Tom jiggled the hand holding his crotch, the urgent need to release the flow growing with every few yards they came closer to the pebbled forecourt and main doors.
Way over in the distance, Tom saw a lone scarecrow standing just to the side of a copse of trees. As the car swung to the right, Tom reached for the door handle and picked up his comic books. When he next looked out of the window the scarecrow had now shifted behind the trees, out of sight.
Minutes later he was upstairs in the toilet, whistling as the pent-up flow hit the stagnant water in the bowl.
“Remember to wash your hands, young man,” Trudy called from a kitchen that was—like all the rooms they had passed from the front door—piled high with boxes. She leaned against the sink and stared at the countryside. It looked so lonely.
Up on the first floor, Tom was just turning toward the basin when the floorboards outside the door creaked and there was a noise as though something heavy was being pulled along the corridor. The sound, albeit very soft, was growing slightly louder. So whatever was causing it was coming from the west side of the house toward the east … and right past the small room where Tom was standing.
“Ger?”
Tom could hear voices downstairs, but he was too far away to tell who they were.
A sniffing noise came from just outside the door now. It had to be Gerry.
“Gerry, you’re not funny, okay? You are so not funny.”
Sniff … sniff sniff … sniff …
“Gerry, could you quit it now?”
The noise stopped suddenly. Tom stood very quietly and watched the two glass panes in the toilet door. The corridor on the other side of the door was dark—the light had gone very quickly since they had arrived. How long ago was that? Five minutes? Seven?
“Gerry, would you quit fooling around?”
No answer.
“Please, Ger.” Still no reply. It could be that she was still pissed off at him, but no, that didn’t make sense; after all, she was—
What was that?
Tom turned his head so that he could hear better.
There it was again. He turned his head swiftly to face the door just in time to see the round handle move back into place.
Then something splashed in the toilet bowl. And that’s when the door handle started to move again.
Gerry struggled into the house and took the heap of coats straight to the cloakroom.
Charles dropped the car keys onto a thick wooden table that looked as though it had been there for centuries. He stepped into the kitchen, threw his arms around his wife and turned her around to face him.
“Happy new home, sweetie.”
Trudy wrapped her own arms around Charles and stood on her tiptoes to give him a kiss. “Happy new home to you, too, Charlie-mine.”
“You happy?”
“Happy? Oh, dear Charlie-mine, I am happier than you could imagine.”
He nodded.
“Don’t I look happy?”
“You looked a little sad.”
“When? When was that?”
“When I came in, just then.” He pointed at the window. “You were looking outside.”
“Oh, I was just thinking. You know … about the past.”
“But happy thoughts, yes?”
Trudy nodded and hugged him tight. “Happy thoughts, yes … But those memories …” She let her voice trail. “Where would we be without them, huh?”
“Ah, so nice to hear my parents saying nice things about their children,” Gerry said as she came in from the cloakroom.
“In your dreams, Gerry,” Charles said. It was more of a snort.
Gerry didn’t respond. “I’ll go get changed. My boxes in my room?”
“They should be, pooch.”
As Gerry started up the stairs, Trudy said to Charles, “That stuff in the car.”
“Stuff in the car?”
“The ‘House of Usher’ stuff. How’d you remember all that? I mean—you were quoting word for word. You were like … like an actor.”
“You know how much I love Poe’s ‘stuff,’ as you call it. I’ve only learned a few bits by heart—that, the opening part of ‘Fall of the House of Usher’—bits of ‘The Raven’ and ‘The Premature Burial’ … and ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ of course—”
She smiled and assumed a shocked expression. “Of course!”
Charles pulled his head back and studied her face. He reached out and ran a finger through the single tear running down her cheek.
“You’re tired,” he said.
“Yes, I am tired—fucking knackered, if the truth be known—” She chuckled and then her face grew serious again. “I was just thinking about—well, stuff, really. Things from our past, memories I just couldn’t do without now.”
“Like what? Give me an example.”
She took a deep breath and then let out the air through clenched lips. “Remember when Mo and I—Maureen, yes? From college?”
Charles nodded and looked around to make sure Gerry wasn’t standing on the staircase, listening.
“Remember when we came to see you at the bank, where you were working that summer?”
He groaned. “Yes, a nightmare.”
“And you were really sweet—I think that was the first time I thought that maybe we could make a go of it, you and me. You know?”
He didn’t say anything, just blinked and smiled.
“You bought us lunch—Mo was having a heavy time at home—and then afterward, she and I went into Austicks and bought you—”
“The Town and the City, Jack Kerouac’s first novel.”
“You remember!”
“Of course I remember. I didn’t know of the book at all, even though I’d read On the Road back when I was thirteen or fourteen. I still remember how it starts—it’s a remarkable book.” He held Trudy by the shoulders, arms locked straight, and looked at her face, saw the moisture forming in her eyes. “If anyone were to ask me if I could name the moment that I fell in love with you, that would be it. When you and Mo came back into the bank and gave me Kerouac’s The Town and the City in one of those striped paper bags that Austicks used to use.”
Trudy took hold of her husband’s face tightly between her hands. “See,” she said, “and now imagine if that memory were removed from … from your memory bank. Your storage device. Think how you’d feel.”
Charles took hold of his wife’s right hand and kissed it. “I can tell you how I’d feel right now.”
Trudy frowned.
“I wouldn’t give a damn. I know. I know. It sounds like sacrilege … but the fact is that if it were removed from my memory, then I wouldn’t remember the book nor would I remember the circumstances in which I received it.”
He looked at her. “You’re thinking about your mom now, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes. But I’m thinking about us as well. Our memories. When I was at university, we had a lecture one morning and we were asked to pick a sense you could do without.”
“Do without?”
“Yeah … like, if we were to have a choice—I know it sounds crazy, but if someone said to you, ‘Okay, you can keep only one of your senses—your sense of smell, your sense of taste, your hearing or your eyesight—which—’”
“Kind of like a Sophie’s Choice of the senses.”
Trudy nodded. “Trudy’s choice.”
Charles gave her a kiss on the cheek but, for a few seconds, Trudy straightened away from him, thinking he was being patronizing. He pulled back and nodded.
“And I was having a real hard time thinking about whether to get rid of my hearing—and not being able to listen to Carole King’s Tapestry ever again—or ditch my eyesight, which would mean I wouldn’t be able to see your face ever again.” She swiped hair back from her forehead and shifted her weight to her right foot.
“And suddenly, Jeremy something or other—I forget, but we all called him Jem … Roberts! It was Jem Roberts!—he waves his hand and asks if the lectu
rer was including memory.
“And the lecturer waits a minute and then he says—a real smartass, this guy was—‘That’s not a sense, it’s a function.’”
“What? That’s bullshit.”
Trudy nodded vehemently. “Yes, total bullshit.”
Then she paused.
Charles asked, “So what happened?”
Trudy shrugged. “Nothing else happened—or I just don’t recall what happened. But he had made the point. Jem Roberts, yeah …” Trudy gazed along the darkened hallway that led to the main drawing room. She gave a weak smile.
“And from then on, I’ve dreaded losing my memory of you or the places I’ve been. Because, you see, I could lose my eyes and my ears, my smell and my taste buds—it would be traumatic and devastating, yes, particularly when it comes to bacon sandwiches—but in my memories … like right now”—and she closed her eyes—“I’m thinking of your face and I can see it. I’m thinking about Carole singing ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ and I can hear it. You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.”
“And, yes, dammit, when I try, I can smell bacon sandwiches. I mean, I know I can’t, but I have this memory locked away and I can … I can just call it up.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”
“And taste?”
“Taste would be Indian food. Doing without that would be agony. But I believe I can experience at least some of how it tastes simply by accessing the memories I’ve got stored of all the fantastic meals I’ve eaten.” She reached out and rubbed his bare forearm. “Most of them with you, dear Charlie-mine.”
The silence following intruded the way silences sometimes can and it was Charles who decided that perhaps it should be he who broke the spell.
“Well, sweetie … there but for the grace of God and all that.”
“Mommy doesn’t remember one thing to another in the same day … sometimes in the same sentence.”
“But she’s happy.”
“Like a pet,” Trudy said and there was a sharpness to her tone. “Like a dog that doesn’t know it’s going to die. Doesn’t know its doggy friend has died.”
“Your dad?”
“Yes, Dad. She doesn’t even know his name.”
“And that’s fine, sweetie. She’s fine. She doesn’t know about what she’s lost. It’s hard for you to grasp, I know.
“Emily Dickinson said that ‘parting is all we know of Heaven and all we need of Hell.’”
“Boy, she surely had that right, didn’t she?”
Tom went to the sink and ran the hot tap—but there wasn’t any hot water. All the time, he kept his eyes on the door handle.
Footsteps sounded along the hallway, getting louder. Before he could even think of saying anything, the handle turned and his sister walked in.
“Jesus Christ, Tommy,” she said. “Lock the door next time.”
“Why didn’t you answer me,” he asked her, looking around for something to dry his hands on, “instead of messing with the doorknob?”
“I wasn’t messing with the doorknob. I just came—”
“Have you got a towel?”
“Do I look like I have a towel?”
“Could you get me one?”
“Get it yourself.”
Tom looked at the window, but there were no curtains.
“Hey, can you leave the bathroom, please? I need to go.”
Tom sidled out and Gerry closed the door.
“Well, somebody was outside the door,” he said. “Sniffing.” He crossed the corridor and ran his hands across the uneven wall. “I thought it was you.”
The toilet flushed, the tap ran and Gerry opened the door, shaking the water off her hands.
“Hey, this wall … there’s a piece of board across it.”
“Later.” She strode past Tom. “I think we’re going out to eat.”
Tom clapped. “Yay, I’m starving.”
“Are we going out to eat?” Tom asked as he bounded into the kitchen.
“There was a Pizza Express in town,” Charles said. “How about that? Pizza and pasta—sound good?”
“Sounds good to me, Mister Poe,” Trudy said as she turned right around and marched for the door.
Tom frowned. Mister Poe? He shrugged and followed with a skip. Adults were strange creatures, and parents the strangest of all.
As Charles retrieved his keys, Gerry called out, “Hey, wait for me.”
Charles put his arm around his daughter and pulled her close.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Town.”
“To eat?”
He nodded. “Pizza. And pasta,” he added as he pulled the door closed, rattling it to make sure it was locked.
A minute later the Jaguar roared to life, and soon the noise of it had faded away, leaving only the sound of the wind in the trees.
Inside, the house got to work.
I: A Little Cupboard
Just before Gerry called out, a loud crash sounded from outside. Trudy thought someone had broken something.
It was their second day at Grainger Hall, their new house—well, not new in age terms but new to them. So here they were, out on the coast of the North Sea after twenty-five years as landlubbers in York and a four-month spell in Manchester. It had been a full day, and here it was getting toward dusk and still so much left to do.
Gerry had announced her discovery—“There’s a little secret cupboard in here!”—although her words were almost drowned out by the sound of the rain lashing against the windows of the new house. “Come see!”
Tom broke off from unraveling a confusion of aerial, telephone and cable leads, dropping the lot noisily to the dusty bare boards and setting off for his sister’s room at a gallop. Tom went everywhere at a gallop. Even when he had broken his ankle swinging into a backflip from the basketball hoop attached to the garage roof at the old house back in Harrogate, the eleven-year-old had continued to propel himself and his plastered leg across house floor or paved pathway with something approaching unnatural speed. “He’s got a pain threshold that will work against him one of these days,” was how Charles always evaluated his son’s “ability.”
“Let’s see!” Tom yelled as he skidded to a halt beside his sister.
“Thomas, just calm down,” Trudy called from downstairs. She had been trying to arrange a visit from the local odd-job man suggested by the estate agent. Essie was a big woman—she tipped the scales at more than twenty stone—and boasted a formidable gap-toothed overbite with a space so wide she could surely have been able to suck in sausages like another person could clear a plate of spaghetti.
Trudy listened to the ringtone in the town about five miles away and was about to give up when a voice snapped, “Yes?”
She was caught unprepared by the rudeness on the other end of the phone as she struggled to gather her thoughts. “Is that Mr. Blamire?”
“Do I sound like a ‘mister’ to you?” the voice—now clearly that of a female—said, and then chuckled. “I’m Charity Blamire. You want Carol.”
“Don’t pull on it,” Trudy heard her daughter shout, and just for a second she wanted to giggle.
“Carol?” she said.
“Yeah, my husband’s name is Carol.” The laugh that followed was without any humor. “Like the song, you know?”
“The song?”
“God, it’s tight,” she heard Tom say, sounding like it was through clenched teeth.
“Country music feller? Singing about a boy called Sue?”
“Ah,” Trudy said as she edged into the hallway to hear better what was going on, “Johnny Cash.”
In the silence that followed that, Trudy sensed the woman shaking her head and staring at the phone with a mix of pity and frustration. But all the woman had to say was “Whatever,” and then “He’s not here; he’s away on—”
“When will he be back?”
Tom emerged from one of the upstairs rooms and took the stairs two at a time.
&nb
sp; “No matter,” Trudy said, glaring at her son to keep the noise down. “I’ll call back later.” She killed the call and took a deep breath before holding a hand up in front of her son. “Whoa, slow down there, hoss.”
“There’s nothing to see,” Tom explained, ignoring his mother’s frown. “I stood on my tiptoes and leaned nearly all the way in but—”
“All the way in where? Nothing to see where?”
He turned around and started back up the stairs. “It’s a cupboard. In the wall,” he added, so excited that he had notched down his voice to almost a whisper.
When Trudy stepped into the bedroom—was this Geraldine’s or was it Tommy’s? She couldn’t remember—Tom was already standing at the wall and trying desperately to clamber into a large cupboard about five feet from the ground.
“Give me a leg up, Ger,” Tom said as he scrabbled at the wall, trying to get a foothold so he could pull himself up.
“There’s nothing in there.”
“Just let me have another look!”
Gerry sighed and hoisted her brother up so that he could rest his elbows and forearms inside the cupboard on a narrow lip of wood.
“It’s still empty,” he said after just a few seconds, his voice back to its usual level.
“I did tell you.”
He sniffed loudly and pulled a face. Turning to Gerry he said, “Smells like you’ve farted.”
Gerry thumped him in the side, causing Tom to move his right arm. He slid back down the wall into a crumpled heap below the opening.
“I think we’ll have less of that, thank you, both of you,” Trudy said. She stepped across the room and studied the opening before running her hands along the edges of the square aperture.
“It’s Tom,” Gerry explained, nodding at the heap of eleven-year-old nursing his side.
“She does do farts,” Tom countered.
“I did not fart!”
“But you do do them. Don’t you?” He turned to Trudy and whined, “Make her answer, Mum.”
“Let’s have less about farting and more about trying to sort stuff out. Your father will be home in—” She broke off and pulled back from the cupboard, gagging. She waved a hand in front of her nose and pulled a face. “My, it does whiff a bit in there.” She glanced across at her daughter and raised one eyebrow questioningly.
Fearie Tales Page 33
