‘I want to see Maisie. I want to see her.’ Ellie lashed out at her grandmother who held her back with deceptively strong arms.
‘No, you wilful child. I told you to stay put.’
‘She’s my friend,’ Ellie cried out, followed by an ‘Ow!’ as her grandmother clamped a hand over her mouth, pulling on the recently repaired skin.
‘Shush! Your father said you’re not to be disturbed or excited. Now look at you.’ Her grandmother half dragged, half pushed her into her bedroom, where she released her hold, only to smack her on the bottom. ‘You’re a disobedient thing. No wonder your mother didn’t want you.’
Ellie looked up at her with wet eyes. ‘I want Maisie, I want Mummy…’
‘No. You can stay in your room. Nobody wants you.’ With that, she shut Ellie’s bedroom door and Ellie kicked it until her foot hurt. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Maisie had gotten her drawing; Maisie had come to find her.
She was alone in the house. Daddy was at work and Grandmother had gone out to buy groceries. Ellie had been left with a sandwich and a book and instructed to sit in silence. She had kept her eyes fixed on the plaid tablecloth before her.
Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. She had counted to one hundred five times inside her head before she dared move. She had a plan. This was her chance to creep outside to the secret spot she shared with Maisie and see if Maisie had left her anything in return.
She hoped that Maisie had liked her drawing. Ellie had tried to capture her world on the page. She had drawn what she could see: the cups, the globe, the cat, the dark-haired man in the doorway, and putting it on paper made everything real. At the top of the drawing Ellie had scrawled, ‘dont tell im home’. If Daddy found out Ellie had been out, he’d be so mad. Her picture was just for Maisie. She’d wanted to write ‘secret’, but wasn’t sure how to spell it. She envied Maisie being able to go to school and see Mrs Burton and learn new words. It was a school day she supposed; Daddy had gone to work and there was no noise from next door, no sign of Maisie nor of any member of her family. Ellie had left her drawing with the silent wish that Maisie would find it, that Maisie hadn’t forgotten her. Maisie had to know she was still here.
Ellie cocked her head and listened for the sounds of her grandmother’s car returning. She couldn’t hear it, so she tried the back door, just in case grandmother had forgotten to lock it. No. Grandmother may have broken the rule to let her out, but she hadn’t broken the rule about locked doors. It would have to be the window. Ellie had lain awake the last few nights considering her plan. Maisie had known the last drawing was new, even if Mrs Tillett hadn’t believed. Ellie needed to make sure Maisie didn’t think she’d now gone away. If she could just pry the kitchen window open, she thought she would be able to slide down and out into the yard. Daddy had opened the window last night when she’d burnt the lamb chops and he had had to let the smell and the smoke out. She’d watched him out of the corner of her eyes. He had unscrewed a bolt at the top of the frame and placed it on the bench before he eased the window up. Daddy had only papered the bottom section and he had pushed it up without tearing it, his hands placed on either side of the wooden frame. But what if Grandmother came home? Or Daddy? He’d kill Beadie. He’d kill her. The beating she’d had after the cats would be nothing compared to this. Ellie bit down on her lower lip. She felt faint.
She had to be brave. Ellie unscrewed the bolt and placed it on the bench. Her hands were so sweaty they slipped uselessly down the frame when she tried to push it upwards and the window remained shut.
‘For Maisie.’ Ellie wiped her hands on her pants and tried again. The window frame had risen and the backyard was visible. She crouched on the bench, next to the kitchen sink, and looked out giddily at the sullen grass and empty clothesline.
‘Oh-kee doh-kee,’ she said with more confidence than she felt. She would be quick. There was no telling when Grandmother would be back. She pushed the fly screen out gently, praying that the top catches would hold.
Ellie swung out onto the window ledge, her lower legs hanging free. She slid forward a little. It was awkward and as she leaned forward, she overbalanced and tumbled onto the narrow cement path at the back of the house.
She lay stunned. She was outside, alone. Her breath came in frantic pants that hurt her chest. She stood, torn between running to her secret place or climbing back inside. It was safe inside; Daddy always said so. With her head tucked down and her shoulders hunched, Ellie ran to the side of the shed. She squeezed past the ferns, cocooned herself between them and the fence, every blood vessel in her body pounding furiously. The horrible stench was still there and she tried to hold her breath. Seconds later she let it out with a gasp. So it smelled bad; it didn’t matter. She was outside, outside in the world, in her special place.
Ellie peered through a gap in the palings and saw the Tillett’s washing hanging limply on the clothesline. There was a rustle at her feet and Ellie tensed as a small skink scurried past, unnerved by her presence. As she followed its movements, she noticed a scrunched-up piece of paper poking out of their letterbox, half covered by one of the fern fronds.
‘Yes!’ She grabbed it and flushed with pleasure as she opened it, smoothing out the creases. The slightly damp blue sheet of paper bore the names ‘Maisie and Ellie’ in a multi-coloured scrawl. There was a drawing of two houses, a fence, and a little girl on either side. One girl had a smile, but the other was without a mouth. That’s me, Ellie thought. The two girls were holding hands between a gap in the fence. Ellie grinned, the action causing the scars in her face to tighten and pull and she turned the page over. On the reverse, Maisie had written a short letter.
to ellie you came back mummy said you went away i hope you come play soon why cant i tell? Maisie
Ellie clutched Maisie’s letter to her chest and crawled back along the side of the shed. Checking that no one was watching, she sprinted back to the house. She had to climb back inside before Grandmother came home. She had to hide her letter somewhere safe in her room where no one would find it—not Daddy, not Grandmother. Then she could draw another picture for Maisie and write her a letter in return. It would be a secret. Her secret.
Ellie stood on tiptoe and awkwardly clambered back inside, her shoes smearing dirt on the windowsill and bench top. She couldn’t stop smiling. Maisie hadn’t forgotten her. Ellie skipped down the hallway to her room.
Lying on her stomach, her head and torso under the bed, Ellie read the letter again and again. With her finger she traced over the letters, then turned the page and placed her palm on the image of the two girls holding hands.
‘Maisie, my friend. My bestest friend.’ Ellie would write back soon. She would. Daddy had said that everyone would laugh at her and hurt her if she ever went outside, but she knew Maisie wouldn’t. Maisie would become her secret friend, someone who was just Ellie’s. Someone Daddy and Grandmother Clements wouldn’t know about.
The sound of her grandmother’s car slowly coming down the driveway caused her to jerk upwards, thumping her head on the base of the bed, her hair tangling in the springs. She had left the kitchen window open. Ellie tugged at her hair, wincing as the strands attached to the metal springs ripped out. She thrust herself backwards and ran to the kitchen. Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl. Balanced on the tips of her toes, she pulled the window down before raising herself up on the bench to screw the bolt back in, just as she heard her grandmother unlock the front door. Ellie slid off the bench and with the movement, noticed a green curl of fern near her hand. She had swiped at the bench, only then aware of the streak of dirt she’d left. The front door closed with a bang. Ellie wiped the bench with her sleeve and hurried back to sit in her kitchen chair. She had looked down at the tablecloth, trying to calm her breathing as her grandmother entered the room.
‘God, I’d kill for a cuppa.’ Grandmother Clements hefted a shopping bag and her tan-c
oloured handbag onto the kitchen table, then eyed Ellie with suspicion. ‘Girl, have you been sitting there like a bump on a log the whole time?’
Ellie didn’t know what to say.
‘You lazy thing,’ her grandmother went to the sink and filled the kettle. ‘Well, make yourself useful and put this lot away.’
Ellie had nodded, her expression blank. Her secret was safe.
‘Our lives define who we are. Our lives and our lies.’ Arthur listened to the other men talk rot at the bar. He had come in for a drink, not bloody philosophy. He’d taken a look at the man who’d spoken and for an instant the disdain that had marked Arthur’s face had intensified. In that brief moment he had seen Jack in the tilt of the head, the posture…
‘Our lives reveal our truth; show us for who we really are.’ The man had spoken again and the illusion shattered. Arthur cursed himself inwardly. Jack had been a good friend, but then it had all changed, once he’d found out who Jack really was. What Jack was. God, why had he been so eager to be friends with Jack? Why had he been so needy? He had been so much better than Jack; why hadn’t he seen it? Jack had been weak. No one could ever accuse Arthur of being weak. He’d made sure of that.
‘We ain’t nothin’ but blood and bone and piss and shit,’ Arthur muttered, cradling his schooner glass in one hand whilst with the other he fumbled in his pocket for his tobacco pouch.
‘What’d you say?’ The man on his right looked at him then, a hint of belligerence behind thick-rimmed glasses and a shock of bushy eyebrows.
‘Nothin.’
‘Huh.’ The man had grunted, unsatisfied, and turned back to his friend.
Arthur sat the pouch of tobacco on the bar.
‘There’s no smoking inside, mate.’
Arthur glared at the barman. ‘Do I look like I’m smoking?’ He couldn’t bear to sit here and listen to this bullshit. He swallowed the last of his beer and left the pub, his feet scuffing loudly across the gravelled car park surface. Unlocking his car, he slid behind the wheel. Piss and shit. That was all it came down to in the end, a whole heap of nothing but piss and shit.
He missed his dogs. He missed their warm, wet muzzles in his hand, missed being able to slap and rub their short, sleek fur with that pure animal smell. He mourned the loss of his pack. He couldn’t have kept them, not after what had happened to Ellie. People would have talked and he wasn’t going to be fodder for gossip. He couldn’t risk calling attention to himself or the house. Someone would get suspicious. Already that blasted nosy neighbour had been in, looking for Dolores and Ellie. According to his mother, she’d brought her brat of a daughter with her too, the one with those blue eyes and flawless skin… Bloomin’ little liar, that’s what she was, saying she’d had a picture from Ellie. He’d keep an eye on that one.
‘Fuck.’ He hit the steering wheel in frustration. He had to focus. He had lost sleep last night: another night destroyed by recurring dreams of torrents of blood, dreams drenched in crimson. He’d had these dreams before. Ellie was in the dogs’ enclosure as a malevolent hail of blood clots pounded down upon her, clots that grew teeth and growled as they barrelled into him. He had tried to run to her, to save her as he had skidded and slid and fallen into pooling slicks that threatened to drown him, even as he’d reached out to her again and again, helpless as his baby girl slipped out of his grasp. He couldn’t hold her and he couldn’t keep her safe. The dream had ended as it always did, as he drowned, choking in red, treacle-dense waves. As he floated above his lifeless body, he saw that he’d been trapped inside a galvanised steel drum while thrashing around him were the screaming bodies of kittens. He had only been able to hover and watch uselessly as Ellie was devoured alive, before a maniacally grinning Dolores sealed the lid on the drum.
Last night he had awoken drenched in a sweat so thick he’d thought it was the blood and that he was truly drowning in the red storm that swamped him. The unholy images refused to fade, so he had staggered drunkenly down the corridor, reaching out for her door. For the shape of her, her warm, living, mutilated flesh, his Ellie, his baby doll, alive. He had pulled back her sheet and blanket, ignored the startled doe eyes in that grotesque face she wore and clutched at her for fierce comfort and mad, possessive love.
He wasn’t proud. But at least he was a better man than his father. Arthur could never remember what set his father off, but he remembered the fights. His mother had regularly sported ugly bruises on her arms and face. Once there had been a raised shiner across her cheek that had spread towards her hairline. She hadn’t left the house for two weeks, not even for church. He had stood in the doorway to his parents’ bedroom the night of that beating; he had heard groans and wasn’t sure what had made him get up. He must have known he couldn’t help his mother, that he wasn’t strong enough to stand up to his father. Not yet. He had stood and listened and watched. Watched his father grunting and thrusting on top of his mother. She had opened her eyes and seen Arthur standing there. She’d cried out, shock and shame in her eyes. His father had just clamped one of his burly hands over her mouth and continued.
‘You like that?’
Arthur had thought his father hadn’t seen him, but when he turned to go, his father had spoken again. ‘Stay and watch the whole show, boy. I’ll show you how it’s done.’
‘Want to play a game?’
Ellie remembered the words. Maisie would peer through the fence and search for Ellie amongst the greenery. Before the attack, before the years of captivity, the girls had played in both yards. Hide and seek was their favourite, especially in the overgrown section of the garden where Dolores had once planted seedlings, trying in vain to establish a cottage garden on the wind-buffeted coast. The girls would chase each other with erupting giggles and squeals of delight, sounds that had brought Daddy to the back door yelling, ‘For the love of God, shut up!’
In those days Ellie would watch Maisie and her little brother, Timmy, laughing and playing in their yard, sometimes joining in with them. Their daddy played games with them. Their daddy didn’t yell. Locked inside after the attack, Ellie tried to relive the memory of those times. Ellie would stand with one hand on her cold, lonely bedroom wall and picture Maisie wearing the red cardigan that Ellie envied, the one with the bright red ladybird buttons. The first time Ellie had seen it, she thought she’d never seen anything so pretty and wished over and over with her fingers and toes crossed that Mrs Tillett would knit her something so bright. Instead, the only hand-knitted clothing she ever received was from Grandmother Clements. Grandmother had knitted a chunky brown jumper for Daddy and started a matching one for Ellie with the extra balls she had bought.
Ellie recalled her grandmother holding the unfinished front up against her body checking the size. She had dared to speak.
‘It’s brown…’
Her grandmother had snorted. ‘The dogs didn’t damage your eyesight then.’
‘But…’
‘What?’
‘Can’t I have a red one? Like Maisie’s, with ladybirds on it?’ The softly spoken words had come out in a rush. Her grandmother had grabbed her by the upper arm and twisted the tender flesh.
‘You ungrateful child. You’re bloody lucky you’re getting anything at all.’ With a final pinch, she had let go of Ellie’s arm and pushed her away. ‘Get out of my sight.’
Ellie had trudged to her room. Her jumper wouldn’t be bright. It would be dark and plain and horrible. An ugly jumper for an ugly girl. When the jumper was finished, her grandmother had dumped it atop her bed without a word. She had also left an oversized beanie, practically a balaclava, to pull down and cover Ellie’s face. Ellie had cried fat, silent tears as she’d rocked herself to sleep that night. She’d wanted ladybird buttons, wanted to own something bright, cute, and colourful. She didn’t want to be a shadow.
‘You take after your mother all right. She was
never good enough for my boy.’ Ellie hadn’t known whom her grandmother was talking about at first. She couldn’t imagine Daddy as a boy.
‘Why wasn’t she good?’ Ellie had once dared ask.
‘Look at the mess she left behind, running off and dumping you on my son.’
Wary of her grandmother’s bitter moods and hard words, Ellie had soon fallen into her routine. Her grandmother would grudgingly do the outside chores: picking up some groceries, doing the laundry, hanging Arthur’s clothes on the line whilst Ellie’s meagre belongings were draped over airing racks inside the laundry so they wouldn’t be seen. Ellie had to do the housework in the morning: dusting, making the beds—‘pull the sheets tighter than that, girl’—and learning to cook. After the lunch things had been washed and put away, her grandmother would retreat to the lounge room and pull out her needles, hooks, and wool.
‘Read to me, child, ignorant as you are.’
Ellie read whatever was at hand: the Bible, the CWA cookbook, or the picture encyclopaedia. Occasionally Grandmother Clements brought a magazine with her, and as Ellie stumbled over the words, she cringed in the face of her grandmother’s sarcasm and disapproval.
‘Good Lord, that’s enough, girl. Leave me in peace.’
Dismissed, Ellie would leave her grandmother to endless crocheted squares and relish the respite of those brief periods she was outside her grandmother’s focus. Sometimes her grandmother would fall asleep and Ellie wouldn’t dare enter the room to wake her. She wished her grandmother would truly leave her alone so she could draw, read without criticism, or listen to the radio before Daddy came home, but time to play, to just be, was rare.
‘Child, where are you?’
Ellie would shrink at the summons, but she always obeyed. There was no escape.
A-maze-ing…A-mais-ing Maisie. Amasing Maisie. Ellie
had frowned down at the letters. With her tongue poking out of her mouth, she’d gripped the pencil tightly and tried again. The letters looked wrong and she hadn’t known how to make them right. She couldn’t ask Daddy or Grandmother. She couldn’t ask Maisie either; Maisie was a secret.
Path to the Night Sea Page 16
