by Jack Lewis
The car drifted to the right. Billy looked in his rear view mirror and then turned the steering wheel, blocking the car from overtaking. He smiled as he obstructed the road.
He’d always had a competitive streak. When she met him he was in the university football, rugby, cricket, and power Frisbee teams. Billy was never happier than when he was looking into the forlorn face of someone he’d beaten. It was endearing for a while, but when the competitiveness extended to things at home like who earned the most money, it began to grate.
“Come on, Billy. They could be rushing to hospital or something.”
“The nearest hospital’s fifty miles back that way. Thought you’d know that, given this is Tamara country.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much grass and so many trees. Didn’t think it’d look so dreary, though. It’s hardly Little House on the Prairie,” he said.
The car behind edged to the left, so Billy swerved to block their way.
“Just let them pass us.”
He sighed.
“Fine.”
He steered over to the side. The car behind didn’t seize the gap at first, but then Tamara heard the drone of their engine as they revved up. As they drew beside, she saw two teenagers in the car. The one in the passenger seat held his middle finger up to her.
Billy was right about the countryside. Far from lush plains and cresting hills, this was a landscape of dry, brittle grass and grey skies. They passed crop fields where the produce had been plucked out to show mounds in the mud. The ground was covered by something that looked like moss, and it reminded her of the moors where, decades ago, dead bodies had been found.
He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. She always hated the way he held it with one hand. Such a cavalier way of driving, as though he was the king of the road and sitting in the driver’s seat made him invulnerable.
“I was thinking,” he said, “about the bar. I found this great place by Appleby’s Tailors and the DVD store. I was talking to a guy who owns it, and he can give it to us for next to nothing.”
“How much is next to nothing?”
He gave her a sideways glance, and she saw a grin curl on his lips.
“Ten K for a year,” he said, speaking the words so softly that the rattle almost drowned them.
“Ten thousand pounds? Are you kidding? That’s all our savings, Billy. What about buying a house? Finally going on our honeymoon? Christ, what if something really bad happens and we need the cash?”
He sighed.
“Always bad omens with you, Tam.”
“You’re moving way too fast.”
“Come on. This could work. The city is crying out for a whiskey bar. Something better than the dance clubs and dingy old men’s pubs. You know, proper nectar, ice clinking in glasses. Give me one good reason why it won’t work.”
She felt like a hunter who’d watched game fall into her trap. It had taken a while, but he’d finally gone down this path, and she was ready for it. She took a breath.
“Number one, you might pay rent on the place for a year, but what about fitting it? I’m guessing it didn’t used to be a bar.”
“It was a butcher’s shop.”
“Two, what about stock? All those whiskeys you showed me from around the world, I’m betting they don’t come cheap. Three, where’s your business plan? And I don’t just mean something in your head, Bill. I mean an actual plan. Written on paper. Ideally a presentation too.”
He waved his free hand at her dismissively.
“Come on. You know my parents owned a pub. I worked behind the bar as soon as I was old enough to reach it.”
She knew that his mum and dad used to own a pub called the Septic Tank. It had been in the Deacon family for decades, but then a rum bar had opened next door and muscled it out of business. Once, Billy had driven her there to see it. She remembered the boarded-up windows, and the pub sign whining as it swung from its metal fixings. The rum bar had shut down, too, and both buildings sat on a lonely road.
She didn’t like being the one to take a dump on his dreams. After all, Billy had supported her while she shopped herself out to publishing houses as an editor and waited for one of them to respond. The problem was that he was stuck in the past, trapped in a time where his dad stood behind the bar and laughed and joked as he filled pint glasses. Tamara was the opposite; she was trying to get away from the past, but she felt it reach out of the pits of time and grab her ankles and drag her back in.
“Look, I’m not saying never, okay? Just not yet.”
“Fine,” he huffed.
“You’re annoyed.”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah you are. Your dimples are twitching.”
“It’s this air. The compost stinks.”
He glanced at her tattoo again, and this time he didn’t hide his glare. Knowing how much he hated it, she thought about covering it up. Then she thought, no. Why should I? If he doesn’t like it, it’s his problem.
Billy took a right turn and drove the car onto a country road. There were stone walls on either side stacked up like a game of Jenga and just waiting for someone to dislodge one and send the whole structure tumbling apart. The road was so narrow that the sides of the car almost scraped against the stone.
The sky seemed to get darker, and the air grew colder. Billy concentrated on the road in front of him. He seemed uneasy with the tightness of it, and put both his hands on the wheel. Over in the fields amongst the dead grass, an electricity pylon stood alone, as if on watch.
Billy slowed the car to a stop. There was a cattle grid in front of them, and a lorry tried to manoeuvre over it. The gap was so tight that the driver hunched over the wheel and stared with concentration.
Tamara glanced to her right and was taken aback to see two young boys sitting on the stone wall. One dangled his legs and swayed his feet side to side, while the other kept the soles of his shoes on a slab of stone that stuck out from the wall. Both had faces as pale as the sky above them. The one dangling his legs smiled at her, while the other seemed to be crying.
She stared ahead. The lorry inched forward, wheels screeching as they drove over the metal of the grid. In the distance, poking out through a patch of trees like a thorn, she saw the roof of Towneley Manor.
“I Googled your family name,” said Billy. He stared ahead at the lorry and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “I found some weird stuff. Had to go down to page five in the end, but it was pretty interesting.”
She felt irritation rise inside her.
“Come on, Bill. Don’t.”
“Yeah,” he continued. “Your great, great, great, great grandfather…is that enough greats? Anyway, he was pretty famous, apparently. He used to be in the magic circle, but they struck him out. He did loads of shows all over the Northwest, but then he suddenly stopped. One of his old assistants sued him, said she was injured in one of his tricks.”
She tried to ignore him. She knew it had always been an issue for Billy that she never told him her family name. For years she’d just say she was Tamara. He’d say ‘Tamara who?’ and she’d answer, ‘Tamara Nobody.’ It was only when they went to get their marriage license that she had to tell him that her surname was Towneley.
“So yeah,” said Billy, “he was a pretty weird guy. Found out some more about the estate, too. Did you know that monks used to hide in Towneley Manor to escape persecution? Only, things got a little heated when some of the monks went missing. Most people thought that they’d absconded; that temptation had gotten the better of them, and they’d got tired of giving themselves to God.
“And then there was a load of crap about the Heritage Society. Looks like your family has bickered with them for years over construction on the house.”
The irritation built up to bubbling point. She remembered an exercise Shukla had told her, one of deep breaths and calm places. It didn’t work.
“Just shut the hell up, okay, Bill?
You know I don’t like to hear about this stuff. What about if I started talking about every single time your football team lost? Or I started harping on when you had a bad game?”
Billy hit the steering wheel with his palm. She could tell he struck it a little harder than he meant to.
“Hardly the same, is it?” he said. “Talking about a football match and hiding your real name from me. I feel like I don’t even know who you are sometimes.”
“You’ve known me for the last eight years. That’s who I am. Is that not enough?”
He sighed.
“I don’t even know about your parents or your family.”
The lorry trundled over the last grid and then rumbled past them. Billy found his biting point and moved the car forward. Tamara stared out of the window. She recognised some of the fields around them, but it had been so long that they felt alien to her. She looked back at her husband.
“My dad’s dead now, and my mum’s a bitch. That enough for you? Or do you need to hear about how they packed me off to boarding school because they couldn’t be bothered looking after me? Need to know any more? I don’t like to talk about it, Bill. Let the past be the past.”
“It’s not the past if it’s affecting your present.”
“Jesus. Have you been talking to Dr. Shukla?”
He looked at her, and smiled.
“I just want to know more about my wife. That’s normal, isn’t it? I care about you.”
She knew that most of it came from good intentions, but she couldn’t help thinking that there was something else there. He had a nagging curiosity, and she knew that Towneley Manor and the Towneley family were subjects best left unquestioned. She couldn’t even believe he had talked her into going to see Magda. Fall or not, her mum didn’t deserve the time of day.
“Speaking of parents,” she said, “it’s someone’s birthday soon.”
She’d bought him a bottle of Aultmore twenty-five-year-old whiskey. It cost a few hundred pounds and drained what little she’d earned from odd temp jobs, but it would be worth it. His face was going to be a picture.
“Don’t change the subject,” said Billy.
They rode the rest of the way in silence that was only marked by the rattling of the engine and the screeching of birds somewhere above. Tamara felt the air around them change, and when she looked ahead she saw the woods that marked the start of Towneley Manor.
The trees were spindly and bare, as if an alopecia epidemic had stricken the woodland and none had recovered. A pale mist made the air look thicker and gave the forest a dull glow. She remembered walking through the woods the morning they sent her to boarding school. Mum and dad didn’t take her, and instead let the bus driver come fetch her. Neither of them talked as they walked over the rough path. She felt cold, as though icy hands were grabbing her wrists. She felt them pull her. She looked up at the driver and saw that he wasn’t affected by the same sensation.
Billy stopped the car and pulled the handbrake.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I just want to take in some of this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“You’ve never been in the woods before? Come on.”
He wound his window down a touch and let the chilly breeze fill the car. Tamara pulled her coat tighter against her.
“I’m a city boy. Closest I’ve been to the woods is when we nearly went paintballing for my stag.”
The woods were murky, and it was hard to see further than ten feet. It was as though they were out of focus, or worse, that there were things hidden amongst the bracken and gangling trees that she wasn’t supposed to see. A dark bird flapped across the forest and settled into a tree, shuffling along a limb and then disappearing into a black hole in the trunk. From another tree, a ragged t-shirt hung from a branch and swayed in the wind.
She heard a cracking sound from behind the car. She wound her window down and looked out to see a deer stood a few yards away. It stared at her with black eyes that allowed not even an inch of colour. Its sharp ears pricked up, and it stood perfectly still for the longest time.
Tamara felt something pull at her head. It was some unseen force trying to break the spell of the deer, trying to drag her gaze across the woods to a different part, somewhere she shouldn’t see. It was begging her to turn her head. She felt a cold fuzz work up her legs and then across her waist. She knew what lay beyond the dark haze of the shrubbery, but she wouldn’t look at it. Even after all these years, how could it affect her so much? It was just an orangery, for God’s sake. Someone had bricked up the windows. So what? It wasn’t like she’d even been in there before. There was no frame of reference for the shivers that crept over the skin of her back when she thought about it.
She reached across and turned the key in the ignition.
“Hey,” said Billy.
“Let’s go.”
He drove the car over the path. Parts of the asphalt had cracked from years without maintenance. Where once bright lights shone from the side of the pathway, now there were just metal casings housing dead bulbs. The car bumped and scraped over the road until finally, Towneley Manor stood before them.
It was humongous and wide, a crumbling brick-built monster blotting out the sky. Shadows hung over doors and below windows where the daylight couldn’t reach, and some windows had been boarded up with plywood. Birds perched on the roof and regarded the landscape around them with stern gazes. An oak tree reached thirty feet into the air. It had been there ever since Tamara was a girl, and probably decades before that, too. Who knew what it had seen in its time near the manor. Now its crooked branches had grown so close to the house that it reached toward it, skinny twigs prying at the window frame nearby.
If a house can be said to have a face, then Towneley Manor’s was that of a miser; a face wracked with age and tormented by the bitterness of its past, shadows hanging under its window ledges like bags beneath menacing eyes. As the car rolled on it seemed like the manor willed them toward it, and she thought that the front door might open like a mouth and swallow them deep into the bowels of the house.
This is where we should turn back, she thought. It was a moment that would affect her forever; a stain on her life that never fade away. The warning was ominous. We should turn back.
It was lucky Billy was driving. Had Tamara been behind the wheel, she would have turned the wheel and hit forty miles per hour down the asphalt path, passing the misty trees and staring deer and lurking orangery, and never looking back until the compost-tinged air of the countryside was a memory.
Instead, the wheel of the car crunched on the gravel as Billy pulled up outside the manor. In front of it stood a tall man in an ill-fitting suit and beside him, sat in a wheelchair and a dog on either side, was her mum, Magda.
Chapter Three
The dining room looked as it used to, but at the same time it felt like she wasn’t comparing it to real memories but to a photograph that she’d seen again and again, and now she was viewing the room in person for the first time.
The dark of dusk pressed against the window pane that spread across one wall of the room, and white drapes fluttered at a breeze that seemed to have no source. The carpet felt stiff as she trod on it. She remembered Magda scolding her once for running through with a bottle of juice, warning her of the damage a stain could do to such an old carpet. Now, half the carpet had been ripped up to reveal naked timber that groaned when weight was pressed onto it.
There was a long dining table in the middle of the room, gobbling up the biggest share of floor space. Twenty chairs sat empty around it, and the flower-patterned tablecloth sported the marks of feasts eaten long ago, with gravy and turkey stains forever encrusted into the fabric. In all her time at Towneley, Tamara had never seen the chairs around the dinner table full. She had no idea why her parents had always insisted on having so many around it, nor why they even kept such a big table in the first place. It was so large that it felt like you were sharing a meal over an astral pl
ane, and passing the salt required NASA-level planning.
The room was narrower than she remembered it. Across from the windowed wall was one that had been stripped back to bare essentials. The wallpaper had been removed to show weathered panelling, with the wood stained dark in some places but light in others. There was a paper drawing on the wall of a man with dark circles where his eyes should be. It was obviously done by a child.
“I kept them all,” said Magda, catching her looking. “Every single drawing you ever did.”
After parking outside the manor, Magda had insisted they go in for dinner. There was no hello and no hugs, not that Tamara would have allowed one. It felt like in Magda’s eyes, Tamara had just popped to the shops for an hour. She wanted to go to their room and get settled, but Magda insisted. Larry’s been cooking for hours, haven’t you, Larry? The tall man gave a grave nod.
