She toyed with the idea of going straight upstairs, but she knew it was inadvisable. Her parents would know something was wrong regardless, so she might as well get the worst of it over with.
She found them in the garden, digging up the flowerbeds. Her mother was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her long hair swept back from her forehead and fastened in a red scarf Connie had never seen before. She was kneeling in the dirt, her hands plunged into the earth, and Connie’s first thought was that she looked happier than she had in months. She wasn’t smiling exactly, but there was a lightness to her expression which reminded Connie of earlier times. Of Life Before Billy.
Her father was on the other side of the lawn, wielding a spade, shovelling wood and weeds into a pile for a bonfire. He was the first to notice Connie, and he lifted his hand in a wave as she stepped out on to the patio. ‘Hey, stranger. What’s going on?’
‘I was just about to ask you the same thing,’ she replied, smiling faintly. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Oh, nothing major. Just a general tidy-up that’s long overdue.’ He lay the spade down on the grass and walked over to give her a hug. ‘How was your day?’
She shrugged. ‘Day-like. Are we having a bonfire?’
‘Yeah, I thought I’d light it tonight. You want to help?’
‘Sure.’ She wandered over to the pile, prodding it experimentally with a toe. ‘It’s been ages since I’ve been out here.’
‘Well, I think we’ve all been neglecting it a bit.’ Marcus hesitated, as if he might say more, but decided not to. ‘Your mother’s going to do some planting over the next couple of days.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late in the year for that?’
‘For most plants, yes.’ Anna stood up, brushing dirt off her jeans as she did so. ‘There are some things we can plant now. Might not see much activity until next spring, but at least if we make a start now then we know it’s there.’
Connie nodded. This seemed to contradict most of what she knew about gardening, but she chose not to say anything, not wanting to test the boundaries of her mother’s newfound good mood.
‘We were thinking,’ Anna continued, her eyes wide and slightly unnerving, ‘that we might go on a holiday at some point soon. Nothing major. Just get out of the house for a few days, go somewhere peaceful. What do you think?’
Connie hesitated. ‘With Lily?’
‘Not this time.’ Her father jumped in before Anna could. ‘The institute won’t let her leave at the moment. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get away for a bit, does it?’ He reached out a hand and squeezed her shoulder. ‘I think we could all do with a break.’
‘We need to stop putting our lives on hold,’ Anna said bluntly. ‘We can’t just sit here, waiting for Lily to come back.’
We could have just not sent her away in the first place, Connie thought, but didn’t say it aloud. ‘No,’ she said instead. ‘I guess we can’t.’
She went back inside after a while, leaving her parents to it. She picked up her school bag from the hallway, remembering as she did so the letter that was inside it, advising her parents that she was in trouble again. She had promised Mr Elliott that she would give it to them, and for a moment she felt bad about betraying his trust, when he’d expressly said that with any other student he would have put it straight in the post. But then, surely he shouldn’t be putting her in that position? Giving her the responsibility of bringing about her own downfall?
She hesitated, and then went back to the patio doors. Stuck her head out of the door until she could see her father. ‘Dad?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Can I stick some stuff on the bonfire?’
Lily, as Connie remembered her. Eight years old, tiny, blonde, almost ethereal in her pale insignificance. Voice just a whisper:
– Connie please take me with you I want to come don’t leave me behind –
In the dark, in a room with bars on the windows. The institute.
Shadows behind her, shifting but never quite resolving into an image Connie could identify. Black on black, indecipherable.
– Only crazy people live in a place like that –
The walls of the room blended into the trees outside so that they were surrounded by grasping tree fingers. Twigs snapped underfoot. Lily on her bed, suddenly very far away. Calling to Connie, but Connie couldn’t hear what she was saying.
The bed seemed to be moving. Alive?
– Help me don’t leave me here please hush it’s all in your imagination but it’s not it’s not I didn’t make it up I swear –
‘She’s insane, you know, didn’t you know that, I thought we told you?’ The voice, much closer. Connie turned to find her mother standing next to her.
‘You’re supposed to care about her.’
‘I’m just telling you the truth.’
‘If you really cared you’d help me get her back.’
‘Don’t you know? No one comes back from there.’
Her mother took a step forward, and vanished into the trees.
Or became them. They felt alive, but Connie didn’t want to touch them to find out.
A brief flash of teeth, the faintest glimmer of claws.
No way forward, no way back.
Connie took a step, hesitantly, but even if she ran it would be too late. Lily’s bed was getting further and further away, and Lily was sinking into it, so that her legs were already half-gone, and it was impossible to tell where Lily ended and the bed began.
She screamed her name, and abruptly found herself in her own bed, heart pounding, drenched in sweat, the shadows around her making a fleeting effort at looking menacing before they receded into the normal darkness of her room.
She took a deep breath, and lay back down, counting her breathing, two seconds in, two seconds out, until her heart slowed to its normal rate. She didn’t go back to sleep.
now
Lily sat at the kitchen table, letter in one hand, the other curled around a steaming mug of coffee. The warmth in the palm of her hand was keeping her almost-grounded in the present moment, though she still found herself drifting. It was the words, she thought, frustrated. They were blurring on the page in front of her. Rearranging themselves into senseless sentences. Sentences without sense. Tenc. Cent.
Oh, for pity’s sake, not now.
The university letterhead hovered above it all, the one thing that seemed to Lily concrete and understandable. The rest of the words were too small and close together.
Dear Ms Emmett…
Richard was at work. He’d only been back for five days, but already Lily had settled into a routine. She got up when he got up, checked her emails, went back to bed an hour later, slept until mid-afternoon. Then she got up and toyed with some work until he got home. She mostly paced from room to room, scribbling on her graph pads, covering them in scrawls that Richard wouldn’t understand.
He believed her to be doing work. He always thought the best of her.
The phone rang, but it was distant, otherwhere. She didn’t answer it.
In light of recent events, we would like to offer you…
She traced the words on the page with one finger. It was a horrible font, she observed, distantly. Richard would hate it. All angular and computery. He was a fan of serifs, flourishes, things that looked old-fashioned.
A sabbatical. Wasn’t that supposed to be a good thing? She’d heard people talking of them as something to be earned, something exciting. Time off to do research, wasn’t that basically it? So why did she feel like she was being fired?
Time to rest. Well, she certainly didn’t need that. If anything she needed less time. Her days were filled with time. All she had, in fact, was time, which she filled with sleeping and remembering and forgetting and not a whole lot else.
It couldn’t be right. Richard would be home soon. He would sort it out.
Richard tried the home number again, but hung up after five rings. He didn’t want it going to answerphone. Didn’t want to l
eave a message and then spend the next hour or two waiting for her to ring back.
At least if he could keep ringing it would give him something to do.
He’d spent five days pretending. Leaving the house at the usual time, coming home at the usual time. Wandering from café to park and back again. Getting buses to random villages and strolling around them.
Today, he’d come back to Drayfield.
It hadn’t been intentional. He’d decided to go further afield, having grown tired of the local scenery, and happened to look up as the train he was on passed through the nearby town. Figured he might as well get off and catch a bus to Drayfield: at least he’d be wandering around somewhere with some significance to it. All villages blended into one another after a while. He wasn’t sure how many more quaint white cottages he could stand to look at.
Drayfield was a fairly modern village, all things considered. It had expanded from a small cluster of houses (all quaint and cottagey) to a relatively sizeable collection of streets, housing about a thousand people. It had a couple of pubs that didn’t look like terrible places to spend time in, a church that was rarely more than half-full, and a small high street with all the necessary shops and a couple of souvenir places that seemed to exist in the optimistic expectation of some future tourism. Although it didn’t have a school, the one in Farnworth, the nearby town, was known to be good, so plenty of families with young children lived here. All in all, Richard reflected, not an awful place to be.
The house where Lily and Connie had grown up was right on the outskirts. The front garden looked considerably more overgrown than it had done a few weeks ago, with weeds invading the gravel driveway, and the bushes almost obscuring the front gate. But it was still a nice house. Although he didn’t have the keys, he walked around the back and peered in through the patio doors. The kitchen looked dark, less welcoming than it had done last time he had been there. But that was just because he was looking at it from the outside, of course. Once they were inside, and once they’d decorated a bit…
He tried to imagine Lily’s expression. Whether she’d say anything at all. Would she tell him, if she didn’t want to come? Or would she just go along with his wishes, thinking that she didn’t have a choice?
He knew Connie had been worrying about what to do with the house. And he knew Lily had been restless ever since they’d visited it. Richard thought of the effect it was having on her psyche; the things that were going undealt-with, her separation from her past. She wasn’t just passing out for random reasons. There had to be something going on there. And there was Connie, of course. Constantly worrying about her sister. Connie was right. Richard had been wasting his time, selfishly wishing that Lily wouldn’t change. Refusing to face up to the fact that it would be better for all of them if she did.
Well, maybe not for him. But better for her.
Even though she might not see it that way.
She was asleep on the sofa when he got home, the TV projecting silent images across the room, her half-drunk coffee sitting stone-cold on the table. She didn’t even stir when he walked in. It was only four-thirty, but it was already dark, the room lit by the greenish glow of the lamp in the corner.
He surveyed the room, looking for other clues. He knew she’d been feeling low since he’d gone back to work. She’d faked productivity, but he wasn’t an idiot. He might not understand maths, but he’d spent enough time watching her from the sidelines to know what real work looked like. Besides, she was different when she was occupied with a problem. There was usually an insurmountable distance between them which felt like some kind of force field. At the moment, she might be far away, but he could still get close enough to touch her.
He paused by her side, brushed silvery strands of hair away from her face; she huffed in her sleep, scowling, and he smiled to himself and pulled his hand away. Walked through to the kitchen, to find the post disordered on the table. The letter from the university, resting neatly on the top.
He read it through twice, trying to find words which belied anything but concern. There were none. They weren’t firing her; they knew how precious she was. They were just giving her some time off to preserve whatever it was that made her who she was.
He smiled, went back into the living room, and tucked himself under her legs. She moaned softly, but didn’t wake up.
Connie was putting the boys to bed when the phone rang. Nathan was out, attending some work do that she hadn’t been in the mood for. He’d grumped at her for not going with him, but conceded the fact that he would have a better time by himself than with a miserable wife in tow.
She left Tom in charge of tucking Luke in, and caught the phone just as the answerphone clicked on, whirring and announcing itself in its ridiculously patronising female voice. ‘Hello?’
‘Hey, it’s Richard.’
‘Oh.’ She waved a hand impatiently in the direction of the answerphone, as if that might in some way silence it.
‘Everything okay?’
‘Yes. Sorry. Putting the boys to bed; the answer machine’s going haywire… Can I ring you back later?’
‘Well, actually, I was just wondering if you wanted to go for dinner tomorrow.’
His voice was hushed, Connie noted. ‘Just the two of us?’
‘Yeah. I’ve got some things to discuss. And, er, probably an apology to make, after the last time I saw you.’
Connie laughed. ‘Don’t worry about that. You had just lost your job. And I haven’t been the most cheerful person of late. I’m sure we were both overreacting.’
‘Even so…’
‘Dinner would be lovely. Actually, Nate’s out tonight so that works out perfectly for us. He can do child duty tomorrow. Usual time, usual place?’
‘Excellent. See you then.’
They hung up, and Connie went back upstairs, not sparing a moment to wonder what he might want to talk about.
then
‘You do realise, don’t you, that everything is just meaningless? Life, I mean. There’s no point to any of it.’
Lily looked up from the page that she had been working on. Esmeralda, the girl with the scars on her arms, was curled up in the armchair opposite Lily. She was supposed to be reading, but she kept putting the book down and looking out of the window, or looking around the room and sighing loudly.
‘Of course, you know. That’s why you don’t talk.’
Lily wondered if she was being given permission to get back to her work, and decided that she probably wasn’t. She continued to watch Esmeralda, until the older girl turned to look at her directly.
‘The nurses know as well. They’re just trying to brainwash you. Like they were brainwashed when they were younger. It’s all just some big fucking… conspiracy. It’s crazy. The whole world’s a conspiracy. And we’re all just robots.’
Lily watched as Esmeralda chipped the purple polish off her nails, flicking tiny flecks of colour on to the table between them, revealing the bare nail colour beneath. Esmeralda’s skin, Lily had noticed before, was paler than anyone else’s she had ever seen. Almost translucent. As though she was gradually fading out of the world, ceasing to exist in stages.
‘I mean, take this place. They’ve got us all in here to make us better, but there’s not even a name for what’s wrong with us. We’re just… casualties of life, or some shit. There’s nothing medically wrong. They can’t actually make it better. They’re just keeping us here so we don’t infect the rest of society. I mean, like you, for example. What’s wrong with you? You don’t talk – so what? Lots of people would be better off if they didn’t talk. The world might be a better fucking place if people did a bit less fucking talking.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Lily saw one of the nurses sit up, take notice. They didn’t like swearing.
‘But no, just because you’re not like everybody else, there’s something wrong with you. You need to be fucking fixed. It’s just – it’s fucking –’
‘Okay, enough.’
&n
bsp; One of the nurses – taller than the rest, with thick eyebrows and a mouth that never smiled – appeared next to Esmeralda, and took her by the hand. ‘I think it’s time you came with me.’
‘That’s ridiculous. We’re just talking. I was going to start reading my book in a minute.’
‘I heard you. Swearing. Lily’s only nine; you think she needs to hear you swearing at her? No, I don’t think so, either. Come on, we’ll take you somewhere quiet. You can have a rest.’
Esmeralda tried to pull her hand away from the nurse’s. ‘I don’t want to fucking rest, I feel better in here, with people, I don’t want to go –’
But the nurse was unrelenting. ‘Up you get, dearie.’ The cheerful tone could have almost obscured the forcefulness of her pull on Esmeralda’s arm. Another nurse joined the first, and together they left the room, Esmeralda’s smothered protests stalking their progress.
Lily watched the door for a moment, until the sound of Esmeralda’s voice had faded completely. Then she returned to the worksheet in front of her. She had settled into a rhythm now. It had been nearly six weeks – she had been counting the days off on a chart on the bedroom wall. A nurse had suggested that she might like to do that, to know how she was progressing.
They only had a limited supply of maths worksheets; after all, it was not a proper school and children were not supposed to stay in residence for long periods of time. She had started with the ones designed for eight-year-olds; although Grandma had been teaching her, her maths was patchy and Lily was lacking in some areas of vital basic knowledge. In a week she had progressed to the nine-year-olds’ worksheets, and a week later she’d completed those. She worked on little else. The nurses insisted that she spend at least an hour each day doing something other than maths, so she rotated between art, science and music, all of which she could do without having to speak. They didn’t like the fact that she wouldn’t read aloud to them, so she left the books alone for the most part, though she missed reading.
Hush Page 11
