by Amanda Mason
‘They have no idea what it’s been like,’ said Cathy. ‘Not really. None of you do. I’m sorry, Issy, but you don’t.’
‘No, I know.’
‘They said they could help, but they haven’t – they’ve made it worse.’ Cathy looked around the room, at the children. ‘We can’t carry on like this. They say they want to help and you think they’re listening and then they just – they just do what they want.’
‘I know.’ Isobel picked up the teapot and began to pour. ‘I understand.’
Outside, they played the tape while they were waiting. The second time Michael had Simon pause it occasionally so he could make notes. Olivia had wandered off to explore the garden, such as it was, which was a pity as Michael would have liked more of her opinion on the voice, on the exact nature of this contact: was it a warning or an echo? He made a note of the question in his book, underlining it carefully.
‘Are they OK, do you think?’ Simon asked, looking up at the house.
‘I’m sure they’re fine,’ said Michael. ‘I’m sure Isobel will be able to smooth things over.’
‘I don’t want them to go,’ said Loo. ‘I like them.’
‘They’re OK,’ said Bee, ‘I suppose.’
‘Dante?’
Cathy had told them they could help decide. They didn’t have a vote, she wasn’t daft, but they could say what they thought.
‘I don’t know,’ said Dan slowly. ‘But if they reckon they can help, make it all stop, and if Bee and Loo want to keep going, then I suppose it’s OK.’
‘We’re finished,’ said Bee, pushing her plate to one side.
‘Can we go out to play?’ said Loo.
‘No,’ said Cathy. ‘I don’t want you out of my sight.’
‘They’ll be all right, you know,’ said Issy, ‘if they stay in the back garden.’
Cathy looked out of the window. They were still there, Michael and Simon. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘We could talk, then,’ said Issy. ‘You know? Properly?’
Cathy considered this. ‘Only if you take Florian too, and you stay where I can see you,’ she said as the two girls stood, scraping their chairs back across the floor. ‘And Dan’s in charge.’
‘No,’ said Dan. ‘I want to stay here with you, hear what Issy has to say.’
‘It doesn’t matter what she says, I won’t change my mind.’
‘I’m not going to try to change your mind,’ said Isobel. ‘But maybe you should think about the book.’
Cathy snorted. ‘I’ve heard enough about the blasted book, thank you very much.’
‘Bloody hell, Cathy.’ Issy put down her cup. ‘He’s going to get paid for it, at some point, you know. I mean, hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe you should get something too?’
‘I’m not sure. I mean – we asked him to help. I don’t think I could ask him for money too, could I?’
‘Well, I’m going to.’
‘But that’s different. This is your job.’
‘And the newspapers paid, didn’t they?’
‘A bit. Not much.’
‘Well, then.’
‘We should get paid too,’ said Bee.
‘Get rid of them if you want, Cathy,’ Issy went on. ‘But you should come to some sort of financial arrangement, while you can. You should settle that with Michael and the Society now, before they leave.’ She raised her cup, drinking back the dregs of her tea as Flor climbed down from his chair, knocking his way past her.
‘Ow.’ Issy jerked forward, spitting her tea back into her cup and over the table.
‘Florian,’ Cathy said. ‘Mind Isobel. Say sorry.’
‘Sorry.’
Issy didn’t seem to hear. She pushed her chair back and ran to the sink, her hand cupped under her mouth; she leant over coughing and spitting.
‘What’s wrong?’ Cathy stood too. ‘Did it go down the wrong way?’
Issy shook her head, her lips suddenly darker now, her fingers and chin too, smeared with red spittle. Cathy looked down into the sink. ‘Dan,’ she said. ‘Go and get Michael. Go and get him now.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Loo asked. Issy started to cough again, she looked like she might be sick. Loo peered into the sink and saw that in the bottom of the cracked ceramic, by the plug, lay two narrow slivers of sharpened glass, gleaming scarlet in the sunlight.
‘It’s from a light bulb, I think,’ said Simon. He had retrieved the glass and laid it out on the draining board.
‘How did it get there, though, into Isobel’s cup?’ Cathy looked as though she might faint.
‘We’ve discussed this,’ said Michael, ‘the removal and appearance of small objects in poltergeist activity.’
‘Apport,’ said Loo. ‘That’s the word.’
‘Shut up, Loo,’ said Dan, softly.
Issy was sitting by the kitchen table, a towel pressed against her mouth. There had been a lot of blood, but she’d been lucky, just a cut lip and a scratch inside her cheek.
‘But it’s never actually hurt anyone before,’ said Cathy. ‘I mean, not like this.’
‘Well, it’s entirely possible Tib doesn’t understand that her actions have consequences,’ said the professor. ‘That despite this unfortunate incident, she still means you no harm.’
‘Or maybe she does,’ said Bee, smiling at Issy.
‘If we made contact, of course,’ said Michael, ‘we would know for sure.’
Cathy went to the sink, turned on the tap and rinsed it out again, even though it was clean, even though she told the kids off all the time for wasting water. Her hands were shaking and they were all waiting for her to decide. ‘I need to talk to Joe,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ Olivia said. ‘You go and ring him and talk it over. We can wait while you do that.’
Cathy seemed surprised by this response, as if she’d been expecting a fight. She dried her hands and noticed a spray of fine red spots on the tea towel. She’d have to soak it. ‘I need my purse,’ she said, running her hand through her hair.
‘Here.’ Olivia picked up the bag Cathy always kept hanging on the back of the door. ‘Would you like me to walk down into the village with you? I’d be happy to talk to Joe as well, if you think that might help.’
‘I could give you a lift,’ said Simon.
‘No. I’m fine, I’ll walk,’ said Cathy, looking around again, as if she was a stranger, seeing it all for the first time. ‘Would you just – keep an eye on the children? I won’t be long.’
Florian wasn’t supposed to walk into the village on his own, but he reasoned that with his mother in front of him, he wasn’t really alone. And he’d keep an eye out for cars. He wasn’t stupid.
Anyway, if she looked back, he’d just run up to her and ask if he could go with her. She wouldn’t send him home. He could probably do that anyway, run up to her now and grab her hand and she might be cross but she wouldn’t take him back. But Flor decided to stick with following. It was more exciting that way.
‘You’re going undercover, Flor,’ Dan had said, taking him out into the garden once Cathy had set off, making a pretence of babysitting him. ‘You’re a man on a mission.’ He had sounded funny, sort of serious and sort of like he was taking the piss.
The grown-ups thought he was a baby, a bloody baby, and if he was tugging at Cathy’s skirt and asking for a drink of water while they were all in the kitchen having one of their meetings they thought he didn’t understand what they were saying. But he was nearly seven. He knew what was going on.
Cathy walked past a couple of women in the village, standing in the street, but Flor couldn’t hear what she said to them. She kept on walking anyway and didn’t look back. He smiled at the women and hung around by the shop, as if he was looking in the window at the display of sweets and biscuits and packets of tea, but really he was watching Cathy reflected there, pulling at the door of the phone box.
‘Are you all right, pet?’ said one woman. He didn’t answer, just nodded and gave
her the blank stare that worked so well with the grown-ups at the farm. She went off, whispering something to her friend that made them both look back at him, but he didn’t mind, he was trying to see what Cathy was up to. He decided to risk getting a bit closer and he crossed the road to the War Memorial.
He could see her from there. She was inside the kiosk, but she wasn’t talking to anyone. Instead she was standing with both hands clasped on top of the phone, her head down, crying.
31
Now/Then
‘Liar,’ says Nina. ‘You’re a fucking liar.’
‘Yes,’ says Lucy.
‘You’d say anything to stop us, wouldn’t you? Anything to get us to leave. This is all such bullshit.’
‘You couldn’t have,’ says Lewis. ‘You couldn’t have fooled them for all that time. You were just a couple of kids.’
‘But we did,’ says Lucy. ‘I’m sorry, but we did and it wasn’t even that difficult.’
Lewis stands up. He’s still holding the camera, but absently, without bothering to focus it on Lucy or anyone else in the room.
‘It was Dan’s idea, really, I think. Dan and Bee’s anyway,’ says Lucy. ‘He had a book. We had so many books, they were the only things we had too many of, looking back. Anyway, he had one about famous cases – mediums, and ghosts, and it gave a sort of history of the supernatural. We read about the Fox sisters, about the spirit rappings and them being mediums, fake mediums, and the way they fooled everyone. Dan thought it sounded like fun.’
It’ll be a laugh, Loo, don’t be a spoilsport.
‘Dan?’ says Nina.
‘Yes.’
The room is getting darker now, Lucy notices, and as if he’s heard her, Hal stands and switches on the light. She had known it would be difficult to tell the truth, or at least part of it, the part they needed to hear, after all these years. What she hadn’t reckoned on was their disbelief.
‘Before we moved up here, in our old house, Bee and I had our own rooms. She and Dan were much closer in age, they were both in their teens, they went to the same school for a bit. It was always the two of them together and they always had this – attitude. They were cool, I suppose.’
As thick as thieves.
‘Well, that’s how it seemed to me. They liked the same books, the same bands. And they used to like winding Cathy up. They hated that we’d moved away from their friends and Bee hated having to share with me. She hated being lumped in as one of the girls.’
She’s starting to babble now, but she wants to get to the end of her confession, to get it over and done with.
‘But they let me join in with them for this, for the game. They needed me, and we found it worked for us, in the end. No one ever questioned the age gap. We had a dressing-up box and we found all these old clothes in the scullery.’
She hasn’t thought about that in a long time, the way they looked then, the way the clothes felt.
‘We started dressing in matching outfits. We’d seen those old photos, the ones of Alice Liddell and her sister – you know, Alice in Wonderland – and the more people looked at us, just the two of us, the less attention they paid to the boys.’
‘Florian as well?’ asks Lewis.
‘Yes.’
He had been so keen, delighting in spying on the grown-ups, in being allowed to join in for once; Cathy hadn’t stood a chance.
Nina is standing by the fireplace, silent, bereft.
‘Anyway, the police officer came and then Isobel turned up,’ Lucy says.
‘You can’t have faked it all,’ says Lewis. ‘What about the thing with the marbles?’
She should have realised, they won’t take her story on trust; they’re going to want details, too many details when there isn’t enough time.
‘The boys, Florian and Dan, were outside the window. It was always the boys, throwing things, moving things. They had catapults, heavy-duty ones that could fire stones and pebbles.’
Or marbles.
‘And that summer, we always had the windows open.’
‘What about the police officer?’ says Nina. ‘He saw the chair move. What about that first night?’
‘Please,’ says Lucy. ‘We don’t have time for this.’ She needs them to pack everything up and get as far away from the farm as they can.
‘No,’ says Nina. ‘You tell me. You tell me what you did.’
Loo was sitting at the kitchen table eating a piece of toast and reading. The back door was open and Cathy was outside collecting the laundry, unpegging it, folding it into rough quarters and dropping it into a blue plastic laundry basket. It was supposed to be Bee’s job, but she had vanished not long after tea. Cathy drew back suddenly, inhaling sharply, rubbing at her arm, and Loo tried to concentrate on the print on the page in front of her.
Bee was upstairs in the bedroom then, crouched down under the window ledge most likely, just in case Cathy thought to look up. Ever since Joe had left, both girls had become adept at flicking tiny pebbles and bits of gravel at unsuspecting targets in the garden below; it had to be someone’s fault, after all, that he had gone. Someone had to pay. The hardest bit was ducking out of sight, giving up the chance to see your victim inspecting their skin, looking round the garden, puzzled, wondering what might have stung them.
Loo closed her book and got herself a glass of water, trying not to look as though she was checking up on Cathy. She downed it all in one go; the water made her throat ache, left her breathless. Her mother kept an old shaving mirror on the ledge behind the sink and next to it she had left a lipstick. Cathy wasn’t one for makeup as a rule; the tiny gold cylinder looked out of place as it glowed in the late evening sun. Loo rinsed her glass and put it gently on the draining board. Still keeping a careful eye on her mother she picked up the lipstick and left the room.
The plan was to wait until Cathy had put Flor to bed and Flor was under strict instructions not to complain or whine.
‘Just ask for a story and listen like a good little boy,’ Bee had said. ‘Keep Cathy busy until Dan gets back.’
‘But I won’t know when he gets back.’
Flor was being thick on purpose, he had a clock in his room, he could tell the time.
‘Till half past seven, then. All right?’
‘All right.’
Misdirection, Dan had called it. They were going to get Cathy to look the wrong way. It would be a laugh.
Serve her right, Bee had said, for what she’d done.
The game involved a lot of rules. One was if you were out of the way, on your own, knock on the walls or the banister. If you were upstairs you could bang on the floor, but that was hard, because of the carpets, not as effective, Dan said.
You could slam the doors too; the hard bit there was getting away quickly then making it look as if you were as puzzled as everyone else. Cathy had been irritated at first – she’d thought they were messing about, but she couldn’t prove it. But as they’d gone on with the game, and neither Bee nor Dan seemed to be getting tired of it, the irritation had been replaced by something else.
She had a lot of books, did Cathy. Art books mostly, but a lot about what she liked to call the spiritual life, too. What Dan called hippy bollocks, which made Bee laugh. And they did a good job of being visibly afraid, all of them; even Bee, now and then, managed to cling to her mother, burying her face in her neck, seeking comfort. And gradually, Cathy had become afraid too.
The plan was for a grand finale.
Dan would come in at his usual time, he’d go upstairs and start playing his music, and if there was music playing, then it followed that he must be in his room listening, right? The girls would go to bed as usual, and once Flor was settled for the night the three of them would start the knocking.
‘I don’t like it,’ Loo said, curled up in the corner of her bed, so far back Cathy had to kneel down to reach in to her. And that bit was true: she didn’t like it. Even though she knew it was only Flor or Dan knocking on the walls, it still scared her. Besides,
there would be such trouble when Joe got back.
Downstairs the living-room door slammed shut, making her jump.
‘There’s nothing to be frightened of, sweetheart.’ Cathy was practically crawling into bed with her, on her hands and knees, her back to the door, while above her, on the top bunk, Bee raised herself slowly and silently onto her knees, her hands filled with marbles, and once she was sure her mother was fully distracted she let them fly.
They hadn’t expected the policeman, but still, they stuck to their plan.
The phone was still working then, at the beginning of the summer, and they had huddled in the living room, Loo and Bee, as Cathy had stood in the hall, clutching the receiver, insisting that someone come out to the farm. Immediately. She’d shouted up to Dan to come and help too and when he’d appeared in the hall, barefoot, pretending to be annoyed, she’d told him to put some shoes on, to go and take a look around outside.
‘What for?’ he’d asked, making a bit of an argument about it.
‘Just do as I say, please.’
And he’d pulled on his work boots and gone out of the back door.
‘I don’t want to,’ Loo had said to Bee, hanging back by the door as Cathy paced up and down the hall, glancing up at the ceiling, waiting for goodness knows what to happen next. She’d never seen her mother like this before, it didn’t feel right.
‘Don’t be daft,’ Bee said softly, glancing into the living room. ‘Don’t be so bloody wet.’
‘Oh, God.’ Cathy was standing by the stairs. ‘Florian, Antonella.’
‘I’ll check on them,’ said Bee, pushing past her mother. ‘I’ll be quick.’
‘I’m thirsty,’ said Loo, just as they’d planned, and she took her mother by the hand and led her into the kitchen.
They had seen PC Thorpe once or twice in the village. The first time he’d thought they were truanting and had walked them back to the house, making dark threats about parents and head teachers and the law. Cathy had refused to let him in, and it had only been when Joe had appeared behind her, filling up the hall, that the copper had accepted her assertion that her children were being home schooled.
