by Jen Williams
Heather nodded, although it was strange to think of her mother as an “old lady”.
“How did she seem to you? Over the last month or so?” The question seemed to bring Lillian up short, so Heather uncrossed her arms and tried to look more relaxed. “I didn’t see her as often as I should have, you see. All this has come as a bit of a shock.”
“She was a strong woman, your mother. Surprisingly so. But it’s a generational thing, you see. People my age, well, we don’t talk about our feelings.” Lillian smiled thinly. “It’s not the done thing, and I’m afraid if Colleen was struggling, I had no idea.”
Heather thought about the screwed-up page on the dressing table, the pained face of the police officer as he passed her her mother’s wedding ring.
“So, nothing she said struck you as strange? No odd behavior?”
“Goodness,” Lillian looked down at the countertop as if Heather had just said a rude word in front of the vicar. “Colleen mentioned you were a journalist, but …”
“I’m sorry, I …” Heather looked away, half smiling. I can’t even do small talk properly. Mum would have found that funny, probably. “Look, can I get you a cup of tea?”
“No, thank you dear,” Lillian flapped a hand at her. “I wouldn’t dream of intruding, not now. I just wanted to drop that off and get a look at you. Colleen used to talk about you all the time, you know.”
“Really?” Heather smiled again, but it felt forced this time. We didn’t always get on so well. I was a pain in the ass when I was a kid, as I’m sure she told you.”
“Oh not at all,” Lillian brushed a piece of fluff from her sleeve. “Nothing but praise for her golden girl.”
Heather had the sudden impression that Lillian was lying, but she nodded anyway. The woman made to leave, squeezing her arm briefly as she came past.
“If there’s anything you need, dear, just tell me. Like I said, I’m very close, always happy to bake or cook or even do laundry if you’re feeling overwhelmed …” Heather followed her down the corridor like an errant schoolchild; she suspected people were often following Lillian about like this, dragged in her wake.
“Oh, would you look at that?” Lillian had stopped at a small side table in the hallway, where Colleen used to stack her post and keys each day. On it was a framed photograph of Heather. It showed her as a teenager, sitting on her bed in her old room. Tall and gangly, her dark hair hanging in her face, she was holding up a certificate of merit she’d been awarded at school; for an essay, a short story, Heather couldn’t remember. Seeing the photo made her stomach turn over—it had been taken just a few weeks before her dad had died and everything between her and her mother had started to turn to poison.
“That’s my favorite photo of you,” said Lillian, sounding pleased for reasons Heather couldn’t guess. “Isn’t it charming?”
Heather opened her mouth, uncertain what to say. In the photo she was wearing a black X-Files T-shirt that was too baggy on her, and she looked sulky. She had no idea why her mum had even framed it, let alone why this stranger was so taken with it.
“Anyway, I’ll let you get on.” The woman was already out the door, her neat white shoes crunching on the gravel. “Remember dear, anything you need, just let me know.”
* * *
Heather gathered up the post from the hallway carpet and chucked it on the kitchen counter. Lots of shiny leaflets, a few bills, several takeaway menus. Frowning, she separated out the stuff that would need attention, then dumped the rest in the bin. Something in the bottom of the bin had gone bad—some old bit of food, probably, the remains of her mother’s last dinner—and the waft of rotten meat made her stomach roll uncomfortably. Suddenly very close to being sick, Heather headed to the back door, sure that fresh air would make her feel better.
Tall evergreen trees obscured the view of the neighbors. When she had been a kid—when she had lived here, too, getting under her mum’s feet—those trees had been shorter, friendlier even. Now they threw the garden into shade, hiding Heather from view and keeping the outside world firmly out. There was a little square of concrete by the back door, with two ironwork chairs and a table on it, and another clay flowerpot with empty soil in it. Empty. Out in the cool air, she felt a little better. She wondered why she had gone wandering around the house in the first place, looking in rooms and staring at photos. Poking around on dressing tables. Because I’m checking she’s not here, she thought, wincing. Part of me still expects to find her in the bathroom, scrubbing the loo, or in the living room, watching Countryfile. I’m checking for ghosts.
“Fucking hell.” She took a long, deep breath, waiting for the nausea to retreat. “What a bloody mess, Mum. Honestly.”
Her mind turned back to the screwed-up page, thinking of her mother’s mental state in the days before she took her own life. What had she been thinking? It was hard to imagine her mum—a woman with near religious feelings about the use of coasters and bookmarks—tearing out a page from a book, let alone crumpling it up like a piece of rubbish. But that was the dark heart of it all, the frightening truth Heather didn’t want to look at directly: her mother hadn’t been in her right mind. Something had stepped in and taken her reason from her; some cruel, lethal stranger had taken up residence inside her mother’s head. “None of this makes any sense to me. None of it.”
Shortly after she’d been called to take possession of her mother’s body, the police had put her in touch with a counsellor, who had been very kind and spent a lot of time talking about shock, about how people with severe depression could be very good at hiding it, even from their closest loved ones. Heather had listened patiently, nodding through her own numbness, and though she had understood perfectly what the counsellor had been saying, even then it had felt … wrong. Those old instincts had started to twitch, the ones that told her when a story was bunk and when a story had legs.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she told herself, listening to how cold and small her voice sounded. “Paranoid.”
Somewhere out on the road in front of the house, someone beeped a car horn, and she jumped. There were hot tears on her face, which she wiped away irritably with the back of her hand. After a moment, she slid her phone from her pocket to see a text message notification winking up at her.
Hello stranger—word is you’re back in Balesford. Want to meet up? I was so sorry to hear about your mum, I hope you’re ok xxx
Nikki Appiah. She looked around at the dark trees, wondering if the neighbors were watching and reporting on her somehow from between their net curtains. She sniffed, blinking rapidly to clear her eyes before typing a reply.
Are you on the neighborhood watch or what? Yeah I’m back for a bit. Are you around now? Spoons? I need a drink.
She paused, then added a green-faced vomit emoticon.
Nikki’s reply popped up almost immediately.
It’s eleven in the morning, Hev. But yes, let’s meet in town. It’s been too long, and it would be good to see your face (even if it’s green). See you in an hour? Xxx
Heather slipped the phone away. It was growing darker, and the air was beginning to smell sharp and mineral—it would rain soon, and it would be good to be elsewhere. The wind picked up, rattling through the tall bushes and making them sway, and for the barest moment it seemed to Heather that there was too much movement there, as though something was choosing to move with the wind, to hide its footsteps. She peered at the darker shadows, trying to discern a shape, then turned to the back door, dismissing it as her imagination looking for things to be scared of. The house still looked blank and unknowable, a little box of mundanity.
“What were you thinking, Mum?”
Her own voice sounded sad and strange to her, so she wiped away the last of the tears from her cheeks, and headed back through the house to the rented car.
CHAPTER
3
THE WIND HAD freshened through the morning, driving away the clouds and leaving behind a scrubbed-clean sort of sky—chilly yet
cheering. Beverly was pleased. Her grandchildren, Tess and James, would get a few hours out in the garden at least. Like all kids these days they were obsessed with their phones and their gadgets, but Beverly was proud to note that they could still be tempted out into her garden when the weather was fine, and with that in mind she shrugged her coat on—still the thin one, autumn hadn’t quite started to bite yet—and made her way out the back gate. Her garden was beautiful, but it had no horse chestnut trees, whereas the fields out back had two very fine ones, and she wanted to see if they were dropping yet.
Ahead of her were the line of trees that cupped the field, the two huge horse chestnuts and a cluster of oak, birch, and elm. Under the sunshine the leaves were as bright as stained-glass, green and yellow, red and gold, and yes, there were the thorny green casings scattered on the grass, spilling open their milky pale insides. Beverly began stuffing her pockets with fallen conkers, picking up only those that had survived the fall unscathed, and keeping an extra eye out for cheese cutters—conkers with a flat side, which were especially good for destroying your opponent. Once or twice, she found casings that had only partially split open. These she pressed on one side with her boot, smiling with satisfaction as the conkers popped free, all smooth and newly born. One of these produced a particularly fine cheese cutter.
“I’ll keep that one for myself, I think.” Beverly slipped the conker into an inside pocket. Conkers was no fun at all if she couldn’t beat at least one of her grandkids. It was the conker immediately after this, plucked from the grass close to the roots of the big old tree, that felt wrong in her hand. Grimacing, she held it up to the light, not quite registering the crimson smear on her fingers until she caught the smell of it: the back step of the butcher’s shop on a hot day.
Beverly yelped and dropped the conker. The grass by her feet was dark: saturated, she belatedly realized, with blood.
“It’ll be that bloody dog,” she said hotly, holding out the dirty hand as though she had burned it. “Bloody dog got hold of something again.”
But there was no eviscerated rabbit that she could see, or even a big bird—both of which she had seen on the fields in the past. Instead, as she drew closer to the trunk of the old conker tree, she saw that the blood was flowing from the roots, as though the tree itself were bleeding. The big hollow at its base, normally clogged with old leaves and mud, had been filled up with something else.
“Oh God. Oh God no, oh God …”
Beverly’s arms fell to her sides, her fingers numb. There was a face in the hollow, a woman’s face with her eyes closed and mouth open as if in prayer. Her cheeks were waxy and flecked with dark matter, and there were flowers poking out from between her teeth. Pink ones, noted Beverly, who would never allow pink flowers in her house again. Dog roses, by the looks of it.
Crushed beneath the woman’s head were a pair of feet, bare, save for a silver toe ring and pale pink nail polish, and there was an arm, too, the hand laying palm up on the grass as though she were reaching for help, or, beckoning for someone to join her. Incongruously, she could also see the sleeve of a red jacket, the wide buttons on the cuff dotted with beads of moisture. It was all crammed in so tight that Beverly couldn’t see the color of the woman’s hair or anything of her torso, if indeed that was in there with her, but she could see a soft wall of purplish rope-like things, falling softly to either side of the arm. In the bark above the hollow, a heart had been scratched; some pining lover’s romantic gesture, no doubt.
Suddenly aware she was very close to passing out, Beverly stumbled away from the tree and began to run back to the house, her face wet with tears.
CHAPTER
4
“THIS PLACE WAS always a shit hole.”
Heather settled the two glasses on the table and dropped three packets of chips next to them. Nikki picked up a packet of salt and vinegar and peered at it critically.
“You chose it,” Nikki pointed out mildly. She looked, annoyingly, much as she always had. Her hair was in neat black braids and her glasses were slimmer, more fashionable versions of those she had worn in school. She was even wearing a chunky knitted navy jumper, reminding Heather inevitably of their old school uniform. “I know Balesford isn’t heaving with trendy spots, but I suspect we could have managed better than Wetherspoons.”
“Oh, for old time’s sake.” Heather took a sip of her drink and grimaced. Once at the bar she had fallen back into old habits and ended up with a dark rum and coke—the drink she most associated with school. Nikki had ordered a white-wine spritzer, although she seemed more interested in the chips. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you know earlier that I was back in the area, but … everything has been such a mess. How did you know I was back, anyway? Do you have spies watching the house? Are you with MI5 now, is that it?”
Nikki shook her head, smiling. “My auntie lives on your road, you know that. And she basically is the MI5 of Balesford. They were all waiting for you to turn up, once Mr. Ramsey had told everyone you didn’t so much as have a set of your mum’s keys.” Nikki’s smile faltered. “I’m sorry, Hev. Really sorry. How bloody awful. Are you all right?”
Heather shrugged and popped open a packet of chips, not quite meeting her friend’s eyes. Nikki had always been the nice one, the kind one, and having to look at real sympathy on another human’s face was too much to handle at that moment, especially after her wobble at the house. Organic material.
“I’m as well as can be expected, I guess. Looking around the house earlier, I half expected her to still be there, you know? Like it was all some sort of, I don’t know, clerical error. It’s …” Something moved in her chest, and the room felt unstable, as though the floor were about to drop away. “It’s been a while since I’ve been back to the old place. And, well, you know she wasn’t a huge fan of mine, anyway.”
“That’s not really the point.”
“Yeah, I know.” Heather took a sip of the rum and coke, blinking as the burn hit her throat. A headache that had been brewing fizzled away, and some of the tension left her shoulders. “Why would she kill herself, Nikki? I can’t get my head round it. There’s something … it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t make sense.”
Nikki looked faintly uncomfortable, shifting in her chair. The pub was starting to fill up with lunch trade, people coming in for the five-pound curry deal. “Auntie Shanice wouldn’t believe it at first. Said that Mr. Ramsey must be talking out of his ass … Heather, suicide is difficult to understand. Your mum must have been very unhappy, troubled even, possibly for a very long time, and it’s possible that no one even knew she was suffering. Mental illness can be devastating like that.”
“Yeah. And I’d be the last person to know, wouldn’t I? It’s just …” Heather shrugged. “You remember my mum? I know you do. Never wanted a fuss, preferred everything to be as quiet as possible. It feels like such a gesture, like she was telling me something, or she wanted to, I don’t know, punish me maybe.” Seeing the look on Nikki’s face, she sighed. “I know, I sound like a bloody cliché. Refusing to accept what’s right in front of me because the truth is a little too uncomfortable. Making it all about me, for Christ sake. But I can’t shake the feeling I’m missing something. Did your aunt notice anything wrong with her? Recently, I mean?”
“Hev …” Nikki reached over and squeezed her hand briefly, and again Heather found she couldn’t look at her friend’s face. “Some things … Some things can’t be figured out, or reasoned away.”
Heather nodded, looking down at the sticky table top.
“Anyway, let’s not talk about this, shall we? It’s rubbish. How are you? It’s been a little while since we last did one of these random booze ups. What are you up to now? Still teaching, I assume?”
“I am, and I can tell from the face you make when I say that, that you’re horrified.” Nikki smiled and took a sip of her spritzer. “I’m teaching at a college now, which you would know if you ever paid attention to my Facebook updates. I’m covering the English an
d History departments. Are you still at the newspaper?’
Heather winced, then tried to hide it by eating several chips at once. “It didn’t work out. I’ve been freelancing for a while and it suits me better.” More bad memories. She downed the rest of her drink, and raised her eyebrows. “Another?”
They spent the rest of the afternoon in the pub, both switching to soft drinks when the edges of the room started to blur. At some point, one of them suggested getting food, and soon the table was crowded with plates, with smears and blobs of alarmingly bright yellow curry sauce and scattered bits of poppadum. They talked about school, dredging up all the old stories that must by tradition be dredged up at such times. Eventually, the evening crowd began to arrive, and they agreed that it was likely time to make their way home—spending all day in the pub was not, Nikki pointed out, a great look for a teacher.
“Suit yourself, professor.”
Outside, the day had grown gloomy and cold, and as Nikki called them a cab, Heather found that the small cache of good spirits she had built up over the afternoon were leaking away into the shadows. She wasn’t going home now, to her untidy yet cozy room in a house shared with other untidy people; she would be going back to her mother’s empty house, no doubt to a long night of trawling over bad memories and unanswered questions. Something must have shown on her face, because once she slipped her phone back in her pocket, Nikki touched her arm softly.
“Hey. Cab’s going to be a few minutes. Are you all right?”
Heather shrugged. The fizzy drinks were a sour slick in her stomach, and she felt too weary to pretend.
“The suicide note was really weird. Did I tell you that?”
Nikki shook her head, her brown eyes somber.
“I mean, like you said, she was in a bad place, and there’s no real reason to expect a suicide note to make sense, I suppose.” Heather tried to smile, but it twisted into something sickly on her lips, so she stopped. Instead, she opened her satchel and slipped a piece of paper from out of her notebook. It was pale lilac, with a picture of a wren at the top next to a banner reading “notes to you”. For reasons she didn’t want to look too closely at, she’d kept it with her since the police handed it over along with her mother’s belongings. Her mother’s cramped handwriting hunched in the middle of the page. She passed it to Nikki, who frowned and smoothed it over carefully with her fingers.
