by Abigail Dean
It had been a difficult day. The baby had started to cry before dawn. The miserable persistence of it, pervading the rooms of the house. I had heard Ethan groan, then throw something at the wall between us. I clung to sleep for as long as I could, cover drawn up against the first thin light. Evie lay on her back, her lips moving, telling herself a story. Even when the baby stopped, I could hear his cries, living between the walls.
Autumn again, and the kind of weather which never commits to daylight. Father instructed us to write in our journals. I sat at the kitchen table, looking at the empty page. Contemplating what I would write, if it wouldn’t be subject to inspection. As it was, my entries were all comically dull. Today, we spent a long time considering the fact that Jesus never raised the issue of homosexuality. I agree with Father’s opinion that this omission cannot be taken as permission to participate in homosexual behaviours. I glanced at Evie’s page. She was drawing a garden, completing the veins of each leaf and shading the shadows underneath them. ‘Eden?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. Just somewhere I think about.’
I couldn’t draw: I was stuck with this world. We had a tiring night, I wrote. The whole family was awake early. I love having a new sibling, but I hope that he starts to sleep a little more.
On days like this, I thought of codes and messages. How to capture – quietly – the extent of our boredom? How to record each little assault? At the table, Gabriel hunched his back, to position his eyes a few centimetres from the page. And the pervading ones. How to translate the hollowness of starvation? The feeling that something was feasting on the walls of my stomach, chewing it from the inside out?
Mother is getting stronger every day, I wrote, pathetically.
There were two figures in Evie’s garden, walking hand in hand in silhouette. Their heads tilted together, as if they were lost in conversation. ‘Are you sure it’s not Eden?’ I asked.
‘Yep.’ She pressed her lips against my ear. ‘It’s us.’
She touched a finger to her lips, smiling. I rolled my eyes, smiling too.
And then the knock at the door.
My pen jerked across the page.
Delilah stood up.
‘Who is it?’ Evie asked. Beneath the table, I took her hand.
Another knock.
Father came softly into the kitchen. ‘We have a visitor,’ he said. His hands were pressed together, as if he was just about to begin a sermon.
‘Let’s all be very, very quiet,’ Father said. ‘And very calm.’
He placed his hands on my shoulders.
‘Lex,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
In the hallway, he knelt down in front of me. For a long time, I had avoided looking him in the eye, and now that I did, I saw that he was tired and wild. Clumps of grey hair stuck to his forehead. At the edges, his mouth slumped into his jowls. There was a smell coming from him, not just from his mouth but beneath his skin, as if something had hidden there to die.
‘I need you to answer the door, Lex,’ he said. ‘But it’s more than that. This is your chance, you see – to prove your commitment to this family.’
He took my hair in his hand – as long as Mother’s, now – and tweaked my head to face him.
‘It’s Aunt Peggy,’ he said. ‘You know how she likes to interfere with us. You know how she’d like to see us suffer. All you need to say – all you need to do – is say that your mother and me are out. You say that everybody’s well. You don’t let her inside. Do you think that you can do that, Lex?’
I looked longingly back to the kitchen.
‘Come on, Lex,’ Father said. ‘It’s very important to me. It’s very important to us all.’
That’s what I think of, when I remember the afternoon. Father’s faith in my loyalty. In my obedience.
A tendril of shame, stirring in my gut.
Father stood, and kissed me on the forehead. He watched me walking past the living room and the bottom of the stairs. The warmth of his eyes, nudging me along the hallway. I was already smiling. I opened the door.
Peggy Granger started. She was a few steps from the threshold, looking up to the bedroom windows. She was rounder and older and blonder than I recalled. Beyond her, I could see Tony, parked on Moor Woods Road, watching us from the car.
‘Hello,’ I said.
Peggy examined my face and neck, my dress and ankles and feet. In the daylight, I was dirtier than I had thought, and I crossed one foot over the other, to hide some of the grub.
‘Is that you, Alexandra?’
I laughed. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, Aunt Peggy. Of course.’
‘How are you?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Good.’
Then, thinking: ‘How are you?’
‘We’re very well, thank you. Listen. Are your mum and dad home? We were in the area.’
‘Not at present,’ I said. ‘They’re out.’
‘And when will they be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s a shame. I hear I’ve got another nephew. I’d love to meet him. How’s he doing?’
‘He cries a lot,’ I said, and Peggy nodded, satisfied. Still susceptible to a little schadenfreude.
‘He’s OK, though,’ I said.
‘Good. Well. We’ll be heading home.’
She lifted an arm to wave, but didn’t move. She looked to her shoes, like she couldn’t convince them to retreat.
‘Listen, Alexandra,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit worried about you. You don’t look very well, if I’m honest. Not very well at all.’
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Codes. Messages. A few vague ideas, which I was too tired to enact.
‘Alexandra?’
Peggy took a step closer to the door. An imploring look on her face, as if she wanted to say it for me.
‘Are you all right, Lex?’
A fierce little figure assembled herself beside me, obscuring the view between the doorframe and my shoulder.
‘Hello, Aunt Peggy,’ Delilah said.
‘And this must be Delilah! Look at you. Like a model.’
Delilah curtsied, and did the thing with her face which made Father forgive her trespasses.
‘Girls!’ Aunt Peggy said. ‘What are you like?’
‘I’m sorry, Aunt Peggy,’ Delilah said. ‘But we were playing a game. And Lex is holding everything up.’
‘Well, that won’t do.’
Peggy laughed. Delilah laughed. And, after a few seconds, I laughed, too.
Delilah pinned her arm around my elbow.
‘You ask your parents to give us a ring,’ Peggy said.
‘We will.’
‘Goodbye then, girls.’
‘Goodbye.’
I closed the door and turned back into the gloom. Father waited there, still and smiling, then advanced, one arm raised, ready to use it when he reached us. I shut my eyes. When I opened them, his hand was on Delilah’s head, cradling her scalp, with his stare settled on me.
‘Well done, Delilah,’ he said. He looked satisfied, the way he looked at the end of a good, long lunch. ‘Well done.’
No Judases at his table.
That was when the Binding Days began.
I followed Noah’s mother through the village. There were spindly stone cottages craning to see the road. The bells were ringing at the church, but there was no one around. There was a cafe with a queue of walkers, and dogs lapping at water bowls outside. There was a noticeboard advertising the choir and Kittens For Sale. I passed a sprawl of teenagers at the cenotaph, sucking on ice lollies, their limbs entwined. The hills were speckled with mountain bikers and sheep.
Noah’s mother walked fast, with the chair in one arm and the other arm swinging. Her legs were scrawled with varicose veins, but otherwise, I could have been following a child. We crossed a stream, subdued by the summer and busy with ducks, and turned down a new road. Here, the houses were bigger and further apart. She stopped at the third one on the street and propped the chair
against the wall.
‘Mrs Kirby?’ I said, and she turned around, with her face open. The front of her T-shirt said Bondi Lifeguards.
‘One of them,’ she said. ‘My wife isn’t home.’
‘I think you have a son,’ I said, ‘called Noah?’
‘I just left them,’ she said. ‘Is everything—’
She looked at me properly, then. She had the door unlocked, but she didn’t open it.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I’m not—’
‘Please,’ she said. Her mouth was clenched in one straight cut, and as she shook her head, the sun-ruined skin at her neck went from taut to slack. ‘Please.’
‘I just need a minute,’ I said.
‘Tell me who you are. And tell me what you want.’
‘My name’s Lex,’ I said. ‘I’m his sister.’
I shrugged.
‘Girl A,’ I said.
She slumped against her house. I thought that she didn’t know whether to plead or to gut me. I took a step away, back onto their lawn. I had been holding up my hands, but I realized how stupid I must look, and dropped them.
‘Early on,’ she said, ‘I expected this every day. Every time the door went, or the telephone – I’d think: This is it. Then a bit of time goes past, and you start to think it might be all right. The press, the family – they might never look for you. You start to think you’ve got away with it.’
She closed her eyes.
‘Sarah always said that someone would come,’ she said. ‘But the last few years – I didn’t think about it at all.’
‘I’m not looking for him,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to see him. It’s just – administration.’
‘Administration,’ she said. She laughed.
‘I just need a signature. For our mother’s estate.’
‘Your mother,’ she said.
She opened the door and entered the house. ‘You can’t be here,’ she said, ‘when they get back.’ In the hallway mirror I saw the two of us together. My face looked sunken and stunned. A whole different species. She stepped onto the side of her trainers to take them off, and I reached for my shoes.
‘Don’t,’ she said.
She walked barefoot through her home. There was one great white room, with the garden behind it. Along the back windows was a wooden table, with two benches, and a scatter of belongings: keys, envelopes, something half knitted. She wrestled with the patio doors, and heat fell into the room. A cat padded after it. I sat slowly, expecting her to tell me to stand. Instead, she handed me a glass of water and sat opposite me. Her eyes twitched across my face. She was looking for her son, I thought. Like there were parts of him I’d already stolen.
‘You might have seen,’ I said, ‘that my mother died.’
I laid the documents across the table, and I explained them to her the way I would explain them to a client. I talked with a performative precision, a notch louder than usual. It was one of the few times I could hear my own voice. Here was a photocopy of the will. Here were our applications. Here was where she should sign.
‘Give me a minute,’ she said.
She collected reading glasses from between the cushions of the sofa. Above the mantelpiece, there was a dreamcatcher and a photograph of my brother’s family. I tried not to look at them. While she was reading, I checked on Evie’s flight. She was mid-air, bouncing towards me every time I refreshed the map. The cat hopped onto the table and surveyed me with great disapproval.
‘Don’t worry,’ Noah’s mother said. ‘She looks at everybody like that.’
She tightened her ponytail.
‘How are the rest of you?’ she said.
I thought: How long do you have?
‘We’re doing well,’ I said. ‘All things considered.’
‘And do they know,’ she said, ‘where to find us?’
She dug a pen out of the fruit bowl and clicked the end of it.
‘No. They don’t.’
‘When we first brought him home,’ she said, ‘Sarah would have visions. Nightmares, really. Cameras in the cradle. Your mother, driving down from Northwood in the middle of the night. She bought a bespoke alarm system. The ones with lasers, like in the films. A badger would come up the side of the house, and she’d be out there, with a torch and the Stanley knife. It took years, for her to sleep the way she used to.’
She signed, with her face close to the paper.
‘I told her she was going mad,’ she said. ‘We could usually laugh about it, in the daytime.’
She slid the documents across the table. She was looking over my shoulder, out to the hot, bright street. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’d like you to leave.’
I nodded. We stood together, in synchrony, and across the table I held out my hand. She took it. An old habit: to shake hands over a deal, at the end of a meeting.
‘The community centre,’ she said. ‘It’s a good idea. I like it.’
‘Thanks. It was my sister, mostly. She’s better than the rest of us.’
She followed me back across the house. I went slower, this time. I took in the bee-print coasters and the dead orchid on the bookcase. I took in the wedding photographs up the stairs, and the light of bedroom windows, falling into the hallway. There was a row of Marvel figurines guarding the fireplace. There was a basket of hats and gloves and sunglasses by the door.
‘It’s hot out there,’ she said. ‘I can get you some sun cream. If you want.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m parked pretty close.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. It was easier to be sorry, I thought, with the documents signed, and me on the front step.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I won’t come back here.’
‘Is there anything that would help?’ she said. ‘I mean – is there anything that you would want to know?’
I smiled. You don’t need to tell me, I thought. I already know. When I was at university, he was learning to ride a bike. In the winter, he plays video games and runs cross-country. He doesn’t think about money or God. He moves easily through the school corridors, and he walks into each classroom knowing exactly who he’s going to sit next to. There’s a five-tier bookcase in his room. I think of you on Sunday evenings, having dinner together, and some nights – I see it – you stay at that table when the meal’s over, talking about the cricket club, or the week ahead. I won’t search for him, any more. I already know.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s OK.’
She started to close the door, but as she did, her head moved to fill the gap, and then the crack. I knew that kind of love. Too ferocious for niceties. She had to make sure that I’d gone.
‘Still,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
In another long night, the baby’s cries came down the hallway, ever louder. Then the door opened, and Mother ducked into the room.
‘Girls,’ she said. ‘Girls. I need your help.’
Her arms were full of blankets, and within them the baby, the little twisting tremors of him. She knelt down in the Territory and unravelled the material from his body, and stepped between us, loosening the bindings.
‘Girls,’ she said. ‘You have to make him stop.’
She looked from me to Evie.
‘Please,’ she said.
Babies were OK, I thought. There had always been one around. I liked their softness and their strange preoccupations. They would laugh at all of my tired games. I lifted the child and lay him in the hollow between my thighs. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Hey.’ His eyes veered past me, through the ceiling and the roof. Seeing him here, like this, there was something odd about him. Something missing. I realized then that I hadn’t really looked at him before. There had been a time when I had stopped thinking much beyond our room.
I leaned over and touched my nose against his. He smelt of the house, which smelt of worn clothes; stale plates; shit.
‘Why won’t he stop?’ Mother said.
‘Here,’ Evie said, and peek-a-booed over my shoulder.
‘
It’s been days,’ Mother said. ‘Your Father—’
She looked to the door.
‘You’re supposed to be clever,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you? So – fix this.’
I held the baby closer, his head nestled against my shoulder. Crying, still.
‘Not that clever,’ Mother said.
‘I read somewhere,’ I said, ‘that the more a baby cries, the smarter it is.’
I tickled the soles of my brother’s feet. When he writhed, Mother lifted him from my arms and entombed him beneath her blankets. She ignored us now. It was just Mother and the baby. She murmured a prayer, part to God and part to the child, whispering his name. Imploring him to save himself.
For the first two weeks of his life, he had been nameless. The tag on his wrist said Gracie, so the nurses knew which mother to look for when they lifted him from the incubator. When he returned from the hospital, Father declared that he had already survived a fortnight in the lions’ den. He wanted to give him a name which belied his half-formed frame. His tissue-thin skin. As if in naming him, he could reform him, and begin again. My parents congregated in the kitchen, and when they emerged, they declared that they would call him Daniel.
6
Evie (Girl C)
AT THE AIRPORT, I swung the car into the pick-up queue and looked for Evie. I had heard my phone vibrating on the passenger seat, and I was pretty sure that it would be her. The end of the summer, and waves of people returning home, wheeling suitcases and trolleys through the sliding doors. She was sitting apart from them, cross-legged against the wall and with one hand on her rucksack, keeping it close. She wore sunglasses and a hanging white dress, the straps fastened to the bodice with big red buttons. She had bundled her hair on top of her head in a precarious blond turban. I waved manically, as you can only really wave to people you love, and she looked up and tilted her sunglasses down to be sure it was me. I waited for the recognition to click. When it did, she jumped to her feet and darted through two lanes of traffic. ‘You could have got a convertible,’ she said, and kissed me through the open window.
