Baba Lenka

by S E England

  This time, the poppet twitched more definitively. No, I had to be making it happen. I mean – how the fuck?

  It moved, you felt it, it jumped with life…you did…you felt it!

  Stilling it once more, this time resting my elbow on the desk so there was no room for error, I asked again. “If I curse my grandfather, will I get well again?”

  The pendulum swung from side to side without any doubt whatsoever, cutting, in fact, a ninety-degree angle. Nor would it stop. It was like a live thing in my hand. My heart jittered wildly. Was this telekinesis? Uri Geller did it like a parlour trick, causing objects to move or bend with the force of his mind. They said it was energy, something like that. Yes, that was all. I bet a scientist could explain this away.

  But what if I asked something I didn’t know the answer to?

  I steadied it once more. “Right, is my mother alive?”

  Immediately it swung from side to side. No question. Its motion was far stronger, the poppet quivering before eventually calming on its own.

  “Is she in a mental institution?”

  Affirmative. My eyes must have popped like organ stops. It was swinging widely, and so strongly it felt as if it might fly from my fingers! Oh, freak! The room was empty, I swear – there was no one and nothing there. And not a breath of air.

  “So she is alive and in a mental hospital?”

  Side to side.

  The air was electric, crackling, daylight flickering as if a storm was coming. I think my heart rate must have shot up to a hundred and ten. Who was making this happen? Was someone standing beside me? Someone I couldn’t see?

  “Is someone here?”

  As if in answer, a cold breeze wafted against my face as softly as if a bird had flown too close.

  Muss i’ denn…

  Muss i’ denn…

  A terrible fear got a hold of me then. It shivered up and down my back. I had to get out of there, out of that room.

  What had I done? Holy Christ, what had I invited in?

  I could barely breathe. My head pounded, and my heart felt like it was about to give out, sweat pouring off me. It was like the worst case of flu and food poisoning all mixed in. Frantically, I stuffed all the possessions I had into the rucksack. I had to get to Mrs Dixon’s. A new life beckoned. Medical help. A fresh start… I wished I hadn’t done this, really wished I hadn’t.

  Eva, Eva…give us work…!

  It was at the last moment, just as I was scanning the room for anything left behind, that I saw it and remembered. On top of the sewing box lay the screwed up tissue containing Earl Hart’s toe clippings. For a second I hesitated. Was there time?

  Gran had gone to fetch him.

  I could see his face while she was telling him at this very moment what he was accused of…saw his eyes dilate to black, his teeth visible through the beer glass as he drained his pint before slamming it onto the bar.

  “Right, I’m ready for you, you bastard!” Rage, that perfect channel for evil of the most powerful kind, came riding in like a devil on horseback. And not a damn thing could stop it.

  Knocking back the poppet’s whisky and glad for the burn of it, without further thought, I took one of the candles kept in the desk drawer for blackouts. Memories replayed in quick succession as I worked – every hard slam against the kitchen cupboards, every single painful thrust over and over and over, the lies, the betrayal, the deceit, the interminable self-righteous rants, temper, punches and slaps…

  Uttering words not known to me, my mouth worked as if pulled by the strings of a puppeteer: “Nema Olam a son arebil des menoitatnet ni sacundi son en te. Sirtson subiotibed sumittimid son te tucis, artson atibed sibon ettimid te. Eidoh sibon…”

  Tipping the toe clippings inside a piece of notepaper, I folded it into a small envelope, drawing onto the front an inverted pentagram filled with a black sun surrounded by rays. The only photo there was of him was in their bedroom. I darted in, grabbed it and cut out his body to fix to the front. And when the little package was ready, I took a pin from the sewing box and repeatedly stabbed him in the groin with it.

  Every thrust of the excruciatingly painful rape correlated with every stab of the pin. And with every stab came the satisfying image of his cock shrivelling to black necrotic tissue, wizening with disease as rip-roaring ball pain consumed his every waking breath. He couldn’t walk, couldn’t pee, his red-veined eyes as terrified as a bull realising too late it was lined up for slaughter.

  And when the hexing was done, I held the paper over the candle flame and burned it. “This is my Will!”

  Would it work?

  Blowing out the candle, I speedily cleared away the remnants of the evil deed. The whole thing had taken less than two minutes, but it was two minutes too long. He’d be back soon. All hell, as they said, was about to break loose, and it hit me now what he’d do when he found me gone.

  Shit, I can’t do that to Mrs Dixon and Nicky, can I? Think…think!

  Flying into the front bedroom, I flung open the top drawer of his bedside table. That’s where he kept his winnings from the horses. Gran had a tin on the mantelpiece containing a meagre amount of housekeeping for the Co-op and a once-a-month visit to the hairdresser. I would never take that. But this was Earl’s betting money – cash he really ought to have given to her – and my eyes bulged at the amount he’d stashed. Lousy git! He could have replaced her threadbare overcoat, taken her to Blackpool for a weekend, something she said she’d love to do. But no, it was hoarded. And there was at least seven hundred pounds.

  His footsteps pounded in my head along with my heart.

  They were halfway down the street…

  Separating the wad, some went into my jeans pocket, some inside my shoe and the rest in my underwear. Then, thundering downstairs as Earl Hart was still stomping down the road from the working men’s club, several feet in front of his bustling, hand-wringing wife, I slipped out the back door into the yard – trusting that within hours he would be unable to even think about revenge.

  Or anything at all. Except the searing pain of his rapidly decomposing cock!

  ***

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It was only later I realised just how fast my recovery actually was. Barely had I reached the end of the street before the banging headache cleared and the stomach cramps stopped. Funny how you can live with pain day in, day out, praying for it to end, but the precise moment it goes can pass unnoticed.

  Besides, escape had been fully occupying my mind. That and protecting Nicky and Mrs Dixon. No way could they be subjected to violent recriminations because of me. Eldersgate was an estate where laws were enforced by a few individuals, and Earl Hart was the boss of that mob. Escape to where, though? There was only one obvious option, and that was to track down my dad – seeing as how he lived so close.

  The loaded rucksack banged into my spine as I hurried down the gennel linking our street to the main road. The priority was to put as much distance between me and Earl as fast as possible. By the time he worked out I’d packed and gone, hopefully the agonising pain would have kicked in, an ache somewhere deep inside his scrotum – a sickening thump that would consume him to distraction. He’d have to sit down for a moment while his eyes watered.

  On the main road, level with the bus stop, the street opposite led to the nursing home where Mrs Dixon worked. On the left, about halfway along was a row of shops that included a newsagent, and it must be that one Mrs Dixon had referred to. It was still impossible to comprehend – that all these years Dad had been living just around the corner. I mean, why say he lived in Leeds? He must seriously have wanted to avoid me.

  My stomach clenched into a fist that wanted to punch someone. It just hurt. I can’t tell you how much it hurt. I was going to ambush him next morning, anyway. And he was going to explain this and also disclose where my mother was. God, what had happened that was so bad she’d ended up insane and their only child had to be dumped with a violent man?

  I’d find out.
Damn right I would!

  Careful, the hyenas are out – a young girl alone, with money…and a bag of belongings…

  Once again I thanked that silent voice. To the rear of the newsagent was a locked yard containing rubbish bins and a rickety shed, presumably for the newspapers? Well then, that would provide a few hours of undisturbed protection. Not comfortable, not by any means, but I had a couple of sweaters in the rucksack to sit on, and it wasn’t cold.

  Strange what happens on the streets at night. Sleep was impossible amid drunken shouts from those falling out of the Greyhound pub and cans being kicked down the road. This estate was rougher than ours and scrawled with hate-filled graffitti. It pulsed with anger, fear and resentment, many houses boarded up, and the thin-walled maisonettes of the elderly quiet and dark.

  At one point a crash jarred the padlocked gate to the yard, a fight or scuffle broke out, followed by a nasty laugh. And then it was quiet, as silent as death, the drugged and the drunk finally falling into slumber before dawn filtered in.

  I was out of the shed well before the papers arrived, rubbing my hands, standing in a single ray of light opposite the shop. Waiting.

  He showed up exactly as Mrs Dixon had said, at the same time she would be passing on the bus for her morning shift – ten to eight. As he came out of the shop, scanning the headlines of a tabloid, he shook out a Silk Cut and fished in his denim jacket for a light.

  “Hi, Dad!”

  The cigarette on his lower lip wobbled precariously. It seemed a lifetime ago that he’d popped round on my sixteenth with that cheap radio. He had of course been a different man two days ago – a busy, successful one preparing for a new life with a new family. A man sorted after a difficult relationship with a mad woman. Only that was a lie. Wasn’t it, Dad?

  “It’s not what you think,” he said, removing the unlit cigarette and wedging it back into the packet. “Come on, we can’t talk here.”

  We walked back to his house in silence, both of us trying to cohese our thoughts. Eventually we rounded a corner into a cul-de-sac of pebble-dashed semis. His was at the end – the one with a rusting gate, an overgrown front lawn and dingy curtains. This was not my dad. He wasn’t like this, he wasn’t!

  “Come on in; don’t mind the mess. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  The front room was drear, with an Artexed ceiling and a swirly orange carpet. The tea he made sat cooling on the coffee table while we sat there wondering where to start, the only sounds those of screaming, shouting children from the nearby primary school. He was poor and broken, that much was obvious. How on earth he’d managed to put on such an act for me and his parents, I couldn’t guess. It explained the cheap radio, anyway, that image of three other children having everything I did not, now dissipating as quickly as the illusion itself. There was no new family, was there?

  He glanced at the rucksack. “Going somewhere?”

  “Yeah, I was coming to you.”

  He stared at me for a long time before speaking, before deciding how best to phrase this. He had no need to explain how it was for him here, with the cardboard-thin walls, empty beer cans, overflowing ashtrays and well-thumbed tabloids. But he told me anyway. How they’d taken a bank loan for the trip to Bavaria, not wanting anyone in the family to know about it on account of Earl’s aversion to all things German. He couldn’t ask his dad, he said, for the flight money, so he’d taken out a bank loan. At the time they’d both been in work and I was healthy.

  “Of course, when we came back, you were ill and then your mother lost her job.”

  “And you bought an expensive house.”

  This he acknowledged. But my mother had been unable to find another job, he said, with the hours she’d had before – the ones enabling her to babysit me while he worked shifts. And as my health deteriorated, there had been no other option but for her to stay home pretty much all the time. The mortgage, bank loan, and building jobs on the house had sunk them, he explained, and as a result, they’d had to leave me with his parents so Alex could work full-time. At least until I got better and they’d paid off some bills.

  “For a short time, you said. Not eight years!”

  He looked at his hands, examining the nails. “Aye, well—”

  “Eight years with Earl Hart, Dad. When you knew, didn’t you, that he was violent?”

  He looked up sharply. “He’s handy with a slap, but—”

  “You left your eight-year-old daughter there, when in your own words he was ‘handy with a slap’? I get that my mother needed a job, but you didn’t have to dump me there for the rest of my childhood when you knew! You knew he hit Gran and that he’d hit me, too. Did you know he was a rapist, as well?”

  He looked as if he’d been punched, and at the sight of his shock, all the bitter recriminations of rage, pain, fear and bewilderment fired out in a volley of despair. It consumed the whole of me, and even when the look on his face told me all I needed to know, that he was saddened beyond words, I still couldn’t stop. I kept on going until I was shaking and crying.

  He hung his head, staring at the swirls on the carpet.

  I was past needing to be hugged and consoled – that never happened – and far too upset to just sit there. Pacing back and forth, I railed at him through blinding tears. “I need to know why you lied and continued to lie. Why tell me you were in Leeds when you were here all along? And how come I never got to see my mother ever again? No one would tell where she was. They wouldn’t even say what happened to my cat! Nothing, bloody nothing.”

  “She went to the neighbour,” he said quietly. “The lady next door took Sooty, love.”

  “So why couldn’t I be told that?”

  “In case you wanted Sooty and made a fuss. I couldn’t leave the cat in his house, could I? The man shot his own dog when I was a kid.”

  The view through that front room window was depressing: gardens piled with discarded furniture and rubbish, bedroom curtains still drawn, gates hanging off.

  “It doesn’t exist, this perfect second family, does it? It’s been one lie after another and all because you didn’t want to look after me anymore. Was I honestly that bad?”

  I would have got my bag and left there and then; such was my anger. I could barely look at him just sitting there staring at the bloody carpet like a sodding victim. But if I left, the chance to find out where my mother was would be lost.

  Eventually, when he realised I wasn’t going to slam out of the front door and really did expect answers, he raised his bloodshot eyes to mine. So he drinks to numb the pain…smokes for something to do with his nervousness…hides from something worse…

  “I had to protect you, Eva.”

  “From what? My own mother? Why couldn’t I even see her? People visit relatives in psychiatric units all the time.”

  “From the truth. Sit down, love. Listen, you don’t understand – your mum was in a terrible state, and I couldn’t let you see her like that.”

  “What terrible state?”

  He kept his eyes on the swirls, mumbling the almost unsayable. “It was when she was left alone in that house, after we took you to Eldersgate. She had some books from her great-grandmother – the old lady who gave you nightmares, remember?”

  I looked away. For fuck’s sake…as if I’d forget!

  “I didn’t know she’d brought them back from Rabenwald, but one day I came home early and found her reading them in the attic. She was on the floor up there, rocking back and forwards while she read, and when she looked up and saw me, there was this horrible malicious grin on her face. It made her look like a totally different person. I barely recognised her. It took a good few minutes for her to compose her features and become Alex again, and it stayed with me, you know? That image, I’m telling you it left me shocked, really badly disturbed. Anyhow, I asked her what the books were, and she told me – said they were the diaries Baba Lenka kept during the World Wars.”

  “Diaries? Really?” So they contained the rest of the story, and that
information had sent my mother mad? I tried to keep the astonishment off my face. “What happened then?”

  “Well, I had more pressing issues, I suppose – put it to the back of my mind. Anyhow, she managed to get a part-time job and for a while it looked like we were back on track. But she’d changed, Eva – become a different person. I can’t put it any other way. She started to go up to the attic at night to read those bloody books instead of coming to bed. I asked her why she didn’t bring them down so we could read them together, but she said no, they couldn’t be brought into the house itself, into our living space. She became very furtive, sneaking up there with a torch, devouring the things. One night I heard her laughing in this horrible way, maniacal and nasty, and talking in a language I don’t think she even understood. It got worse and worse.”

  “How so?” And where are the books?

  “About a week or so later, I came home to find her in the corner of the kitchen on the floor, talking to herself in gobbledygook. Her eyes were wide and excited, she was biting at her fingernails, and she kept swinging round to stare at invisible things. And talk to them! But her voice, Eva…I don’t know that I’ve got the words, but it were low and masculine – not hers anymore. And she were sniggering and whispering to people that just were not there.

  “Oh, Eva, I’m sorry, love, but I was scared. She wasn’t my Alex anymore – more like some sort of demon. I called the doctor, and he gave her a sedative. But she continued to deteriorate. She wet the bed, she messed the bed, she smashed up the room… We had to have her sectioned in the end. Only I couldn’t tell you because you were just a child and I wanted you to get better and have as normal an upbringing as possible.”

  “Did she ever recover? I mean, ever?”

  He shook his head. A single tear dribbled down his cheek, dripping from the end of his chin. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “It was terrible to see. I’ve used every last penny to pay for private treatments and assessments, paid for her to stay in top clinics and see leading psychiatrists. But whenever they try to wean her off the drugs, it starts again. Eva, I’ve seen her every single day for the past eight years, and there isn’t any improvement at all.”