B07B2VX1LR

by Imogen Clark

  I shrug dismissively, like this is just a fact of life – which of course it is – but I can see Mrs P shaking her head ever so slightly.

  ‘But he could see how determined I was so in the end he gave in and let me have the workshop here. To start with, I didn’t make enough money to afford the rent on a house of my own, let alone a studio, so it suited me. Then when he got ill my being here killed two birds with one stone. He’s never seen it as proper work, though. According to Dad, this . . .’ I sweep my arm around, taking in my workroom with its tables and bolts of fabric and pots of beads and spools of thread. ‘This is just a hobby that he finances.’

  ‘But surely you make enough to live on now?’ Mrs P asks, looking at the notice board where I keep snaps of all the brides that I have dressed, the pictures all layered on top of one another so that only tiny portions of some dresses can be seen.

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I could keep both of us very well on what I earn, but Dad either can’t or won’t believe that. Well . . .’ I rephrase. ‘He wouldn’t before. It’s different now, of course.’

  Mrs P nods.

  ‘I like to think that my mum would have been proud, though,’ I add. ‘I told you that she died, didn’t I? When I was two.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You did mention it. Such a tragedy to lose your mother so young. Do you remember her at all?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, nothing. I know her name was Anne but that’s about it. There are hardly any pictures either. I suppose there just wasn’t any spare money for film back then. There’s a wedding photo and a couple of holiday snaps but that’s all.’

  I point to a picture of Mum and Dad together. It is a square Polaroid of the two of them sitting on a blue-checked picnic blanket, the colours overdeveloped and garish. Mum is wearing a dress with roses on it and a yellow and blue scarf ties her straw-coloured hair away from her face. She is beaming at whoever was taking the picture but her face is less than a centimetre across.

  ‘It says on the back that it was taken in Brighton in 1980. They look happy, don’t they? I wasn’t born in Yorkshire,’ I continue. ‘We used to live in London, but after Mum died Dad moved us away. I think it was too difficult for him to stay where we were. And we had no family to speak of. I suppose there was nothing keeping us down there so Dad got a job in Leeds and we moved here. A fresh start for the three of us. Like I say, I don’t remember any of it. As far as I’m concerned my life has always been here.’

  Mrs P doesn’t say anything. She just sits and listens, twisting the calico of the mock-up dress though her fingers.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, suddenly feeling slightly awkward, ‘I hope she would have been proud of me. Mum, I mean.’

  ‘I’m sure she would,’ says Mrs P. ‘What kind of a mother wouldn’t be proud of her daughter?’

  Then she stands up, smoothing the skirt of her blue uniform down with her palms.

  ‘Now,’ she says, readopting her usual, efficient tone of voice, ‘I must be getting on,’ and she leaves my workroom with tiny, quick strides, pulling the door shut behind her.

  Something glints on the floor and I see yet another pearl. I know that I will be treading on the ones I’ve missed for weeks. I pick it up and pop it back into the box.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Michael, 1992

  It’s raining. It’s been raining for days, not the dank mizzle that drifts down from the moor but water in biblical quantities. It hammers on the windows, demanding to be let in. It engulfs gutters and bounces off the surfaces of the newly formed lakes on the lawn. It’s what they call ‘raining cats and dogs’, Michael knows, except that it isn’t and he is scornful of the inaccurate and frankly ridiculous expression.

  He and Cara are caged indoors and their resources are running low. As with everything in the house, there are rules attached to where they can play. Michael’s room sits directly over the lounge and so if they jump around in there, drop anything or even talk too loudly, threats of punishment from their father waft up the stairs. Cara’s room is better positioned but too small to swing a cat in and so only any use for Top Trumps or reading. The attic, which would place an entire floor between them and their father, would seem like the ideal space. However, playing there or even on the wooden stairs leading up to the two rooms is banned. Michael once suggested that they clear a little bit of space to make a den but their father shook his head.

  ‘I don’t want you two poking around up there,’ he said. He was smiling but there was just enough menace in his voice to let them know that he was serious. ‘There are too many things for little fingers to get caught in.’

  ‘What kind of things, Daddy?’ Cara asked.

  ‘Things that you shouldn’t be messing with,’ he said, leaving so much to their imaginations that the attic became like a siren, luring them in to crash on the rocks.

  Today Cara looks at Michael, her hazel eyes wide with hope and expectation that he will make her day better.

  ‘What shall we do?’ she asks him.

  ‘Let’s play the French Resistance.’ Cara looks unconvinced but is nodding loyally and waiting for more details. ‘We can be Resistance workers,’ he continues, warming to his theme, ‘and we can try to get our soldiers over the enemy lines and back home.’

  ‘Is it very complicated?’ asks Cara, her small mouth taking its time over forming the long word. ‘Will I have to be the prisoner again?’ She narrows her eyes. She may be young but she’s not stupid.

  ‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘And the attic can be the enemy territory.’

  ‘But Daddy says we’re not allowed to go in the attic,’ Cara says, shaking her head earnestly.

  ‘I bet there’s nothing up there. He just doesn’t want us making a mess. We won’t touch anything. We’ll just rescue the men and get out. Dad’ll never know anyway; he’s too busy watching the golf.’

  Cara clearly isn’t convinced and screws up her little nose. ‘I don’t think Daddy will like that game,’ she says.

  ‘Tough.’

  They creep towards the attic steps, casting wary glances up and down the corridor for the enemy. Michael feels that he, as mission commander and the oldest, should go first. He picks his way up the forbidden wooden staircase gingerly, avoiding the third step and carefully testing the others for creaks before putting his full weight on them.

  Cara takes a deep breath and then sets off, mimicking Michael’s careful tread. When she reaches the second-from-top step, the heavy torch that Michael has attached to her mission belt with his school tie somehow works its way loose and drops from her waist. It lands on the wooden step with a clatter. Panicked, Cara reaches out to try and break its fall but it slips from her small fingers and thuds down the remaining steps, each bang louder than the last. There is nothing to do but stand and watch it go.

  The torch has still not come to rest when they hear the lounge door open. Cara throws a horrified look at Michael, her eyes wide and the colour draining from her cheeks fast. Michael’s brain freezes with panic. He is rooted to the spot. They should run. They should run as fast as they can to Michael’s room or the bathroom and come up with some story as to how the torch ending up clattering so loudly. They should do something but instead they just stand there, frozen, as they hear their father’s heavy footsteps approaching.

  ‘What on earth is going on up there?’ he shouts, long before he makes it up the first flight of stairs. And then, when he realises where they are, he adds, ‘I do hope you’re not in that attic because if you are, so help me God, I’ll tan your hides.’

  Michael is shaken from his terror first.

  ‘We’re not, Dad,’ he says, trying to make his voice even and calm. ‘We were just playing here on the stairs. We didn’t go in, did we, Ca?’

  ‘No, Daddy.’ Cara backs him up, shaking her head as hard as she can. ‘I dropped the torch and it fell and made all that noise but we haven’t done anything wrong, Daddy. Honest.’ She looks at their father, opening her eyes as wide as she possibly
can to show how innocent they truly are, but this seems to make him even angrier.

  ‘Get away from there!’ he hisses, his voice sharp with an anger that Michael has never heard before. ‘How many times have I told you not to go in the attic? It’s dangerous and you must not . . .’ Their father reaches out a huge hand and slaps Cara hard across the thighs. The blow takes her legs out from under her and she has to grab at the banister to stop herself following the torch down the stairs. ‘You . . . must . . . not . . .’ he repeats, each word separated from the others, the consonants spat out, ‘go . . . in . . . there. Ever. Now get down and go to your rooms. There will be no supper tonight. You can think about your disobedience when you get hungry.’

  Cara makes her way down the stairs. She keeps her head down but Michael knows that she’s fighting to hold back the tears. Despite the obvious danger, she rubs at her thigh as she walks, determined to show how much it hurts. With each step she takes, Michael feels anger building inside him. He follows his little sister down, his shoulders tensed and his arms ready to lift in self-defence in case he needs to shield himself against a blow.

  ‘I’m sorry, Daddy,’ Cara says again, more warily this time, as she passes their father and heads towards her bedroom.

  Michael stops three steps from the bottom. He is at his father’s eye level but he pulls back so that he is just out of easy reach. He takes a deep breath and stands as tall as he can. ‘You shouldn’t hit us,’ he says. He tries to sound calm but there is a tiny catch in his voice. He hopes his father won’t hear it. ‘It’s against the law. They told us at school. And Mummy wouldn’t like it.’

  His father looks as if he might explode. His eyes narrow and he thrusts his lower jaw forward at Michael. ‘I will do what I flaming well like in my own house,’ he shouts. ‘And you know your mother is dead. She doesn’t care about you. Now, get to your bedrooms and don’t come out until I tell you.’

  Michael has no intention of moving. He searches out his father’s eyes and then holds their stare with his. He can feel the insolence radiating out of him but he doesn’t care. His father reaches out, grabs his arm and yanks him down the stairs. Michael loses his footing, first his ankle and then his leg crumpling beneath him, and lands in a heap at the bottom. Cara, from her safe vantage point down the landing, gasps and Michael immediately worries that this will draw their father’s attention back to her. He stands up slowly. His right ankle is screaming out at him but he ignores it. He lifts his head and looks at his father, channelling his venom straight into his soul. He thinks for a moment that he will be hit again for his cheek, his father’s arm beginning to lift but then dropping back down. Michael can see the muscles working as his father flexes his fist.

  ‘Go to your rooms,’ he says, anger resonating with every word.

  Then he turns and stamps back down the stairs, slamming the lounge door behind him.

  As soon as he is gone, Cara runs straight to Michael and throws her arms around him but he cannot hug her back. His anger seems to have turned his body to stone. He stands bolt upright and stiff as her reedy arms wrap themselves around his waist. He can feel her heart beating hard in her chest.

  ‘I. Hate. Him,’ he mutters. ‘As soon as I can, I’m leaving this house and going as far away as possible.’

  The next day, their father went up to the attic with his toolkit and fitted a padlock to the door. Michael and Cara didn’t go up there again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Cara, 2017

  It’s not like I haven’t been up to the attic since I was a girl and it was banned. The padlocks are long gone. I went up with Dad’s ancient toolkit and removed them when I was pretty sure he would no longer remember why they were there in the first place. He never comes this high anymore. It is as if this part of the house and its contents have been entirely erased from his memory. I rarely make the climb either. Even though I’m an adult now and this is my house, to all intents and purposes, something about being up here makes me feel anxious. It’s like Dad’s warnings are still hanging in the musty air. It’s silly. I know now that Dad just didn’t want us messing with his stuff but I sometimes wonder if he ever realised just how much damage he did to his relationship with Michael by laying it on so thick. In any case, I have never had any desire to mess with Dad’s stuff. It’s just old boxes filled with old things, after all.

  Anyway, something that I heard on the radio has sent me up here now. The programme said that it can be helpful for people with Alzheimer’s to have familiar objects to touch. I fear that Dad might be a bit beyond this stage but there’s no harm in trying and it might give me new things to talk to him about. So, I venture up for a snoop around his stuff in search of memorable treasure.

  It’s the heat up there that always hits me first. The air is dry and warm, claustrophobic somehow, even when it’s cold in the rest of the house. The room at the front is almost completely empty but for the cobwebs and dust motes dancing in the spiked light. When I first discovered it, I was so angry with Dad. All this space! What would it have hurt to let Michael and me play here? Surely he could just have locked the room that housed the things ‘that little fingers might get caught in’.

  While the first room is empty, the second is filled to the rafters with the detritus of almost an entire life. It’s like the forgotten storeroom of a long-defunct business. There are shelves along two walls filled with cardboard storage boxes, each with a neat, white label facing outwards and describing its contents. My eyes settle on a couple – ‘Slides from Holiday in Arran Aug 1993’, ‘Spare Belt Buckles’. How could anyone have spare belt buckles and why did it justify a whole labelled box in a long-forgotten attic?

  The answer to this is easy. Dad. There was nothing in his life that he didn’t have full control of. That’s why the Alzheimer’s is so cruel. It’s robbed him of his entire raison d’être. This space represents the last vestiges of his power. Were it not for these neatly labelled boxes, it would be easy to think that he’s just an elderly man who has fallen foul of a common affliction of old age. It is only when you see this room that you get some idea of the man that he once was.

  As I stare at the regimented boxes, I wonder, yet again, if there might be some of Mum’s things up here too, although I know the answer to that. When I was small, I was constantly asking. I longed for photos of us as a family or an old handbag that might have further treasures inside. Each time I asked, Dad became more angry than the time before so that it got so I had to steel myself before I brought it up. Michael would shake his head in silent warning but it didn’t stop me asking. Dad’s answer never wavered, though. He always said there was nothing and I never found anything of Mum’s anywhere in the house.

  I peer at more of the labels – ‘Tax Returns 1990–99’, ‘Instruction Manuals (Electrical)’. I cannot see how far the room goes back because of the towering stacks of boxes, which create a huge, beige wall. I move a few until there is a gap that I can hop over. Back here the boxes are less regimented, and instead of purpose-bought office storage, Dad seems to have used whatever he could get his hands on. Many of them are shoe boxes, some of them tiny. I suppose they must have held my little shoes originally. I run my fingers down them, smiling at the sketches of the shoes once contained inside. They’re all so familiar even though it’s more than twenty years since I wore them. Then I spot a box in the corner. It is not like the others. It is metal for a start: a dull, khaki grey, like a large cash box. There is no white label either. A battered luggage tag hangs from one of the handles. It simply says ‘A’.

  I feel my heart beat a little faster. ‘A’. Anne? Mum.

  There’s barely room to turn round in this darkest corner, let alone to squat down to investigate the box properly. I have to rearrange some others to give myself space to manoeuvre. I am aware of my breath coming in quick, shallow snatches and I tell myself to calm down. This box could contain anything and might be nothing to do with Mum.

  When I have made a big enough space, I kneel on the
floor next to the box. Dust has settled over the lid so thickly that I could write my name in it. Clearly no one has touched it for quite a while. Then I see that it has a lock and my heart sinks. Am I going to have to search for the key in all these boxes? I am about to take it downstairs to see if I can prise it open somehow, but when I go to pick up the box by the handle the lid just opens without any resistance. I’m holding my breath and I take a couple of slow gulps of air before I allow myself to look inside.

  Unlike everything else around me, there is no tidy order to the contents of the box. It is half-full but no attempt has been made to stack things neatly. Each item has been thrown in carelessly without thought as to where it might land. It looks like dozens of photographs, but when I look more closely I realise that they are postcards and I feel deflated. This can’t be a box of my mum’s things after all.

  I pull one of the postcards out at random. On the front is a picture of the Post Office Tower in London. I can tell from the quality of the image that it’s old. I turn it over and see that it is addressed to me and Michael at this address. Again, my heart sinks a little. Mum died before we moved here so it can’t be from her. My eyes flick to the short message, which is written in a stilted, jerky script.

  My darling babies. I love you more than you will ever know. Please forgive me.

  That is all. The card isn’t signed and the only other clue is the postmark. Thoughts race round my head so fast that I hardly have a chance to catch one before the next one has set off. I squint at the postmark. It is smudged as they usually are but I can just make out part of the date – March 1992. That would make me nearly eight when this was posted, so it can’t be from Mum, but who else would write us a card like this?