The Stranger in Our Home Page 8

  ‘Mmmm, this is very tasty, my dear. But where’s my son? Why isn’t he here to eat?’

  ‘Oh, he’s gone to visit his uncle, my love. He’ll be back within a week.’

  I painted the stepmother smiling at her husband, her lips twisted with delight, and the little girl, too small for the dinner table, perched on her chair. She was staring at the stew, a finger rolling to the surface.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever tasted a meal as good as this!’ says the father, stripping the bones with his teeth, throwing them over his shoulder onto the kitchen floor.

  I drew the little girl on her hands and knees, gathering up the bones, placing them inside a folded handkerchief. I painted miniature bees and butterflies embroidered on the silk.

  The girl carries the bones to the juniper tree, arranging them on the grave like flowers. They move, scuttling across the stone, nudging each other, jostling for place, shaping the figure of a bird.

  I painted the bird as it sprang to life, its wings a shimmering kingfisher blue, flying over the girl’s head, its beak open as it sang.

  ‘My mother, she killed me,

  My father, he ate me,

  My sister, she gathered my bones …’

  I painted the bones again, re-creating the shape of a bird. Except it wasn’t the same bird. Not even a living bird. This time the image was that of a bird like the one in the butcher’s shop, its head hanging down, its feathers limp and wet, its beak breathless and hanging open. I stared at it, my mind struggling to move on. My fingers plucked a fine-tipped pen from the stash of pens and I added more detail, lines and dots and strokes of ink, hunched over with an intensity I couldn’t relinquish, until it was no longer identifiable as a dead bird, but a solid block of black.

  Later, I climbed the stairs, looking for somewhere to sleep. I was Goldilocks searching in a strange house. I didn’t want to use my old bedroom – it was small and depressing. The room next to Elizabeth’s was too close to hers and I didn’t want to use Steph’s old room. On the far side of the hall was a fourth room, directly over the kitchen. It had been the guest bedroom, not that we’d had many guests. It had a side window, through which reared the black shapes of the derelict barns and a second window overlooking the garden. I felt my body relax.

  I hadn’t really paid much attention to the garden since I’d got there. I stood at the window looking out over the lawn with its flower beds draped in white. The moon shone directly down onto a wrought-iron bench on the patio where a bird had left delicate marks in the snow. Trees dominated the far end of the garden, their thick limbs piercing the sky. Beyond was a snowy hexagonal roof, a summerhouse. My eyes slid across to the fields and the spectral hills gleaming in the distance.

  This last room had been stripped of everything. The bed was unmade, the shelves bare. Good, I thought, this would do fine.

  But sleep evaded me, my head still creating pictures.

  Clack, clack, the noise echoed through the house. And when I closed my eyes I saw the attic, with its blanket-covered bumps and frozen window.

  Clack, clack, the window was opening, slowly spilling moonlight onto the floor.

  Clack, clack and a long finger of silver white reached out, stretching across the room, pointing towards one lump in particular. It moved, the covers lifting, two beady eyes peering from beneath. The covers dropped and the eyes disappeared. But the larger shape remained. Ominous but familiar. In the furthest, blackest corner of the eaves.

  The morning was bright, light reflecting back off the snow. The attic was at the forefront of my mind. I’d chucked the cat out the back door and she kicked a leg in protest as she stalked off, waving the tip of her tail, shaking her paws in the snow. I climbed the stairs, this time prepared with a torch.

  The attic smelt of mushroom damp, cold air still blowing through the gap in the window. A pile of snow clung to the inner window sill and I brushed it away in a useless gesture of distaste. The bulb popped, finally giving up, but there was enough early morning sunlight to shine across the room. I didn’t need my torch. The sheets that covered the floor looked a whole lot less sinister by day as I pulled them off, one by one, like a waiter in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

  There were toys I didn’t remember, boxes of Lego and farmyard figures, adventure books and tennis racquets. Surely, if we’d had these, I would have known? I felt a surge of frustration, I had remembered the books in my room, the Monopoly game and soft toys, but these things felt alien to my hands. They must have been Steph’s. It was normal, wasn’t it, to not remember stuff from when I’d been so young? I searched my mind, but it was obstinately unresponsive.

  My hand reached out again, then stopped, dropping to my lap.

  There was another shape, much bigger. I felt a twinge of recognition, the images from the night before hovering, like the fingers of a hand too close to the nape of my neck, enough to make the hairs stand upright and crackle with electricity.

  It was a crate. But different. This was the one I’d been looking for. The one that had been obsessing me.

  It was large and wooden, rectangular and deep, with a brass lock. The timber, the rough, heavy wood, the way the lock levered up, unhooking itself from a double catch, it was exactly as I’d drawn it the day before for the story of the juniper tree. The realisation startled me. I had recreated it with such accurate detail, the image must have been buried in my head.

  I dragged it towards me, hands reaching for the catch. It wasn’t locked. Perhaps Elizabeth had known that it was safe from prying eyes up here in the attic. My fingers pushed the lever and the lid flipped open like a toy nutcracker’s head.

  I’d known what was inside, despite my reluctance to name it. With its life-sized wooden belly, a handle at one end and that long arm with its own secret box, reaching into the full length of the crate.

  I’d found it.

  The pear drum.

  CHAPTER 10

  Painted figures danced across the side of the pear drum. Birds and animals and humans too, limbs and faces blurring one into another. They frolicked and laughed, leering like drunken revellers with expressions of twisted joy. Was it some kind of pagan ritual, a circle of villagers driven into a frenzy by the heavy rhythmic thrum of a pear drum?

  My fingers clutched the edges of the crate, my knuckles bent white. For a moment I was drowning in remembered fear. But my stepmother was dead, wasn’t she? And I was an adult, a rational, intelligent adult. She had no power over me any more.

  I made myself lift it out, struggling to fit it on my knees as I pushed the crate away. I was a child again, sitting with my legs tucked in, staring at the pear drum, overwhelmed by the size of it, the weight of it.

  I’d seen pictures of one once, on the internet. It cropped up when I was researching early musical instruments for a project. For the rest of that day it possessed me despite all attempts to put it from my mind. I’d found videos demonstrating how it worked. It was so big that normally it was balanced on the knees of two people, one of them winding the handle at the far end, the other pressing the keys on the side of the box. There was a stone carving of something similar, held by two medieval minstrels, side by side, high on the wall of a cathedral in Barcelona, their bare heads baking in the Spanish sun.

  I remembered my stepmother, that day in my father’s study when I was six, when she was dressed in black, her face narrowed in concentration, the wild, raucous, hideous notes, their screaming tearing at my ears.

  It felt illicit, just holding the thing.

  I’d no idea where she’d got it from, she’d never said. She’d brought it with her, the day she arrived, or so I assumed. But it was a part of her taunting of me, asking me to explain how it worked, knowing that I had no idea.

  Then she would tell me the story.

  This was the memory of Elizabeth that haunted me the most. That story. And those words, with which the story always ended.

  I thought of the commission. The Pear Drum and Other Dark Tales from the Nursery. I su
pposed it was inevitable I would come across the story again at some point, with my interest in fairy tales and my job. Or was it the other way round? Had my interest come from an obsession with a story I couldn’t quite let go? It had given me such a jolt seeing it there in the title of my latest project. I didn’t need to read it, I knew the story off by heart.

  I closed my eyes, picturing Elizabeth in her coffin, newly placed in her grave in her best suit, her face made up. The lid had been removed and she was sitting upright, the wild autumnal winds snatching at her hair. She glared at me as if to tell me the story again.

  I opened my eyes, staring into space.

  It was Elizabeth’s voice that I heard in my head.

  Two children, sisters – Turkey and Blue-eyes …

  Who would call a girl ‘Turkey’?

  Don’t interrupt!

  They had wandered off one day, out of their mother’s sight, when they met a ragamuffin girl. The girl had a pear drum and she was playing it by the side of a stream. The sisters were intrigued.

  ‘What’s inside the box?’ they asked. They meant the pear drum itself, the box built over its arm into which the strings disappeared, not the crate discarded to one side.

  ‘Little people,’ came the reply.

  ‘Can we see?’

  ‘Maybe. If you’ve been bad enough.’

  The sisters were confused but went home. In the kitchen, they kicked over their mother’s basket of laundry.

  ‘Ohh, you mischievous little girls, whatever made you do that?’

  The sisters ran away giggling, back to the stream, and demanded to see inside the box.

  ‘Have you been bad enough?’ asked the ragamuffin girl.

  Turkey and Blue-eyes told her what they’d done.

  ‘But that’s not very bad, kicking over the laundry. I meant something proper bad!’ said the ragamuffin girl.

  The sisters thought about it this time and stole into the kitchen whilst their mother was outside. The elder rummaged in the cupboards whilst the younger stirred the stew.

  ‘Salt! That’ll do it!’

  They laughed as Turkey shook the salt, showering it into the pan.

  ‘More! More!’ cried out Blue-eyes, till the stew was quite ruined.

  Elizabeth told the story to me, not to my sister. This one thing I knew for sure with a certainty that gripped me like a hand around my throat. How come I remembered that and not other things? Why was that? And why would Elizabeth have told the story only to me?

  Steph had known about the pear drum though. I’d seen her sneaking into our father’s study, opening the crate. She’d wanted to know, when Elizabeth wasn’t around, demanding I tell her the story Elizabeth had denied her, then gazing at my terrified face.

  Turkey was smiling, thinking about their mother, her face as she tasted the stew. But the ragamuffin girl was still not impressed.

  ‘That’s better, I suppose. But you’ll have to do much worse than that if you want to see inside my box!’

  This time the sisters went wild, upending every piece of furniture in the house, even the beds. They broke the windows, lifting chairs and smashing them through the glass. It surprised them both, how good it felt, letting rip. They ran all the way to the stream and boasted about what they’d done. The ragamuffin girl just smiled, winding the handle on her pear drum, the music screeching in their ears.

  When she stopped, she said:

  ‘Are you sure that you really want to see inside my drum? Because do you know what will happen if you do? If the little people aren’t satisfied, they’ll hide from you and when you go home, your mother will be gone. In her place will be a new mother, with black glass eyes and a wooden tail!’

  Of course, in the story, eventually Blue-eyes and Turkey did look, how could they resist? They’d gone home, one last time, bursting with so much curiosity, it overcame all their inhibitions.

  Turkey spotted their mother’s favourite hen. Blue-eyes fished out one of the kittens hiding under the table, the little tabby that their mother was so fond of. They both put their hands around the creatures’ necks and squeezed. At first, not very hard, as the animals wriggled in protest. The hen squawked, the kitten’s eyes widened, so the girls squeezed again. Harder and harder still.

  By the time their mother came home and found the little bodies lying on a stone outside the house, feathers scattered all around, fur matted with sweat, it was too late. To undo what had been done. To think again.

  Their mother sat upon the ground and cried.

  The sisters ran, with all the eagerness of children at Christmas, jostling the ragamuffin girl this time.

  ‘You have to! Now you have to let us look!’ cried out Turkey, pulling at the pear drum.

  The ragamuffin girl let go and they opened the box, but there was nothing inside.

  Had they not been bad enough? Had it all been a trick?

  They walked home without talking. When they got back, the house had been put to rights, the glass in the windows was brand new, the furniture back on its feet. The hen and the kitten were still dead, but the bodies had been removed and the feathers swept away. Inside the house, there was no sign of their mother.

  Then they heard it.

  A thwack, thwack, coming up the path.

  It was the new mother. She was beautiful, with smooth, jet black hair and skin as soft as snow. And eyes as black as glass.

  Behind her, slithering out from underneath her full-length silken skirt, was a long wooden tail.

  That wooden tail had put the fear of God in me – glass eyes and a wooden tail, that’s what she’d said, whenever Elizabeth had showed me the pear drum.

  Have you been bad enough, Caroline?

  CHAPTER 11

  I’d never opened the pear drum. The box where the little people lived. In all those years, Elizabeth had never let me.

  I suppose I could have sneaked in and opened it anyway, but I’d never dared. Perhaps I’d been too afraid of what I might find. It was only a story, but even now, as I sat there with it on my lap, I still couldn’t bring myself to open it. Even holding it made me feel sick, stomach acid burning up my throat.

  As a child of barely six, curious, needy, and desperate to please, not long after Elizabeth had started telling me the story of the pear drum, I’d tried to think of all the things that I could do. To be naughty, to be wicked and evil, a monster in my stepmother’s eyes.

  But why? Why did the box – or was it the little people? – demand such a price? Where had the story come from – had Elizabeth made it up? I didn’t think so. Truth be told, I had no idea. My memories of those early days were confusing. And before? It was so frustrating – I’d never really thought about it much, why my memories stopped before the pear drum.

  I felt its smooth wooden curves beneath my fingers. Every day after that first day when she showed me the pear drum, she would taunt me, when other people were out of sight. She’d even make suggestions.

  ‘Tip the table over, go on – that little one, the coffee table, you can manage that. Watch the mugs go flying to the floor!’

  I’d scream as the burning hot coffee scalded my arm.

  ‘Pull your sister’s hair. Give it a good tug. Stronger. Look how it makes her yell!’

  It did, but it made her kick me too, till we were rolling on the ground, biting, fighting each other, my tiny fists punching as my big sister tried to pin me down.

  ‘Take it, Caroline, take the book, tear the pages out. Isn’t it fun? Look at the mess it’ll make! You can write on it too, spit on it, anything you want!’

  It was a book a friend from the village had lent her, an expensive ‘coffee-table’ type book, all glossy photographs and artistic prints. When her friend came back into the room, Elizabeth would show her.

  ‘Look what that horrible child has done. She hates me. She hates everyone! What am I supposed to do with her?’

  And her friend would stare at me as if I had sprouted from Mars.

  I’d been so naï
ve, not understanding. The gossip spread. Elizabeth’s devil of a child, always causing trouble.

  Until one day, Steph had gone. And I was alone. With my stepmother. And her pear drum.

  I put the pear drum back in its crate. I closed the lid and fastened the catch. Then I pulled the blankets and sheets back over every object in the attic exactly as they’d been before, leaving the crate where it was, a shrouded shape amongst many shapes in the middle of the floor in the attic.

  I had an early lunch that day, balanced on a kitchen stool, staring out of the window into the garden. I’m not sure I was even aware of the wetness on my cheeks until I reached up with my hand. The clouds were hanging low over the fields with that pregnant grey colour that promised more snow. I felt an overwhelming need to get out of the house, so I pulled on some boots, grabbed a coat and headed outside.

  The snow was deep, piled up against the back door, and my feet sank unexpectedly far as I waded out across the lawn. I relished the cold on my hands, my face, numbing my feet. After a few moments, I stopped, looking back at the house. All the windows were lifeless, save for the kitchen where an orange light burned with an unexpected warmth. I could see the table, my artist equipment sprawled out across its width, my laptop, the lid open, the kitchen sink, crockery, one plate, one saucepan, one mug, stacked up on the draining board. My life. In the other rooms there was nothing, the blank glass reflecting only the grey clouds and the white laden trees outside.

  I walked on, to the bottom of the garden, the summerhouse to my left surrounded by trees. The brick walls had crumbled with age, the windows partially shattered and overgrown with ivy. The wind blew inside, spiralling leaves and screaming through the glass. It was straight out of Shelley or Byron. But it was too real, too broken. It was like seeing a homeless person lying in a shop doorway. I felt pity and shame, a sense of helplessness and guilt, as if I was somehow responsible for its neglect, something I did not want to face. I turned away, heading down the slope and across the fields, head bowed against the cold.

  Elizabeth had hated me, I knew that. She hadn’t told me the story of the pear drum to amuse me, this was no sweet bedtime tale. Her eyes had glittered when she spoke the words. There was an energy in the telling of it, a chanting under-beat in the rhythm of her voice, the repetition of familiar words, vowels and consonants raining down on me like hailstones pelting from above.