The Stranger in Our Home Read online

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about Angus. Had he fallen or jumped? Suicide – was it suicide? It lingered in my head, the unnatural pose of his limbs, the stillness of his body, the helmet … That helmet troubled me, somehow it made him into something else, inhuman, an inanimate object. Not a person, not a living, breathing, flesh and blood person. Just a body, dead. Slowly, I drifted back to sleep.

  When I woke again it was daylight. I was calm, but my head was full of images. Were they real? Were they memories from behind my blank wall?

  I rolled to my feet. I had to paint before they dissipated into the day. Always it was the way with me when I was upset, I became obsessed with the need to get them out of my head. But this was something else.

  I ran to the kitchen still in my pyjamas. With a sweep of my arm, I cleared the table, laying out the largest sheet of paper I could find. The pads of my fingers felt its surface, the rise and fall of the fibres, like a blind person reading Braille.

  Outside, on the lane below the house, I heard the clip clop of a horse’s hooves, the regular motion of a trot, the rise and fall getting louder then moving away. But the sound was distant, detached, something somewhere else.

  I was driven, oblivious to the living world. I rinsed the paintbrush in water, there was no need to sketch it first, I knew exactly what to do. I squeezed the watercolours from their tubes, dipping the brush into the paint, mixing and folding the colours until I was satisfied. Rinsing, mixing, rinsing, mixing. Then I trailed the brush across the paper.

  I worked fast, slashing lines across the sheet, dabbing, flicking, leaning over the table until my back ached and my neck was pulled tight. The image grew. It showed the summerhouse as it was now, the panes of glass broken, all sharp edges and jagged spikes. Leaves had been blown into piles across the floor, heaped against the walls where multiple trails of ivy wriggled upwards. The colours were brown and green and russet red, spiders clinging to the roof struts, beetles clustered on the ground. There was a whole mound of insects, worms and maggots writhing one against another, their segmented bodies clearly defined with additional pen and ink. A heaving, breathing shape hidden under the leaves, except for one small delicate hand, peeping out like a little white mouse.

  I paused to evaluate the scene. Something was missing. Something was not quite right. I dipped my brush back into the paint. Carefully, I added it in beside the hand. At first, it was only a little, a small pool touching the fingers. Then a bit more, spilling out across the floor.

  There – that was it. Stop right there.

  Red. Bright vermillion red. It’s enough.

  I stood back to look at the picture. Why had I drawn it that way?

  Something hovered out of frame, a growing feeling of fearful recognition. I reached out for another sheet, pulling it up so that it aligned with the first. I taped it top and bottom so that it was fixed to the kitchen table. Picking up my brush I began to paint again.

  This was a different summerhouse. Cleaner, newer, the one from years ago but still neglected. This half of my picture merged seamlessly with the first, window frames and sky fitting perfectly together. A figure kneeled on the ground.

  I stopped. My hands were covered in paint, my hair escaping round my face. I rubbed my fingers together as if to clean something that wasn’t there. My ribs felt like bands of iron squeezing my lungs and heart, my breath came short and fast, my eyes darting from the red paint on the paper to the red stain on my hands. Slowly, I stood up.

  I moved like an automaton across the kitchen. I went out into the garden, heading across the lawn towards the summerhouse. A spray of rain fell from the branches overhead, scattering over my clothes. I hadn’t bothered with a coat, nor a jumper. I was barefoot. The cold sank into my flesh, numbing my feet, my face and arms as if the Snow Queen herself blew upon my skin. I stopped at the entrance to the summerhouse.

  I watched the wind teasing at the dead leaves on the floor. Like the ones in my painting. Even now there were shards of broken glass scattered on the ground. The summerhouse hadn’t changed for over twenty years, abandoned to the elements and a mother’s grief. Steph had said it was an accident. In the garden … In the summerhouse, she meant.

  I was drowning in memory, the sound of breaking glass, the impact of a thousand pieces falling to the floor, my own voice screaming, Elizabeth’s voice telling me that story, malice dripping from her tongue, the pear drum throbbing in the distance.

  Have you been bad enough, Caroline?

  Finally, I remembered.

  CHAPTER 37

  It was autumn, a few months after the birthday party, the one where Elizabeth’s friend, had locked me in my bedroom. I’d been playing with a ball. My brother had snatched it from me as he often did. Another trick to taunt me with.

  Danny ran off into the summerhouse and I chased after him. The group of trees surrounding it leaned overhead, their branches overwhelming the building. It was steeped in shadow and the glass and wood that should have made the summerhouse a thing of beauty were covered in moss and green algae from damp and lack of daylight. This time I was determined to fight back.

  It was dusk already, the dying light playing tricks on me. For a moment I couldn’t see Danny. The wind rattled the too-thin window panes and the branches of the trees scraped against the glass. It had never been a pleasant place, the summerhouse, used more for storage by the gardener than its original purpose of pleasure.

  ‘Where are you Danny? I want it back!’

  I moved into the shadows. I saw the rows of empty flower pots, chipped and cracked and leaning against the wall. I saw the bags of compost, piled high, the top bag split open where a knife had cut it corner to corner, the black innards spilling out. I saw a fork, some spades, a bucket full of dead and dying weeds tangled in their roots. I saw the dry leaves that had blown through the door, spiralling up against the corner where the draught played out, the spiders on their webs hunkered down against the weather.

  A figure stepped out from behind me.

  I spun around, surrounded by the six walls of glass. Like the eyes of a fly. My heart was pumping, my head full of indignation at the theft.

  ‘Give it to me, Danny,’ I cried. ‘Give me my ball. Give me my ball!’

  ‘Caroline, limpy, lumpy Caroline!’

  Danny darted this way and that, like a basketball player throwing the ball from one hand to another.

  ‘I want my ball back!’

  He didn’t reply.

  My head was filled with pain, as if a knife had gouged out the middle of my forehead. I was so angry, a rage of red flooding across my eyes.

  ‘You give me my ball back! I want my ball back, Danny! Now, Danny! Now!’

  But he only danced some more.

  ‘Scaredy cat, scaredy cat, come and take your ball back!’

  I reached down towards the flower pots, grabbing the nearest thing. When I stood up, I saw myself reflected in the glass. A metal spike was in my hand, one of a collection of spikes bought for the gazebo in the garden. It was the length of a ruler, brand new and unused, its weight heavy in my hand, the point of it as sharp as a kitchen knife. I held it out in front of me.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ I cried. ‘Fuck you, Danny Crowther! Fuck you!’

  My six-year-old self didn’t understand the words, but I knew their potency, Danny had taught me that. I waved my spike and the figure retreated.

  Danny was backed up against the glass, his face brilliantly aware. He wasn’t bullying me now. He had a hand up as if to hold me off. He looked afraid. For the first time, he was afraid of me!

  ‘Steph!’ he screamed.

  He was calling for his big sister now, like the snivelling boy that he was. How quickly he had changed. I was emboldened.

  ‘Steph!’ His voice was thin and whining. He was properly frightened now.

  I felt the power, the satisfaction of a reversal in roles. He was feeling it, how I had felt it, small and weak and vulnerable. My metal spike beat his hands. It beat his stick
and his words too.

  His feet kicked out but I dodged clear. He tried again, his leg catching on a roll of barbed wire. He panicked, screeching and throwing his arms about. One arm caught me from the side and I reacted. Head down, I pushed. He was thrust backwards against the summerhouse. In that split second the windows shattered, chunks and slivers of glass slicing down all around us like a sudden summer squall. His body pitched forwards towards me as he tried to escape the glass. He was bigger than me so that my own body was sheltered under his, my face, my shoulders, my back protected from the onslaught. I felt my other hand tighten around the spike. I didn’t see the blood until it was too late. I lifted my head. Danny had slumped against me, his body sliding to the ground. Steph was standing in the doorway, horror on her face. I looked down. I saw the blood on Danny’s hands, the red stain blossoming on his chest, warm, scarlet, gleaming blood pumping from his body, seeping down towards the floor, running along the cracks between the concrete slabs, the metal spike buried between his ribs.

  CHAPTER 38

  They blamed me. Of course they did.

  Wasn’t that why they despised me in the village, even after all these years?

  ‘How does she put up with it?’

  ‘How can she even bear to keep that child in the same house?’

  That was what they’d said.

  They all knew.

  I hadn’t meant to do it, I really hadn’t. It all happened so fast. One minute I was standing there, shouting for my ball, the next minute there was glass everywhere and Danny was in front of me, blood pouring from his body.

  Oh God, so much blood. I’d never seen blood like that.

  Have you been bad enough, Caroline?

  It was like a devil had taken hold of me. I staggered to my feet, my body launching towards the house. I burst into the kitchen and through the hall. I ran up the stairs, one floor, two floors, to the upper hallway and the door that led to the attic. The key almost fell from my hand as I unlocked it. I climbed the steps, not bothering to switch on the light. I found what I was looking for. The crate. The pear drum.

  It was after Danny’s funeral that Elizabeth had started telling me the story – just me, not Steph. It had been her way of punishing me.

  Have you been bad enough, Caroline?

  She never spoke about what happened. Not once. I lived in a vacuum, nothing, no one touched me, spoke to me, even acknowledged me, in those first few days. I had a vague memory of being dragged into somebody’s office, later, the smell of lilies in reception, the perfume of the lady behind the desk, the depth of the carpet under my feet. But I couldn’t remember anything else.

  I had nowhere else to go. I was Elizabeth’s daughter, at least in the eyes of the law. She’d never liked me before, me, her predecessor’s daughter. She’d tolerated my presence for the sake of my father. But later, after …? Perhaps it would have been too easy to send me away. To palm me off on the authorities or some relative on my father’s side, if they’d have had me. To never see me again. To never have the opportunity to do what she wanted to do. To punish me.

  No, she’d found another way to torment me, with that story.

  I flung open the lid to the crate and lifted out the pear drum. I cradled it in my arms, hating it, dreading what was to come.

  I placed it on the attic floor, kneeling in the dust.

  It was a beautiful thing. The wood had been shaped with the eye of a perfectionist, its curves smoothed and polished to a rich mahogany brown. The main body, the pear-shaped bit, was painted like a Greek urn, birds and animals decorating the top. On the side were figures, a trail of eager musicians cavorting one behind the other, arms akimbo, wild-eyed and whirling, their clothes flying out in bright colours. The colours of blood and war paint. The colours of the devils in the medieval paintings of hell, writhing in ecstasy to the sound of Satan’s music.

  I traced the strings that lay taut along its frame, across the wheel that rotated with the handle to where they disappeared inside the box – the one the story spoke of, long and thin, it housed the little people, the mechanism that made the notes. I’d never opened it. I’d never dared. I didn’t want to admit that I’d been bad – that bad.

  ‘If you open the pear drum,’ Elizabeth had said, ‘and the little people are hiding, then when you get home there will be a new mother with a wooden tail and glass eyes …’

  She’d been my new mother long before I’d ever seen the pear drum.

  I held the handle with my shaking fingers and turned.

  A noise began to grow, like the slow heat of pleasure from a lover’s touch. The handle was S-shaped, twisting backwards as it moved, an optical illusion that had fascinated me as a child. I wound it with one hand, the other fingering the keys on the side of the box. I had no real knowledge of how to play it, but I hit the keys anyway in whatever order I wished. Clack, clack, clack, the drone hissing through the box. Clack, clack, clack.

  I saw Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth sitting on the sofa in the sitting room holding the pear drum. Elizabeth sneering at me as the drone began to hum. Elizabeth closing her eyes as the noise filled the room, a heavy vibration causing the curtains to shake, the decorative figurines on the mantelpiece to jump. Elizabeth opening her eyes again, fixing her gaze on me, smiling in that cold, specu-lative way that she had.

  ‘Have you been bad enough yet, Caroline?’

  She spoke quietly over the sound of the pear drum.

  Had I? Been bad enough?

  I let my fingers slide to the catch on the side of the drum, still turning the handle with my other hand. I could hardly touch it, my fingers falling clumsily away, but I forced myself to reach up, to push it again. The music hung on one note and it felt as if I would explode, fear, panic, excitement pulsing through my body, my thoughts racing, darting from one thing to another like a drug shooting through my veins.

  I could see the trees in the orchards of Larkstone village, bedecked with lanterns blowing wild in the wind, their branches writhing against the sky. I could see the house, Larkstone Farm, its huge shape stark against the horizon, its empty windows blazing in the glowing sunset, like the day when I’d arrived. I could see Elizabeth’s grave, the gown of the vicar standing overhead, his clean brown hands, his pristine white skirts dragging in the dirt, stained with black.

  I could see Craig. His naked body lying by the fire in the sitting room, red and yellow flames reflected in the damp beads on his skin. My body remembered his touch, the scent of his hair, the taste of his skin, the dark hairs that coiled down his chest, his breath feathering my cheek. He was rolling me over, smiling, holding me secure until I lay on top of him, looking down upon his face. I blinked.

  I could see Angus at the base of Alton Heights, his fingernails scratched and torn, his motorbike helmet bulbous like the giant head of an insect. But now he was lying somewhere else. On a bed of leaves in the summerhouse. Dead and dying leaves, the colour of mahogany. I could see the leaves scattered beneath his head, the trails of ivy that climbed the walls behind us. As he lay there, he began to wake. Slowly he began to move, one hand grasping for my skirt. His knuckles clenched the fabric tight, one hand after another, dragging himself up. His breathing wheezed and curdled in his throat. I pushed back, shoving him as hard as I could. I heard the glass crushing beneath his weight. I saw his eyes flutter in alarm, the blood seeping from beneath his body, trickling between the leaves, one line joining another, pooling, growing, flooding the floor, one large pear-like pool of shining scarlet blood.

  Have you been bad enough, Caroline?

  My head swayed with the weight of the images in my head. The present and the past blurring into one.

  I understood now what Elizabeth wanted. She wanted me to remember.

  But why hadn’t she just told me? The truth that I’d been hiding from myself all this time. It was as if with each image layered one over the other, I sought to block out the one I dreaded most, the horror of it rising in my throat.

  Dann
y dying at my feet.

  I gripped the handle in my hand, turning it still.

  ‘Have you been bad enough?’ she hissed.

  Yes. I had been bad enough.

  I let go of the handle. The wavering drone stopped.

  I opened the pear drum.

  CHAPTER 39

  The house stood in silence, the only sound the clock ticking slowly in the hall below.

  The little people weren’t hiding. Inside the box, the keys were lying neatly lined up. Each was a straight wooden peg, one for every note. There were twelve in all. I pressed upon a key and saw the corresponding peg lift to meet the strings. I moved the handle again and it changed the whining tone of the drum. I pressed another key and another, listening and watching with growing fascination. It was such a simple instrument, the handle turning the wheel, the keys pressing against the strings, like the fingers on the neck of a violin, playing each note.

  Why had I been terror-stricken by this thing for so long? It was just a thing. I rested back on my heels to peer inside the pear drum. I thought of all those years when I’d lived in dread of it, wondering what awful thing could be within. Elizabeth had simply used it to torment me, to control me. Why had I let her do that? I knew the answer now – my own buried guilt.

  I saw something inside the box, a glimpse of yellowed white against the wood. I leaned forward – there was something trapped beneath the pegs.

  I tried to push my fingers in between, but the pegs were too close together. I lifted up the box, tipping it so that whatever it was could slide down the length of the box to where the pegs were further apart. A thin package. My fingers waggled and pushed, pinching and grasping until I could pull it up between the pegs. At last, I had it.

  It was a sheaf of papers, flattened and smooth where they’d lain under the pegs. Why would someone have placed them there? How long had they been hidden? Apprehension held me back. I smoothed the papers on my lap, delaying the moment. It was only a small bundle, one or two sheets and a handful of photographs.