by Nicky Singer
“Have you been to the house?” She interrupts, nice Gran suddenly going hard round the edges.
I pause. “Sort of.”
“And?” She leans forward.
“It’s all boarded up.”
Her still dark eyebrows knit across her brow. “So?”
“You can’t get in.”
She gives me that see-right-through-you look. “You can do anything,” she says, “if you want to enough.”
I’m not fast enough to say, “But do I want to, do I really want to go into that house?” So she says:
“Pass me my stick!”
I hand her the ebony cane with the silver top. She throws back her covers, swings her feet to the edge of the bed and bangs the stick on the floor. I check my face and hands. No scaly throat. No webbed fingers.
“Dressing-gown!”
I find the pink quilted affair in the cupboard. She refuses my help to put it on. Pulls it around her angry body. Jerks and twists at the belt, while I watch uselessly. “There!” Finally she has some sort of knot. She smiles triumphantly.
“I could have been a singer,” she announces, as though we’re in the middle of an argument about the subject. “I had a beautiful voice. Everyone said so. ‘You must train that voice,’ they said. But he wouldn’t let me. Said it wasn’t a suitable occupation for a woman. I wasn’t to do it. Even though I had a place at college. I had to give it up. Wasn’t to sing.” She turns to me, eyes ablaze. “But I did.”
“Right.” I say. And then, “Who wouldn’t let you?”
“Pardon?”
“Who didn’t want you to sing?”
“Ernest, of course. My husband.”
Well, that figures. “I thought you said you didn’t have a husband.”
“I don’t. Not any more.”
“Oh – you divorced.” Then Ernest’s claw dissolves into Ernest’s tender, reaching hand and I suddenly feel the way I do when my dad rings me from some far away place and tries to make conversation, and it all sounds false and forced and I want to be able to do something about it but I can’t.
“Yes. We parted. He went away.”
“But you still see each other,” I say tentatively.
“Of course not.”
“He doesn’t visit?”
“Why should he? I haven’t seen him for thirty years.”
And then I think she must be ill and that’s what makes her forget. Because she can’t not know that he sits at the end of her bed watching and…
“So you’ll go then?” she says.
“I’m sorry?”
“You’ll go to Chance House, go to the top, Top Floor Flat?”
“Miss Sorrel, what is it you want from the house?”
“Want? I want you to go in.”
“But why?”
She looks suddenly bewildered. “Because…”
“It’s boarded up. I told you. It’s derelict.”
“But you can go in,” she says with slight desperation.
“Yes. OK. You’re right. There is a way in.”
“Yes?”
“And I did go in. But I was afraid. I was terrified. In fact I didn’t even get past the kitchen.”
“Robert,” she stretches out a bony hand, clasps it over mine. “You must not be afraid. Do you understand me? You are a wonderful boy. An extraordinary boy. You can do anything you want. You can fly, Robert.”
I snatch my hand away. “What?”
“I said, you are the sort of boy who can fly.” She smiles. “So you will go for me, won’t you?”
“No. No!”
“But you must. I beg you.”
“What’s in there, Miss Sorrel? What do you expect me to find?”
“Find?” The confusion is back. She concentrates, draws in her lips. “I don’t know.”
“You must know, if it’s so important to you.”
“I don’t know.” She says this coldly, shutting me out. “I don’t remember.”
Out in the hall a clock strikes. In the silence that follows I hear Catherine’s voice from the lounge beyond.
“Shall we finish with a song, then?”
There’s some mumbling and scuffling and clearing of throats. Then it begins, a few cracked old voices, led by warbling Albert, and the stronger but not necessarily more tuneful tones of my classmates:
“One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow…”
“Who’s doing that?” demands Edith.
“Went to mow a meadow, two men, one man and his dog, went to mow a meadow…”
The song is lifting now, louder as more voices join in.
“I told them to stop. Make them stop.” Edith is banging her cane. Banging and banging. “Tell them to stop, Robert!”
“Does it hurt your ears?”
“No! It hurt, it hurts… I don’t know! I don’t remember!”
She drops her cane and puts her arms over her head. I’d like to think she’s hiding. But actually I think she’s sobbing. Big silent sobs. And I don’t know how to comfort her so I just stand there. And then the crying gets worse, or maybe it doesn’t get worse, it just goes on. It doesn’t stop. So finally I say: “OK. OK. I’ll go. If it means that much to you, I’ll go.”
She lifts her head. “You are such a dear boy,” she says.
6
It’s warm during the days but cold at night. I’m sitting in front of an empty grate. Dad used to light the fires. In fact it was something we used to do together. He showed me how to roll the newspaper and tie it into a loose knot, how to lay the kindling and space the smaller pieces of coal. After he left, Mum said lighting the fire was too much trouble. It meant too much clearing up. She didn’t have the time. So I laid a fire once. I did it just as he taught me. I thought Mum would be pleased. But when she got home she went mad. What did I think I was doing with the matches! I could have burnt the house down! But she was wrong. The fire wouldn’t light. It sputtered and went out. Just charred sticks in the grate.
I want to light a fire now. Or maybe I just want to have a fire lit. Which is different of course, and involves my dad walking through the door and doing it. Which he won’t. Not least because he lives sixty miles away and can’t visit often. He has a new family now. Jo’s two girls (Annabelle who’s older than me and Louise who’s just younger) and the new baby, Lewis. Lewis must be about one and a half now. My step-brother. I’ve only seen him once. I sent him a tower of stacking beakers for his first birthday. I bought them with my own money. It’s on account of having so many new birth dates to remember that Dad sometimes forgets mine, Mum says. The last present Dad actually gave me on the day was the soldiers for my eighth birthday. I wouldn’t swop them for anything in the world now. But then I was disappointed. I’d wanted an aeroplane. One I could make fly. Ride the wind. You see, I’ve always dreamed of being a pilot. I let that slip to Niker once.
“They don’t train blind people for pilots,” he said, wibbling my glasses up and down on my nose.
I asked Mum if that was true.
“I think there are certainly strict medicals,” she said.
I took that to mean they don’t train blind people like me. And I haven’t mentioned it since. But I still have my dreams and in my dreams I fly. Not in a plane but with my arms outstretched, gliding, swooping, rising and falling with the hot air currents. And it feels good. It feels powerful. I never feel that power when I’m awake. Awake I am something feeble. Something laughed at.
Of course I’m thinking about Edith Sorrel’s words: “You can fly, Robert. You are the sort of boy who can fly.”
And of course I’m also thinking of Niker’s story of the boy who tried to fly from 26 St Aubyns and fell to his strawberry-jam death. And while I know it’s only a coincidence – because Edith didn’t mean what she said literally, did not expect me to take off and fly about her room, and Niker’s story was just that, a story – I cannot help feeling the connection. And that’s another reason why I’m going to go to the top of Chance House. Because i
t feels personal. Not just Edith Sorrel’s story but mine too.
“Penny for them.”
“Hello, Mum.”
She ruffles my hair. “You didn’t hear me come in, did you?”
“No.”
“You must have a very vivid inner life.” She sits down. “Go on then, what were you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Selective memory.”
“What?”
“Selective memory, what is it?”
“Selective memory is when I tell you you can have a chocolate biscuit if you tidy your room, and you remember to take the biscuit but forget to tidy your room.”
“Seriously, Mum.”
“I am being serious. That’s what it is. Choosing to remember some things and forget others. And it normally involves remembering the good things and forgetting the bad. Why do you want to know?”
“Someone accused my Elder of having a selective memory.”
“Who?”
“Her husband.”
“Oh well – there are lots of things between husbands and wives you’d want to forget.”
“Like when Dad hit you?” I don’t know why I say this. I don’t know why it’s on my mind.
She looks at me. “No. I’m not likely to forget that.” There’s a pause. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even know you knew. But it was only the once. And I did hit him back. It was a two-way thing, you know.” She sighs. “I thought you were asleep.”
I shrug.
“I guess it was difficult to be asleep. Right? Maybe I just wanted you to be asleep. Maybe that’s the selective memory bit.” She smiles. “OK?”
“OK.”
“It’s normally the really bad stuff that your brain edits out,” she continues. “Shows that the thing between Dad and me wasn’t important, see?”
She waits for me to nod.
“Take the war. Men ‘forget’ the terrible killing they saw. Your Great-Granddad – my Granda – it was like that for him. Never wanted to talk about the trenches. He was at the Somme, you know. He lived and others died. It’s difficult, being a survivor. You feel guilty.”
She pulls her cardigan tighter about her. “Getting chilly isn’t it? Maybe it’s the gloomy talk. What would you say to a hot chocolate?”
“Good evening, hot chocolate.” That was one of Dad’s jokes. Both of us laugh limply and she goes into the kitchen.
I don’t want to compare the Grape Incident to the Great War, but this is what I’m thinking. Maybe I have selective memory about this. Maybe refusing to talk about what happened is my way of refusing to think about it. But the Grape Incident keeps popping into my brain, keeps on nagging. Like Chance House nagged. Then I wonder two things: first – did the Somme nag Great-Grandpa Cutting? Second – what exactly is it that’s nagging Edith Sorrel?
I follow Mum into the kitchen and watch the gas hiss under the pan of milk.
“How does old age affect memory?” I ask.
“Generally speaking, you just become increasingly forgetful. Just last week I managed to leave my purse in the house…”
“No. Really old people.”
“Short-term memory,” says Mum. “That’s what normally goes first. A person won’t be able to tell you what they had for breakfast whereas they will be able to describe in perfect detail an event that happened fifty years ago.”
“Does that mean,” I venture, “that, if you’d tried to forget something, something that happened to you, say, thirty years ago, that you might suddenly ‘remember’ it in old age?”
“You mean a bad memory?” Mum asks. “Something you’d actively tried to suppress?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure. I think you can bury stuff so deep you never uncover it.”
“So if you did begin to remember,” I press, “then some part of you must want to find out, want to examine the horrid thing?”
“What are you getting at, Robert?”
“Nothing. Just asking.”
“Has old Mrs Sorrel got some skeleton in the cupboard?”
“Old Miss Sorrel,” I say.
“I thought you said she had a husband?”
“She has someone who says he is her husband.”
“Oh – and what does she say?”
I’m still considering this when, in the front room, the phone rings.
The milk is on the boil. “Can you get that for me, Robert?”
I go to the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Robert.”
“Hello, Dad,” I whisper. If Mum knows it’s him she’ll come, milk or no milk.
“All right?”
“Fine.”
“Good day at school?”
“Great.”
Silence.
“Ahem.” Dad coughing.
“All right, Dad?”
“Course. Fine.”
Sometimes I blame him. That he never asks the right questions. That we only ever talk at this useless monosyllabic level. Then I think it must be me. That I don’t give the right answers. That I should say: Actually I’m not all right because it’s cold and you’re not here to lay a fire. And school wasn’t great either because I met Ernest Sorrel at the Home, and I don’t want to believe that the boy who fell out of the Top Floor Flat of Chance House was Edith Sorrel’s son, because she said she didn’t have a son. But then she said she didn’t have a husband either. And I feel quite frightened because I’m going to go to the top of a derelict house and I want someone to tell me not to go, but no-one knows I’m going so they can’t. And by the way, does my mind run round in circles like this because I’m mad? Or because Niker really has got an implant in my brain? And Dad, Dad, were you ever frightened of a boy at school? I mean really frightened? And…
“Robert?”
“Yes?”
“Can you get your mother?”
“Mum – it’s Dad.” I put down the receiver. Then I pick it up again. “Are we going to see you Saturday?”
“That’s what I want to speak to your mother about.”
Mum comes into the room with two steaming mugs of chocolate. They smell of the time when Dad and Mum and I used to sit together in front of a blazing winter fire.
“Hello, Nigel. Yes. No. I see.”
Mum’s mouth goes into a tight line. He’s telling her something she doesn’t want to hear. And I know what it is. There’s some problem about Saturday. One of the children – Dad’s new children – is ill maybe. Or there’s a clash with an appointment of Jo’s, she needs the car. It’s all off. He isn’t coming.
“Right,” says Mum. “Well, I think it’s important for Robert that we make another time, don’t you? Have you got your diary?”
“Don’t bother,” I say. “Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter.”
“Robert…” she calls after me.
But I’m away. I’m up the stairs and in my bedroom with the door shut and wedged.
Mum will follow me. She always does. Tries to comfort me. But what good is that? The way I look at it is – I’m on my own. So I’d better get used to it.
7
I arrive at Chance House at 8.25am. I considered coming after school, to give myself more time. But then I thought – what if something goes wrong? With Mum at work, it could be hours before anyone even notices I’m missing, let alone institutes a search. Whereas I reckon if I’m more than fifteen minutes late for morning school, Miss Raynham will have the tracker dogs out.
I don’t go round the back of the house. Not immediately anyway. I stride boldly up the front steps, advertising my presence in the hope that Niker will jump out of some bush. But he doesn’t. Never there when you want him, Niker. There’s a man emptying rubbish outside the Cinderella Hotel next door and I look to him too, needing him to challenge me, call me a trespasser, rail about the despicable youth of today and threaten me with the police if I don’t vamoose PDQ. But, no. He just shuts the lid of his dustbin and goes back insid
e.
So I’m forced to come down the steps and start walking. I go round the side, past the door rotted into its frame and overgrown with brambles, past the beer can… Beer can? I don’t remember any beer can. Up to the corner of the house now and then on, round – into the abandoned garden. The dandelions are still there, and the bluebells, the smashed wine bottle, the dirty Sainsbury’s bag (now wind-hooked on the branch of a tree), the washing line, the scorched earth and the microwave. Microwave. The microwave is definitely new. I couldn’t have missed a microwave. Could I? I half hope the mesh will have been screwed back over the kitchen door and that all access will be denied. But of course the mesh is off and the kitchen wide open.
I look up. The top-floor windows give nothing away. They are blank. But no more blank than those of the Cinderella Hotel next door. What exactly am I expecting? It not as though there’s going to be a body up there. If there was to be a body it should be down here. I look at the concrete beneath my feet. Plain ordinary concrete with a few blades of grass pushing through the cracks. Pushing up the daisies. Maybe he’s under there after all, the boy, pushing up the daisies, forcing those cracks, erupting from the soil beneath…
Robert Nobel. You are an idiot. You are Norbert No-Brain. It is just a story. Niker’s story. And anyway the boy would just be worms now. It all happened – if it happened – so long ago.
Last night I couldn’t sleep. Was thinking about the flat, Edith Sorrel, the boy, the strawberry jam over and over – and then I dreamt… No. Forget that. It was only a dream. A story – just a story like the other story. Concentrate on getting into the house. Please, just get into the house!
I get in.
It’s not windy today and the holly bush is not scraping the window. I step over the litter of paper, the envelopes, the fireplace rubble. The inner kitchen door is closed, the brick up against it. Nothing seems touched. But I touched that brick, I moved it into the corridor, then pelted back through the kitchen door, leaving the brick where it had fallen, on the other side. So someone has been in. Someone has put the brick back in its place.
Quietly, I move the brick and enter the inner house. Through the gap between the floorboards and the wall I see again the basement mounds of lamps and flowerpots, the filing cabinet, the ceramic sink. They too look undisturbed. Yet something is different. I stand still. The water. There is no sound of gushing water. No sound of water at all in fact, not even a drip. I don’t want to think about an explanation for this, because it has to involve people, other people, and…
