The Missing Years

by Lexie Elliott

  “Look, this is here. It’s the Manse,” says Callum excitedly. I look up from the jotter in my hand to the sepia photograph he’s holding out. It’s recognizably the front of the Manse, though the oak tree is quite a bit smaller. “Was it taken a very long time ago?”

  “I don’t know when.” I take it from him and turn it over, hoping for a date, or something else in a precise neat handwriting. I can almost see it, a line in faded ink, the way the letters loop and slope, the evenness of the script, but there’s nothing there at all. “Perhaps a photography expert could tell.”

  “Is everything in there to do with the Manse?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you have any more photos?” asks Callum, clearly much less interested in the jotters. I look around for the aerial shots of the Manse and hand them to him. “Cool!”

  I inspect the jotter I’m holding again; one could buy something like it in any newsagent’s. It’s about two thirds full of decisive handwriting, with a slight flourish to the cross of the t’s. My father wrote this, I think. This, and this, and this. He sat at a table, somewhere in this house, and he set down his thoughts. Not in Biro, in fountain pen, and in the same blue ink. Did he always write in fountain pen? Or was that choice a mark of his investment in the project? “Your grandfather told me that my father was researching the Manse’s history. I think we’ve found his research.” I sink into a chair and read a page at random. Pre-1841, the census report was statistical only. In 1841, the Manse is listed with John Buchanan (41), Mary Buchanan (32) and Christine Anderson (16) in residence.

  I flick through, looking for something relating to an earlier period, to the period of Ali’s story. From his notes, it looks like my father had heard that story and was looking for that, too: there’s various expressions of frustration in that decisive blue handwriting that he can’t find any records naming householders from before the 1800s. The Jacobite rebellion was 1745, and Bonnie Prince Charlie died in 1788. Any pockets of Jacobite rebellion would have died out well before the 1841 census.

  “What’s this?” Callum asks, pointing near the shore of the loch on one photo.

  “Oh, that’s a path, surely.” The line he’s indicating is paler than the green around it.

  “But there isn’t a path there.”

  “Well, there might have been one back then. These must have been taken almost thirty years ago.” I look at it again. It seems an odd-shaped path, like a tick mark, leading away from the shore at a forty-five-degree angle for a short distance, perhaps only meters, and then turning a right angle to head back toward the shore. But perhaps the shore line has changed over that time too.

  “Can I go play?”

  “Of course.” I follow his dark head out of the room with my eyes, marveling at his comfort here. He seems entirely at ease, more so than I for all this was my own childhood home. And the Manse seems at ease with him.

  Picking up the jotter again, I flick through to find a substantial section on window tax, which was apparently introduced in 1748, but my father was disappointed to find that the records contained names only, not addresses. I wonder how he found that out, in the pre-Internet era. Did he have to go to a public records office somewhere? Did he leave Karen and me alone to indulge his passion? I can just imagine my mother’s lack of patience with that.

  The sound of Callum’s footsteps drags me out of the blue-inked jotter. “Hey, you, are you already after another biscuit?” I’m reaching for the cupboard but as he comes farther into the kitchen, I realize he’s paper white. “What is it? Callum, what is it?”

  “Under . . . under Carrie’s bed,” he says. There’s a catch in his voice. “I was playing a spy game. I was under her bed.” Anxiety is creeping in, too. “Was it okay to be there? I wasnae meaning to be naughty, I swear.”

  He’s right beside me now. I kneel down and wrap him in a cuddle. “Of course that’s okay. We’ve told you before that you can go in our rooms so long as you don’t touch our things. What’s under the bed, Callum?” He’s clutching me with a fierceness that worries me more than any words could. “Wait, I can’t hear you properly—” I pull back to look at his pinched face.

  “There are bones,” he says tremulously. “Under her bed.”

  “Bones?” He nods silently. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I close it again. I can’t think what on earth he could have mistaken for bones. Or is this the next step in the escalation of the scare-away-Ailsa campaign? How could I have been so stupid to have only moments ago been fantasizing that the Manse is benign with this child in it? But Callum is waiting for me to speak, to tell him it’s all going to be all right. “Well, I’m sure this is some kind of confusion, but it sounds like I ought to go take a look, don’t you think?” He nods silently, his eyes brimming with words that he can’t find a way to utter. “Why don’t you stay here—”

  “No!” He has grabbed my hand with desperate ferocity. “No! Dinnae leave me! Promise you willnae leave me, promise—” He’s almost sobbing. I realize I’ve never seen Callum cry before. I’m utterly out of my depth.

  “Okay, okay, I won’t leave you. Callum, honey, I promise I won’t leave you.” I’ve gathered him up in my arms again. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.” I’m stroking his hair, his back, almost crooning to him, for how long I don’t know. Minutes, perhaps. Gradually I can feel the tension ease in him and his breathing return to normal.

  Finally he lifts his head. I smooth away the tear tracks with my thumbs, feeling close to tears myself. “You have to go see,” he says, his face a heartbreaking mixture of dread and determination. “We’ll have to go together.”

  Do we have to? Together? I debate it internally. My first instinct is to keep Callum well away from whatever has scared him. But would that be worse? Would he build up whatever he thinks he has seen in his head until it’s the stuff of nightmares, when the truth might be entirely innocuous? But at any rate, it’s clear he will not leave my side, and it’s equally clear I have to see whatever this is. Reluctantly I nod. “Okay. Together.”

  So we climb the stairs together, with his little hand enveloped in mine, and I wonder that I ever thought him robust. Right now he feels as fragile as tissue paper. We walk across the landing to the door to the master bedroom—Carrie’s bedroom. I find I’m taking a deep breath as we enter.

  Carrie’s bedroom is as messy as ever. The duvet hangs half off the bed, obscuring the small space beneath the bed on the side we’re standing. I take Callum’s hand and secure it on the back pocket of my jeans so as to free both of my own hands. “Okay?” I ask him. He nods back silently, his eyes dark pools of barely contained fear. I can feel his hand tightly bunching my jeans pocket material. I pull the duvet up and deposit it all on top of the bed. “Under here?” He nods again. I get down on my knees to look properly. Callum is still gripping my jeans pocket.

  The space under the bed is so narrow that only a child of Callum’s size or smaller could fit, and the light from the window doesn’t penetrate far enough for me to be able to see properly. I sit up for a moment and pull out my mobile phone and switch on the torch function, then put my head back down to peer under the bed again. The pale yellowish light picks up a sock and a red hairbrush and the fact that the carpet under here could really use a pass of the Hoover. And then, at the far end, the pillow end, I can see . . .

  Bones. Small bones, yellow-white and clean, looming large against the black shadows thrown behind them by the angled torch. I can’t judge their size—the torchlight and the shadows are skewing the perspective—but probably they’re no bigger than my hand. A cold thread of dread circles into my belly.

  I pull back abruptly and sit up, almost dislodging Callum, who hasn’t relaxed his grip on my jeans. “Yes,” I say. He nods back at me, once, without displaying any satisfaction in having been proved right, his dark eyes enormous in the pale chalk of his face. “I can see them. I’m going to mov
e the bed.” He nods again. Normally he’d be so eager to help that he’d be already moving the bed himself by now, but this time he just shuffles silently along beside me, always maintaining his grasp on my pocket, whilst I yank on the heavy bed myself. When I glance down at him, I see that the thumb of his other hand is in his mouth. After a couple of big heaves, I have moved the bed perhaps a foot and a half away from the wall that it was previously flush against. I have to lean awkwardly over the headboard to see if that’s far enough.

  It’s far enough.

  The carpet is heavily indented from where the bed normally sits, and a thick layer of dust covers the inch between the indentations and the skirting board. The bones—five or six of them, all small, not any longer than the main bone in a chicken drumstick—are resting on the hardy woven beige carpet in a loose pile, an inch or so farther from the wall than the indentations from the bed.

  Maybe they are chicken bones. Though they seem a little thicker. And perhaps longer. I can’t for the life of me think how chicken bones—clean ones, with nary a strip of meat on them—would find a resting place on the carpet under a bed. And I can’t shake the dread that’s settled, coiled snakelike, inside my belly.

  “What are you going to do with them?” asks Callum.

  I turn back from peering over the headboard to face him. “I suppose I’d better take them to the police, just to be safe. Though I expect they’re probably animal bones of some kind,” I add quickly.

  Callum looks completely unconvinced. “Why would Carrie have animal bones under her bed?”

  “Honey, this has nothing to do with Carrie. They’ve probably been here from before we arrived.”

  He’s frowning stubbornly. “How can you be sure? It could be a black magic thing. I saw it on the telly.”

  “What?” I stare at him. “What on earth have you been watching?”

  “James Bond.” He screws up his nose as he thinks. There’s a bit more color in his cheeks now, and he has let go of my jeans pocket. “Die or Go Live, I think? Or something.”

  “Live and Let Die?” He nods. I have a hazy memory of Jane Seymour and some kind of voodoo in that one. I’ve never particularly thought about the age certificate for Live and Let Die, or for any Bond film for that matter, but I’m sure it must be at least a 12. Which Callum is most definitely not. “Erm, did your mum say you could watch it?”

  “Nah, it was Uncle Jamie.”

  “Right,” I say faintly. “Well, I can assure you I’ve never seen any sign of Carrie being involved in black magic.” His jaw remains mutinously set. “Look, Carrie would hardly be fine with you playing in her bedroom if she had black magic paraphernalia to hide, would she?”

  “Para . . . ?”

  “Paraphernalia. It means stuff, equipment.”

  He considers this carefully for a moment, then his face clears and he nods. “They could have slipped through,” he mutters, half to himself.

  I pretend I didn’t hear that. “Okay then. I’ll just grab these and we can wrap them up and I’ll take them to the police station.” But then I wonder if I ought to be touching the bones at all—if they are human, would I be tampering with evidence? “Callum, can you grab me some toilet paper from the bathroom there? I’ll wrap them in that.”

  He’s off like a shot, then back only seconds later with an entire roll of toilet paper. I shift the bedside table so that I can access the gap more easily. Then I tear off a healthy length of loo roll, fold it and lay it down on the bedside table, waiting to take delivery. I take another length of toilet paper in my right hand, and bend into the gap to pick up the bones.

  The paper makes me clumsy; I can only grab a couple of bones at a time. They are simultaneously lighter yet more solid than I had expected. When I’m finished, all six lie among loo paper on the bedside table. It could be a bird’s nest, I find myself thinking. A nest of bones. Too small, though, for the raven that lies outside with a yellow Post-it note pinned to its breast. A rising wave of panic is threatening to pick me up. Dear God, what was I thinking, allowing Callum to come here? What was Ben thinking, letting him come? How could we expose a seven-year-old boy to this house and the things that go on here? I’m going to be dashed on the rocks of the sheer awful carelessness of it. How could I have? How could Ben? How could Fiona—who seems to know more about the Manse than anyone—have allowed it?

  Callum’s hand slips into mine again, anchoring me. “Are you okay, Ailsa?” he asks quietly. “I willnae leave you either.”

  My father is watching me. My father has always been watching me. You could say he’s a spirit or a ghost, you could say that he slipped into before, or later, but those would just be attempts to put into words what can’t be truly expressed or understood. Perhaps years in the future—a century or even two—mankind will possess the language to describe it, but that won’t be a language that any layman might comprehend. Mathematicians at the very pinnacle of the field, right at the bright frontier of discovery, will see the elegance of the equations that encircle where my father is, that wrap it and ensnare it in golden threads of Greek letters and symbols. They will be able to spout about quantum entanglement, the reversibility of time and the equivalence of mass and energy, but they still won’t actually see my father, because even reversing time in an equation can’t create mass from memory.

  But nonetheless, wherever it is that he has gone, my father is watching me.

  SEVENTEEN

  Carrie telephones, as she always does, but I miss the call because I’m outside with Ali’s security camera guy. Later I find a text from her, in her telegram style, when I come inside to make a cup of tea for the camera guy.

  Getting lift from station. Will pick up stuff for dinner on way x

  A lift from Jamie, I suppose. I expect he’ll have told her about the bones. The bones that are nothing, of course; almost certainly nothing. I drove to the police station and handed them in once Jamie had collected Callum. The policeman behind the desk listened to my tale of discovery with only the merest hint of a raised eyebrow, looked dubiously at the tissue-wrapped collection then shrugged and found a form for me to fill out. I couldn’t have been there for more than fifteen minutes. Surely if he could see the bones were human there would have been a more excited response.

  I text back:

  Great. Thanks x

  I’m at the front door saying good-bye to the camera guy when an ancient Volvo I don’t recognize pulls in, with Carrie in the passenger seat. I look across at the driver, but it’s not Jamie. It’s Fiona.

  “Hey. Who was that?” Carrie calls across as she climbs out of the car, then reaches back in for a bag of groceries.

  “That’s Finley,” says Fiona. She has climbed out too, and is eyeing the receding van thoughtfully. She must have come straight from work; she’s wearing jodhpurs, a fleece and boots. “He works for Ali.” I can only just hear her words. Then she turns back. “Hi, Ailsa.”

  “Hello.” I’ve lost a sense of perspective on exactly how much warmth I should project. Carrie crunches across the gravel, Fiona in her wake, looking at me rather as if I’m made of glass. Then in a rush, I add, “Is Callum okay?”

  Fiona nods. “He’s fine. Really he is,” she adds, on seeing my dubious expression. “Dinnae worry. To be honest, he’s more worried about you. He didnae like the idea of you being here alone.”

  “Are you okay?” asks Carrie searchingly.

  “Fine,” I say brightly. Fiona hovers by the door when I step back to let Carrie in, an indecipherable expression on her face as she glances up at the facade of the Manse.

  “Come on in,” Carrie says encouragingly, jerking her head, and she does. She’s been invited; I can hardly complain about it. And I wouldn’t want to either. I’m feeling wretched enough about Callum and the bones that in that moment my uneasiness around her seems exactly what it is: petty and unfounded.

  “I can’t apologize enou
gh,” I say to Fiona when we reach the kitchen.

  “Dinnae be daft. You were doing me a favor, looking after Callum. You couldnae have known that would happen.”

  “It’s probably nothing anyway,” says Carrie. “Most likely chicken bones, right?”

  “Right.” But even as I’m speaking, I’m looking at Fiona, at her sharp wary eyes and determined chin, waiting for her to agree. She sees me looking, and she doesn’t say anything.

  It doesn’t mean anything that she hasn’t said anything. It doesn’t.

  I offer drinks and start to make tea, because that’s what you do when people come to your house, regardless of whether you’re comfortable with them being there—which I am, really I am—regardless of whether it’s entirely your house. Though I wonder if the Manse has ever truly belonged to anyone. There’s an odd expression on Fiona’s face as she looks around the kitchen, similar to Callum’s: But . . . but it shouldnae look like this. I want to ask her about whether Callum was really born here, but Carrie has picked up a block of paint swatches I’ve left on the table. “Are we redecorating?” she asks, settling into a chair.

  “I thought I might repaint the kitchen, at least.” I got them from Ali’s hardware store, along with Finley and the cameras and a hefty dose of sarcastic repartee.

  “Any particular color in mind?”

  I lean over her shoulder to pick out a strip and point to one specific shade. It’s a strong purple, almost blueberry. “Just for that wall.” I point to the wall opposite the window. “The rest in one of the gazillion variations on white.”

  “Bold choice,” says Carrie, sounding impressed. “I like it.” She holds it up to show Fiona. For a second Fiona looks startled, but then she smiles and nods in a noncommittal way.