Half-Sick of Shadows (6 page)

Sophia never cried.

Father’s voice wavered near to tears in a way I had never heard before.

Far from being sad, I was happy she’d gone. We all were, except Father. I wondered what dead people did all day when they were closer to Jesus than ever. Sing hymns, I supposed; it must be like attending church for ever. Poor Granny Hazel. But old people like that kind of thing, although I couldn’t imagine Granny Hazel getting off her chair for long enough to stand up for a whole hymn.

Father said to Sophia, in a way that made me swallow hard, ‘I want you to make me a solemn promise.’ When she didn’t reply, he raised his voice: ‘Promise me?’

Her head nodded like the stiff tail of a small dog, but her expression far from reflected a similar kind of happiness. She might pee herself. She had done it before this close to Father’s face. We both had.

‘You’re a good girl.’ He stroked fine strands of hair from her eyes with porcine, farm labourer’s fingers. I noticed that his fingernails were clean. I’d never seen them clean before.

‘You’re my only daughter,’ said Father. ‘A daughter’s place is to help her mother, and your mother’s past the age now where … The thing is, what I want to say is, this is your home, and it always will be.’

She seemed to have no energy left to nod her head.

‘Do you hear?’

Her eyes were huge and round, her lips pressed tight.

‘Do you hear?’

At last Sophia’s head nodded the way it would have done no matter what he asked.

‘You must make me a promise. You must promise you’ll never leave. Never leave your home.’ He shook her, gripping her shoulders too hard. ‘You promise?’ Sophia nodded her head harder. ‘Never ever desert your mother, daughter. Never ever leave your home.’

Father’s grip relaxed.

He had never displayed great skill with words, unless they were part of a sermon of one kind or another. He seemed to speak to himself next, looking at the ground. ‘Your mother needs you as all our mothers need us. She’ll need you when her husband’s long gone … Unless, Him knowing best, He takes her first.’

Father looked at Tennyson as though trying to remember what kind of beast it was. Sophia had dropped the stick. We stayed like that for a long moment, alive but inanimate like the dog, as though we were dead too, yet still standing with our eyes open. The Manse and everything around and inside – including us as a family – had death running throughout as surely as fat runs through meat. Maybe that’s why the dog came to the Manse: to die – because it smelt death where we were.

Lightning snapped us in the wrong places. I saw Father and Sophia, and the outhouses and the toilet coffin and the dog’s corpse and, somehow, they were behind me, as were the headstones and angels, in black and white like a photograph’s negative. I saw them close up, then distanced. Sophia was a skeleton. Father, staring at the sky, prayed: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Thy will be done.’ Lightning bolted. Thunder thundered like the Lord cross.

Father rose to his feet and staggered indoors like a shot cowboy, wounded, head low, leaving us there, his rejections, as rain grew heavier and we got wetter. We cared nothing about wet. We would rather swim across the cemetery, out to the fields and beyond, than sit dry indoors with Father for company. Rain pounded upon large pothole puddles that formed in seconds on the broken cement and
gravel
ground. Rain sounded like glass shattering on the kitchen floor.

The shape of Sophia’s mouth asked: Never?

‘What?’ I shouted, and put my ear in her mouth.

‘What does he mean by never? He said never leave.’

‘I don’t know. He means what he says.’

Mother waved at us from the kitchen doorway. I think she wanted us in out of the rain with some urgency.

‘Does he mean never ever?’

‘He did say never. Never is never ever.’

Her eyes grew wide and her lips parted in awe and terror.

‘But what will happen if I do leave one day?’

‘Awful things,’ I said, thinking of Father more than anything else. Father represented all kinds of awful things.

‘What awful things?’

Canes and straps and dead dogs flashed in my mind.

We jumped when the dead dog gave a spasm. We gaped into each other’s faces, and sprinted, screaming, for indoors.

4

Sophia’s Curse

Sophia’a nerves and mine spent the rest of Granny Hazel’s burial day settling. Our nerves had never been so nervous. Mother noticed it. As we sat at the hearth, building we knew not what with coloured wooden blocks, she looked down on us as if we had each sprouted an extra ear on our foreheads. Mother turned to Father who was reading his bible on an armchair bleeding discoloured stuffing like snot from a nose. ‘It was too much for those two. Look at them; their nerves are on end.’ Sophia and I looked at each other, but we still had flat hair and looked the same as always. Father grunted.

Granny Hazel had been changeless, present all my life, stinky on her chair but suddenly gone. The living room doubled in size. The kitchen became a pleasant place to linger. The air smelled fresher.

Granny Hazel’s burial day became the day after Granny Hazel’s burial day and the next day became the day after that. Sophia and I looked at each other’s faces, pressed each other’s noses and tugged each other’s cheeks. We realized we were what Granny Hazel had ceased to be. We were alive.

We went round in circles, too inexperienced to know how to conclude our ruminations. But when we did we would conclude them together, because our heads were one and our tight circles were the same. We had yet to split and become ourselves.

The wind blew two slates off the roof. One of them killed a chicken, which was rubbery, but the chips fried up nice and crunchy.

A special game came into existence called The Promise – our new, favourite game. We couldn’t begin to guess what the outcome would be, but no ending we could imagine looked like a happy one.

In dry weather we talked about the promise while bouncing rubber balls off the side wall. In wet weather we talked about the promise while flicking through the encyclopedia in search of information about nothing in particular. We whispered about the promise in our beds at night when we were supposed to be asleep. We talked about the promise to each other, exclusively, because we never thought of talking about it to anyone else.

When we lost interest in bouncing rubber balls off the wall, and in reading books that didn’t tell stories, we played hide-and-seek in the cemetery – when the rain stayed away – and built very small snowmen in the cemetery when too little snow fell to build tall ones.

‘I think Granny Hazel has it in for us,’ whispered Sophia as we lay in our beds, the cemetery through the window in the Dark and the curtains drawn open. ‘I dreamed she burned us down.’

‘You didn’t tell me,’ I said.

‘I only just remembered.’

As I thought of what to say, the bedsprings protested. Sophia punched her pillow and turned her back to me. ‘Night-night.’

What would happen if the Manse caught fire? Sophia would have to leave it then! Maybe she could leave the Manse as long as Mother went with her. Mother going with her would be all right. But, then, they might both get lost. Lost in a dark wood, like Hollow Wood, but with wild animals, sinking sand and pirates, highwaymen, fire-breathing dragons and monsters and no way out … And so on, in the Dark, until yawns came and my eyelids drooped in the black middle between midnight and dawn.

Father moved Gregory and Edgar into Granny Hazel’s bedroom at the front of the Manse, and moved me into their old room. Gregory
got
Granny Hazel’s double bed, Edgar took his single with him, and I got Gregory’s single. In making me change rooms, Father shut me off from Sophia at night-time. Sophia had a room of her own now with two beds, one of them empty. Separation from Sophia seemed like a punishment for something I never did.

When I asked if I could stay with Sophia, Father said I would do as he said, and Mother added, by way of unfathomable explanation, that Sophia would be a young woman one day. Although I didn’t see what Sophia’s becoming a young woman had to do with anything, I held my tongue.

My new room gave me a phobia I had no name for. Perhaps there’s no better name for it than small-person-in-big-brothers’-former-bedroom phobia. Which isn’t as bad as big-brothers-in-dead-granny’s-bedroom phobia. My new room contained an odour of older brothers who broke wind too freely and washed too seldom. Sophia slept on the other side of the wall to my right. The junk room was to my left as I lay in bed. It had been reserved, since the beginning of time, for our future toilet – or bathroom, as Mother had taken to calling it because we were going to have a bath too.

I had difficulty getting to sleep in my lonely room. I awoke in the wee hours almost every night. Getting back to sleep took ages. Sometimes I got out of bed, wrapped in my sheets, and looked out of the window. When the moon hid, I saw almost nothing. When the moon came out, I saw the cemetery and miles and miles of fields stretching to the horizon.

Sophia and I lay side by side with only a solid wall between us, which we knocked secret codes on and hurt our knuckles.

Before Granny Hazel died, we were regular churchgoers. We went once each year, on Christmas Day. I hated church. It’s no place for children or people with brains. Aged eleven months, I watched Mother staring down at me, cooing ‘Ma-ma, Ma-ma’, and my first words back to her were I hate church.

After Granny Hazel died, Father stopped going, which meant that the rest of us stopped going too. I never knew why Father stopped going; there were no signs that he had fallen out with God, but, obviously, he must have done. I don’t blame him. I’d have fallen out with God too, if He’d killed Mother – and if God and I had been on friendly terms in the first place.

It was a Sunday. The day had been overcast and night came early. Evening approached candle-lighting time. Drizzle dotted the window, in morbid contrast to the scene within.

Gregory: jumping in the air, clapping his hands, jigging around the living room in a most non-adult and unsophisticated way. Sophia and I looking on, astonished that he should greet bad news with such delight. Edgar: cross-legged on the rug in front of the fire, ha-ha-hawing and clapping his hands in imitation of his older brother …

The promise had never been a secret. Neither Sophia nor I knew of a reason why the promise should have been kept from Gregory. Father never said that we had to keep it a secret. When Gregory started leaping around we wished we had kept it to ourselves.

‘I’m glad you think it’s so funny,’ I muttered loud enough for only Sophia to hear. I felt like punching Gregory in the head. Had I done so, he would have been imprisoned for my murder.

Sophia knew no such fear. ‘I’m glad you think it’s so funny!’

He stopped abruptly and acted deadly serious. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong: it isn’t funny, little Soapy Soapsuds; far from it. It’s a curse!’ he announced. ‘You’re cursed! You’re cursed!’

‘What’s a curse?’ asked Sophia.

The living-room door opened. Father came in. We held our tongues and our breath. Father looked behind a cushion, scratched his beard – some of it had grown back. Having scratched his beard for half a minute, and inspected his fingernails, he left the room and closed the door behind him.

I had hoped that in Father’s depression, because of his mother’s death, he would do himself in by swallowing a tin of rat poison, or sawing off both hands and squirting blood all around the outhouses … Although he could only saw off one hand, unless he could saw with a foot, and I doubted he could. He might have sawn off both feet; or both feet and a hand. Alas, he hadn’t sawn off anything and our lives hadn’t improved.

‘Go on, then, Eddy Bear: tell her what a curse is.’

‘I don’t know any curses,’ I said.

Gregory went behind the sofa and placed his hands on the top as if it were a lectern. Pleased that I had thrown the question back to him, but unwilling to show his pleasure, he used the sofa as a stage prop. He stood behind it legless, like Punch or Judy. ‘A curse, dear sister, is like a spell cast in ye olde days of witches and wizards and boiling pots of bats’ blood, pee, bulls’ bones and human hair all mixed together.’

‘But what does it do?’

‘It …’ His search for a word ruined the performance; it also gave me an injection of joy, and I hoped all the words he wanted to find to define a curse were lost. ‘A curse made by, say, Father, on, say, you, means that if you do something in the future … Never mind. Look; your particular curse is this: if you leave the Manse something bad will happen to you.’

‘I already know that.’

‘Then what more do you want from me, child?’ He raised his arms in a shrug and dropped his head to one side. While holding that pose, he looked like a boy Jesus on a cross, apart from the polo-neck pullover, which I doubt they wore in Jesus’s day, especially when they went to get crucified. ‘The bad thing shall be something very, very, veryvery unpleasant.’

‘What like?’

‘All the people in the cemetery breaking into the house to eat you?’ He did scary monster shapes with his arms and face.

‘Stop it! Stop it!’

He monster-lurched towards her. ‘We’re coming all smelly and horrible from our graves to get you, strangle you, tie you up, boil you in a pot and pick your bones clean.’

‘Stop it.’ She ran away from him behind the chair Mother normally sat on. ‘Dead people are in Heaven and Hell.’

‘You’re frightening her,’ I said.

‘Shut up, you wimp, or I’ll frighten you in a minute.’

‘Why don’t you tell her the truth? What kind of thing?’

‘How should I know? She’ll turn into a frog or something.’

Sophia screwed up her face like when she had to take a spoon of castor oil. ‘I think I’d rather sleep for a thousand years.’

‘Right! I’m bored with this,’ said Gregory. ‘You won’t have to worry about either frogs or princes, if you ask me. Just forget about the whole thing. I’m sure Father will too.’

Instead of simply heeding his advice, we told Gregory that we needed some kind of boundary and the old, fallen tree on Hollow Heath seemed like a good distance.