The culvert was empty when they reached it, and while the disturbed snow could have been made by any creature in panic, there was nothing to suggest it had been made by anything so specific as the boy William had seen.
Stephen picked his way around the remains, turning over a ruined fortress wall with his toe. He glanced back at William.
'Liar.' He said it with half a smile as though he was still capable of playing along. 'I might have known you'd make a scene.'
He looked out to the edge of the copse where the adjoining field of grey fallow grass stretched upwards to the curve of the hillside.
Already he was tiring of the game. He turned on his heel and marched back the way they had come. When William didn't follow him immediately, Stephen stopped and looked back.
'Father's calling,' he said.
William shook his head stubbornly. He'd not heard anything, but he followed anyway as he always did.
*
That evening, William's father did something he'd never done before. He came to visit his youngest son in his bedroom. Still wearing his hunting clothes, he brought the smell of smoke and sulphur into the narrow room on the second floor.
At first, neither of them spoke a word. William had already been in bed, and at the sound of the door opening, he'd swung out from under the covers to sit on the edge of the frame. A stripe of shadow hid his father's face, but William felt his eyes on him. Sharp and unwavering, they trapped him where he sat.
His father cleared his throat.
'You must be patient with your brother,' he said. 'Stephen is experiencing new things, a world away from this life you've both become used to. You need time. You both need time.'
He turned to go and for a moment, William saw Stephen was waiting in the hallway outside. He too was dressed in his outdoor clothes. There was a lantern at his feet and something tall propped by his side which glinted brief and dull grey in the shaft of moonlight that fell through the window. William recognised the wooden stock he had seen the day before, wrapped in cloth and hanging across Briggs' back.
His father turned back to William, blocking the view; his watch chain glinted in the hallway light like the flash of a smile.
'You mustn't be jealous of him,' he said. 'Next year you'll be at Greyhurst yourself. Next year, you'll understand.'
He pulled the door to, and it was open barely a crack when he spoke again.
'Next year, William,' he said, 'it'll be you.'
He closed the door. Somewhere outside, a dog barked. And once again, William was alone.
Breadcrumbs
Ellie is alone in her bedroom on the fifteenth floor. She sits crossed-legged on her bed, a brightly illustrated book in her lap that has been passed down from her mother, from her grandmother. Its cover has faded with age, its spine is creased and broken, but the pages are still vivid, their stories preserved. Her hands rest upon the illustration of a beautiful white cat, its head bowed and docile before a prince with a sword.
Ellie has read it so often, on any other day, she would recite from it by heart.
But not today. Today, her parents have grounded her. Today, she's angry.
Let's say they've gone to a ball. Mum, Dad, Louis, they've gone to a big charity number in some enormous villa out on the coast. It would be a grand affair and simply everyone will be there. If Ellie were to turn on the television right now, one of the entertainment networks would almost certainly be covering it.
Ellie doesn't turn on the TV. She never wanted to go to the wretched thing in the first place. She has no one to go with anyway. Who goes to a ball with only their parents? But now she's been denied the opportunity to hate it first hand, it hurts that she was not allowed to go; it's not the sort of hurt to draw blood but it will bruise and, cultivated with the right kind of resentment, this bruise will last.
For her own amusement, she composes vengeful fantasies, relishing the excesses her imagination refuses to censor.
Witness this:
Her father, she feeds to a wolf in drag. He is swallowed whole, his hands and face press desperately against the elastic of the animal's belly. The wolf relaxes; he reads a paperback while he waits for the struggling to subside. Maybe her father will suffocate in there? Maybe he'll be digested piece by piece. Either way, it proves to be a slow process, but the wolf for one is content to wait.
Her mother is set upon by charcoal-coloured carrion birds. They fluster around her face and her hands flap weakly in return. The birds overwhelm her, their heads jab at her, swift and sharp. Pluck! Pluck! Mother's mouth is a wide O; her palms cover her eyes to stem tears that run red, then black, then blacker still.
And little Louis? Louis reaches for an apple from a chest made of iron. As he peers inside, the heavy lid wavers in a current of air. It falls with a clang and a snap and, perfectly headless, Louis sits back in surprise. Ellie scoops up his remains and pops him in the pot she's prepared on the stove. She cooks him on low through the best part of the day, until the meat, such as it is, falls tender from the bone.
Backtrack, backtrack. Maybe that's too much, even for her. Let's say this instead: Louis is dressed up in some preposterous little tuxedo he insisted their parents had made for him; a suit that makes him appear too old, too small, too novel. He joins them like their very own sideshow act, trotting along behind Papa, trying to mimic the cadence of his walk.
Louis. Louis. Ghastly little beast.
That, if nothing else, is true.
She imagines the three of them at the ball without her and, because she is not there, it must be a gaudy, tasteless thing; not her scene at all. She pictures her family entering the ballroom at the top of a sweeping staircase, their names are announced and the revellers, who are already circling the dance floor, turn to stare. Conversation dims in the cavernous hall; the guests lower their masks and gawp at the new arrivals. Is it really them? Are they really here? No one wonders where Ellie might be. No one knows she even exists.
As Ellie bounds off the bed, the book slips from the sheets and lands tented on the floor. She ignores it and crashes through her bedroom, crossing the hall towards the front door.
If this were a network TV show, a boy would climb through her window and they'd kiss and the credits would roll and that would be a nice way to end things. Being a network TV show, the boy would be dark-eyed and square-jawed and have perfect skin, none of which would be bad things at all.
No one climbs through her window; the apartment is far too high up for that. Maybe she'd get a window cleaner if she was lucky, but a prince? Sometimes life could be so goddamn unfair.
In her story, the white cat is a cursed princess who asks the prince to cut off her head and her tail with his sword. This is how the curse is lifted; this is how she becomes the beautiful woman she always was; this is how they fall in love and get married.
If this were a network TV show, the audience would complain if the hero took a sword to the cat. Audiences today had no faith in real magic. The boy would be arrested even if the princess did turn out to be beautiful. Cats are more important than princesses, so why change at all?
The apartment is enormous today. Acres of marble, miles of crushed velvet. If she cannot go to the ball, then let the apartment become palatial instead. Maybe it's not on the fifteenth floor after all. Let's say it's a penthouse, a penthouse with views over the glittering majesty of the central district. It is a castle on top of a tower of rock.
Ellie opens the door and leaves it wide. She ducks down the hall to number 1513 and hammers on the door. Jan opens it. He's wearing a vest and drying his hands on a towel. He gives her a look which she absolutely doesn't deserve.
'Hey, El,' he says. 'Thought you said you wanted to be alone?'
She had said that. For all of half an hour, the book had seemed like a good idea. But it's difficult to be alone in her flat, what with the maid – yes, the maid, why not? – pottering about in the kitchen, singing some horrible song from wherever the hell it is she comes from.
'I am the least loved member of my family,' Ellie declares. 'I'm probably adopted. I'm an unloved stepchild of a wicked, wicked queen. I'm probably one of her charity projects.'
Jan looks at her.
'Very Dickensian,' he says. 'You know that means you'll probably end up marrying your brother?'
'Jan! Gross.'
'It's a Victorian thing. They thought it was a happy ending.'
'Jan, cut it out.'
She stares at him, saucer-eyed and pouting.
Jan holds firm, but only so he can prove he's doing her a favour when he finally relents.
'Alright, come on in, then.' He looks past her. 'You left your door open,' he says.
'The maid can get it.'
'Maid?' Jan shakes his head. 'Jesus, Ellie.'
Jan's apartment is smaller than hers. It's less tidy too, worn around the edges and cluttered with teetering stacks of books and paperwork which can find no room in the clogged bookcases or the overflowing desk. Ellie makes herself comfortable on the sofa.
'They hate me,' she says. 'The treat me like a servant. They wouldn't even let me go to their silly ball.'
Jan sits beside her.
'They've gone to visit your aunt,' he says. 'She's in hospital. She had a fall, remember?'
Fall. Ball. Whatever.
Ellie shoots him a look. She shouldn't have to explain something so obvious. Jan shakes his head.
'Coffee,' he says. It's not a question, it's an excuse. He gets up and disappears into the kitchen.
Klee comes in from the bedroom. He's wearing a kimono and has the paper folded to the crossword. He doesn't acknowledge Ellie as he sits in the armchair and puts his feet on the coffee table.
'We babysitting?' Klee says to Jan when he comes back in. He doesn't look up from his paper; his pen totters above it. Ellie doesn't waste a look on him; he wouldn't see it after all.
'We're keeping an eye out,' Jan says. 'Accounts are conflicting, but according to princess here, mom and pop are at some charity ball and the maid is being too loud and ethnic.' He arranges coffee mugs on the table, shoving Klee's feet off as he does so.
Klee scowls.
'I sympathise,' he says. 'These days, you simply can't get the staff.'
'Well we could use some help with all the shit you leave behind,' Jan says. 'What's the going rate for make-believe maids these days?'
'An imagination would be a start.' Klee writes something furious into his crossword.
'I'm too old to have a babysitter,' Ellie says. She's nearly fifteen after all; it sounds plenty old enough to her.
'And yet here you are.' Klee reaches for the nearest mug and smiles at her; a well-oiled expression, it comes to him with ease, but it lacks sincerity.
Ellie looks away and imagines something better.
*
The coffee relaxes her; she has always been contrary. She sits back on Jan and Klee's sofa and lets it give around her. Her fictions shed from her like stubborn orange peel. They flake off in pieces; they leave a residue so she can almost still believe.
Lou is at his friend's place, somewhere across town. He wouldn't be seen dead in a tux. He's a baseball cap and T-shirt sort of kid and defiantly so. Mum and Dad are visiting Auntie B who took a tumble down the stairs. Claudia, Auntie B's twelve-year-old Jack Russell, had a stroke on the unlit landing. The poor mutt fell in a lump at the top of the stairs, solidifying into a trip hazard that sent Auntie B cartwheeling down to the lobby when she was walking about the house shouting the animal's name.
Mum and Dad worry about Auntie B. Auntie B is sad and lonely and needs people to worry about her or she might forget she exists at all. Once upon a time, she had been married, but there was no happy ending there: Uncle Bill went on to have a family with someone else but he was equally miserable. Auntie B remained alone, and now her dog was dead and she was in hospital with a broken who-knows-what.
Dad told Ellie how Auntie B lay at the foot of the stairs screaming, not because her back was folding up in a way it wasn't supposed to, but because when she had fallen, she had kicked Claudia loose from where she had lain, and made her roll down the stairs to meet Auntie B at the bottom. They lay there, nose-to-nose, and Auntie B couldn't move an inch.
Ellie shouldn't have laughed. She knew that at the time.
Don't laugh, she'd told herself, but she could feel it brewing up inside her, making her face red and hot as she tried to keep it down. The image was like something from a cartoon and she couldn't keep her amusement to herself. It demanded to be shared. Her laugh came out as a bark and it kept coming, leaving her breathless.
Ellie still remembers the look her mother gave her after that. It was the sort of look she might have given to a stranger she'd found in her home. In that moment, it was as though Ellie was no part of her. She was no longer her daughter, just a penance she didn't deserve. Her mother didn't say anything. She just turned her back and walked away.
In her room, Ellie had listened to her parents arguing over whose fault she was. The walls in the place were so thin she heard everything they said.
'Always with the fucking stories.' Her dad's voice sounded as though it had been folded up into an accusation and hurled across the room. He only used language like that when he thought he and her mother were alone.
'I'm right here,' Ellie said to the wall, but she spoke quietly, as though by not being overheard, any curse which had been placed upon her might lose its grip and drift away.
Because Ellie was worried about Auntie B too. She really was, because if Auntie B could one day find her way through the woods to a happy ending, then perhaps she could leave a trail for others to follow.
In the lounge in flat 1513, Jan nudges her awake.
'Hey kid,' he says. 'It's getting late. You sleeping here, or at home?'
Ellie blinks at him.
'Are they back yet?'
Klee is in the doorway. Jan looks to him for an answer.
'Not yet,' Klee says.
*
Flat 1512 feels bigger now she's alone. Not palatial, but the rooms she must fight to dominate on a normal day feel too stretched, too spacious now she has the whole place to herself.
Maybe it's the same size as Jan's flat after all. Jan's is different enough, its rooms are flipped tip-over-tail which makes it makes it hard to judge.
The heat of her anger has dissipated and the absence of everyone else makes her shiver. She wonders if her family are coming home at all. She imagines them in the wood, following the breadcrumbs Auntie B left behind, picking them up as they go so Ellie can't follow. She feels her eyes sting and her throat prickle.
Looking for distraction, she stands at the window in the sitting room and stares out at the world beneath her. She's always preferred the view at night. The estate looks so bleak in the daytime, but now, the grey concrete of the surrounding tower blocks is consumed by the encroaching dark and only the lights remain. Dot-to-dot clues which her imagination mis-draws to denote superstructures coiling up into the night. The lights of the traffic on the distant bypass? Those aren't cars grounded on the road, they're flying machines on an express route, looping the loop at the intersection. She cocks her head and watches them fly.
In the flat next door, Mrs Kiesmoski's radio is still playing that godawful music. A chorus of very determined men singing about something very important to them. She can almost hear them punching the air in time with the drum and the brass. Ellie considers hammering on the partition but Mrs Kiesmoski would only turn the volume up. Ellie's mum complained once. Well-mannered, in that way of hers, she dressed it up as an excuse: 'I'm waiting for a phone call and I won't hear it ring…' Mrs Kiesmoski told her it was all she had of home, so mum could kindly fuck off. And that's exactly what Ellie's mum did. She fucked off, but oh-so-politely. She backed out of Mrs Kiesmoski's flat making little apologetic noises. Ellie's mum really wasn't one to make a scene.
Ellie goes back to the room she shares with her brother. His bed is still in the mess he left
it in that morning and she wonders how long it should go undisturbed before she might consider it a monument. But her appetite for revenge has dulled and the morbidity of the thought is distasteful to her.
She rescues her book from the floor and curls up on her bed with it. She teases it open with her thumb, enough for the smell of oxidised paper to promise something familiar, something magical, but she feels heavy and tired. Even though the little white cat tilts its head and winks at her from the pages, she lets the book fall shut again and tries closing her eyes as well.
When she was small, she would tell herself stories at night because she thought it would make her dream. She thought of it like getting a car to start on a cold morning. She would give the story a push and then, at some point, her subconscious imagination would kick into gear and take her for a ride which would last her through the night. But it didn't work like that. She'd get too involved in her own narratives and they'd keep her awake as she tried to figure out how her stories would end.
As she lies on the bed, something inside of her flutters; something light and beautiful growing and stretching deep in the marrow of her. Ellie feels its eagerness, its impatience, but she ignores it and fills herself with blank and empty thoughts. She does not tell herself a story to help her sleep.
*
At first the urgent knock on the front door sounds like part of a dream she wasn't aware she was having. She glances at the bedside clock and sees it has advanced by hours.
Woozy, she stumbles to her feet and answers the door.
Jan is there, his eyes a little wild.
'You've got to see this,' he says.
He leads her down the corridor to the stairwell, he's almost hopping with impatience. There's something electric in the air and the doors to the other flats are all open; the neighbours are milling about on the threadbare hallway carpet. Ellie sees Mrs Kiesmoski talking to Klee, her arms are folded as a defensive measure. Ellie notices the music is off. No wonder she slept as well as she did.
You Will Grow Into Them Page 5
