head.
These days, he spoke less of God. He talked of more modest things. He was contemplating a holiday, he said. We had never been on an aeroplane. That had to be addressed. Did we remember the weekend in Blackpool? How the sea looked in the mornings? I nodded. We could get more T-shirts, Father said. A different design, this time around. We would need seven of them, he said, and in my head, I said: six.
‘This family’s been through so much,’ he said, and when I turned to look at him, standing at our window with his face turned to the scant light, I knew that he believed it.
Across the room, I saw Evie shaking her head, her eyes locked on my bed. Her whole body was contorted in terror.
I traced her stare.
There it was: the corner of the book jutting out from beneath my mattress.
Our book of myths.
Father turned back to us. He eased himself onto my bed, and the weight of his body rolled me towards him. He laced his fingers through my hair. ‘Alexandra,’ he said. ‘Where should we go?’
I closed my eyes.
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you and Ethan know all about geography. Don’t you?’
‘To Europe,’ Evie said.
‘See. Eve knows where she’d like to go. You had better have a think, Alexandra.’
‘Or to America,’ Evie said, her eyes wet with fear, trying to keep his eyes upon her, shaking with the bravery of it. ‘They have Disney.’
‘Yes. You’d like that. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He sighed, and stood.
‘My girls,’ he said, again, and leant to kiss me.
I felt his body stop, his lips suspended against my skin.
‘What’s this?’ he said.
He reached for the corner of the book and tugged it. Here the beautiful cover and the golden pages. He opened it in the middle and stared blankly at the story, as if it was something he couldn’t understand. His face was beginning to change, veering between shock and triumph. It settled at a kind of madness, as if a revelation had come to him, and I thought of Jolly at the pulpit. But Jolly had only ever pretended to be mad. Father was different.
‘All of this family’s misfortunes,’ Father said. ‘And now we know.’
Get it over with, I thought. Quickly. How does it feel? Will you be able to stand it? And stand it defiantly – do you have that in you? You. Always so eager to please.
He wrapped his fist around my neck. Between his arms, I saw Evie struggling against the chains, her whole body taut. Don’t look, I wanted to say. You won’t be able to unsee it. And Evie was so young. She was so good. It was suddenly very important, that she didn’t look – one of the last few important things. I tried to say it with my eyes, but it was impossible. Still she was fighting.
‘Do you want to die?’ Father said. ‘Do you want to die and go to hell?’
He threw me back to the mattress. There was no need to pretend any more, and I started to laugh.
‘Where are we now?’ I said. ‘Come on. Where are we now?’
He walked from the room, his whole body trembling. In the few seconds before he returned, I looked across at Evie. ‘Lexy,’ she said.
‘You’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘You’ll be OK, Evie.’
‘Oh, Lex.’
‘It’s OK. But promise you won’t look.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘No, Evie.’
‘OK. I promise.’
‘OK.’
When he came back, he was holding something in his hand. A kind of wooden baton. From the cross, I thought. From the kitchen wall. From the Lifehouse. He bent over me and unlocked my wrists, a last tenderness to that, and I hauled myself up to face him.
‘God,’ Father said. ‘God, I loved you.’
He hit me in the stomach, and something there collapsed, burst, changed state. Then there was the sensation of my body being opened, the dumb vulnerability of it, with its nerves and its holes, and the soft insides.
And that was it. After that, Evie stopped speaking, and I knew that soon – very soon – we would need to escape.
Coldness and damp. The floor was soft and the last scraps of linoleum shifted beneath my feet. I stepped between weeds and new shoots of grass, where the moors had started to reclaim the house. Everywhere was the sound of dripping water. Through the darkness, my torchlight lit tumours of mould growing from the ceiling, reaching for the last ruins of the kitchen, the hobs bloody with rot and the fridge on its side on the floor. Particles of dust fluttered in the air, invisible until the torch beam moved between them.
A rat dashed from the hallway and I danced away from it, too frightened to yelp. I wondered then if Emerson had been a rat, if we had called him a mouse because the thought of a rat was too horrifying to sleep with.
‘Evie?’ I called. ‘Evie? Please?’
I passed by the living room and cast the light up the staircase. It was too dark: the beam hit the first few steps and faltered against the blackness. I knelt to examine the bottom stair. The first layer of wood had decayed, exposing the soft underbelly, yellowed and beginning to rot. I pressed my back to the wall and let it take my weight, body stiffened and one breath for each stair climbed. Floorboards creaked in the rooms above me.
The landing came into view, doorway by doorway.
I stopped at the threshold of Gabriel and Delilah’s room. Behind the sound of the water was another noise, the gurgling. The house leaking its old secrets. The first miserable little bedroom, the corners of it dark enough to evade the torchlight. Flaps of paint hung from the walls. The wind moved through the house, and the door shifted, but I caught it before it could shut.
There was a noise behind me, at the other end of the landing. My heart beat in my skull and hands and stomach, and I held the door and turned across the hallway.
‘Evie?’
The door to our bedroom was closed.
I crossed the landing, thinking of nothing, sure that any memory might conjure the thing itself out of the night.
I reached out a hand, bright white in the torchlight, and parted the bedroom door.
I knew then that there was something in the room. The beds had been removed as eviden
ce, many years before, leaving white relics on the wall. The Territory was a wasteland. The carpets and the walls had eroded, exposing the flesh of the house, the white plaster and the floorboards bony underfoot. The terrible shape was huddled in the corner, where Evie’s bed had been. Something small and still. When the torch beam reached it, it twitched. I wasn’t frightened any more. Here she was, waiting for me.
‘Evie,’ I said.
‘Oh, Lex,’ she said. ‘Do you really think I ever left this room?’
7
All of Us
I LEFT ENGLAND IN the autumn. In early October, I crossed Soho, collar-up, and collected my belongings from the Romilly Townhouse, where they had been packed from my room and stored since my visit to Hollowfield. ‘How was your stay?’ the receptionist asked, and I opened my mouth, then closed it again. She looked at me, knowingly. There were few secrets to be kept in a hotel. ‘It was eventful,’ I said.
‘And what now?’
‘Now,’ I said. ‘A wedding.’
By the morning, I was propped up on pillows in a hospital bed, surrounded by the chatter of nurses and machines. It wasn’t the same hospital we had been taken to after the escape, but in the first strange minutes, I was sure that it was. It had the same sweet, chemical smell, which still made me feel relieved. I watched my hand reach to the ceiling, testing its freedom, and Dr K nodded, watching too.
She had been waiting for me to wake up. She looked pale and old. She wore a beautiful cream dress which hung haplessly from her body and exposed the sinews of her neck. I couldn’t reconcile her with the woman who had sat by my hospital bed when I was a child. She was like a world leader at the end of her term. We met eyes and she smiled, without much conviction.