The Mark of Cain

by Lindsey Barraclough

  “What? I don’t believe it!”

  “Honest,” cries Terry. “That Mimi girl, and her big sister, in Mrs. Aylott’s.”

  I am at the sitting-room door before I know it.

  “Are you sure you weren’t seeing things with those new glasses?” I say.

  “Promise. When I said hello, that big girl pulled Mimi out the shop.”

  Mum looks over at me, but I quickly turn round, head for the bedroom I share with Pete, climb up onto the top bunk, and lie there, not knowing what to think.

  After a while there comes a soft knocking on the door.

  “Cup of tea, Roger,” says Mum’s voice softly. “I’ll leave it here.”

  I hear the chink of a cup in its saucer as she places it gently on the hall floor, then the car engine starts up outside and the horn beeps twice.

  “‘Bye, Mum!” Pete shouts. “Just off to the match!”

  “Good luck! Up the blues!” Mum calls as the front door slams behind him.

  One by one, I bat the three model Spitfires hanging from the ceiling. They are the first things I see when I wake up from a nightmare. And I stare at them, lying as still as I can, pretending I’m asleep when I’ve been woken by Pete in the lower bunk, crying quietly in the night, remembering too what happened to us four summers ago.

  Glad to get out of the cold wind, Mimi and I round the corner of the house. I’ve given up trying to get her to talk to me and am seething with irritation. I take the back-door key from my pocket, wondering why we bother to lock the house at all. Just as I’m thinking it, we turn into the cobbled yard and I stop dead. Something has been chalked on the back door — a mark like an M, the two halves crossing over at the bottom. Just touching the two points at the top is a circle like a white moon.

  I blink. Swallow. Look down at Mimi, ask the stupid question: “Did … did you do that?”

  “I’ve been with you, ain’t I,” she says.

  “I’ll have to get a rag to it,” I say.

  “Maybe … maybe we should leave it,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe, just for now.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t do it?”

  I turn the key in the lock. Mimi goes up the stone passage and takes off her coat.

  “Was it those two women?”

  She doesn’t answer me.

  “Mimi! You’re driving me up the flippin’ wall!”

  I cross the main road, make my way to the top of Old Glebe Lane, and start walking down, for the first time in over four years. It’s been done up a bit, a lot of the potholes filled in, the bare hedges trimmed of their tops.

  I feel a wash of cold sweat on my forehead.

  Keep going.

  Standing for a while on the brow of the hill, the bitter wind at my back, I gaze down at the little steeple of All Hallows rising up out of the tangled black branches of the elms, a triangular patch of snow clinging to its north side. The marshes beyond are a colourless expanse. Under a low grey sky are grey pools of still, half-frozen water edged with grey grass patched with clumps of white, and stiff grey reeds.

  To the right the salt creek leaves the river on the horizon to feed the tidal channel around Guerdon Hall, the twisted, snow-topped, red-brick chimneys of the house visible behind the bare trees of Glebe Woods.

  My heart thumps. I shut my eyes tight, trying to squeeze out the memories, but they leap even more vividly into the darkness.

  How could Cora and Mimi have returned to this dreadful place, after everything that happened here?

  I wipe my glove across my forehead, turn slowly, and make my way back to the main road.

  Dad throws his keys down on the kitchen table, takes off his overcoat, puts it over the back of the chair, and fishes around in the pocket for his cigarettes.

  The creases around his eyes seem deeper.

  “Could do with a cuppa,” he says, sitting down, flicking his lighter.

  I put the kettle on.

  “She didn’t want to come back, then, Auntie Kath?”

  He draws in deeply, blows out the smoke. “Wouldn’t even let me in the bloody house. Kept me standing on the ruddy doorstep — wasn’t even enough room for me to get me foot in — said through the flippin’ crack she wouldn’t come back here for all the tea in China.”

  “Did — did she say why?”

  “Shut the door on me, she did. Then that blimmin’ old cow, her mother, shouted through the ruddy letter box, said Kath had told her this house was falling to bits and was bloody haunted. I ask you — haunted! You seen any ghosts? Well, have you? On my life, I ask you.”

  I empty the tea leaves out of the teapot into the sink and feel like the world has closed me in so tightly it’s like wearing a coat three sizes too small.

  Nobody ever wants to stay with Mimi and me.

  I talk to fill the moody silence but know even as I speak that I should have waited for a better time, or maybe I realize there may never be one.

  “Um, it’s the Prizegiving thing at school on Wednesday. I’ve got to stay behind, show people to their seats and things. I won’t have time to get home for tea first, probably won’t be back till really late.”

  “Ruddy hell!” Dad thumps his hand on the tabletop. “Why do you have to ruddy do it? Didn’t you say you lived too far away? Use your nonce, Cora — tell them to get somebody else who lives round the corner.”

  “I — I’ve got to do it.” I look down at the lino. “Just wanted to make sure you … you’d be here for Mimi.”

  “For Pete’s sake, it’s not a bloke’s job to be looking after flaming kids.” He stubs his cigarette out furiously in the ashtray. “All this mollycoddling — getting her from school. Why doesn’t she walk up the bloody road with somebody else? How long is it going to take her to make some ruddy friends! What is she? Eight ruddy years old. I took myself all over the place when I was a nipper half her age!”

  He takes out another cigarette. His hand is shaking.

  “And what’s she bloody doing scribbling with chalk on the ruddy back door? I’ll give her a ruddy good hiding, mucking things up when this place cost an arm and a leg to do up!”

  “She said she didn’t do it.”

  “Who else would it flippin’ be? Get a rag and wash it off for me, would you? And where’s that tea? I’m bloody parched.”

  A bit later, I pull open the back door and scrub out the drawing with a damp dishcloth. The cold wind stings my wet hands.

  I run my eyes over the garden as far as the creek. The last of the snow has disappeared, and the water is sloshing high up against the muddy bank overhung with drooping spears of pale reeds. Just on the edge of the cobbled yard, a little white stone, still knotted with red string, lies in the grass. I walk over and pick it up.

  The bundle of twigs … the stones …

  I think I might just go and look at the front door too.

  I walk round the house to the porch, step inside and up to the door. The mark is there — the M crowned with a circle, just like the other one. I rub it off with the cloth.

  I shiver. The evening is drawing in quickly.

  Going back round the house, I think about Prizegiving, imagine Mimi having to walk home in the darkness alone.

  For four years, sometimes in waking moments, more often in dreams, I have lived in two worlds, the one where Mimi was saved, and the other, almost more vivid, where she wasn’t, where Auntie Ida, Roger, and I got to the crypt too late. And in that ghastly second world, I am engulfed by the same ocean of grief and terror I would have drowned in if it had been true. The division between the two worlds is fragile, like a film of frost, easily melted with a breath.

  When I get back in, Dad says, “Look, I’m sorry I got cross with you, Cora. Don’t worry about that Prizegiving palaver — all right? I’ll be here.”

  I feel such a surge of relief that I reach up and kiss his cheek, just beside the scar.

  “I — I’ll sort something out for you — try to get someone to come and help
out. It isn’t easy for a bloke on his own, all this …”

  I go to the sink to rinse out the cloth when Dad says, “Oh, by the way, has Mimi made a friend at long last?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “When you were out just now, I could have sworn I heard her talking to somebody on the telephone.”

  I go to the door, look along the hall to the small table where the telephone sits solid and solitary opposite the clock.

  Dad says behind me, “I didn’t even think she knew how to make a call.”

  Mass in the school chapel. Phil Chisholm makes a great big thing about pointing out in a loud whisper to everyone the similarity between my barnet and the hair of Saint Dominic, standing in his stone niche on the wall. Even I have to grin from the row behind: the likeness is uncanny. Father Bartholomew spots him, and Chisholm gets his whole row a detention for laughing at a holy statue, then notices me smiling and ropes me in as well.

  Fortunately Mum’s given me half a crown to go to the barber’s on my way home. Hope I’ll be out in time to get there.

  I jump off the bus in Daneflete, nearly go over on the slippery pavement, shiny under a thin layer of ice, leg it past the Longship, down Paxton Street, up to the Happy Plaice fish-and-chip shop with its tantalizing smell of greasy chips wafting out onto the road, and on to Monsieur Antonio’s, the barber’s next door.

  I groan with frustration. Monsieur Antonio is behind the glass, turning the card from OPEN to CLOSED. I bang on the door and jab my finger at my ghastly hair. Monsieur Antonio points to CLOSED. I hold out my hands in supplication. He shakes his head and points to CLOSED. I join my palms and wring them in prayer, hold my head to one side, and try to form an expression of mute desperation.

  He raises his eyes to heaven and bends to unlock the door.

  “Oh, thank, thank you,” I gush as I bluster inside, restraining myself from grabbing his hand and kissing it.

  “Who did this?” He curls his fingers around a lock of hair and flicks it back in disgust.

  “Mum,” I say.

  “What with — a knife and fork?”

  He steers me over to the big chair and wraps a huge, yellowing white nylon cape around my shoulders. A few of someone else’s blond curls are still clinging to it with the static, and it crackles whenever I move.

  “How short do you want it?” he says with a touch of south London in his voice.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  He clicks his scissors and lays out his clippers.

  “I thought you’d be Italian — or, um, French?” I say, once he begins snipping.

  “No — come from Peckham. I started out French, like, with Antoine, ’cause me name’s actually Tony; then the ruddy man who painted me sign went and put Antonio and was going to charge me an extra ten bob to put it right, even though it was only three blimmin’ letters. He’d just done the ice-cream shop down the road and had Italian on the brain.”

  “Why didn’t you just stick with Tony?”

  “Ooh, no, no, no. It’s class, mate. French is classy. Monsieur’s got a ring to it. I get a better sort of clientele in here than Bill’s Barbers round the back of the garage.”

  When Monsieur Antonio has finished, I might not look like suave and sophisticated Paul Newman gazing out from a framed photo standing next to the tins of pomade, but glancing in the mirror — no, definitely not Paul Newman — I feel I can at least hold my head up again without shame. My hair even seems a bit longer. I feel quite cheery.

  I fumble around in my blazer for the half-crown and hold it out for Monsieur Antonio.

  His mouth withers under its little black moustache. “It’s three bob,” he says, “and I stayed open special.”

  “Oh, I’m really sorry. This is all Mum gave me. I could call in tomorrow with the extra sixpence.”

  “‘S all right,” he says, vigorously shaking the cape to try and dislodge the clinging hair, then reaching for his broom. “Off with you, now — and mind how you go. Pavements are getting slippy.”

  When I get off the bus at Bryers Guerdon, the air is raw and it’s long past dinnertime. I put my head down, wrap my arms around my chest against the biting cold, and set off down Ottery Lane. All the way home, passing the lighted windows of the little houses, their chimneys belching out grey smoke against the black night sky, I count my steps in groups of fifty, then twenty, then ten, hoping dinner will either be sausage stew or shepherd’s pie, with apple crumble and custard for afters. I’m praying it won’t be tinned prunes.

  As I go into the sitting room, Dad screws up a brown envelope and tosses it across the rug into the fire, which flares up for a moment, leaving a scrap of black, feathery ash.

  I put his cup of tea down on the little table. “Do you want me to get you a biscuit?” I say.

  “No, it’s all right.”

  He taps his fingers on the arm of the chair, seeming a bit far away. I expect he’s still annoyed because Mr. Blezzard came round for his money, caught Dad on the hop. They had a big row about the wallpaper coming off. Every morning we pick more up off the floor where it’s rolled down in the night and have started shoving it into a pile in a corner of the dining room with the fallen plasterboard. Mr. Blezzard is going to have to order some more, and get better paste, and start clearing out the barn as well, or he won’t get a penny.

  Dad’s cross about everything at the moment. I think that for all his fancy plans, he had no idea what he was going to do with himself in this worn-out old house in the middle of nowhere. He’s used to the city. He doesn’t fit in. And he’s bored.

  I notice him stuff some creased paper down the side of the chair before reaching for the cup and saucer.

  “It wasn’t my fault, you know,” he says out of the blue, “about your mother. It makes my life bloody hard, I’ll tell you that.”

  I take a deep breath, say nothing.

  I go into the hall and push open the door into the cold wooden bareness of the dining room, with its heap of wallpaper piled up in the corner.

  I hold my hands out over the unscratched teak tabletop. My fingers are trembling.

  I think of my mother in the only photograph we’ve got of her — getting married to Dad just after the war. She’s wearing a dark suit with a fox fur around the neck, its legs dangling down the front of the fitted jacket. Her fair hair’s all wavy under her hat, and she’s holding a bunch of carnations — only a handful of flowers, but lots of fluffy leaves to make it look bigger and more expensive.

  It’s four years since I last saw her, and now I only seem to remember her as she looks in the photograph. Whatever she’s doing — washing the clothes in the sink, pegging them out in the yard, cooking spuds, scrubbing the doorstep, on a bad day sleeping on her bed with the curtains drawn — she’s wearing that suit with the fox fur, and the hat, and the smile, and the carnations are somewhere next to her, and everything is in black and white as it is in the photograph, even the flowers.

  When we came out here, I felt as if I was leaving Mum behind. All my memories of her are in our old house, and they are fading. I want to stop myself imagining how it would be if we heard she had died in the asylum. Would it make any difference to us at all?

  She is only there because of what happened here in the war, because she thought she was to blame when Lankin snatched away her little sister.

  From the dining-room window I can see out to the creek at the front. With no light on in the room, I should be invisible to anyone outside as I peer through the glass into the half-darkness. With a shiver I see that it isn’t so. Old Mr. Wragge is on the bridge, bent slightly to one side, pushing a wheelbarrow towards the house. Even in the gloom of the wintry evening, it is obvious that he is looking at me. Seeing him makes me think of the broken pottery in the barn.

  I hear the squeak of the wheel as he approaches the front door. The knocker thuds twice.

  I wait for Dad for a moment, but in the end go to unbolt and unlock the door myself.

  In the shadow of t
he porch roof, Mr. Wragge stands among the leaves on the flagstones.

  “Your dad said I was to come for the wallpaper what’s fallen off,” he says. His dark little eyes gleam out from under a furry hat — their gaze steady and unnerving.

  Dad’s voice bellows down the hall, “Can’t you close the ruddy door? There’s a gale blowing in.”

  “Come for the wallpaper, Mr. Drumm,” Mr. Wragge says again as Dad appears.

  He points to the dining room — “It’s in there” — then goes back to the sitting room.

  I follow the old man. “Cup of tea?” I say. “There’s some in the pot.”

  “No, don’t worry, thanks. I’ll just get this loaded, then I’m off back home. It’s too dark to do no more.”

  He gathers up the paper.

  “You cleared the barn yet?” I ask.

  “No. It’s going to take a while, and Ed — Mr. Blezzard to you — will have to bring his van down.”

  “Funny old stuff in there,” I say.

  “You don’t want to go rummaging round with that lot,” he says. “Best left alone.”

  “I’ve seen it already,” I say. “Those old broken bottles and things.”

  “‘Scuse me,” he says, trying to get past me with his bundle.

  I follow him back down the hall and open the front door for him.

  “What are they — those bottles?” I ask.

  “None of your business,” he says.

  “You know what they are, don’t you?” I say, the cold beginning to creep into my sleeves as I stand in the porch.

  “Not saying nothing,” he says.

  He turns his back and I watch him trundle the barrow away down the path.

  I run after him. “Mr. Wragge —”

  He stops, irritated. “What do you keep pestering me for?” He purses his lips, moves on.

  “If you won’t tell me about the bottles, what about twigs tied with red twine … little white stones … chalk marks on the back door, a big M with a circle on top —”

  “Must be getting on,” he mutters, walking faster.

  “Mr. Wragge …” I hurry alongside him towards the bridge, beginning to freeze without a coat. “I’m going to keep asking you — every day till you tell me.”