29. Wren
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
WREN
I am reminded of when I came here as a little girl and I ran away back to Mum’s car.
No option this time.
I used to think of tactics to remain calm, and then life got in the way.
It’s amazing what being busy can do for the brain, but sometimes when I stop, the old feelings rush up and twist my heart, and I have to quickly do something, anything, to prevent them from bubbling over.
I employ them now though, breathe slowly in and out, count inside my head.
It is odd to be out here and know lockdown is not restricting anyone’s movements.
Plenty of people could walk along the street if they wanted to.
And we are not teenagers beholden to our parents.
We are women, beholden to unspoken rules about being alone at night for sure, but in theory we are free to be here.
Standing, looking at Bishop’s House. It is getting over that gate where we dip our toes back into the forbidden.
We have easily done it before, and yet it is so different now.
The front gate has stood the test of time, the black iron vivid as ever.
The less robust metal gate that surrounds the perimeter leans against it, maybe blown over by a strong breeze.
The stone pillars that flank the gate have moss on their spherical posts, and bird shit is splattered on the left wall, parallel with the metal gate.
The walls are lower than I remember, barely waist height, easily hidden in places by thick shrubbery and bushes with thorns.
It is a cloudy, dark night, moon in shadow, which means the house is invisible from here, an indistinct opaque mass in the distance. The others are already waiting for me.
“Ready?” Cuckoo is on time for this one. Midnight on the dot, we are dressed in all black like the old days. Starling even has a face mask, kept from times when safety was paramount to some and disguise was critical to us.
Starling scouts around for anyone, and then we take it in turns to help each other up and over the metal railing.
Cuckoo, always the fittest, is able to clear it herself once the rest of us are safely over.
We have torches, our phones of course left in our respective homes, but we don’t turn them on until we’re farther into the garden, the house in our sights.
We also have a large backpack, bin liners, and emergency garden trowels in case the shovels have disappeared. But we’re not thinking about that yet.
I never thought I would set foot in here ever again.
That night, when we left with dirty fingernails and tearstained cheeks, I swore I’d never return. I smashed that stupid gnome to smithereens and I avoided this street, this place, and pretended it no longer existed.
“We have to go into the house first,” Starling says.
“The house?” I gasp. “It’s bad enough we’re in the grounds. Why? She’s not there.”
“She’s not, but what if we left anything behind?”
I open my mouth to protest, but nothing comes out.
“Like what?” Cuckoo asks.
“I don’t know.” Starling shifts from side to side. “We ran out of that place when . . . and then we got the spades, but . . . we didn’t go back up. We buried her and we ran, quite rightly, far away. We never came back. What if we left things that could identify us?”
“You’re right,” Crow says. “We have to look. Check everywhere. Be sure. Because we’re only going to do this once.”
God. Resignation inserts itself deep in my shoulders, and I exhale. My only lifeline is Cuckoo. “Cuckoo? Do we have to?”
“I didn’t want to go in there either,” she says. “But Starling is right. We can’t leave any loose ends, not if we’re willing to . . .”
“Inside, then,” I say. “Let’s do that first. I don’t think I could face it afterward.”
They agree. Will seeing Goldie create another fissure, an irreparable fracture in our friendship? Will it force us apart again?
Or will it finally bind us, wrap us further together in a secret so suffocating we need each other to breathe?
“Gloves,” Starling says. She has them with her. “We’re already all over the house, I know, but . . . just to avoid anything new. And everyone avoided the CCTV spots?”
“There was a new one around the corner,” Cuckoo says. “Did everyone avoid that?”
Thankfully, it seems we all did. And we put the gloves on.
We bypass the front door, as we always did, even though it’s no longer boarded up. We walk around to our window, and sure enough, it is still smashed, welcoming us inside.
“Like we never left,” Cuckoo says, but I am distracted by something on a jagged piece of glass. A blue ribbon, accidentally caught and torn from its source.
“One of ours?” I say, but they shake their heads.
“Blown here from something over the years,” Starling says, an explanation none of us asked for.
The basement is freezing. Was it always this cold?
Enough to make me wince and zip up my coat, hug my arms across my chest. We finally shine our torches, and it seems at odds with my memory.
I have images of us in a circle playing party games, drinking, sitting on blankets and cushions with lots of food and giggles and color.
Instead it is gray all around. Gray concrete floor, gray walls.
Dingy is the first word that comes to mind.
There are piles of rubbish in the corners, though none left from us.
We always cleaned up in here. Which is why it’s all the more surprising when there is a bottle of vodka sitting in the center of the room, half drunk, the very same kind Goldie used to steal from Patricia.
“Is that ours?” I whisper.
“No way,” Starling says. “We wouldn’t have left that. We weren’t even drinking in here the last time—”
“It’s a common brand,” Cuckoo says quickly. “It’s not ours. Plenty of other people could have come here in the past seven years, had a drink.”
“Maybe the strange people that used to live here came back,” Crow says.
And yet I can’t get it out of my mind. I pick it up against Starling’s instruction and put it in my bag, ready to dispose of it later.
Just in case.
The steps leading up to the ground floor are more fragile than before, wood buckling under the weight of our shoes.
Too many of us at once and they would break apart.
Dust flies into the air as the basement door is disturbed, which is too stiff and reluctant to let us out.
Cuckoo leads the way, pushing hard, and eventually it opens, dust thick as smoke, causing us to cough.
Our torches cast beams of light that show dust floating in the air, glittery when visible.
The front hall, with the double front doors in all their glory up ahead, stained glass unable to sparkle due to being boarded up outside, but on full display this side.
There are images of flowers and birds, vines creeping their way around as if accidental, intrusive rather than deliberately crafted.
The floorboards are exposed, varnished wood, the smell of it somehow still present, which must be a placebo effect because these floors can’t have been varnished for decades.
We emerge from under the main staircase, which leads grandly to the floor above, but we stay in the hallway.
There are plenty of doors leading off from here, places to reexplore.
The doors are all closed, which doesn’t seem right, to my memory.
I remember them all wide open, welcoming us inside.
Now they are firmly shut, which maybe we should take as a warning we can’t afford to listen to.
You shouldn’t be here.
The thought—because it can only be a thought, the house cannot communicate—jumps into my mind unbidden.
We swore we would never return.
After Hugo died, the sale of Bishop’s House fell through, just as we wanted.
But after Goldie, we couldn’t go back. It was up to me to check in every now and then with Mum, to make sure no one else was interested in purchasing it.
And no one was. It was too complicated, required too many permissions, was too expensive to knock down and build on.
No one was allowed on the grounds unless Mum showed them, and as before, Bishop’s House fell back into obscurity, our secrets safe.
Until now.
“This floor first,” Crow says. “Check every room.”
Her voice bounces off the walls and comes back to us in a whispered echo.
We check the rooms toward the back of the house first, the galley kitchen and oversized bathroom.
The golden toilet is in its prime position, the crystal light switch grubby but comfortingly there too.
How we gasped when we first saw them, amazed that something like that could be in a place like this.
The kitchen, with countertops dusty but otherwise intact, still feels like the most normal room in the house.
It is dated but looks as though it could be used tomorrow with a bit of cleaning.
The only indication of something not quite right is the boarded-up back door, even from the inside, and empty shelves.
Not even a box of cereal left behind, or a jar of pickles.
On the kitchen table are bowls and plates and cutlery, set out in anticipation of a meal, and I frown at them, wondering if they were like that before.
Weren’t they neatly packed away? Wouldn’t we have made something of this, pretended to have a dinner party?
Starling opens the wooden cupboards and looks inside the tiny oven, hobs blackened and dirty.
Empty as before, until she reaches the last, producing a packet of cigarettes.
Her cigarettes. The kind we smoked together for the first time. There is even the same health warning on the front, an image of damaged lungs and block capitals informing us of the risk of death from cancer.
A chill runs through me, whispered warning returning: You shouldn’t be here.
But Starling laughs, opening up the packet, which is almost full. She takes a lighter from her pocket, brings a cigarette to her lips, and lights it, inhaling a long drag.