The garden sparkles in orange hues of sunset, the old wooden table draped with a pale cloth and sprinkled with bundles of dusty-pink roses from the garden. I smile at them, even though I wish Cath had just left them in the earth.
So pretty.
Cath made a cake and I take a slice from Gowan’s offering hand.
“I like your nail polish,” I tell Cath, noting how it matches the roses. Her smile is so wide that a jolt of pleasure jumps through me.
“Thank you, Silla dear.”
But the smile doesn’t reach her eyes.
“Shall we?” Gowan asks, indicating the garden.
I grin, and we walk off alone, away from the light of the kitchen.
“Did you see her nails?” I ask him when I sit down.
“Pink?”
I shake my head. “No… they were all messy, painted over her cuticles.”
“I guess she had shaky hands.”
“Gowan. There was some in her hair.”
He shrugs. “Maybe she’s tired.”
“It’s more than that. Something’s wrong with her. Can’t you see it?”
He glances back at Cath, who stands with Nori in the kitchen doorway, smiling at us.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.” He smiles at me. “But tonight, you’re all I care about, birthday girl. How about you eat your cake and make a wish?”
I lean closer to him. “What if my wish had already come true?”
He leans closer, too, kisses me tenderly. “Then wish for the impossible.”
I eat the cake while he watches, and offer him the last piece. He opens his mouth and I pop it inside. He licks my fingers on the way out, eyes sparkling with mischief.
“Tease,” he says.
I hand him the plate. “Another?”
He kisses me on the cheek and I giggle. “That’s more like it.”
When he comes back, there are three pieces on my plate. “Two more for you, one for me.”
It’s amazing cake. Moist and subtle, vanilla and raspberry. I am done with my third when Nori skips over. She puts down her plate and shows us what she is holding.
Something dangles from her fist, the one attached to the bad arm, so it shakes a little with the strain of lifting it up to show us. Her mouth is covered in pink icing. More pink.
Look, she signs, one-handed. Look!
The thing swings like a fatty bit of raw bacon covered in cake.
“What is that?” Gowan says, laughing with a frown.
Worms! She laughs and digs into her piece of cake for another, while she holds the first.
Everything s l o w s down around me.
Wrong. This is wrong.
Cath still stands in the kitchen doorway, the light pooling around her. She is laughing, tears running down her cheeks.
Gowan lets go of my hand, and the air seems to bite with cold.
“Give me that,” Gowan says, his demeanor utterly changed. “No more cake.”
Why? Nori signs. I want it!
“No more,” he repeats, and gathers up my plate, too. He strides to the kitchen, gesturing at Cath and pointing at the plates.
She simply rolls off the wall, goes inside, and Gowan, agitated, follows her.
We don’t see either of them all night.
It is the early hours of the morning when Gowan slides into bed next to me.
“You were right. Something is wrong with her.”
The next day Cath goes up to the attic.
And never comes down.
1980: The woods are waterlogged, and Catherine has trouble finding her way. She screams for Anne as she runs, searching, but the trees all around her move and whisper, thrashing in the storm, and it is many hours later that she sees.
And the wood echoes with screams.
It was her job to be carer… to protect Anne. To protect them both. She was the eldest and the wisest. Anne tried to tell her about their protector, but Catherine, growing up fast, had not quite believed. At twelve, she fancied herself grown, and so her childhood faith in stories had started to fade.
And now look.
Anne is gone.
Shredded up on the forest floor.
And it is all her fault.
“You never came back. You left us that day. You went for help, but you never came back.”
I r e m e m b e r him.
Gowan’s face has fallen a lot since then. “That’s not true.”
Behind me, I can hear La Baume sighing and shifting and changing.
“You abandoned us.” Nothing. There is nothing alive inside me right now. My heart died a long time ago. He left us. He left us all alone. He left me.
I don’t wait for his reply. I just turn and drag myself back to the now root-infested manor, ready for the shadows to take me. Inside, the walls flake and peel away as I pass, which gives me intense satisfaction. Everything breaks down as I wander by; the roots bend and twist behind me, cutting him off, locking him out. And I know that it is me doing this to La Baume.
I am the infection.
I am the decay.
29
anne
Children are sponges, yes
we soak up everything!
including all your blackness, yes
we do it just by breathing.
BROKEN BOOK ENTRY