House of Small Shadows

FIFTEEN

Wire covered in dark-green plastic, municipal green. Too high to climb over. Wire formed into diamond shapes she slipped her fingers through. She could squeeze her entire hand into a gap, even if it felt like she would dislocate a thumb. She’d got her hand stuck once and tugged and twisted her wrist and made her thumb go all red where it was squashed between the wires. Once the panic subsided, and she was as exhausted as a fish caught on a line, her ringing hand was released by the fence.

She’d never seen the children move into view. They would just be up there in the derelict school, above the den, when the back of her neck prickled and she knew she was being watched. And she would look to the place between two of the buildings where the grass and weeds were as high as her knees.

Some of the children were smaller and younger than her, others were eight or nine. Older children. All stood in a group with the raggedy boy out front and the girl in the old hat beside him. ‘A bonnet’ her nan had called the same kind of hat on one of her dolls, Gemima. It had been like a tunnel around Gemima’s cloth face.

The air would go a bit wavy around the children of the special school, and above the grassy slope, like it did when it was so hot in the summer she’d sit in the shade all day.

She didn’t know what most of the children looked like. Only remembered bits of the boy with messy hair, in the ragged suit and callipers on his legs, and the girl in the dress and bonnet.

The special schoolchildren would stare at her and she would stare back at their dark and uneven silhouettes, each wary of the other. Had they been children from the Fylde Grove, even with the fence protecting her, she would have run for home before the stones whipped past her head. But the other children never threw stones.

Only the raggedy boy came near the fence. To the section where the green wire sagged, and where the wire had been unravelled beside one concrete post. Where she had unwoven the wire with her small hands, one link at a time from the frayed bottom upwards.

Alice had sat and watched her unthread the wire. ‘Better not, Caff. We’ll get in trouble. We’s not allowed to.’ But Alice had also asked when the children of the special school were going to reappear.

As soon as Alice was told about the children of the special school, she believed Catherine’s stories. Alice hadn’t needed proof because she yearned for the same thing. Escape. In Ellyll Fields there was only so much comfort two little misfits could give each other.

Once Catherine started picking at the wire, she could not stop until the unthreading created a space large enough for a child to fit through.

She only went to the den once more after Alice went missing. At the very end of the summer holidays, before her family moved. Their sanctuary had been wrecked, and the fence by the river repaired. And that was the day she ran home in tears and said she’d seen Alice and made her mum cry and had her legs slapped.

I did. I did, Mum. Alice was up on the hill and she said, ‘You’s comin’ up the big ’ouse, Caff. Wiv us, Caff? They’s callin’.’

She never knew what upset her mum so much, the story about Alice, or because she’d been back to the den. The police and Alice’s mum came round and Catherine recounted her story again, which upset Alice’s mum even more than her own mother. The kitchen was full of crying women, one who couldn’t even stand up.

She never saw the children leave the plastic bag either. The bag of coins was just there when she went to her den alone, one afternoon right before Alice went missing, when she was buoyant with relief the school day was over, but also pale and weakened by the day’s torments.

She’d kept the fifty pences and the ten pences, but the other coins were either very old or from other countries. These her father took when he found them in his shed where she’d stored them. She’d lied about them when questioned. But the coins she’d found were real because her dad had seen them too.

‘Not seen one of these since I was your age.’ Her dad had inspected the coins she knew she couldn’t spend at the paper shop.

In her trance, she’d even smelled the shed scents of cut grass, oily metal, fresh timber and creosote while he talked to her all over again like she was really back there. 1981.

And then she’d left biscuits on the plastic serving tray of her tea set, for the children of the special school, on their side of the fence. They took the tray and the biscuits, but left metal spoons that looked older than the ones that her nan kept in the sideboard with the sherry decanter. Catherine buried the old spoons in a handkerchief.

Smelly Cathy Howard, Smelly Cathy Howard. Dopted, dopted, dopted.

She’d heard that again in her trance too. And also seen the three girls from the year above her in junior school, waiting outside the school gates for her every afternoon for three weeks, until her mother went up to the school to speak to her teacher about the chunk of hair that had been ripped from her scalp.

The raggedy boy only came closer to the fence the day after her mother and father had a talk that she’d overheard, about moving her to a new school. Because of the bullying. She’d watched her adopted parents’ blurry shapes through the dimpled glass of the hall door. Her mum had been crying.

The next day she sat in the den for an entire Sunday afternoon and was so cold she stopped feeling it. And she shivered and stared through the fence at the empty brick bungalows and prayed for the children to come back. She was alone that day because Alice was recovering from an operation on her leg.

She gave up on the children and took to staring between her shoes, wondering how to avoid ever going to any school. She only looked up when she suspected she was no longer alone.

There was no sound of their approach through the long wet grass on the other side of the fence, nor did she catch a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. But she looked up to see the raggedy boy stood in the grass, closer to the fence than to the buildings of the special school. In the distance, the other children had formed an uneven line and watched.

She’d never seen one of the children so close before. The raggedy boy’s face was round and was either painted or he wore a mask. His small thin body was covered in a dark and grubby suit like the ones she had seen in her nursery rhyme book. His face was one big grin and he waved a small white hand that poked from a tight sleeve too small for his arm.

White hand, white teeth, white hand, white teeth, white eyes… she’d felt dizzy with him so close. His hair was a thick black mop, a wig made for a girl.

She stood up. In the distance, the girl in the strange hat put both of her thin arms into the wavy air.

Then Catherine was pretending to pour tea from her greenish plastic teapot into the paint tins, while a crowd of children who smelled funny stood around her inside the den.

The memories had come back for her, and swept through her. She’d even been able to smell the rivery stagnant dell. How was that possible?

In the first half of her life she had been told she always came back to the world from a trance with her mouth open. When ‘out of it’, her expression was reported to be vague, and her eyes distant. Her parents told doctors all of this while she sat in silence on plastic chairs in surgeries and hospitals and offices. These were the first times she’d heard her ‘episodes’ described.

Teachers at the new school added to her awareness of what she looked like when she was entirely withdrawn from the world. Children at the new school crept up to form circles around her beneath the tree at the bottom of the school field to wait for her to wake up. She would come to covered in leaves, twigs and litter they had placed on her head and body. Once, she woke with a dead snail in one hand.

Flatmates and friends in shared accommodation at university had not been so cruel. They thought she was epileptic and resisted the urge to tease her, a temptation she read behind their half-smiles. She burned with shame when they told her how she looked during her time away.

She would pass through school assemblies, entire films and train journeys in the same state with no recollection of the time elapsed while ‘she was away with the fairies’.

Sometimes her nose bled and people tried to shake her awake. Once an ambulance was called and she woke up beside a bus on a stretcher, wrapped in a red blanket. Her secondary-school teachers kept sending her home.

Doctors had tried to medicalize her ‘condition’. The doctors, to whom she had been taken as a girl, claimed it was all kinds of things, as did the two specialists the doctors referred her to. At one time she was a narcoleptic, a catatonic, and suffered from hypnotic states. She was scanned and doctors with soapy hands and coffee breath kept looking into her eyes from close range.

No one ever asked what she saw when she was ‘out of it’. What she looked like seemed to be the most important thing to other people.

She could not slip away on command, though as a girl had wanted to. After a bad day at school, if she’d had a choice, she would have eagerly returned to wherever she went in a trance. In trances she experienced a joy so intense it made her nose bleed and left her body drained.

The trances occurred when she was tired, and it was like going to sleep with her eyes open. Sometimes it occurred when in deep thought, but only when relaxed. It was the most at peace she’d ever felt, being transported deep inside herself and far away from the world.

By her late teens the episodes almost never occurred. Then she was caught up in the ways of the world, and there was little sanctuary there. Anxiety, tension, despair aplenty, but little calm. She was partly relieved the trances had either gone into remission, or that she had grown out of them. It was difficult enough to fit in wherever she found herself, without passing out and dribbling through a gaping mouth. But part of her had come to secretly miss the condition too. It was the last thing that connected her to Alice. In the perpetual white noise of London anxiety, the episodes never came to save her. Only being drunk enough to stop caring about anything had helped her there.

But now they had come back.

Catherine wiped the blood off her top lip with the back of her hand. The nausea soon vanished with the dizziness. Memory had briefly dulled the jabs of pain in her stomach that Mike had left behind. Mike must have caused the relapse, so close to the place where it all began.

On Thursday someone delivered a letter to her flat by hand. They had gone by the time she scraped the latch off the front door and peered into the street she had not walked upon since the previous Friday night. It was addressed to her, care of the Osberne office. Leonard must have sent it on to her.

The heavy linen envelope was sealed with red wax like a court summons from the nineteenth century.

Feeling leaden and sore, as if she’d pulled every muscle in her abdomen while crying intermittently for a week, she opened the envelope on the breakfast bar.

The letter was from Edith Mason. Written untidily by hand on antique stationery, it was more of a curt request than an invitation to begin the valuation of the contents of the Red House the following day, Friday.

She’d only been away from the Red House for one week and her life had fallen apart. But she doubted even M. H. Mason and his rats could stitch it back together again.