House of Small Shadows (9 page)

On Sunday morning, she opened the filing cabinet inside herself and got out every folder for a thorough scrutiny. By Monday morning she’d reached the last file. It took that long to
re-examine the evidence.

With a remarkable clarity and in forensic detail, her memories were all waiting in Technicolor with an audio track. She drew the inevitable conclusions from them and unravelled the six months of
psychotherapy her parents had recently paid for.

First, she revisited the London years and the swivel chair in the ticket office of the children’s museum, and the boredom that became a physical pain before she made assistant curator. The
flat in Walthamstow appeared next, with the determinedly upbeat girls who were prancing at 5:30 in the morning with their blonde ponytails swinging (shoulder-length blonde highlights at the
weekend), to do Pilates and body pump, but with whom she never made it past small talk.

She watched herself undermined by a bitch in the specialist antique publishing company who stole her ideas for two books. She saw again the bulbous features of the fat male colleague, who made
two rebuffed passes before she left that job for a junior position at an auction house, while renting a room for five hundred pounds a month in Kilburn and trying to live on the remaining three
hundred of her salary.

Then there was an auction house for two miserable years and a bad break-up from a long relationship with an older man she could not love, who tried to throttle her when she finished with
him.

Two years at an independent television production company followed, Handle With Care, and a year full of exclusion and spite from a consensual coven of
quick
girls with wannabe Kate
Moss wardrobes, who she still wanted dead.

When her recall arrived at
the incident
with one of them, their leader in effect, she put her memories on fast forward through the resulting crisis that made her parents come and fetch
her, although they were on holiday in Portugal, before she began six months on antidepressants in her teenage bedroom at her parents’ house, right here in dear old Worcester.
You
couldn’t cut it so you had to be brought home by your parents at the age of thirty-six.

But there was Mike. Mike had been there for her when she came home to Worcester. He limited her slide and shortened the downward spiral.

She meandered ahead to the job as an estate agent, before a chance meeting with Leonard, a specialist in toys, which led to her dream job as a valuer in Little Malvern. Thirty-seven by then and
things were looking up. She found her own flat and was strong enough to inhabit it. She’d never been happier. Not ever.

Miscarriage.
Fast forward for God’s sake.

She clutched her hands to her face and began a slow rhythmic moaning, wretched in a towelling robe with two-day-old make-up blackening her cheeks.

Single again. Childless.

A moan of anguish came out of the pit of her stomach. The sound terrified her, so she cut it short and stared at the wall instead, until the fabric of the cushions started to burn her legs and
bum.

She moved back to her bedroom and stayed there until Wednesday morning. Sometimes she slept but always hated waking up. At noon she had wanted to die again, but only briefly.

Leonard had left eight messages since she’d called in sick. The sound of his kind voice only made her cry more. An old man in a wheelchair with a bad wig was the closest thing she had to
comfort.

On Wednesday afternoon she suffered an ‘episode’ of the kind she had not experienced since her first year at university. A trance. One of her old episodes that
began the day Alice Galloway went missing.

When she broke from the trance she lay on her sofa in the same position she remembered herself to be in when conscious. Her mouth and chin were sticky with blood.

The television screen and V&A poster of Renaissance Marionettes came into focus on the wall on the other side of the living room. The sun was no longer pouring through the net curtains.
Outside, dusk had fallen and turned her unlit flat blue-grey. A car reversed and a distant chime of an ice-cream van faded to silence.

Against the sofa fabric her skin was hot, her jogging bottoms were damp and creased under her buttocks and thighs. Catherine stayed still for a while until the swoops of nausea subsided. If she
tried to walk she would fall.

Black sky over a meadow. Plastic boy outside the sweet shop. Row of children standing on a hill, clouds moving over them swiftly. Boy with a painted wooden face. Bright-red roses in
shimmering golden air.

Some of the images faded when she chased the final fragments of the trance. Other parts stayed as if the past was yesterday, pieces that had returned from a far distance inside her; the part of
herself where what she thought were memories were dreams, and what she thought were dreams were memories.

The last time she’d suffered an episode was on a Sunday afternoon in her parents’ conservatory. That day she came out of a trance and back to the world with her head hanging between
her shoulders and a chin wet with blood and saliva. It had been the summer holiday before her second year at university. She must have been nineteen. So this was the first trance in nineteen
years.

Sat in shock, the idea that she had not just drifted away in a daydream, but had been engulfed, was paralysing.
It
had come back, all over again.

Wire covered in dark-green plastic, municipal green. Too high to climb over. Wire formed into diamond shapes she slipped her fingers through. She could squeeze her entire hand
into a gap, even if it felt like she would dislocate a thumb. She’d got her hand stuck once and tugged and twisted her wrist and made her thumb go all red where it was squashed between the
wires. Once the panic subsided, and she was as exhausted as a fish caught on a line, her ringing hand was released by the fence.

She’d never seen the children move into view. They would just be up there in the derelict school, above the den, when the back of her neck prickled and she knew she was being watched. And
she would look to the place between two of the buildings where the grass and weeds were as high as her knees.

Some of the children were smaller and younger than her, others were eight or nine. Older children. All stood in a group with the raggedy boy out front and the girl in the old hat beside him.
‘A bonnet’ her nan had called the same kind of hat on one of her dolls, Gemima. It had been like a tunnel around Gemima’s cloth face.

The air would go a bit wavy around the children of the special school, and above the grassy slope, like it did when it was so hot in the summer she’d sit in the shade all day.

She didn’t know what most of the children looked like. Only remembered bits of the boy with messy hair, in the ragged suit and callipers on his legs, and the girl in the dress and
bonnet.

The special schoolchildren would stare at her and she would stare back at their dark and uneven silhouettes, each wary of the other. Had they been children from the Fylde Grove, even with the
fence protecting her, she would have run for home before the stones whipped past her head. But the other children never threw stones.

Only the raggedy boy came near the fence. To the section where the green wire sagged, and where the wire had been unravelled beside one concrete post. Where she had unwoven the wire with her
small hands, one link at a time from the frayed bottom upwards.

Alice had sat and watched her unthread the wire. ‘Better not, Caff. We’ll get in trouble. We’s not allowed to.’ But Alice had also asked when the children of the special
school were going to reappear.

As soon as Alice was told about the children of the special school, she believed Catherine’s stories. Alice hadn’t needed proof because she yearned for the same thing. Escape. In
Ellyll Fields there was only so much comfort two little misfits could give each other.

Once Catherine started picking at the wire, she could not stop until the unthreading created a space large enough for a child to fit through.

She only went to the den once more after Alice went missing. At the very end of the summer holidays, before her family moved. Their sanctuary had been wrecked, and the fence by the river
repaired. And that was the day she ran home in tears and said she’d seen Alice and made her mum cry and had her legs slapped.

I did. I did, Mum. Alice was up on the hill and she said, ‘You’s comin’ up the big ’ouse, Caff. Wiv us, Caff? They’s callin’.’

She never knew what upset her mum so much, the story about Alice, or because she’d been back to the den. The police and Alice’s mum came round and Catherine recounted her story
again, which upset Alice’s mum even more than her own mother. The kitchen was full of crying women, one who couldn’t even stand up.

She never saw the children leave the plastic bag either. The bag of coins was just there when she went to her den alone, one afternoon right before Alice went missing, when she was buoyant with
relief the school day was over, but also pale and weakened by the day’s torments.

She’d kept the fifty pences and the ten pences, but the other coins were either very old or from other countries. These her father took when he found them in his shed where she’d
stored them. She’d lied about them when questioned. But the coins she’d found were real because her dad had seen them too.

‘Not seen one of these since I was your age.’ Her dad had inspected the coins she knew she couldn’t spend at the paper shop.

In her trance, she’d even smelled the shed scents of cut grass, oily metal, fresh timber and creosote while he talked to her all over again like she was really back there. 1981.

And then she’d left biscuits on the plastic serving tray of her tea set, for the children of the special school, on their side of the fence. They took the tray and the biscuits, but left
metal spoons that looked older than the ones that her nan kept in the sideboard with the sherry decanter. Catherine buried the old spoons in a handkerchief.

Smelly Cathy Howard, Smelly Cathy Howard. Dopted, dopted, dopted.

She’d heard that again in her trance too. And also seen the three girls from the year above her in junior school, waiting outside the school gates for her every afternoon for three weeks,
until her mother went up to the school to speak to her teacher about the chunk of hair that had been ripped from her scalp.

The raggedy boy only came closer to the fence the day after her mother and father had a talk that she’d overheard, about moving her to a new school. Because of the bullying. She’d
watched her adopted parents’ blurry shapes through the dimpled glass of the hall door. Her mum had been crying.

The next day she sat in the den for an entire Sunday afternoon and was so cold she stopped feeling it. And she shivered and stared through the fence at the empty brick bungalows and prayed for
the children to come back. She was alone that day because Alice was recovering from an operation on her leg.

She gave up on the children and took to staring between her shoes, wondering how to avoid ever going to any school. She only looked up when she suspected she was no longer alone.

There was no sound of their approach through the long wet grass on the other side of the fence, nor did she catch a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. But she looked up to see the
raggedy boy stood in the grass, closer to the fence than to the buildings of the special school. In the distance, the other children had formed an uneven line and watched.

She’d never seen one of the children so close before. The raggedy boy’s face was round and was either painted or he wore a mask. His small thin body was covered in a dark and grubby
suit like the ones she had seen in her nursery rhyme book. His face was one big grin and he waved a small white hand that poked from a tight sleeve too small for his arm.

White hand, white teeth, white hand, white teeth, white eyes . . . she’d felt dizzy with him so close. His hair was a thick black mop, a wig made for a girl.

She stood up. In the distance, the girl in the strange hat put both of her thin arms into the wavy air.

Then Catherine was pretending to pour tea from her greenish plastic teapot into the paint tins, while a crowd of children who smelled funny stood around her inside the den.

The memories had come back for her, and swept through her. She’d even been able to smell the rivery stagnant dell. How was that possible?

In the first half of her life she had been told she always came back to the world from a trance with her mouth open. When ‘out of it’, her expression was reported to be vague, and
her eyes distant. Her parents told doctors all of this while she sat in silence on plastic chairs in surgeries and hospitals and offices. These were the first times she’d heard her
‘episodes’ described.

Teachers at the new school added to her awareness of what she looked like when she was entirely withdrawn from the world. Children at the new school crept up to form circles around her beneath
the tree at the bottom of the school field to wait for her to wake up. She would come to covered in leaves, twigs and litter they had placed on her head and body. Once, she woke with a dead snail
in one hand.

Flatmates and friends in shared accommodation at university had not been so cruel. They thought she was epileptic and resisted the urge to tease her, a temptation she read behind their
half-smiles. She burned with shame when they told her how she looked during her time away.

She would pass through school assemblies, entire films and train journeys in the same state with no recollection of the time elapsed while ‘she was away with the fairies’.

Sometimes her nose bled and people tried to shake her awake. Once an ambulance was called and she woke up beside a bus on a stretcher, wrapped in a red blanket. Her secondary-school teachers
kept sending her home.

Doctors had tried to medicalize her ‘condition’. The doctors, to whom she had been taken as a girl, claimed it was all kinds of things, as did the two specialists the doctors
referred her to. At one time she was a narcoleptic, a catatonic, and suffered from hypnotic states. She was scanned and doctors with soapy hands and coffee breath kept looking into her eyes from
close range.