Crow face doll face, p.10
Crow Face, Doll Face, page 10
We met at the turnstile. Kitty and Leila uncoupled their tangled fingers and each reached for me, smiling softly as though the afternoon were perfectly ordinary and their return, as two now where previously there had been three – there had been three? – was an everyday thing. I tried to say something but they hushed me, and they each took one of my hands, towing me as they’d towed Elsa, gently and firmly towards the picnic benches. ‘You know it has to be done, Mummy,’ Kitty whispered. Leila nodded. ‘To keep us safe.’
I bobbed along in their wake, empty as a balloon, hearing the numbers in my head – thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six – and wondering what would happen when Elsa got to a hundred and realised her sisters weren’t crouched a few metres away, sniggering into their skirts.
Our luggage was where we’d left it, unmolested, though the family who’d been guarding it were long gone. The bus was waiting, belching exhaust fumes, ready to leave. I pushed the girls on ahead of me, stumbled blindly up the steps behind them, and sat alone across the aisle. From my seat I could see the entrance to the maze. I pressed my face to the gritty window and stared until my eyes stung, tensed to stand up and scream a halt should a tear-streaked girl fling herself out. Even after the driver swung out of the car park and we undertook the rest of our journey along the golden roads, charging towards the twilight, I didn’t turn away from the window. I couldn’t bear to look across at my Doll Face and Crow Face, sleeping serenely with their heads tucked on the other’s shoulder.
NEW HOME
The bus dropped us in the centre of the village. I left Kitty and Leila perched on the pile of luggage under a streetlamp while I ran into the bright bustle of a pub and asked the woman behind the bar to phone me a taxi. I bought three bottles of pop and pointed out of the window to let them know where we’d be waiting.
I worried over how much the fare would be, how much of a tip I should leave, ferreting in my purse for loose change that wouldn’t seem too meagre: more silver than copper. After their long nap on the bus the girls were wide awake again, swinging their legs and watching with giggling interest the comings and goings in the pub car park. I stood apart, still unable to look at them directly, still counting in my head from one to a hundred, over and over. I’m coming, ready or not!
I was light-headed with fatigue, unable to push a way through the numb mesh thrown over my mind. I didn’t feel much of anything. Dogs barked and laughter rang from a beer garden out of sight. There was the occasional raised voice but no sense of real threat so I didn’t think that I would have to move us all further along the lane where the evening shadows were thicker.
When the taxi arrived I told the driver our new address and asked if he knew where it was. He nodded and loaded our suitcases into the boot, waited for me to help the girls into the back and fill their laps with bags, then take a seat beside him. He didn’t say a great deal on the journey for which I was thankful. I was trying to follow the turns and junctions of the roads, commit them to memory, estimating how far we’d be living from the village.
‘Here you are then.’ He pulled up beside a cottage almost lost behind a thicket of unkempt dog roses. He let the car idle while he set the luggage beside the gate. In the lane behind me the faded scarlet of a telephone box loomed.
‘Do you need a hand getting those in?’ he asked, indicating the heap of bags and cases. I shook my head and thanked him, handing over what felt like more money than was necessary while worrying that it wouldn’t be enough. But he scanned the coins in his palm quickly and seemed satisfied, smiled briefly at me then patted Kitty on the head as he passed her. I waited for the rear lights of the car to disappear into the shallow summer night, and then I took the key from my handbag and led the way down the path to the front door. The girls were subdued now, staying behind my legs and peering past me into the dim slit of hallway once the door had squealed partially open, hinges protesting. I stepped inside and let them follow me in their own time.
The house smelled of disuse, damp and musty. I trod the passage down to the kitchen and turned on the light switch, wincing at the flicker and buzz as the bulb warmed up. Turning, I could barely see the girls or make out who was who. They’d come inside but were still a huddle of apprehension by the front door. Kitty called out to me but I didn’t answer her. You wanted this, I thought, opening cupboard doors and leaning close to the window to see through it to the garden beyond. Just the three of us. You wanted this.
But when she called again and Leila joined her, panic shrilling their tones – Mummy, where are you? ricocheting from the walls and hitting me in the chest like gunshot – I went rushing back to them and put an arm around each, steering them into a small room at the front of the house that would be our living room. ‘Just stay here and I’ll get our things. I won’t be long, darlings, then we can all go to bed and when we wake up tomorrow everything will be lovely.’
II
MAKING FRIENDS
My landlady’s son, Joshua, rolled the tyre across the garden to the crab apple tree and went back to his truck for rope. As I carried mugs of tea outside, I watched him thread his way delicately past the washing that flapped on the line; elbows pulled stiffly in, taking care not to touch anything with the muddy sleeves of his shirt while averting his eyes squeamishly from a chance sighting of knickers or vests. He’d turned up the morning after we got here and came back daily to patch up the cottage: fixing a drooping drainpipe or replacing the cracked glass on the back door. Shoring us up for winter, he said. I guessed his mother sent him to find out about us and report back, but I didn’t mind. It was good to have a stranger around, to be forced to focus on the bland, grounding rituals of social politeness. These last five days since we moved here had that same underwater quality to them that I’d felt when Elsa was a baby; my mind trapped beneath a layer of scar tissue. My core, my self, lost in Elsa’s maze.
Kitty leapt onto the prostrate tyre and jumped across its gutted middle, back and forth, calling for her sister. Leila twittered unintelligibly from somewhere inside and then popped into sight, wavering in distorted patches of dark and light, hair and skin, through the cobbled pane of the bathroom window. She wrestled with the catch, pushing against the swollen frame until the window flew open and tipped her forward so that she sprawled across the outer sill. She squawked as she reversed hurriedly back in with her bottom high in the air, wren-like. ‘How many times have I told you not to climb on the toilet seat and lean out of the window, Crow Face?’ I called up to her. ‘You’re going to fall right out one of these days and I won’t be here to catch you.’
She disappeared and then reappeared at the kitchen door, hurtling past me to join her sister. I sipped from my mug, watching them as they held hands and each arched away from the centre, leaning back and trusting on the other’s grip to stay upright. They spun round and round with a fluid and effortless grace, feet skipping faster and faster, so that it could almost have been they who were still and the tyre that was moving.
I passed Joshua his mug when he stood beside me trailing a thick length of rope from his fist. He nodded thanks but didn’t speak. ‘There are biscuits in the kitchen, I can bring you some?’ I offered, but he shook his head and mumbled something unintelligible, concentrating on his tea. He didn’t say much to me, he never wasted words, and I found that I liked that. Silent and awkward as a teenage boy, as Julian, he would occasionally be overcome with a sudden, sweet enthusiasm and rush through speech until his stammer tripped him up and tipped him back into a muzzled inarticulation. Yesterday he’d been so overwhelmed by the sight of leverets suckling from their velvety mother in the long grass of the field behind my cottage, he’d had to cover his mouth with a hand and just point. He looked nothing like Julian, or Peter for that matter – though I heard Peter’s soft stammer from his younger years if I closed my eyes – but my affection for Joshua was as instinctive and tender as if he were my estranged son returned to me.
He gulped the last of his tea and set the mug down on the ground. ‘Come on then, girls,’ he said, striding towards them, ‘let’s get this swing up.’
They leapt immediately to his side, clutching bits of his shirt and beaming up at him. ‘What are you doing after you leave here?’ Kitty asked. He told them he was going to go home and climb onto his mother’s roof to fix a few broken tiles. ‘Can we come with you to help?’ Leila asked. ‘Mummy, we can go, can’t we?’
I mouthed apologies at him and asked the girls to release him, give him a little space to work. ‘Joshua’s very busy,’ I said. ‘Now, do you want this swing or not?’
We all helped. The girls hung around Joshua’s heels and tried to pass him various tools he hadn’t asked for, and I held the tyre propped against my thigh while the rope was knotted securely around it. When it swung free from a low bough of the tree, he slipped a leg through it and squatted, feet raised comically off the ground, testing its strength. ‘Nice and safe,’ he reported to Leila. ‘Now you have a turn.’ He never stammered when he spoke directly to the girls, and unlike every other person we’d ever met he seemed more drawn to Leila than Kitty. It might have been the rawness of her looks, that strong-boned face and the beak nose jutting out from her magpie-nest of curls, that made her more interesting to him than Kitty with her pale and exquisite beauty. I’d seen his sketches of the creatures that lived in the hedgerows around here, had admired them and embarrassed him. There was something of that same earthiness about Leila. I could imagine her emerging from a sett at dusk, crouched among a blanket of ferns and idly scratching at her stomach as she gazed past our human landscape into worlds beyond our senses.
She clambered into Joshua’s arms and squealed as he lifted her and slotted her sturdy little body, feet first, through the tyre. Kitty braced her shoulder against the thick rubber and tried to push it, toes scrabbling into the ground for purchase. It began to sway with a heavy slowness, chasing her down and almost knocking her over. I forced a laugh at her screech of delighted fright, at the way Joshua snatched her up and pulled her to safety. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘it’ll take both of you. And you too?’ He addressed that last to me with a humorous cock of his eyebrow, cheeks reddening, as he posted Kitty through the tyre’s empty centre. I shook my head and backed away, smiling.
We stood side by side, Joshua and I, and watched as the girls worked together, foreheads kissing and legs surging, to manoeuvre the swing. They flew like swifts, hair streaming in the breeze they created, arrowing higher into the violet depths of the afternoon sky. They screamed at us to look at them, excited and happy. For a moment, a second, I borrowed a little of their joy and experienced the day through their eyes. For a second, the stiffened lacquer of shock and grief that coated me developed a crack that allowed fresh air to rush in.
Glancing sidelong at Joshua as he wiped his dirty hands on his trousers and grinned so that his face was all mouth, cheeks coloured with glee, I felt that umbilical tug again and pretended the man at my side was younger and all mine, bound to me by blood and inheritance. That he stood beside me, my son, because he wanted to. Because he’d chosen me.
SETTLING IN
There were only two days left of the summer holiday when I found the fox, and that melancholic summer’s-end feel was everywhere. The light now snapped rather than dripped out of the evening sky after dinner and the afternoon shadows lay dense and slant on the lawn. We were starting to get used to the new house after a full week there. We had stopped fumbling for a light switch that didn’t exist behind the kitchen door and now remembered to swerve left at the top of the stairs, not right, when dashing from bedroom to toilet in the middle of the night. I’d written lists for all the things we were going to need and a lot of things we might not, but better to be safe rather than sorry. I traipsed into the village most days to visit the school and look for work – I’d sold the widow’s gold jewellery before we left the other house; it had fetched enough money to pay the rent and keep us in food for a couple of months at least (the ring I hadn’t been able to part with and I wore it on my wedding finger) – while the girls tumbled down the stairs each morning to spend the day in the overgrown garden, nipping indoors for meals and then flinging themselves back outside to plague Joshua or burrow tunnels into the long grass and make a rickety, probably terribly dangerous, den from old tables they’d found in the lean-to.
They had decorated every room in the house with drawings of two manically grinning children, one golden-haired, one dark, each tugging on the hand of a larger, huge-eyed and mouthless figure that I had to assume – the brown crayon scrawl above the empty face and the blue jumper below it – was me. I was confronted with variations on the image wherever I looked, later incarnations replacing the early ones (different background scenery or clothes, sunshine and then cloud) but all of them identical in their depiction of that tethered, silenced central figure. I asked Kitty about it, tapping an accusing fingernail against ovals of white where a mouth should be, leading her from paper sheet to sheet. Her shrug was confused. ‘But she does have a mouth, Mummy,’ she told me, tracing an invisible grin delicately. ‘It’s right there, see. Don’t worry, you’re just as happy as we are.’
I missed the comfort of the sodium lamplight that used to burn orange patterns through the nets at my window and scatter across my bedroom carpet at night. The darkness here was complete, and alive in a way I’d never experienced before. As soon as dusk swept down the lane to our cottage it brought with it an army of creatures that growled, screamed, muttered and yelped. They showed themselves only in glimpses when I stood at the window: a striped face peering from the bushes at the end of the garden or a frisk of tail slinking through the broken slats of the fence. When Kitty begged for her and Leila to be allowed to sleep in the garden under a blanket strung between two chairs, my mind didn’t immediately lurch towards mad killers but a sneak of rabid weasels with a taste for girl flesh.
I knew it was silly to be scared, these were just animals going about their ancient and private business with no regard for me, but the proximity to this wild world, one I’d only ever seen on nature programmes, stabbed panic through my evenings and woke me before dawn, wrestling the bed sheets as if they had claws. Wrestling them as I’d wrestled Elsa when I couldn’t soothe her from her nightmares, when I’d had to cover her body with mine to keep her flailing limbs from harming either of us. Now, I’d push the sheets away and lie in the very middle of the mattress, groping right and left for the child that was no longer sharing my bed. For the child that I sometimes wondered if I’d simply made up. Wincing as the light from the rising sun began to probe its way through the curtains and another day waited, I’d whisper her name – Elsa, Elsa, Elsa – and hold my breath for a response that never came.
We had no near neighbours but there was a row of squat stone houses about half a mile away, scratched into the steep valley and strung in a low line between us and the village. From a distance they looked like pebbles stacked into neat piles by a child at play, with tiny fragments of a broken glass or vase pressed into the sides to serve as windows. I walked past them every day, exchanged nods and the odd murmured word with women hanging washing in the garden, aware of the eyes on me like nails drawn down my spine. Nobody I’d met had yet removed the pegs from their tight lips and asked where my husband was or where I was from, but I imagined they had plenty to say once they’d closed their front doors.
The fox had been yelping for an hour when I finally found the courage to go out into the garden. If it had been quieter in its distress, or the night cooler, I’d have put off investigating the noise until the morning, but all the windows at the back of the house were open wide onto the humid air and I knew I’d never be able to sleep. The late evening was thickening into night around me and the cheap torch in my sweating fist sent shadows swerving and stuttering around my feet. I flinched and jerked my way to the end of the garden, feeling the safe bright glow of the house retreating behind me like a drop in temperature. The darkness solidified until I could almost be sealed inside a bubble of pure black – leagues below the sea or in deepest outer space. Entirely alone but for the wild creature panting and whimpering somewhere beyond my sight.
The faint torchlight snagged an auburn streak of snout and I stumbled to a halt, waist-deep in grass, beside the girls’ den. I tried to calm my breathing, digging below the panic to find some brave, logical sliver inside me that would enable me to approach the animal. Shuffling a foot closer, I held the torch at arm’s length and gave it a sharp tap to jolt more light from it. Colours flared in the leaping beam as the fox darted forward and fell back, teeth bared in a yellow snarl. Its eyes were a beautiful pumpkin orange, wide and fixed above that snapping mouthful of tarnished gold fillings. I screamed and dropped the torch, flung myself away and crashed onto my knees, blind among the tall grass, convinced the animal would go for my throat. I flailed with one hand for the torch and thrust the other into my trouser pocket, dragging out the hammer I’d grabbed from the kitchen drawer on my way out of the door. Its heavy wooden handle and cold metal head were a comfort against my skin. I thought I was probably scared enough now to be able to use it.
I knelt, staring down at the illuminated circle of torchlight between my thighs, hammer raised, and waited for the fox to burst through the grass and attack. I could sense it, crouched just past my reach, as tense and trembling as I was. I could smell its sweet musk scent, pungent enough to coat my tastebuds with saliva but not exactly unpleasant. When it shifted and yelped, I swiped the hammer down through the air with a yell, plunging the tool into the earth and then tugging it free to repeat the action.
We were both poised for a while, maybe for hours, waiting for any movement from the other. My legs spasmed with fatigue and my arm ached from holding the hammer cupped in my palm and raised above my head, ready to strike. A car drove along the lane, sweeping light briskly over the garden so that I was lit up for a grimacing second and then abandoned to darkness once more. Night-time sounds began their steady creep around me, rising and falling in a chorus: chirrups and groans, rustling and chittering in the grass just behind where I squatted. I turned my head to look but saw nothing.
