Diving Belles (18 page)

Warm light comes through the windows and lies in slabs on the floor.

The buddleia is growing back. The woman comes up to the attic and tells the boy to go downstairs. She hasn’t been in the attic for a long time. When the boy has gone, she does the strangest thing. She gets on to the rocking horse and she doesn’t fall through the ceiling.

Brick by brick by brick, more houses are being built somewhere near by. When do we arrive in them? We don’t know. Were we already there and the house was built around us? We don’t know. We don’t exist without bricks and slate and glass, and bricks and slate and glass do not exist without us. There is no need to think about it any further, but sometimes we like to think about it a little bit.

The boy makes louder noises and puts more weight on the floorboards and stairs: bang bang bang. He doesn’t go up to the attic now. He stays in his bedroom with the door and the curtains closed.

One day he disappears, but nobody seems worried this time. We can’t find him anywhere in the house. No one else is looking. The house goes back to the way it was. There is only a toothbrush left behind in the pot, the banister he pulled off hanging askew. The house gets its quietness back; it gets its echoes and its quietness. Once or twice, the man goes into the boy’s bedroom, talking, as if he has forgotten that the boy isn’t there.

Things we miss about the boy who left:

The girl who came to visit him and wrote her name behind a corner of the wallpaper and then stuck it back down with spit.

The smell of the stuff he put on his hair – sometimes we would take off the lid and scoop out tiny little bits.

The house is bare. People come and go, mostly in pairs.

When they come in the front door, they bring with them one or two dry leaves, one or two variations of light, and then the door closes and the light is the same.

There are dark patches on the walls in the shape of furniture and pictures that aren’t there any more. The rocking horse nods forwards. The carpet is thin and threadbare. Why doesn’t anyone replace it? We would have replaced it by now. Light moves up the stairs and then down the stairs, and the house is dark again.

We miss lamps. We didn’t think we would. We must have got used to them. At night, colours ebb away as if they were never there. The corners of the house darken and the hallway becomes narrower. A door bangs open and closed but we don’t know which door it is. It isn’t one of our doors. We would never bang our doors like that. It makes us nervous. We miss lamps. The windows are huge and dark. The curtains are still here, they usually take away the curtains. One night, we decide to close them. It is not our job to close them but we prefer it when they are closed.

At night, the house closes into itself and then it stills and quietens and sleeps, and we dream of it under water.

A strong breeze comes in under the door and chases us around the house. It slams a loose cupboard door. It furls and unfurls the corner of a loose piece of wallpaper in a bedroom. Underneath, someone had written something, which they shouldn’t have done because that will be hard to get off and we can’t remember who it was.

It’s always the same – feet, feet, feet and dirt on the carpet and now everything is being moved, now everything is being changed. There is noise and there is more noise and then there is the worst thing: walls have been taken away and a door. Now there is a gap where the door was and there is a bigger room instead of two rooms and one less room where the wall was before. We have been rearranged. We hide behind the curtain poles and under the loose tiles in the kitchen. Things have been changed and things have been taken away. We are not sure. We are not sure at all. We have been rearranged. It is not what we expected to happen. How can you take away a wall or a door and not expect the whole house to fall down? How hasn’t the whole house fallen down already? We cower, covering our heads, waiting for it to happen.

It hasn’t happened yet.

The man who did all the moving and all the rearranging is staying here with a woman. They have put in a new carpet. We actually liked the old carpet. We actually miss the old carpet. They don’t get up early and leave for most of the day like most of the others. Instead, they stay in bed for most of the morning and they eat breakfast in bed and get crumbs everywhere. We are not sure about them. But the woman sings in the shower and her voice is deep and beautiful, almost like the piano, and the man downstairs in the kitchen starts humming the same tune and it seems like he hasn’t noticed he is doing it. They stand under the crack in the bathroom ceiling. They say it looks like an ear; they say it looks like a heart. Why are they so good at finding bits of themselves drawn on to the house?

We miss the piano.

They talk about things they are going to do to the house. They are going to get rid of the crack in the bathroom. They are going to pull out the buddleia. They are going to paint everything. They are going to rearrange more walls. We don’t want to listen, but we have to listen. It seems like they have nothing to do except change the house. We push against the wall when they’re drilling and break their drills. We cling to the wallpaper. It is our job to protect the house.

Now they have gone away and they have covered everything with sheets. We like everything covered with sheets. It keeps everything clean and less dusty. It is not our job to dust.

Sometimes we think of the butterballs. They are the only thing we have ever missed.

The new carpet is fraying. There is no stopping it. The buddleia is growing back. There is no stopping that, either.

Shadows that have passed across the keyhole: twelve.

Number of silverfish in the attic: seven, but one is not moving.

Dust that has floated past so far: four million, seven hundred and forty-eight pieces. There is a lot less dust than you’d think when a house is empty.

Number of times we have banged into a wall, forgetting that things have been changed: too many to count.

We dream, and in our dreams, there are whole houses under water, and streets and trees. It is cold and quiet. Bubbles rise slowly out of chimneys.

They have come back. We think they are the same people but we are not sure. We are not good with faces. They seem much older. They walk slowly up the stairs. They only take some of the sheets off the furniture. The woman stays in bed, not just late into the morning but for the whole day. The man lowers her gently into water. He sponges her back and washes her hair, keeping her propped upright. He is silent, he is concentrating hard. We, the house, hold our breath.

And we must have lost track of time because when we release it, the house is bare again. The rocking horse nods forwards. The air slows and stills in rooms. Nothing is ever exactly the same, but it goes back to how it was. We watch the door and wait for somebody to come through it.

The Wishing Tree

They were lost but it did look familiar. Maybe it was somewhere they had been lost before.

‘I think we got lost here last time,’ Tessa said. ‘It looks familiar.’

Her mother, June, tapped the steering wheel with her nails and craned her neck forwards. She was almost sixty and had started wearing scarves all year round: she had summer scarves and winter scarves, all ironed into neat folds. She said to Tessa that it was because her age showed in her neck, but Tessa knew that she also wore them to cover up the small white scar on her throat. She had bought one for her mother herself – gold with red poppies on – and had sent it in the post, feeling complicit in something.

‘So we’re not lost. We know where we are,’ June said. The roads were narrow with high hedges. She drove fast and every time they went round a corner Tessa braced herself against the seat, imagining another car coming straight at them. ‘Stop doing that,’ June said. ‘You’re making me nervous.’ When another car did pass, they had to squeeze so far over that a kaleidoscope of nettles and bindweed pressed flat and star-like against Tessa’s window.

‘It looks familiar,’ Tessa said again. They had come down here a couple of years ago so that her mother could visit an old friend and got lost trying to find the town. Tessa had been talked into going then and she had been talked into going again now. June didn’t like driving long distances by herself and she needed an excuse not to stay at her friend’s because she hated her dog, which clattered up and down the wooden stairs all night and left hair on the beds. ‘We’ll stay in a bed and breakfast and have a few days away. I’ll pay,’ she said. ‘I’ve got vouchers.’

Now, Tessa definitely recognised that oak tree at the bend and the lay-by after it. ‘Could you pull in here for a sec?’

June sighed impatiently, but she pulled in and stopped the engine. She didn’t like stopping; she liked to be moving, on the move, even if she didn’t know where she was going. ‘I used to sit you on a newspaper to stop you getting car sick,’ she said. ‘I had to buy one especially.’

Tessa tried to open her door but the car was too close to the hedge. There was no way she could get through the gap; maybe a few years ago she could, but extra weight had started to creep up on her. Sean, her boyfriend of nine years, said he didn’t notice any difference. ‘You’re just the same, aren’t you?’ he asked, gentle and puzzled as always. She put on his slippers and jumpers as soon as she got in from work and wore his baggy T-shirts to bed.

June got out of the car so that Tessa could climb over. On her way, Tessa knocked into the horn and it let out a short bellow. It was mid-August and heat funnelled into the lane. The mud was dry and packed down. There were bees everywhere. The hedges were full of honeysuckle and the hard green beginnings of blackberries.

There was a narrow path leading away from the road. ‘I think we went up there,’ Tessa said, although doubt niggled as always – she could walk back up a high street the way she’d come from and not know it, go back in the same shops.

June flicked a horsefly off the back of her hand. ‘Where are you going?’ she called.

Tessa’s plastic flip-flops snapped against the ground. She remembered this. The path was overgrown and shady. There was a signpost with the top snapped off, thick ivy covering a gate; the ground was getting wetter and colder.

June caught up with her. ‘If you see a horsefly on my back, kill it, will you? It’s stalking me.’

The path ended suddenly and opened out on to a shallow pool of water with trees arching over. There, on the far side of the pool, was the tree they had found here last time. It hung low and wide over the water, its thin branches covered in hundreds of small yellow leaves and then, among the leaves, there were other things: a flash of red, something silver trailing almost into the water, a ribbon swaying from a branch. Up closer, the colours and shapes suddenly became hundreds of objects tied all over the tree: shoelaces, bracelets, plastic bags, plaited wool, gloves.

Everything seemed especially quiet and still. The water didn’t move; not even one ripple.

‘I’d forgotten about this,’ June said.

Tessa nodded, although she hadn’t forgotten. They had got lost here before and come across the tree, looking just as half-threatening, half-beautiful as it did now. It was like a strange bird crouched over. Tessa had heard something about wishing trees and knew it was one straight away, although somehow she had imagined it would have looked, or felt, different – more passive maybe, less like it was reaching outwards.

Last time, they had both made wishes. June had rolled her eyes when Tessa suggested it, but she looked at the tree for a while and took off the leather bracelet she wore around her wrist and hung it over a branch. Then she’d gone back to the car and sat in it with the engine idling, singing loudly and out of tune with the radio.

Tessa had taken the band out of her ponytail. She had looked back, heard the car’s faint noise. She couldn’t think of a wish. Her mind had emptied of everything; there was just her heart beating, just a vague tightness in her throat. She had thought it would be easy – why wasn’t it easy? Nothing had come into her head, or rather, suddenly, this did: a memory of that morning when she had walked in on her mother after her shower. It was a mistake, an accident; it should have been something to laugh about. But June, who had wiped clear a gap in the fogged-up mirror and was looking at herself intently, sadly, whipped round like a startled deer, grabbed a towel, and wedged the door so it wouldn’t open any further, peering round from behind it angrily. Afterwards, they had both pretended it hadn’t happened.

That was it. Nothing else had come into Tessa’s mind. It was ridiculous. She could never do anything properly. She knew that her mother was fidgeting around in the car, waiting to leave, so she had looped the hairband over a branch and stood back. What had she wished for, exactly? Nothing else had come into her mind. She had wished for nothing.

She’d tried to forget about it. Wishes she should have made flitted about like moths from time to time but she swatted them away. Maybe she would have forgotten about it completely, but now here they were back again.