The Tall Man

by Phoebe Locke

  ‘Morning,’ she said, surprising herself by daring to slide an arm around his sun-warmed back; allowing herself to breathe in the sleepy, floury smell of him with its undercurrents of aftershave and sweat. He drew back, taking the bag of presents from her. ‘I remember the good old days,’ he said, ‘when I’d have to stay up late figuring out how to wrap a pink plastic trike or a Barbie horse and carriage.’ She saw him realise too late how this comment might be interpreted as a jibe and so she smiled again to release him from it. He set the bag on the table, taking his time to rearrange the individual parcels – MAC make-up and DVDs, a perfume costing what seemed to Sadie an obscene amount – so that they fanned out of the bag enticingly. Satisfied, he returned to the hob and ladled another dollop of batter into the pan.

  It had hurt, of course, though she knew he hadn’t meant it to. Reminiscing was not supposed to be a thing to be avoided; memories were supposed to be embraced, welcomed, sought, not jerked back from like solitary shards of glass sifted from an anonymous shoal of sand. It wasn’t his fault that those harmless memories of pink trikes and plastic horses were not hers, that they filled her with terror. It wasn’t his fault that she had abandoned the both of them. It wasn’t his fault that she had come back.

  She went to the fridge and looked inside, because that seemed to be a thing that people did in kitchens. She’d rarely cared about food when she’d been gone, had bought bread and junk food when she remembered, ate soup from cans most nights.

  ‘I bought blueberries,’ Miles said. ‘She’s still into blueberries, right?’

  ‘I think so.’ Sadie took a blueberry and placed it on her tongue; popping it against the roof of her mouth. Sour. Sensations were starting to take her by surprise again. All of these superficial life things, suddenly switched back on.

  She decanted the blueberries into a bowl with some raspberries she vaguely remembered buying two or three days ago. They were imploding, caving under their own ripeness. When she tipped them into the bowl, they left clots of themselves behind, the carton streaked viscerally. She took the bowl over to the table with a pot of thick Greek yoghurt, another of Amber’s (temporary) favourites. Though it had been years since she had been young, when she watched Amber eat she had to bite down on her tongue or the soft insides of her mouth to stop the same words spilling out that her mother always slid across the table to her – Better not eat too much of that Got to watch that figure You won’t always look like that They do low-fat versions you know. She knew Amber could sense those words held back. Not that this would be unusual; it often felt that there was a whole other dimension within this house: Things Held Back, a shadowy other-life where they conducted most of their internal family business, where they had filed the previous sixteen years for safekeeping. Amber had so far proven very good at playing along – but Sadie sensed it there, beneath the surface; a distrust, a building fury. There were two of them in this house now.

  ‘Morning.’

  Sadie felt a tensing around her heart as she turned. Her daughter stood in the doorway, wrapped in her fluffy dressing gown, flannel pyjama bottoms tucked into fuzzy Ugg boots. Her face in the morning always shocked Sadie anyway – it was so rare to see her without make-up, her eyebrows their normal blondish fuzz instead of painted on thick and dark, that it often took a minute to compute that it was Amber looking back at her. Looking back in that unblinking, impassive way Sadie was still not used to. Looking back with a face so similar to Sadie’s that when they had first set eyes on each other that night six months ago, they had only been able to stare at each other. It sent a spike of fear through Sadie.

  Amber’s highlighted hair was scraped up into a lopsided knot on the top of her head and she yawned widely, fanning the air near her mouth in a showy sort of way.

  ‘Happy birthday, baby girl!’ Miles said, sweeping past Sadie to envelop Amber in a bear hug that lifted her off her feet.

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’ She rolled her eyes as he put her down, but it was affectionate in a way that Sadie was finally learning to read. ‘Oooh, presents!’

  Their daughter turned her attention to the bag of gifts, pastel paper drifting to the floor around her. She examined each item briefly, an occasional squeal thrown in, before it joined the growing pile on the table. They were all things from the list she’d printed off for Sadie a month ago – no surprises. Amber did not like surprises and Sadie felt she could hardly blame her.

  When she was done, she glanced up at them and smiled. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and, to Sadie’s surprise, Amber came to her first and hugged her tightly – properly – so that she could breathe in the flowery, slightly sweaty scent of her hair and the smell of her skin.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, vertiginously tearful, and then, ‘Happy birthday.’

  Amber had already moved on, was already stretching up to throw her arms round Miles’s neck as she planted a kiss on his stubbly cheek. Sadie stood back, feeling strange and warm. When Amber chose to shine her light on you, however briefly, it was so bright it stunned. It left Sadie wrong-footed, like stepping from the sunshine into a dark room, her brain struggling to catch up.

  ‘And now birthday breakfast for the birthday girl!’ Miles said, proudly setting the plate of pancakes on the table with a small bow.

  ‘Aww, thanks, Dad!’ Amber loaded a plate, a furious stream of syrup upended over everything. ‘Yum.’ Forking a corner into her mouth, still standing up, she made for the door. ‘I’m going to get ready for school.’

  ‘Well, I thought—’ Miles started, but Amber was gone, her plate spirited away, her footsteps thudding across the ceiling above them. The room felt curiously stagnant without her in it, even as Miles deflated into a chair and began forlornly forking pancakes on to his own plate.

  ‘Coffee?’ Sadie offered, and he turned to her and smiled. He was glad she was there, she realised, with a crushing sense of relief. She was there. She was there, and Amber was her daughter, and she was at home again.

  Her parents were doing their best to look serious on the rickety plastic chairs, her dad leaning forward as if he didn’t want to miss a single word Mrs Barclay said from the other side of her desk. Her mother had forgotten to change out of her decorating clothes and a blotch of white bloomed across one shoulder of her old shirt. Both of them were listening to her teacher with furrowed brows, lips pressed together – from the outside, it looked as though they were the ones in trouble.

  Sadie watched them through the scratched glass of the classroom window, squeaking the toe of her shoe against the lino floor. The corridor was cool and quiet and so far she was alone. But a single strip light at the end of the hallway had begun to flicker and she knew she should keep an eye on it. She glanced behind her at the place where the corridor met another, its lights already off. The shadows were still – for now – and she returned her attention to the scene inside the classroom.

  She could see the moment when her parents went from anxious to angry. They had come here expecting a fight or a broken bone and instead the ‘incident’ Mrs Barclay had referred to in her clipped voice had turned out to be this.

  Sadie. The first whisper creeping up the corridor behind her. Sadie glanced at the flickering light again but it showed no sign of giving up. It soldiered on and the shadows were kept at bay. When she returned her attention to the window, all three of the adult faces inside were turned towards her.

  In the car on the way home, her mother kept hitching her seatbelt forward so she could turn and look at Sadie.

  ‘Feeling OK, sweetheart?’ she asked, once or twice, and Sadie had to work hard to nod and smile instead of rolling her eyes.

  They waited until dinnertime, though that was not unexpected. Anne and Robert Frederick preferred to let their problems fester in the hope that eventually, with enough normal life pressing down on them, they might moulder into nothingness. Into whatever it was that a family grew in.

  But this, clearly, was too much even for them to ignore. Over their spaghetti bolognese, o
range flecking her father’s shirt and a tide of rejected carrot fragments slowly washing up against the edge of Sadie’s plate, they looked at her again. The mushrooms she ate first, ignoring them.

  It was Anne who finally decided to speak. Her fork going down with a meaningful thunk, Robert hurrying to slurp up the mouthful of spaghetti he’d taken.

  ‘What happened today?’ she asked. ‘You tell us your side of the story.’

  And Sadie carefully put down her own cutlery and pushed back her chair. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said, and then she went to her room.

  She did remember, of course. She remembered all too well, lying in bed with both lamps and the overhead light on. One of the lamps was new – a lava lamp bought from the incense-scented shop in town where a curtain of beads separated each tiny section from the other. Her mother hated that shop, just like all the other mothers, but she had taken Sadie there to cheer her up after her first filling at the dentist (she had not once, as Sadie had expected, reminded Sadie that she had told her so; she had even bought her a cola-flavoured Mr Freeze on their way to the appointment. It wasn’t a blue one – the sky itself would freeze over before Anne Frederick let her child eat something coloured such an unnatural shade of blue – but it was a victory nonetheless). Sadie had chosen the lamp hastily, afraid that the offer might suddenly expire, and now she spent hours admiring it, the soft globs of purple drifting through the sickly pink.

  The other lamp had been on her bedside table when she was small – a china toadstool house with windows cut out and a door left ajar so that light could creep out when it was switched on. It had been abandoned under her bed but recently she had found need for it even though she was too old to have a nightlight.

  She lay there with the lamps on either side of her and the ceiling light with its dusty lampshade giving out its reliable warmth. The shadows crept in anyway. They leaked out from under furniture and crept across walls. The whispers snuck in between the rushed hushing of her own breath and she tried to tell herself that she could not hear.

  Thinking instead of her abandoned dinner and her parents, in all likelihood still sitting silently at the table, she turned on to her side.

  School had felt safe. It wasn’t the same as going into the woods with Helen’s hand in hers, Justine and Marie taking it in turns to tell stories of the Tall Man. When they were alone in the woods, wind whispering through the trees, it felt as though anything could happen. It felt as though he could step out from the shadows at any moment, take any one of them away with him. But the school, with its greasy windows and its rows of desks, was a normal place. No one was special there. She spent most days looking out at the playground and beyond, at the clouds scudding across the grey sky. Wondering if the stories could be true; if the things she sometimes heard in the darkness of her room at night were real. Wondering if she wanted them to be.

  They were studying the Victorians this term, which she had quite enjoyed. Looking at old black-and-white pictures of women in bustled dresses, men with ruffled collars and hats. Imagining cobbled streets lit with puddles of weak streetlight, fog crawling round corners. Sometimes she dreamt of a tall house with steps up to its front door, a face that was not hers looking back at her from a mirror with curled golden edges. The clicking of heels down an alleyway, the smell of something sweet and awful.

  There was no Helen at school that day – Sadie had decided she would call at their house on the way home to see if she was OK. Helen was often off sick; she seemed to attract every bug and cold that went round. But Sadie couldn’t help wondering if Helen had started to hear her name being whispered from the shadows, too.

  It was Tuesday, which meant Art, and Mrs Barclay had asked them to draw pictures of the factories and mills they’d been learning about using chalk and charcoal to shade in where the light could and couldn’t reach. Everyone liked Art and for once it was quiet as the class leaned over their work. Dusty-fingered, the edges of the construction paper curling, their pictures emerged. Sadie sat and watched as smoking chimneys grew and crooked windows were etched in all around her but on her own piece of paper there was only smoke and shadows, a swirling mass that seemed to take flight every time she looked at it.

  She put her hand up, straight and tall. ‘I made a mistake,’ she told Mrs Barclay. ‘I want to start again.’

  ‘Go and get some more paper,’ Mrs Barclay had tutted. ‘And be quick about it.’

  At the back of the classroom was a door which led into a long, narrow store room. Cheap MDF bookcases lined the walls, stacked with art things and exercise books and the plastic zip-up folders they were supposed to carry their homework around in. Boxes of pencils and paintbrushes and clammy lengths of cobweb which clung to the thickly painted walls.

  Sadie hesitated just inside the door. There was a single bare bulb in there, swinging gently in the draught from the classroom. Its white light calm and even on the poured concrete floor. The corners and the edges remained independent, their own shades of shadow; the light was too feeble to cast them out. When she took a step towards the bookcase with the stacks of drawing paper on its shelves, the door creaked closed behind her and the shadows grew.

  She faltered for a moment but the mountain of paper was tantalisingly close and already she felt in her the thrill of creation. It had been this way for a while, the idea of making something or of writing a story a pull so powerful she found herself angry when, with paper and tools in front of her, the thing did not pour itself immediately out.

  And so she forgot about the creeping darkness and came closer to the shelf. She chose a piece of paper that was a bit bigger than the others, picturing Mrs Barclay absent-mindedly sliding the guillotine’s blade across its board over and over, the pages piling up at her feet. She forgot about the creeping darkness until the bulb blinked, once and then twice. Her hand slipped back from the shelf. She looked towards the end of the room, where chairs and an old, broken easel were stacked up against the wall. The darkness there was long and stretching, the light swinging wildly now so that the shadow of the easel towered over the floor and then crept back into its corner.

  But it wasn’t the easel’s shadow that lurked in the corner, was it? Her heart stopped as she saw the shadow slowly detach itself, long fingers uncurling. A nose and a chin in profile, high, high up the wall – turning slowly in her direction.

  The paper fluttered to the floor.

  Listen, said the voice. Sadie’s hand stuttered across the shelf and found a pot of plastic-handled scissors. She was listening.

  She felt breath against the back of her neck, a shadow stooping down over hers. The light flickered and then, with a spark and a clap, it went out. Sadie, said the voice.

  Sadie stood very still, feeling the darkness move around her. Don’t be afraid, she told herself. You asked him to come, you asked him. But as the breath fluttered against her skin again, she squeezed her eyes shut despite the dark. Sadie, said the voice again, and then cool fingers whispered across her cheek. She could hear the paper on the shelves fluttering wildly, the jars trembling.

  I can make you special, if you ask.

  Sadie was not ready to be special. She tried and tried to keep still, but when the smooth, cold hand closed around her arm, she couldn’t stop the scream from escaping. She couldn’t stop her own hand, hot and damp around the scissors’ handles, from lashing out, from striking hard into him as he held her.

  And then the screaming was not her own. Then she opened her eyes and saw the storeroom door open, the room flooded with light. And Mrs Barclay was standing in front of her, the scissors with their green handles poking up from her doughy arm. Blood running in a slow, fat trickle towards her fingers with their chalk and charcoal stains. Eyes on Sadie, wide and watching and afraid.

  And then Sadie had been alone again.

  She wondered if she was alone now.

  She stared up at the ceiling, listening to the silence of the house. And then she reached over and slowly, one by one, she turned out the
lights.

  6

  2016

  Sadie was early to everything now, determined not to be late or unreliable. While she’d been gone, time had been her own and something she rarely thought about; it was difficult now to adjust to its strict shapes, its unrelenting march. But she was trying. If you’re coming back, Miles had told her that first morning, his face ashen with shock and his eyes swollen and bruised with lack of sleep, You have to take it seriously. You have to be her mother. And so she did take it seriously; she treated it like a new job in which she was trying to impress both her bosses. She knew that it would be a long time until her probation was over.

  She pulled into the leisure centre car park at seventeen minutes to ten, seventeen minutes too early. This seemed reasonable, at first, not long to wait, and she settled back in her seat, listening to the cooling engine tick. There were hardly any other cars so late at night and the fir trees which lined the car park twitched and whirled in the wind. She sat in the car and listened to herself breathe. She tried not to look at the trees.

  Twitch and whirl. The shadows stretched out in the orange streetlight; they reached out, unfurled. Dark shapes danced across the asphalt and took flight. The engine tick tick ticked, the seconds becoming elastic again. She closed her eyes. It didn’t help.

  She’d been surprised that Amber had agreed to Miles’s suggestion of the charity disco for her birthday. It was for under 18s, which meant zero access to alcohol and Sadie had been certain that Amber would turn her nose up at the idea. But then Amber was not easy for Sadie to predict, not how she’d expected. Though the physical similarity of mother and daughter was undeniable, Sadie was pleased when traits belonging to Miles alone made themselves known in their child. She had noticed too how Amber was kind to Miles, humouring his suggestions even when they were obviously uncool or unexciting to her, and Sadie took this as a good sign. When she did catch a glimpse of herself flitting across her daughter’s face, she tried to pretend that it was a trick of the light.