Once the removal men had gone she sat on the floor in the hall and wondered what to do next. The floor was filthy, but the chairs were piled high with boxes and the idea of removing them seemed like too much effort. Most of what she had brought to the cottage was Jude’s. Her mother had taken a couple of things—a chinoiserie drinks cabinet she had always liked, and a walnut coffee table—and Vinnie had been inclined to get rid of the rest. Without Jude it was simply junk, a collation of expensive bric-a-brac without context or purpose, but Margo had been entranced by it. She said they should keep it to furnish Sharps Cottage.
“Shouldn’t we be going for something simpler?” Vinnie said. “Scrubbed pine or something?” She remembered seeing something about scrubbed pine in one of Margo’s house magazines.
“That distressed look is so last decade,” Margo said. “Your aunt’s stuff is going to look amazing. Trust me.”
Now it was stacked in packing cases in the sitting room. Vinnie made herself a cup of instant soup and toyed with the idea of simply abandoning Sharps Cottage and returning to London. She had nowhere to live now of course, but at least with Jude’s money she could afford to stay in a hotel for a week or two while she made up her mind what to do. It was five o’clock by her watch. Even with the walk into Chilham she could still be arriving at Charing Cross Station in less than three hours.
She rinsed the soup mug under the tap and went outside. The back door was rotten at the base and loose in its frame. Like everything else in the house it needed replacing. The door opened on to an ugly concrete yard, cluttered with plastic buckets and various other gardening receptacles, all of them brimming over with rainwater. Beyond the yard was the patch of land the estate agent’s particulars had optimistically referred to as a paddock. Vinnie stared out across the mass of unkempt grass she supposed was now her property and tried to work her way towards a decision. The problem with returning to London was that there was nothing to go back to. She had given up her job along with the flat, the idea being that she and Margo would renovate Sharps Cottage and use it as the base for Margo’s property refurbishment business. The business as such did not exist yet, but Margo was confident that the experience they would gain from doing up the cottage would put them in an ideal position to start one. There was always Jude’s money to fall back on if things went wrong.
“It’s lucky you’re so good with figures, Vin,” Margo had said. “It leaves me free to get on with the creative stuff.”
Vinnie had the uncomfortable feeling that the only thing Margo was being creative with was her concept of how much money they had. The difference in price between Jude’s small apartment and the cottage in Chilham was not nearly as vast as Margo liked to make out, and whichever way you looked at it the money would not last forever.
In the end, Vinnie was not sure what it was that made her change her mind about leaving, the idea of being beaten by Margo or the idea of having wasted Jude’s money. But as she gazed at the rain-glazed concrete and sodden grass she had a sudden vision of scrubbed floor tiles and white walls, the back door mended, the monster bedstead polished and gleaming. The electrics and plumbing were beyond her of course, but the rest of it was mostly just cleaning. Margo had been right about that, if nothing else. It might even be fun, she thought. How difficult can it be?
She saw how the land sloped, dropping gently towards a small declivity bisected by a narrow tea-coloured stream. Three willows overhung the stream. The rain had stopped, and the long grass was stippled with sunlight. There was a smell of damp earth, loamy and rich and reminding her of fruit cake, although the two scents were actually quite different. A blackbird was singing from the branches of one of the willows.
Vinnie listened to it for a moment then returned to the house. She wished now she had thought to get some food in before the shops shut, but she had instant noodles and more Cup-a-Soup, enough to see her through until the morning. She managed to unearth the television and set it up in the narrow back room adjoining the kitchen, where by some miracle there was a working aerial socket. She drank instant coffee and watched the news and thought about Jude. It was a full nine months since her death, yet the finality of it still caught her off guard.
Unlikely though it seemed, she thought Jude would approve of Sharps Cottage. The one thing Jude hated was routine, and the move to Chilham, if nothing else, was a break from the norm. It was a new beginning, a story whose eventual outcome she could not predict. She remembered how much Jude had loved to retell anecdotes from her travels, the more outlandish and unlikely the better. Some of Jude’s stories had been quite frightening. The one about the fairy skulls for instance had secretly terrified her, although the fairy skull bracelet was one of the few things of Jude’s that Vinnie knew she intended to keep. It was a macabre thing, but it fascinated her. In the months since Jude’s death she had come to believe that her aunt’s evasiveness about where the bracelet had come from was probably down to the fact that she had acquired it illegally.
It was perhaps because of this that she had shown the bracelet to someone she knew from college, a guy called Matt who now worked in the valuations department of Sotheby’s.
When she asked him about the laws on importing ivory he said she had nothing to worry about.
“The skulls are made of bone,” he said. “You see these black dots? That’s blood, the remains of the cardiovascular system. Ivory doesn’t have that, nor does plastic or resin. It’s the first thing we look for in a piece like this.” He pointed with the tip of his thumb, and she saw that the white surface of each skull was pitted with tiny black dimples. Vinnie had never noticed them before. She thought they looked like pen marks.
“Is the bracelet valuable?” she said.
He gave her a look, the kind of look that seemed to ask, are you crazy?
“You do know it’s gold, right?” he said. “The chain alone must be at least three ounces.”
“Three-and-a-half. I weighed it on the kitchen scales.” She kept it locked away after that.
Vinnie shivered. She could not help remembering that the fairy skull bracelet was the one item from Jude’s estate that Margo had always been pressing her to get rid of. Also, Sharps Cottage had no heating. The ancient boiler had been deemed unsafe to use, and if she wanted hot water she would have to boil it in the kettle. She decided to go to bed. Any improvements would have to wait until the morning. She hunted out the bed linen, feeling glad she hadn’t cancelled the new mattress, and fell asleep with the light on. The radio was playing the midnight news. She woke up with a start just after two, uncertain of what had disturbed her but knowing nonetheless that something had. She snapped off the radio and kept still, hoping to get a sense of what had woken her. The house rustled and wheezed like an old man turning over in his sleep, but there were no sudden or loud noises and in the end she drifted back off to sleep.
She woke again at seven, confused about where she was, then remembering and feeling glad. She asked herself if she missed Margo. The answer came back immediately: not much.
She washed herself in cold water then dressed quickly and went downstairs. On the floor in the hall was a wire scrubbing brush. Vaguely remembering placing it on top of the radiator the evening before, she supposed it must have slipped off somehow during the night. It must have been this that had woken her. She picked it up, pleased to have the mystery solved, and stowed it in the cupboard under the stairs. There was a musky smell inside, mice probably. Mice were inevitable house guests if you lived in the country, Vinnie had read, and in buildings of a certain age the mouse dynasties stretched back even further than the human. She supposed she could live with that. Just so long as it wasn’t rats.
She breakfasted on coffee and Ryvita, working out a plan of campaign. She decided that fixing the boiler would be her first priority. She selected a heating engineer at random from an ancient copy of the Yellow Pages she found in the kitchen pantry, then walked the half mile into Chilham to buy some basic provisions. When she returned to the cotta
ge an hour later, the door to the kitchen was standing ajar and a box of washing powder had been tipped over. There was a blue-white trail of Persil across the tiles. The back door needed fixing, she knew that already.
Vinnie’s heart raced as she went through to the hall, hoping to make enough noise to startle any burglars the hell out before she was forced to confront them. If it was Jude’s junk they were after they were welcome to it. But there was no one in the house, and no further signs of disturbance. She hoped it was mice she had after all, and not a poltergeist.
The boiler man came at eleven. He cleaned out the flue, and told her the boiler would be safe to use in the short term but that she should think about getting a new one in time for winter.
“These old models are sturdy enough, but they’re obsolete. If anything goes wrong you can’t get the parts.” Vinnie nodded and tried to look interested. She wished the man would go away and leave her to try out her new hot water. She went upstairs to fetch her bag so she could write him a cheque.
On the floor in the bedroom was a tiny grey cardigan. It lay sprawled across the floorboards, its two arms flung wide, looking as if they had recently become untied from around someone’s waist.
She stuffed it in her front jeans pocket and went back downstairs. The boiler man was packing his tools. She asked him to leave his card and then wrote out the cheque. As soon as he was gone she snatched out the cardigan. It was small, much smaller than any baby’s garment. It might have fitted a Barbie doll, only no self-respecting Barbie would have been caught dead wearing such a dowdy article of clothing. It was coarse, woven from what might have been raw sheep’s wool, and had tiny wooden pegs instead of buttons.
The one thing she was sure of was that she had never seen it before in her life. This meant it must have been in the cottage before she moved in, although she had been in and out of the bedroom at least a dozen times since first arriving and had never noticed it.
Either she was being haunted by a gnome, or her house had been invaded by some kind of weird doll thief. She didn’t know which was worse. She had no idea who had lived in the house most recently or how long ago that had been. That had been Margo’s department, and in any case, she did not see what good it would do. She had enough to deal with without phantom Barbies. She put the grey cardigan out of sight in the kitchen drawer. Given time she would forget all about it.
She spent the rest of the day clearing and scrubbing the kitchen. By five o’clock she had filled six dustbin liners with discarded kitchen utensils, jam jars choked with dried gloss paint, and other miscellaneous rubbish. She lined the bags up by the front gate, together with the rotting carpet she had managed to remove from the back room. She was covered in filth and exhausted, but she had found the whole experience curiously energising, the most satisfying task she had undertaken in years. The finished kitchen was bare but spotless. It smelled wonderfully of Flash floor cleaner. She felt certain she would sleep well that night.
She filled the cow-sized bath and got undressed. She lay in the steaming water for half an hour, listening to Jazz FM and wondering if she could sand the back room floorboards herself or if it would be safer to call in an expert. As she wrapped herself in a towel and headed back to the bedroom three small forms dashed past her and down the stairs at a headlong run. They dodged between her feet, moving with such speed it was impossible to see what they were. She stepped backwards in surprise, teetering on the edge of the top step. A tiny startled voice cried, watch it! and then they were gone.
Unless mice had taken to walking on their hind legs, they were not mice. Vinnie put on clean jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs. She glanced at the understairs cupboard, unable to remember whether she had left it open or closed. It was closed now. That’s where they’re getting in, she thought. I knew it. Down on all fours, she ran her fingers around the doorframe, testing the floorboards for weak points. Then she put her ear to the door and listened. She could have sworn she heard a stifled giggle. She opened the cupboard. There was a smell of creosote and old newspapers, a couple of empty shoeboxes, nothing more.
After supper and a documentary about Stanstead Airport, Vinnie tried to tell herself she had imagined it all. The first few days in a new house were always strange. Still, later, she took the grey cardigan out of the drawer and examined it at length. The bottom edge was slightly frayed, and she wondered if she might have a go a fixing it. It’s the fairies, she thought. They’ve come to reclaim their property, just like Jude said.
She had no intention of handing the bracelet over. It had belonged to Jude, and now it was hers. She wouldn’t give it up without a fight. Just thinking about it made her angry.
She supposed this was how the curators of the British Museum felt about the Elgin Marbles.
Nothing happened for about a week, but after that the nights became less peaceful. Often she would wake to the sound of voices, arguments conducted sotto voce out on the landing. She could never quite catch what was said, but it seemed to go on for hours. They started stealing food from the kitchen, which wouldn’t have mattered so much, only they left crumbs everywhere, an invitation to vermin. She started keeping everything in Tupperware containers.
On the Wednesday of the second week she crept downstairs in the middle of the night and managed to trap one of them in the kitchen pantry. She leaned her back against the door and listened to it rushing round inside the cupboard looking for an escape route, like a panicked fly. Suddenly everything went quiet. She eased the door open a crack, feeling for the light switch. The creature exploded out through the gap, brushed briefly against her bare shins and sped into the hall. She could just see it disappearing beneath the door of the understairs cupboard, a confusion of spindly arms and dirty knees. The whole thing happened so quickly she found herself wondering afterwards if it had been, after all, a large spider.
She went back to bed and slept badly. In the morning she took a roll of gaffer tape and sealed up the cupboard under the stairs. For half an hour or so she felt pleased with herself, then started to wonder what she would say if people came round. She stripped off the tape, then looked in the Yellow Pages under ‘Pest Control.’ There was a long list of numbers to choose from, advertisements that promised the total eradication of all types of vermin.
We’ll Kill Anything, said one. It was a tempting offer.
Sharps Cottage was not online, one more thing that needed fixing. On the Monday of the third week Vinnie took a day off from renovation and went into Canterbury. The library had free internet access and when a console became vacant she logged on to Google and, hoping no one was looking over her shoulder, typed ‘fairy infestation’ into the search bar.
She was surprised by how many results there were, although it quickly became apparent that a lot of them were for branded products: necklaces and mugs and key rings depicting Cicely Barker’s flower fairies or characters from Japanese anime. There were a couple of spoof videos, a long rambling blog post by someone calling himself SpaceMonkey about how fairies were trying to kill him by blocking the extractor fan above his gas cooker. If she had read this a month before, Vinnie would have dismissed it as the usual brand of internet insanity. Now she was dismayed to experience a twitch of fellow feeling.
She cleared her search and then began again with just ‘fairies.’ The results returned ran into millions, but after browsing for about an hour Vinnie began to suspect that none of them was going to be any use to her. Everyone seemed hung up on the myth of fairies as delicate, gauzy creatures, somewhere between a damselfly and a Christmas tree ornament. Her own brief experience of living with them told her that they were noisy and meddlesome, the neighbours from hell you could never get rid of.
She continued to search, uncertain of what she was looking for. At some point she became aware that someone was standing behind her. She spun round in her seat, for some reason convinced that it was going to be Margo. Her heart did a stop-start leap and then steadied. Before her was a girl in her late twenties, with frec
kled forearms and enormous spectacles. Her plaited mouse-brown hair reached to her waist. She was holding a book. As Vinnie turned she thrust it towards her.
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” she said. “But those sites are all so useless, aren’t they? You’ll find this book is much better.”
Her staff name-badge identified her as Alison Coombes. With horn-rimmed glasses and patchwork cardigan she looked like something out of an Iris Murdoch novel. Vinnie stared at her in bewilderment, unable to work out whether she felt embarrassed or intrigued.
“Better for what?” she said at last. “Have you been spying on me?”
“Not spying, exactly. But I couldn’t help noticing you were having problems with your search. If you’re trying to find out about fairies this book will help you. The woman who wrote it is a world authority on the little people. Have you seen any fairies yourself? I have to say you do have that look about you.”
“What look?” Vinnie said. “Don’t tell me you believe in this shit.” She glanced about her in panic, hoping no one was eavesdropping. The last thing she needed was an overnight stay in a mental hospital. God only knew what the little bastards might get up to in her absence.
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