by Sarah Hilary
I waited for some sound from the room, his voice raised in anger, or surprise. Hers, cajoling. Nothing. I shivered, feeling the cold in the house, and in the city sprawled outside. London lies so still on the water, its long jaws open in invitation. You see its scraps, the promise of a meal. All the gaps and hollows, and people hiding, unknowable, in each one.
I’m Carolyn Wilder. Her scent stained the hall. Robin’s wife.
The living couldn’t touch me, that’s what I’d told myself. Only ghosts could do that. Carolyn was what I’d been waiting for, the whole reason I was here. Stealing Joe from me, leaving me alone. I’d told myself I’d find Joe here and if I didn’t, I’d take my revenge. On this house and the people inside it. So why wasn’t I glad she was finally here in the house? I had what I’d wanted, and she had no idea who I was. I could get to work properly now.
It’s just me, now. In the Villas.
I touched the red woven bracelet, remembering the warmth of Robin’s wrist on mine. He’d been happy without her. With his rota, and me. Should she be allowed to ruin that, too?
From the kitchen windowsill, the pigeon watched me search the cupboards for a container to hold the meal I’d been ordered to freeze. Carolyn hadn’t asked what it was, wrinkling her nose in the direction of the kitchen, deciding they’d dine out. I’d made ratatouille, nothing fancy, but it smelt good. I’d planned to warm a hunk of bread for him to soak up the sauce. I didn’t think he’d mind getting his hands dirty because that’s the kind of dish it is. Rosie called it red stew.
Pulling a plastic lidded bowl from the back of a cupboard, I banged it onto the counter by the sink. The pigeon took flight. When she spread her wings, I saw the soot inside. She’d looked white but she wasn’t, London’s dirt lining her feathers.
Carolyn Wilder. His wife. Her silver satin gown in the wardrobe, perfume lingering in its folds. Lime, with a twinge to it like artificial sweetener. Her scent, I knew now. Tomorrow, his bed would smell the same, its pillows indented, sheets ratted. Did Joe smell of her? Or had he been a one-night stand, soon forgotten? Sitting on her high stool at the bar in her black satin coat, naked underneath. I’d seen their heads together, hers and Joe’s. What had she promised when she whispered in his ear? I’d been telling myself it was drugs or money, but maybe he liked the way she looked, her lime scent, her cool creaminess. Robin must have liked it, too. He’d married her, even if they no longer lived together.
Leaving the ratatouille to cool on the stove, I rinsed the lidded bowl. Sweat sat in the armpits of my black dress. I’d planned to warm a hunk of bread for myself, a rough crust to wipe around the casserole dish after I’d served his helping. The zest of lemon had been on my tongue all afternoon, appeasing my hunger with the promise of this treat to come. I should eat it, the whole casserole dish of it, while they were dining out. Let Robin come home to find me curled over his kitchen table with two hunks of his bread in my fists, red juice running down my chin.
The library door stayed shut.
I climbed the stairs to his bedroom, armed with white vinegar and a fistful of newspaper. The room looked the same, his bed as I’d left it, tightly made. Facing the mirror, I saw a dark figure with her hand a crumpled grey fist, her lovely neck knotted with distress. I sprayed the vinegar, watching her face run down the glass in wet white streaks. The newspaper smelt ashy. I bunched it in my fingers, pushing it at the mess where my face should have been. My breath was coming in hisses, damp against the glass. I took a step back, pressing my lips together to keep the noise inside, my chest tight with tears. I wanted to smash the mirror and crawl inside, to hide. I wanted Joe. He was the reason I was here, the reason I was trapped. He’d left me alone in the club, following Carolyn as if he’d known her all his life. He had, in a way. Or women like her. All his life.
Darkness fell into the mirror, dimpling there in a hot little bubble.
Carolyn was standing at the foot of her husband’s bed. She moved, and our eyes met in the bruised surface of the old glass. ‘Oh . . . !’ She laughed. ‘Now I see what Robin means.’
‘Robin?’
‘Dr Wilder. Your employer.’ She came closer. ‘My husband.’
In her heels, she was taller than I was, and slimmer, her face symmetrical in that classical way we’re taught to call true beauty. Her eyes were a cat’s, though. Yellow-green like her scent, and just as narrow. We stood shoulder to shoulder, two women dressed in black, as different as could be. One tall and golden, made of symmetry. The other dark, her eyes evasive. Next to Carolyn, I felt crude and clumsy. Her grey dress, cinched at her waist, whispered against her skin. Like her coat, the dress was all about how naked she was underneath. She’d retouched her make-up, her lips newly red. She watched my face for a second then dropped her stare to my hands holding the bottle of vinegar and scrunched-up sheet of newspaper. Her own hands were empty but she didn’t need a weapon, with her eyes like knives.
‘Well, get on with your work. It’s what you’re paid for.’
A stab at the end of the sentence, as if the full stop were a drawing pin.
Before we were homeless, in those first three months after leaving Lyle’s and coming to London, we’d lived for a while with a man called Brian. We met him in the Shunt Lounge, where Joe and I went often. One night, Brian hired a masseuse to come to his house. She wore acrylic nails, each press of her fingers punctuated by a crescent of pain. Carolyn’s stabbing sentences reminded me of that woman’s fingers, her sharp acrylic nails.
I turned back to the mirror but I must have been at the exact spot where the flaw lay, because I wasn’t there. There was only Carolyn in an empty room, with her eyes on me.
After supper, they went to the garden room to drink champagne.
Carolyn had brought a bottle back from the restaurant, ordering me to find an ice bucket. There was no such bucket in the house. I explained this, as simply as I could. She stood and listened and then she said, ‘You really are hopeless, aren’t you?’
‘Perhaps they sell ice in the newsagent’s?’
‘Oh, never mind, we’ll just have to finish the bottle before it loses its chill.’ She wrung the champagne bottle by its gilded neck. ‘Can you at least find a pair of flutes?’
Dr Wilder used two kinds of glasses, one for water, another for wine. Both were kept in the kitchen cupboard, but neither was a flute.
‘For goodness’ sake, there must be some purpose to you. Champagne flutes.’ She sketched the shape with her free hand. ‘You can manage that, surely.’
I found what she wanted in a cabinet in the drawing room. I washed and rinsed the flutes before carrying them on a tray to the garden room where Carolyn made an acidic joke about warm glass and cold champagne. Dr Wilder didn’t look at me. He wore a suit of dark flannel over a white shirt and crimson tie. He looked very handsome, and unhappy. Lonelier than I’d ever seen him look. I wanted to bring him a mug of warm milk, but she was busy filling the flutes with champagne.
My attic was warmer than the garden room.
I closed the door and changed into leggings and a T-shirt before sweeping the newspapers from the rug. I’d brought the soft-bristled brush with me. My neck ached with the work I’d done in the house but I was wound too tight for sleep. Kneeling, I brushed at the rug, taking the soot and dust from its silk, working a small section at a time, raising the pile until its colours glowed.
The light was going from the sky, the ceiling bulb stingy. I worked in a swill of light but it was enough, my fingers knowing when the silk was clean by its heat under my hand. The sound of brushing soothed me, rhythmic, raising the smell of chimneys and woodsmoke so that while I worked I was able to imagine the mountains rising up around me.
When at last I straightened and stood, the moon was watching me, waiting. I opened the window to see street lights pitching their slew of colour into the road. Traffic hushed either side of Starling Villas, the scent of petrol strong enough to taste. Was Robin awake to taste it? Was he watching the moon, the way it bl
oomed like a flower in the night sky? No, he was with her, tasting champagne and her . . .
Forcing the window wide, I leaned out, remembering the way the moon hung over the lake that night, two years ago. The night I stayed, the day Rosie disappeared. Afraid to leave her alone, out of my mind with fear. It’d filled every inch of me, curling my toes and squeezing shut my eyes, its black fur thick in my throat. No one could help me, not even Joe. The lake was like tar, sucking at my feet.
In Starling Villas, I fell asleep with my cheek pressed to a clean corner of the rug, the soft-bristled brush tucked like a child’s toy under my chin until dawn came, chilling me awake.
For a long time I didn’t move, watching as the sky grew stronger, seeing more and more of the attic as the day asserted itself. I knew what I must do. Where I’d found myself, and how to fix the problem of Carolyn Wilder. As if last night’s industry had emptied my skull of everything but the solution, as clear-cut as the diamonds she wore on her fingers and in the soft pink lobes of her ears.
12
‘Do your shopping, missus?’ No one ever knocked on Meagan’s door. Yet here he was, bold as brass, fixing his ten-year-old tiger’s eyes on her face. ‘I do hers.’ Nodding in the direction of Meagan’s neighbour. ‘She pays me two quid.’
‘Do I look like a charity?’ She’d not slept well, plagued by dreams about Nell, about stones and broken china coming through her windows. ‘Clear off.’
‘Do yours for fags.’ He cocked his head at her. ‘Paid me for nothing, last time.’
Another good deed coming back to bite her. She bared her teeth at the boy. ‘Clear off before I call the police.’
‘Had enough of the police, you have. And anyway, they won’t come out here. Can’t be arsed, can they?’
She tried to stare him down. When that didn’t work, she said, ‘Does your mum know you’re bothering respectable people when you should be in school?’
‘What respectable people? Not you.’
‘Know all about me, do you?’
‘Know you killed that kiddie. Everyone says so.’
‘Everyone’s wrong.’ But she opened the door, wide. ‘Come on in, then. Since you’re not scared of the kiddie killer.’
He hesitated, long enough to let her know he believed the gossip. In his padded coat he looked half-starved, smelling of gutters. But he swaggered in, hands in pockets, eyes all over the place, making up the stories he’d tell his mates about being in the killer’s flat.
Meagan took him to the kitchen and gave him a packet of biscuits and a glass of milk, because she could be like that when the mood took her. Even after Little Nell’s best efforts to make her into a monster. ‘What’s your name, then?’
‘Darrell.’ Mouth full of biscuit. ‘You ran a home. What’s that like?’
Meagan lit a cigarette. ‘Better food than your mum cooks by the look of you.’
‘Fuck off talking about my mum.’ He drained the glass of milk, wearing a white moustache. ‘For real, though. What’s it like?’
‘Nothing special.’ She shrugged smoke across her shoulder.
Strange to have someone in the flat with her, after all this time. Stranger still that it should be a child. She was telling the truth for what it was worth – Lyle’s was nothing special, just another big red lump of a house with no central heating, top to bottom hard work. Filthy, no matter how much you cleaned it. Cold, no matter how many jumpers you put on. The kids always hungry, always missing their mums, even the mums who’d battered them. Crying and mizzling, catching every germ going. She wasn’t paid nearly enough for the work. Stood to reason she needed help from the likes of Nell and Joe, not that Joe was ever much use on his own. Social Services sticking their oar in, every few months. Police, Meagan could handle. She’d grown up with them. Social were one long moan, from their home perms to their sandalled feet, prying and preaching, poking their noses, muttering about soft play and art therapy. Soon’s she saw that perky Fiat 500 parked up outside, she’d shout for Joe: ‘Get your arse and eyelashes down here, that cow’s incoming!’
No point pretending life wouldn’t be tough when it was already tough, that’s how they’d landed up with Meagan. She’d fostered over eighty kids before it got on top of her, after the trouble with Rosie Bond. No coming back from that. She’d tried, because God knows they needed her. Lyle’s was the back of beyond but there were always kids in need of a home. It wasn’t just cities or towns that made a mess of families, it was slag-heap villages like Pig’s Knuckle Arkansas, the fag end of an old mining community. Hard winters that kicked your windows for six, trains bringing tourists five weeks of the year. Londoners mostly, kidding themselves they were getting away from it all, having a big adventure. Until they discovered how hard it was to cook authentic rye bread with Calor gas, and that septic tanks took exception to a diet of kale and quinoa. She watched them come, shiny-eyed and patronizing, and she watched them go, loading their camper vans with recycling bins and the wetsuits they’d bought for their kiddies to swim in that bloody lake which was an expensive joke – a dirty green pool that should’ve been sealed off years ago. Deep enough to drown in, riddled with caves to carry you out to sea, and all a stone’s throw from Lyle’s.
‘Stay away from that bloody pool!’
How many times had she shouted that at Nell and Joe? They never listened, too in love with the place. Hiding towels under their clothes, pretending they were going to catch the bus to the beach, but Meagan always knew. They came home damp, smelling of clean coins. She watched from the window as they trailed up the path, heads together. Saw the way they held one another, feet moving in step, like one kid not two. A flash of light from inside the house – Rosie’s bobbles bouncing in her hair as she raced to greet them. Nell reaching to scoop her up, Joe petting Rosie’s cheek. The three of them clinging together, wet towels dragging in the dust, the kiddie’s head buried beneath their chins. Seeing it, a shiver moved up Meagan’s spine. Nothing to do with the stubborn chill in the house. Fear, for the three of them. Their closeness, that selfish happiness like a kite flown too high to come down. You couldn’t survive on closeness. As for happiness, it was just another way of getting your fingers burnt. The three of them so tight together, the smell of the pool getting into Rosie’s hair, her dress damp from their T-shirts. Scowling, ‘Take me next time!’ Kicking at the pair of them with her sandalled feet. ‘Take me or I’ll tell!’
‘Give us one of those then.’ The boy, Darrell, reached for her cigarettes.
She passed them across the table. It was nice to have company for a change, someone who wasn’t scared of her, or not enough for it to get in the way of his hunger or his curiosity. He had Joe’s eyes. But this boy was a lot sharper, she could see that. Give him time. All the boys she’d ever known turned to mush as soon as they fell in love. And Joe hadn’t been the brightest brick in the bucket even before Nell got to work on him.
All that summer, two years ago now, black rot had sat on Lyle’s windowsills. No matter how hot it got, those windows let you know it’d be winter soon enough. Burst pipes, fights over breakfast and extra blankets. Nell and Joe thought the summer would last forever, that they could sneak off to their bloody pool whenever they wanted and never find it frozen over, a pit of cold that’d suck the heat from your bones and spit it back in bubbles.
‘Take me next time!’ Rosie kicking at the pair of them. ‘Take me or I’ll tell!’
Nell and Joe with their arms wrapped round her, the sea off somewhere behind, its tides tugging at the beach. When winter came, it’d be chucking waves over the railings onto the prom, rusting the hubcaps of cars.
Back at the beginning, Meagan thought Nell was like the sea. Wild and choppy but you could learn its tides, chart its patterns. That summer, she’d started to see the girl was more like their precious pool. Deep and treacherous, full of caves where currents flowed to an ancient rhythm, stealing through the spaces in the stone, taking fish and rocks and anything lost, sucking it into a place n
o one could ever follow or find.
Meagan wouldn’t have minded, but for Joe.
All those years of not caring tuppence for any of the kiddies they landed on her, but he was different. Got under her skin, did Joe. She missed him when he ran from Lyle’s, missed him like he was part of her. She’d broken a toe, years ago it was now. But she felt the weather in that toe before any breath of wind or rain on the way. It surprised her, feeling the same pain over Joe. Kids had come and gone from Lyle’s, dozens of them, and never so much as a twinge. With Joe it was like he was her blood. And he picked Nell over her, that’s how it felt. Even though Nell wasn’t the one keeping his secrets, the shoplifting and the rest of it. It was Meagan he’d to thank, for everything. That little bitch stole him away, after Rosie’s funeral. Upped and went in the night, leaving Meagan to face the music all over again. Stories in the press, stones through the windows. It was Nell’s doing – to keep Meagan too busy to hunt them down. Not just busy either. Ruined. No Lyle’s, no livelihood. A hole inside her like a missing tooth where Joe’d been. She’d missed Nell too in those first few weeks, with all the work to be done in the house and kiddies crying, the sound of it jagging on and on until Social Services came to take them away. Then she was left alone, cursing the girl who’d arrived on her doorstep all those years ago. Little Nell handed to her like a stick of dynamite and she took it, old fool that she was, and nothing was ever the same again.
‘D’you do it, then?’ Darrell smoked like a woman, his thin fingers fussing at the cigarette. ‘That kiddie.’
Meagan was choosing her answer when she heard the phone ringing. Not the one on the wall. The pay-as-you-go phone, in her handbag. Only one person had that number.
‘About bloody time.’ She heaved herself to her feet, leaving Darrell at the table.
He watched her as she dug the phone from the bag, answering the call.
