Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  I am sent to bed first and have to negotiate this treacherous journey entirely on my own. This is manifestly wrong. I have adopted certain strategies to help us in this ordeal. It’s important, for example, that I keep my hand on the bannister rail at all times when climbing the stairs (the other one is being clutched by Teddy). That way, nothing can hurtle unexpectedly down the stairs and knock us flying into the Outer Darkness. And we must never look back. Never, not even when we can feel the hot breath of the wolves on the back of our necks, not when we can hear their long, uncut claws scrabbling on the wood at either edge of the staircarpet and the growls bubbling deep in their throats.

  Terrible, apocalyptic images rise before my eyes as we undertake our ascent – images of Teddy being ripped to pieces, torn limb from limb and tossed from wolf to wolf as great gobbets of saliva drop from their jaws. Finally, his little body is held down under a stinking, matted paw and his stuffing is pulled out. He turns his pleading amber eyes towards me—

  ‘Who’s that?’ A hoarse, thick voice rasps out this question – we are on the landing outside ‘Grandpa’s’ bedroom, not my grandfather (they have both under-gone their genetic fate by now – one run over, one blown up) but the twins’ grandfather – Sidney’s father – who lives in the room beneath ours. ‘Just Ruby!’ I shout back to him – although I don’t think he has the faintest idea who ‘Just Ruby’ is – and carry on up the stairs. Now we’ve reached the really tricky bit – getting into bed.

  We linger on the threshold of the bedroom for a while – thresholds are safe, but unfortunately you can’t stay on them for ever. Also, the wolves that live on the stairs can’t cross them (or they’d be all over the house), which is good, but the bed is on the other side of the room, which is bad. There are things living under the camp bed. There are a handful of crocodiles and a small dragon but mainly they are nameless things without clear definition or taxonomy. But one thing is certain – all the things that live under the bed, named, or unnamed, have teeth. Teeth that will snap vulnerable little ankles when they try to get into bed.

  Speed is the only stratagem here. Ready, Teddy – steady, Teddy – Go! Little slippered feet patter across the linoleum, little hearts go thud, thud, thud, as we get near the danger zone – two feet from the bed – we launch ourselves onto the camp bed, which nearly collapses, but we are safe. Safe, that is, as long as we don’t fall out of bed during the night. I stuff Teddy down the front of my pyjamas, just in case.

  I want to go home! I want Patricia. I want Watch with Mother! This is still a televisionless household and every afternoon I feel a hollow sense of deprivation when I realize that my friends – the biggest spotty dog in the world, Little Weed, Rag, Tag and Bobtail – are playing their games without me. Time to go home! Time to go home! Ruby and Teddy are waving goodbye! Goodbye! If only.

  I resolve that I will use Puppies and Kittens as my escape plan. I will learn to read! I’ve been trying to read for a long time, I’m due to start school after the summer and I would like to get off to a flying start. I have absorbed as much as I can when I’ve been roped in to help Patricia play schools (to tell the truth, I don’t think she’s as good a teacher as she thinks she is) but although I know the alphabet inside out, back to front, and upside down, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

  If I learn to read and then to write – because I know one thing leads to another – then I will be able to write a letter to the outside world, to Patricia, and she will come and rescue me from Mirthroyd Road. Auntie Babs is my unwitting ally in this because she gives me Daisy and Rose’s old alphabet cards to play with – I am ‘under her feet’ (not as much as I would be if I shrank to doll’s house size) all day long. The twins are at school and Auntie Babs is obviously peeved at suddenly finding herself with a child in the house, especially as she already has ‘Grandpa’ to look after. This is more evidence that I have been sent as a terrible punishment rather than a holiday; if I was here on holiday she would put herself out to make sure I had a good time. But then again, perhaps not.

  Everything runs like clockwork in Auntie Babs’ house. For example, there’s a strict rota for the bathroom in the morning, with Auntie Babs going first, then Uncle Sidney, then the twins (together) and then me. The order is reversed in the evening. There is none of the bleary-eyed grumpiness that George, Bunty and Gillian taint the morning with. I wouldn’t say Patricia was exactly chirpy in the mornings, more phlegmatic and resigned, but that’s a great improvement on Gillian who doesn’t even speak in the morning and usually communicates via her Sooty and Sweep glove-puppets. Sooty can be particularly unpleasant at the breakfast table.

  Auntie Babs is also a slave to housework, I know this because she tells me so. Often. On Monday she does the washing. She has an antiquated boiler that she has to heat up (her domestic appliances are all more primitive than her younger sister’s) and the whole house ends up a soapy, sudsy Turkish bath by the time she’s finished. She makes me play next to the frightening boiler because I have a croupy cough and tells me that ‘I should count myself lucky that’s all I have.’ Auntie Babs, you notice, has the same cryptic ways of communicating as Bunty. If the Germans had used Bunty and Babs instead of the Enigma coding machine they would probably have won the war. On Tuesday Auntie Babs irons all the clothes she washed on Monday. On Wednesday she does low dusting, on Thursday, high dusting. On Fridays she washes paintwork and floors and sweeps the carpet with her Ewbank. On Saturday she does the shopping. This is exactly the same housework timetable as her fellow housework slave – Bunty!

  Meals are regular and wholesome; Uncle Sidney never has to wait for more than two minutes for his tea when he comes home at night. Auntie Babs prides herself on being a good cook and suffers none of the Strindbergian gloom that Bunty experiences when cooking. (Or perhaps it’s Ibsenesque – perhaps Bunty is also trapped in a doll’s house? Just a thought.) Uncle Sidney is a great encouragement to Auntie Babs’ culinary talents. He talks about ‘Babs’ Yorkshire Pudding’ and ‘Babs’ Onion Gravy’ as if they were fellow members of the family – ‘Hello, hello, here comes Babs’ Shepherd’s Pie’ – I’m surprised he doesn’t ask it if it enjoyed itself at the end of the meal. And Auntie Babs is the Queen of Puddings – every night a new one – treacle sponge pudding, jam roly-poly (which Patricia calls ‘dead baby’ but I think it best not to mention this at Auntie Babs’ table), lemon meringue pie, rhubarb crumble, rice pudding – what will we have on Sunday, I wonder? What will we do on Sunday? In our house it’s a no-housework day, so presumably it will be the same here.

  ‘Are you ready for church, Ruby?’

  Church – this is a novelty: we are a family of heathens for the most part, although Patricia takes herself off to Sunday School every week and would probably have ended up as a nun if she hadn’t become so thoroughly alienated. I know what churches are like because Auntie Gladys has taken me to hers (Church of England, straight-down-the-middle) and I’m not averse to the idea. It’s a women-only outing – ‘Grandpa’ hardly ever leaves his room anyway and Uncle Sidney disappears on Sundays into the front room and listens to Gilbert and Sullivan records all afternoon.

  This is very unlike Auntie Gladys’ church. It’s in a basement for a start and you have to go down a spiral stone staircase and along a corridor lined with heating pipes and then you come to a door with a little sign above it announcing, ‘Church of the Spirit’. It’s very hot in the basement and there is an odd sickly-sweet smell like Parma Violets mixed with Dettol. There are a lot of people here already, chatting away as if they were at the theatre, and it takes them a long time to settle down but eventually a small organ strikes up and we sing a hymn but, as I can’t read the words in the hymn book, I have to open and close my mouth in a variety of ways in what I hope is a polite imitation of singing.

  Then a woman, who introduces herself as Rita, invites a man called Mr Wedgewood up onto the platform. Auntie Babs leans over to inform me that Mr Wedgewood is a medium for the world of Spirit and will
be talking to them on our behalf. ‘Dead people,’ Rose says (I can see the freckle – she has her chin tilted in a very pious fashion). She’s watching me carefully, down her nose, to see my reaction to this information. She can’t frighten me. Well, she can, but I’m not going to let her know that. Instead I merely raise my eyebrows in silent but eloquent surprise. I wonder to myself if the dead people will have anything to say to me, but Daisy – who I’m beginning to think can read my mind – says, ‘Dead people, you know, don’t speak to you if you don’t know them.’ Given this rule of etiquette I suppose I won’t be spoken to because I don’t know anybody who’s dead (how wrong I am).

  Mr Wedgewood then proceeds to ask Spirit to come and talk to us and that’s the signal for all kinds of strange things to happen – the dead pop up all over the place – a woman’s husband who’s been dead for twenty years tells her there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Then there’s the father of another woman who ‘passed into Spirit’ last year and reports to her that he misses going to the cinema. Somebody’s mother comes back just to tell her ‘how to get rid of that scratch in your coffee table’ (linseed oil) and one woman has an entire family of six people materialize behind her chair (to Mr Wedgewood’s eyes, anyway) who turn out to have been next-door neighbours who died in a house fire thirty years ago. Clearly, there is no escape from the dead. Their message to their ex-neighbour is to ‘batter on’, to the end of the tunnel presumably. The world of spirits seems a rather mundane place to me, like a doctor’s waiting-room full of people trying to top one cliché with another.

  I’m just beginning to droop into sleep in the overheated atmosphere when I realize Mr Wedgewood is standing at the end of our aisle and looking at me. I swallow with difficulty and stare at my feet, perhaps he knows I was only pretending to sing the hymn. But he smiles benignly at me and says Your sister says not to worry about her and Auntie Babs gives a little gasp, but before I can work any of this out the little organ strikes up another hymn identical to the last one (all the hymns in the Church of the Spirit are exactly the same – a phenomenon that, interestingly, nobody seems to notice).

  I puzzle over my experiences in church for the rest of the day, even Babs’ Roast Beef and Babs’ Apple Pie – our guests for Sunday dinner – cannot allay my fears that Patricia or Gillian are dead. I try and bring this subject up with Auntie Babs – to a background accompaniment of ‘Willow, Tit-Willow, Tit-Willow’ – but she just says, ‘Don’t try to be clever, Ruby – it doesn’t suit you’ (I think it suits me very well, actually) and refuses to talk any further about it.

  Another week passes. Another week of the housework timetable. Another week of assiduous study of alphabet cards and Ladybird text – I try to copy the words in the book with the alphabet cards, laying them out on the dining-room table like fortune-telling cards, but as there is only one card for each letter, the sentences are inevitably foreshortened – ‘Here is a Puppy’ becomes ‘Her is a Puy’ and ‘Here is a Kitten’ becomes ‘Her is a Ktn’.

  I have slipped into the routine of Mirthroyd Road, soon I will be transformed into one of them. Already, Auntie Babs is dressing me in their cast-off clothes and trimming my hair to resemble theirs. Soon noone will be able to tell the difference between us and they will have achieved their aim of taking over the body of an earthling. If I could learn to spell, I could chalk H-E-L-P on the pavement outside the house. What do they really want me for? My telluric powers? Or my teddy bear?

  The worst things of all are the nightmares – terrible dreams of drowning, of falling, of being trapped, of flying. Flying dreams are the worst – we’re pitched headlong from the top of the stairs onto a vertiginous, non-stop flight over which we have no control. We accelerate faster and faster until we reach the hallway down below when we wake up just before crashing into the stained-glass panels of the front door.

  These dreams are bad enough when they take place on the stairs at Mirthroyd Road, but even worse when they are in the doll’s house. Its stairs are too narrow to negotiate properly and after a night in the doll’s house Teddy and I wake up with bruised elbows and battered ankles. Whichever stairs we’re on, we also have to dodge the Unnamed Dread lurking on the landings, or worse – Grandpa shouting out at us like a mad cuckoo clock screaming, ‘Who’s that?’ and I wake up crying, ‘It’s just Ruby,’ but now, even I’m not sure who ‘Just Ruby’ is.

  And then something really horrible happens – I begin to walk in my sleep. And now I not only dream about the staircases – I am sometimes shaken awake by Auntie Babs and find that I’m really there! Just Ruby – all alone except for the Unnamed Dread. Once, I wake up and find I am alone in the dark, no Auntie Babs – perhaps I have shaken myself awake? I am standing in front of the doll’s house and the dim street light filtering through the attic curtains reveals a complete muddle in its little rooms as if some small creature desperate to find something had ransacked it from top to bottom. Horrors!

  I comfort Teddy by telling him stories, stories that involve a lot of rescuing – Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, detailed episodes of Robin Hood in which I am Maid Marian, Teddy is Alan-a-Dale and Auntie Babs is the Sheriff of Nottingham. Or sometimes I am the Lone Ranger and Teddy does his passable imitation of Jay Silverheels. Sometimes we are captives on a pirate ship, already teetering on the gangplank as Sinbad’s ship hoves into view; sometimes we are stranded in log cabins and are shooting at the Indians outside, sure in the knowledge that the cavalry, Patricia at its head, hair streaming behind her, will rescue us at the last split second. Of course, I realize now we were on the wrong side – if we’d gone over to the pirates or the Indians we would probably have been quite safe.

  Sometimes we sit on the fireside rug – a contemporary thing with geometric designs on it in black, red and grey – and pretend it’s a magic carpet that’s going to take us away from Mirthroyd Road, take us home – but no matter how hard we wish we cannot get it to rise more than a couple of inches above the ground, where it hovers indecisively for a few seconds before flopping back to earth.

  Another Sunday comes around. We go to church. This week Rita introduces a visiting medium called Myra, who looks like Alma Cogan, but without the frocks, and Myra gives us a little talk on ‘Animals in the Spirit World’. Myra claims that animals as well as people pass over into Spirit, posing many unanswered questions, not least of which is how there can be enough room for everybody. If all living things exist in the afterlife then there must be zillion upon zillion of plankton, amoebas, bacteria, spinning off to the astral plane every day. If not, then where do you draw the line? Domestic pets only? Nothing smaller than a Yorkshire terrier? A wasp? And are they segregated – do dogs float around with dogs, giraffes with giraffes? Puy with Ktn? Does chicken flock with chicken? Bluebird fly with bluebird (birds of a feather)? Or all the birds of the air? And what of teddy bears – is there one section where all the spirit teddy bears are corralled or are they allowed to live with their children? Questions, questions . . .

  I devote myself to the alphabet. Teddy and I sit, day after day, on the magic carpet in front of the fire and study its arcane messages – ‘A is for Apple’, ‘B is for Bus’, ‘C is for Cat’, ‘D is for Dog’. I understand the meaning all right, it’s the form that escapes me. The cards have pictures on them – Apples, Buses, Cats, Dogs, Elephants, Fish, Goats – hermeneutic symbols that drive me into a frenzy. ‘I’ is for Indian and in the night the hostile tribes gather on the landings, their eyes and beads shining in the darkness, their feathery headdresses forming a barricade behind which huddle the Unnamed Dread. The things that live under the bed crawl out and join them and here and there, a cutlass flashes. We fly past them all on our unstoppable, roller-coaster dreams.

  Perhaps the flower-twins, the cabal of two, have bewitched me – put a flying spell on me that dooms me to fly, wingless, every night. Or perhaps they have made a wax doll of me and have slipped it unnoticed into the nursery of the doll’s house and practise telekinesis on it at nigh
t, throwing it down the narrow little stairs while lying ‘innocently’ in their beds. When I wake in the mornings they are both lying there, looking at me; their eyes are pinpoints of darkness boring into my skull as they try and probe my brain. I will not let them read my thoughts. I will resist them.

  There are so many things I want to ask and nobody who has the answers. One of the twins, chin held down to avoid identification, shows me one of her school books (I’m surprised they bother with language when their telepathy is so advanced) in which Janet helps Mummy bake a cake while John makes a bonfire with Daddy. And I thought ‘J’ was for Jam! One afternoon, Auntie Babs comes into the living-room and finds Teddy and me sitting on the magic carpet in tears – in front of us a ouija-board of letters spelling the mysterious word P-E-A-R-L. Auntie Babs’ face is pinched in fury so that she resembles a Picasso portrait. She picks up the letters and throws them on the fire. Fools that we are – ‘P’ is for ‘Puy’ not ‘Pearl’.

  So the days fly by in the alchemical pursuit of reading and the nights speed past in flight and all the time I try to find the secret spell that will take us out of our mysterious exile and back home. How long have we been imprisoned in Mirthroyd Road? A year? Five years? Two and a half weeks really, but it seems like a hundred years. How will my family be able to recognize me when I return? I have no handy freckle to mark me out as the Ruby Lennox who left them so long ago. Perhaps they will cry ‘Impostor!’ and refuse to let me back in.

  And then suddenly we are free! I come into the kitchen and there is Auntie Gladys talking in a low voice to Auntie Babs, who is buttering bread for a Bread-and-Butter Pudding whose acquaintance I will never make because Auntie Gladys sees me and says, ‘I’ve come to take you home, Ruby.’ Both Aunties regard me warily over the bread and butter, as if I were a notoriously unpredictable animal (‘T’ for Tiger).