Edward Little had specialised in Mystery snails. He had shown her one once, holding up a rare albino on the palm of his hand and saying that its favourite food was old spinach. He had heard of a farm in Scotland which had managed to grow a Mystery as big as a tennis ball.
Then, as Miss Hartington stared at the gastropod protruding from Edward Little’s mouth, his cheek began to bulge and undulate, as if he were still alive and his tongue were working, trying to extract something stuck fast in a molar, perhaps.
As she watched with mounting disgust, another glistening head and pair of horns emerged from underneath his upper lip. The head seemed to swing her way and move from side to side, as if in greeting.
Miss Hartington let out an involuntary gasp.
Miss Crabbe stopped and put down her manuscript. There had been a sound from next door, a sound so slight that it was already a memory. She did not even know what sort of sound it had been.
She sighed. The character of Miss Hartington was proving a little difficult. Her protagonist was, at heart, a somewhat timid lady, yet she must be endowed with a few eccentricities. How else would it be credible that she should track down a killer and bring him or her to justice? There was also the matter of the all-important twist at the end. You had to have a twist. It was de rigueur.
For some months now, it had been sneaking up on Miss Crabbe. She knew what had to happen. The question was, could she bring it off? The trick to managing a surprise was that it should be entirely inevitable. The Ancients had it right. You knew from the word go that it was Oedipus at the place where three roads meet and that the shepherd was going to give the game away – but it was as if the brain was happy to be divided into two. It wasn’t simply a question of watching Oedipus writhe around in self-delusion, like an insect in a jar. You had to share that delusion for it to be effective, even though you knew exactly what was going to happen.
The trick, Miss Crabbe felt certain, was to disbelieve in good and evil. The surprise ending of her book had to lie in the character of the seemingly ordinary and conventional Miss Hartington, the detective herself. A murder story was only interesting if there was some ambiguity, after all. There was no point in having evil performed by a wholly evil person.
It came again, louder. It was halfway between a moan and a cry – a brief ejaculation of sound which none the less had depth and meaning: a human noise with animal undertones.
Miss Crabbe rose and tiptoed the length of her gallery to the wall that she shared with Miss Akenside. She knelt on the oxblood leather armchair and put her ear to the wall. Her stiff curls flattened against the wallpaper with a soft, seashell noise. For some time there was nothing. Then it came again – a low, restless moan. Poor dear Alison was at it again.
Miss Crabbe had never really suffered from bad dreams. She had slept the sleep of the dead every night, exactly six and a half hours, for as long as she could remember. Her sister had insomnia and would sit glumly in a chair all day in her kitchen at Edith Weston, sipping coffee to keep her awake and posting chocolate biscuits into her sullen mouth with a hand that hardly seemed attached to the rest of her body. Miss Crabbe found that sort of problem incomprehensible.
Alison’s difficulty was different, she felt. There was something unnatural about it. It came in waves – whole nights of moaning sometimes, then the sound of movement around the cottage. Miss Crabbe heard it because she stayed up late working. She often did her best stuff at night.
Miss Crabbe returned to her desk, put down her manuscript and pencil and lowered the roll-top. She wasn’t in the mood for work. She had not really been in the mood since the discovery of the Cowpers’ bodies. She felt, somehow, as if she was ever so slightly culpable in what had happened to them. She knew this was ridiculous – a psychotic could turn up on your doorstep any time. It could have just as easily been her.
At the same time, she could not escape the feeling that to have a murder occur in the village was all too convenient for her purposes. It would be wonderful publicity, after all. She had already written the disclaimer to go in the front of her book.
Was it wrong to want to take advantage in this way? It wouldn’t make the Cowpers any less dead if she didn’t. It wouldn’t be any help to them if she set fire to the entire manuscript.
She went downstairs to the kitchen. The shattered eggshells from the omelettes still lay in a pink saucer by the side of the sink. She took the saucer over to her swing-bin and tipped the eggshells in, then saw that the bin was almost full. The nights were warm now. She didn’t like sleeping with a full bin in the house. You never knew what might come in to take a look.
She had already locked her back door for the night, so she had to withdraw the old iron bolts and turn the key. Her wheely bin lived in the garden during the week. She lifted the lid and dropped in the swing-bin liner, with its handles firmly tied. As she lowered the lid, she looked over to Alison’s garden.
Suddenly, Miss Crabbe went hollow inside, the way she did when she drove too quickly over the hump-backed bridge at the end of the lane.
Alison was standing in her garden. The fence between them was a small brown picket fence, no more than three feet high. Alison was on her side of it but close enough for Miss Crabbe to see her clearly in the light that shone from her kitchen.
She was standing deadly still. She was wearing a long t-shirt which came down below her knees. On the front of the t-shirt was a large teddy bear dressed up as a fireman and carrying a hosepipe. It had an idiotic smile. Her feet were bare. Her short hair, normally neat and straight and modern, was ruffled and spiky. She was staring at Miss Crabbe. It was a stare of open-eyed malevolence.
Miss Crabbe froze, then wondered if she should say something. What did you do with sleepwalkers? Weren’t you supposed to guide them gently back to their beds? But Alison wasn’t walking anywhere. She was standing stock still, and staring a stare that rooted Miss Crabbe to her back step. She tried to tell herself that she had shared an omelette with this young woman only hours before, but their congenial supper belonged to an ordinary life, a life made up of ordinary days – not the night-time world they now found themselves in, where anything could happen.
Miss Crabbe stepped backwards as soundlessly as possible, back into her well-lit kitchen. She closed the door, turned the key, bolted her bolts. Abandoning her washing up, she turned out the kitchen light and went through to her sitting room, where she stood for a moment. She did not want to go up to her bedroom. It also looked out over the back of the cottage, and she knew she would not be able to resist looking down to see if Alison was still there. She could not bear the thought that she might look up and see her. She did not want to be looked at that way again. It had been a look of pure evil.
5
O Rose, thou art sick!
William Blake
The Sick Rose
I sleepwalk sometimes. I have no memory of it. I only know I do it because of the traces I leave behind; objects moved around the house, doors left open. Sometimes, I notice that my feet are grubby and there is soil or a grass stain on my nightwear, and I know that I have been out in the garden.
It comes and goes. When I was little, it was nearly every night. My brother Andrew and I shared a room. After I had gone to sleep, he would get up and, taking the mattress and blankets from his bunk, bed himself down across the door, so that I couldn’t get out of the room. I don’t know how old he was when he did this – I only know because he told me about it a couple of years ago. I try and remember it when I get annoyed with him, which is frequently. A small boy slept across my bedroom door, like a guard dog.
I never think of myself as a small girl. I feel as though I have always been grown up.
It was only in adolescence that the sleepwalking became a problem, and only then because I didn’t get myself back to bed in time for the morning and would wake up in odd places like behind the settee. My mother had to hunt high and low for me in the mornings, finding me eventually because my feet were sticking out. Com
mon to these episodes seemed to be a desire to burrow, to squeeze myself into the smallest space into which my clumsy thirteen-year-old body would fit. This seems peculiar to me now, as I am something of a claustrophobe.
Soon after, Andrew left home. He had graduated from our local comp with zero qualifications bar woodwork, and took only a rucksack full of clothing and a handful of chisels. We heard nothing for years.
Being at home was very quiet and unpleasant after he left. I was furious. It was all right for him. He was not around to see the hurt he had caused; my mother’s perpetually strained expression, my father’s bruised silence. I may not be the most dedicated of daughters but I don’t think I could have wounded them in the way that Andrew did. They had already lost one child, after all, in an accident too horrible for words.
‘Too horrible for words’. Can that be literally true? Can anything be too horrible to bear articulation? It depends on who is doing the articulating, I suppose. For the inarticulate, many things must be too horrible for words – or too awkward or unusual or plain. My father is a man who cannot bring himself to say, ‘How are you?’ Instead, he looks at you, grunts, then tilts his chin minutely upwards, a tiny gesture of interrogation. In response I say, ‘Fine, Dad. You?’ He nods.
My mother achieves the same effect by the opposite means. Words spill out of her. She talks as if talking will prevent thought – and thought is something which must at all costs be prevented. ‘Hello Alison you’re looking your usual self, I’m fine apart from my back but I told you all about that, your father went to the chiropodist last week, I made him go, kettle’s boiling’ is a typical greeting.
In response to my mother’s verbosity, I become my father. I grunt and nod.
Which came first, I wonder? My mother’s talkativeness or my father’s silence? Did the one create the other or merely encourage it? Maybe that was what they saw in each other in the first place, two pieces of a jigsaw which could lock together snugly, then merely co-exist.
My baby brother’s death is the only thing that has ever happened to my parents which is out of the ordinary, and I wonder sometimes to what extent it has created them. I was five when it happened. It is my earliest memory – I have no idea whether Mum and Dad were any different before. If it is my earliest memory, does that mean that it has also created me? I don’t believe in the subconscious. All that buried self is good and buried as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps I sprang to life fully formed at five years old, one April.
The memory goes like this.
I am in my room. It is bedtime. I have a dressing gown on over my nightie. It is made of a squeaky, quilted fabric and there are large roses on it, full-blown roses. I will grow too big for it soon. My forearms will get cold because they protrude from the sleeves.
Our council house is large but each room in it is tiny, as if it is a series of hutches knocked together. The walls are thin. Andrew’s room is next to mine and we communicate by tapping with our knuckles on the embossed wallpaper, which has a satiny feel.
Andrew is sitting on the end of my bed. He has sherbet. The sherbet is bright pink and encased in a plastic packet shaped like a tiny, see-through suitcase. You flip a little plastic catch and open the lid, then hold it up to your mouth and lick the sherbet from inside. It prickles on the tongue.
In the shop at the end of the road, there are many different ways of persuading children to eat sherbet; sherbet Fountains, sherbet Dib-dabs – sherbet encased in flying saucers made of rice paper which collapse then explode, making your gums tingle. In my case, persuasion is unnecessary. Sherbet is the most sensory experience I have – the sparkle of it, an almost-pain, magic in the mouth.
Andrew has left me alone for a moment, to get something from his room. He has left the tiny case of sherbet open on my bed, with strict instructions that I am not to touch it until he returns. I am trying to work out how I can get sherbet into my mouth without touching, prepared to break the spirit but not the letter of the law.
This is something I can remember quite clearly from childhood; the greed, the constant wanting. There was a girl in one of my classes who came from a road called The Crescent. Her mother packed her off to school each day with three biscuits wrapped in greaseproof paper. Myself and other girls used to crowd round her at break time and demand a bite each – a small, aspirational nibble at what it might be like to have a middle-class mother who worried that her child might get peckish between classes. When the girl – Susan, I think – finally put her foot down and refused, we crowded round her anyway, watching her. I remember whispering, ‘We never liked your stupid biscuits you know. They taste like poison.’
Suddenly, the door to my bedroom flies open and my mother storms in. We have been caught. She grabs one of my upper arms and hauls me to my feet. I give a small cry.
As she pushes me down the stairs, she is muttering. I can’t hear what she is saying.
My brother is in the sitting room. His face is blank. I know that this means we are in serious trouble.
My mother prods me with the ends of her fingers and I go and clamber onto the settee, next to my brother.
I am expecting a tirade, but instead, my mother begins to pace the room, still muttering. Perhaps she is trying to decide how badly we are to be punished. I sneak a glance at Andrew to see if he can give me a clue but he is staring straight ahead. It is not like him to be so unhelpful.
I don’t know how long we sit there but it feels like for ever.
Suddenly, my mother turns. She falls on her knees on the carpet in front of us, grabs at us with her large hands and pulls us down. I assume the kneeling position I have learnt in school assembly, sitting back on my heels, head low, palms pressed together. It is quite different from the one we use in church each Sunday, where I kneel upright and hold on to the wooden shelf attached to the pew in front.
My mother entwines her fingers. Grown-ups do that when they pray.
My mother is saying something like, ‘These children are wicked, Lord. They are wicked to the core. Show me how to knock the wickedness out of them, so that they may be spared Your wrath. Do not strike them down, O Lord. Show me how to improve them.’
I pray for forgiveness and promise that I will never eat sherbet again.
After a while, her voice becomes a mutter. I lift my head and creak my eyelids open, peering through trembling lashes. My mother’s eyes are tight closed. I sneak a look at Andrew but he is kneeling next to me and I can’t see him properly without turning, which would be risky.
We pray until my knees begin to ache.
Then there is a noise from the room above us, a sort of whumphing, like air falling at speed. At the same time, there is a crack and tinkle of breaking glass.
The room above us belongs to Baby James. Baby James arrived not long after Christmas. The Baby, we had been warned in advance, was going to use up all the money, so that was why there were no big presents.
Andrew and I have recovered from our resentment remarkably quickly. We have realised that Baby James is a good thing because our mother spends her days trying to stop him crying and has, until tonight, been much more lax with us. We feel well-behaved in comparison with Baby James. At least we don’t scream all the time.
All three of us lift our heads. The sound is so unusual that Andrew and I forget to be afraid. Our mother clambers to her feet and rushes out of the room.
There is a pause. Through the open sitting-room door, we can see her shadow in the hallway.
Then she begins to scream.
As we run out into the hall, we collide with her running back in to get us. She pushes us towards the front door. As she opens it, a flood of freezing air rushes in. There is another bang from upstairs.
Out in the street, people arrive. I can hardly see them in the dark. My mother has stopped screaming and is moaning and gasping for breath. Somebody holds her arms. Men rush past us into the house. There is the distant, insistent clamour of a siren.
The fire engine is as big as a dragon.
It belches and coughs. We are pushed to one side. My feet are bare. I tread on something sharp, and begin to cry. Somebody big and strange picks me up and holds me. My feet sting. I try and twist my head to look back at our house but all I can see is darkness and people. There is shouting. The person holding me turns and begins to walk down the street, away.
That night, Andrew and I are put to bed in somebody’s lounge, on wobbly camping beds which have been blown up with a foot pump. Our father comes in and stands in the doorway. ‘Where’s Mum?’ I ask.
‘In hospital,’ he says. ‘But she’ll be back tomorrow.’
We were never told exactly how Baby James had died. I remember watching a documentary, many years later, about how dangerous cheap furnishings were. It made it sound as though any council house could burst into flames spontaneously and fill with poisonous fumes in seconds. I remember walking round our new house – we had been rehoused on an estate a mile away from our old home – and thinking, could this one burn as well? Could this one fill with poison?
If our mother had not been downstairs chastising Andrew and me, maybe she would have noticed the fire earlier, maybe the baby could have been saved. I wondered sometimes if she blamed us, blamed our wickedness. I haven’t a clue – neither she nor my father has ever discussed it with us. Too horrible for words.
Andrew asked me about it once.
I was ten, I think. We were in the sitting room, watching television. It was a Saturday morning. Our parents were out.
‘Alison, do you remember the fire?’
At that age I was still going to church with my mother and my faith had temporarily acquired something of her fervour. I loved the routine, the ritual. I wanted some prettiness in my life, some colour and gleaming. I sometimes think that half the membership of High Churches like ours can be attributed to stained glass.
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