A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  ‘Morning, girls.’ Reverend Mortmain eyed them with interest. ‘Your lovely aunt’s well, I trust?’ He licked his teeth and Caroline saw how his tongue rode the waves of his lower incisors like a surfboard.

  It was Joanna who answered him: her willing, clear-eyed self. Caroline wished she wouldn’t. Why couldn’t she see the evil in people like the Reverend Mortmain and Gordon Hooper? Reluctant to leave her sister’s side, Caroline waited until the vicar strode away, for his broad black shape to be gobbled by the trees engulfing Dead End Lane.

  Witchwood’s shop, with its dingy, threadbare feel, was owned and run by Tilly and Frank Petley. Mirror images of one another, with their side-partings and unflinching stares, the rumour was that these two weren’t husband and wife at all, but brother and sister.

  ‘Ooo , it’s a terrible thing.’ Tilly, talking to herself as usual, gave up arranging the apples bruised sides down and moved on to the tomatoes. The door tinkled as Caroline opened it, but it was the frenzied yapping that fanfared her arrival, severing whatever terrible thing Tilly had been about to reveal.

  ‘Hush now, Mitzy.’ Tilly gathered her tiny dog and tipped her head to nuzzle its white fur. ‘Hush, baby, hush … ’ And she jiggled it up and down in a way Caroline’s mother did to placate Joanna as a baby. Caroline saw the woman’s well-muscled arms that, bare from the shoulders down, showed off a mahogany suntan and tattooed pair of love birds caught mid-flight.

  ‘Hello.’ Caroline lifted the lid of the freezer and plumped for a Funny Feet ice cream and the chocolate Dora wanted from the ranks of confectionery barricading the till.

  ‘For your auntie, are they?’ Tilly winked, before calling through to the back: a muddle of cardboard boxes, plastic crates and yellowing newspapers. ‘Frank! Got a customer.’ Her voice, splintering the gloom, was as brittle as glass.

  Caroline spied an abandoned copy of the Cinderglade Echo lying open on the counter, and turned pages showing photographs of agricultural shows, charity events, end-of-school-year concerts, Princess Diana opening a new wing at the hospital in Cinderglade … the continuing saga of a local spate of unsolved robberies in and around Witchwood …

  ‘Eh-up, lass – that’s twenty-five pence if tha wants to read it.’ Frank, suddenly at his counter. ‘Tha get off to Liz’s if tha wants.’ The shopkeeper whipped his head to Tilly, who was still clutching her frothy white dog. ‘I can manage.’

  ‘Just these, please. And Dora said I’m to settle her newspaper bill.’ Caroline gestured to her meagre purchases and dug through her pockets for the ten-pound note she knew was there.

  ‘Not buying paper, then?’ The shopkeeper’s eyes glinted like teaspoons.

  Caroline shook her head.

  Without averting his gaze, Frank Petley counted out her change to the chromatic accompaniment of the till. If he didn’t keep gawping at her, Caroline supposed, she might be able to nick some stuff from here; but thinking how he was always gawping at her, even when she wasn’t in the shop, she added Mr Petley to her ever-growing list of grown-ups not to be trusted.

  ‘Going to Ellie’s party?’

  Caroline stared at his paunch that strained at the buttons of his faded shop coat and nodded.

  ‘Enjoying your holiday, are you?’

  Caroline watched him place her items into a plastic bag.

  ‘Yes, thank you – I don’t think I want to go home.’

  ‘Where’s home, then?’ The mouth screwed out its question.

  ‘London.’ Caroline, self-consciously touching her coarse wedge of fringe.

  ‘London , eh,’ he thundered on in his Yorkshire burr. ‘Can’t say I’ve ever bin … can’t say I’ve ever had a mind to.’

  The chime of the shop bell sliced between them.

  ‘Mornin’, Charlie.’ Frank’s face widened to a sickly grin.

  It was her cue. Sidestepping the pair of them, Caroline shot out the door. But where was Joanna? The bench she gave strict instructions not to leave was empty.

  ‘J-o ?’ she called, her cardigan pockets swaying with Dora’s treats and the rapidly melting ice cream. ‘Jo ?’ she tried again, blowing out air to inflate the tiny word.

  Then raised voices and, like a magnet, she was pulled towards the commotion coming from the outbuilding where Dean kept his motorbike. Joanna forgotten, Caroline pressed her spine to the undergrowth and craned her neck to see what was going on. The shock of seeing Dean for the second time that morning – wielding an oily rag, his hair laminated by sunlight – thumped in her chest. Was that Ellie with him? Yes, Caroline saw her roller skates, the new pink ones she must have had for her birthday. But what was she doing? Clambering on to the seat of Dean’s Suzuki, crossing her arms and wearing a look of determination Caroline hadn’t seen before.

  ‘Get down, damn it,’ Dean told her. ‘You’ll scratch the paintwork with those flippin’ things.’

  ‘But you promised me a go,’ Ellie grizzled.

  ‘I didn’t. And I can’t,’ Dean asserted. ‘I’m taking Amy to Slinghill.’

  Caroline baulked at the name. And as if on cue, the vicar’s daughter strode into view. Zipped into an indigo leather catsuit, she gave Dean a sexy, come-get-me smile.

  Fat cow – Caroline, drinking her in – you really think you’re something special, don’t you? Pretty? Caroline’s thoughts, blackening at the edges. Well, you’re not pretty, and your bum looks massive in that getup.

  Caroline continued to observe Dean as he retrieved a small plastic pouch from his motorbike pannier. He passed it to Amy.

  ‘Precious stuff.’ He winked at his girlfriend in a way he sometimes winked at Caroline in the pub. It made her hate Amy even more. ‘I don’t mind waiting,’ he said. ‘If you want to drop it off at home first.’

  ‘You sure?’ Amy weighed whatever he’d given her in the flat of her palm. ‘Okay, look, give me five … ten minutes tops. It’ll give me the chance to check in on Mum too.’

  ‘Take your time, I’ll get this baby warmed up.’ Dean surrendered his girlfriend’s backside to pat the shiny-chromed snout of his other love, and Caroline saw Amy scoot away.

  ‘Dean.’ Ellie again, she still hadn’t got down. ‘Now you can take me for a quick go while you wait for Amy to come back, can’t you?’

  ‘No way, Ellie – and that’s final. Your mum’d string me up … Ellie. ’ Caroline caught the frustration in his voice. ‘You’re not listening – I said, get off. NOW .’ And grabbing her by the arms, after a short, stiff struggle, Dean hauled Ellie down from his motorbike. He then turned from his stepsister’s demands to unbutton and step out of his overalls.

  ‘You’re so mean,’ Ellie yelled, her face wet with tears. ‘It’s my birthday,’ she sobbed, lifting then dropping the candy-striped skirt of her new skater dress. ‘You said I could have a go on my birthday.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Dean laughed and tugged on his leathers. ‘It was you who said, on your birthday . I agreed to nuffin.’ Shaking out his curls, he positioned his crash helmet over them.

  ‘You’re horrible – you’re only nice to me when you want something.’ Ellie rubbed the tops of her arms where Dean had grabbed her. ‘I’m going to tell Mummy on you. You love Amy more than me … ’

  Whatever else she said was lost to the growl of the engine. Caroline lingered long enough to see Ellie roll away in the same direction as the vicar on her pretty pink skates, then further, into the open jaws of the woods.

  ‘Liz told you not to go too far,’ Dean hollered after her. ‘You’re to stay on the lane, d’you hear? You’ll get your party dress dirty.’ And straddling his sleek-sided Suzuki Marauder, the engine ticking over, he waited for Amy to return.

  Caroline found Joanna at Pludd Cottage’s gate stroking Laika through the slats. She was chatting to Mrs Hooper as she weeded between her hydrangeas.

  ‘Where’ve you been? Your ice-lolly’s all melted now.’ A flash of her usual sharpness; Caroline had difficulty curbing her frustration in front of Mrs Hooper. ‘Why’d you
run off like that?’

  Joanna didn’t answer. Up on her feet, she exchanged goodbyes with her piano teacher and joined Caroline in the lane.

  ‘Drop by on your way to the party.’ Lillian had seen the state of Caroline’s fringe. ‘I’ll tidy your hair for you.’

  Present Day

  Avoiding puddles and pedestrians pulling suitcases behind them like recalcitrant children, Joanna picks over her recent conversation with Sue Fisher as she weaves her way along Queensway. Hyde Park, now the rain has stopped, gleams under the bleached look of winter. A rush of runners in obscenely tight Lycra dodge dog walkers and buggy-pushers. An attractive-looking couple, arm in arm, remind her of Mike and her boys, and the gnawing anxiety that she spends too much time away from home rears its head again. A flash of a laughing mouth close to hers. The teeth, like Caroline’s, spin Joanna back to her sister and how she had loved this time of year, with its low-hanging sun and the need for scarves and gloves and woollen layers. Joanna wonders, gazing up through a canopy of filigreed branches and inhaling January’s melancholy breath, if her sister used to follow the same webbing of paths through the park to the rescue centre she’s now taking. The idea Caroline could have been fretting about something Joanna said to her when she was nine is difficult to get her head around. Why didn’t she talk to her, clear the air, instead of letting her resentment fester?

  ‘You must have known I only said that about Dean to cheer you up, I didn’t mean anything by it. I don’t know why you’d hold something so small against me all these years? And that thing your nurse said,’ Joanna mumbles to the dead Caroline, ‘about it driving you to do something terrible, something you could ultimately never forgive yourself for – what the hell was that about?’

  A squirrel from within the darkened undergrowth catches her eye, and she forgets her troubled sister for a moment or two. Vaulting from grass to blackened bough, to grass again, the flick of its tail amuses her. She wishes Freddie and Ethan, with their eternal What? Why? How? could be here to enjoy the experience. But before there is the chance to dwell on her sons, the slow slop of the Serpentine, when it finds the concrete bank, brings thoughts of Drake’s Pike. She stops to watch the bob of moor hens and swans on the water, the geese clustering the path. It makes her jump, the whizzing of plastic wheels on tarmac. Wrenching her head to it, she sees a girl on quad skates: hair pulled back from her face like party streamers, arms akimbo. The sight of her flings Joanna back to Ellie Fry … her bunches the colour of demerara sugar … the pink birthday cake … the ten silver candles …

  What’s this girl doing out on her own? Joanna’s mind rolls her into the present, to the urgent concern for this unknown and seemingly unaccompanied child. Where are her parents? They should be with her, don’t they know it’s not safe? You’re not safe , she wants to shout, to warn, but barely a whimper betrays her.

  St James’s Animal Shelter, when at last Joanna pushes open the wide glass doors, reeks of damp dog and disinfectant. The reception area is littered with ‘cleaning in process’ hazard signs and, clutching the directions she was given over the phone, Joanna tiptoes across the wet concrete to the empty registration desk. Looking through to high, mesh-walled kennels spreading off into the distance, she hears the frenzied barking of dogs throwing their weight against the wire, frantic for attention.

  Rotating this way and that, looking for someone, anyone, she spots a wall of full-length photographs under the banner of Our Volunteers . Stepping closer, Joanna instantly identifies the forty-one-year-old Caroline. It’s easy to distinguish the mixed-up, solemn-eyed little girl she once was from this overweight figure with straggly salt and pepper hair. Her sister, trapped in childhood – a childhood which ended that summer in Witchwood. Caroline’s inability or unwillingness to grow up is displayed for all to see: the velvet Alice band, the sandals and ankle socks, the baggy dungarees. It’s enough to break her heart.

  The clunk of a tin bucket and Joanna turns to a teenage girl wearing regulation overalls, the slop of her zigzagging mop perilously close to her feet.

  ‘Hi,’ Joanna calls, raising an arm in greeting. ‘Is Jeffrey about?’

  ‘Coo-ee , Mrs Peters.’ Jeffrey appears from nowhere, crisp in striped shirt and what looks suspiciously like a lady’s cardigan. ‘You found us okay then.’ His voice rings, staccato sharp, above the incessant barking. ‘Amber.’ He waves at mop-girl, who up close is tattooed to her neck and smells of patchouli oil. ‘This is Caroline’s sister. You remember Caroline?’

  A shrug. ‘Spose,’ is all she’s prepared to give, and the three of them stand in awkward silence.

  ‘Okay then, you carry on, Amber.’ Jeffrey nods at the saturnine teenager, who slinks away, towing her bucket. ‘Something I’ve come to realise over the years,’ he whispers conspiratorially, ‘is people who do volunteering work usually have a need to atone. Yes, it’s surprisingly common.’ He claps his hands theatrically. ‘Take Amber, for instance.’ Jeffrey steers Joanna through to the office. ‘She stabbed her stepfather to death. Yes ,’ he reiterates, sensing her shock. ‘Sexually abusing her, he was – admittedly, her volunteering here is part of the conditions of her parole and enforced by the court, but you catch my drift?’

  Joanna pretends she does and follows him into a tiny office piled floor to ceiling with cardboard files.

  ‘Not that anyone here asks questions, you understand.’ He winks. ‘And it must be a relief not to have to share intimacies, don’t you think? Wonderful, for the mutual love of animals to be enough of a foundation for friendships. After all, who needs the burden of other people’s sins? Each of us has areas uncharted by our imaginations, areas too dark to penetrate, don’t we?’ He pauses, the ominous weight of his hand on her arm. ‘And I suspect your sister was only just learning to close the doors on such places in her past, don’t you? The last thing she’d have wanted is any of us opening up old wounds.’

  The tatty canvas rucksack Jeffrey Morris said he found in Caroline’s abandoned locker appears to contain very little. Hardly worth yomping all the way over here for, Joanna thinks, opting for an empty bench along Birdcage Walk: a setting as deprived of birds as it is a cage. Beneath an arch comprising of the shrivelled heads of dangling roses, she pulls the rucksack into her lap, cuddles it in a way she wishes she could have done to Caroline when she was alive, but rarely did. Unbuckling the rusted fastenings, she pulls out various bottles of antidepressants, a tutti-frutti lip balm, an old Nokia mobile that wouldn’t look out of place on Antiques Roadshow , and a couple of notebooks she stops to flick through.

  Stuffing the things back inside, her fingers collide with a hardback library book on the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and, posing as a bookmark, a piece of stiffened card. A postcard: expensive, dog-eared, miles from its intended destination. Lifting it free, the image is one Caroline had been fixated on, believing it echoed her own life story. But refreshing herself with its descriptive forms, Joanna finds it conjures up painful memories of her own.

  … it drove her mad, Hamlet murdering her father … her sister’s voice, maybe Dora’s too, find her out of nowhere … then one day, out picking flowers by the river, she fell in and drowned, slowly, singing all the while .

  It was this particular painting and the allegorical message it contains, a framed reproduction of which hung on the landing at Pillowell Cottage, that Dora – along with her classical records and exotic foodstuffs – took great trouble to explain to them as children. Caroline took it all to heart, believing the weeping willow leaning over Ophelia’s body signified forsaken love; the floating fritillary, sorrow; the pansies, what it is to love in vain. But it was the garland of violets looped around Ophelia’s neck – indicating faithfulness, chastity and death of the young – she had the deepest affiliation with.

  I am the true Ophelia … Her sister’s voice again, talking in a way that would repel and frighten. And Joanna sees Caroline as she was, twirling her hair around her finger, making it greasy where it met her neck, a faraway look in h
er eye … that should’ve been me, I should’ve been the one to die .

  She turns the postcard over. Sees the date it was written: 11 November, a first-class stamp pressed to its top right-hand corner. Joanna’s full married name and Hertfordshire address is written in neat block capitals, safe within the designated lines. But it’s the five truncated sentences that make her suck back her breath: He’s here. He’s hunted me down. He wants to kill me. You’ve got to stop him. You’ve got to help me.

  Summer 1990

  Alone in her room at the top of the vicarage, Cecilia Mortmain needed to think about what she was going to wear that afternoon. Whether to have her hair up or down. Trying it out in the mirror, her reflection on her dressing table given as a triptych in its three-hinged panels, she drew it back off her face. Up, she decided, less trouble out of the way, and she could snazzy herself up with those emerald earrings her sister, Pippa, gave her for Christmas.

  Her body jerked. A bird – big, black, out of nowhere – smacked itself against the window. A bad omen. She gasped, reading its message. Not that her cats noticed; continuing to frisk her through her pyjama bottoms, they didn’t look up. Cecilia let her hair fall and refocused on her reflection, wanting her sister’s face – which if she stared for long enough she could sometimes find. But there was nothing of Pippa’s mellowness, only Cecilia’s own despondency. Today of all days, she scolded herself, she should be feeling happy with the prospect of an afternoon at the pub celebrating Ellie Fry’s birthday.

  The cats, hunting out her thoughts, leapt on to the dressing table to lick her wrists with dry, barbed tongues. Carnivorous-breathed, they poured themselves over her hands, responding to her touch in a way her husband no longer did. Fetching whatever remained of her marriage out for a polishing, she manoeuvred her wheelchair to the window in the hope of seeing Timothy coming home. She’d caught sight of his tall, dark shape whisking into the woods earlier that morning, but there had been no sign of him since.