They went to see the bank who no longer agreed with Gary that capital should be liquid. The thinking in the 1990s was that capital should be secure. They defaulted on the timeshare deal and lost all the money they had put in. Some of the goods they had purchased on loan agreements they could send back. But the expensive curtains and carpets, the luxury kitchen and the studio bathroom were fitted to the house, and could not be reclaimed or returned.
‘We’ll sell the house,’ Gary decided. ‘Recoup.’
But it was not easy to sell. Large houses were coming on the market almost every day. The price they had paid in the booming eighties had been a triumph – a steal. But they had poured money into the improvements and décor. Now people no longer wanted cold empty rooms, they wanted the country look. Potential buyers saw the elegant laboratory-like kitchen and wanted stencilled wood, and Agas. They had to put the house on the market for less than it had cost them, for less than it was worth. In any case they would see none of the money. It would go straight to the mortgage companies and then to the loan companies and to the bank. Gary had seen whole corporations go bankrupt, wiped off the flickering computer screen. He had never thought that his life and his house, and perhaps even his marriage, could be erased by a blinking green cursor into total blackness.
It was then, in their long evenings of desperate calculations and arguments and bitter regrets, that Gary thought of the ghost. He had read an article about a family who had suffered from a poltergeist, which threw chairs, smashed mirrors, broke glasses. One of the glossy magazines had paid them £50,000 for their story with pictures. ‘It would pull us clear,’ Gary said. ‘Get us liquid.’
Stella knew how to contact newspapers, how to set up a story, who would buy. Gary set himself to fabricating evidence of a murder so foul that it would give rise to a gruesome – and therefore profitable – haunting.
‘Children,’ he said. ‘It has to be children.’
Stella said nothing. She was working on the copy for an advertisement. She glanced up at him and did not try to hide the irritation in her face. ‘Just do it,’ she said. ‘If you’re so sure. And I can sell the story. But don’t keep interrupting me. This has to be in by tomorrow.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. He was humble these days. He felt he owed her, just as he owed the bank, and the building society, and the loan companies, and the timeshare company. He owed them all.
He went to the library to research and then he struck lucky. There had been a murder, a particularly nasty murder, of three small children in a house in their street, way back in 1923. The local newspaper did not give the number of the house and Gary was certain that no-one would remember or, if they did, by then the story would be published and the cheque banked.
He copied down the details. The man, shell-shocked from the trenches, not knowing where he was, had come home from the pub, drunk and angry. The children had been locked in an upstairs room. He had staggered up the stairs and kicked in the door. He had no weapon, he had used his hands, his boots, and in the end his teeth. Even Gary, who was not a squeamish man, battled with nausea as he copied the details into his little notebook. They had called the man the Savage of Steel Crescent, an animal, a monster.
He brought the story home and Stella read it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can sell this.’
Gary started work on the house. He treated the walls of the spare bedroom so that stains like blood seemed to be seeping through the subtle cream paper. Together they opened a couple of air vents, hidden in the cupboard, so the room was several degrees colder than the rest of the house. They practised their accounts of hearing the footsteps on the stairs, the cries for help. Stella was particularly good in her description of the creak on the floorboards of a heavy foot, the noise of the man stumbling, and then the heavy crash as he broke into the bedroom where the children were crying in fear.
They frightened themselves thoroughly with a complete dress rehearsal. ‘It’s perfect,’ Gary said. ‘Tomorrow you ring the papers. It’s irresistible.’
They went to bed but Stella could not sleep. She felt afraid, her account of the murders had been too vivid, her heart still thudded as she thought of what she had described, so certainly, with such conviction. ‘I suppose it is all right to do,’ she said. ‘It is lying.’
Gary had the answer. ‘It’s conjuring,’ he said. ‘Like stage magic, like Paul Daniels. Now you see it, now you don’t. Nobody asks: is it true?’
‘No,’ she said. But that night she dreamed that she heard a footstep and the strange monstrous snuffle of the man coming up the stairs, dead drunk on his hands and knees, inspired by a savage madness.
‘You’ll do it better if you’re really scared,’ Gary said in the morning. He was pale himself, with excitement. ‘Call the newsdesks.’
They auctioned the story: there were three papers involved at the end, and the last one took the bid up to £80,000. That night Gary bought a bottle of champagne, they had almost forgotten the taste. Next day he signed the sale contract on the house with the buyer. They would clear their debts. They might even show a profit of a couple of thousand pounds. They could rent a little flat, take their furniture, and start again. They were young, no slump lasts forever, Gary would get work, they would rebuild their lives.
The reporter and the photographer came together, half an hour before they were due. Stella and Gary, wise in such methods, had been ready for the previous hour. They showed the room with the little bloodstained handprints on the wall, at the pitiful low level. They showed the layer upon layer of wallpaper that they had put on to cover the stains, and to cover them again. The reporter shivered at the icy chill of the room. ‘This is really spooky,’ she said.
But the strongest moment was when Stella, in the kitchen, her eyes wide with real fear, said that she heard the man coming upstairs on his hands and knees, sniffing like a dog, up to the bedroom door, and sniff, sniff, sniff on the threshold, and then his roar as he flung himself up and against it.
‘I hear the children cry out – and then I hear a dreadful thing …’
‘What?’
Stella went pale. ‘I hear the murder,’ she said. ‘I hear a crack, a bone breaking, I hear a little scream, a helpless scream, and then I hear an awful sound … an awful sound …’
She broke off, she could hardly breathe.
‘What sound?’ the reporter pressed her. Gary covered Stella’s hand with his own and felt that she was icy cold.
‘Steady on …’ he said softly.
‘I hear him biting,’ she said. ‘Biting like a dog. A terrible grunt and snap and gobbling sound.’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I know it’s him,’ she whispered. ‘Biting into the baby’s throat, and chest, and little stomach.’
They took photographs: of the bedroom, of the stairs, of Gary and Stella arm-in-arm at the front door. Stella refused to go into the room itself – a nice touch, Gary thought – but then he saw her white face and thought that she was near to convincing herself. The reporter had brought the cheque. As soon as she were gone he banked it and paid for a rush transfer. They had £80,000 in their account at the close of business, they were in the clear.
When he got home Stella was having a bath, the door firmly locked. He glanced into the haunted bedroom. In the twilight the little handprints seemed darker, and there seemed more of them. He shook his head. He was spooked by the story, by Stella’s convincing acting, by the horror of the whole fiction.
He tapped on the bathroom door, and heard her little scream of fright at the sudden noise, quickly repressed. ‘Come down for a drink!’ he called.
She did not come down. He sat in the kitchen and drank a couple of glasses of brandy. When he went up to bed she was pretending to be asleep and would not speak to him. Gary climbed into bed beside her, stubbornly clinging to his sense of relief that they had pulled a clever scam, a brilliant sting. Their conjuring trick, their once-in-a-lifetime conjuring trick, had saved them.
He fell asleep. Stella turned on her back,
and lay wakeful in the half darkness of the room. And then she heard him. She heard the front door quietly click open and the stumble as his foot found the first stair. She heard the treads creak, one slow creak after another, as he walked up, and then he fell to his hands and knees and crawled the last steps. She heard him at the spare bedroom door, and the dreadful snuffle snuffle, like a dog, like an ogre. But instead of going in to the empty room, instead of being fooled by the red paint and the trickery, there was a terrifying silence, a pause. And she sensed him, she could almost see him swinging his head from side to side, trying to catch a scent, to discover where he should go. As she lay frozen, trying not to move, holding her breath, she knew he was trying to catch her scent, listening for her. Then she heard a little grunt, of satisfaction, of recognition, and she heard the slow beast’s crawl as he came remorselessly towards her door.
And she remembered then, as she should have remembered before, that there is another sense of the word conjuring as well as trickery and pretend magic. To conjure means to summons, to invoke, to call up.
They had conjured him.
The Wave Machine
He hated the phone ringing in the early hours of the morning. It jerked him from sleep, and he liked his sleep. His first thought was that Tom, his brother, was worse. Tom had been ill all winter, one of those lingering mystery illnesses. He knew he should have cared more; Tom was his only brother. But he knew himself to be a selfish man: a bachelor, an artist. He did not care for anyone very much.
‘Hello?’ He could hear the caution in his own voice.
‘It’s Veronica,’ she said sharply. ‘I am sorry to wake you so early.’ She didn’t sound in the least sorry, he thought. She sounded demanding. ‘It’s an emergency.’
He stifled his groan and sat up in bed, rubbing his face with his hand, erasing the hangover, feeling the enjoyable rasp of stubble. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s Tom,’ she said, as he had known she would. ‘They want to start a programme of allergy tests. I have to take him in every day for the next two months.’
‘Oh.’ He twitched back the curtain by his bed. Outside a perfect peach and pearl sky was reflected into a gently breathing sea.
‘I need help,’ she said, then specified: ‘I need your help.’
He said nothing, hoping that his silence was discouraging.
‘I can’t cope with Katie,’ she said. ‘It’s an hour’s drive to the hospital, and then an hour’s drive home again, every morning and every evening. She can’t do four hours in the car every day.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Shouldn’t she be at school?’
‘She is only just four,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t start until September, and already she’s dreading it.’
‘Nursery?’
‘Summer holidays.’
‘Isn’t there some kind of crèche?’
‘Not one that stays open till nine o’clock at night,’ she said.
He let the silence stretch. He knew that having a child at all had been Tom’s idea. Veronica had never been more than a reluctant mother.
‘It’s too bad if it’s not convenient,’ she said brutally. ‘I can’t cope. You’ll have to have her. It won’t be for long. Just till she starts school in September.’
He thought of the long sun-warmed days that had spread before him. He had planned to start a new sculpture, something abstract and mechanical-looking, a wicked stone robot-thing. He did not want a little girl in his house, which was a spare clear environment. He did not want a little girl who would need food that he did not like, such as fish fingers and perhaps beefburgers. He emphatically did not want a little girl curtailing his visits to the local pub and chaperoning him when his lover – a fashion journalist – arrived unexpectedly, demanding an exotic welcome.
‘Surely there must be agencies?’ he asked vaguely, deliberately not knowing what he was suggesting.
‘You want me to put her into care?’
‘Oh, all right,’ he said irritably. ‘I’ll have her. But you’ll have to send me instructions. I won’t have a clue.’
‘There’s nothing to do,’ she assured him. ‘Katie’s no trouble.’
He did not believe her, until they arrived and the little girl carried her own small suitcase up the stairs. They left her to look around her room and the pretty view over the sea. As he poured Veronica a gin and tonic he heard little footsteps overhead.
‘What’s she doing?’ he asked nervously, like a new owner with a strange pet.
‘Unpacking I should think, she’s madly tidy,’ Veronica said. ‘God knows where she gets it from.’ She finished her drink and slapped down her glass. ‘Must go.’
‘Already?’
She nodded. ‘I have to take Tom in to the clinic this evening. He sent his love.’
‘Will she be upset when you leave?’
Veronica shook her head. ‘She’s a calm little thing. You’ll see. Any problem, ring me up. I’ll come down at the weekend if I can.’
He did not want her to go, but he had no excuse to keep her. She called up the stairs to the little girl, and then kissed her in a businesslike fashion. ‘Your Uncle Michael will look after you,’ she said. ‘Ask him for whatever you need.’
Michael looked at the small serious face between the jaunty bunches of brown hair and wondered what outrageous demands she might invent. She looked back with large trusting brown eyes and smiled a gap-toothed smile. ‘I need to go to the sea,’ she said.
‘After lunch,’ he said. ‘We’ll go after lunch.’
They waved goodbye to Veronica and then the little girl took his hand as they walked through the house to the kitchen.
‘I’m going to have soup and a bread roll,’ he said. ‘Do you want fish fingers?’
‘I’ll be like you,’ she decided.
‘I usually read at lunch,’ he said, defending his bachelor habits. ‘I read the newspaper.’
‘Oh, so do I,’ she said, and went to her room and fetched a brightly coloured comic. They sat, rather solemnly, side by side spooning soup from matching bowls, reading their papers.
‘We don’t have a nice nap after lunch,’ she asserted when she had finished her soup.
‘Don’t we?’
‘Can we go to the sea?’
‘Oh, all right,’ he said. His cottage was at the top of a steep cliff path, delightful for visitors but wearisome for someone who lived there all the year round. In his first year he had trotted down to swim in the sea every sunny morning. In his second year he remembered the steep climb back up to his house and went less frequently. This summer, his third in the little house, he had not been down to the sea at all.
‘Do I have to wear my boots?’
‘I don’t know!’ he exclaimed.
‘No, I don’t,’ she said decidedly.
He thought longingly of the afternoon he would have had without her, there was horse-racing on the television and he could have sketched and looked at the screen over the top of his sketchbook. But she was determined to be out, and the sunshine was warm and welcoming.
The beach was a revelation.
They hardly walked at all. As soon as she arrived on the rounded stones at the foot of the cliff path she thumped down on her red-trousered bottom and examined them, one after the other.
‘Don’t you want to walk down to the sea?’ he asked, and encountered a glance which was so full of wonder that he felt humbled, as if in the presence of a miracle.
‘They’re all different!’ she said.
‘Yes.’ He was about to say ‘I know’, when he realised with rare honesty that he did not know. He had scrunched over the stones hundreds of times, cursing their sharpness when he was barefoot, but he had never properly looked at them.
She held up for him a rounded pebble almost scarlet in colour and beside it a sea-smoothed white flint with a dark slaty heart, just visible through an entrancing little keyhole. ‘Look!’ she said.
He could not resist her interest. ‘And here!’ he
said. He had found a pale speckled stone, oval-shaped.
‘An egg!’ she exclaimed.
‘Let’s put it in a nest,’ he suggested.
‘Oh yes!’
Together they amassed dark-coloured pebbles and formed them in a circle. Inside, they placed the first speckled stone and then hunted for others. In the end they found half a dozen and she arranged them very carefully, and then squatted solemnly on top of them. He could not think, at first, what she was doing.
‘Hatching,’ she said with dignity.
It seemed to him that she sat on her little nest for an extraordinarily long time. The heat went from the sun and an onshore breeze started up.
‘I’m getting cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
She rose up and started up the path willingly enough but after the first set of steps she was tired and wanted to rest. He had to urge her on the next set, and promise her all sorts of delights for tea to get her up the next set. They counted steps together for the final set and he reached the top with a sense of achievement.
He had planned an omelette for his tea and she agreed to share, but was reluctant to let him break the eggs. Feeling rather ridiculous he blew the eggs for her, with a pinprick in the shell at each end so that she had a complete box of empty egg shells. She took them up to her bath with her and floated them in the water.
‘Do I stay up very late here?’ she enquired.
‘No,’ he said decidedly. ‘You go to bed and stay in your room.’
‘But I look at my books in bed?’
‘All right,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But you stay in your room.’
Her lower lip trembled slightly. ‘Unless I am afraid of the dark,’ she suggested.
For a moment he was terrified that she would cry. ‘You are not afraid of the dark,’ he said firmly. ‘You can see in the dark because you’re an owl. You were an owl on the beach all afternoon and owls can see perfectly well in the dark.’
Bread and Chocolate Page 7
