The Song House (21 page)

The first is of the three of them sitting in the garden: Ed in
a deckchair with Nell on his lap, her face obscured by a lock
of his hair blowing across it, and Cindy kneeling, as if about
to get up, her blouse billowing open, her eyes surprised. Maggie
stares at the photograph for a beat longer, sees how tanned
Cindy’s face is, how white and shining her breasts. Imagines
what it would have been like to be Leon, seeing her that way,
closing one eye, pressing the shutter at just that moment. The
second is of a later time, of her young self in a broad-brimmed
hat, clutching a doll; and the third is a portrait of Nell, looking
hot and uncomfortable, dock leaves at shoulder height. Maggie
knows this photograph. Nell had a series of them, all taken in
the garden and the fields around the cottage, which she’d taped
into an exercise book. She taught Maggie the names of the
plants this way. Sometimes she’d cut a stem or flowerhead and
press it between the covers. After a while they’d darken, go
brittle, fall out onto the floor and be lost.

She studies Nell, takes in her beautiful auburn hair and her
rueful face, and smiles with her, for her, asking her to please
smile properly, willing the image to change so that Maggie can
see that gap-toothed grin again. And in the background is the
river, and beyond the river the trees, slightly out of focus, and
a flare of orange low down on the forest floor.

Beneath the photographs Maggie finds a business card, clean
and new, with Ed’s logo and a telephone number. On the back,
in her fat handwriting, Nell had scrawled another number and
an Internet address. Maggie recognizes it: Ed’s website. She
didn’t know that Nell knew. There are cuttings; one from a
glossy magazine showing her mother’s dreamcatchers hanging
in a shop window, and a music review of Athame at Les
Cousins. At the bottom of the box, wedged flat, is a bent piece
of sugar paper. Maggie takes it out and looks at it: she drew
this picture with the crayons Leon bought her. It was after she’d
stopped talking. Most of the glitter has fallen off the edges, and
the paper is faded, but the colours are still fresh. It was supposed
to be a Christmas card for Ed, only it’s here, in Nell’s box. It
shows a tiny red girl under a mountain. On the top of the mountain
is some sort of animal.

It is the very last thing that makes her cry out. Tucked
beneath the drawing is a folded square of newspaper, yellowed
with age, and when she carefully unfolds it and looks, the sight
of it stops her breath. Here she is, four years old, the whole of
one side of her face a shade darker than the rest, as if it’s been
painted black; that slash of pain cutting across her forehead,
darker still; and the left eye closed and swollen like a walnut.
She’s leaning forward across the picture, one arm stretching out
of the frame. And the boy who is holding her is triumphant
and smiling.

Birdie Crane Found Alive!

Below the headline, a single smudged line of text before the
page is torn:

Schoolboy William Earl was said to be ‘flabbergasted’ when he
discovered—

She never knew.

Nell says, Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear, so Maggie doesn’t
tell her. It might be the words in a book she’s reading, or a
song she’s heard on the radio, or something someone said on
the television. It could be anything, and it will make the feeling
in Maggie inflate like a balloon. But Nell will put her hands
over her ears and block her out, or she’ll say, You mustn’t speak
about it, do you understand? You’ll get us into trouble. They’ll
take you away from me!

Maggie began to unlearn how to speak. It wasn’t deliberate.
She’d start to articulate something, but the words in her mouth
felt like sharp gravel: her tongue couldn’t move round them,
and her voice would come out narrow and pointed over the
stones, as if it had been slashed into ribbons. And then one day,
Leon noticed how silent she’d become and said, What about
singing for us, Bird, you used to do that a treat. And it was easier
to sing, except Nell couldn’t bear that, either. She’d shake her
head and say, Stop, Stop, in a panicky way, as if Maggie was hitting
her, and Leon would shout, What do you think you’re
doing? Poor kid’ll have to open up some time. And you! Stick
your head in the sand long enough and someone’s sure to come
by and kick your arse.

She was a child who couldn’t speak, with a mother who
couldn’t listen. There was no way forward after that. Nell would
talk, though, enough for both of them. They’d lie together in
bed, Nell’s arms wrapped tight round her daughter, and she’d
whisper secrets, stories about her old life, before Maggie, before
Ed and Leon, and the two of them would sleep, eventually, and
dream of the past.

Maggie stares accusingly at the empty bed.

You never let me talk about it, she says, to the pillow, the
wall, Not even between
us
! Never. Like it never happened. You
know, Nell, sometimes I think they should have taken me away
from you. Sometimes I think I’d have been better off.

As if she’s magicked her – of course, she has magicked her –
Nell drifts into her vision.

Tell me now, then, Bird, she says, Go on. You can tell me
now. No one can touch us now.

Sitting in the armchair, with the dreamcatcher box at her
feet and the ghost of her mother lying peacefully on the bed,
Maggie takes a breath to begin. But when she opens her mouth,
silence follows. She swallows hard, feeling the knot of sounds
stuck in her throat, gives a little shake of her head.

In there, you daft thing, says her mother, Go on, write it
down!

Maggie picks up the notebook and reads the words on the
front again, parting like a wave beneath the steady shield:
Veritate
et Virtute.
Truth and courage, truth and courage, she says.
She turns to the pages at the back.

Black again. Light goes thin like this. If I put my eye here, it
goes black. The boy came with pop and a fruit. It had fur and
a sandwich in silver paper. The paper was shiny. The boy sat
on the bench. He smelled funny. He said, She’s not ready for
you yet. I tried to think but he was too close.

She can’t do it. Maggie looks up from the page. Instead of the
bed, instead of her image of Nell, she sees the plate glass window
of the petrol station. Three women looking out at her,
her looking in at them. The revelation makes her heart beat
faster: they were seeing only her. But she was seeing them, and
in front of them, like a frail replica of the real thing, she saw
herself.

Okay, Nell, she says, I’m going to tell you. But I have to
step back to see it.

The light goes very thin again, and then it’s gone. If she put
her eye to the crack in the door, all she’d see would be black.
It must be years, she thinks, and to stop the fizzing in her chest,
she plays I Spy.

The boy came earlier with a bottle of pink lemonade and
a fruit. It had fur on it: a peach. And he had a sandwich wrapped
in silver paper, but she wouldn’t eat it. She told him she wanted
her mummy, and he said, She’s not ready for you yet. She’s
upset. And he’s got to be on his plane. We don’t want him
coming back and spoiling everything, do we? And at first she
thought he meant Leon, so then she worried about Nell, and
what would she do all alone, and then she worried about the
postman with the something eyes. Then she remembered a
song they used to like singing. They were all going to look for
America. When she’d asked what a merica was, Nell told her
it was a massive country far away where all the westerns were
filmed. You had to catch a plane to get there. She didn’t know
if Nell would go on the plane with Leon, or how she would
find them in such a big place. It was a bad worry.

The boy must have seen it, the worry worming around
inside her, because he sat close to her on the bench and said
in a soft voice,

Do you like horses?

And when she didn’t say anything, he asked,

Do you like boats? I like them.

And when she still said nothing, he said,

You must be very tired. Shall I sing you to sleep?

And in a quiet, high voice, he sang a song she’d never heard
before. She listened very carefully. A song about a storm,
about a boat on a stormy sea, about an anchor. She didn’t know
what an anchor was, but she didn’t like the sound of it, the way
the word broke in two inside his mouth. Or the way he laughed
at his singing, made a joke about his pillows, how the pillows
rolled. It made her think of Nell and Leon in the big bed.

She must have fallen asleep, though, because when she wakes,
the boy is gone. But the worry is back again, crouched like a
toad in a corner of the dark.

There’s a lump on her eye with a cut down the middle of
it, and she touches it, and the feel of the cut under her fingers
is ragged like the hem of Nell’s dress.

The line of light is wide again, and she wakes up and moves
off the slats that have been hard on her back and looks through
the gap into the open. She sees a lot of children crossing the
courtyard, going under the shade of a tree and round to the
front of the house. She’s about to shout for her mother, but
remembers that the dog will come and eat her if she talks, so
she sings instead. But no one can hear her for the sound their
feet make on the gravel.

She stays at the crack, smelling the air, which tastes like light.
She wonders if she’s been put in here because she has to be
cured, like Nell’s fur hat. She hears singing. It’s very faint, but
not on the radio; she can tell it’s not on the radio because they
keep stopping and starting, and when they stop there’s a sound
like a stick being tapped on wood. That’s what makes them
stop. And again, says a voice, and they start up once more:

Each little flower that opens

Each little bird that sings

He made their glowing colours

He made their tiny wings.

Maggie tries to focus on the words on the page, sees how some
of them are blotched from where the ink has smudged. She
wipes her nose with the back of her hand. What did you do,
Nell? she says, You never told me that, either. What did you do
when you found me gone?