The Silk Factory (29 page)

‘Not quite everyone,’ Rosie said drily.

‘And she was trying to do you a favour, really …’

‘Sorry?’

‘As you weren’t feeling well. She thought it would give you a break.’

‘Who said I was ill!’

‘Well – Josh.’

‘Because, as you can see, I’m not.’

He rubbed his head, appearing to digest this, and then shrugged. ‘This family stuff’s really Sandra’s area. I try to stay out of it.’ He took a drink. ‘I just bring home the bacon.’

‘Look, I didn’t come to make a scene. It’s not unreasonable to want a share of my own kids’ time at Christmas. Josh hasn’t been playing fair.’

‘Couldn’t you just stay for lunch? I’ll get it in the neck if I don’t persuade you.’

Rosie snorted. She was pretty sure Sandra had been bluffing with her invitation, simply intending to embarrass her into giving in and going away. ‘I don’t think anyone really wants me to stay. I’d be like Banquo’s ghost.’

The door from the snug opened and Sam came in, his hair tousled and his shirt done up on the wrong buttons. Still half asleep, he wandered over to Rosie and climbed on her lap, snuggling in. Rosie hugged him. ‘Time to go home, soldier,’ she said. ‘Can you show me where your bag is and help me pack up your things? And Cara’s things too?’

‘Rosie …’ Gareth remonstrated, raising his hands in a helpless gesture.

She lifted Sam down off her lap and they went upstairs together.

When they returned, Josh, Tania and Sandra had joined Gareth in the lounge. Sandra had a sleepy Cara in her arms and Tania stood at Josh’s elbow as if ready to give him a nudge. Josh said, ‘What’s this, Sammy? I thought I was going to teach you how to hit a snooker ball today? You’re not going already, are you?’

Sam stood in the middle of the room looking uncertainly from his mum to his dad. Rosie began to feel angry. How could Josh play on Sam’s feelings like that? It was a low trick, dragging him into it, putting emotional pressure on him. Keeping her voice even, she said. ‘Go and pick up your Lego, Sam, and put the box in your bag, please.’ Sam trailed over to the tree and began dropping pieces of Lego one by one into the box.

Rosie walked over to Sandra to take Cara from her but Cara let out a wail and turned away, burying her face in Sandra’s shoulder. Rosie stopped as if someone had slapped her, even though she knew that Cara did this every time at nursery when she picked her up: a toddler’s protest at having been left by her mum.

Josh pounced on it. ‘Look, this isn’t going to work. It’s just confusing them. Why don’t you go home and I’ll bring them back later as I told you in the first place.’

From the corner of her eye she saw Tania give a tiny smile.

‘Perhaps that would be best,’ Sandra said. ‘If that was the agreement.’

She looked to Gareth for support. He took another drink and said nothing.

Suddenly, she felt Sam’s hand slip into her own. She squeezed it tight and took a deep breath. ‘Right then, let’s talk about agreements,’ she said to the adults. ‘The bald fact is, Josh’s access agreement is every other weekend, as he very well knows. Today it’s not a weekend and he hasn’t any right to have the kids. I think things’ll go a whole lot more smoothly if Josh respects that in future.’ She put the kids’ bags over one shoulder and then firmly took Cara from Sandra, hefting her on to her hip.

She got as far as the door and then stopped. ‘What do you say, Sam?’

‘Thank you for having me.’

‘Good boy. Now go and give everyone a kiss and then we’re going home.’ Even Josh had the grace to look a little shamefaced as he bent to be hugged and kissed on the cheek.

Rosie drove back towards the motorway while next to her Sam played a game on her phone and Cara dozed in the back. She tried to calm herself. The mixture of anxiety over taking on Josh and elation at her success had left her feeling strung out, every nerve overstretched and humming. She had won the battle; she was taking the kids home, but when she thought of going back into the house she found herself taking in a deep breath and holding it. She let it out slowly through her mouth in a long, blown-out sigh. Last night, in the warmth of Tally’s home, safe among friends, she had almost managed to believe that she’d imagined it all, that the long-term strain she’d been under and the distress of remembering how Lily died could have flipped her mind in some peculiar way: the broken plate a mere accident; the whole experience in the cellar the hallucination of a troubled mind, brought on by a mix of drugs and wine she knew perfectly well she should avoid.

Now, alone, and with time to think more clearly, she could
see
the way this rational explanation held together but try as she might she couldn’t
feel
it. How could an imagined experience be so complete: smells, sounds, even touch?

And now she had to go back. The thought of returning to the scene of last night’s nightmare filled her with dread. She drove on through the snowy fields slowly, although the roads were clear, almost everyone tucked up indoors for the holiday. Longingly, she thought of last Christmas, at the flat, when she and Mum had cooked dinner and got tipsy together in the process.

Soon she would reach the motorway. She could turn right for the Midlands or left for London. She didn’t have to go back; she had a choice. A picture of the flat as she’d left it came into her mind, the living room small and shabby but full of familiar, comforting things: her books, the battered leather sofa, a litter of the kids’ toys. And her bedroom … the light through the branches of the plane tree in the street, the quilt Mum had made for her, spread smooth on the bed.

They passed the first sign for the motorway junction. Was it a good idea? Once she was back at the flat, it would get harder and harder to return to the house, and there were things she had to do to be able to move forward: sort out all the contents, get it ready for sale; no one was going to buy it with that ancient wiring and the garden like a jungle. She should really just grit her teeth and get on with it. Nonetheless, she imagined the padded texture of the quilt under her cheek, lying down, forgetting everything, feeling safe. Where was the harm? Just for a few days, to get her head back together?

They would soon be at the roundabout. She glanced at Sam, still deep in his game. ‘I’ve been thinking, do you want to go home, chump-chop? What do you say?’

‘Of course.’ He looked up. ‘Can Nicky and Amy come round to play?’

Rosie paused, amazed at how quickly Sam had laid aside his old home.

‘They’ve gone to relatives today,’ she said automatically. ‘They’re seeing their family.’

‘But they
are
their family,’ Sam said logically.

‘No, I mean aunties and uncles and their granddad and … and their granny.’

‘Oh.’ Sam went quiet.

Rosie glanced at him. His head was bent over the phone as if he was playing, but the screen was blank.

‘I know you miss your granny; I miss her too,’ she said gently. ‘She wouldn’t want you to feel sad though, not at Christmas.’ She reached over and touched his cheek. ‘Tell me what you’d most like to do today.’

‘Can I open my presents? Can I show Amy tomorrow?’

Rosie signalled right, got into lane, took the Midlands exit.

Leaving the kids asleep in the car, Rosie braced herself and let herself into the curtained house. The dim hall was warm and quiet, the only sounds the familiar whoosh of the boiler and the trickle of water in the radiators. She snapped on the hall light. A yellow glow shone on the bike, knocked askew by her frantic flight, and on the cellar door, which she saw Rob had bolted: a protective gesture that Rosie found touching. She straightened the bike’s handlebars, wheeled it forward and leant it against the door as if to barricade it. She stood and listened, as she had last night, down there in the dark. It was quiet and calm now, yet she felt weak at the memory of her fear. It hadn’t been all in her mind; she was sure of it. There had been something outside her self: a presence. You knew it in the same way that you sensed a spider’s eyes on you or smelt rain before it came. Instinctive. The child had been there, right beside her. She looked at her makeshift barricade and knew that if the girl were to come again, neither the bolt nor this mechanical barrier would be any use whatsoever.

Without allowing her eyes to wander to the shadows at the kitchen door or at the turn of the stairs, she hurried into the living room and swept the curtains back. She found the batteries that had rolled under the bureau the night before, fitted them, wrapped the presents quickly and put them on the hearth. It’s no good averting your eyes, she told herself strictly; you’re going to have to look before you can bring the kids in. Forcing herself to be thorough, she checked all of the rooms. Taking a deep breath she walked into the centre of each and turned slowly all the way round. Only when she’d scanned every corner, and sensed in every room an ordinary everyday emptiness, did she go to fetch the children in.

Carrying Cara and leading Sam by the hand, she brought them into the living room and said brightly, ‘Oh look! Santa’s been while you were away!’ The wrapping paper was off in seconds and Sam danced about, desperate to get outside and try the loader in the snow.

An hour later, after Sam had scooped and bulldozed a veritable fort and Rosie had made a stumpy snowman with Cara, they peeled off their wet coats and Rosie warmed up soup and made toast. She brought down a pile of kids’ books and a duvet and tucked them up all together on the sofa.

‘Isn’t Cara going for a sleep upstairs?’ Sam asked, wanting their usual storytime to himself.

‘Not today,’ Rosie said. ‘We’ll make our camp here and Cara can curl up and drop off when she wants.’ They sipped their soup and she read to them for a while until Cara fell asleep and Sam asked to watch
The Snow Queen
.

Once she was sure he was engrossed, Rosie got out her laptop and searched ‘ghosts’. Scrolling through links to movies and sites featuring supposed ghostly images, she found a research site and a heading caught her eye: ‘Residual ghosts: the Stone Tape theory’. She read:

The
Stone Tape theory
is the speculation that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that emotional or traumatic events can somehow be ‘stored’ in rock or the natural environment, and ‘replayed’ under certain conditions. The idea was first proposed by British archaeologist turned parapsychologist Thomas Charles Lethbridge, in 1961.

Many serious paranormal researchers accept that some ghosts behave like recordings. They show no knowledge of their surroundings and repeat the same actions whenever seen. They even sometimes appear to follow different room layouts from the existing ones. Such residual hauntings can be prompted by a range of events, from traumatic events such as a murder, rape or suicide to high-energy events such as a ball or celebration, when music, singing, dancing and conversation may be heard.

The most impressive evidence on which the case for a recording theory rests is the idea that apparitions repeat themselves. In classic cases, as well as in fiction, the ghost is often said to be re-enacting some tragic part of their lives or trying to right some wrong done to them. When a residual haunting appears, the percipient is essentially witnessing or hearing an event in time being replayed over and over again.

Rosie paused. The article said that an event could be replayed ‘under certain conditions’ but didn’t specify what these might be. She searched again, typing in, ‘When do people see ghosts?’ and found some research that simply sought to gather experiences of sightings and compare them to classify them and produce a taxonomy. Here she found a great deal that matched her own experiences: apparitions tended to be reported as solid rather than transparent and were often said to be so realistic that the subject only doubted their reality after the event; they generally did not interact verbally and events tended to happen in everyday surroundings such as the subject’s own home and most often when the environment was secluded, dark and quiet.

Reading on, a point caught her eye:
Those who had seen ghosts also reported being anxious or distressed at the time.

Sam pulled on her sleeve. ‘Why aren’t you watching it with me, Mum? Cara’s gone to sleep.’

‘I am watching,’ Rosie said, laying the laptop aside and putting her arm around him as he wriggled closer.

…
being anxious or distressed at the time.
This struck a chord. She began to go through the times she’d seen the weird things she couldn’t explain, thinking about how she’d been feeling each time. The girl had appeared in the garden on their first day at the house and then again in the weeds under the mulberry tree. Newly arrived at a house packed with her mum’s things, both times she had been feeling the loss of her mother sharply. When she’d caught the strange moth: that had been just as she was about to go through difficult personal things in the bureau. And then on top of mourning Mum, she’d found out about Lily. She remembered the feeling of terrible sadness as she sat in the darkening garden thinking of hiding long ago with Lily and Maria under the mulberry tree and how it had seemed to conjure in answer another presence in its shade. And, yes, it had been later that night that she’d seen the child bending over Cara, as the silk fell around them. Then, last night, the worst experience of all, hard on the heels of her remembering how Lily died.

Tally would say this was all evidence that her imagination was affected as a result of strong emotions, that at moments of grief and stress her mind was creating strange perceptions – things that weren’t real – but what if it was the other way round? What if the apparitions she saw
were
real but she was only able to see them when her own emotions were running high? A sighting would only happen when a person became susceptible through being vulnerable themselves, in a heightened state of sensitivity. Something could have happened in the house to people long ago that somehow struck a chord with her own situation, like two tuning forks vibrating at the same frequency, a kind of emotional resonance. Perhaps there was some kind of link – some common experience or loss? She was grieving for Lily, who had died as a child … More than once the girl had appeared close to Cara, seemed drawn to her … She gave up her guessing game. The only thing she was sure of was that the girl – her imprint, ghost, spirit, whatever you cared to call it – did exist. She knew it. Something awful had taken place here. She remembered the struggling noises as she’d escaped from the cellar, the scrabbling and the scrape of metal, and the clinging smell of something bloody burning.