by Ben J Henry
‘Happy Birthday, darling,’ he said, mirroring her delirious smile. He slid a massive portion onto a small plate and pushed it across the table with both hands. Alicia took a seat, lifted the fork and rubbed sleep from her eyes.
‘How did—when? Thanks, Dad.’
She very nearly told him about the leatherbound book; but why spoil the moment? She plugged her mouth with cake. The sponge tasted of baking powder, but Rory hadn’t noticed, finishing his equally gigantic slice in thirty seconds. She ate it all while he told her about the time that he and his university flatmate sold brownies at a charity bake sale and the Ultimate Frisbee team had fallen violently sick. His laughter ended with a cough as he caught her staring at the two empty chairs around the table. Creatures of habit, they would each sit in a particular chair. In Anna’s chair, on Alicia’s left, the central wooden spindle was loose and she would twist it until it squeaked, distracting David from whatever he was eating at the time.
‘She’ll be home later,’ Rory’s voice was quiet and comforting.
Alicia nodded, her eyes down as she carried the plates from the table. He would have said if he had heard from Anna; he must assume that she would not miss her daughter’s eighteenth birthday. Alicia did not share his confidence. With a bright smile, she thanked him for the cake, planted a kiss on the top of his head and left to shower for school.
She did not go to school. Treading the pavement slabs as she had in her dream just hours before, Alicia’s chest was tight, her ribcage a coiled spring. One of the girls would remember: Happy Birthday, and then it would spread. Birthday wishes would end in questions. They would ask why her mother was absent, and she would have to lie. They would want to ask about David, just to let her know that they had not forgotten, but they would stop themselves, and that tiny awkward pause while one of them tried to think of something to say—
She turned down the path that led to the park. A nagging in the back of her mind, the cry of a buried memory: what had she forgotten? She was so tired, her eyes would pop out of her head if she sneezed, but not so tired as to believe that this trip to the cottage would jog her memory. Anxiety pushed her further from school and she counted her steps down the path, fabricating hope: she needed a reason not to respond to her mother’s birthday wishes with accusations of murder.
At half past eight in the morning, the park was empty, except for a solitary magpie pecking at the foot of a bin. Alicia crossed the park in brisk steps, unable to shake the onion-skin image of the wolf ahead of her, stalking through her memory bank.
Her grandmother’s cottage was the epitome of abandoned. The window boxes were overgrown and the red paint on the front door had all but flaked away. She had tried to describe the colour to David when her parents had painted it during their last visit to the cottage, almost a decade ago.
The rusted gate brayed like a donkey, and she walked down a path thick with weeds. Knowing the front door to be boarded from the inside, she passed under the boughs of trees along a dirt path down the left-hand side of the building. In the back garden, bottle caps and an empty crisp packet faded grey on the ground beneath a swing set. A broken beer bottle poked through a thicket of pampas grass: evidence of teenagers who had found a use for the vacant space. She passed the patio doors, with boards visible through the glass, to the tall bushes crowding the back door. Broad leaves pressing against the glass were pitted with holes: the work of hungry beetles. She had convinced her infant brother that their grandmother hole-punched the leaves to allow sunlight through. David was so trusting. How easy it must have been to kidnap him.
She plucked a loose pebble from what was once a flowerbed and prepared to break the glass panel in the back door. Pausing, she tried the handle. It was open. Old, rotting wood scraped across the tiles as Alicia entered the cottage.
The kitchen cupboards and worktops were clear. There was nothing on the walls but an ugly handcrafted plate that nobody had seen fit to store. A dead woodlouse lay upside down in the sink. She carried on down the corridor.
She was eight years old when she was last inside the cottage, running a pair of her brother’s toy cars along the wall and describing the most epic of chases. David had waddled behind her in a nappy, following the sound of her voice and tracing muddy fingerprints in her wake. Now, she brushed a smudge of dirt from the wallpaper and glanced up the stairs. Skylights in the bedroom lit a narrow landing. In comparison, the room at the front of the house was dark and dank, like a cave. Three boards had been nailed across the back of the door, and two across the windows on either side. A small, cracked window beside the mantlepiece received the remnants of sunlight that were not swallowed up by the neighbouring trees.
Alicia scanned the sparse contents of the room as though a useful memory might surface. A sofa faced the door, covered with a dustsheet. The room was otherwise unfurnished. Dents in the brown carpet marked where a television cabinet had stood, and the coffee table that was now at Rory’s bedside. Loose wires jutted from the walls where light fittings had hung. Stepping over cigarette burns on the carpet (the work of teenagers that had accessed the property before Rory put up the boards), Alicia walked to the single item on the mantelpiece. An ornamental stone monkey, the size of her fist, pressed both hands to its eyes, playing hide and seek.
‘What have you done with my brother?’ Alicia whispered, lifting the ornament from the mantel and allowing herself a smile that fell when she heard a voice upstairs. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and a floorboard creaked overhead.
The voice was angry, muffled as it travelled from the bedroom above: What am I supposed to do?
Alicia’s heart pounded in her temples. The front door was boarded up; her only way out was to pass the stairs. The stone monkey slipped through her fingers and landed on the corner of the fireplace with a loud crack.
The floorboards creaked again, twice—footsteps crossing the room in the direction of the stairs. Alicia picked up the monkey and considered hurling it through the cracked window. She could just squeeze through it, but would shred herself on broken glass in the process. Holding the monkey to her chest in both hands, she listened. No footsteps, no talking. Were they listening for her?
She crept along the spongy carpet back towards the corridor, stepping over the tell-tale floorboard that had creaked during games of hide and seek. At the foot of the stairs, she paused, hearing nothing. She took a step forward and a silhouette broke the light in the landing above: a figure at the top of the steps.
Winter’s face was lost in shadow. She wore a loose white shirt and a large leather belt, dressed to impress at school.
‘What are you doing here?’ Her tone was accusatory as she descended the stairs.
‘This is my grandmother’s house. Who’s up there?’ asked Alicia, looking over Winter’s shoulder, expecting a second face to emerge.
Genuine surprise creased Winter’s brow as she replied: ‘Nobody.’
‘I heard you talking to someone.’
Winter shook her head, reaching the bottom step, and Alicia pushed past her, marching up the stairs with the monkey in her hands.
‘Alicia…’ Winter called, irritation in her voice as she chased after her.
The landing was five paces across, with a bathroom on the right and a bedroom on the left. Alicia turned for the bedroom. A mattress that had previously leaned against the sloping walls was now in the centre of the room, beneath a purple, patterned sleeping bag. Light flooded the small room through two skylights in the ceiling, catching the gold chain on Winter’s denim satchel by the corner of the mattress. There was nobody in the room.
‘Seriously?’ asked Winter when Alicia strode to the corner cupboards, opening doors to the bare eaves.
‘I heard you.’ Alicia straightened up, looking past Winter in the direction of the bathroom. Winter folded her arms, her glare corrosive.
‘I was talking to Jack.’
There was a flash of vulnerability in her eyes; a curl to her lip: this was not a lie. Winter w
as a cornered animal, forced into confessing that she had been arguing with her dead boyfriend. Alicia paused, then dropped the ornamental monkey on the bed.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘You broke into my grandmother’s—’
Winter closed the distance between them.
‘She killed him.’
Glowing green letters flashed before Alicia’s eyes. Her mouth opened and closed before she managed: ‘You painted that message—do you have any idea—’
‘You don’t know where she is, do you?’
Winter’s head was cocked. Alicia frowned and Winter jumped on the hesitation.
‘I don’t get the “motive”’—air quotes, eyes narrowed in disdain—‘I don’t know if maybe she thinks Jack had something to do with David, or—or whoever took him said they’d give him back if she—I don’t know, Alicia. I’m not a detective. But I’m not stupid. There’s no way he would have drowned in that pool. A cramp? Seriously?’ She shook her head and stared up through the skylight. Her eyes were wet. ‘But she was there. She was right there, the moment—and you said she was supposed to be in Bath. He was swimming alone in school, and she was right there. She killed him.’
A tear slipped down her golden cheek. The coiled spring tightened in Alicia’s chest. When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost pleading: ‘She would never kill anybody.’
‘You know that? I never thought my dad would drink himself to death. I never thought—we don’t know what anyone is capable of. You don’t know anything.’
Alicia did not know anything. She thought of a book with a name struck through in blue biro. The memory fragment was chased by another: a cold look on her mother’s face as she glued dead petals to the wicker sculpture of an eye.
I would do anything to get him back, Alicia.
She shook her head at Winter, denial in her eyes. But Melody Wilson’s bespectacled face beamed between baskets of marigolds. What was her mother capable of?
‘Get out,’ said Winter before Alicia managed to construct a sentence. Her hands were on her hips, her eyes dry.
‘You can’t actually live here—’
‘I don’t live here! I just needed somewhere…’ Winter trailed off and swallowed. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be at school, making up excuses for your mother?’
‘I just needed somewhere.’
‘Well,’ said Winter, leaning down to pick up her bag. ‘You can have it.’
Floorboards creaked as she marched towards the door. Alicia blinked heavy lids.
‘I talk to David too, sometimes.’
Winter turned on her heel and, for half a second, a sliver of understanding passed between the two young women who had lost more than they could articulate.
‘Maybe you should talk to your mother.’
Footsteps receded down the stairs and Alicia stared at Winter’s sleeping bag, lying open like a gutted fish.
Tattoo
The girls alternated positions with their backs to the window of the art room, the girl on the right taking photos of their three unsmiling faces. The sky was cloudless and the light bold: perfect conditions for the latest silhouette trend, with filters to set their eyes bright against the shadow. Gus had arrived at school early, hoping to catch Alicia on the way in. He had been watching the girls strike identical poses for the past five minutes. It was not the ideal start to his birthday.
Winter walked into the room, flanked by the Carpenter twins. She paused by the empty teacher’s desk, the thumb of one hand tucked into her leather belt and the nails of the other drumming her satchel. She cast her eyes around the class as though surveying a hotel buffet. Eight students sat in pairs at the desks and Winter made eye contact with each of them before claiming the empty desk in the middle of the room. She nodded at the girls taking photos, who broke into wide smiles that fell as soon as she passed. The desk was made for two, and one of the identical twins, whose hair was in a ponytail, took the empty seat beside Gus and lugged it to Winter’s side.
‘You know that abandoned cottage by Fletcher Park?’ Winter’s voice was loud as she pulled a sketchbook from her bag.
‘The one with that creepy shed at the bottom of the garden?’ asked the twin with pigtails, while she and her sister scrubbed their seats with anti-bacterial wipes.
‘Alicia has been sleeping there,’ said Winter.
‘Why?’ asked the twin with the ponytail, taking a tentative perch on the drying seat.
‘Her mum’s a murderer, you tapeworm,’ said her sister. ‘It’s not safe in the house.’
‘How do you know?’ asked the first, laying out coloured pencils on her corner of the desk. ‘That she’s been sleeping there?’
Winter shrugged. ‘I know everything.’
Heels clicked on the concrete floor as a young woman entered the class. Wearing a royal-blue cocktail dress cut just above the knee, she looked as if she had stepped off a luxury yacht. She was tall, with dark hair that fell down her long neck and past square shoulders. The class took a collective breath at her striking appearance: mixed heritage, East Asian and Caucasian, with large eyes that settled on Gus at the back of the room.
‘Miss,’ said one of the trio at the window, in a Lancashire accent. ‘Can you take our photo?’
The woman’s face was impassive as she walked over to receive the phone. Holding it before her, she took a couple of steps back until she stood in the doorway. She then extended her arm and dropped the phone in the bin, where it landed with a clang.
‘Sadly,’ said the woman, clasping her hands as she strode to the front of the room. ‘Mrs Harrington remains absent.’
She paused, perhaps waiting for moans of protest. The girls fished the phone from the bin and whispered to one another furiously as they took their seats. Gus shot another look through the window to the quad beyond, but Alicia was not approaching the classroom. The path leading to the art room was bare, apart from some chalk outlines drawn by younger children, giving it the appearance of a crime scene.
‘I know how fond of her you all are.’ Her gaze flicked past Winter. ‘My name is Ms Burnflower, but you can call me Rainn. You’ll have to forgive me,’—a self-deprecating smile—‘I don’t know the first thing about art. I’m actually the new school counsellor, but Mrs Lawson thought it would be good for me to get to know some of the students.’
In the seat nearest the teacher, a girl raised her hand and spoke in a plummy voice: ‘We were supposed to learn about Escher this term. That’s what Mrs Harrington told us last year. The supply on Monday had us doing self-portraits,’ she added with an eye roll and a small laugh.
Rainn inspected the girl at the desk before her like something she had just stepped on.
‘No swearing in this classroom,’ she said, her voice firm. ‘To Mrs Lawson’s office.’
Rainn pointed at the door and the girl glanced left and right, wide eyes seeking solidarity, before deciding that a word with the headmistress was exactly what she wanted. Scraping back her chair, she marched indignantly from the room.
Though her eyes had returned to Winter, Rainn’s arm remained extended as the girl disappeared through the doorway. Gus’s breath quickened as he spotted something on her slender wrist: a tattoo. He blinked. A black oval curled into a lightning-struck eye; it was the symbol on the leatherbound book.
Rainn shook her head and folded her arms.
‘This lesson, we will concern ourselves with a subject that is very close to my heart. A subject that will be close to yours every day for the rest of your lives. That subject is fear.’
There was a glimmer in her cerulean eyes. Winter’s back was straight, her posture matching Rainn’s, mirroring the larger ego. The teacher spoke so quietly that the students leaned forward at their desks.
‘I remember what it was like to be your age. Well,’ she pursed her lips, ‘at your age I fled my home in Singapore and flew to England to determine what had
happened to my mother—I wasn’t agonising over what to wear to the Ashley L’Amour concert. But context is irrelevant: same mind, different problems. As a child, you fear the dark, the monsters…the offers of old men in new cars; being eaten, stolen, broken—you fear what your parents have the power to protect you from. But as a teenager, these fears move beyond the limits of parental control. Beyond the safety of a locked door. It is not death that you fear, but humiliation. What would they think of you, you wonder, if they knew the truth?’
The question hung over the class, mouths bemused, eyes entranced.
‘Perhaps you are scared of being defined as a beauty or a brain?’ Rainn continued, trailing her fingertips along the desks as she circled the room. ‘A boy or a girl? Being stuffed into boxes that are already labelled?’
She locked eyes with the thin, breadstick of a boy at the desk to the right of Gus.
‘Perhaps you are scared of talking to a beautiful woman?’
The boy shrank into his chair.
‘It is important,’ said Rainn decisively, a finger raised, ‘to identify our fears, for it is fear that will dictate the choices that shape our lives. The fear of missing out, the fear of rushing in. Whether we choose to act—to apply, to commit—or not to act—to avoid, to defer—at the core of these decisions lies our fears.’
‘What do you fear?’
Rainn turned to the voice in the centre of the room and challenge lit her eyes as she met Winter’s gaze.
‘A world of order,’ answered Rainn distastefully, moving to the front of Winter’s desk. She ran a finger through the coloured pencils. ‘Straight lines. Checked boxes. A world without chaos.’
Heels clicked as she returned to the front of the room and sat on the teacher’s desk with one long leg folded over the other.
‘This morning, you will draw what you fear. Not spiders, not snakes—I’m not interested in phobia. In truth, I’m not interested in what you draw at all; I’m looking for the struggle. The courage to override that desire to hide in the shadows like a child with its arms wrapped around mummy’s legs. I am looking for honesty.’
