The Song House

by Trezza Azzopardi

  As she pushes her way through the dripping willowherb, nearing the flint wall at the western edge of the Gatehouse, she knows what she’s going to do. She heads back onto the main road, ducks under cover of the bus shelter, and takes out the pen. She writes just three words – Water over stones – and addresses the card to Kenneth. Only when she has dropped it into the postbox on the way back home does she realize she’s forgotten to put a stamp on it.

  Aah! How very cold it is. Nice and cold. Cools the blood. Echolocation. Echo location. Echolocation!

  Kenneth takes a deep breath and pushes down towards the riverbed, opening his eyes to a rush of silvery specks, and then a hand, an arm, greenish, dead, looming in front of his face. He rears up in fright, choking, scrabbling for the surface. You fool, he says to himself, It’s your own bloody arm. And ducks down again. Below is oblivion, sightless, silent. There’s Maggie, now, dipping one wrist, then the other, under the tap, and there again, lying on the lawn, her pale hand raised to the moon. And here, sitting on the edge of the chair in the library, tears falling in big splashes from her eyes. Afterwards, he noticed a trail of dark stains down the front of his trousers, thought they were grease spots, probably, and didn’t much care. But later in the garden, baffled by William’s attitude, he’d looked down again and the spots on his trousers had dried into faint blotches, glittering on the fabric like battered stars.

  So strange and quiet. And so green. The current drags at his legs, pushes him sideways and back, he has to walk rather than swim through the water. And now he must breathe. He forces himself up again, feeling the mud slide away under his feet, sees from underneath how the rain pricks the surface of the water and the rain looks like a song. Not a song, a musical box, the one his grandfather had bequeathed him, when he was just a boy. He’d been so disappointed; it looked like any ordinary boring brown box, but then he’d lifted the lid and everything changed. Inside there was a glass plate through which you could see the cylinder. Shining brass. And when he turned the key, the metal teeth combed the pins on the cylinder so that he felt every single tooth of sound on his skin.

  You should see me dance the polka,

  You should see me cover the ground,

  You should see my coat-tails flying

  As I jump my partner round!

  Standing under the umbrella on the far slope, William waits and watches as his father wades back through the mud, underpants grey and sagging, the hair on his chest glinting like wire wool.

  They section people for less, William says, holding out a hand as Kenneth approaches the reeds at the water’s edge. Kenneth ignores him, grips an overhanging branch and pulls himself up to the lip of the bank, teeters for a second, then slips and falls with a flat thwack back into the river. William tries to find an open spot to wade in after him, but still his father won’t be helped, shooing him away with a dripping brown arm. As if he were a dog.

  No point in ruining your shoes. I expect they cost a fortune, mutters Kenneth, finally easing himself up onto a patch of rough grass. William stares at his shoes, flecked with mud and strings of slime, and continues to stare at them until Kenneth is away, walking unsteadily back to the house; and then he trails him, seeing the long dark slash of red running from his father’s elbow and wanting it not to be there.

  You’re bleeding, Dad, he says, his voice coming very small.

  It actually feels quite warm in there, Kenneth replies, Relative air temperature, something like that. Womb-like. I suppose it’s not the worst thing, drowning.

  William won’t be led into another meandering conversation. He’s had enough. He makes to pass Kenneth the trousers he’d left slumped on the lawn, but his father bats him away.

  I said it was warm. Didn’t say it was clean. I’ll need a shower. It’s quite stirred up underneath, you know, soupy. What was the name of that chap who used to look after the river?

  William stares at his father’s back, freckled and soft as milk.

  Dad, you’re bleeding, he says again, putting a hand out to touch him.

  Kenneth turns so fast, so full of wrath, it makes William flinch.

  I said, what was his name? he says, teeth bared.

  Cooper, says William.

  Kenneth grunts, bending to the lawn to retrieve his belt. He wraps it round his hand.

  The one before him.

  I can’t remember.

  William shakes the rain from the umbrella and folds it closed.

  It’s hereditary, you know, says Kenneth, his eyes hard as marbles, Don’t think you’ll escape.

  Escape from what, being a lunatic? A crazy old bastard? Well, I’m really looking forward to that, shouts William, launching himself up the steps and crashing the back door wide, I’m so looking forward to being you. Roll on dementia!

  twenty-five

  And there it is again, rising up to hit her as soon as she opens the door: the unmistakable stink of gas. Maggie slips off her boots and parks them on the newspaper under the stairs, throws her coat over the arm of the chair and pads through the house.

  She’s had weeks of the smell, trying to endure it, unable to endure it, checking the bins out the back and the sink in the kitchen, standing on the doorstep in the middle of the night, sniffing the air like a fox, wondering if it was a leak blowing in from the town, whether she should report it to someone: knowing all the time it was inside, in there with her, but not knowing what it was. It is worse now than before she left to go and work for Kenneth, as if the cottage is punishing her for her absence. It makes her furious, this invasion, and she longs again for the tawny scent of her room in Earl House, and for Kenneth, the trace of his cologne on the air.

  She knows there’s really no point in searching. She’s been through the whole cottage, looked under the furniture and in the cupboards, opened and closed drawers, poked at the drains with a stick. But still. She kneels in front of the fire, breaks up the firelighter into smaller shards, relishing the squeak it makes, the sharp petrol tang, and puts a match to the kindling. Slowly, she adds sticks of tinder until the blaze is steady enough to support a log, which she balances on top. Rests on her haunches, sniffing solvent on her fingers but looking at the electricity cupboard as if it’s a stranger sitting there, sitting there in the corner.

  She opens the door, as she has done twice, three times before, but instead of staring at the digits slowly turning over, she glances down. Pushed against the wall, down low where the skirting used to be, is a dusty brown box. She knows it well. Made of wood, it has a carving of an elephant on the lid, the tusks inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Nell was given it by one of her travelling friends, before Maggie was born: her dreamcatcher box. She used to keep feathers in it, and bits of string and beads, and that’s what Maggie expects to find when she lifts the lid, some old beads and bits of string. After she’s seen, she goes into the kitchen and washes her hands, tears some kitchen towel from the roll and takes it back in with her, because she doesn’t want to get dirty prints on what she’s found. Wipes the lid of the box, wipes her fingers, opens it again and takes out the photographs.

  The first is of the three of them sitting in the garden: Ed in a deckchair with Nell on his lap, her face obscured by a lock of his hair blowing across it, and Cindy kneeling, as if about to get up, her blouse billowing open, her eyes surprised. Maggie stares at the photograph for a beat longer, sees how tanned Cindy’s face is, how white and shining her breasts. Imagines what it would have been like to be Leon, seeing her that way, closing one eye, pressing the shutter at just that moment. The second is of a later time, of her young self in a broad-brimmed hat, clutching a doll; and the third is a portrait of Nell, looking hot and uncomfortable, dock leaves at shoulder height. Maggie knows this photograph. Nell had a series of them, all taken in the garden and the fields around the cottage, which she’d taped into an exercise book. She taught Maggie the names of the plants this way. Sometimes she’d cut a stem or flowerhead and press it between the covers. After a while they’d darken, go brittle
, fall out onto the floor and be lost.

  She studies Nell, takes in her beautiful auburn hair and her rueful face, and smiles with her, for her, asking her to please smile properly, willing the image to change so that Maggie can see that gap-toothed grin again. And in the background is the river, and beyond the river the trees, slightly out of focus, and a flare of orange low down on the forest floor.

  Beneath the photographs Maggie finds a business card, clean and new, with Ed’s logo and a telephone number. On the back, in her fat handwriting, Nell had scrawled another number and an Internet address. Maggie recognizes it: Ed’s website. She didn’t know that Nell knew. There are cuttings; one from a glossy magazine showing her mother’s dreamcatchers hanging in a shop window, and a music review of Athame at Les Cousins. At the bottom of the box, wedged flat, is a bent piece of sugar paper. Maggie takes it out and looks at it: she drew this picture with the crayons Leon bought her. It was after she’d stopped talking. Most of the glitter has fallen off the edges, and the paper is faded, but the colours are still fresh. It was supposed to be a Christmas card for Ed, only it’s here, in Nell’s box. It shows a tiny red girl under a mountain. On the top of the mountain is some sort of animal.

  It is the very last thing that makes her cry out. Tucked beneath the drawing is a folded square of newspaper, yellowed with age, and when she carefully unfolds it and looks, the sight of it stops her breath. Here she is, four years old, the whole of one side of her face a shade darker than the rest, as if it’s been painted black; that slash of pain cutting across her forehead, darker still; and the left eye closed and swollen like a walnut. She’s leaning forward across the picture, one arm stretching out of the frame. And the boy who is holding her is triumphant and smiling.

  Birdie Crane Found Alive!

  Below the headline, a single smudged line of text before the page is torn:

  Schoolboy William Earl was said to be ‘flabbergasted’ when he discovered—

  She never knew.

  Nell says, Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear, so Maggie doesn’t tell her. It might be the words in a book she’s reading, or a song she’s heard on the radio, or something someone said on the television. It could be anything, and it will make the feeling in Maggie inflate like a balloon. But Nell will put her hands over her ears and block her out, or she’ll say, You mustn’t speak about it, do you understand? You’ll get us into trouble. They’ll take you away from me!

  Maggie began to unlearn how to speak. It wasn’t deliberate. She’d start to articulate something, but the words in her mouth felt like sharp gravel: her tongue couldn’t move round them, and her voice would come out narrow and pointed over the stones, as if it had been slashed into ribbons. And then one day, Leon noticed how silent she’d become and said, What about singing for us, Bird, you used to do that a treat. And it was easier to sing, except Nell couldn’t bear that, either. She’d shake her head and say, Stop, Stop, in a panicky way, as if Maggie was hitting her, and Leon would shout, What do you think you’re doing? Poor kid’ll have to open up some time. And you! Stick your head in the sand long enough and someone’s sure to come by and kick your arse.

  She was a child who couldn’t speak, with a mother who couldn’t listen. There was no way forward after that. Nell would talk, though, enough for both of them. They’d lie together in bed, Nell’s arms wrapped tight round her daughter, and she’d whisper secrets, stories about her old life, before Maggie, before Ed and Leon, and the two of them would sleep, eventually, and dream of the past.

  Maggie stares accusingly at the empty bed.

  You never let me talk about it, she says, to the pillow, the wall, Not even between us! Never. Like it never happened. You know, Nell, sometimes I think they should have taken me away from you. Sometimes I think I’d have been better off.

  As if she’s magicked her – of course, she has magicked her – Nell drifts into her vision.

  Tell me now, then, Bird, she says, Go on. You can tell me now. No one can touch us now.

  Sitting in the armchair, with the dreamcatcher box at her feet and the ghost of her mother lying peacefully on the bed, Maggie takes a breath to begin. But when she opens her mouth, silence follows. She swallows hard, feeling the knot of sounds stuck in her throat, gives a little shake of her head.

  In there, you daft thing, says her mother, Go on, write it down!

  Maggie picks up the notebook and reads the words on the front again, parting like a wave beneath the steady shield: Veritate et Virtute. Truth and courage, truth and courage, she says. She turns to the pages at the back.

  Black again. Light goes thin like this. If I put my eye here, it goes black. The boy came with pop and a fruit. It had fur and a sandwich in silver paper. The paper was shiny. The boy sat on the bench. He smelled funny. He said, She’s not ready for you yet. I tried to think but he was too close.

  She can’t do it. Maggie looks up from the page. Instead of the bed, instead of her image of Nell, she sees the plate glass window of the petrol station. Three women looking out at her, her looking in at them. The revelation makes her heart beat faster: they were seeing only her. But she was seeing them, and in front of them, like a frail replica of the real thing, she saw herself.

  Okay, Nell, she says, I’m going to tell you. But I have to step back to see it.

  The light goes very thin again, and then it’s gone. If she put her eye to the crack in the door, all she’d see would be black. It must be years, she thinks, and to stop the fizzing in her chest, she plays I Spy.

  The boy came earlier with a bottle of pink lemonade and a fruit. It had fur on it: a peach. And he had a sandwich wrapped in silver paper, but she wouldn’t eat it. She told him she wanted her mummy, and he said, She’s not ready for you yet. She’s upset. And he’s got to be on his plane. We don’t want him coming back and spoiling everything, do we? And at first she thought he meant Leon, so then she worried about Nell, and what would she do all alone, and then she worried about the postman with the something eyes. Then she remembered a song they used to like singing. They were all going to look for America. When she’d asked what a merica was, Nell told her it was a massive country far away where all the westerns were filmed. You had to catch a plane to get there. She didn’t know if Nell would go on the plane with Leon, or how she would find them in such a big place. It was a bad worry.

  The boy must have seen it, the worry worming around inside her, because he sat close to her on the bench and said in a soft voice,

  Do you like horses?

  And when she didn’t say anything, he asked,

  Do you like boats? I like them.

  And when she still said nothing, he said,

  You must be very tired. Shall I sing you to sleep?

  And in a quiet, high voice, he sang a song she’d never heard before. She listened very carefully. A song about a storm, about a boat on a stormy sea, about an anchor. She didn’t know what an anchor was, but she didn’t like the sound of it, the way the word broke in two inside his mouth. Or the way he laughed at his singing, made a joke about his pillows, how the pillows rolled. It made her think of Nell and Leon in the big bed.

  She must have fallen asleep, though, because when she wakes, the boy is gone. But the worry is back again, crouched like a toad in a corner of the dark.

  There’s a lump on her eye with a cut down the middle of it, and she touches it, and the feel of the cut under her fingers is ragged like the hem of Nell’s dress.

  The line of light is wide again, and she wakes up and moves off the slats that have been hard on her back and looks through the gap into the open. She sees a lot of children crossing the courtyard, going under the shade of a tree and round to the front of the house. She’s about to shout for her mother, but remembers that the dog will come and eat her if she talks, so she sings instead. But no one can hear her for the sound their feet make on the gravel.

  She stays at the crack, smelling the air, which tastes like light. She wonders if she’s been put in here because
she has to be cured, like Nell’s fur hat. She hears singing. It’s very faint, but not on the radio; she can tell it’s not on the radio because they keep stopping and starting, and when they stop there’s a sound like a stick being tapped on wood. That’s what makes them stop. And again, says a voice, and they start up once more:

  Each little flower that opens

  Each little bird that sings

  He made their glowing colours

  He made their tiny wings.

  Maggie tries to focus on the words on the page, sees how some of them are blotched from where the ink has smudged. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand. What did you do, Nell? she says, You never told me that, either. What did you do when you found me gone?

  Nell’s not an early riser, so when she opens one eye to look at the clock and sees it’s only just gone six, she rolls over into the middle of the bed and wraps her smooth leg around Leon’s hairy one, and falls back to sleep. At nine, she sits up with a start and shakes Leon’s shoulder.

  Where’s Bird? she says, because it’s my habit to climb into bed with them as soon as I wake up, which is often quite early, and sing to them. Nell sees my empty bed and the open door and she knows in her bones that I’m in the river.

  Get the river man, she says, Get the police. Why don’t you do something?

  Leon gestures wildly, as if, like a conjurer, he can make her panic disappear simply by waving his hands.

  I’ll get Bryce, he says, But no police, not yet. She might have just wandered off. Let’s have a search round, okay? Okay?

  They go to Meadow Cottage first, along the river and down through the back lanes, where Nell keeps looking over the hedgerows, expecting to find me in a ditch. Mrs Baggs, in her long apron, gathers her children into her body, as if they too are in danger of being lost.