Chapter Three
THREE
A week later the hosepipe ban comes into force and the verges and lawns yellow and turn brown while flowers desiccate and shrivel into husks. There is no breeze and the air is dense as velvet. I lie on my stomach in the garden, dozing slightly in the shade, a can of lemonade open at my side. Heavy lidded eyes watching a wasp crawl into the hole at the top of the can, too lazy to lift my hand to swat it away, too hot to do anything except lie and stare with my mouth hanging agape.
I hear the phone ringing from inside the house. I look down the lawn to the open doorway into the kitchen. The phone rings and rings. Can’t be bothered, I think. Go away, whoever you are.
Finally it stops. I can hear the wasp buzzing inside the can, an angry metallic sound. I wonder what it would be like to be imprisoned in that sweet smelling dark, a pinhole of light overhead, the sides slippery and sticky with sugar. There are worse ways to go.
When the phone starts ringing again, I sigh loudly, hoisting myself up onto my hands and knees and staggering to my feet. Sweat trickles down the backs of my legs and between my breasts, skin glistening. I’m meant to be going to meet the caterers later this afternoon to discuss food for the wedding, vol-au-vents and king prawns on chips of ice, tiny slivers of fruitcake. I’m not looking forward to it. My appetite has shrunk to nothing in this weather. Oscar and I are having a winter wedding, like I’d always wanted. Holly and ivy and mistletoe, the bright red of poinsettias. The day will be crisp and bright with frost and I will wear white and my father will walk me down the aisle of the old church with the tilted gravestones out the front.
Inside, the house is cool, a few flies lazily drawing zeroes in the air of the kitchen. I bat at them ineffectually as I pass but I’m hot and slow and they instantly regroup. The phone is still ringing by the time I get into the hallway. Up until last year, we still had a rotary dial phone but I insisted we replace it much to Oscar’s irritation. He likes “old things” as he constantly reminds me. If it were left to him, we’d still have the old black-and-white television set with the rabbit ear antenna.
“Hullo?”
“Mina? Is that you, light of all lights?”
I can’t place his voice, not at first. Then he laughs gently and I remember the tall, snaggletoothed man who had stood quietly in the kitchen of the church hall with a crumpled piece of paper in his hand.
“Sam?”
“Listen, I don’t have long—I’m in a phone box and my money’s going to run out any second.”
“How did you get this number?”
“I begged Horace for it. It cost me a large donation to Hope and Hands and almost all of my dignity. Are you free? Can you meet me this afternoon, about two?”
I hesitate. My eye falls on the calendar tacked to the wall beside the phone. I can see today’s date clearly. Tuesday, June 27. Written in the little box alongside it are the words: Wedding Menu—Caterers 3pm—bring notebook!
“What’s all this about, Sam?”
I can hear the smile in his voice as he replies, “Ghosts, Mina. I think I have one for you.”
Oscar comes through the door that evening, calling my name as he always does—first high, then low. Mi -na. I greet him in the hallway, lifting my damp hands to take the bouquet of flowers he is holding out to me. Pink roses and baby’s breath.
“These for me?”
“Make sure you add sugar to the water, they’ll keep brighter for longer.”
“They’re so beautiful, Oscar. Thank you.”
He snakes an arm around my shoulders and skims a kiss on my temple. Heat radiates from him, making his skin clammy, hair sticking to the nape of his neck. He heads into the kitchen and washes his hands at the sink, scooping a palmful of water over his face. I watch him carefully. Anxiety knots behind my ribs. He glances at the plate of vol-au-vents sitting on the counter.
“Those from the caterers?”
“That’s right.”
“They good?”
“You tell me.”
I watch as he lifts one from the plate and folds it into his open mouth. I hope he won’t be able to detect the heat still clinging to it, hope he won’t notice the oven door is still warm to the touch. Because if he does, then I’ll have to tell him why I missed the catering appointment that afternoon and instead I had to pick up two boxes of frozen vol-au-vents from the supermarket on my way home. I folded the empty boxes into the bin at the far end of our road, a good distance from the house. Sometimes the deceit is so weightless, you barely think of it.
“Nice.” He’s nodding. “I like this one, what is it?”
“Uh, prawn I think?”
“So will we use them? Did the meeting go okay?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s so much to plan! I wish you’d come with me to these things.”
I keep my voice light, even managing to smile a little as I move to the sink, peeling the paper wrapping from the flowers. Oscar slides his hands around my waist so I can lean back into him. It’s a wonder he doesn’t notice how fast my heart is beating.
“I trust you to get it right,” he says kindly. “And you know my mother is just desperate to get involved. Why don’t you take her along next time?”
I clench my jaw. Oscar’s mother is polished and cold and sometimes I see her looking at me askance, the tips of her mouth pointed upward in a taut little smile. When we announced our engagement, she hugged me so tightly that she dug her curved nails into my shoulder blades. “Wouldn’t life be dull if we all married our equal,” she said, and it had got under my skin somehow, the heat of it.
I turn in Oscar’s arms to face him.
“I’ve been offered some work.”
This is how I’ve chosen to phrase it. An investment. An opportunity. These are the expressions Oscar will recognize.
“Doing what?”
“Research.”
I’m speaking with a confidence I don’t feel, can’t quite meet his eye. Oscar’s voice is steady.
“For whom?”
“A newspaper.”
“I see.” He walks over to the counter and starts looking through the pile of mail. In among it is a circular from the government listing precautions to take in the heat wave. The words Keep Safe, Keep Cool have been written at the top beside a cartoon of a thirsty-looking cat. Oscar frowns at it.
“They think it’s going to hit thirty-seven degrees tomorrow. I heard it on the radio.” He turns the leaflet toward me.
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s going to be like seventy-eight all over again. You remember that?”
I did. It had been the summer of skimming stones across the river with my best friend Sharon and rubbing our legs with sunflower oil because we thought it would help us tan quicker. Dad had told us we smelled like a chip shop, which had made us laugh. The sun had been a furnace that whole long summer, the lawn in the garden a strip of yellow, scorched earth.
“It won’t be that bad,” I reply, filling a vase at the sink, and putting the flowers in, stem by stem. “That was a drought. A proper one.”
“Which newspaper?”
I frown at the sudden swerve in conversation. Sometimes I think he does it on purpose.
“It’s, uh, The Western Herald. ”
“Hardly a newspaper but go on, tell me what the job is.”
“You ever heard of a place called Banathel, Mina?” Sam asked me that afternoon when I’d met him in the café on the harborside. The River Fal moved slowly past, the water brackish, brown, and muddy. I’d told myself I wasn’t staying long, ordered a tap water with plenty of ice. Sam put aside his empty plate smeared with ketchup and stirred a sugar into his tea.
“Nope.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised. It’s a tiny village down near Penzance, which barely warrants a mention on the map. Population just over a thousand—on the High Street you’ll find a post office, a few shops, and a pub. That’s it. Its only real appeal is the medieval chapel there and access to a stone circle further up the valley. The tourists pass the turning to Banathel on their way to Marazion and Praa Sands for their cream teas and don’t pay it any mind.”
“I thought you wanted to talk about ghosts.”
“The paper had a call last week from a man called Paul Webber. He’s worried about his teenage daughter, Alice. More than that. He’s frightened. You see, just after Christmas, Alice Webber started to get sick. She complained of pains in her sides like needles being pressed there. When they lifted her shirt, there was a pinprick rash and blood welling up as if the skin had been broken. A few days later she started vomiting. By this point Alice was too weak to get out of bed so her mother put a bowl beside it. When she came to empty it, she found watery bile and clots of black hair, like you’d pull out of a plughole. Another time Alice coughed up a handful of sewing pins bent into strange shapes. She developed a fever which made her start seeing things. She got delusional.”
“In what way?”
“Alice told her parents that a witch was spying on her through the chimney breast. She said the witch had a black tongue and her face was ‘all on upside down.’ Alice shares a room with her younger sister, Tamsin. Their beds are either side of an old fireplace and Lisa—that’s their mother—started finding dead wasps in the grate and on Alice’s pillow. They think there must have been some sort of colony in the chimney because Alice said at night she heard buzzing and tapping loud enough to keep her awake. After this had gone on for a month, Lisa took Alice to the doctor who declared her perfectly fit and well. Physically, at least. He said the buzzing and clicking she was hearing was likely tinnitus. Harmless but incurable. Nothing we can do, so sorry. Soon, the noises changed. Alice began hearing grunts and squeals which were almost piglike.”
I didn’t notice the way the time was slipping away from me, the hands of the clock inching toward three. I leaned forward, face flushed with expectation.
“Well? What was wrong with her?”
He puffed out his cheeks, laughing. I recognized it as an expression of bafflement, not good humor.
“No one knows. Alice was sent for more tests, this time at the hospital in Truro. They couldn’t find any issues except that she was underweight and borderline anemic. She was prescribed sleeping pills and this appeared to help for a while.”
“These tests you’re talking about are all physical. Did she speak to any psychiatrists or neurologists?”
“They’re on a waiting list, apparently. There’s been talk of a brain scan but again, there’s a wait.”
“Maybe they’re hoping your intervention will move them along quicker.”
“Well, they’ll be disappointed if that’s the case. I was hoping, however, to be able to offer them access to a child psychologist—albeit a newly qualified one.”
He looked at me meaningfully, not quite smiling.
“Me?”
“Why not? Alice needs the help and you need the experience. It’s win-win as far as I can tell. Besides, who better to understand an adolescent brain than the woman who wrote a paper on it?”
I stared at him, open-mouthed. I’d come here expecting ghost stories, not this. Excitement ran through me like an eddy in water but I kept my voice steady, remained calm.
“Keep going.”
He shrugged again.
“The fever and the vomiting went, after a fashion. But the clicking and buzzing and grunting—the animalistic sounds—they only got worse. Alice said she was most aware of it at night when the house was quiet. That’s when the noises became something else.”
He looked at me levelly with his pale brown eyes.
“A voice.”
I turn the vase in my hands so the late-afternoon sunlight slides over the surface like liquid. Oscar is standing with his head tilted, waiting for me to speak. “Tell me what the job is.”
“I met a journalist who’s working on a story for The Herald. They need a child psychologist.”
“So why have they asked you?”
A sting, but I hold his gaze. Oscar gives me a weak smile.
“You know what I mean. You’ve only just graduated. So go on, what kind of investigation is it?”
“It’s working with a family, three young childre—”
“Bloody hell, Mina, what kind of investigation?”
“A haunting.”
He snorts, shaking his head.
“There we are. There’s the crux of it. No wonder you look embarrassed. How much are they paying you?”
Tap, tap. His fingernails on the kitchen counter. Impatient. I feel a flush of irritation.
“It’s not about the money.”
He barks a single, disbelieving laugh.
“They’re not paying you?”
“That isn’t what I said!”
“You don’t need to. I can see very clearly what’s happened here. You’ve been finagled. Someone has found a way to use your expertise for free by spinning you some yarn about a haunted house, haven’t they? ‘Research,’ indeed. Goodness me.”
He shakes his head, still laughing. My voice is strangled sounding. It’s hard to swallow my frustration.
“You spend your life doing research, Oscar. I thought you’d understand how important it is.”
“You know I had this conversation yesterday with Lucy. The work we’re doing shapes the whole universe, Mina. Known and unknown. It’s pivotal. Some would call it life changing.”
“Would Lucy?”
I’m waspish, can’t help myself. He sighs, as if he is suddenly weary.
“Would Lucy what?”
“Would she call it ‘life changing’?”
I’m talking through gritted teeth, feeling conflicted and sad and angry all at once. Then, I see it. The flicker of a smile on his face. This isn’t the first time he’s mentioned Lucy, the dark-haired undergrad who joined his laboratory in March. I’ve met her just once, at some austere party she threw last month. I’d worn a short dress and heels, my hair swept to one side. I copied the style from a magazine, which had called it “glamorous.” I blotted myself with Opium perfume and wore the gold and pearl earrings my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday. Oscar was nervous, pacing. Drinking a gin with ice, checking his watch. “Finally!” he said, when I walked in. When we arrived at Lucy’s flat, it became clear the party was a gathering of other scientists, mostly older men in collarless shirts and tan slacks parlaying the same basic story about research funding back and forth to one another while everyone sipped warm wine. Someone asked me what time I was due on the set of Dynasty and Oscar laughed. Other than myself, he and Lucy were the two youngest people there by far. I got too drunk and had to leave early in a taxi, home by ten, feeling the redness creep up my neck, head spinning as I climbed into bed alone. Oscar came home in the early hours, creeping into the bedroom on socked feet. I pretended to be asleep. I am still pretending.
“Put these in the bin, would you?” Oscar is handing me the leaflets that came through the letter box with the post. “I’m sick of this junk mail. We should get a sign up. That’s what they’ve got next door, have you seen? ‘No cold callers, no circulars, et cetera.’ That’s what we need. Make a note to ask them where they got it.”
A beat. The air is very hot and very still.
“Mina?”
“I’m going to do it, Oscar.”
He leans in the doorway with his arms folded, a look of puzzled amusement on his face. Humoring me.
“You’re not serious?”
“Yes, I am. I bloody am. I leave tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mina. Okay. Let’s just— Gosh, let’s just have a drink, all right? Something nice and cold. It’s this air, it’s too humid. Did you know heat waves are linked to a rise in violent crime? You’d wonder who had the energy for it.”
“Oscar, please. I want to talk about this. The train leaves at nine-thirty tomorrow morning and I intend to be on it.”
“You won’t find Eddie this way, Mina.” His voice is so quiet and flat I almost mistake it for the hum of the fridge. “All this expectation. It will crush you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know bloody well what I mean.” He sighs. “Look, I get it, Mina. I do. I know how much you miss your brother. I know how much you want to see him again, how tightly you hold on to the idea that he can somehow navigate back to you.”
Tears spring into my eyes. The room blurs and then prisms into sharp little points of light. I turn and brush them away. Oscar is still talking.
“But this? You’re looking for something that isn’t there. You’re just prolonging pain.”
It hurts, and he can see it, and I know he’s trying to be kind but oh, it hurts. I jump as his hand takes mine tenderly, standing so close I can smell the soap on his skin.
“You’re in purgatory, Mina. Death by a thousand cuts.”
Sam had asked my opinion. As a psychologist, he’d said. As a professional. I admit to having felt a small swell of pride, bright as a red balloon. I straightened up in that hard little chair. It felt good to be necessary.
“Well, it could be that Alice is suffering from some form of temporal lobe epilepsy. That would go some way to explaining some of the states you described—hearing voices, visual disturbances. Or there could be more to it—a tumor maybe? I read once about a man who suddenly woke up only able to speak German. It turned out he had a pea-sized tumor pressing against his pituitary gland. Then you’ve got any number of psychotic disorders that can cause these symptoms, she’d need to be assessed properly for those. As for the vomiting, you know what pica is?”
Sam shook his head. I took a quick glance at my watch. It was almost quarter to three. I could still make it to the caterers if I left soon.
“Pica is a compulsive eating disorder in which people eat nonfood items—clay, dirt, even soap. It’s very common for people with anemia to do this—it’s the body’s response to a nutritional deficiency. It might explain the hair and the pins, though again, this is just my opinion, and I’m not a doctor. This vomiting, did anyone actually see her do it?”
“No. Her mother just collected the bowl.”
“So Alice could have put the pins and hair into it herself, right?”
Sam frowned.
“I guess.”
“You’re taking a lot of this at face value,” I told him, stirring the ice in my glass with a straw. “Aren’t reporters supposed to be cynical?”
“There’s a story here, Mina, I’m just not sure what type it is yet. It’s my job to find out.”
I nodded. Sam’s voice was strained and it looked as though he hadn’t been sleeping, eyes ringed with dark shadows. Besides, I thought, was what he was telling me any crazier than seeing a ghost in a photograph?
“So you think she’s faking?” Sam asked. He tapped his cigarette into the ashtray.
“I didn’t say that, but yes, that’s the assumption I’d start from.”
“But it’s not normal teenage behavior?”
“There’s no such thing as normal teenage behavior.”
“You’d need to see her to be sure, wouldn’t you? Face-to-face?”
I nodded.
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“What about the hallucinations? Could they be linked to this—uh, anemia?”
“Unlikely. But it’s been so hot lately—could be dehydration, heatstroke? Even something like carbon monoxide poisoning would cause some of the behavior you’re describing, although the whole family would be affected if that was the case. How is she in school?”
“She’s been taken out of school. In September she’s due to study hairdressing at the local college.”
“Ah, okay. What’s her homelife like?”
“I mean, I can only go on first impressions but there are five of them living there. Dad works in a factory, Mum’s a housewife. There are two young children under ten and a teenage girl. It’s hectic. They live in a small, terraced house, council owned, like the others around it. It’s a close-knit community, but there’s poverty and an air of dissatisfaction with the government and life in general. Unemployment in the whole county is high.”
We both fell silent. My glass was empty, the ice melting into miniature floes. Outside, a man was shouting in a hoarse, cracked voice, “She said she could swim! I threw her in !” over and over. The heat was sending us all mad, I thought. I checked my watch again. I had to go.
“I hope that’s helped you, Sam. For what it’s worth, you asked for my opinion so I’m going to give it to you. I think whatever is happening to Alice Webber doesn’t have roots in the supernatural. I think it’s environmental, almost certainly physical. Something as mundane as hormones, even. If you’re considering turning this into a story, I would ask that you go easy on her, huh? I remember how it is to be a teenage girl—I was one myself not long ago—and it’s tough. Okay?”
“Sure. Okay.”
I stood up, but I didn’t leave right away. I studied Sam carefully. There was a blot of color high in each of his cheeks and, when he shook my hand, he didn’t quite meet my eye. I wondered why I was not moving out the door and into that bright sunshine, why I was not already calling a cab to an important appointment that I was dangerously close to missing.
“There’s more, isn’t there? Sam?”
“You’ll miss your appointment.”
It felt as though someone was squeezing my ribs, making it difficult to draw a breath.
“Sam?”
He sighed, pushing his hair away from his face.
“I was intrigued by this story when Paul told it to me. Last week I went down to Banathel and met Alice Webber and her family. I had low expectations and to be honest, Mina, I wasn’t disappointed. Alice is a normal teenage girl, quiet and a bit sulky. Shy. Unremarkable, really. She didn’t say much—her father did most of the talking. In the time I was present, I saw no evidence of a haunting or anything untoward. I taped some interviews with members of the family and then I drove home feeling disappointed. I almost didn’t bother listening to the tape—it’s about forty-five minutes from beginning to end, but I did. I did. And right at the end as I’m packing away there’s a voice.”
“Whose voice?”
“I don’t know. We’d been using the girls’ bedroom for interviews, as that’s where most of the ‘activity’ was concentrated, according to Alice. When we were done, I started packing my things away, not thinking about much except how hot it was and the long drive home. By this point I was alone in the bedroom. The recorder picks up a lot of sounds, you can hear me breathing and moving around, zipping up my bag. It’s just me in there, Mina. I’d swear it on my life. But when I played it back it’s as if something came right up to it and whispered into the microphone.”
A chill slipped down my back, breaking me out in gooseflesh. I leaned forward hungrily, caterers forgotten.
“What did it say?”
“You tell me.”
He reached into his bag and pulled out a slim black box, plastic and chrome. At first I thought it was a camera but I realized as he passed it to me that I was mistaken. It was a Dictaphone. Sam also passed me a pair of headphones, his face set.
“Play it, Mina.”
At first there was nothing but the sound of the mechanism whirring, a hiss of static from the small speaker. I turned the Dictaphone over and found the volume dial, turning it with the pad of my thumb until the hiss became a roar. I pressed the headphones close to my ears, heart quickening, tongue dry and heavy as sand. There was a rustling, voices growing distant as if in another part of the house, walking away. Silence. The hiss and click of the tape. Then, something bled through, distorted. Something with a throatful of splinters.
“Good riddance!”
I dashed the Dictaphone away from me in one deft swipe, whole body stiff with alarm. It hit the ground with a crunch as the plastic casing split. The waitress turned toward the sound, eyes wide. My mouth was working over and over but no words were coming out, and Sam was reaching for me and saying what is it, Mina, what’s wrong and all I could think was tell me about the ice, tell me about the ice.