Sophie

by Guy Burt

  We ate a ploughman’s lunch, with bread, cheese and pickles, drank the blissfully cool lemonade and lazed in the sun. After a while we started swapping stories, and gradually Sophie lost some of the slightly apprehensive shyness that had been dogging her over the past two days. When she eventually joined in, even the two grown-ups were impressed. We had been telling fairy tales to begin with, but Sophie changed the subject to ancient myths and I listened, enraptured, to stories of heroes and gods and creatures from the underworld. Somehow, we then ended up telling jokes, and after that everyone except me had a little lie down in the sun. I set off to walk along the bank of the stream and see how far I could get in half an hour. I had Sophie’s wristwatch with me to check the time by.

  When I rejoined the group, the picnic had been packed up again, and the other three were laughing at some joke or story that I had missed. We walked back to the car with the afternoon sunlight becoming more orange. My pockets were full of pebbles and my head full of questions and ideas.

  The phone was ringing when we opened the front door. Caitlyn rushed to pick it up.

  “Yes? Speaking. Yes, that’s right. How is she?”

  I put the stones in my room and helped put the remnants of the food into the fridge. Sophie helped; Nick had joined Caitlyn and was listening in on her conversation.

  I heard the receiver click into place. The two grown-ups came through to the kitchen.

  “That was your dad,” Caitlyn said, brightly. “Seems your mummy’s done really well. She’s coming home tomorrow.”

  Sophie’s eyes widened, and then her face went blank, as if someone had shut it off.

  “Will Mummy bring the baby?” I asked.

  “That’s right, Mattie.”

  “What’s the baby called?”

  Caitlyn shrugged. “I don’t know. I expect you’ll find out sooner or later.”

  Nick said, “How is she?”

  “Fine, by all accounts. Must have a constitution like a mule,” muttered Caitlyn, audibly. In a normal voice, she continued, “You’ll be able to see your brother soon. That’s going to be good news, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Will you still be here?”

  Caitlyn hesitated. “Ah—well, Mattie, no, I won’t. Not for much longer, anyway. But we’ve got lots of time before that, so we’ll make the most of it. And when Mummy comes back, I want you and Sophie to be really understanding and helpful, 'cos I imagine she’ll be pretty tired. You know, make her breakfast in bed and get her lots of tea and all that.”

  “Yes,” I said, even more doubtfully.

  For a moment Caitlyn seemed at a loss. Then, with a big grin, she said, “Come on, then. Let’s play I spy. Do you want to stay in here or go outside?”

  That night, I lay awake looking at the summer sky outside my window, thinking how nice everything was. I thought back on the wonderful afternoon by the stream, and the red car, and the colouring pencils. As I turned over and closed my eyes, I remembered something else also. I had gone back downstairs to retrieve my colouring book and pencils from the hall, where I had left them. The door to the spare bedroom was standing open, and I could hear Caitlyn talking inside.

  “Do you think I’ve had too much sun? I spent a long time outside yesterday, too. Better be careful, or I’ll end up like a peeled prawn.”

  Nick said, “You’ll be OK. Are you going to have a shower?”

  “That I am. I’ve got half the heath in my shoes, I reckon. Well? What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “You know. This. This place.”

  There was a long silence. “Truthfully? I don’t know. It’s not as bad as you make out. They seem nice enough kids.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’d take little Mattie home right now if they’d let me. But there’s something strange about Sophie, like she knows more than she’s letting on. D'you get that feeling?”

  Nick considered. “No, not really. Like I said, she seems OK to me. Bright kid.”

  “Too right. She knows things I don’t know. And her stories were pretty damn good, too. Maybe I’m just overreacting still. I haven’t got over the shock of being dragged out to the recluse’s abode yet. Nearly scared me shitless, middle of the night and all.”

  I padded upstairs with my book, smiling to myself that Caitlyn liked me. In the corridor below, the voices continued, sometimes murmuring, sometimes laughing. And, later, in bed, I wondered what it might be like to live somewhere else, to go home with someone different and never come back.

  The next day, my mother came home.

  It was all over very quickly; my father drove her to the house. With them was a white plastic carry-cot with the baby wrapped up inside it, silent among blankets. For once, my mother seemed to notice Sophie and me: she took us into the kitchen, and, resting the cot on a chair, let us see the baby. Its tiny face was swollen and dark, and in front of its mouth it held two minute fists, as if in the throes of some terrible rage.

  “This is your brother,” my mother said. We both looked at the baby in silence, unsure of what to say. “He’s asleep at the moment.”

  Caitlyn came through to the kitchen. “Isn’t he adorable?” she said. “Look at him—all snuggled up.” My mother shot her a glance.

  “Have Matthew and Sophie behaved themselves?” she asked.

  “Oh, they’ve been perfect,” Caitlyn said easily. “Nick! Come and have a look at him. He’s gorgeous.” When I looked at her face, though, I suddenly had a strong feeling that she was concentrating more on saying the right things than being genuine.

  “Hello,” Nick said to my mother, awkwardly. My father was somewhere in the background, moving between rooms, sorting things out.

  “What’s the baby called?” I asked.

  “Have you decided yet?” Caitlyn added.

  My mother nodded. She didn’t look tired, as Caitlyn had said she might; she looked the same way that she usually did. “We’ve decided on David,” she said.

  “That’s a nice name,” Caitlyn said. “Hi, Davey.” The baby stirred uncomfortably, and made a little coughing cry.

  “Really, we mustn’t keep you,” my mother said. “I’m sorry to have troubled you like this, really I am.” She pressed a sealed envelope into Caitlyn’s hand. “I’d be most grateful if—”

  “Oh, come on,” Caitlyn said. “Families don’t do that sort of thing. Besides, I really enjoyed myself. It was great fun, wasn’t it? We did lots of things, and these two were good as gold. In fact, it’s a shame I don’t see more of them. Perhaps they could come round once in a while? It'd be no problem, I promise.”

  “That’s very kind,” my mother said, and I saw Sophie’s face—which had become tinged with expectation—fall at the words.

  “It would be lovely,” said Caitlyn, but now that I had noticed Sophie’s reaction, I thought I could hear defeat in her voice as well. She put the envelope on the table and left it there.

  “I guess we’d better be off,” she said to Nick. Then, abruptly, she bent down and kissed the end of my nose. “Bye, Mattie. Keep good care of yourself, you hear? Colour some pictures for me.”

  “Bye, Caitlyn,” I said. It was strange, I hardly felt sad at all.

  She kissed Sophie, too, “Bye, Sophie. I really liked the tree you showed me. Take care, OK?”

  “Bye,” Sophie said, carefully. “Thank you for looking after us.”

  “Run along, you two,” my mother said. As we left the kitchen into the garden, I could hear her talking to Caitlyn again; the mention of colouring pictures seemed to have caught my mother’s attention. I could hear her saying, “At least let me reimburse you for . . .”

  There was a low smear of cloud in the morning sky as I followed Sophie down the garden. I saw a bottle top lying in the grass, near where we had eaten lunch on the lawn. Sophie was walking very fast, heading for the holly bush.

  “Wait for me!” I said, but she ignored me. I reached the holly bush after her, and pushed my way in through the curtain of dark leav
es clumsily, ignoring the scratches I got as a result. Sophie was sitting in the middle, her back to the trunk, breathing hard as if she had been running. I knew immediately that something was wrong.

  “Sophie? Are you OK?”

  As I watched, her hands gripped the canvas covering the floor, then unclenched. She opened her mouth a little way, and made a noise that was almost like the beginning of a sob. As if this was all that was necessary to break open what she had been holding back inside, she struck the ground with both hands, and cried out loud, “You fucking bitch! Fucking bloody cocksucking bitch.” There were tears running down her cheeks, but instead of crying she shouted obscenities, on and on, words I had never heard and didn’t understand. I sat in terrified silence until, at last, her voice grew quieter, and finally she stopped. She was still breathing in little irregular gasps, but her face had become more normal again.

  She seemed to notice me for the first time. The last of the anger and violence went out of her, and she reached across and hugged me to her tightly. With my face pressed into the comforting warmth of her shoulder, she whispered, “It’ll be OK, Mattie, it’s going to be all right. Don’t worry, everything’s going to be OK.” I hugged her back, scared for her, not knowing what was happening, not aware that there was anything wrong, anything I should have been worried about. After a long time, she pulled away a little and looked into my face.

  “Hey,” she said, and there was a fleeting glimpse of one of her old smiles. “Don’t look frightened. Everything’s going to be all right. I promise. You’ll be all right. I’ll look after you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered.

  I was only six; I really thought she was talking to me.

  six

  We stare at each other across the boards. The hollows of his eyes are pooled in shadow, and the candle on the floor makes an eerie reversal of the normal contours of his face. It makes it difficult to judge what he is thinking. I am starting to realize that the need to make that sort of judgement about him has become very strong.

  Matthew frightens me: I have never seen him like this, never suspected, before tonight, that he was capable of anything of this nature. I have been taken by surprise, and now there is nobody except myself to look to. The pieces of Matthew’s story are joining together, beginning to form a more coherent whole than before. Disjointed memories are giving way to a more consistent, more linear account. I do not know, yet, where this is leading, but I am sure that what happens here, now, in this room, will be determined by what happened years ago.

  The dream-like quality of our conversation is offset sharply by the constant reminders of the world outside—the storm, the sounds of the wind and rain, the sudden whipping to and fro of the candle flame. Once there has been a crash as a slate has torn from the roof and shattered against something hard; at other times, there have been void-like moments of quiet when the wind has dropped, and only the hammering of the rain has continued in the background. I can’t remember a night as fierce as this.

  I have tried to stop myself regretting how I came to be here; there is no point, and I need my concentration on what is happening now, not what happened hours ago. But every so often, I can’t help but think—there must have been a way to avoid this earlier! Before it reached this! I don’t think there was, though. Matthew has kept his secrets too well, and it is only now that I am being allowed to see them, being allowed to share them.

  But now I have a secret as well. Not much, yet, but the first taste of something. Because I am getting to know Matthew Howard from the inside for the first time, and although I don’t yet know how to use what I am discovering, it is the only edge that I have. I don’t mean to waste it. There is still enough time.

  Life almost returned to the way it had been; almost, but there were subtle differences. My father was around the house more often. My mother, who had practically disappeared from our lives for the past few months, was now to be seen on her normal circuit of movement around the ground-floor rooms. Upstairs, the books and shelving were cleared out of the little room at the end of the corridor, and a crib was brought down from the attic and set up. The baby, whose normal expression of rage occasionally softened into something resembling normality, became a part of life overnight. In his white room with the pale blue blankets and curtains, we could hear his baby-noises sometimes when walking along the top corridor. Our family doctor, a large man with cool, dry hands, dropped in one morning, looked the baby over and pronounced him fit and well. Maybe, in our sleepy little village, he had nothing better to do.

  A house with five people in it was unusual and claustrophobic. Sophie and I went to the quarry to escape.

  Soon, the first of the wasps were evident in the garden, scanning the trees in the orchard and zooming around the drainpipes of our house. Once the initial excitement over the arrival of the baby had died away, I grew used to the idea, although it was not nearly so much fun as I had imagined it might be. There was no pram to push, for example, although my mother sometimes took the carry-cot out into the sun on the edge of the lawn. That in itself was a new departure; the back garden was usually territory into which my mother never strayed.

  Being six was not noticeably different from being five; I still played the same games, was scared of the same things, liked the same stories. Growing older was a transparent process, and I only saw the evidence of it later, and from a new perspective.

  Sophie and I went fishing for sticklebacks in the pond behind the hill. The sunlight was hazy through the trees, and played across my back as I bent, laboriously tying a worm on the end of my piece of cotton. The little fish lived in and among the old bottles and cans and pieces of metal that had been dumped long ago in one end of the pond. Once they’d attached themselves to your worm, you could haul them straight up out of the water and they wouldn’t let go.

  We returned home happily exhausted. My mother had prepared supper while we had been out; we ate it quietly. We had both long since given up trying to interest her with what we had been doing. At bedtime, Sophie told me a story about a fool who won a princess’s hand in marriage by presenting her with a dead crow and some mud. I found the idea extremely funny, and giggled quietly to myself once or twice as I fell asleep.

  In the night, in my dreams, there was a rustling in the corridor. Only now I recognized some things that had not been there before: the blue curtains were dark against the pale walls, and there were bars all around me. The crack of light down the hinge of the door was abruptly covered as something passed outside. The door opened, and it shuffled into the room.

  My body had frozen, motionless, unable even to breathe, as the long-armed, faceless figure of Ol' Grady edged along the wall, its mumbling words taking shape in my memory. If you’re a bad boy, Matthew, Ol' Grady will come.

  And with the cry half out of my throat, I shuddered awake.

  I must have made some noise. The light down the corridor snapped on as I fumbled for the inhaler that always rested on my bedside table. Sophie opened the door and slipped into the room.

  “What is it?” she whispered as she knelt down beside the bed. “Is it the same one?”

  I nodded helplessly, and took another gulp of spray. Gradually, the aching tension in my upper chest relaxed, and I found it easier to exhale.

  “OK, it’s all right now,” she murmured, and brushed the hair back out of my eyes.

  “Sophie, I’m scared,” I whispered back. “There were bars.”

  “There were bars round you?” she asked, understanding immediately.

  “Yes.”

  “Shit.” She paused. “Mattie, you’ve got to listen to me. Ol' Greedy’s gone now. He’s dead. Do you understand? It was just a bad dream.” She stared into my eyes, as if willing me to believe her, and saw it was no use. “Shit,” she said again. There was a struggle evident on her face, as if she wasn’t sure what to do. Then she came to some decision.

  “Do you feel better?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It
was just a dream, I think.”

  She rubbed my head and smiled. “You know, you mean. That’s all it was, Mattie, just a bad dream. Ol' Greedy’s been dead for a long time. You want to see?”

  I looked at her with incomprehension.

  “Put on some trousers and shoes,” she said. “And your coat. It’s cold outside.”

  “Are we going outside?” I asked. “It’s the middle of the night!”

  “Yeah, I know. Don’t worry, I’ll be with you. Just put some clothes on, OK?”

  “OK,” I agreed, confused but unwilling to let such an opportunity for excitement pass. I had no idea of what Sophie was thinking. She went back silently to her room and reappeared a few minutes later with clothes pulled on over her pyjamas. I was having trouble with my shoelaces, so for once, instead of letting me tie them myself, Sophie knotted them quickly and neatly.

  “There. Are you ready?”

  “Where are we going?” I asked, fascinated.

  “I’ll tell you on the way. Quiet, now. You don’t want to wake the baby.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  We went downstairs, through the silent and empty kitchen. Sophie unbolted the back door, and we stepped out into the moonlit garden. Shadows under the bushes were black as oil, and the sky was riveted with stars.

  “It’s dark,” I said.

  “I’ve got a torch,” Sophie replied. “Don’t you worry. This way, now.” We started down the lawn towards the stream. As we walked, Sophie talked to me quietly.