The House on the Lake

by Nuala Ellwood

  I stand in the hallway and try to think straight. I need to find some kind of normality: a bathroom, a kitchen. I try the door straight ahead of me and as I open it I instinctively put my hand on to the wall to locate a switch but, again, there isn’t one. I step inside and point the torch ahead of me. There is a huge wooden table in the centre of the room. Like the mantelpiece in the living room, its surface is piled with junk and clutter. There are empty food cans, old newspapers, bits of wool and twigs. A flash of colour catches my eye and I bend down to take a closer look. It’s a red ribbon, the kind I used to wear in my hair when I was a child. I pick it up and rub it between my finger and thumb. It’s velvet. I stare at the ribbon, wondering how something so pretty has come to be in the midst of all this junk. Then I coil it round my wrist and tie it in a knot.

  I lift the torch and direct it at the far wall, desperately trying to locate something, anything, that resembles a modern amenity – a washing machine, an oven – but there isn’t even a sink. Shining the torch to the left, I see a black metal contraption wedged against the wall. It has ornate tiles on the front of it with blue figures painted on them. There are various knobs and handles on the top of it, though I have no idea what it is. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

  Next to it is a glass door. Wiping my hand across the grimy glass, I see that it leads outside. I try the handle. The door is locked. I shine the torch up and down its surface then notice a bolt at the very top. I slide it across and pull the door open.

  Standing on the wooden step, I look out on to an expanse of purple wilderness. The hills, which seemed to close in on me as I drove here, now look like sleeping giants, their peaks arching towards the grey sky. A drystone wall dissects the field beyond the house, framing a square patch of land. There are wooden canes sticking out of the ground and what appear to be, in this fractured winter light, the remains of a vegetable patch. The rest of the garden is cluttered with wire cages. I take a deep breath then grimace. Even out here in the open the air is putrid. I turn to go back into the house but something catches my eye; I look closer. There’s something poking out of one of the cages. I walk towards it. It’s a tail of some sort. Orange and wiry. A fox’s brush? A memory of Highgate Cemetery at twilight and the cries of the foxes that would nest in amongst the gravestones flashes across my mind then disappears. I flick the brush with my hand and it falls on to the ground, sending up a flurry of tiny flies into the air. Definitely a fox, I think to myself, but as I glance back at the cage my heart flips inside my chest. There, lying on the bottom of the cage, grey and mottled, is a skull.

  I stagger backwards then run back to the house, yanking the glass door so hard it almost falls off its hinges. Back through the stinking mess, out of the front door and past the lake.

  When I reach the car I have to lean against the bonnet to catch my breath. A couple of moments later I open the passenger door and I am greeted with the sight of Joe, red-faced and screaming.

  ‘Shh,’ I whisper, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. ‘It’s okay, baby. Mummy’s here.’

  He looks at me with terror in his eyes.

  ‘Want Daddy. Want Daddy now.’

  I don’t know what to do. I can’t take Joe into that place when he’s in this state. Think, Lisa, think, I tell myself. Then I remember the shop in the village. I’ll drive there, get some food and provisions, and give myself time to put together a plan.

  Joe’s screams intensify on the short drive into the village. Not even a replay of Where the Wild Things Are will calm him down. As he thrashes about in his car seat I try to remember all the things they taught me in parenting class when Joe was first born; the stacks of literature we were supposed to read with headings such as ‘Surviving the Terrible Twos’ and ‘Gentle Parenting Tips’. But the skills I was meant to hone in those years were thwarted by the horrible situation I was living through.

  How can you apply gentle parenting when you’re trapped in a toxic environment? How can you survive the terrible twos when you’re only just managing to keep going yourself? Still, the guilt at the years I’ve wasted living in fear gnaws at my insides. I glance at Joe in the rear-view mirror, his face wet with snot and tears, and I make a promise that I’m going to make up for all of it.

  When we reach the village I swing the car into a space outside the pub. Someone has placed an unlit cigarette in the inflatable snowman’s mouth. I’d laugh if my situation weren’t so dire.

  I unclip my seat belt, open the door and step out into the freezing air. When I open Joe’s door he lets out an ear-splitting cry.

  ‘It’s okay, Joe,’ I say, leaning across to unfasten his belt. ‘We’re just going to have a look in the shop.’

  He shakes his head violently from side to side.

  ‘Not want to go shop. Want Daddy.’

  ‘Come on, darling,’ I say, trying to keep the agitation out of my voice. ‘I’ll get you some sweets. What about some nice chocolate buttons, eh?’

  ‘No,’ he yells. ‘Want go home. Want Daddy.’

  He thrusts himself forward in the seat and smacks me right in the eye. The pain shoots up my head and my patience snaps. I look at my little boy, his face red and contorted with rage, and all I see is Mark. It’s then that the anger and frustration I’ve been holding in for the entire journey comes tumbling forth.

  ‘Your daddy’s not here,’ I yell. ‘Do you hear me? He’s not here and he’s not going to be. Now stop being such a naughty boy.’

  He falls silent then looks at me for a moment. I unhook the belt on his car seat but as I lift him out of the car he starts wriggling and squirming in my arms. His hands, balled into fists, hammer at my chest and it’s all I can do to keep him steady.

  ‘Hey, are you okay?’

  I turn to see a man standing next to the inflatable snowman. He’s in his early thirties by the looks of it, broad-shouldered – ‘stocky’ as my mum would have said – with dark eyes and close-shaved chestnut hair. He’s got one arm folded across his chest and in his hand is an unlit cigarette, presumably swiped from the snowman’s mouth. He frowns as he watches me.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, hoisting Joe on to my hip and trying not to make eye contact with the man as I step on to the pavement.

  ‘You sure about that?’ he continues, pausing to light the cigarette.

  I nod my head briskly.

  ‘Haven’t seen you before,’ he says, narrowing his eyes. ‘You visiting?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I say. ‘Sorry, I’m in a bit of a rush.’

  I turn and make my way to the shop, Joe hanging angrily off my hip.

  ‘Well, nice to meet you,’ calls the man from behind us. ‘Whatever your name is.’

  I shudder. Why do men do that? Yell after you. Invade your space. Demand you tell them your business. What gives them the right?

  As we reach the shop I put Joe down then arrange my hair so that it falls across my eyes. I need to make myself as respectable as possible. I push the door open and my heart lifts as I see a lottery machine, a cashpoint, a display of gluten-free bread. Things I’ve taken for granted after years of living in a big city. Comforting ordinariness. It’s strange but even though I was only in that house for a few moments it felt like I’d slipped through some weird time portal, as though real life had ceased to exist.

  There’s a woman sitting behind the counter reading a newspaper. She’s in her fifties and has a mop of curly greying hair. She looks up as we enter, gives me a cursory glance over her cherry-red spectacles, then returns to her reading. Good. The less attention I draw to myself the better.

  I take a wire basket from the stack by the door and make my way over to the fridges. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be buying. Food. That’s it. I pick up a pack of fresh chicken breasts and I’m about to put them in the basket when I remember there is no oven in the house. I put them back then move on to the chilled ready meals. There is a selection of pre-packed sausage rolls. I choose a handful of them and put them in the ba
sket. I hear Mark’s voice in my head: ‘You’re not giving our son that processed rubbish, Lisa.’ But Mark’s not here and I have brought our son to a house in the middle of nowhere with no running water and no bloody oven. A sausage roll is the least of our worries.

  ‘Shall we get some juice?’ I say, turning to Joe.

  He is making a low humming noise.

  ‘What kind would you like? Apple or orange?’

  I hold up two cartons but he just shakes his head.

  ‘Come on, Joe,’ I say, crouching down so I’m at his level. ‘Tell Mummy what you’d like to drink.’

  He scowls then lifts his hand up. I go to grab his wrist before he can hit me again but he quickly yanks it away. A clawing dread rises up my chest as I put both cartons of juice into the basket. Every part of me wants to shout for help; to alert someone to the predicament I’m in. But I know if I do that then Mark will find us and I can’t risk that happening.

  I move around the shop adding cleaning fluid, sponges and bin bags to the now overflowing basket. It’s more than I need but it’s reassuring to see the familiar items. For just a few moments I forget about the house and focus on being an ordinary mum.

  When I get to the counter the woman folds her newspaper and puts it down. She doesn’t speak, which I’m grateful for, just scans the shopping and puts it into carrier bags for me. While she does that I cast a glance at the headline on the newspaper. Nothing yet.

  Still, it’s only a matter of time. My heart starts to palpitate. I need to get away from the village now. He could be anywhere. He could be closing in.

  ‘That’s £22.80 when you’re ready, love.’

  I look up at the woman. Her accent is soft and warm, and for a moment I feel like telling her everything that’s happened, ask her to help, to take me and Joe to her nice, cosy cottage and give us hot tea and toast. But instead I distract myself with separating the plastic ten-pound notes that have unfurled out of my purse and landed on the counter like those fortune-telling fish you get in Christmas crackers.

  I hand three of them to the woman and as I’m waiting for my change I turn to check that Joe is okay. But he’s not there.

  ‘Joe?’ I call. ‘Joe. Where are you?’

  ‘Are you all right, love?’

  I hear the woman’s voice behind me as I rush up the drinks aisle, frantically calling his name.

  ‘Joe! Where are you, baby?’

  I reach the third and final aisle and there’s no sign of him. The room shrinks around me and I feel my legs giving way. This can’t be happening.

  ‘Lost someone?’

  I look up and see the man from outside the pub standing there. He’s smiling at me.

  ‘My little boy,’ I say, staggering towards him. ‘He’s run away from me and I –’

  ‘He’s over there, love,’ says the man, pointing at the door. Joe is standing by it, looking sheepish.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ I say, running to him. ‘Joe. You naughty boy. You mustn’t run off like that.’

  Then I compose myself and turn back to the counter. The woman looks at me sympathetically as I approach.

  ‘I think he were looking at the comics,’ she says warmly. ‘My little grandson loves them too.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, my heart still fluttering with shock. ‘I just … lost sight of him.’

  ‘Well, no harm done, eh? Here’s your change, love,’ she says, handing me a five-pound note and some coins.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, hurriedly putting the money into my purse.

  ‘You from London?’

  It’s the man speaking. I turn round.

  ‘It’s just I recognize the accent,’ he says, coming towards me. ‘I used to have a cousin who lived in Brixton.’

  I shake my head then turn back to the counter. Grabbing the bags of shopping, I make for the door, taking Joe’s hand. I’ve drawn too much attention to myself. I need to leave. Now.

  ‘You here for long?’ calls the man.

  I don’t reply. Instead I start to run. I hold my breath and don’t dare release it until I’ve reached the safety of the car.

  4

  Soldier

  Rowan Isle House, January 2003

  A New Year and whole new start for me. Forget Christmas, I just had the best present anyone could have given me because today Sarge told me that I’m finally ready to embark on the ‘big’ mission. This is an important one because, if I pass, Sarge says I’ll advance to the next level and become Soldier Number 1.

  Sarge and I have been planning this mission for the last few months. Every day the two of us have gone up to the hills for what Sarge calls RECONNAISSANCE AND INTELLIGENCE GATHERING. We even worked on Christmas Day. I wasn’t too happy about that but Sarge soon put me right. ‘A day is what you fill it with, my girl,’ he said. ‘You have to be alert and vigilant no matter the day’s name. Never forget that.’

  I told him I understood. And I did. I’m eleven now. Old enough to not need presents and all that. Though I did feel a bit sad when I woke up on 25 December and saw there was no knitted sock at the end of my bed. For as long as I can remember Sarge has left that sock there on Christmas Eve and it’s always filled with the same things: a tangerine, six hazelnuts, a mince pie (baked by Sarge) and a pair of gloves to see me through winter. But since my birthday Sarge has changed. He treats me differently. He’s been listening to the news lots on his old portable radio. Sometimes at night when I’m lying in bed I can hear voices through the wall talking about someone called George W. Bush and the War on Terror. This George person seems very angry with terror and it seems to make Sarge angry too because he shouts at the radio whenever George is mentioned.

  Sarge says I’m old enough to be a proper soldier now, to find out about the evils of the world and fight back at them. The first step towards that is to listen carefully and concentrate on the skills Sarge is teaching me. ‘The game playing’s over,’ he said. ‘Now it’s time for the real battle to begin.’

  We’ve started by making my very own ghillie suit. This helps to disguise you from the enemy so that if they look your way they just see a mound of grass, not a person. Sarge has taught me how to make one using one of his old army boiler suits and some fishing net. Sewing the suit is quite tricky because the net is coarse and keeps slipping out of the needle but Sarge has made it fun by singing rude songs that he learned in the army. I can’t write down the words as they are very naughty but the way he sings them, with this silly pretend posh accent, makes me laugh so much I get the hiccups. This morning I got them so bad I almost messed up my stitching.

  Sarge stopped then and got me a glass of water. When he came back his face was all serious and he said that there was a reason why we were doing what we did, that there was still a battle to be won. He told me some more about his big war then. He said that if he did it again he wouldn’t be fighting the Iraqis. Instead he would take his gun and wave it in the face of George Bush and his ‘reetarde retard son’ and ask them to fight like soldiers. Sarge calls them criminals. He thinks they should be in jail and that it’s their fault that he shouts in the woods and that I have no mother. He looked away as he said that and changed the subject. Talk of the dead mother in the desert always makes him sad. I wish he would tell me more but he won’t. My whole life he’s told me exactly three bits of information about her.

  That he met her in the big war.

  That she came from a place called Baghdad.

  That she died in the desert.

  All the other stuff I know about her comes from my head, from the stories I told myself after seeing the photo of her. I found it one day a few years back when I was bored and wanted something to read. The library van hadn’t been because it was snowing out so I had a look through the books in Sarge’s room. One of the titles caught my eye because instead of words it was just squiggly shapes. Sarge told me later that this was Arabic, the language of my mother, and that the squiggly shapes were the title of an Arabic poem. I opened up the book to see if there were
any English words inside, and I saw that Sarge had written in the pages of the book, next to the squiggly poems. I felt a bit funny then because some of the words he’d written were sad and I thought it best if I didn’t read them so I closed the book, but when I did the photo fell out. There were three people in it, all sitting round a table: an old man with a crinkly face and a grey beard, a plump, smiley, middle-aged woman in a long red dress and, in the centre of the two, a young woman with dark hair. When I looked closer I felt all funny because even though this was an old photo and the people in it were wearing strange clothes, the woman in it looked like me, just a bit older. She had my thick black hair, my weird eyes that turn from black to yellow-green depending on the light and the same brown skin. I’d never seen anyone else who looked like me before. Sarge has fair hair and pale skin, the people from the village are all pale or pink, even the characters in the books I read are too. But it was more than that. The girl in the picture had my face.

  The photo was all glossy and it slipped through my hands. It fell to the floor face down and when I picked it up I saw there was writing on the back. In black ink someone had written:

  Our love

  Has no mind or logic

  Our love

  Walks on water.

  Like the picture of my mother, those words have been saved to my memory. They were the strangest, most beautiful words I’d ever read. The idea of love being something outside of a person, of having a mind of its own, was something I’d never imagined before. I sat for a bit reading the words over and over again and wondering who had written them, because it wasn’t Sarge’s handwriting. But then the door burst open and he came storming in and grabbed the photo from my hands.