Sophie

by Guy Burt

  “It’s not easy to understand,” she said. “I want you to try, though. You see, Ol' Greedy doesn’t exist. He’s like a fairy story, right?”

  “Right,” I said, doubtfully.

  “He’s just an idea to frighten people with. He's—ah—like a bogeyman.”

  “I’ve got a book about a bogeyman,” I whispered.

  “What I’m trying to say is, even if Ol' Greedy frightened you once, he won’t again. Careful, this bit’s slippery.”

  We crossed the little bridge and made our way through the orchard. The little grouping of sheds loomed up out of the night. Sophie clicked the torch on, and the shadows leapt up like black flames. I reached out tentatively and held her hand.

  She smiled. “There’s nothing to be frightened of. It’s a bit spooky, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said in a small voice.

  “It’s OK, though. I’m here.” We passed by most of the sheds and came up against one that was crouched against the wall at the end of the garden. Sophie took a key from her pocket and held it in the torch beam as she undid the padlock.

  “You’re not to be scared, OK?” she said. “You’ve got to be brave.”

  She opened the door to the shed. For a moment, there was nothing, and then a long arm snaked out of the opening, brushing against the door frame. My heart stopped for a long second, and then pounded in my throat. I gripped Sophie’s hand as if I were drowning.

  The door swung fully open. Hung on the back of the door was the skin of Ol' Grady.

  Sophie played the torch on it. “You see?” she said.

  I looked. It wasn’t a skin; it was some sort of coat.

  “Come in,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  Still nearly rigid with fear, I followed her without protest into the shed. Sophie shut the door carefully behind us, put the torch down on a shelf, and seated herself on the edge of a big metal drum. Silently, we stared at Ol' Grady.

  “What is it, then?” Sophie said, after a minute or so had passed.

  I swallowed. “It’s a coat,” I said.

  “But you thought it was something else . . . ?” she prompted.

  “Mm,” I said. “It looks scary.”

  “There’s nothing scary about a coat,” Sophie said. “This is a special coat. It’s for rainy weather. They wear them on boats. It’s called an oilskin. You can see it’s quite long, yes? So your knees keep dry as well.”

  Reduced to these mundane descriptions, the skin of Ol' Grady did seem to lose some of its terror. I relaxed my grip of Sophie’s hand just a little, but kept hold of it firmly just the same.

  “It’s just a coat,” Sophie said. “If you put it on normally, it looks like a raincoat. It’s got a hood, see?”

  “Mm.”

  “Let go a second,” she said. She took the oilskin down from its peg and held it up. “It’s way too long for me,” she said. “I’m going to look like a dwarf if I put this on.” I giggled nervously. “Do you want to try it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Gradually, the blind panic I’d felt when the arm of the coat had swung round the door was seeping away. I reached out deliberately and touched the coat. It felt heavy and smooth.

  “Go on,” Sophie said. “It’s all right.” She helped me put my arms into the sleeves, and then drew it around me. The hem of the oilskin trailed on the ground. “It’s just a coat, right?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, it’s just a coat.” The laughter welled up inside me. “It’s just a coat!” I said. Sophie nodded, smiling.

  “You want to pretend to be Ol' Greedy?” she said.

  “Yeah. How?”

  “Take it off.” She helped me. “Now, just turn it around, see? Put it on back to front. Now you look like it’s not a coat at all. And if you put the hood up now, you look like you haven’t got a face. Go on, try it.” Nervously, I pulled the hood up over my head. Inside, the coat smelt warm and slightly sweaty. I found there was a rip in the cloth that I could see out of.

  “Wow,” Sophie said. “Pretty scary, Mattie. I think you’d better make some ghost noises now.”

  I giggled. “Whoo!” I said quietly.

  “Louder than that. No one can hear us down here.”

  “Whoo! Whoo!”

  “That’s better. You’re a really scary ghost.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah.”

  I flapped my arms. “I feel scary.” Sophie grinned.

  “And if you walk with your back to the walls, then no one can see the opening,” she went on. “Understand? So it doesn’t look like a coat anymore.”

  “You’ve been a bad boy, Matthew,” I said. “If you’re a bad boy, Ol' Grady will come.” I pulled the hood down again. “So Ol' Grady isn’t real?”

  “No. He’s just an old coat. Pretty silly, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Really silly.” I paused. “The bars . . .”

  “The bars in the dream?”

  “Yeah. Those could be bars on a cot, couldn’t they? Like the baby has.”

  “That’s right. I think that’s how it was, Mattie.”

  “But it was all a long time ago, and now Ol' Grady’s dead.” I yawned. “I think I understand.”

  “You ready to go back to bed now?”

  “OK,” I said, and yawned again. “Put Ol' Grady back.” We hung the oilskin on its peg and went outside. There was the first lightening of the sky beginning to show behind the hills to the east. I held the torch while Sophie locked up the shed again, and we hurried back through the cold night air to the kitchen door.

  Once inside, Sophie settled me down again in my bed. “Feeling better?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “OK. You’re a pretty brave boy, aren’t you?” I blushed.

  She closed the door quietly behind her, and I heard her footsteps move down the hall, and then the gentle click of her door closing.

  He moves his hands against each other uncomfortably; his voice has become tense. I sit frozen against the wall, not moving, not speaking, trying to give away nothing of what I am thinking.

  He says, “You can only have been about five. What did you do, Sophie? How did you kill Ol' Grady?” He lapses into silence briefly. Then, “She always seemed afraid, almost. Afraid of you. Half hating you, but too afraid to do anything.” There is a rough edge to his laughter. “Which one of you ended up the victim? Can you tell me that? It was you to begin with, but you sorted that out pretty fucking quickly. Things got turned around. By the time you’d finished, Ol' Grady was dead, and Mummy was just a shell. Venomous, yes, but nothing compared to what she must have been before. When you knew her.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” But, if I am truthful, I begin to think I do.

  “You killed Ol' Grady, and you forced her back into her dusty drawing room, but you were too late to stop the dreams. There wasn’t anything you could do about that. The memories were still there, somewhere, but they weren’t real; they couldn’t be dealt with in the same way. You must have felt—angry, about it. Like you’d failed. You didn’t like to fail at things.”

  “Lose control, you mean?”

  “Exactly.” I smile to myself, slightly. He says, “It must have hurt you. I understand. I know how you felt.”

  I blink at that. How much did Matthew understand? How much did he know, back then? It is a frightening thought; to hear him speak, you could imagine him completely innocent of the realities around him, oblivious for ages to the truth of what—who—Ol' Grady was. Is that how it was? Or is it just how he wishes it was? I hear only what he says. And this, this last, seems almost a confession.

  After a while, he continues. “I went back to the quarry, you know.” It seems a statement made at random, and I wait for him to follow it up, but he doesn’t. Instead, he gets to his feet, paces the length of the kitchen, peers between the cracks of the plywood sheets that cover the window. There is less lightning now, and his face remains dark. He seems to be looking for something, and it occurs to me abruptly tha
t he is trying to see the hilltop behind the house where the quarry lies. The hiss and beat of rain echoes upstairs, and there are the creaks and mutterings of the old house around me. For a minute, while he stands there motionless, it is almost as if I am alone. I feel a sharp, overpowering urge to start crying, to bury my face in my arm and forget where I am. It would be very easy.

  I say, “What can you see?”

  He looks round, surprised by my voice. “Not much. The rain’s too thick. . . .” His voice trails off absently, and he turns back to the window. He is there for a while longer, and then he goes back to his place opposite me. The candle casts his shadow large and fluttering on the plaster of the wall, and in that instant I can imagine Ol' Grady sliding around the walls of the nursery, reaching for him through the bars.

  The summer was nearly over. Sometimes the smell of bonfire smoke from the farm reached us on the breeze.

  It happened in the night, and Sophie shook me awake to the sound of vehicles pulling up on the drive outside. There were voices downstairs. There was an ambulance, and Doctor Roberts was there, too. In the kitchen, with Sophie and me standing by silently, he told my mother about cot deaths, how it could happen at any time, for no reason. There was nothing she could have done. My father was not home. My mother sat like a statue, her hands folded precisely as alabaster on the smooth surface of the table.

  Afterwards, I asked Sophie, “Is the baby dead, then?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. We sat on the stairs. There were voices still in the kitchen, and then a crunch on the gravel of the driveway as a car arrived.

  “Is Mummy upset?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Doctor Roberts said there wasn’t anything we could do,” I said.

  Sophie nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

  A door slammed. We sat there, ignored, as the rest of the house went about their business around us.

  seven

  I struggle to find something to fill the silence. In the end, I say, “What did you feel? Then?”

  “I hardly know anymore.” His voice is hoarse, unpleasant. “A lot happened since then, wouldn’t you say? It’s not so easy to disregard everything else.”

  “Can’t you—try to?”

  He sighs. “I don’t know what I felt. Some kind of disappointment, I suppose. Nothing much. Nobody seemed to feel anything. It wasn’t just me.”

  “You don’t think they were just keeping it hidden?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. That sounds more . . . humane, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s what it was.”

  His eyes dart around the room, as if he is looking for something. He says, “The next time I saw Caitlyn was at Mummy’s funeral. She was older. She saw me, but either she didn’t recognize me or she chose not to. She was with a man I’d never seen before. I think they were married.” He runs his hand irritably through his hair. “I didn’t mind. She was just something else that had passed out of our lives by then. It’s strange. She didn’t look happy, and I was pleased.”

  “Would you still be, now?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. I was only eleven. Everything was—everything was coming apart. You know. Maybe I felt that she deserved it.”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, shut up, for fuck’s sake.” He pushes his hand through his hair again, and lets his brow drop into his palm. He sits there, cradling his head, and I watch him without speaking. Again, I am afraid at what I have glimpsed.

  If Matthew was predictable, everything would be fine; but he is not, and his changes of mood and of interest frighten me. I know, when I am honest with myself, that I am in more danger here than I thought at first. I also know that, realistically, I have very little chance of developing things to my advantage. I am not even sure whether what I am doing—waiting, and watching—is the wisest course, whether I shouldn’t instead try to confront him again. I squeeze my right eye closed, and feel my cheek burn; no. I tried confrontation before, and it got me nowhere then.

  I am beginning to feel that there is nothing I can do, that there is no way out of this. Matthew, opposite me, head down and not speaking, is simultaneously my enemy and the only hope I have. It is ridiculous. I don’t even know exactly what I am trying to escape.

  I have my small store of weapons: the bruise on the side of my face, the reminders of the world outside, the scraps of information about Matthew that I keep telling myself will eventually build into something I can use. What if they never do? What if there is no coherence in what he’s saying? The irony is that, to avoid whatever madness this is, I am going to have to trust him, however hard that may turn out to be. I bite down on my lower lip sharply. I know I can do it, if I keep strong.

  He raises his head, clasps his hands together in front of his mouth, and stares at me. I realize that I hardly know the man who is looking out of his eyes.

  “What are you thinking?” he says.

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I really don’t know. I’m too frightened to think.”

  He looks surprised at that. “You don’t have to be frightened. But at least you’re being truthful now. That’s good.”

  I have to bite back laughter; the confession wasn’t planned, only came out that way by chance. I really am too frightened to think. That thought sobers me, and I realize that if I keep speaking what is in my head, I will make a mistake—sooner or later. The laughter in me vanishes instantly.

  Between then and my ninth birthday, there was a fallow period, where nothing of great joy or great sadness happened, and which memory has compressed into one or two sharp images. Watching rabbits at dusk in the fields across the lane. A playground scrap where, for once, I came off best. Sophie’s annoyance when, nine years old, she had to wear braces on her teeth for a time to correct some small irregularity—although I remember that nobody teased her about them. Holding hands with Elizabeth Anne after school, and hoping fervently that no one had noticed. Catching a bird that had flown into the kitchen through the open door, and feeling its madly beating heart before I let it go. Good memories, all of them. And, of course, I grew taller, and older, wore long trousers to school for the first time.

  All this time, though, it was still just the two of us. The summer holiday in which Sophie turned eleven, and I nine, saw us playing in the same places as three years previously, although perhaps the games were different.

  Walking back from school, the air was thickly fragrant with bonfire smoke. A silver bank of cloud hung low down in the western sky, although the light was clear enough. The hedges and roadsides were laden with the browns and reds of autumn, and the conker trees were heavy with spiky fruit. Our class was doing fruits and seeds for science, so I knew several of the more common species by name, and understood how wind dispersal worked for dandelions and sycamores, but not for holly. Sophie and I were chatting away about the day’s work, which teachers we liked and what had happened. We saw less of one another during the day than we had before; among the older children, the boundaries between different year groups hardened so that, even at break time, we hardly ever spoke.

  “I’m building an aeroplane,” I said.

  “Where are you going to fly to?”

  “Silly. A model. There’s four of us, and we’ve got most of the wings done now. It’s made out of balsa wood, and we’re covering it with paper and dope and stuff.”

  “Yeah? When’s it going to be finished?”

  “Before half-term,” I said airily. In fact, there had been arguments over who should design the camouflage, and half-term was quite an optimistic date.

  “I’d like to see it when it’s finished,” Sophie said. She pointed up across the hill we were passing. “See there?”

  “What?” I asked. It was the old farm where we had once stolen bricks.

  “They’re selling it,” Sophie said. “Tessa’s dad works there sometimes. There’s a really big company that’s moved in and bought them up. I don’t know wh
at they’re going to do, but they’re obviously after land around here.”

  “Do you think they’d want our house?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. We’re quite a bit farther away, you know. And I haven’t noticed anything.” She meant she hadn’t overheard anything. “Probably not. We’re in a funny little dip, you know? Where the stream cuts down. So probably it’s too awkward a site for anything serious.”

  “Is that why the fields are empty?”

  “The ones behind the house? Yeah, that’s right. But all these will be, too, soon enough.” She waved a hand to indicate the farmland off to the side of the road. “Anyway, I thought it might be useful to know. So little happens around here normally.” She shook her head.

  “Mr. Fergus wanted to see you, didn’t he?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What about?”

  She turned and grinned. “Nosy little bugger. He wanted to talk to me about schools. You know, where I’m going to go after this. It’s exam time next year.”

  “Why didn’t he talk to Mummy?”

  “I think he has. They seem to reckon I could get a scholarship. It would mean extra lessons and stuff.”

  “And? Are you going to try?”

  “I don’t know. Fergus is only interested because of the prestige factor for his shitty little school. And it’s not as if we needed a scholarship financially. You wouldn’t catch Mother talking about a bursary instead, for example. So I really don’t know. I don’t know if I want a scholarship.”

  “You’re going to pretend to be stupid, then?”

  She laughed quietly. “That sort of thing, maybe. They think they’ve sorted it all out between them, I expect. I’ll think about it.”

  We walked on in silence for a while, enjoying the waves of light and shadow racing across the hillside. A strong wind was starting to blow; we could see its full effect in the distance, where trees were rippling on the skyline.

  “I thought, once the plane’s done, I could launch it from the top edge of the quarry,” I said. “See if it really flies.”

  “Yeah, why not. But don’t bring any of the others, will you? It’s good to have a place that’s just our own.”