Chapter 2
I find my way back to Menstrie on muscle memory this time, and old habit makes me switch off the engine and coast in silently so as not to wake them, even though it’s hard to say whether they’re up or not.
On the one hand, the big gates are still open and there are three strange cars parked in a row, besides John’s van and Shelley’s little runabout.
On the other hand, the house is in total darkness.
Or so I think until I see a chink of light coming from a gap in the dining room curtains and feel a wash of memory.
That was always where Mum and Dad sat, fists on the table, to chew us out if we got home too late on a school night.
I creep towards the window half expecting ghosts but, when I peek in, of course it’s not the pair of them, worried sick and fuming, both in their dressing gowns.
My brother’s sitting facing my way at the far side of a small, square table, lit by a low-wattage bulb in the hanging lamp.
There are three more people gathered around and I don’t recognise any of them.
Not the beefy man in a checked shirt with his scalp shining through his hair; not the slick-looking guy with his suit-jacket hung on the back of the chair and a cigar in his mouth, the smoke hiding so much of his face he must surely be puffing at it like a steam train.
Obviously not the thin, grey-haired one opposite my brother.
From the back, he could be anyone. I glance at John again and just for a second there is a ghost as my dad’s face meets my gaze.
I tiptoe away from the window and climb the steps to the kitchen door. It’s locked but I reach up and feel my fingers close around the spare key right there where it always was, like nothing’s changed. But it must have. John said. Everything’s different now.
And anyway, it’s not as if I’ve never been back here, since I left. I’ve visited. I brought Kai to meet them. I’m fine.
Before I can fit the key into the keyhole, the door swings open and Shelley is standing there in the darkness.
“Lindsay? You’re not supposed to be here till tomorrow.”
I can’t see her face and I can’t read her voice, even though I’ve known her for twenty years and I can read any voice. Even the voices of strangers, even in a foreign language, even underwater or through a wall when the words are muffled to nothing and only the tune is left.
“Is my bed not ready?” I say. “It doesn’t matter. I can sleep on the—”
“I got the time difference wrong,” Shelley says. “I added instead of taking away.”
That doesn’t make any sense but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the way Shelley’s standing square in the doorway like a nightclub bouncer.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
She reels away from me, clicking the light as she goes, and then stands at the sink with her head bent.
She doesn’t seem the least bit okay. She makes a sound I think at first is retching then realise is sobbing.
I’ve never seen Shelley cry. She got tears in her eyes when she was first breastfeeding, but that doesn’t count.
The thing about grief, though, is it makes you so selfish. I don’t care what’s wrong with her.
“I’m sorry,” she says. And even though I don’t ask what for because I don’t care about that either, she goes on. “I’m sorry I’m crying. I’m sorry Kai died. I’m sorry we didn’t make it to the funeral. I’m sorry we haven’t got space for you to stay here long-term.”
She’s lying. And she’s not very good at it. One reason would be better than four, for a start.
“Are you hungry?” she says. I shake my head. I haven’t been hungry for months. But she sees through this. “Have you eaten?” she tries next. “Sausage sandwich?”
Right enough, as well as the olive-green laminate units and the rattling fridge, not to mention the lumps on the carved back of this orange pine chair that are digging into my spine, there’s a smell of white sausage fat congealed in the grill pan, same as ever.
Nothing’s changed. How can John live here? How could he ask me back?
“I made them for John’s poker night,” she says. “Plenty left over.”
“Yeah, I saw—” I begin, but she cuts me off.
“He needs to know you’re here.” She goes off into the passageway.
Were there cards on that table? There must have been.
And actually why else would four men be sitting like that at nearly midnight?
Even though who the hell has poker night on a Monday?
I hear Shelley bang on the dining room door. “John? It’s Lindsay.”
There’s a stretch of total silence then a click and low voices. Shelley’s is so neutral it sounds robotic. John’s is . . . John’s voice is . . . My heart is guttering in my throat. John’s voice is another ghost, like his face was.
“Your old room’s all set,” Shelley says as she comes back. “Zak’s in with Nicky tonight already so I could give it a good clean round.”
John is behind her. He lifts his chin once and says, “Lindsay. You change your flight?”
I almost laugh. This is the bosom of my family that I’ve come home to?
“Give Lindsay a cup of your wonder stuff,” John says to Shelley. “I’ll see you in the morning, eh Sis?” And he’s gone again.
“It’s only herbal tea,” Shelley says. “But it’ll help you sleep. What time does your body think it is?”
I haven’t got a clue. My body thinks it’s Kai died. But I accept a cup anyway, take one sip and try not to grimace. Typical that Shelley’s carried on with terrible food but given up on a decent cuppa. I take it upstairs to my old room and stand at my bedroom window, staring out into the past.
I can’t see much detail, just hummocks in the dark.
If I didn’t know it was a scrapyard, I could believe I was looking at shrubs and gazebos out there.
What I can trace, though, is the boundary against the fields beyond and it’s familiar enough to make me feel dizzy.
The fence, high and sturdy, is still like a garden-centre showroom—odd sections all different styles, one after the other, with no thought to appearance.
I let my eyes travel down to the far end, to the Barrens. That was John’s secret hidey-hole, named after something he read in a book, back when he was too old for toys and started reading instead, same as me.
Before that, we shared everything. We were pirates with a ship made out of a feed trough.
We were spacemen with the guts of sit-under hairdryers and a dentist’s chair.
We were Ghostbusters, with weedkiller-backpacks that probably still had the dregs of absolute poison in the bottom.
I squint out into the dark, wondering if any of it is still there—feed trough, dentist’s chair, backpack sprayers.
But it’s hard on the eyes, or maybe it’s the jet lag.
Certainly, my vision is doing something it’s never done before.
Has it? The scene outside the window seems to flatten and flutter as I gaze at it, as if all those wood and wire-mesh panels are so much tissue paper, the black silhouettes of the trees beyond no more than painted card. I turn away, blinking.
I brush my teeth and wash my face, knowing I’m never going to get to sleep after that nap, but I climb into bed anyway, angle the lamp towards me, and start reading.
It only takes a page or two to know I was right about this book: I can’t see past my job to relax into it.
There’s a young New Zealand woman and I can do that; there’s a posh English man, young though, so I could do that too; the doctor .
. . he could be Scottish to distinguish him, if that’s not too much of a cliché; an elderly lady . . .
But Peggy was right about the book too: It’s a sweet tale of a young couple buying their dream home. And I can’t bear it. I set it face down on my bedside table so I can’t see that unsettling cover and pick up Shelley’s special tea.
My second sip tells me I should have drunk it hot, because it’s even worse lukewarm, but I gulp it down anyway and switch the lamp off, expecting to lie staring up into the darkness until the morning.
Shows what I know. Almost immediately, I feel exhaustion licking around the edges of me and my thoughts start to roll towards dreaming.
Where I find nightmares waiting for me. Kai is sitting at a small table with three doctors I’ve never seen before, although one of them is John.
Shelley is walking round behind their chairs delivering those flavoured build-up shakes I used to pour down the toilet and swear blind to the nurse he had drunk.
The lightbulb over the—it’s not cards and I can’t see what it is—gets dimmer and dimmer and Kai is gone and now it’s just blackness in front of my eyes, a sweaty twist of blankets all around my body and scuffles and mutters inside my skull.
It feeds on itself until the mutters grow into shrieks that are loud enough to wake me.
I lie still in the tangle of sheets, waiting for my ears to stop echoing and my breath to find a rhythm, for my heart to settle back down into my chest. Did I make those noises?
I can’t have, because Shelley isn’t bursting into my room and the boys aren’t crying.
But was it real? Vixens can sound like terrified children in the still of the night, I know.
I keep listening as my pulse stops pounding and my sweat begins to cool and dry.
There’s one weighty thump, somewhere outside, as if a pile of something soft and heavy has collapsed, and then silence.
Fox, I decide. It knocked something over but nothing breakable, by the sound of it.
Maybe it was hunting birds in the dawn. Certainly, I see grey light stealing in around the curtain hems and I can hear at least one bird singing as my limbs get heavy and I sink back down.
Or maybe all of that was a dream, because the next time I wake, it’s still pitch black, and Kai’s so real that I reach out to feel the warmth of him and knock my hand against the wall beside this single bed.
I lift up on one elbow and grope for the glass of water I didn’t bring upstairs with me, drain the teacup instead to slick my throat, and crash back, making Kai huff and thrash.
He was always such a light sleeper, and so sour about me moving or reading or God knows snoring, despite his white noise machine and sleep band and black-out mask and now, back in Hawaii, the noise machine beeps and hisses, half compression-sore mattress and half lorry reversing to come and take him away.
Because he’s cold beside me, the worst dream of all.
He’s lost in masks and tubes and wound tight in sweaty blankets, and it’s not Hawaii.