Witches Sail in Eggshells

by Chloe Turner

  She looks around. Sees the jury have given their verdict.

  Perhaps it is too late to intervene, in any case. ‘Joanne, I’m calling your mother,’ Lou says gently.

  Joanne holds herself very still. There’s a hole in her right sock, and through it they can see the toenail on her big toe has been untended so long, it’s started to curve up and away from the skin.

  ‘She won’t have it on her. She’s got no credit.’ Joanne looks at her feet as she says it. Why doesn’t she deny it? Marlie would have denied it immediately before she knew what she’d been accused of.

  Veronica snorts, strokes the deep red of a fingernail with the thumb of the other hand. ‘Dirty little thing. Just take her home. I would.’

  ‘Mum’s at work.’

  Joanne doesn’t cry. The only sign of her distress is a tremor at her shoulder, where a legless spider clings on to the tattered remnants of a web.

  ‘Take her there, then. It’s a party. You’re not running a crèche,’ Veronica says.

  Lou takes a deep breath. Tegan’s mother is the playground’s undisputed queen. A bad word from Veronica and every school run will be a misery. Lou quashes inconvenient memories of Terri-Ann: tiny saves and kindnesses. She looks away from Joanne’s wrists, so thin that the lump at her wrist where the ulna meets the tessellated bones of the hand, stands proud like a tumour. She’ll make it up to the girl. The party is over for her now, anyway.

  ‘Stu can do it. I’ll get him now.’

  Veronica nods at her, satisfied. Steps past Joanne as if she were something unspeakable on the rug. Presses play on the stereo—only the tiniest frown at the outdated model—so Taylor Swift comes blasting back into the room. Andy moves in for a closer look at the drawing, looks about for Stu, padded cheeks sagging when his friend’s not about to share the joke. The candy floss machine rattles, empty of sugar, hanging proud of the sideboard’s edge.

  When Lou comes into the kitchen, she doesn’t realise at first what she’s seeing. Mitzy’s mother is facing away, towards the window that looks out over the garden, and Stu is right behind her, leaning past her with his hand on the tap. But the water’s not running, and he’s close to her, too close, so that his groin must be pressed hard against the back pockets of Emmie’s skinny jeans.

  Lou starts to wheel about, catching her hip on the hard plastic edge of Stu’s fryer, sending a bolt of pain up through her ribs.

  ‘I told you, we should have done the side return,’ Stu doesn’t say because he can’t speak. He’s looking round at Lou now, but his face has turned a dull terracotta shade she recognises. Lou’s surprised by how bored it makes her feel this time, how the sight of his belly peeling away from Emmie’s fragile vest makes her nauseous rather than jealous. She doesn’t make eye-contact with Emmie. Can’t be bothered. It’s not about her.

  ‘Wait, Lou…’ she hears, as she retraces her steps, but she doesn’t turn. When she gets to the lounge, Joanne is still on the rug, alone. A loosely anchored skiff in a storm. Robbie and the other boys bounce around her to One Direction.

  ‘Can you turn it down?’ Lou shouts across the room. Andy nods, mouthing something back, twisting the dial the wrong way. The light beads from the glitter ball judder in their path around the walls with the bass. The children’s eyes are wild. Robbie is break dancing in a pool of squash between the piano legs.

  ‘I can’t…’ Lou shouts.

  People are looking. Her cheeks must be as flaming as they feel. For a moment the faces are like masks in a play, shifting and gurning across her vision. Then comes the mechanical thud, and the scream that follows it. The candy floss machine has been driven over the edge by the incessant bass, and someone has broken its fall. Identical dents have been left in Georgia’s leg and on the waxy surface of the lino. She’s lying white-faced, staring at the unnatural depression the machine has left in the bony core of her shin. ‘Let’s have that off. Mate, I’ll get the ambulance.’ Stu’s there at once, shouting across the noisy room. He flicks the switch on the stereo, his hand grazing Andy’s shoulder as his friend bends over his daughter. Lou realises she’s been frozen, staring.

  ‘I’ll make the call,’ she says, grateful to be relieved of the sight of that leg.

  In the frantic minutes that follow, Georgia starts up a low moan, and a couple of other children begin to cry. Joanne doesn’t move from the rug. Robbie picks up sausages from the floor, tucking them under his lips to make fat vampire teeth.

  ‘Tegan, baby, we should go.’ Veronica is wiping her hands with a disinfectant wipe she’s pulled from her handbag. Her daughter whines and pulls on her arm. Veronica brushes her off with the wipe.

  ‘But we haven’t done the piñata.’ Marlie’s outraged squeal combines with Georgia’s moan and Tegan’s whine in a dreadful choir of complaint.

  ‘Quickly then, while we wait for the ambulance.’ Stu’s recovered himself. Like a child, his guilt is short-lived and quickly turns to indignant denial. Nothing cheers him more than a crisis. He lifts the blue papier mâché shape from on top of the bookshelf, sets it down on a bare patch of floor. The glitter ball’s light beads still spin pointlessly around the walls, illuminating the crushed food and spillages.

  ‘Ewww,’ says a child’s voice.

  ‘Make sure you give Georgia enough space.’

  ‘Some party,’ Lou hears behind her. This’ll be playground fuel for weeks.

  Stu hands the toy baseball bat to Marlie for the first strike, but she misses the piñata altogether, leaving a dent in the coffee table leg that is an unwanted reminder of the groaning girl in the corner. Marlie strikes again, and again, but the bat falls weakly away from the papier mâché core.

  ‘You made it too hard, Mum.’ Her arms are folded. She is rigid with disgust. Robbie snatches the bat before she can throw it aside.

  ‘I’ll do it. You watch.’

  His face reddens as if a dial is being turned inside, and the mould does give a little under his barrage of abuse, but it doesn’t yield. A few others try. Mitzy kicks the piñata with the toe of a glittery shoe. The lacy trim around Elsa’s dress comes away, so the Disney princess looks as shameful as Lou feels.

  All at once, impatience and overtired laughter bloom in the group around Lou, and then there is a move as one towards the door. The sharks have had their fill. It is time. The three wise women exit quickly, leaving a lingering trace of Chanel and a tide of guilt. Robbie kicks the doorframe as he passes, still griping for another go with the bat. Too late, Lou realises that she’s forgotten the party bags, which sit upstairs in accusing ranks across her bedroom floor. She thinks of the charm bracelets and watches, in multiples that she could not afford, and wonders if the market stall might take them back.

  Soon after, the ambulance arrives: two booted men in high-vis march in, grinding the last of the food between the cracks in the lino tiles. With a tiny twitch of his head, one gestures at the sofa arm, raising his eyebrows to his mate as they lift the girl onto the stretcher. Georgia’s smiling weakly now, already contemplating lucrative weeks of convalescence. Stu claps Andy on the back as he follows the ambulance men down the path.

  ‘Sorry, mate.’ ‘Not your fault.’

  Stu wanders out with his friend to see the ambulance off.

  At last, it is only Lou, Marlie and Joanne. Around them, the full scale of the destruction is revealed. The sofa cushion lies in a sodden mass of molten candy floss. The uplifted arm of the plastic flamenco dancer has been wrapped around its throat in a stranglehold. Bare of its shielding cushion, the sofa arm’s obscene inner cheek is in full view. The fingers of a chocolate handprint are clearly visible on the other arm.

  ‘You ruined my party, Mum.’ Marlie is already stomping upstairs. Any minute now she will pass the open bedroom door, pumping the bellows of her fury at the sight of the forgotten party bags.

  Joanne still has not moved. Someone has pulled the witch’s cauldron from the belt of her dress, and her hair has come loose from its plait. Lou wants to say sorr
y, but she can’t find the words. She reaches for the baseball bat, which has rolled under the coffee table next to a discarded shoe, and hands it to Joanne. She hears the wail from upstairs, and Joanne’s face is a question. Lou shakes her head and points to the piñata.

  Joanne makes the first strike, and then Lou joins her, grabbing the Velux window pole from the corner, which thuds into the piñata’s casing again and again with a satisfying smash. The green of Lou’s shirt darkens at the armpits, but they keep up the battery. At last a tiny tear appears in the papier mâché bodice. A tear that eases open into a wide rip, and further still so that the piñata yawns to reveal the sweet wrappers inside. Lou takes a handful, passes them to Joanne, motions for the girl to sit. Then she picks up the pole again, twisting it for the best grip, and returns to the sickly iced-blue shell of the piñata.

  ‘What you doing, Lou? Think the woman’s lost it,’ she hears from the doorway. But it’s too late by then; her face is burning with the pleasure of it. With every strike of the pole, the void inside Elsa’s dress gapes more widely. The sweets are pulverised in their jewelled wrappings. As she pummels the bloated mass of the thing, she thinks about Marlie. About her daughter’s sour little face, and the eye roll she has inherited from her father. She thinks about Emmie, how her thin hand with its opal rings covered Stuart’s fat palm on her thigh. She thinks about Robbie, with his random acts of destruction, and whether she could call herself any better than him now, smashing this piñata as if it had done her some wrong. And she thinks about Joanne, how the girl’s face did not alter as she was wrongly accused, so used to being let down. About Terri-Ann, and all those times.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Lou says at last, laying down the pole and taking Joanne’s hand.

  ‘What the…?’ Stu says, as she pushes past him in the doorway, but the cool air outside strengthens her resolve.

  Joanne’s hand, sticky in her palm, feels as fragile as the skeleton of a mouse. There’s no sign of the Punto, but it’s not far to Terri-Ann’s.

  ‘There’s something I need to say to your mother,’ Lou says, as they walk together down the path.

  Inches Apart

  Ben was only supposed to be paying the bill, but he never came back to the bedroom, and there was no sign of him now as Rachel strolled through the public areas of the hotel, forcing herself to keep smiling. No sign of him. No sign of her. The whole, empty, frost-white expanse of the nine-hole pitch-and-putt course was visible from the drawing-room windows, and he wouldn’t have had time to make it down to the lake. Rachel could go to the room to wait, but that would be worse. Instead, she slipped out through the front door, crunching over frozen lawns, to the side of the hotel and then the back. Ben wouldn’t be here either, of course, amongst the fire escapes and wire food crates and weeds growing through concrete, but she’d give him the benefit of the doubt.

  It took some time to walk the length of the back wall, picking her way through the detritus of the hotel’s industrial backside. At the far end, a sheet of render had slipped from the masonry like sloughed skin, and frost crystals had collected along the sheared edge. Stepping round it and turning the corner, Rachel found herself beside the black tarpaulin of the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool. It had seen better days; she’d forgotten it was even here. The ladder was buckled on one side, rusty, and blooming with frost flowers even where the chrome remained. The cover over the pool’s surface was bleached and stained.

  She stepped closer now, tiptoeing around the striped aqua tiles that framed the pool, pausing in front of a leaf net and—tipped from it before it had been dropped—a collection of dead things. Disgusted but drawn, she sifted this frozen flotsam with the toe of her boot. Frosted lumps that might have been wasps. Butterfly wings, grey and shapeless like newspaper left in the rain. Something too long to be a mouse, its body barely thicker than its tail now, with the fur frozen to its skin. She pulled her coat closer, exhaled twin streams of steam. There was a smell of mildew, and cat shit, and something wrong: perhaps it was that furred creature, whatever it was, as it warmed in the pale glow of the winter sun.

  Rachel stamped her feet. She was about to walk on when she noticed the pool’s cover had been pulled back at one corner. Underneath, a layer of waxy, opaque ice had clogged white around the legs of the ladder. Green beneath: deep green. Then, leaning over, frost snapping at her palm as she gripped the ladder’s curve, Rachel saw there was something there. In the ice. Two solids, each the size of a hand. She crouched, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the shadow of the tarp. The edges resolved themselves into an outline of spines, of pointed noses, clawed feet. Two hedgehogs, inches apart and head to head: frozen. She imagined a cuboid cut from the ice with a saw; those two creatures, in freeze frame. Ploughing the solidifying water at the moment of death, their soft undersides as fur-sodden and limp as the butterflies’ wings.

  Nauseated, she turned away. They’d visited the hotel once before, her and Ben, but it had been late spring then. Too cold for the pool still, but she had a memory of the water as blue-clean, nothing like this place of death. Ben had been at his fulsome best that weekend, charming everyone. Holding her hand as they waited to check in. The hotel manager, a wiry man with one broken eye, had taken a fancy to them at once—to Ben, anyway—treating them in his dated way, with complimentary sherries, and a table saved near the congealing trays of the breakfast buffet.

  Rachel had found the hotel odd, old-fashioned. Ben had liked it, and they were not long married, so it was enough to be together. She remembered walking through fields of fattening lambs, and further, to the edge of a reservoir that was belted with the hooped arches of a brick-built dam, like something from a film. They’d climbed alongside streams thick with huge pebbles. His hand had rarely left the small of her back. Once, they’d made love on a wooded hillside, amongst bruised daffodil stalks and the white stars of the wood anemone.

  This time, arriving late and crabby, they’d stood a little apart as they waited at the reception desk. Waiting for the paperwork to be completed, she’d looked up to find Ben staring at a woman on a sofa in the hall.

  ‘Busted,’ he’d said, laughing, when he realised he’d been caught out. It was what he said about women in magazines—they were both allowed one free pass, he’d announced too early in the marriage—but he’d never said it about flesh and blood before.

  The woman had been all in black, something big and gold around her neck, and the man she’d been with had seemed older, withdrawn. Later, in the bar, she’d been there again. It had been Rachel who’d suggested going down early, thinking they’d have a cocktail before dinner, remembering too late that the menu didn’t stretch to that. The woman had been alone this time. Her husband had been called away on urgent business, she’d said.

  ‘Don’t I look silly,’ the woman had said. It was a special occasion, and now, alone for the evening, she complained of feeling overdressed. Rachel had watched Ben watch the woman smooth the silky fabric of an evening dress over the gentle curve of her waist; had felt the pinch of her own trousers. Pregnancy had made Rachel fat, but not because she had a baby inside her. Clomid and gonadotrophins, agonists and antagonists, tablets and jabs and gels: a seething mass of drugs that had clogged her system for months. She’d pushed around the cubes of ice in the gin she shouldn’t be drinking, reminding her for a moment of the single, frozen embryo which might represent their last chance.

  Rachel came to the last corner now, which took her back round to the front of the hotel. They should never have come. This wasn’t a place well-suited to winter. Even under the frost, the minigolf course had been thick with leaves when they’d crossed it yesterday, and they’d found the boating lake frozen solid, a lump of dead feathers on the muddied edge. Deep potholes marred the tarmac, and rooks had congregated in accusing gangs in the tall trees which lined the car park. The hotel’s roof was patched around one chimney with a sheet of pink plastic.

  It was Ben who’d asked the woman to join them for dinner last night, touchin
g her arm as he did so, fingers tracing the skin just above the swirling cuff which cupped the flesh of her upper arm. Rachel had expected him to apologise later when they were briefly alone—it was their last night, why could the woman not eat in her room if she preferred not to dine at a table for one?—but he’d shrugged when she’d complained. Up close, the woman had been a little older than Rachel had realised, the finest lace ladder running up from the hollow of her neck. She’d talked easily, throwing back Merlot in greedy gulps. Told wild stories of an international life.

  Much later, Rachel had woken in darkness to find the bed shaking; soft, urgent, animal noises coming from the far side. Ben had said he wasn’t in the mood when they were undressing, as happened so often these days. They’d both shuddered as the rhythm of his hand reached its peak.

  The car park was busy now: idling taxis crisscrossed the potholes, and a coach with steamed-up windows disgorged a fill of Japanese women in thin dresses. There was no sign of Ben. Rachel walked amongst the cars, stepping on ridges of frozen mud at the car park’s edge. Then suddenly, there he was, loading matching luggage into the boot of a taxi on the far side. In her mind, Rachel had built the woman up into a cartoon Cruella de Vil, but it was worse than that. She was softer, slinkier. More real. Her lips were subtly drawn. Her fur coat was a rich brown, its pelt grazing her midthigh. Bare above heeled boots, she had the legs of a much younger woman. Even in the depths of that coat, her curves showed through, and her luminous skin was pink-cheeked in the cold.

  Rachel watched the woman shake Ben’s hand and then hold it a moment; there was intimacy there. The palm of her other was on his chest. Perhaps a finger slipped between the buttons of the cotton placket to the cooling skin beneath his shirt. The hotel manager looked on from the steps, smiling.