Chapter Twenty-Eight
STUART, NINE YEARS EARLIER
Annie hates me. She hates everything about me.
She behaves as though I smell, simply because of the way I dress, the way I present myself, but if there’s one thing you learn when you’re sleeping in a different place every few months, every few days, when you’re sofa-surfing, squatting, short-term renting, a night on the streets, whatever it is, you learn how to stay clean.
You learn where to get your clothes washed, or you learn how to hand-wash.
You learn how to shampoo over the side of a bath with a jug of cold water and a bar of soap if necessary.
You learn to keep your shoes fresh, your breath fresh, all the shortcuts to hygiene.
So I may look rough from a distance, but close up I smell like a summer meadow, I can assure you.
However, Annie will never know that because she will never get that close. She is like a magnetic particle, repelled across whichever space we find ourselves sharing. Boing. I don’t care. I can’t say I’m that fond of Annie either.
“I’m only here for another week,” I tell her reassuringly that weekend. “Don’t you worry. And in the meantime, I will do all that I can to help around the place. I’m pretty handy. I can build things, fix things, move things. Whatever you need doing, Annie, just ask.”
“There’s a dead cat in the shed. It’s been there for over a year. Maybe you could get rid of it for us.”
“A dead…” I sigh. Jesus. I bloody love cats.
I don’t want to see a dead one. But I need to earn my keep, to earn my place here.
“Sure,” I say. I ask for rubber gloves, a garbage bag, and a point in the right direction.
I set off through the back door and head up the scruffy, overgrown path that leads through the scruffy, overgrown garden.
I can imagine it was beautiful once, a proper English cottage garden: flower beds, apple trees, cherry trees, nooks and crannies, a greenhouse at one end, and there, just ahead of me, the shed.
I pull the neck of my sweater up over my mouth and nose and yank the door open.
All the accoutrements of a keen gardener are here to see: bags of compost, neatly arranged gardening implements, an apron hanging from a peg, little plastic seedling boxes on a tall wooden table.
And there, just as Annie promised, a desiccated cat, curled into a corner, its gray hair matted into knots, its eyes wide open, mouth hanging ajar, the tip of a dead gray tongue protruding.
“Jesus.” I snap on the gloves and crouch down. “Oh, buddy,” I say to the cat. “Buddy, buddy, buddy.” Poor bastard, I think, what a way to go.
I collect him carefully and realize that he is a she and I say, “Ah, sweetheart,” and slide her into the bag. Then I take her out into the garden with a spade in my other hand and I head toward a quiet corner to bury her with dignity.
“What are you doing?” Annie calls out to me from the back door.
“I’m going to bury her,” I say. “Somewhere up the back there.”
“No!” she snaps. “Do not do that! Throw it into the bushes. Let the foxes deal with it.”
I frown. “It’s a she,” I say, “not an it. And I want to bury her.”
“Well then, take it on to the Heath. Bury it there. But do not dig up my garden, absolutely not.”
I shake my head and tut gently under my breath.
“Whatever you want, Your Majesty,” I say, and then I take the cat and the spade into a quiet corner of the Heath, far from prying eyes and CCTV.
I call her Tina, I don’t know why. I mark the spot with a cross made out of dry sticks and then I head back to the house.
Annie eyes me curiously when I return.
“All done,” I say. “But I guess there’s probably a family somewhere round here wondering where their beloved pet ended up. Would be good to let them know. Could put posters up, maybe?”
She looks at me aghast. “Absolutely not. The cat’s dead. If they loved it so much they should have kept it indoors.”
“How do you think it got in? To the shed?”
“No idea. Must have followed one of us in there without us noticing.”
“So you’re the gardener?”
“Gosh. No. My husband was the gardener.”
“So what were you doing in the shed?”
She narrows her eyes at me, purses her lips. “Looking for pruning shears. For the rosebush by the front gate. And talking of which, the frontage is a mess. Brambles. Chaos. Could I trouble you to tidy it up a bit?”
“Absolutely, Your Majesty,” I say. “Pass me the pruning shears and I am all yours.”
I see her shudder slightly at the idea of me being all hers, but she turns and pulls open a drawer in the sideboard behind her, and hands me a pair of pruning shears.
As she passes them to me my eye is caught by other items in the drawer: the glint of a pair of handcuffs, a pair of white leather gloves, and there, smiling up at me chillingly, a plastic clown mask.
The January sun has disappeared beneath the January horizon and I am alone for now, cooking dinner for the family.
It turns out that left to their own devices this family eats shit.
Nobody cooks; they make meals out of toast and frozen chicken pieces, out of powdered potatoes and packet sauces.
There are no vegetables in the fridge, no fruit in the bowl.
They eat cereal for dinner and toast for lunch and if there’s one thing I can do to help around here it’s to get some proper nutrition into them.
Hampstead is wall-to-wall food emporiums, and I have filled their fridge with organic veg and fresh meat.
Tonight I am making a chicken stir-fry with noodles, but first I really want to check inside that drawer in the sideboard because, frankly, this house has given me the creeps since the moment I arrived, and what with the dead cat and now the clown mask, I’m this close to booking into a hotel for the night.
I check the entryway into the kitchen and see that the coast is clear.
Then I pull open the drawer. The clown mask still manages to make me jump, even though I’m expecting it.
I touch it gingerly. It looks old. Vintage almost. It repels me in a way I can’t quite fathom.
I move my fingers to the handcuffs, feel a swell of relief when I realize that they are plastic, not metal, a toy, not a restraint.
But still, there is something about them that sets my nerves jangling, that makes me wonder about this family and what other secrets they might be hiding.
Annie’s not in at the moment; she’s gone to Brent Cross, her favorite place in the world according to Jessamine.
Brent Cross is a shopping center out near Hendon built in the 1970s, the very first in London and beloved of those with northwest London postcodes and cars.
She will return later fizzing faintly with the electricity of retail therapy, with bags that she will ferry directly to her bedroom, maybe a spritz of department store perfume on her wrists, a bale of Egyptian cotton bath towels from John Lewis.
The fizz will die down slowly over the space of a few hours and then she will seat herself back in her study, the tiny room opposite the kitchen where she spends nearly 90 percent of her time.
Nobody is allowed to be in that room for more than a few seconds, just long enough to deliver cups of tea and coffee on saucers.
But even during such brief moments, I feel something bad in the air in there.
I tiptoe into the hallway now and gently push against the door, but it does not give.
I notice that there is a keyhole halfway up and I realize that Anne has locked the door.
There are other locked doors in this house, including one up in the attic that has a large piece of furniture placed in front of it, behind which you can just make out the rectangle of the doorframe, and another into an outhouse attached to the back of the house.
As someone who grew up in a house with no locked doors at all, I find this unnerving.
I hear footsteps coming down the stairs from the hallway and quickly head back into the kitchen. Jessamine appears, rubbing anxiously at the nibs of her elbows inside the sleeves of a baggy cardigan. “When’s it ready?”
“Oh.” I turn to regard the ingredients still half chopped on boards. “A little while.”
“Shall I open some wine?”
“I thought,” I begin carefully, “we were knocking that on the head for a couple of weeks.”
She shrugs and backs away. “Never mind,” she says.
The atmosphere has been tense these past few sober days.
I can feel the burn of Jessamine’s physical longing like a bubbling cauldron.
She pretends she’s all right, but I can feel the magnetic pull that flows through the house at eleven thirty every morning, when she looks at the dog, looks through the window, envisages her table in the corner of the White Swan, the sharp, blessed blow of a vodka tonic hitting the base of her stomach, the edges of her world bleeding out, the pain of whatever it is she carries around with her, day in, day out, quickly fading away.
I make sure to distract her at this time of day.
I suggest a walk to the shops or on the Heath, I ask her what she wants for dinner, show her recipes on my phone, but she is short-tempered, even more so than when she is drinking; she is unhappy and she is dark.
And I can’t say I’m surprised, because there is something in this house, something living and breathing behind locked doors and in the creases between this world and another.
I’m not talking about ghosts or spirits; I’m a little woo-woo, but not all the way.
But there are fissures and scars in this house, something misaligned, something horribly, brutally broken, and I am determined to find out what it is.