Sophie (4 page)

“OK. Good, OK. So where the hell did it come from?”

The question didn’t seem directed at me, but I answered anyway. “I don’t know. But it hasn’t got a face.”

“Does—it have a name?”

I nodded. “It’s called Ol' Grady. Can I have some more squash?”

Sophie looked right past me. “As much as you like, Mattie,” she said. “I’ll go and get some now. You feeling all right?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“I can’t believe this,” Sophie murmured, and again I felt that I was only overhearing her words, that I was not expected to comment. I kept quiet. After a long time, she seemed to focus on the bedroom again. “Was that more squash you wanted?”

“Please,” I said.

“Right. We’ll straighten your bed out when I get back. Shit, it’s an awful mess, Mattie. You’d better sleep in my room tonight.”

“Can I?” I was immediately elated, and the nightmare slipped away at last.

“Yeah. It won’t hurt, this once. Now hang on while I get you another drink. And use your 'haler again.”

“OK,” I agreed solemnly.

As she left, I heard her say something under her breath. She had her back turned, but I caught the words. “Not Ol' Grady, Mattie. Its name was Ol'
Greedy
.” And then she was gone.

That night, I curled up in Sophie’s bed, warm against her back, and we slept soundly together. There were no more nightmares for a long while after.

“Ol' Grady had been dead for two or three years, by then,” he says. “I only had him as dreams. When I thought about it, much later, I realized.”

“What?”

“That he must have come to you as well. For longer, because you were older. I always used to wake up before he reached me.” His eyes are sharp. “You must remember him, Sophie; properly, I mean, not just as nightmares. What happened? What used to happen after he reached out? What did he do?”

I stare at him in silence, not knowing what to say, how to deal with this. I notice with sudden dismay that there is a faint sheen of perspiration on his face.

“I used to try and imagine,” he says, slowly. “And as I got older, the things I imagined became—more awful. They say that childhood fears are by far the worst, but that’s not the whole story at all. It’s when your childhood fears start growing faces that you are really afraid.” He hesitates. “When I realized what you must have been through, I couldn’t really believe it.”

“What did you think?”

“You never really talked about him. Not properly. I know you did, a bit, when you showed me—what was left. But that’s different. You didn’t talk about
you
.”

I swallow, with difficulty. “Do you think maybe that’s the problem?”

He blinks. “Do you remember going to the quarry?” he asks. His voice has altered almost imperceptibly. “Summer was really starting to happen by then.”

The candle flame splutters for a moment before recovering itself. The wind hammers on the boards and tiles of the house, and the upstairs corridors echo its sounds back.

The sun was brilliant as we walked up the hill to the quarry, and the morning was already thrumming with a vibrant warmth. The edges of the quarry were almost completely hidden by the uprushing growth of tall weeds, pink and purple with flowers, that waved lazily in the gentle breeze. My sturdy legs carried me with more confidence than I could remember them having done before, and by the time we reached the top of the hill, I was proudly controlling my breathing. Sophie was a step or so behind, smiling and carrying the picnic in a large plastic bag.

“We’re at the top!” I said happily.

“OK. Let’s see if there’s any way at all through these things. Be careful, Mattie. Stamp them down a little and mind out for the edge.” I nodded. Feeling like an explorer in a jungle, I beat down the weeds with a stick, trampling them underfoot with glee. After five minutes or so of this, we had cleared a path through to the way down. The stark expanse of the quarry stretched out below us, looking more white than grey in the direct sunlight. Only at one end, where the cages were, was the rock dark, caught in the shadow cast by that high side and lip. I swallowed. Strangely, the cages looked even more ominous now that this contrast was apparent. Almost as if they were staining the quarry themselves.

Once on the quarry floor, we cleared an area of the larger stones and settled down in it. I found a suitable anvil among the rocks to one side, and Sophie helped me to carry it to our central camp. Here also we set out the various constituents of the picnic, on carefully chosen stones. Sophie and I took turns determining the placement of the foil-wrapped packages she had prepared that morning. There were big white labels on some of them.

“You can read these,” Sophie said, grinning. “They say what’s inside.”

“OK,” I said, although a part of me was rather bored by the idea. I turned my attention to the first one, and, having read it, read it a second time. I broke into helpless laughter, rocking backwards and forwards. “It says—it says—”

“What does it say?” There was a gleam of amusement in her eyes.

“It says
dog shit
!” I burst out at last, laughter squeezing tears out of my eyes. “You wrote
dog shit
on this one!”

“Open it and see,” Sophie said, solemnly. Eagerly, I tore the foil wrapping open. Inside were several sticky, shrivelled-looking brown things. I dissolved into giggles again. Finally, able to talk only with considerable effort, and still gasping a bit, I managed to say, “What
is
it?”

“You read the label; you tell me,” Sophie said, but I knew her too well, and had seen the secretive laughter on her face.

“Tell me, tell me,” I shouted through my giggles. “Tell me!”

“All right, calm down.” She grinned. “You’ll explode with giggles.”

“What is it?” I peered into the package. “It
looks
like—like what you said it was.”

“It’s dried bananas,” Sophie said, proudly. “They’re really nice. You’ll like them.”

“Where did you get them? Bananas? Did you make it yourself?”

“You can buy them in the health food shop. They’re really nice. Someone at school had them in her packed lunch.”

“What’s in the other parcels?”

“You can’t open them until one o’clock. But you can read the labels now,” she added, seeing my crestfallen look.

“Hey! Dead beetles! What’s that?”

“You have to wait,” she reminded me. While I read the rest of the lunch labels, laughing uproariously at some of them, Sophie went off to collect the quarry books. Seizing upon the hammer once she had returned with the bag, I quickly left Sophie to her pointless scribblings, and set about happily breaking up the more interesting-looking rocks that were scattered around. Within a few minutes I had found several of the common thumbnail-shaped shells, and was thoroughly immersed in my own world. The sun moved higher above where, strangely out of place, two small children were playing quietly.

We ate the wonderful picnic lunch, threw stones to try and knock over one of the cans, lay in the sun and made stories for each other. I listened, enthralled, to Sophie's, and she endured my rambling efforts with kindness and patience. Her scribblings went on for pages. I ran around the perimeter of the quarry, pleased at my effort, the pleasure banishing any tightness at my chest. Half an hour after lunch, with its cans of drink, I peed against the quarry wall, making patterns where the glittering stream of urine turned the hot rock dark.

When the evening drew on, the lowering sun turned a marvellous deep red. It spilled into the mouths of the cages, lighting them up like a row of blazing eyes, darkly hooded. Drawn by a half-sickening curiosity, I edged around so that eventually I was staring right into one of them. It felt like gazing into the open throat of something. The old beer cans and bits of rock on the cage floor cast short, black shadows down the depth of the opening. The bars across its mouth cut across the litter and rock, joining the dark shadows at the back. I could not see any end to the cage at all. Behind me, Sophie was gathering things together ready for our departure. With my heart beating fast, I picked up a stone and hurled it into the cage, turning and running even as I did so. There was a faint noise as it struck something metallic. I ran down and out across the quarry until I was safely away, then turned and looked.

In the cage, nothing stirred. There was no sound, no echo. It was as if the stone had been swallowed.

“You’re getting really brown,” Sophie said, eyeing me.

“Am I?”

four

He has turned away from me, rested his elbows on the windowsill. The dark pane reflects his face, distorting it slightly where the old glass has rippled; when lightning scores the sky outside, the contours of his brow and cheeks are thrown momentarily into sharp relief. He hasn’t spoken now for several minutes, seems instead to be searching for something beyond the cracked boards. One foot stirs uneasily on the dusty kitchen floor.

I take the time to examine things again, to remind myself of what is happening. I have a faint, unpleasant sensation that I am missing something important, but I am unable to pin it down. I try to ignore it, but the feeling won’t go away.

The reasons behind this evening are starting to become clearer. I try to hold everything that he says in my head, to turn it around and around in my memory until it fits into the whole sequence, knowing that my only chance to affect him lies in understanding him, and understanding what he wants. Outwardly, I can do nothing; every time I try to move my hands, I am reminded of this. But I can listen, and, up to a point, I can talk to him. If I am careful. If I don’t try to move too fast.

There is a part of me that looks on with derision as I tell myself this; but it is all I can do, and I have to do
something
.

I am very afraid.

There are areas—territories—that he refuses to explore. Not yet, at least. And there are things he will not hear from me. The bruise on my face is less painful now, but I find myself half willing it to keep hurting, to remind me of that. There are rules here.

If I detach myself from the immediacy of what is happening, I find myself curiously amazed—amazed that I could think that I knew someone so well, and yet know them not at all.

He rubs his face with one hand, pushing hair back away from his eyes, and turns towards me once more. He starts to sit down, then checks himself, remains standing, leaning against the wall. I remember his words:
I loved you. I wanted to be a part of everything that you were.
Is that true? If it’s an excuse, what is it an excuse for? I don’t believe he was lying; but then why am I sitting here?

He smiles slightly. He looks calmer.

My sixth birthday was one of the happiest of my life. The week had begun with salmon-pink clouds rimming the sky at dawn: I knew, because I had been awake as early as possible. The week of my birthday was also the week of Sophie's, and with great secrecy I had been preparing my presents and card for her. It was a ritual that went back as far as I could remember, with both Sophie and I pretending nonchalantly that nothing was out of the ordinary until the actual days arrived. This year, my card for her was an elaborate and time-consuming project, decorated with a good deal of stolen silver foil and milk-bottle tops. I worked on it in the privacy of my bedroom, early in the mornings, when Sophie and my mother were still asleep and the world was silent.

My mother celebrated our birthdays in her own way. There was a selection of small, pretty-looking cakes after school, carried into the drawing room on a china plate. There was also lemonade, which helped to alleviate the dryness of the cakes, which it seemed to me might have been cooked with the dust from the drawing room; they had the same musty smell. There were presents, too: there was a quality about these that remained uniform throughout my childhood, and which I only later learned to recognize. They were universally expensive, yet out of date—the kind of gifts bought by grandparents with no sense of the current fashions in children’s toys. There was a cupboard in the upstairs hallway where Sophie and I put our birthday presents each year.

My gift for Sophie was the best thing I could find. There had been agonies of doubt and soul-searching before I resolved to give it to her instead of keeping it for myself, for while I knew what a good present it would make, I was deeply in love with it myself. I had come across it in the quarry one afternoon, and something had made me stop before calling Sophie over to me. All that afternoon I had worried at it, gradually easing it from its firm seating in the grey stone, and when it eventually sprang loose—there was a small section missing on its other side, but nothing too serious—I had pocketed it, instead of surrendering it to the quarry bag with the other shells. It was quite different from anything I had seen before in the quarry: a round, spiralled shell as wide as my fist and perfectly made. Compared to the thumbnail shells that littered the rock, it was a work of art. Prising it out without breaking it had taken me the best part of four hours, but Sophie, making her unintelligible notes in the quarry books, or sunning herself happily under the oval sky, didn’t seem to notice. I took the shell with me to school the next day, a warm, flat medallion in my shorts pocket. During games, when I was left alone in the classroom to read a book, I carefully painted the shell with white glue—the kind that dries clear and shiny. And so my gift for Sophie was complete.

Seeing her face when she opened the small, untidily wrapped parcel made all the time and effort well worth it. She gave me a huge hug. “It’s fantastic,” she said. “And you’ve made it shiny as well.”

I nodded happily. “Do you like the card?”

“I love the card. I’m going to stick it on the wall in my bedroom where I can look at it. You must have been collecting those bottle tops for weeks.” She held the card out at arm’s length to admire it. “It’s really good, Mattie,” she said. “You didn’t do this at school?”

“No,” I said, feeling proud that I hadn’t. “Mrs. Jeffries always tells us to draw our cards in crayon, and I wanted to make one that glitters.”

“Well, you’ve certainly managed it. It really shines, doesn’t it? And your writing’s much better, too.”

A few days later it was my turn. There were more dry cakes and lemonade, and, once these had been endured, more beautifully made, totally unsuitable presents. My mother sat in her chair, not meeting my eyes, tapping one foot slightly against the thick carpet. As soon as we were able to escape, Sophie and I retired upstairs to her bedroom to start the birthday celebrations in earnest.

Her present to me was neatly wrapped in red paper and tied with blue ribbon. Eagerly, I tore it open. Inside there was a small hardback book, a bar of white chocolate and a badge with
I am 6
on it.

“The chocolate’s for now,” she told me seriously. “I was going to get you the Winnie the Pooh book called
Now We Are Six
, but we can get that from the library. This is a bit different. What do you think?”

It was strange; she almost sounded anxious, as if she was afraid I wouldn’t like her present. I turned it over in my hands carefully. On the front of the book, the title read
The Observer Book of Fossils
—and then, in smaller writing, “In Colour.” But what was most exciting of all was that, below the title, was a photograph of the shell I had given Sophie, almost exactly as it had been when I saw it poking out of the quarry wall.

“Wow!” I said.

“You like it? It’s called an ammonite, that shell you found. You can find out all the names of the shells in the quarry, if you want.”

“It’s brilliant.”

“I’ve written your name in it. See? At the front.”

The end of term came in a flurry of rolled-up paintings and bags and boxes of books, emptied desks and lost Wellingtons. Mrs. Jeffries’s cheery classroom was a chaotic jumble for two days, until it gradually resolved into an ordered sterility as more and more of the year’s work was taken home to be stuck on fridge doors and bedroom walls. There was one brief eruption when it was discovered that I had written my name in ink pen on the inside of my desk lid, and another when Chloe Webster stabbed herself with a pair of scissors, but Mrs. Jeffries appeared unwilling to make too much of a fuss. The school playground was bubbling with parents after final assembly. The oldest children—those leaving—clumped into small groups, the boys shouting jokes at each other, boasting and trying to exceed one another’s eloquent swearing, while the girls huddled in tearful clusters, hugging people they’d never liked and would probably see around the village the next day. Elements of carnival combined with grand farewells until the school appeared as if in the throes of an extravagant wake. Teachers, brittle smiles wedged on their faces, shunted children aside as they made for their cars.

Sophie and I slipped away discreetly in the confusion. We’d finished early, of course, and the sun was bright and thick in the air, so we walked slowly down the lane towards our house. The trees on the hill, surrounding the quarry, were a dark and cool-looking green, and the hedgerows had exploded into masses of weeds and grasses. The summer holidays stretched out in front of us like a journey, and the thought of them was sweet and happy.

We saw less and less of my mother. In the summer she retired in any case, preserved until the onset of autumn by the musty air of the drawing room, like something in formalin. But this summer it was even more noticeable. As her belly grew, the more she receded into the house, out of sight. The tightness of her dresses must have been uncomfortable. She seemed to be trying to compress the baby, squash it back into herself, reabsorb it before it became too insuperable an obstacle.

Sometimes, at night, Sophie and I would sit by the window in my bedroom and look out over the landscape, the hill, the trees against the sky. We told stories and waited for the stars and the moon to come out. The moon, Sophie told me once, was a place like the world, but without seas or rivers or trees or people, where all the ground was white and there was no air to breathe. In the stories, the moon was made of cheese. One man thought he had caught the moon in a pool, but it turned out to be only a reflection. Entranced, I would sit beside her and listen for what seemed like hours, until Sophie decided that it was bedtime. Once or twice, if she was in a good mood, we would have midnight feasts of biscuits and orange squash by torchlight.

He says, “How are you feeling?”

The question comes as a complete surprise. He sounds sincere, even concerned. “I’m—OK,” I reply. I keep my voice even.

“Good. I’m just going to—” He takes a candle from the windowsill, lights it from the flame of the stub burning in the centre of the floor, drips a little wax, and sets it in place. The light in the room is augmented, and the shadows recede, until he blows the first candle out. “I don’t like to let them burn all the way down,” he says, almost to himself, and then laughs a little. “It seems unlucky, somehow.” I don’t know what he means. His tone of voice strikes me as strange, as though the action of replacing the candle has confused him, dragged him out of the past temporarily.

“You’re comfortable?” he asks.

“I’m OK,” I say again. The boards over the windows clatter briefly as the storm tugs at them, and the fresh flame streams, dips and trembles.

He shakes his head, as if brushing away something clinging, and settles himself on the floor opposite me.

“I wanted so much to be like you,” he says quietly. A draught from under the door catches me, and I shiver.

In the second week of the holiday, my father came home to us again. The lunch table was laid ready to receive him, and he appeared as if summoned by this ritual at about half past eleven. He was as tall and handsome and clean-smelling as ever, and just as forgettable. He brought Sophie and me small gifts, which we hastily unwrapped—late birthday presents, brought from America, where, we learned, he had been. His presence conferred upon the house a crowded feeling that was not entirely unpleasant; he must have remained in some way a recognized part of our family, even during his long absences. No one mentioned what had brought him back this time.

After a few days, though, the reason became suddenly obvious.

I was awakened sometime in the middle of the night by footsteps in the corridor outside my room. For a quick moment my heart leapt with fear, but then the hallway light clicked on. It was Sophie. There was more noise from downstairs, and the sound of a telephone ringing.

“Sophie?” I asked, still bemused with sleep. “What time is it?”

“It’s OK, Mattie. It’s—about two o’clock.”

“What’s happening?”

She came over and sat on the side of my bed. “Mummy’s going away for a while, that’s all,” she said. “They’re getting her clothes packed and so on.”

“Why?”

Sophie frowned. “I don’t know. I think maybe—”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe the baby’s ready. But I don’t know,” she added quickly. “It might not be time yet. Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about. All right?”

“All right,” I murmured, sleepily. “Will you call me if the baby’s born?”

She smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Sleep well, Mattie.” She smoothed my pillow for me and straightened the covers. “We’ll talk about it all in the morning.”

I nodded contentedly, and before I knew it, I was asleep again.

The morning brought further surprises, however. I had actually made my way down to the kitchen and got the milk from the fridge for my cereal before I began to remember what had happened the night before; and then I couldn’t be sure whether it had been a dream or not. Confused, I ran upstairs to where Sophie was brushing her teeth in the bathroom.

“Sophie! Did Mummy have the baby?”

Sophie glanced at me, an amused expression on her face. “Oh, so you
do
remember. I saw you go shooting down to breakfast and wondered if you’d forgotten.”

“Has she?” I repeated.

“I don’t know. She’s not here, though. Neither’s Daddy.”

“Where’s Daddy gone?”

She rinsed her mouth out and spat. “Your turn. I think he’s gone with Mummy. There's—”

“Are we all alone?” I mumbled excitedly through my toothpaste.

“If you’ll shut up a minute, I’ll tell you. That’s what all the phoning was last night. Do you remember Caitlyn?”

“Who?”

“She’s our cousin. She’s come to stay with us and look after us.”

I dried my hands. “Katy? What’s she like?”

“You met her a couple of years ago. No? Oh well, maybe you’ll know her when you see her. She’s all right. But her name’s Caitlyn, not Katy. Now push off and let me get dressed.”