‘I don’t know. Probably some kind of meat.’ I sigh and follow her, ignoring a little portrait of my mother up high on the wall between a couple of mirrors and an old sketch of the town, hoping it’s going to stay silent. I couldn’t bear to hear her voice right now. Couldn’t bear the look on Angel’s face if she realized who it was. I don’t know what she’d make of her, but I know she’d be curious, and there would be questions, and I’ve had about enough of all that today. ‘Aoife likes meat.’
‘Bet it’ll have onions,’ Angel says. ‘Onion gravy, maybe . . .’ She looks up at me, all bright-eyed, but I don’t reply, because she’s standing right in front of a door that shouldn’t be here. There are hundreds of doors in this house, and dozens I’ve seen today that I can’t say I really remembered very clearly. But this one . . . this one rings with wrongness. It’s taller, narrower than the rest, the wood is a reddish-brown, and it looks brittle and dry, like an old dying tree.
‘Well anyway, it’ll probably be better than Mary’s fish pie,’ Angel says, pulling on the pitted, tarnished handle. She wiggles it and pushes, and then shoves at the wood with her shoulder, but it won’t budge.
‘Who’s Mary?’ I ask, a bit distracted, reaching out to the door, my mother’s eyes following me.
‘My foster mother,’ she says, still straining at the wood. Her tone is neutral, careless. But when I look down, her shoulders are high, tensed up around her neck, and I know that feeling.
‘Why do you have a foster mother?’
‘My parents died,’ she says. ‘I told you the other night; you were a bit out of it. Come on, let’s do this.’ She gestures at the door, moving away to let me get closer. ‘Open it already!’
‘But . . .’
This is a bad idea.
‘Bavar, just do it! We can talk about stuff later; I want to know what’s here!’
‘BAVAR!’ comes Aoife’s voice. And Angel glowers at me and I could just keep going with this door but I already know it’s going to change everything, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that.
Her parents died.
I wish I could remember what she told me. I want to know if it’s connected. I want to ask how they died. But I can’t because there’s an ache at the base of my stomach when she looks at me, and I don’t want to go there.
Not yet.
‘Come on,’ I say, turning my back on it all. ‘We’ll come back to it.’
‘No!’
‘Uh – yes!’ I charge out on to the main landing. After a moment she catches up with me, her arms folded. ‘I promise, we’ll find it straight after dinner.’
‘Yes, Master,’ she says eventually in a little voice. ‘I know we will.’
I look back at her.
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously, Master,’ she says with a cunning smile. ‘Look, I’ve left some clues – just in case you forget which way it was.’
I look back, and see that she really has. Not exactly breadcrumbs, but bits of her stuff, in a trail. A pen, some keys, a few books. They look like little islands in a vast sea, just pulling us back to that door. I shudder, and start down the stairs at a run.
There was a kind of pie, with various colours of mash, and we ate off platters with long, thin knives and forks that weighed a tonne. And Aoife and Sal talked about how the potatoes weren’t doing so well this year, their eyes constantly flicking from me to Bavar. And he just lowered his head and ate a mountain of food, and then there was tea, and cake. I swear, I wouldn’t at this point be surprised if the whole house was actually made of cake.
I look at one of the walls and narrow my eyes, and then laugh at myself. If it was made of cake, it’d be a lot prettier, anyway. It’s all so dark. Dark paint, only broken by darker wallpaper. The floors are polished black wood, and the rugs are like pathways through bewitched forests, vines and flowers leading you onward, onward, to where I hope at some point I might find a loo.
The ancestors are quiet up on the walls, but their eyes follow me, and Aoife said something about straight on and to the left, or the right, I don’t know, I wasn’t really listening. I stand there for a moment, a little bit lost, and in the silence something calls to me. A whisper – not in the air but in my blood. Something deep inside, like an itch I can’t reach. I step forward, to where the feeling is louder, and it peaks when I get to the ornate door on the right of the great hallway. It’s closed, it’s always been closed, and I shouldn’t go in, I know I shouldn’t, but something in there is calling like a heartbeat, like a storm on the inside. I open the door and dart in, pulling it closed behind me.
It’s bleak and bare in here, tattered velvet curtains parted at the vast bay window, and an old chaise longue along one wall, faded blue and gold. Over the fireplace is an enormous mirror with a gilded, blackened frame and that . . . that is the thing that calls to me.
I can hear my dad.
I tread lightly over the dusty rug and I keep my head down, and I can barely breathe because I don’t want to make a sound. I don’t know how, but I can hear his voice and I have this hope, this wild hope that somehow he’s going to be here. That when I look up there he’ll be, in the mirror, in the room, breathing, talking, living.
I look up. Me, but not me. My hair glows, my eyes are the blue of a bright winter sky, and there, just over my shoulders, sweeping up to the ceiling, a pair of gleaming cloud-pale wings. I blink, and the image is gone.
Hah!
I scowl at my reflection. Pale, scrawny old me, just kidding herself. And then the mirror clouds over. For a moment I can’t see anything at all, and then slowly, as I watch, a new scene unfolds behind me. The room isn’t a cold, silent place. It’s ringing with noise and light, and laughter. Men and women gather in clusters, and in the middle of it all is a couple who shine even brighter than all the rest. They’re both tall, and the man has Bavar’s hair, though he’s tried to tame it and it shines beneath the swinging crystal chandelier. The woman has magic in every movement: when she laughs the whole room brightens, and when she stops there’s a sigh, as if the world is trying to hold on to the sound. She looks up at him and those eyes . . . it’s Bavar’s parents, it must be. I turn to the room, ice down my spine, but there’s nothing there, and when I turn back the scene has faded. I look harder, desperate to see more, and another scene appears before me, like the first, except the air is darker, thicker, the room hums with tension. Bavar’s parents stand together, their heads bent.
‘What does he want, Faolan?’ she whispers. Her face is pale, though she still smiles.
Faolan bends to her. ‘He says he’s found a way . . . I don’t know! The man’s raving. They’ve let him in and now he won’t go away, and he won’t stop speaking of the raksasa!’
‘I must speak to you!’
A man breaks through the crowd and stands before them. He looks so small, so pale and scared. The whole room stops to watch.
My dad.
His hair is plastered to his head, his coat dripping with rain. His eyes are haunted. I never saw him like this. I never knew he could look like this.