The Dead Room

Chapter 12 #2

I’ve heard of this mistake in people’s thinking.

It’s famous. It’s probably even got a name.

It most usually happens around funerals, or at least that’s where I’ve come across it.

People lose a loved one and they’ve got a ton of paperwork and organising to do.

They need to make decisions and plan the send-off, tell friends and other family where it is and when, what they’ve decided about flowers or donations.

They know they need to get all this done before life goes .

. . and this is the mistake coming now . . . back to normal.

But, of course, life isn’t going to go back to normal. Life is going on, it’s true, but changed forever. That’s why so many people crash right after the reception, surrounded by cards and leftovers. That’s when the real work of grieving, the real hard hurting, begins.

Only not for me. Because when I was planning Kai’s cremation and memorial, I was also denying that I had to—and then accepting that I had to—sell up, pack, come home, find a house, and move in. Then, I only right now realise I’ve been mistakenly believing, life would go back to normal at last.

Somewhere inside my heart, unknown to my brain, too deep for common sense to reach it, I didn’t really believe I was going to live in this big empty house all on my own. I thought once I’d got it ready, Kai would come and join me, where he belongs.

This is the first time I’ve faced the truth that, just like Peggy March, I’m going to be alone here, and for the same reason: Richard and Kai are both gone.

“Linds?” says Shelley. I must have been quiet a long time.

“I won’t have time to fret,” I tell her. I tell myself really, but she can hear me too. “I need to buy some acousticware, get it fitted, and get cracking.”

“Is there really such a rush?”

“I need to start making a living. The only thing I’m worried about is staying on top of the garden.”

“Subtle.” She gives me a nudge. We’re both looking out over the back lawn to the greenhouse. “Yes, Lindsay, I well might run the lawnmower round and clip the odd shrub, while I’m here making use of your lovely old greenhouse. Out of gratitude, you know.”

“Cool,” I say. “Can you do me a key to the plants too, if I draw a plan? Like, what’s that one there that can’t be a passion flower?”

“Clematis,” says Shelley. “Nelly Moser.” Something in her voice makes me turn and, when I do, I’m sure she’s close to tears.

“Shel?”

“I want nothing but happiness for you, Lindsay,” she says. “Ignore me.”

We head back downstairs to discover that John has manhandled the couch, the table and chairs, the bed, and the chest of drawers out of the pickup without us and only needs a hand up the stairs with the big stuff headed to my bedroom.

In another ten minutes, we’ve done that too and he’s standing whistling through his teeth, desperate to get going.

“What about your pie?” I say.

“Drop it round,” he tells me. “Throw in a bag of crisps to thank me for getting you a cheap car. You ready, Shel?”

“Give my love to the boys,” I say. “Tell them they’re welcome anytime. Tell Zak there’s a wee something in his room for him to say thanks for letting me use it.”

“Nicky won’t like that,” Shelley tells me.

“And a wee something for Nicholas to say thanks for putting up with Zak,” I add.

“You’ve spoiled them,” says John.

“And tell them they’ll be spoiled some more, every time they come and see me.”

I’m sounding pathetic even to myself now, an old lady filling her biscuit tin to make the kids visit.

In fact, once John and Shelley have gone, that black biscuit tin from Victoria’s jubilee is the first thing I unpack.

I’m still chuffed I remembered to fish it out from under the seat before I took the hire car back.

It got dented at some point, though, and the lid is stuck on.

When I find where I’ve put my phone down, I’ll google how to unstick it without damaging the enamel.

Meantime, I set it back on the high shelf where its twin used to live when Peggy March was here.

I smile at it, looking forward to showing it to her, once I find her, if she’s able to visit, if she wants to, if her health didn’t take a nosedive. Which it might have, I suppose.

I lock the front door. Whoever cleared this house made a proper job of it.

They’ve even taken the basket that should be hanging inside the letterbox, the one that was full of junk mail when I pushed my business card through.

I find myself hoping I don’t remember my half-heartedness every time I go in and out.

Then I tell myself that no one goes in and out the front of their houses.

I close the inner glass door of the vestibule and head back to the kitchen.

Making sure I’ve got the right key for the back door, I step into the garden.

This is mine. I own these ornate washing line posts and the old rope sagging between them; I own that tree, whatever it is, and “Nelly Moser” the clematis too.

I own the shed full of pots and mysterious tools—one like a huge flat sieve, one like a giant’s back scratcher with a handle six feet long—and the greenhouse that Shelley covets so much, although to my eyes it’s just ten feet of dry dirt with cobwebbed glass around it and warped wooden shelves, furry from soaking.

At the far end, past the beds full of enormous plants that should be vegetables but surely can’t be, unless vegetables turn into these monsters if no one picks them, there’s an area I never got round to exploring with Chloe, or the day I came back with David, while he double-checked what the home report had told him, before he let me proceed.

There are trees here even a fool would recognise, because the apples and plums are fully formed on them, though green and tiny.

The branches twist and buckle, reaching almost all the way to the ground, so the shaded grass underneath isn’t as dry and dead as the rest but instead still lush and silky feeling when I slip off my shoes and wander around in my bare feet.

I find the most comfortable-looking tree trunk and settle down against it, wriggling my shoulders. The bark is rough enough to make me tingle. “We’re going to be good friends, you and me,” I say.

“Who’s that?” comes a querulous voice. “Who’s there?”

For one moment, my heart leaps and all my childhood tales of magic gardens and enchantments come streaming back. Then I turn and see the top of a bald dome showing over the boundary wall. I’m pretty sure it’s Colonel Nosyparker, but he can’t do anything to me now.

“Your new neighbour,” I say, taking a run at the wall and managing to toe myself up high enough to hook my arms and look over.

It is indeed him, still dressed in shirt and tie, although without his jacket today.

“Lindsay Hale. We met last month. But you were thinking about security and I didn’t get your name. ”

“Mr. Boyle,” he says. “Bunny Boyle.”

Not laughing takes every bit of my self-control, and I don’t quite make it. But he appreciates the effort and only shakes his head and sucks his teeth. “For the first fifty years of my life, it was just a jolly, unremarkable moniker,” he says. “And then came that dratted film. Aye, well.”

“Do you remember what I was asking you when I came poking round, Mr. Boyle?” I say. “When you quite rightly sent me packing.”

To my surprise, his bottom lip quivers and I think his eyes start to water. Or maybe it’s just that he’s looking up into the sun at me hanging over the top of the wall.

“Not at all,” he says. His voice has gone a bit husky too and he clears his throat before he goes on.

“I wouldn’t have been right, my dear, even had I known.

I was officious and misguided and, if I’m honest, I was hurt that I was in the dark.

I mean, what harm would it have done for you to know where poor Peggy had been taken off to?

What harm would it have done for me to know?

We could both have gone to see her and brightened her day.

I owe you an apology . . . Linda, was it? ”

“Lindsay,” I say. “But please don’t worry. I’ll find out where she is and then I could take you too or you could take me.” I know men that age don’t like it when women drive them.

“I haven’t had a car for six years,” he says.

“Not since I turned ninety. And I’m very much afraid to tell you, Lindsay, that you’re too late.

Not by much, but too late all the same. Peggy’s boy stopped round only the other day and broke the sad news that .

. . well. My old nanny used to say ‘gone on ahead.’ It struck me as a mealy-mouthed way of alluding to a plain fact, back then when I was a child, with all of life before me, but it sounds about right now when I won’t be long at her back. ”

I should say something comforting, as if he hasn’t just let me know he’s ninety-six, but I am numb at this news, and silent too.

“And she left instructions that more or less prevent any of her friends from marking her passing too. Most unlike her. Not that we ever discussed it. We should have, given our ages.”

“Oh, Bunny,” I manage to say. I can’t keep clinging onto the wall with my bare toes braced and my shoulders straining. I slither down and hit the grass with a soft thump.

“Sorry, Lindsay,” he says, out of sight now.

“Me too.”

I trail back inside, expecting the house to feel colder and sadder now.

I pause in the lobby, looking through the open door to the kitchen and the yards of empty red-tiled floor ready to ring out at the clack of my sandals crossing it.

I look up the little staircase towards the dead room, where I really will be spending most of my time very soon, every day until I retire.

Something in me shrinks at the thought. I find myself rubbing my fingertips together, without knowing why, and then I slip my shoes off again and tiptoe as lightly as I can towards the front of the house, where my boxes offer occupation and distraction.

“I’ll love the place for you, Peggy,” I say out loud.

I wish it didn’t echo so much, but I mean it.

The boxes don’t work. I spend the rest of the day spreading my few temporary possessions around, first trying to space them out and then, when that leaves the whole house looking bleak, bunching them together in key spots, telling myself I’ll ignore the empty places until my container gets here.

I go to the shops and lug home two bulging carrier bags of the kind of healthy food you home in on when there’s a new start on the go.

Later, I look it over and then acquaint myself with the handful of Dunblane carry-outs who deliver. I eat three quarters of a pizza and go to bed, almost missing the company of the holographic monsters, definitely missing Sleeping Murder, which I haven’t found yet.

It’s still light when I turn in, the midnight sun only a month and a bit gone and the sky rosy until well after ten, so it doesn’t matter that John plonked the big old bed he’s lending me smack in the middle of the floor, far too far from the wall for me to plug in the lamp he included in my haul.

But, when I start awake in the pitch black with my heart hammering, I’ve forgotten all that.

I grope around, helpless and confused, checking and rechecking both sides of the bed, until I finally remember that the nearest light is yards away.

What woke me? I wonder, swinging my legs out from under the covers. I am padding confidently towards the door when I hear the click of a latch closing and am suddenly sure that what disturbed me was the sound of it opening.

Draughts.

Surely.

But I want the light on. Only, I’ve completely lost my bearings.

With both arms stretched straight out and waving wildly, I blunder around, waiting to hit the wall or the window, to scrape my shin on the edge of the bed or stub my toe on the fireplace surround.

It seems to go on for an endless stretch of panicky, impossible time and I force myself to stop moving when I feel a whimper start to gather in my chest. I must be going round in circles.

I take a deep breath and start to walk in baby steps, placing my heel against my toes to make sure that I keep a straight line.

Right enough, this time it takes only eight paces until my outstretched fingers brush against the silky stripes of the wallpaper and I can feel my way round to the door to hit the light switch.

As I’m letting my head fall forward to rest on the wood, I hear that same sound again.

A door clicks softly open, and then even more softly closed.

Draughts. Old house. The ghost of Peggy March. Imagination. Draughts. The ghost of Nelly Moser. Old doors. Draughts. With old latches. Seven dea—

No.

There’s no one here.