Chapter 23 #2
The rusted filing cabinets to one side are still there too and so is the shipping container, its mustard paint peeling. When I stretch out to touch it, I feel the flakes come away.
I gasp and pull my hand into my chest. Flakes, I think. It’s only flakes, not splinters. Why is my heart hammering? I can feel the answer starting to rise, and so I force my thoughts away. I drive my whole mind to remembering how it’s done, to hoping it still works. Then I drop down into a crouch.
I need to clear twenty years’ worth of weeds and leaf litter from where it’s banked up before I can even try to slide the bottom panel.
My hands are numb with wet and cold and my nails bend and break with the first few handfuls, but I stick at it, scraping and gouging, shoving clods of mud and dead grass back between my bent legs until I feel like a mole making a burrow.
It’s endless, or it seems so until I hit an enormous dandelion—I know what it is from the sudden sharp stink; it’s grown sappy nestled down in mud and mulch this way.
I pull it out by its roots and fall on my backside as it comes clear. When I roll forward again, there’s a different smell. This isn’t decaying vegetation. This is a dry smell. It’s dust and paper and carpet and fabric and old clothes and stale air. It’s the smell of Lord’s Yard. I’m as good as in.
I wipe my muddy hands on the sides of my jumper, under my arms where it’s still almost dry, then I feel for the grooves on the baseboard, where my fingers fit same as they always did, or even better now that I’m bigger.
I give one tug and, with a screech of wood on wood, the board starts to slide towards me.
I wriggle backwards on my bum, scrabbling for purchase with the sides of my trainers, slipping and sliding, but inching back steadily, until—just like it used to and like I should have been ready for—the board comes free and flips, sending me sprawling down the bank and knocking me hard in the neck with one corner.
I clamber clear of it and crawl back up again.
I need to do this next bit without letting myself think about it too much, so I fall onto my front, full length, and wriggle forward until I can squeeze my head and shoulders in, pausing to work one arm through then the other, next my chest, then I pause half in and half out of the cave of dresser base that I’ve opened up.
I’m so much bigger. When I was wee, it was a thrill to crouch in here, but now my elbows are bruising through my wet sleeves and I can feel pins and needles starting to tingle in my calves.
I’ve never been claustrophobic but this dark box is making me shudder.
Or maybe it’s the cold now that I’ve finally stopped moving.
Either way, I stretch forward and shove the nearest door, the click of the latch releasing such a familiar sound that I find myself gasping.
There before me is the place John called the Barrens, same as it always was.
It’s neither inside nor out, like so much of the yard, where skyscraper piles make canyons and, if boards get laid on top of the canyons, turn into caves.
Here, it was rusted scaffold poles stored along the tops of buckling old wardrobes, and then at some point my dad shoved a load of corrugated plastic up there too, not deliberately trying to make a roof—more trying to clear space below—but it turned into a roof just the same, turned what was under it into a room.
A room with no walls as such, except that the press of junk all around makes them.
I haul my torso out of the dresser base and wriggle my legs up through the hole behind me, walking forward on my hands in a way I haven’t done since wheelbarrow races at school.
When my knees hit the hard ground in front of the dresser, sending needles of pain down my shins, I ball myself up and sit huddled against the other dresser door, feeling the knobs of those carved flowers digging into my spine.
The Barrens. John named it and so it was his.
It still is. He has protected it. He has found a use for it.
Huddled there chilled and shivering, I cannot deny for one more second what I came to find, even though I couldn’t admit I was searching.
I’m looking at them right now, here in the no longer forgotten, no longer abandoned, no longer neglected, no longer cluttered, far end of the junkyard, with its straight path from the Portakabin and its—oh God—its vegetable patch where Shelley grows such healthy crops to give away so very generously to the poor.
Here in the Barrens, in the dirt, in the dark, some almost gone and starting to blend with the earth around them, others not even begun to settle, here are the graves that John protects with cameras and a new path, with a better fence and different lighting.
I start to count them but feel my gorge rise. I squeeze my eyes shut, swallow hard and manage not to throw up. There’s nothing inside me to come out anyway.
I realise I’m rubbing my fingertips against each other, cold mud and rain making them slide numbly over and back, over and back.
But I’m thinking of them warm and dry, touching the rough edges of the new holes Shelley drilled into the brass table to turn it into a gong.
And when I did that, I was remembering flakes of paint that I brushed off my fingers, looking down at Chloe in the garden, still reeling from reading those words scratched into the wall.
Help, they’re going to kill m—
Only those flakes of paint should have been long gone.
If that message, scraped out under the windowsill of my dead room, was an old game played by children at an earlier stage in the house’s life, or parlourmaids unhappy or dramatic, then the flakes would have been swept up decades ago.
But there they were the day I toured the house and there they probably still are, behind the soundproof boards, stuck in the grooves of the old skirtings where even Chloe’s cleaning didn’t find them because she hadn’t seen the message and didn’t know they were there.
I should have realised right then, I tell myself.
And, even if I didn’t, I should have known better than what I believed about the poor dead fox back here.
I should have had the wit to know that that terrible smell, the grim rage on John’s face, the blank look on Shelley’s, were all wrong.
And I should have known for sure, beyond all doubt and wishful thinking, when the gods sent me the long-dead fox right there in my own front garden—sent me the gift of knowledge yet again, saying, “Look, Lindsay. Look how mild a poor little fox is as it dies and goes back to the earth. No one even noticed this one.”
I did know. I’ve been feeling knowledge starting to bulge at me from the inside all day until I could burst. I should have stopped resisting it. Then I would have been spared what I’m seeing now.
Or, if the plain sight of a fox’s bones and its poor scraps of fur didn’t shout loud enough, then what about the sound good sense I started dishing out to myself when I found out what those four poker players had done?
I said it over and over again: The junkyard owner is not the same as the rest of them.
A doctor, the care home guy and someone to sell the houses shouldn’t be bossed around by the scrappie.
No way should he get a house for himself, via his sister or not, just to say thanks for clearing out furniture and taking it away.
Now, sitting here, covered in mud and soaking wet, I’m looking at the reason John Lord is the kingpin.
He’s got the most to lose.
He did the thing no one else would do.
And did it seven times.
“Seven dead,” I whisper to myself, but I still can’t count them, because I can’t tear my burning eyes away from the newest—Peggy—where the turned dirt is still dark and mounded high, the shadows black and the peaty earth the colour of dried blood where a glimmer of faded light hits it.
Nothing here is flat. Nothing’s paper. Nothing flutters.
This is dry dirt crumbling and wet dirt clumping.
And down below there will be the suck of mud, close and cloying around hair and skin and eyes and teeth.
This is bones and nails and rotting clothes.
That’s Peggy I’m staring at. It’s my brother and his wife and my friend who are propped-up cardboard that my own brain tried to tell me weren’t there, weren’t real.
My own brain, that I thought was sick like Kai’s or broken by losing him, was telling me the truth all along: This life I’ve come home to live is nothing.
God knows why John wanted me back here. I don’t know who he is, this brother of mine. I don’t know anything.
I crawl away on my hands and knees, no idea where I’m going, no idea what I’m going to do, and only realise where I am when I see the chipped and battered paint on four crooked legs, the hooves up off the ground, just the pole supporting it.
I’m at the fairground horse. Of course I am.
I’m right where I was that day when I smelled the smell John said was a fox, a poor harmless, lonely little fox.
I stand up and look around in the gloom, searching for that plastic washing-up basin full of paper recycling.
If only I had glanced at the address labels on all those flyers and catalogues that day.
Or if only I had wondered why exactly that handy little letterbox cage was such a perfect fit for my new front door, I could have put this all together as soon as I moved into the house.
I tell myself that was still too late to help Peggy, but I start to go through the leaflets and flyers all the same, searching for something with her name on it.
Am I hoping for a piece of evidence to show the police, to make them come here and start digging?
Or am I simply desperate for something of Peggy’s to hold in my hand?
I have no idea but what I find makes my blood sink until it’s pooled in my legs.
I know my heart can’t really have stopped but it feels that way. I drop to the ground, strings cut.
I still can’t read the writing but I feel the smooth, expensive slipperiness of my business card, that Kai told me was worth the money.
The business card I dropped through her door that first day.
And I know at once what it means. I was a day early and they were aghast to see me.
I slept right round the clock, only surfacing briefly because my window was open.
I heard screams and that wasn’t a fox either.
That was Peggy, dying. And I didn’t save her.
I crawl back to her, to all of them, but I’m too ashamed to tell them I’m sorry. I’m too ashamed of how stupid I’ve been to even try.
I don’t know how long I sit huddled and frozen, willing time to turn back, willing myself into staying in Hilo, making new friends there, blocking Chloe’s number, forgetting I’ve got nephews, making this unhappen, making myself unknow.
Making it so I wasn’t so close to saving Peggy, didn’t hear her screaming, didn’t stay there in my bed blaming jet lag and nightmares and grief.
I curl myself as small as I can go and wait for it to not happen, because it can’t.
I don’t know how much time passes, but the light has changed and I’m so cold and stiff that I don’t jump when I hear the voice. I make no noise.
“Aye, but her car’s there.” It’s John and he’s near me.
As quietly as I can, I ease open the dresser door and pack myself inside.
There’s a faint imprint from my wet bum and legs, but it’s dark in this corner and I swish some dust around to hide the outline, then I pull the door shut on myself, as silently as I can, and I pray.