by Lucy Lawrie
‘Oh brilliant, thanks. You’re a star.’ Her voice was too gushy.
‘Why do you need an electric blanket suddenly? Are you really that cold?’
She grabbed my arm and pulled me into the hallway. ‘Listen, Janey. James is arriving next week. I thought maybe you and Pip could come over for dinner? I know you said you were busy, but please. I’m asking you with a big please.’
‘I don’t think so, Hattie.’
‘I know, I know the house freaks you out. But James . . . he’ll normalise it. He never lived here while any of the weird stuff happened. He’s exactly what we need. Don’t be shy of him. Come on, remember the fun we had?’
A short, bitter laugh escaped, and then this, ‘You think I hate this house because of a freaky music case, Hattie? Really?’
‘What, then?’
‘I really can’t. I have to go.’ I started towards the door.
‘There’s obviously something I’m in the dark about,’ said Hattie in a quiet voice. ‘What is it, please?’
‘I can’t see James.’
‘Why not?’
‘What’s the point, Hattie? What’s the fucking point now?’
My voice sounded thin and melodramatic. Language, I seemed to hear my grandmother say.
But I sat down on the bottom stair, resting my elbows on my knees, suddenly tired of all the things I wasn’t saying. Maybe I should take a leap of faith. Maybe it would be like a Narnian tale, and we’d hold hands and plunge through that dark pool into another world. Maybe we’d find our old selves there, and all that weary, intervening time would collapse into nothing.
Hattie sat down next to me. She wiggled one small, neat foot, nails painted the colour of cherryade.
I shuffled my feet in their dull black boots, so that the right was on a black square, the left on a white.
‘Tell me.’
‘Okay, if you really want me to.’ I sighed. Why was my voice coming out like a nine-year-old? ‘I was in Lower Five. Summer term. There was a party. This girl Laura Mallard, who I knew from the Saltire Youth Orchestra, invited me.’
Hattie looked surprised.
‘Oh, I know. I wasn’t a party sort of girl, really. But Laura had invited herself to stay over at mine because she’d cottoned on to the fact that Granny was clueless and wouldn’t ask questions about the party, and she was right. Granny had no idea. The last party I’d been to had been a slumber party where we’d watched Indiana Jones and felt daring because we’d stolen two packets of Wotsits from the kitchen cupboard.’
‘But this party was different?’
‘This party was different. It was a student thing. Organised by—’
‘Some students?’ She shot me a teasing smile.
‘J-james,’ I said. My throat went tight.
‘James? As in . . .’
‘Your brother.’
‘You mean the party was—’
‘Here. Yes.’
‘But the house was being let out. James wasn’t living here.’
She shrugged, as though my story didn’t add up, couldn’t be true. She probably thought she knew about this house, every way in which it was haunted. Good old Janey wasn’t supposed to come out with revelations, she was supposed to stay safely in her sidekick role.
I shook my head. Such awful thoughts.
‘I know. I was surprised to see him too. I’d no idea we were even coming here until Laura walked me here from the bus. I was already half drunk. Laura had a bottle of cider, one of those huge plastic ones. She hid it in her cello case. Granny did, actually, question why she was taking her cello, and when Laura said we were going to have a music session at the party, Granny insisted I take my keyboard, too. I had to drag it all the way to the party, the bus driver nearly wouldn’t let us on the bus.’
Suddenly, now, telling it to Hattie, it seemed funny. I felt a little flare of anticipatory relief . . . Telling this to Hattie was going to neutralise it, frame it as something else. I looked up at her, expecting to see her smile.
But she was staring at me in what could only be described as horror. As if she’d seen me for the very first time.
She stood up, shakily, holding on to the banister.
‘Oh Christ, Janey. I’ve forgotten I’ve got to . . . take that . . . thing back.’ She swayed slightly, her eyes fixed on the floor at her feet. ‘I’ve got to go.’
About to lose my audience, I had to fast-forward. ‘The room upstairs, Hattie. The noises you heard, when I came here for dinner with Pip.’ My words were falling over each other. ‘The night of the party, James found me up there, I was falling-over drunk and—’
She drew her coat around her. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie. I really must dash. We’ll do this another time. Promise.’
We’ll do this another time. As though it was a manicure, or a trip to Harvey Nichols.
She walked towards the entrance vestibule, ushering me along – vaguely, charmingly – with an outstretched arm.
‘Hattie. Please—’
She swung to face me. ‘Where was Laura Mallard when all this was going on? She’s the one that took you to the party and started you drinking. She should have been looking out for you. Where the hell was she?’
Suddenly I was so angry I could hardly breathe.
‘Where the hell were you?’
She made a sound halfway between a sob and a laugh, and in a strange, childlike movement, placed her hands over her ears. ‘Ramplings.’
‘Why did you never – never – get in touch?’ I persisted.
‘Our letters must have—’
‘Fuck the letters. You could have phoned me. You could have written from home during the holidays. I didn’t even have your address. Nothing.’
Her gaze drifted over my shoulder, back into the hallway behind me. She made a strange noise, like the sound Pip makes when he’s having a bad dream. For a second I wanted to put my arms around her.
‘Hattie?’
Her eyes jumped back to my face.
‘What?’ she said, her eyes wild and caught. Then she blinked, and the smile was back in place, plastered across her face: ‘What is it, hon? Hmm? Because I really have to go.’
I reached for the right words, but they’d all gone.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing, Hattie, nothing.’
And I walked past her, out of that wicked, endlessly beloved house. For the last time, surely, now. For the last time.
*
Pip wasn’t happy when I arrived to pick him up from nursery. He’d been in the middle of painting when I’d arrived. ‘Dend,’ he insisted.
I glanced at his painting, stuck to the easel with tape – two slashes of black paint. ‘You can finish your painting tomorrow,’ I said. ‘It’s time to go home for some lunch.’
‘Dend.’ His hands, half-covered by the too-long plastic sleeves of the painting apron, clenched into small fists. We were heading into tantrum territory. Mrs Paxton came to the rescue.
‘How about I put your painting safely over here and you can carry on with it tomorrow?’
Pip turned to her and nodded with a slow blink, as though, finally, he’d found someone who talked sense.
He wasn’t impressed by his lunch, either, when we got home. I’d forgotten to buy the plastic white bread he preferred for his jam sandwiches and attempted to pass off a semi-wholemeal substitute. He wailed as I set it down in front of him.
‘Come on,’ I pleaded, sitting next to him. ‘Just try it.’
Two tears, fat little globes, quivered on his lower lashes. He looked so sad.
‘Oh, Pippy,’ I whispered, and leant my forehead against his.
He screeched, pushing his feet against the table so hard that his chair tipped and almost fell backwards.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. My heart leapt: it must surely be Hattie, telling me she did want to hear it, telling me to come back.
But it was Steve. One of his classes had been cancelled. Could he pop down?
He arrived just as
I’d got Pip down for his sleep. Guilty about the disappointing lunch, I’d given him a bottle of milky. He’d fallen asleep instantly, cheeks flushed, face set into a slight frown, as though unconsciousness was the only reasonable response to the proffering of wholemeal bread.
‘What’s up?’ asked Steve as he came in. His forehead glistened with rain, as it had the first time I’d seen him.
All these struggles, I wanted to say. All these struggles nobody sees.
‘Oh,’ I shrugged. ‘Pip’s not happy with me.’
He drew me into a hug, and we swayed, slightly, there in the hall. How strange, to find myself there in his arms, at two o’clock on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. It wasn’t ordinary, though. Something was about to happen. I felt as though another world – older, realer – was pressing against this one, about to break through.
I thought of Hattie, in that other house, her hand outstretched towards the door.
‘Tell me about it. Talk to me.’
‘I just had a disastrous conversation with Hattie. Oh God, I don’t know why I’m telling you.’
Because you’ve opened a door. You’ve opened a door and it’s all going to flood through.
I drew away from him. ‘It’s all so pointless. And so long ago.’
He sat down on the floor, back against the wall, long legs stretched out in front of him, and held out a hand towards me.
‘Come and sit down next to me. Tell me all about it. I’m listening.’
*
James had answered the door with his shirt tails hanging out of his jeans, a cigarette in one hand, hair rakishly dishevelled. He’d wobbled, standing on one foot as he hung on to the vast black door, and raised an eyebrow at the sight of Laura’s cello case and my 88-key Casio keyboard.
The sight of him sent a sharp shot of adrenaline through me. Not just because I’d always been half in love with him, cherishing dreams of marrying him so that Hattie and I would be sisters, but because it meant the Marlowes were still here. I’d always thought the house had been rented out or sold after Renee and Hattie had gone, a theory borne out by the strange voice that had started answering the phone after a couple of months.
‘Is Hattie here?’ I gasped, almost tumbling over the threshold, and shoving my keyboard up against the wall.
‘Nnnnnope,’ he said, already turning towards the basement stairs. ‘Come and get a drink.’
‘Where is she?’ I followed him down the stairs.
‘Ramplings, presumably.’
I felt a dull throb of hurt in my chest, and in that moment realised how deeply I’d hoped that Hattie had never made it to Ramplings, that her mother had spirited her abroad somewhere, to Monte Carlo or Rio de Janeiro. That would be why she’d never got in touch.
He opened the door into the kitchen and I was hit with a wall of noise, and the heat of teenage bodies. James disappeared into the mass. Laura flicked her mane of long blonde hair and seamlessly joined a group of girls standing to the left.
I hovered where I was for a little while, unsure whether to tag onto Laura’s group, who’d formed a closed circle, or to stay where I was, standing alone by the door. Or I could turn around, haul my keyboard away and leave.
Five boys, rugby lads, by the look of them, barged past me into the hall.
A couple of girls arrived, shrieking with laughter at a private joke and throwing their coats onto the kitchen dresser behind me.
Then I saw the drinks, all set out on the kitchen table – wine, cider, and bottle after bottle of spirits, glittering green and amber and ice white in the candlelight. Yes, I could get Laura a drink, and then I could tap her on the shoulder, and she’d have to let me stand beside her with the girls. I made my way over.
And then I stood. Because what on earth was I supposed to give Laura to drink? A gin and tonic, perhaps? That was Mum’s favourite. I picked up the bottle, unsure how to actually make one.
Somebody appeared at my side. James.
‘Er . . .’ I said, waving the bottle in a questioning sort of way.
He took it from me, and sloshed several inches of gin into a glass, adding a trickle of tonic by way of an afterthought. Then he handed it to me with a nod. An approving nod, at the fact that I was drinking the hard stuff.
‘What’s Hattie been up to?’ I shouted. The Clash was blaring from the stereo: ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’.
He looked at me blankly.
‘Hattie? What’s she been doing?’
He shrugged and glanced over my shoulder, scanning the faces at the other side of the room. I had to keep him talking. Taking a glug of gin, I stepped closer so I could talk into his ear.
‘Are you at Edinburgh Uni?’
‘Er . . . no?’ He gave me a pitying look, as though I’d made an enormous faux pas. ‘I’m at the Royal College of Music? I’m up for Pollock’s eighteenth. You know Pollock, right?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. The name did sound familiar. ‘Yeah. Jackson Pollock.’
He laughed, and looked at me properly for the first time. Little crinkles appeared round his eyes.
‘Great party,’ I said, suddenly infused with confidence. ‘Really nice of your parents to let you have a party here.’
He snorted. ‘Yeah, right. We got in through the back. The tenants are away touring for six months, and the catch on the kitchen window is busted.’
I was shocked. ‘What about the alarm?’
‘Nobody’s ever changed the fucking code!’
‘Oh yes. It’s Hattie’s birthday, isn’t it?’ I laughed and rolled my eyes, eager to demonstrate my insider knowledge of the Marlowe family.
James poured another inch of gin into my glass. ‘Drink up.’
I smiled properly for the first time. He was being so nice. I could stick with him all evening and not have to worry about being a sad case on my own.
‘Oh, there’s Gary. Hey! Gaz!’
Gaz came over, and they started talking about a ‘gig’ they’d recently been to. I stood, nodding and smiling, and laughing when they laughed, until I realised that they’d completely tuned out of the fact that I was there.
I drifted off to find Laura, making four or five hesitant circuits of the kitchen, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. My head was swimming. The gin, the sudden freedom from Granny and school, seemed to be loosening feelings I’d been trying to keep stuck down for a long time. I saw the door in front of me, a bright patch of light, and made my way up the stairs. Laura might be upstairs, and I did need to find her. But that needing somehow changed, with each wobbly step, into needing to find Hattie’s room, needing to go in there and close the door, lie down on her bed, and pull the covers over my head.
But James caught up with me on the second-floor landing.
‘Hey, why are you crying?’ He pulled me in close to him, holding my head against his chest. ‘I could hear you down in the kitchen, for God’s sake.’
He smelt of cigarettes and gin, but underneath was the smell of Hattie. The lemon soap, the washing powder. Inexpressibly comforting.
The opening bars of Madonna’s ‘Crazy for You’ floated up from the basement, and I melted against him. He started – oh God, he was kissing me – and in one fluid move, he opened the door of his bedroom and moved me backwards, still kissing, until we fell onto his bed.
There was no sheet on the bed, only a coarse yellow blanket stretched over the mattress. But there was a stale-smelling duvet and matching pillow.
‘Sorry about the Danger Mouse covers,’ he murmured into my ear, as he slid his hand under my top.
‘Ha! That’s okay. I’ve still got Paddington Bear ones,’ I said, trying to match his ironic tone and somehow failing. ‘Somewhere at home. At the back of a cupboard.’
‘The tenants must have left them.’
‘Oh . . . Yeah . . . I would have left them too, if they were mine.’
It was okay. He would only want to have a bit of a roll around on the bed. Surely he wouldn’t want to – dare to – have sex. I pic
tured Mrs White glaring over her spectacles as Hattie and I had giggled through the ‘human reproduction’ part of our textbook, with the bearded, hippy-ish-looking man and his soppy blonde wife.
Giggles were all very well, but when I looked down and saw James’ thing then, thick and fleshy and very real, all of a sudden it occurred to me that I was out of my depth. Even with the gin swilling round my system, I knew that much.
He reached under my skirt, started pulling at the elastic of my pants. A terrible thought struck me: what if I smelled, down there? Nothing could be worse than that. I took hold of the exploring hand, kissed it sweetly and laid it against my shoulder. But when I let go it was back down there again, his strong violinist’s fingers pushing the fabric to one side and feeling around. I remembered him proudly showing me his calluses, one exeat weekend not long after he’d started at Ramplings.
If we did it, though, that would surely mean we were going out together. James would get me back in touch with Hattie. Maybe we’d spend next Christmas together, singing round the tree and opening our presents. Renee could stay in Monte Carlo or whatever, and the three of us could keep house together, making cheese toasties and heating soup.
The blanket scratched my skin as he pulled my skirt up past my hips and moved on top of me, pushing my legs apart with his knee . . .
And then into me. Every muscle tensed and I drew a sharp, shallow breath at the pain.
‘Come on,’ he muttered, pausing and shifting so that he could change angles.
And then he moved, and I knew that what I’d felt a moment ago hadn’t been real pain. It hadn’t been anywhere close.
I tried to find words. Maybe it wasn’t too late to get him to stop. But he was making such strange grunting sounds. And his eyes were closed, lips drawn back over his teeth in a grimace. He hardly seemed like James any more.
I tried to think of him as he used to be – just back from boarding school with his violin case and a trunk of boy-smelling clothes, or rampaging around the forests of Glen Eddle in a cagoule – and when I found that I couldn’t, panic rose up like bile in my throat.
It would be okay. It would stop soon. I held my breath as he gouged in and out of me, struggling with the waves of nausea. I pushed at his chest, but in the manner of a polite request rather than an imperative, and he gave no sign of having noticed. My mouth flooded with saliva and I managed to pull myself up on one elbow.
