You got me to school, and then you got yourself there too – and you got us home again. You made a few cans of baked beans, some spaghetti hoops and one loaf of thin-slice Mother’s Pride (oh the irony) last for a week. The bag of sugar, that lasted too – that was our treat.
When we ran out of tins, you ‘borrowed’ some money from Mrs Wilmers downstairs. You said it was for the raffle at school, and she could win a hamper or a holiday to Butlins. You said it like it was Barbados – well it was to us – and she gave you three pounds.
You eked it out till our feckless mother returned, suntanned and hungover, not cleansed, with a bag of vodka, two hundred duty-free fags and a worse habit than she’d left with. She brought us nothing.
What a surprise.
But you never even grassed her up to Nan, and you made me swear not to either (though you’d have been doing us a favour if you had). Still, your sense of loyalty was too strong.
Forty-One
Jeanie
3 April 2015
I stare at the letter to this stranger: it’s from Hillfield Dental Practice.
Lisa Bedford.
Who is she, and why is she getting letters here?
I’m being jumpy again. It’s nothing. No doubt she’s just someone who lived here before the Kings, an ex-resident of Malum House. And who is there to ask anyway?
I walk back upstairs, past the locked door, and I peer into Matthew’s study. It feels so empty in the house without him here. I feel empty without him here. Without his approval and without the love I felt so tangibly until only a few weeks ago.
His shiny silver laptop stares at me from his desk.
If I just checked through his emails, I might get some answers about the person who ‘shopped’ me.
I remember the devil’s idea of control: reading everything that came into the house. I remember the results.
I’m not going to stoop to his depths.
But then I pass beneath the attic hatch. I’ve resisted it for too long now.
I move the Queen Anne chair from the corner of the landing and stand on it to reach up and pull the attic stairs down.
As I clamber up into the darkness, emerging into the dim light, dust motes swirling in the weak beams of sun that fall from one tiny skylight, I remember Judy’s drunken ramblings, back in November, and I think: She was right. There is a mad woman in the attic…
Only the mad woman is me.
I nearly laugh aloud – except it would only prove my own fear: ‘the gambols of a demon’ as Mr Rochester noted of his first wife.
Now I’m up here, I can see it’s pointless – there’s nothing in the attic. A few racks of old clothes, boxes of books and some photograph albums I can’t bear to look at.
I run my hand across the clothes, wondering who they belonged to – and something whirls up from the corner.
I spring back, emitting a higher-pitched scream than I ever thought I could make.
It’s a bird, I realise shakily; a bird is in the attic with me – flapping furiously against the roof slats, making an unearthly sound – and oh God I want to get out too…
Running back to the ladder, I stumble against a stack of paintings and the top one falls: a cracked old print of the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’.
I climb down again, sweaty palms sliding on the ladder rails.
The walls haven’t whispered for a while; they might be silent today – but the house is definitely haunted. I think of the Grey Lady who died here. I think of Scarlett’s projection. I think of my terror.
Is that just me too?
On the landing, I perch on the Queen Anne chair and try to calm my breathing. The bird will have to stay there until either Frank or Matthew get home. Sorry, bird, but I’m not feeling brave any more.
I stare down at the spring garden. It’s starting to burst with life – unlike me.
How has my life turned into this… uselessness? There’s no point to me; I’m like some odd 1950s housewife, like someone out of Mad Men. I just need a pristine apron, a gold cigarette case and a vodka-martini habit and I’ll be set…
Outside Matthew’s study I turn my back on the laptop burning into my retinas and force myself downstairs. Today the sun has actually shown its face, and I need fresh air before I suffocate.
I’ll tackle the deadwood in the huge garden, I decide. It’s a beautiful space, a bit dark at the end maybe, and I’ve not really explored out since I’ve been here.
In the garage I root around for gardening equipment. The gardener has left the mower and the big spades and forks very neatly in the wooden rack, but I need the smaller stuff. There’s a long, thin cabinet that’s locked, but I can’t find any keys to it.
Eventually I do find a box of gardening stuff. Choosing the sharpest-looking secateurs and some thick gloves, I walk through the garage and down to the back of the garden, past the jolly daffodils, towards the big trees at the end where primroses cluster shyly at the foot of their trunks.
I’ll start here and work my way up towards the house.
Savagely I cut back brambles and old rose vines until my skin above the gloves is scratched and bleeding. I’m out of breath but enjoying it – feeling alive for the first time in days. Weeks.