The Doves
By
Jack Graham
She gets the call a few days after her birthday.
“He’s dying,” they say. “It won’t be long. He asked for you.”
“He has other family,” says the woman. “I’m his granddaughter. His son, my father, is still alive.”
“Just you,” they say.
She goes. She wonders why she is going. She wonders why he asked for her.
The woman sits by the old man’s bed.
He wakes.
He sees her.
He reaches out.
She withdraws from his touch.
She wonders if he means to ask forgiveness.
She realises she came to see him die.
“Feed the doves,” he says.
“The doves are all dead,” she tells him.
“Feed the doves,” he says.
“You killed the doves,” she says.
“Feed the doves,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, “I will.”
When he slips away, she feels no pleasure, no victory.
***
She inherits his house, his money. She wonders if it is some gesture of restitution.
When her parents hear, they will rage.
She leaves without telling her husband. The flat is still wrecked, and her body still bruised, from his birthday fury.
***
The house is long and low and white, curving around on itself like a great bleached pelvis. It sits alone in a valley, surrounded by trees. There are no other houses for miles. The nearest village is an hour’s walk. The nearest town is two hours’ drive.
She owes the taxi driver a big fare.
Well, she can afford it now.
“You could commit a murder out here and nobody’d know it,” says the taxi driver as he takes the money.
The woman carries her suitcases up the drive, refusing the driver’s offer of help. She walks around the house to the courtyard at the back, her footsteps crunching on the gravel path that surrounds the house.
She passes a structure she doesn’t recognise. A detached garage. He must have built it after the last time she was here. He was always a builder. It’s how he made his money.
There is a little hill that was never there before either, as if he excavated and allowed the displaced earth to grass over.
Beyond the courtyard there is only the woods. Woods, woods, and more woods. There is no fence separating the garden from the woods.
She remembers summer nights as a child, at the window of the bedroom that was hers while she stayed, the room that had been her father’s bedroom when he was a child. She remembers sitting at the window and looking at the dovecote.
The dovecote is still there, in the courtyard. It is wrapped in white plastic. The plastic is tattered and brittle. It whips and flutters in the chilly, rising wind.
She tears the plastic a little and looks inside.
There are no doves to feed.
Their little dried corpses are still within. Dead more than two decades now.
***
He made the dovecote for her between her first and second summer with him. A white triangle, perched atop a white pillar. Six windows; three at the bottom, two in the middle, one at the top; six residents perched inside them.
“In honour of you,” he said.
The girl who became the woman cried with joy. She spent all her time with the doves, utterly captivated by their delicacy, their softness, their whiteness, their willingness to be held.
That night, he came to her bedroom the way he had the previous summer.
He found her lying on top of her sheets in her nightgown.
She was hot, that’s all. Too hot to get under the blanket.
But he thought she was waiting for him. She said no, as she had on the last night of last summer.
This time, she fought. He seemed surprised and hurt.
She remembers thinking it was sad he had to go and spoil things after such a nice day. He withdrew from her protests.
The following night, she found one of the little white bodies broken and bloody on her pillow, its head twisted all the way around.
She never fought again, until the last time.
The next morning, the morning after the time she fought again, she found all the doves dead in the cote, their little necks wrung.
***
The woman carries her suitcases into the house.
There is a surprising amount of food in the cupboards.
Tins of letter-shaped spaghetti in tomato sauce.
Chocolate spread. Jelly. There are lots of plates, lots of cutlery.
The kitchen table is very large, and there are more chairs than seem needed by a man living alone.
It is as if her grandfather had been expecting company.
She sits down in the lounge and looks at the floral wallpaper and frilly cushions, trying to reconcile the idea of him in a shop, choosing nice things for his home, with the image of his face looming over her in the darkness.
There is something wrong with the wallpaper in one corner of the room. She goes to the corner. She does not understand her impression. The wallpaper has been put up well. No wrinkles. No bubbles. No bumps. The pattern, a network of rambling roses, matches perfectly where the strips meet.
Even so.
She stands back and looks again.
There is definitely something wrong with it.
The corner is bad.
***
That night the woman tries to sleep in her old bedroom.
The storm whips up. She hears the plastic on the dovecote rustling, snapping.
Half asleep, she imagines the doves are still alive, suffocating.
She imagines the movements of the plastic are caused by their beaks and wings as they thrash and fight for escape.
She drifts to sleep.
The sound of the plastic wakes her.
She gets up. She goes out.
The wind and rain lash her, plastering her nightgown to her body. She tears the plastic off the dovecote. The wind rips it from her hand. It flies off across the courtyard, towards the wood, as if trying to escape.
She watches it. It enters the wood.
She sees it flitting between the trees.
In the gloom, it looks more like a figure. A slight human figure in a white nightgown. She might almost be looking at herself from a distance, as if the forest were a mirror.
She wonders about the things that mirror has seen.
***
The more she thinks about it, the more she is sure… she saw a figure in the woods. A figure in white.
***
There is a phone call. It is the woman’s father. She will not give him what he wants. It is not courage. It is necessity. The house and the money are her chance, her escape.
“After all the sacrifices we made,” says her father.
“I was the sacrifice you made,” says the woman. “Every summer.”
“We didn’t know,” he says.
“You did,” she says. “I told you.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. In a hundred ways.”
“How could we believe it?” he asks. “How could I believe he’d do that to me? My own father.”
“It doesn’t matter,” says the woman. “In the end, at least he paid the whore and not the pimps.”
“Don’t say that darling,” says her father.
“Shut up,” she says, the tears coming. His pretence of love is what breaks her.
“I want to talk…”
“Don’t come here,” she says. “Don’t call.”
She puts down the phone.
It occurs to her they might tell her husband where she is.
The phone rings.
She picks it up.
“If you call again, I’ll tell. And if you tell Joe where I am, I’ll tell. Everyone will know.”
She puts the phone down.
She stands and watches it for a long time. It does not ring again.
She rips it out of the wall anyway, just in case.
***
The woman sees the white figure in the woods again the next night.
During the day she did some washing. She washed a big white quilt.
The day was dry, so she hung it out on the line in the courtyard.
In the night she looks out and sees the quilt moving in the breeze.
It seems longer. She realises that the figure in white is standing behind it, peeking around at the house.
She is getting closer.
***
The woman sits on the sofa in the lounge and looks at the bad corner.
The more she looks at the wallpaper, the more she seems to look past the vines and leaves and buds and blooms, into the space behind them.
There are eyes in there, looking out at her. Large, dark, round eyes, staring at her, unblinking.
There is someone inside the pattern, watching her through its foliage.
***
The woman is in the loft, putting boxes away. Her grandfather left it empty. Almost empty.
She comes down. She leaves the hatch open. There’s no point closing it. She will need to go back up there soon. She gets distracted. She forgets.
That night, as she is getting ready for bed, she walks under the open loft hatch. She hears something above her.
Whispering.
She looks up. She sees nothing. The open loft hatch is a square black hole.
She stays there, under it, still and silent, waiting.
At last, she hears weeping.
She gets the ladder. She climbs back up to the loft. She turns on the light. The bare bulb illuminates the loft, but leaves dark corners. The loft is empty but for the boxes.
She climbs back down.
She stands at the foot of the ladder.
She hears the weeping again. Through the weeping, there is whispering. Singing. It is a lullaby, sung through tears.
She climbs back up.
She looks again. Again, there is nothing.
“Hello?” calls the woman.
The singing stops.
The silence is pregnant. The darkness in the corners is watchful.
***
The woman is asleep. She lies in the dark, facing the wall.
She half wakes.
She heard something.
She listens. The silence sings.
Then a sound. A rustling. Something brushes the bottom of her bed.
She turns over. She turns on her bedside light.
There is nothing.
“Hello?” she says.
There is no reply.
She turns her light off and lies back down.
It is the fourth time this has happened. It happens every night.
***
It is the sixth night.
The woman lies in the dark, facing the wall.
She hears the sounds. She feels the movement. She waits.
She feels someone sit on the bed. Her body lowers. She hears the springs of her mattress creak.
Can I sit with you? asks Daya.
“Yes,” says the woman.
Don’t turn the light on, says Daya.
“Okay,” says the woman.
Don’t turn around, says Daya.
“Okay,” says the woman.
***
It is the seventh night.
The woman lies in the dark, facing the wall. Daya is sitting on the bed.
“Who is the girl outside?” asks the woman.
That’s Raven, says Daya darkly.