Half-Sick of Shadows (24 page)

Fresh home for ever, I entered the kitchen and was surprised to find Mother washing dishes at the sink, and Sophia at the table ankle deep in spilled flour, both hands a disgrace of lumpy dough – too much water. She beamed when she saw me and ran at me with doughy hands.

Mother looked terrible, like a ghost, as bad as the body in the bog, and she looked at me as though I were a ghost too. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked weakly.

Sophia hugged my neck. Now my coat needed a scrub.

‘My exams are over, so I came home. I’ve finished with Whitehead House for ever.’

Sophia gave a cheer, wiped dough off her hands, jumped on my back, smacked me and ordered me to giddy-up.

‘I suppose I’d best put on the kettle,’ said Mother.

I knew I shouldn’t ask Sophia. I shouldn’t mention the outdoor toilet. I shouldn’t draw her attention to it.

Unable to resist, I asked her anyhow.

‘The lock on the old toilet door’s rusty. I must take a file to it so it’ll shut properly. We never had a lock on the outside latch, did we? Do you know anything about it?’

‘I forgot to tell you in one of my letters,’ she said. ‘The wind blew the door open one day, and when I went to shut it there was a dead body inside.’

‘Good heavens!’

‘I know.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing. Well, I didn’t know who it belonged to. It wasn’t one of
ours
. So I got the lock. I know it doesn’t lock, but at least it holds the door shut … We’re nearly out of jam. Remind me to add jam to Farmer Barry’s shopping list.’

‘But what about the body?’ I asked.

Sophia shrugged. ‘If whoever owns it wants it, they’ll have to come and get it.’

‘How do you suppose it got there?’

‘That’s what I wondered.’

‘And?’

‘Well … Tennyson got here … What’s to stop anybody just walking down the Lane and … I don’t know.’

‘Maybe she came here to ask directions. Before she got to the back door, she needed to go. She saw the toilet, went in, and had a heart attack or something while she was sitting there.’

‘Probably something like that,’ said Sophia.

My twin entertained me that evening by reciting
The Lady of Shalott
– badly – which she had memorized from Alf’s poetry book – partly and imperfectly. Still, it was an accomplishment and I told her I was proud of her. Actually, she looked silly trying to recite a poem in the living room while clip-clopping along on an imaginary horse. Maybe she was supposed to be Sir Lancelot. Maybe clip-clopping along helped her with the poem’s rhythm.

‘There she weaves by night and day

A magic web with colours gay.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.’

I had neither read the poem nor heard it performed. The word ‘curse’ made me pay greater attention.

‘She knows not what the curse may be

And so she weaveth steadily,

And little other care hath she,

The Lady of Shalott.’

My twin’s horse stalled at a jump; she had forgotten what came next. I clapped my hands, said her recital deserved a pot of tea, and escaped to make one.

19

The Cellar

I quickly grew bored at the Manse. Sophia bored me. There! I wrote it! I wrote it because I thought it. Thinking it, I wanted to bite my tongue hard. I hated myself. But, God help us, she bored me. Sophia loved having me at home, and I hid my boredom from her. Hiding it from Mother proved harder. I saw the tiredness in Mother’s eyes. ‘You’ll be off to university soon,’ she said – at least once each day – and I couldn’t tell whether she said it to reassure me that my boredom would end, or because she felt sorry for herself. Having me hanging around the Manse was preferable to having just Sophia for company; Father was none, and Gregory was seldom there.

A week or ten went by like treacle advancing along a gentle slope. On most days, no matter whether rain or mere cloud ruled the sky, I set out for an afternoon stroll to kill time. Although I didn’t like the taste of cigarettes, I smoked one or two along the way because I had nothing better to do. Gregory returned to the Manse once, slept off a poteen hangover acquired at Maud’s, and went away again. Father never rose from bed – he couldn’t. Mother was heading that way too.

We heard the stairs creaking: Mother coming down in her best coat and shoes, wearing a headscarf despite the sun that day and only a light breeze. I packed counters and board into the draughts box.

Mother had changed since her illness. Her eyes were darker and
her
face more pinched. Her lips were all but invisible. With crow’s feet extending from the sides of her eyes like branches from a branchy tree, and skin the colour of winter, I saw an old woman before me. When she filled the kettle with water, she lifted it with her right hand, but held that wrist with her left hand, adding strength she never needed to add when I was a boy. When she drank tea from a mug, as when buttering toast, her hand shivered ever so slightly.

Yet here she was, getting on with making it to tomorrow, as if nothing had changed. She gave us the usual instructions as if we were still five years old: don’t remove the fireguard, don’t touch the cooker, and don’t go outside without a coat. I said to her, ‘Don’t pretend to go shopping if you’re really sneaking off for a crafty cigarette behind an outhouse,’ and she scrunched up her face at me as though I was out of my head.

Sophia bent down a little to hug her goodbye, and I bent down a little lower than Sophia. Some time when we were not paying attention, Sophia’s shins stopped growing while the expansion of mine continued. For all I knew they were still at it.

We waved to Mother from the back door. She crossed the courtyard and passed the sealed and secured dry toilet. We watched as her headscarf vanished under greenery bordering the Lane, then reappeared for a while and vanished again. When she was far enough away for us to be sure that she would not return because she had forgotten something – usually her umbrella in case it rained, occasionally her purse – I said, ‘Action stations!’

Sophia stood to attention.

‘Private Pike, are you ready?’

She saluted. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Into the kitchen,’ I barked. ‘Go! Go!’ Soldier-like, she quick-marched round the floor while pointing out, correctly as it happened, that she was already in the kitchen.

‘Halt!’ She halted to attention. ‘Assume position at table.’ She did so, standing to attention at a shorter side. ‘One end of the table, take
in
hand! The other end of the table, me in hand take! Table, lift and move aside.’

We moved the table aside.

We removed the mat that covered the trapdoor. Its foam underside tore at the floor underneath. Neither Mother nor Sophia had mopped under there for years. The mat smelled of bacon fat, gravy and other spillages. ‘Yuck,’ said Sophia with contorted face, and wiped the unidentifiable stickiness from her fingers on to her dress.

The padlock fitted into the centre of the latch – an iron loop, which in turn rested in a groove. That accounted for why the mat had no tell-tale bulge.

I knew where Father kept the key. He kept rusty keys that opened boxes and trunks lost to time, and thus were useless, in an equally rusty biscuit tin in the bottom drawer beside the sink. There were several keys of the type that fitted the padlock; the first of these I tried, and the least rusted, opened it.

‘Are you ready?’ I asked my excited sister. ‘It’s heavy. When I lift it, put this in the gap.’ I gave her a large paintbrush, the kind used on walls. I’d found it in the bottom drawer with the rusty tin. With hairs stuck as one and solid as wood, it would never paint again. Kneeling above the trapdoor, near the iron loop, I tried to open the door using only one hand but could not raise it high enough. I tried raising it using both hands, standing awkwardly, but that was worse. I went back to using one hand, the other pushing against the floor, but still could not raise the door high enough for Sophia to slip in the handle of the paintbrush. It wasn’t just the weight. The hinges were rusted and in need of oil. The door was probably glued to the floor with dead spiders and mealtime spillages. While resting, I decided that I needed a better idea; using the current method of brute force – not that I had ever been brutish – would get me nowhere. I required leverage.

‘Now … Phase two of operation Raise the Floor requires the
deployment
of elevating technology, which, although functionality is a prerequisite, need not be mechanically sophisticated.’

‘What?’

‘We need the right tool for the job.’

Sophia followed me outside to an outhouse. ‘What’s the right tool for the job? Mother said we’re supposed to put on our coats.’

‘We need a rope.’ The string in the kitchen drawer would be too weak to raise the trapdoor, and would undoubtedly slice into my soft hands like a cheese wire cutting through butter – or cheese, although I seldom ate cheese because it was too expensive for both Whitehead House and my parents. ‘This’ll do.’ The rope was almost black and had been looped on a nail on the wall for years.

‘What’s that for?’ asked Sophia.

‘I’m going to tie you to a chair and tickle your feet.’ I chased her laughing across the courtyard and into the kitchen.

Sophia watched as I upended the table so it rested on one of its narrower sides a few feet from the trapdoor’s latch. Cowboys could have taken cover behind the table and shot round the sides at Indians. I needed something thicker than the paintbrush to slip between the table-top’s narrow edge and the floor – to feed the rope through. Mother’s rolling pin did the job.

‘Now,’ I said. ‘Here’s what you’ve to do. Stand here.’ I placed Sophia behind the table like a cowboy.

‘What do I do?’

‘I’ll tell you in a minute.’ I tied one end of the rope to the iron ring and tugged it tight enough. ‘I’m going to pass the rope over the table … like so … down the other side and back under it … and go over here.’ The rope formed a triangle from the iron ring, over and under the table, and back to the iron ring. I took the rope beyond the trapdoor and stood clear of it.

‘I’m going to open the door by pulling this rope. Your job is to put your weight against the table and stop it moving towards me. It’ll move a bit, but don’t worry; do your best.’ I pulled the rope until it
became
taut, then pulled harder to test how much effort I would need to make … a lot. Mostly, I worried that Sophia would be unable to stop the table from sliding towards me.

Seven feet, the height of the table upended, was the rope’s highest point, and the greatest leverage I could construct. The rope cut roughly a forty-five degree angle to the iron ring latch.

‘Are you ready?’ I asked Sophia.

‘Ready steady.’

‘Lean more weight against the table as you need to.’

At first I thought I had made the trapdoor harder to open rather than easier. As I used muscles previously long-term unemployed, heaving like a tug-of-war champion, the trapdoor began to open. Sophia pushed against the table and prevented it from sliding towards me. The uneven floor tiles helped, immovable obstacles to the table’s upended legs. When the door had opened several inches, I asked Sophia to come and hold the rope while I secured the openness by jamming the paintbrush in the gap. Then we rested and admired our achievement.

‘It’s only opened an inch,’ said Sophia. ‘We’ll never squeeze in there.’ I think she was joking.

An inch gap was enough for me to get my fingers in and, with all my modest might, raise the trapdoor fully open, disturbing gunk and rust, then insert a wooden bar that fitted into slots for the purpose of keeping it open.

‘It’s dark.’ She looked in, poised to recoil if something otherworldly flew out. Cobwebby too, I observed. ‘There are steps.’ Stone ones, but I couldn’t see the bottom. We needed a torch. ‘We need a torch.’ I retrieved Torchy. I felt better about descending now that I could see the bottom of the steps. The cellar looked innocuous enough.

‘Watch your step,’ I said. ‘There’s no rail.’

‘You go first,’ she said.

‘How brave of you.’

‘I’m not brave. You’re a man. I’m only a girl.’

Her self-diminution made me sad.

Standing on the brink, shining the torch into the cellar, I felt a chill run through me, a chill I experienced long ago, although I could not remember when or where. I foresaw tragedy, or disaster, or an extension of my sorrow, and possibly all three; the future ‘thing’ had no name. Nor did I know where or when in the future it would reveal itself.

‘I don’t know about this.’

Sophia’s voice nudged me forward. One hand holding the torch, one on the wall for balance, I stepped over the brink on to the first step down, then another step down, and another. I could not hear Sophia behind me, but I knew she was there.

The beam of light illuminated damp brickwork, old china spilling out of boxes, sealed crates, a bicycle frame and – the beam stopped – three empty coffins side by side and upright so their future occupants might walk out if they wished. Beside the coffins were three coffin lids stacked against each other.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Sophia behind me. She too had seen the coffins. More cautiously, we continued to the bottom of the steps and the cellar floor of dead insects, puddles, moss and concrete. We approached the open coffins as if Egyptian mummies slept inside awaiting reawakening. The soft lining of the first coffin, once pure white, was soiled. There were stains where a head would rest, and others near the centre, which might have been blood, urine, or anything. The other two coffins had similar stains, but lighter.

A loud, echoing noise made my skeleton momentarily flee my flesh – actually, it had been Sophia saying, ‘Who’. My skeleton shot back into my body before it collapsed, jellylike. She had almost killed me with a solitary syllable. She completed her question: ‘… are those for?’

‘I don’t know.’ I swallowed hard, put a finger to my lips and asked her to be quieter. The light beam explored elsewhere in the cellar, which was bigger than the kitchen with three supporting pillars. I
reassured
Sophia, and myself, that we had nothing to be afraid of down here.