by Jonathan Coe
‘We don’t have to go inside,’ she insisted. ‘I just want to see what it looks like. Don’t you want to see all these birds and everything?’
It was true, I was desperate to see where the Mad Bird Woman lived, even though she scared me almost to death. And so later that afternoon Alison and I set out to find Needless Alley.
It didn’t take long to get there. Newbegin was a long one-way street leading from Westwood down towards the town centre. The Alley peeled off from it towards the left, running at first between the walls of two very tall houses: this part of it was so narrow that there was barely room for the two of us to walk abreast. Soon, however, it widened into a short cobbled street with large, venerable, eighteenth-century houses on both sides. The one we were looking for could not have been easier to spot. It was set quite apart from the other dwellings, being separated from its nearest neighbour by a long, low wall running around an expanse of unkempt, not to say chaotic, front garden. On the front door was the house number in rusty silver numerals. It was Number 11.
Presumably the house was built of brick, but you would never know it, looking from the front. The entire façade was covered in foliage of one sort or another – mainly ivy, although there were also many other climbing plants which I couldn’t identify, all mingling and interlocking and twining themselves around each other in a thick jungle of greenery. In the midst of all this, dozens of little birds were hopping, fluttering or resting: a few of them were exotic and brightly coloured but mostly they were your regular songbirds – sparrows, thrushes, that sort of thing. Dark-green netting was stretched over the whole front of the house, preventing them from flying away to freedom. They were basically trapped in a huge verdant open-air cage, but they seemed perfectly happy about it, and kept up a pleasant chorus of chirruping which contrasted with the otherwise sinister ambience of the Bird Woman’s house. I couldn’t help noticing how thickly the ivy creeped over the walls, trespassing on the windows as well, obscuring half of them almost entirely so that it must, I imagined, be quite dark all day inside most of those rooms. I was glad that we’d found it and seen the birds, but still, it was the kind of house you immediately want to run a mile from, the sort that gives you bad dreams. Only a crazy person, I thought, would want to live in it; or even go inside; or stand any closer, for that matter, than the two of us were standing now.
At this point Alison cheerfully pushed open the gate and walked into the garden.
‘What are you doing?’ I hissed. ‘I thought we were just going to look at it.’
She turned and gave me a challenging smile. ‘Are you coming?’
‘Coming where?’
‘Go on, let’s have a look through the downstairs windows at least.’
‘Why? What would be the point? What are you looking for?’
Without realizing it, I had taken a few steps forward myself, and was now standing beside her in the front garden, my heart thudding inside my ribcage with a violence that was actually painful.
‘Have you forgotten what I saw in the woods last night?’
‘Thought you saw,’ I muttered, under my breath. I was still suspicious of the connection between David Kelly’s death and this convenient sighting of Alison’s.
‘The point is,’ said Alison, picking her way through a pile of fallen rockery that lay strewn in the garden path, ‘this woman probably has something to do with it.’
‘How do you work that out?’ I asked. It seemed like quite a leap of the imagination to me.
‘Why else would she want to scare us off from the woods like that?’
Just now, as we were getting close to the front door of the house, Alison stumbled on an especially large stone in the pathway and almost fell.
‘Fuck,’ she said. It looked like rather a minor stumble but she still had to sit down and start rubbing her leg.
‘Are you OK?’
‘My leg still hurts from where I fell out of that tree, you know.’
‘In the same place?’
‘Yeah.’
I looked around anxiously, prey to a growing, irrational sense that we were being watched. Then I noticed something.
‘What are you sitting on?’
‘Eh?’
Alison realized, for the first time, that she had sat down on some kind of metal armchair, surrounded by overgrown bushes, some of which had tangled themselves around it, tethering it to the ground. It was, in fact, a wheelchair. She rose to her feet quickly, as if she had come into contact with something contaminated.
‘Woah! What’s that doing here?’
‘It must have been Mrs Bates’s,’ I said, trying and failing to pull a rope of ivy out from between the spokes of one wheel. ‘It must have been here since she died.’
‘God, that’s freaky. Come on, let’s take a look through the windows and then get out of here.’
We crept nearer to the front of the house. We now had our noses up against the netting, and one or two of the bolder, more inquisitive birds hopped from their leafy perches to take a look at us. They might have been hoping for crumbs of bread but we had nothing to give them. Peering through the thick tendrils of ivy, we could just about see into one of the downstairs windows, but the room beyond seemed to be empty and was in any case so dark that we could make nothing out, except that there appeared to be a large, gloomy picture hanging on one of the walls. The second downstairs window looked into the same room. Once we had done this I felt that honour had been served and we could beat a dignified retreat.
Alison, however, had other plans.
‘Now where are you going?’ My voice was tight with panic.
‘Oh, come on, there’s no one around.’
‘How do you know that?’
I hurried to catch up with her as she made her way down the little alleyway at the side of the house.
‘What are we looking for anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alison, in a preoccupied way, glancing from side to side. The alleyway was strewn with rubbish, besides containing three green wheelie bins which were also full to overflowing. I noticed a lot of old brushes and paint pots. ‘I just wanted to get an idea … a feel for what this –’
She stopped in mid-sentence. Froze, would be a more accurate way of putting it. Her gaze was fixed on a long, thin window at the back of the house, just above ground level, beneath the level of the room we had just been looking into. A basement window, in other words. Behind the dust-and dirt-streaked glass was the bright yellow glow of a powerful light bulb. It was the glow that enabled us to see, quite clearly, the shadow of a human figure in sharp outline.
The figure was in profile. He (or she) was standing (or more likely sitting) perfectly still. We could see the suggestion of a face in silhouette: a short, flat nose, a pointed chin with skin hanging loosely beneath it, straggles of thin, uncombed hair reaching almost down to the shoulders. That was about all we could make out, but it was enough for Alison to exclaim, in an awestruck whisper:
‘That’s him! I mean – that’s her – it – whatever it was …’ And finally, just to spell it out for me: ‘That’s who I saw yesterday in the woods.’
Our eyes met as the reality of the situation began to sink in. Neither of us could explain things, neither of us knew what was going on, by any means, but we were both convinced, now, that we had stumbled upon something huge: something sinister and secret and potentially explosive. This was the biggest, most shocking thing that had ever happened to either of us.
Suddenly, high up in the house, a sash window was yanked open and a woman’s voice shouted:
‘O
Y! YOU TWO!’
We did not even look up to see her face glowering down at us. We turned and ran: out through the front garden, back down Needless Alley, faster than we could have believed possible.
8
It was late that night, when the lights were out and I was almost asleep, that Alison had her brainwave.
‘Oh. My. God,’ she said, sitting up in bed slowly. ‘I think I’ve got it. I know what’s going on in that house.’
I sat up too, and waited for the explanation. ‘Well?’
‘Have you seen Psycho?’ Alison asked.
‘Psycho? The film? Are you serious? Of course I haven’t seen Psycho.’
‘You’ve heard about it, though, right?’
‘I’ve heard that it’s the scariest, most horrible film ever made. Why?’ I couldn’t stop myself asking the question, even though the answer was pretty predictable. ‘Don’t tell me that you’ve seen it?’
‘’Course I have. My babysitter brought it round and I watched it with her, about three years ago.’
‘Your babysitter?’ Every time I got these little insights into Alison’s life I was torn between horror and envy.
‘Sure. She was cool. Anyway, you do know what the story’s about?’
‘Can you remind me?’ I said, not having a clue.
‘There’s this mad guy – he’s the psycho – who lives in this big old house by the side of the road. Next to the house is this motel that he runs, and when this woman comes to stay there for the night he kills her while she’s having a shower. So then her sister comes looking for her and meets this man and straight away she can tell he’s some kind of psycho, so she goes into the big old house to look for his mother, ’cause she thinks he might be keeping his mother captured there or something. So she goes down to the cellar and finds his mother sitting there in a chair. Only she’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yeah. Turns out she’s been dead for years and he’s been keeping her body in the house with him all that time. Sometimes he keeps it in the cellar and sometimes he takes it upstairs and lies it down on the bed.’
I thought about this and a practical difficulty occurred to me. ‘Don’t people start to … smell a bit, after they’ve been dead for a few days?’
‘He’s been pickling her,’ said Alison, matter-of-factly.
I pictured an old lady’s body being squeezed into an enormous jar, filled with the same horrible-tasting liquid I’d seen in Mum’s jars of pickled onions. How on earth this would be feasible was quite beyond my imagination; but right now that seemed the least of my problems.
‘You don’t mean …’
‘Why not? Didn’t your gran say there was something fishy about the old lady dying and leaving her the house?’
‘Yes, but … If you killed someone to get their house, why would you keep their body? You’d want to get rid of it, wouldn’t you?’
‘A normal person would, yes. But this is the Mad Bird Woman, remember?’
The objections to this theory were numerous, I thought.
‘But you saw the dead body in the woods, not the house.’
‘Yes. She’d taken it there.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. To give it some exercise and fresh air. Rachel, she’s mad. Totally crazy. Who else would live in a house covered with birds?’
‘How would she carry the body into the woods? It’d be too heavy.’
Alison was silent, and for a moment I thought that I’d actually scored a point. But the victory was short-lived.
‘Of course – the wheelchair! That’s why she’s still got the wheelchair in her garden.’
I wasn’t convinced by this for long, either. ‘But it was covered in ivy and stuff. It looked like it hadn’t been used for months.’
Alison ignored this objection, and played her trump card. ‘Never mind that. In the film, do you know what the psycho’s name is? Norman Bates. His mother’s name is Mrs Bates. Mrs Bates.’
I couldn’t tell you, now, why it was this argument – the silliest and most irrational argument of all – that finally clinched it for me. Perhaps Alison had just worn me down. But from now on, without agreeing that every feature of the situation corresponded with every detail in the film (besides which I was, in any case, still very hazy on most of those details), I was more persuaded than ever that we had stumbled into the very epicentre of a mystery; that the Mad Bird Woman was the key to it; and that if we wanted to solve it, we were going to have to find out more, somehow, about the person – or the thing – whose silhouette we had glimpsed that afternoon through the window of Number 11, Needless Alley.
In other words, we would have to go into that cellar.
9
Alison’s second brainwave broke upon her late the following morning.
When she came to tell me, I was sitting by myself up near the top of the plum tree, trying to get some peace and quiet.
It had been a stressful morning. At breakfast, Gran and Grandad had seemed unusually tense. Gran was fussing around making toast and tea in a very absent-minded sort of way, and Grandad was hiding behind his newspaper. The front-page headline, as usual, was about the war in Iraq. ‘Saddam Hussein’s Sons Captured and Killed,’ it said. (Or something like that.)
Buttering my toast and sugaring my tea, I was unnerved by the silence between them. It was most uncharacteristic.
‘Grandad,’ I said, timidly. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘What?’ he said, in a tone that was far from encouraging. But I pressed on.
‘Are we still at war with Iraq?’
‘It’s complicated,’ he said, without putting the paper down.
‘Oh.’
Gran noticed my tone of disappointment, even if he didn’t.
‘Nobody really understands what’s going on,’ she said. ‘The good thing is it’s all happening a long way from here.’
‘Saddam Hussein’s going to be pretty angry, isn’t he, now that his sons have been killed?’
‘I think he was quite angry already, what with one thing and another.’
‘But does this mean he might start attacking us now? Because I know that before he died, David Kelly said –’
Before I had a chance to proceed any further, Grandad slammed down his paper with an angry snort.
‘Your gran’s got more important things to do than answer your stupid questions,’ he said. He stood up, and fished his car keys out of his pocket. ‘I’ll go and get the car out of the garage,’ he said to Gran. ‘She –’ (meaning me) ‘– can do the washing-up when we’re gone. And the other one, if she ever gets up.’
He left the kitchen and in the cold silence that followed Gran laid her hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
‘Take no notice,’ she said. ‘He’s all worked up this morning.’
I was glad of the gesture: Grandad’s behaviour had startled and upset me. ‘Are you going out somewhere?’ I asked.
‘Just to the doctor’s. We’ll have to leave you two girls alone for a couple of hours.’ She pursed her lips doubtfully. ‘Perhaps I should ask Mrs Sparks to come round and keep an eye on you.’
‘There’s no need,’ I said, wanting to quash this idea at once. ‘We’ll be good. We won’t even leave the house.’
‘Well, if you’re sure …’ said Gran. ‘I suppose it’s all right. If you need anything, just go next door.’
About half an hour later Gran and Grandad drove off, both looking as pale as ghosts. I realize now, of course, that they had been waiting for this morning for many weeks; tha
t this was the meeting where they would be told once and for all what had caused Gran’s ‘bit of a funny turn’; would be told, basically, whether she was going to live or die. But I guessed nothing of this at the time, and had little more serious on my mind, as I wandered through the garden, than my shock at the way Grandad had spoken to me, and a more pressing – though shapeless – anxiety about how Alison would propose to continue with our investigation into Number 11, Needless Alley: something which I was beginning to think had already gone quite far enough.
At the top of the garden, once again, I climbed up the plum tree and found my favourite spot among its branches. I had already come to love this tree. There was nothing nicer than sitting here by myself, amidst the soft rustle of its leaves, looking down on the surrounding gardens, watching the little fragments of suburban life being played out there, or tilting my face towards the sun, feeling its gentle heat on my closed eyelids. I could have sat there forever. This is what my week with Gran and Grandad should have been like, all the time. Instead, Alison was ruining it with her silly, selfish fixation on this weird narrative she had constructed around the Mad Bird Woman, the body in the woods, the mystery of Number 11 which might not even be a mystery at all. And here she was now, trotting up the garden path towards me, that familiar mischievous glint in her eye, doubtless bursting with some unwelcome new suggestion or foolish piece of information to torment me with. The shocking truth revealed itself to me suddenly: I was beginning to hate her.
‘OK,’ she said, clambering on to the branch beside me, causing it to sway and judder, clumsily breaking off a blameless twig as she settled herself. ‘I’ve got it all worked out.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said, keeping my voice flat, trying to convey as little interest as possible.
‘The thing is – what’s stopping us from going round there, knocking on the door, and walking into the house?’
