‘Try me.’
‘It’s, well . . . It’s just too weird. Giles is livid about the whole thing. He’s had me up in front of the medical team this morning. I don’t know how me and him will ever get back to normal.’
‘It can’t be that bad, can it?’ Static down the line. ‘Ruthie? You still there?’
Ruth sniffs up her tears. ‘Yes, just a sec.’
‘You can tell me anything you want, honey, and I won’t laugh, OK? I’m here for you. Might help you to get it off your chest.’
Ruth breathes out long and hard. ‘Well, yesterday Giles got into a bit of a fight for me with that bastard from the petrol station.’ Sandra gasps and Ruth continues. ‘I can’t bear to show my face down there again – actually, I’m not allowed to – but it’s not like it seems. That bloke was really aggressive. Giles was only protecting me.’ Ruth pictures the first few houses on the street with their view of the forecourt and she bunches the duvet cover in her free hand. ‘But then you might have seen anyway.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ Sandra’s voice booms down the phone. ‘But more’s the point, what did you see?’
Ruth pushes aside the too-plump pillows, cowed by Sandra’s singularity. ‘Well . . .’ She runs her free hand up and down her thigh, palm heating on the denim. ‘It was the night before last. There were some people, about four. Women, I think. A couple looked very young, like kids.’ Silence on the other end of the phone, not even Sandra’s breath. ‘They were at the petrol station. It was night-time.’ A streak of blood runs up Ruth’s jeans. She must have torn a cuticle with her teeth without realizing. ‘They climbed out of a manhole.’
‘Bloody hell, Ruth.’ Ian cries in the background, then the noise scissors off as if a door’s been shut on him. ‘That sounds really bonkers.’
‘I just can’t let it go. One minute the image of them climbing out seems so real and the next I wonder if my mind’s playing tricks on me. But what if it is true? I mean, if they were children? Someone should do something.’
‘Did Giles see? Was there anyone else around?’
Ruth recalls Liam’s mum at her gate. I’m up all hours and I’ve seen them coming out before. Ruth’s been consorting with her best friend’s enemy, been taken in by the crazy talk she’s been warned against, and if she admits this she suspects she’ll lose these lifeline chats with Sandra, plus the nice little bags of gifts that demonstrate her friend’s affection. ‘No, no one else saw.’
‘Listen, honey. Liam knows the blokes that run the car wash. They’re OK, you know. They’re nice.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘Look, you’re a mate so I can say this.’ Sandra’s voice dips, like she’s switching ears before she comes back, louder this time. ‘But do you think you might be being a bit racialist?’
‘What?’ Ruth blinks away the tears. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Really? I mean, don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but you do sometimes give the impression that you think you’re better than the rest of us.’
Ruth opens her mouth to protest, aware of the hole she could dig herself if she protests too much, so her words simply evaporate in shock. Her bigger fear is that Sandra might have a point.
That night, as Giles and Ruth lie side by side, an invisible fence runs the length of the mattress, and Ruth doesn’t dare move across the line. Giles’s breathing slows into gentle puffs as he drifts quickly into sleep, never one to let stress interfere with his eight hours. His shape under the sheets reminds Ruth of a tomb she once saw, where man and wife lay chiselled side by side, together forever but never to touch, frozen under drapes of stone.
With all her unexpected free time today, Ruth’s napped on and off, as a solo yachtsman would, banking an hour here and there in preparation for the bad weather that’s sure to come, and the combination of the medication she’s now taken isn’t strong enough to knock her out. She tosses and turns with a growing thirst, her glass of water empty since she hadn’t dared to go downstairs while Giles was still up. Her bag is downstairs too, and she never feels totally settled unless she has it with her, keys and money inside, in case she needs to run – to where she doesn’t know, but the feeling that something’s coming for her and her baby never goes away. Or perhaps whatever’s coming is already here. Life was easier when she only had herself to think about. Now she’s invested in Bess, she has everything to lose.
She takes the stairs quietly to the lounge where a half-light seeps through the uncurtained back window. At the sink, she fills a pint glass, gulps it down and refills before flopping on the sofa in the semi-darkness. The pills are beginning to soften her edges and she allows her eyes to close for a second before snapping them open – she mustn’t fall asleep downstairs, what would that look like to Giles in the morning? Beer cans and Xbox controllers scatter the coffee table and she puts her feet up, careful not to knock anything over. Liam must have been over earlier when she’d been asleep, her snooze deeper than she thought as she didn’t hear him. At least Giles has let off some steam, probably why he’s sleeping so well now. Giles only ever plays his Xbox when Liam’s around, goading the telly and sinking lagers, trying to be the kind of boy his brothers would have wanted to hang out with. She instantly forgives Giles the day’s issues, wanting to cuddle into the back of this man who’s still a hurt child, but she worries what Sandra might have passed on to Liam, and what Liam might have told Giles. A disquiet has stayed with Ruth since she spoke to Sandra earlier, that prejudice might be a preset, buried so deep inside she’s not even aware it exists. The water she’s drunk turns into a queasy pool in her stomach.
A snapping noise outside. Ruth sits tall and twists her head to look out of the window. The night is overcast, a city’s worth of light pollution making dirty candyfloss of the clouds. Ahead is the solid block of the chicken shed and next to it a shaded area Ruth doesn’t recognize. It could be her fox, finally finding his bed, but the shape is irregular and too dark to formalize. Then, a movement. From under the corrugated roof, a shadow unfolds, flexing tall into a dim outline. Legs, arms, head, just enough information in the darkness to make out the slender build and medium height of a young woman. Dressed in baggy clothes, a tracksuit perhaps, with hair hidden by a woolly hat. The figure climbs the small fence into Ruth’s garden. On her feet are flip-flops – freezing in this weather – and she searches the ground, possibly for the toast crusts Ruth puts out for the fox, but Giles did the supper tonight, so the leftovers would have gone in the bin. Ruth kneels up on the sofa facing the garden, paralysed inside her fear and wonder as her skin prickles, like an electric current is surging into the room. She presses her face to the icy glass. The girl hugs her ribs and shivers. Ruth makes a fist, heart hammering, then taps her knuckles on the window. Outside, the young woman stops dead, checking side to side, then straight ahead at Ruth. She contracts into a crouch.
Ruth rests her palm on the pane, breath misting the window, and whispers, ‘You’re not real. You can’t be real.’
The girl looks behind her, perhaps expecting others to arrive. Her breath makes clouds in the air. Nobody comes. Ruth rubs the mist from the window and smiles weakly. Frail and quivering, the girl uncurls in slow motion to stand tall before she inches forward. When she reaches the window, she flattens her palm to Ruth’s on the opposite side of the glass.
‘Please go away.’ A sob pulls Ruth’s chest. ‘Please. No one will believe me.’ Her voice is louder than she intended and the words startle the empty room. She raises herself higher on her knees, too fast, and the girl leaps back. In a flash, the skinny figure vaults the fence and darts up the path in the direction of the dead end. Ruth presses her cheek to the window as the young woman disappears from view.
There is no one for Ruth to turn to, no one to reassure her about what she might or might not have seen without setting off every alarm bell, and she’s torn between the reality of this desperate girl and the fear that her illness is back, the latter possibility more attractive than accept
ing a desperate person is living in her chicken shed. The medication is finally fogging Ruth’s brain and she settles on the plausible: the notion that again she’s in a waking trance, that elastic zone between awake and asleep where nothing makes sense and everything is possible. All of it – the scream, the petrol station, now this girl – it has to be nonsense. She blames her elderly neighbour for stoking the embers of her own misfiring brain with talk of people under the ground, if Ruth even heard her correctly in the first place. All Ruth had to do was fill the gaps of suggestion, like some psychogenic illness passing between the two houses. A fold in Ruth’s brain has created a friend to fill her lonely days, some warped magic of memory having stored and reprocessed her sister to come back when she needed her most.
Ruth puts a hand to the wall to steady her dizziness, the ground as buoyant as if she’d stepped off a boat, and she pauses for a moment as the bare plaster walls seem to ripple with her exhaustion. She turns and walks upstairs, her footsteps conceding the need for sleep, and an aching desire for the insanity to stop.
Bess is asleep in her cot. Ruth lifts out the sweaty little bundle to hug her close. The baby’s translucent eyelids fidget with a dream. Languageless stories are playing out in her tiny mind after only a few months of life. Perhaps she’s imagining the monster of her mother as a dark overbearing shape, a nucleus of mistrust that will grow and develop as she gets older. There’s so much Ruth has to make up for, if the damage hasn’t already been done. She kisses her daughter’s tiny forehead, absorbing the little girl’s perfection, the gratitude for this good sweet child both immense and perplexing, only to find that she herself cannot move. Effortlessly, at last, the connection Ruth’s been longing for has come; she is incapacitated by love.
She cuddles her daughter, staring hard, reminding herself of every feature, finger and toe belonging to this immaculate being in her arms. Ruth can’t bear to put Bess back in her cot and brings her into her own bedroom, switching on the lamp. The shadows instantly retreat into the comforting certainty of electricity and the girl outside is firmly consigned to Ruth’s imagination. Giles sleep-grumbles and turns from the light.
This room contains all of Ruth’s hope. Without these solid people she owns nothing apart from fantasy. It is not possible to love and be loved when so full of error.
9
Ruth dreams of beaters, of men roaming the sidings, hacking shrubs with sticks to scare out animals for a hunt. In her dream she’s at Bess’s back window with her daughter in her arms. Ruth watches as the men gather in a small clearing of trees and one of them dives to the ground to grab something lithe and wriggling. He stands; Ruth recognizes him as Barry from next door. Triumphantly, he holds Ruth’s fox by its tail, the animal bucking uselessly upside down and screaming like a baby. Another man has a wet rag in his hand and he snaps it at the fox’s head. The sonic crack jolts Ruth awake. Sweat covers her body.
The clock on her bedside table reads 10 a.m. From downstairs, the baseline of Giles’s voice filters through the floorboards, along with the higher pitch of Bess’s chatter. Ruth wraps herself in her dressing gown and walks through to her daughter’s room to peer at the sidings. She tucks the curtains to one side. Daylight overwhelms the darkness in the room and she hugs her robe tight, waiting for the residue of the dream to clear.
It’s too soon for the antidepressants to be working, but with the benefit of a good night’s sleep, a line is beginning to clear through Ruth’s worry. Below in the garden is a sea of weathered plastic toys and, beyond that, the chicken shed is as solid and ugly as ever. Only wood and wire and junk. No one came out of it last night. People don’t live in chicken sheds, the same as they don’t climb out of holes in the ground or get bricked up in recesses under the stairs. She smacks her palms on her cheeks to scare the last of the night-time fears from her system, wishing she didn’t have to work so hard to convince herself her nonsense was simply that and nothing else.
Ruth and Giles’s home is in a single row of terraces with a hedgerow lining the opposite side of the street. The house numbers run consecutively to just past one hundred, and Ruth lives at number 39, situated about a third of the way up the street bordering one of the few alleyways to the back gardens. From the first floor of her house, Ruth has a good view onto the plots of her immediate neighbours, especially Liam’s mum’s in the next terrace on the other side of the alley. A waist-high fence squares off the woman’s rear garden.
Since the police called round a couple of days ago, Ruth hasn’t seen her neighbour, but this morning after Ruth gets dressed, she collects a bag of nappies from Bess’s room and glances outside. The woman’s garden is filled with laundry, pegged on the web of a spinning rack. Lines of beige slacks and fleeces flap in the weak sun. Yards of heavy-denier tights swing next to pale-green blouses. Miss Cailleach wears these same clothes as she walks past Ruth’s house every day on her way to the shops, her hair in that wiry bun at the base of her funny felt hat. It’s her uniform of timidity, a camouflage of mid-greeny browns. Most Fridays, the laundry’s the same, as long as it’s not raining, and the habit of a washday ages her beyond the years Ruth would have guessed at, like Ruth’s grandma who used to set aside a day for chores – dusting on a Tuesday, baking on a Wednesday. Ruth too has been taken over by this domesticity, propelling her back to a time when women’s work was dictated by the tiny universes they were permitted to inhabit.
A door slams and Miss Cailleach brings another load into her back garden. Today a brighter colour mixes with the usual beiges as she pegs out the clothes. She’s wearing a red kimono, patterned with colourful flowers and birds, like she’s emerged from a disguise. The material is ripped in a couple of places, but even from Ruth’s distance she can tell the fabric is luxurious; the way the big sleeves swing and crease is heavy and authentic, not the usual knock-off item from some high-street chain. And the woman’s hair is loose for once. Long grey strands fall down her back, puppeted by invisible strings of wind. She bends to collect another item of clothing, her movements jagging as if there’s sand in her joints, and after she’s hung the last garment on the line she takes her camera from the laundry basket and loops the strap round her neck. She walks across the path and over to her veg patch, checking the multi-pronged bird feeder for seeds and emptying one of the water trays to refill from a watering can. After this she puts the camera’s viewfinder to her eye, pivoting the long lens round the trees on the sidings, perhaps searching for the birds she’s scared away from her allotment. Her lips are moving; she’s talking to herself. Cold air seeps into the bedroom where Ruth stands and a shiver speed-scans from her feet to her head. Then Miss Cailleach turns and points the camera directly at Bess’s window. Ruth quickly steps back into the shade of the bedroom.
It would have been so comforting for Ruth to have had someone kind close by, but on top of the neighbour’s crazy talk and her denial in front of the police – a betrayal Ruth would rage harder against if logic didn’t tell her she must have misheard what was said – is Sandra and Liam’s vehement dislike of the woman, warning enough, and who would know her better than family? Steer clear, nod a smile, and no more chats through the garden gate. Ruth’s already learnt the hard way that no one in London expects you to be neighbourly.
Later that morning, Ruth’s in her front yard cutting back the dead plants and pulling out armfuls of shaggy horsetails. Drizzle wets her face, but she refuses to give up, the fresh air a tonic. While Bess is asleep, she plans to stay outside for as long as possible with the baby monitor on her belt. Giles is expecting a conference call, and the less she has to lean on him for help, the more competent she feels.
A man walks up the pavement. From his purposeful swagger, Ruth can tell it’s Liam even before his face has come into view. He nods at Ruth as he closes in. She replies with a tentative ‘Hi,’ dropping the secateurs she’s holding and fumbling to pick them up. She braces herself, for what she doesn’t know. To her relief he moves swiftly past to his mother’s gate without anoth
er glance. He’s not in the mood for niceties or chit-chat today, but then he rarely is. Ruth almost admires his disregard for etiquette, to be so self-contained that he doesn’t care what others think, though deep down his bad manners rankle – probably his mum’s fault. She sheers off a gnarly twig, annoyed at herself for this knee-jerk finger-pointing that she too has been a victim of, but Liam’s behaviour is the kind that’s ingrained; what is or isn’t put in at childhood recycles through everyone else, Ruth should know. Poor Sandra, having to manage that surliness, Liam keeping his little family tight and stopping anyone else from coming in.
Through the grid of bare trellis, Ruth watches as Liam strides into his mother’s front garden. He knocks. The front door opens. Ruth prunes a bush closer to her gate where she has a diagonal view back to her neighbour’s door. Liam’s mother steps into her front yard, hair resecured in its bun, and dressed again in those neutral slacks and fleece. A heavy condensation has built up on her front window where the curtains have remained unopened. Usually Ruth can see right through to the neighbour’s back window and she imagines the layers of drab clothes brought in from the rain, now steaming on radiators in the dark.
Miss Cailleach throws her arms round her son. It’s a full and strong embrace. Liam’s arms lift a little to his mother’s side before the smallest of struggles as he attempts to pull away and she holds fast. Liam steps to one side and her arms fall from him. He tries to enter the house, but his mum holds her palms up to his chest. Liam normally goes straight inside when he visits, and today he could easily push past, so he must have some respect for his mother, even if it’s begrudged. A rumble of voices, Liam’s a low thunder with the occasional flash of aggression, and the woman’s a monotone patter. Ruth leans an ear in their direction, as if the few millimetres would help her hear what’s being said.
The Hidden Girls Page 12
