Chapter Five
FIVE
Outside 13 Beacon Terrace a knot of people are standing, sweltering in the heat. Their shadows spill over the pavement and pool in the road like melted tar. Sam pulls my suitcase from the car, faking his shoulder giving way with the weight of it. We both laugh politely.
“Who are they?” I ask, nodding toward the group ahead.
“Huh. Don’t know. They weren’t there last week.”
I notice he has unbuttoned his shirt a little and catch a glimpse of damp skin and wiry coils of chest hair. He removes his sunglasses and fixes me with a stare.
“Last chance,” he says.
“For what?”
“To back out. There’s a train heading back to Plymouth in an hour. I’ll make your excuses—I can tell them you got sick.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re having second thoughts. Maybe you’re scared but you’re too proud to tell me.”
“Oscar always says it’s not the dead we ought to be afraid of, it’s the living.”
He smiles thoughtfully, extending a hand for me to walk ahead of him.
“Okay, Mina. Okay.”
I’m wary of the crowd—there is a strange, glimmering energy coming off them—not excitement exactly, but close to it, just beneath the surface. Feverish, maybe. A few heads turn as we approach and a voice floats out of the small mass, “It’s the reporter again, look.” Questions bubble, their voices low and suspicious. They part, but only a little, so we’re forced to squeeze through. An elderly woman in a sun hat and hard white shoes steps forward, one heavily knuckled finger floating up toward me and stabbing me in the chest hard enough to make me stumble backward.
“I see fires on the horizon,” she says, mouth twisting with the words. “They’re burning red!”
A tall man squeezes close to me, his bony hip pressing into my waist.
“Can she find Donald? Ask her to look for him. Please! Ask her.”
“Sam?” I say weakly, as the crowd tightens about me. The tall man presses something into my hand. “Please,” he persists. A boy on a BMX is performing bunny hops down the road, his mouth sliced into a grin. He calls something out, I don’t quite hear it but heads turn toward him and he laughs nastily. The weight of bodies against me is suffocating.
“Sam!” I say again more sharply, feeling a wave of dizziness lift from the base of my skull. I think I can hear Sam’s voice saying “Hey, cut it out,” but it’s overlapped by the press of a body in front of me, musty breath in my face.
“You need to salt the ground,” the man says, towering over me. He must be at least six foot seven, long limbs, stubbled jaw. His eyes protrude from their sockets in a way that show the whites all around. “You need to protect yourselves. Rosemary and hemlock!”
He has a handful of something that he scatters in front of me. I don’t look down, I don’t stop. I push past him and fumble the latch of the little wooden gate. The sun beats down on the tops of our heads like a fiery halo. I can feel my scalp contract with the heat of it. The gate opens and I stumble through it into a yard of scrubby concrete. A potted plant outside the front door is brown and wizened and long dead. Beside it, molten stumps of candles have been left next to a small wreath of bay leaves. There is a teddy bear slumped between them. It reminds me of accident sites, the tributes that appear there. I hear Sam behind me, voice raised as he follows me through the gate and latches it against the press of bodies.
“Behave yourselves! Jesus!”
“You didn’t warn me about this,” I snap, turning away from the rash of faces hovering, open-mouthed and bulbous eyed like a shoal of hungry fish. “Who are these people?”
“I don’t know, Mina. Honestly. They weren’t here last week.”
I look down at what has been placed in my hand. A dog collar of faded green leather. The little brass disc on it reads Donald. Sam is knocking on the front door, flushed with urgency. I risk another glance behind at the people milling by the gate, their glassy eyes fixed at the house. It’s only a small group—a dozen maybe, it barely constitutes a crowd—but that strange aura ra diating from them is a voltage slowly increasing. The weight of their expectation makes my skin itch.
The door is opened by a young boy—Billy, it has to be—wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms. No top. His skinny ribs press against pale skin. There is a graze on one of his elbows, another on his chin. He looks from me to Sam and his expression of irritation and annoyance dissolves. He grins, rubbing a hand over his shorn head.
“Sam! My man!”
“That’s right, Billy-boy. Are your parents home?”
“Mum is. Dad’s at work.”
He looks up at me, face twisted in thought.
“This her?”
“This is her, Billy. Can we come in? You’ve got a mob out here.”
Billy runs off yelling and Sam steps aside so I can enter the house first. Indoors it’s gloomy, all the curtains drawn against the prying eyes outside. The hallway smells like the ghosts of cooking; of boiling and roasting and frying, spitting oil, burned fat. Charred skin. Underfoot, the carpet is a sickly yellow color, thin and scuffed.
“Hi. It’s Mina, isn’t it?”
A woman appears in the doorway to my right. She is lean and pale looking, her voice hoarse.
“That’s right. You must be Mrs. Webber.”
“Lisa, please. Mrs. Webber makes me feel so old. ”
I take her in: a stony face that could seem cruel in the wrong light, shoulder-length hair, a tight smile that doesn’t quite touch her eyes. Her gaze darts over me.
“They still out front? We thought the heat would drive them away.”
“What’s going on?” Sam asks, placing my bag at the bottom of the stairs. “Who are these people?”
“Did you ever tell me where you were from, Sam?”
He hesitates as if anticipating a trap. Then, “Bristol.”
“Ah. Well, then. Banathel is a very small town you see, and in small towns people talk. After your visit down here last week, word got round that Alice was going to be in the paper ’cos she could speak with dead folk. We had a lad knock to see if she could ask the ghosts where his bike was. Said it got nicked last week and his mum was going mad. Paul sent him off with a flea in his ear but by midday half the county were on about it. Next morning a few people pitched up outside. Then a few more the day after that and the next day even more.”
“Herd mentality,” I say. Lisa frowns.
“Some of them drive over every day from Bodmin in a minivan. Some church or other, I don’t know. They don’t want to talk to me. Just her. Yesterday they started leaving stuff out there. I clear it away but they put it back. They light candles but they’re just melting in the sun. And they keep putting things through the bloody letter box. We’ve had to tape it up!”
“What kind of things?”
“Little notes, photographs. They’re all wanting something. They seem to think Alice can perform miracles.”
I look down at the dog collar the tall man had passed me. “Can she find Donald?” he asked.
“Come through,” Lisa is saying. “I’m afraid we’ve only got juice or milk but I can put the kettle on?”
“Tea’s fine.”
I follow Lisa down the hallway and into the cramped kitchen. There is a pile of washing in a plastic basket, a puddle of brown water beneath the sink. Lisa disappears into the pantry and reappears with a biscuit tin. She levers it open and holds it out to me.
“Go on,” she urges, almost whispering. “That lad of mine will have heard that lid come off from a mile away. They’ll be nothing left soon.”
“They eating you out of house and home, Lisa?” Sam asks, pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. Lisa smiles tightly.
“It’s the summer holidays. I don’t know how we’ll get through it. They’re a plague of locusts, my kids. Roll on September. They’ll be the school’s problem, then. Oh, here he is. Couldn’t hear me calling him through for a bath last night but no problem hearing the lid come off the biscuit tin, ay?”
She scruffs Billy’s neck affectionately as he runs into the room, diving his hand into the tin and pulling out a handful of custard creams, laughing and ducking and running away. Sam watches him, then turns back to Lisa who puts the tin on the middle of the table and fills the kettle. The pipes rattle noisily.
“Are the girls here, Lisa?”
She nods, wiping her hands on her apron. Lisa Webber is only nine years my senior but she moves slowly and her face is netted with lines. She’s tired, I remind myself. She has three kids. You’d be tired, too. But it isn’t just that. It’s a weight, a gravity. Like something is dragging her down. I hear her spine creak as she reaches for the tea caddy, the sigh as she bends to the fridge. I wonder if she is ill. Arthritis maybe.
“Tamsin’s upstairs doodling. Alice, she’s outside sunbathing. She’ll look like a leather handbag in ten years if she keeps it up but there’s no telling her. I suppose I ought to be grateful she’s leaving the house at all after— well, after the last few weeks.”
She takes the cigarette Sam offers and sits opposite me at the dining table. It is Formica, like the one my parents have. I dig my finger into the blackened crater of a burn mark in the plastic, feeling awkward and out of sorts. Lisa blows a plume of smoke toward the putty-colored ceiling and looks askance at me.
“He’s told you, has he? What’s going on.”
I nod. She smiles.
“I know it must seem mad. Paul said—that’s my husband—Paul said maybe the heat is melting all our brains.”
I’m suddenly reminded of the man outside the cafe shouting “She said she could swim! I threw her in !” in his hoarse voice. Maybe Paul’s got that right, I think. Lisa leans back on her chair and opens a drawer in the dresser, rummaging through it, her cigarette clasped between her fingers. Smoke uncoils toward the water-stained ceiling.
“Here you are.” She pulls out a small wad of papers and places them in front of me. They are bound together with an elastic band. “That’s what we’ve had to put up with. We didn’t ask for none of this, you know. We just wanted someone to listen to us about our little girl.”
I slide the elastic off and sift through the pile. There are old photographs, some in grainy black and white; wedding pictures, children, dogs. A folded newspaper clipping shows a young man astride a motorbike, helmet in hand, grinning. The headline reads DEATH-TRAP CORNER CLAIMS ANOTHER LIFE .
“That’s Patrick Trevail. He died last summer. Him and his bike went right under a lorry. His poor mother. I’ve heard she collapsed at the funeral. He was her only child.”
“It’s heartbreaking,” I say, opening up a folded scrap of paper. It has a series of letters and numbers and below it one word printed in ink. Kittiwake.
“Far as we can tell it’s a boat,” Lisa says. “Those numbers along the top are nautical coordinates. Paul said there was a Kittiwake lost in the fog down by Mousehole but that was over a hundred years ago.”
“All these people,” I say, more to myself than anything. Babies in christening gowns, a man in a hospital bed with his head bandaged, a woman lying on a beach and laughing, her face tilted toward the sky. Linda, Algarve, ’78 is written on the back in a sweeping hand. Among it all is a star-shaped medal on a striped and faded ribbon.
“That’s a Burma Star from the Second World War.” Sam sifts through the pile, picking it up and holding it to the light. “What you’ve got here Lisa are psychometry tokens.”
“They’re what?” Lisa snorts, but I think I might already know. I remember when Sam told me about his visit to the psychic; she had asked for something of Maggie’s in order to make contact.
“It’s an object belonging to or representing someone who has passed on,” I offer, and Sam nods. “Apparently it can help to make contact with them.”
“Well, someone needs to tell them it isn’t going to work,” Lisa says crossly, crushing her cigarette out in the ashtray. “It’s just taking up space in my bloody drawer.”
“Why do they think she can speak to the dead, Lisa?”
Lisa frowns, thinking. Two bright spots of color burn high in her cheeks.
“She was saying such odd things. At school, then here at home. Sometimes it was like she was listening to music you couldn’t hear, you know? I’d catch her just staring at the fireplace and her lips were moving but no sound was coming out. When I asked her what she was doing, she said”—here Lisa sighs, fretful and ill at ease. It’s clear she isn’t comfortable talking about this—“she said that the dead wanted her to open her throat.”
Sam casts me a brief, concerned look. Lisa waves smoke away from her face and gives a tired, dry laugh.
“One of the specialists at the hospital mentioned schizophrenia. All this hearing voices and that. It’s frightened me to death. Then there’s all the other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
At that moment the back door opens and a tall girl with wavy hair the same muddy blond as her mother walks in.
“Alice.” Lisa gestures toward her. “Come and meet our guests.”
I’m not sure what I’d been expecting but the Alice I’d pictured in my head had been willowy and slender and goth-looking, face a pale slice between two long veils of black hair. I’m almost embarrassed at how far off the mark I am. Alice is blond and tanned, wearing shorts and a T-shirt printed with the words POBODY’S NERFECT! tied at her midriff. Her small, rounded belly is just visible over the waistband of her cutoffs, legs long and coltish. She’s the girl you see giggling with her friends at the back of the bus or fooling around in the arcades. Normal. Unexceptional. I’m almost disappointed. How can this be the haunted young girl Sam and Lisa have been describing?
Alice walks barefoot to the fridge and opens the door, crouching down to peer inside. I can hear the tinny sound of music through her headphones.
“Hi, Alice,” I say. “My name is Mina Ellis. I’m hoping we’ll have the chance to get to know one another while I’m here.”
Nothing. She pulls out a carton of orange juice.
“Alice!” Lisa snaps.
Alice looks over at us dumbly. She slowly removes the headphones. I notice she has a wad of chewing gum stuck to one finger, which she eases back into her mouth.
“What?”
“This is Mina. She wants to talk to you.”
Alice takes three quick gulps from the carton. She looks at me with a slow, sly smile and just for a moment I wonder if maybe there is something about her after all, some strangeness baked into her like clay. It’s in the curve of her smile, that quick flash of teeth. Like something is hiding there under the surface. I tell myself to get a grip. It’s the heat. All those stories Sam told me, they’re getting to me. I turn toward her in my seat, unfolding my arms. I smile to show her I’m not a threat.
“We have something in common, Alice.”
“What’s that, then?”
“Our names. They’re both from books.”
I keep smiling, even as she slides her headphones back up again, gaze lingering on me for a moment. Her gum snaps between her teeth as she walks back out through the open doorway without another word. “I’m sorry,” Lisa says evenly. “It’s that age, I’m afraid. She’s got worse since the sickness started. I used to get rotten headaches that seemed to last for days at her age and now it looks as though I’ve passed them on to her. What shitty luck. Do you have any children, Mina?”
I shake my head.
“One day, maybe. I’m getting married later this year.” I hold up my hand so she can see the engagement ring on my finger. Lisa coos, leaning toward me to better see it.
“A winter wedding? How lovely. How long have you been with—?”
“Oscar. Uh, about three years. Engaged for one. I met him at university.”
I actually met Oscar in the student union. I was drunk, he was sober, and he escorted me back to my room on campus, making no attempt to kiss me, even when I desperately leaned in for it. Older than me by ten years, he was a mature student with a degree in physics who had just received a grant to begin research into zodiacal dust clouds. When he finally asked me out a week later, we drove to the coast to watch a meteor shower up on the cold, windswept cliffs. With his frank, open gaze and his surety, so certain in himself—in us —Oscar was unlike the other people I’d dated, other students, boys my own age with empty wallets and heavy, probing tongues in my mouth. He drove an Austin Metro with an interior of bright paprika orange and took me to the observatory at Herstmonceux and for dinners in Rye and Bath, places rich in history. I took my first foreign holidays with Oscar, visiting Gothic abbeys in France and Germany and the ghostly ruins of Pompeii. While all my peers were listening to the Eurythmics and Gary Numan, Oscar introduced me to the Carpenters and Joni Mitchell who sang that we are stardust, billion-year-old carbon.
“Whatever you have has to be better than mine and Paul’s wedding.” Lisa laughs, interrupting my thoughts. “Me, eight months pregnant and wearing one of Mum’s old dancing dresses with taffeta frills and the number seventy-nine pinned to my back. The registrar getting my name wrong, calling me Laura. I thought Paul was going to run out halfway through, just right on out into the road and keep going, never mind the flippin’ traffic.”
I nod, suddenly wrung out and homesick. The heat, this unfamiliar house, those strange people outside the front door—I have a frightening feeling that I have made a terrible mistake coming here. Should’ve listened to Oscar, I tell myself sternly.
“Why don’t you take your things upstairs, Mina? We’ve put you in Billy’s room at the front. He’s in with us. The girls share the room next door. Sam, I’m afraid you’re on the sofa. It’s a bit of a squeeze but we’ll manage.”
“Thank you,” I say, as another wave of that homesickness washes over me. “You’re very kind.”