Had some other child lost it? It seemed like something that would be made for a child, for a girl… or what else could it be?
As the months drifted on, I lay watching clouds scud across the sky. Occasionally the sound of other children’s shouts carried on the wind, or the clunk of a cricket bat on willow. But I never went back to that school or saw any of those girls again. One day, it occurred to me the sun seemed lower in the sky; a soft haze hovered over the purple moors, and the leaves had become tinged with gold.
In walked my dad. “We’re moving house, Eva.”
My words sounded syrupy and slow. “What, now?”
He laughed, “Well, not right this minute.”
“Before my birthday?”
“You had your birthday six months ago, love. Don’t you remember?”
Six months? I’d missed my birthday? I must be eight!
“You’ve been poorly, love.” He sat on the edge of my bed and stroked my hair from my face. “Thing is, we reckon a move will do us all the power of good – you know, a fresh start?”
“Where are we going?”
“A fantastic place we’ve found in Leeds. Needs a bit of doing up, but you’re going to love it – it’s huge, and it backs onto the woods. And best of all, you’ll be going to a new school – a much better one an’ all. We’re going to see it tomorrow. You up for it?”
He had such an air of optimism about him as he faded in and out of focus that it seemed mean not to smile and nod. But the truth was, it frightened me very much. Waking up, that is.
Chapter Four
It was like being beamed into an alien landscape, standing there on a tree-lined pavement with cars whizzing past. And the new house was far bigger than the last. We got out of my dad’s Cortina and stared up at a large Victorian four-bed detached. Set well back from the road, it had an air of hollow neglect about it, the window frames ragged with flaking paint, a crazy paved driveway tufted with weeds, and a badly overgrown garden tangled with nettles and brambles.
It was the only way we could afford to live in a posh area like this, Dad explained as we walked up the drive. He planned to renovate it all himself.
“Call it an investment – a chance for your old dad to make some proper money!”
A man in a suit stood on the porch, clutching a folder. “Mr and Mrs Hart? I’m from Bradock and Bradock. If you’d like to follow me.”
My dad was practically bowing; it was embarrassing. Somewhere underneath all the ivy and weeds, there was a stone bird bath and a tiny pond coated with emerald algae. I had the feeling the garden had once been loved, that a tiny wren had flapped its wings and sprayed the air in a fountain of diamonds… Someone had caught that joy…
“Come on, Eva. Wake up, love.”
I trailed after them as the man walked briskly around to the side of the house and let us in.
“The price is for a quick sale,” he was saying. “The owner passed away, and her son’s put it on the market. This is a great chance to do the place up and make a profit, or of course”—he smiled at my mother—“it would make a wonderful family home.”
Thing is, while he was talking, I was staring open-mouthed at the scene behind him. There, still on the kitchen table, was a layer of pastry half rolled out and a pie dish partly lined. Had the old lady dropped dead right there, then? Is that where she’d died? No one asked the question. Instead, they walked right past the flour scattered on the floor and the rolling pin under the chair to admire the view from the kitchen window.
“Ooh, isn’t it lovely, Pete? Look at them woods!”
Dad smiled and put his arm around her shoulders.
Shit! We’d be moving in.
So that was how we came to buy a big old house that someone had just died in. A big old house with a big old back bedroom looking out onto a wooded copse that screeched with crows. And it came ready-made with bloodstains that trailed up the wooden staircase and across the landing floorboards, all the way to the back bedroom – drips, streaks and splotches.
This was our fresh start, though.
“This is where you’re going to get better, Eva,” Mum said. The mess was nothing to worry about, and old people died at home all the time – there wouldn’t be a house in Britain that hadn’t had someone die in it, so it didn’t do to dwell. “We’re going to get you off those drowsy tablets, too. And then you can go to the all-girls’ school down the road. It’s got lovely navy-blue uniforms. Come on, love. Be a bit excited, eh?”
The move seemed to be the next day. Of course, it wasn’t, but it seemed that way to me. So fast. A jump. And immediately Dad set about knocking the old-fashioned pantry and coal house out of the kitchen. He had a red bandana round his head, and Mum had the Carpenters playing on the record player. Cement dust coated every imaginable surface as he went at it with a sledgehammer, and two days later, there was a huge gaping hole in the outside wall.
They stood back and looked at it.
“Don’t worry, love,” he said to my mother. “I’ll get some plastic sheeting over it, just ’til I’ve got hold of a brickie.”
She laughed, and they started kissing again.
Next day, he got down to the next job, steaming off years of layered-on wallpaper in the lounge. Ah, this was going to be such a transformation! I never saw him as happy as he was then, with the radio on, smoking and hammering, nailing, steaming, sandpapering, and painting.
But the following week, my mother lost her job, and everything changed. She’d been an evening cleaner at the secondary school in Eldersgate and had a nasty row with one of the other women.
I knew all this because the doctor was reducing the dosage of my drowsy tablets and I’d taken to sitting on the stairs, listening through the bannisters.
“I’m not bloody ’aving it,” Mum was saying. “I’m taking this to a tribunal.”
“Oh, Alex—”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Alex’ me! That bloody bitch called me a Nazi, Pete!”
“You didn’t ’ave to belt her one.”
In the end, Dad persuaded her to leave it, advising she channel her energy into looking for another evening job – he’d do double shifts, and she could look after me full-time until I started school. By then the year was tipping into November, so it meant we’d have to go through winter with nothing but plastic sheeting between us and the outside world, running the constant risk of burglars. It also meant putting up with exposed bloodstains on the floorboards and the horrible dark green bathroom with its rust-spotted mirror. The unpredictable, clunking boiler would have to stay, so, too, the oppressive oak panelling in the hall downstairs. Ditto the heavy oak wardrobe in my bedroom – the back bedroom looking onto the woods, the one with peeling flock wallpaper and a whistling fireplace choked with birds’ nests and soot.
That old lady had died in here, in this very room, I was sure of it – could picture the stained sheets where she’d stewed in her own body fluids, the yellow tidemarks just like the one in Baba Lenka’s bedroom… Someone had lifted her up and put her here, where she had decomposed, staring out at the same barren treetops I was staring at now, but with unseeing opaque eyes… her flesh festering in pee and pus and old blood…
I’m not sure exactly when the night terrors started. And I don’t mean nightmares but night terrors – paralysing, heart-stopping visions meant to cause maximum fear. They became so bad I ended up in hospital with suspected heart failure. Sometimes they started with the plane flying into the side of a mountain, but the bad ones, the ones when something unimaginably terrible and unstoppable was coming, something unspeakably horrific, would always start the same way. That was how I knew they weren’t dreams or memories or anything else… but visions. I was meant to see them.