The Pull of the Moon

by Diane Janes

  ‘But you,’ I ask. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I was not entitled to memories,’ she says. ‘Besides, we had to think of Danny.’

  And what about Stephen? I want to add. It chills me, this notion that the identity of one child was expendable for the sake of another. This short-lived scrap of humanity, whose photographs had been destroyed, whose very existence had been denied: sacrificed to the well-being of his elder brother.

  Then I remember her own torture – a second’s carelessness which resulted in a lifetime of remorse – silently marking the birthdays of that other child, the lost child who was never spoken of. The guilty knowledge like a piece of ice in your heart. I had thought her an overly fond, indulgent parent – but now I understand she had been more. She built a fortress of secrets to protect her surviving son, then suffered the wretchedness of imprisonment within it, carrying the burden of unspoken truth alone.

  I can see that she is on the point of drifting off again. I decide it’s now or never. ‘You said there was something you knew about – something about Danny’s death that you never mentioned at the inquest.’

  ‘When Danny was in hospital – after it happened – I would sit holding his hand, hour on hour. I sometimes wondered why you never came – but they said you were ill too . . . they said you were in shock.’ She pauses for some confirmation, but I wait for her to continue, afraid that now I’ve brought her to this point, finally steeled myself to hear whatever she is going to say, any diversion may prove fatal to her willingness to confide or my resolve to hear her. When she realizes I am not going to reply, she picks up where she left off. ‘I would sit holding his hand, and talking to him. They said it might help, so I talked and talked. I begged him to come back to us .. . begged him to live.’ The length of the pause is unbearable, but I am determined not to break it. ‘One afternoon, I realized that he was responding: squeezing my hand in answer to questions. The nurses said it was just a reflex, but I knew it wasn’t. I’m not sure if even Stan believed me, but Danny and I were so very close – if anyone could get through to him, it would have been me.’

  Her eyelids are drooping again. She tries to keep them open, but it’s a losing battle.

  ‘The medication,’ she whispers. ‘So sorry.’

  ‘That’s okay. Don’t worry.’ I am whispering too. I don’t know why.

  ‘Come and see me again,’ she hisses urgently. ‘Come again – a week today.’

  This is crazy – I live a couple of hundred miles away. I tell myself that there is nothing to fear from her. Surely I am not going to take these fantasy communications seriously. It’s only a step away from table tapping. Is it the time bomb of the knowledge that she does have – the faintest possibility that she will say to one of her non-existent visitors, ‘I wonder what happened to Simon’s girlfriend, Trudie.’ Or perhaps it is something else that makes me say: ‘Okay. A week today.’

  EIGHTEEN

  I intended to tackle Danny about what his mother had said straight away – but Simon got in first. The moment the Wolseley had vanished down the lane he began to tell Danny all about a builder in Kington, who had been unexpectedly let down on a job and was therefore available to come and do the concreting for us the day after tomorrow. The builder had quoted him a price, and they had shaken hands on it. ‘If we work flat out,’ Simon said, ‘we can have the sand base installed before he gets here.’ He was unmistakably relieved that everything was working out so well.

  ‘Was he wearing a Stetson?’ asked Danny.

  Simon grinned. ‘I know, I know, he could be a complete cowboy. But whoever he is, he’ll surely make a better job of it than we could.’

  Danny didn’t seem inclined to argue with this. By now we had drifted into the kitchen, where Trudie was washing up the cups – perhaps like me smitten with a sense that things had been allowed to slide. I didn’t require an audience for our discussion, so I signalled Danny to come upstairs, but Trudie intervened: ‘Don’t go away, you two. I’ve got some corned beef and salad for tea, and I want a hand getting things ready.’

  While Trudie sliced cucumber and tomatoes, I set about opening the corned beef tin and Simon laid the table. Danny excused himself on the grounds that he needed the bathroom. This enforced engagement with the workaday realities of our life made my conversation with Mrs Ivanisovic seem fantastical. I was more than half convinced that it was all a stupid misunderstanding, which Danny would iron out in minutes flat. I wound the metal key all round the corned beef tin, then without thinking I attempted to prise the two halves apart using my fingers. The raw edge of the tin bit into the ball of my thumb, producing an instant stream of bright red blood. It splashed steadily on to the floor while I gaped at it in horrified surprise. Luckily Simon saw what had happened and came instantly to my aid, pulling out a kitchen chair and instructing me to sit down, while he produced a tissue from his jeans pocket which he told me to hold against my thumb.

  ‘It won’t stop bleeding,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s soaking through the tissue already.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. By now he had opened the drawer where the clean tea towels were kept and extracted one of the most faded. ‘It won’t be a deep cut. It’s bleeding so much because there’s a pulse in your thumb. Here—’ he took my hand and replaced the tissue with the clean tea towel – ‘keep your hand wrapped in this for a few minutes and hold it up – like this – to give it a chance to stop bleeding, while I get a plaster.’ Something in his voice completely reassured me. Trudie had stopped what she was doing, but seeing that Simon had taken charge she went back to her chopping board. By the time he returned a couple of minutes later with a strip of Elastoplast and a pair of nail scissors, my knees had stopped wobbling and I had dared to investigate the injured thumb, which had already all but stopped bleeding as he had predicted.

  ‘Better?’ he asked, as he took a look at the cut before cutting a piece of plaster to size.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  He squatted on his heels in front of me to apply the plaster. When he’d finished his eyes met mine and I felt oddly ashamed – as if he knew all the nasty thoughts I had ever entertained about him. ‘Thank you,’ I said meekly.

  ‘No probs. Better just sit here for a few minutes. It can knock you sick when something like that happens.’ He took over the corned beef tin and levered it open with the aid of a dinner knife, extracting the meat and slicing it neatly into eight pieces, putting two on each plate – every action performed with the elegant precision which characterized all his movements.

  By the time Danny reappeared our meal was on the table. While we ate our corned beef, lettuce, tomato and cucumber – all of which would have been vastly improved by the addition of some salad cream if only we had remembered to buy some – Simon and Trudie chattered about their trip into town and the work that still needed to be done before the builder came. The two of them had called in at the library to return Simon’s book about garden ponds and while they were there Trudie had come across a local interest book called Mayhem, Murder and Mystery which she had persuaded Simon to take out on his ticket. Needless to say the Agnes Payne case was in there, and of course Trudie could hardly wait to read it.

  ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Agnes,’ said Trudie.

  ‘What’s new,’ I muttered under my breath, but no one took any notice.

  ‘I think we might be able to make contact with her in the wood. I bet her ghost walks there.’

  ‘A midnight ghost walk?’ Simon grinned. ‘Spooky.’

  I tried to catch Danny’s eye, but he didn’t see me. ‘You can hang about down there all you like, but I bet she doesn’t appear,’ he said.

  Trudie rose to the challenge. ‘How much do you want to bet?’

  My attempt to kick him under the table misfired and I banged my toe against the table leg instead.

  ‘How much have you got?’

  ‘A hundred pounds,’ said Trudie.

  ‘You haven’t,’ said Danny. A hundred pounds w
as a fortune to us. What on earth would Trudie be doing with a hundred pounds?

  Trudie was rattled. She didn’t like her word being doubted. In a movement she’d scraped back her chair and was thundering up the stairs to her room.

  ‘Don’t,’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t get her started. We don’t want to have a ghost hunt in the woods. She’ll only get upset again.’

  ‘Cool it,’ said Danny. ‘She doesn’t have that sort of money. You watch. She’ll be back in a minute, saying Murdered Agnes has pinched it or something.’

  Trudie’s feet sounded again on the stairs. She entered the kitchen with her hands behind her back, then produced a fistful of notes with a flourish.

  ‘Ruddy hell,’ said Simon. ‘That little lot would pay the builder and then some.’

  ‘It’s all yours,’ she said. ‘If Agnes doesn’t show up.’

  ‘You can’t take that bet,’ I said to Danny. ‘You don’t have that sort of money to gamble with.’

  ‘We shouldn’t anyway,’ said Simon. ‘It’s all right, Trudie. We don’t want to take your money.’

  ‘Maybe we should bet with different stakes,’ suggested Danny.

  Trudie sniffed. ‘Such as what?’

  ‘I dunno. Like us doing the cooking for a week or – hey, this is it – if you lose, you have to swim naked in the new pond. How about that?’

  ‘This is getting stupid,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we’re not going down to the woods in the dark looking for ghosts. It’s a crazy idea.’

  None of them were listening to me. Trudie and Danny were exchanging more and more outrageous ideas for bets. Pinching a policeman’s helmet. Streaking through the cathedral. Fed up with the lot of them, I went upstairs to run a bath. The bathroom was immediately above the kitchen and I could hear them laughing and shouting across one another, their voices fainter than a steady drip, somewhere near to hand.

  The lower half of the bathroom was tiled in institutional white. A single line of green tiles marked the point where the tiling ended and the cream-painted walls and ceiling began. The window was filled with frosted glass in a pattern of tiny dimples. There were probably nicer bathrooms in convents or prisons. The immersion heater hadn’t been on long, so the water wasn’t really warm enough. I shed my clothes and climbed in anyway, soaping myself aggressively, as if I could wash away the peculiar humiliations of the day. I lay right down in the water, watching my hair spread out with a thread of green moss floating amongst it. There was just enough heat in the water to dull the tiles with a mantle of steam. Every so often a bead formed, growing imperceptibly until it overbalanced and ran down the wall, giving a sense of constant movement within the room, always at the periphery of my vision.

  I thought about Mrs Ivanisovic giving me motherly advice about my dress. I didn’t like the idea of Mrs Ivanisovic for a mother-in-law. She was a bit too much to live up to. It came to me that loads of girls would simply love to be in my position. Danny was such a catch – good-looking, intelligent and funny. His parents were well off. Maybe I was crazy – maybe I should marry him. Then I saw red again. How dare he discuss something like this with his parents, without talking to me first. Then again, surely the whole thing must be some ghastly misunderstanding. What on earth had he told them? Could he really have said that we were getting married? He certainly had some explaining to do, as soon as I could get him on my own for five minutes.

  After my bath, I spent ages combing the tangles out of my wet hair. I didn’t want to put on the same dirty clothes I had worn through the day; but this only left me with a skimpy wrap-around dressing gown, even more indecent than the daisy dress. Not that I minded about staying upstairs and missing out on another evening with Trudie and Simon. I couldn’t be bothered to listen to Trudie going on about Agnes Payne again, or the funny librarian with her hair in a bun, or Simon’s dealings with the builder. And if I stayed where I was, pretty soon Danny would come up to see what I was doing, at which point I could have things out with him in private. In the meantime I occupied myself with sorting our dirty clothes into piles, ready for washing the next day.

  After a while I noticed it had gone quiet downstairs – for a heart-stopping moment I wondered if they had taken it into their heads to go down to the woods. I all but choked at the thought of being left in the house on my own, with the birds well embarked on their evening songs and the sun getting low. I stole across the landing, reaching the top of the stairs just in time to be reassured by another burst of hearty laughter from below. They’ve opened the beer, I thought. They sound half pissed already.

  I skulked back to my bedroom, feeling forgotten and excluded, but as I turned to close the bedroom door I caught sight of the door of the seance room, which was moving to and fro, sucked back and forth by an occasional gust of air. I decided to ignore it, but as I turned away it thudded softly against the frame again, annoying and insistent, goading me to do something about it. I crossed the landing and tentatively pushed the door open. The room was on the eastern side of the house, so the warmth of the day was long gone and the furniture draped in evening shadows. Everything had been left exactly as it was on the night the seance broke up. No attempt had been made to tidy up – although someone had been in and opened a window and this was obviously what had been making the door bang. I was just thinking that the easiest solution would be to shut the door and walk away when I noticed that the breeze had lifted one of the curtains over the sill, where it had apparently become caught on something outside. I knew that if I left it, it would get soaked when it next rained, or else the wind might drag at it until it ripped. It wouldn’t be my fault of course. I hadn’t opened the damn window in the first place. Then I thought about Simon explaining things to his uncle: there had already been one or two minor breakages – although these might be excused in the ordinary run of things. Damage to the curtains would be harder to justify – specially in a room which we were not ostensibly using – but in order to rescue the curtain and close the window, I would have to walk right across the room.

  You’re not scared, are you, Katy?

  Leaving the door wide open, I scuttled across the room. It was cold next to the open window and the shiny fabric of the curtains felt like ice. The material had snagged on the outside brickwork, but it came away easily and there didn’t appear to be any actual damage. I lifted the curtain inside then pulled the window shut. The movement created a sudden draught which made the door slam so violently that it shook the whole room. It seemed much darker in there now that I was facing away from the window. I stumbled back across the floor with the bang echoing in my ears. I almost fell over the rolled-up rug and then my bare feet sent the jar which had held the joss sticks skittering across the lino. When I reached the door I rattled at the handle frantically. Why wouldn’t the bloody thing open?

  ‘Danny,’ I tried to yell, but a strangled sound came out instead: something between a gurgle and a sob.

  In the midst of my panic I remembered that the door opened inwards. I yanked it towards me so violently that it scraped over my big toe, then all but ran across the landing and scrambled into bed, shivering like a wet dog. I pulled the blankets over me and huddled under them in my dressing gown, welcoming their warmth and weight. I thought I would lie awake and wait for Danny, but within a few minutes I had fallen asleep.

  I must have slept deeply that night, because I didn’t hear Danny come to bed. When I woke next morning he was sleeping soundly beside me, lying perfectly still except for the motion of his breath. The novelty of sharing a bed had yet to pall, but whereas the sight of him sleeping usually brought a smile to my lips, this morning it was an irritant. He smelled of stale beer and I slid myself away from him, as if to avoid contamination. He didn’t stir as I climbed out of bed, straightened my dressing gown, then headed downstairs with an armful of dirty laundry.

  There was no one in the kitchen, but evidence of the previous night’s jollifications cluttered the table. I hauled the twin tub across the floor, fitted the rubber hose on to
the tap and waited while the machine filled. Simon had said something about an early start, but the kitchen clock was already approaching ten, belying their good intentions. When the machine was full I set the temperature and bundled the washing in. It wouldn’t hurt it to soak while the water was warming up.

  I had just finished when Danny ambled into the room. He had evidently come straight from bed, pausing only to pull on a pair of jeans. His hair was tousled and he looked half asleep.

  ‘Hey,’ he greeted me with a stifled yawn, approaching for a kiss, then registering surprise when I ducked aside, putting the table between us. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘Your mother, that’s what,’ I said. Now the moment had arrived, I scarcely knew where to begin.

  ‘My mother? What’s she done to freak you out?’

  ‘Do you know what she said to me, yesterday afternoon? She told me that she and your dad are very pleased about us getting married.’

  To my utter amazement, Danny’s face broke into a grin. ‘Well, that’s nice to know,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I exploded.

  ‘Well, that’s good, right? I mean, imagine how awkward it would be if they didn’t like you.’

  ‘Danny, this is not some kind of joke. Have you told your parents we’re getting married – without even consulting me? You – you can’t do things like that.’