The Safe House, page 19
‘That’s a bloody understatement, girlie,’ Mr Wiffles would have said.
‘You know, your mum – I think I can remember her a little from all those years ago. Your dad here, I barely saw, he worked night shifts a lot in those days. Not a good time for me. I was married to The Git and Tommy was practically feral so I didn’t feel much like talking to the neighbours.’
‘I wasn’t born then, was I?’ Maisie fiddled with one of her plaits.
‘God no, you were way in the future, you and Debs.’ Here Olivia squeezed Debs’ hand, realised she still had sawdust on them and made a face before wiping her palm on her skirt. ‘Even if it means the house is always covered in wood shavings …’
‘My mum and Debs are married – they’re a couple,’ Tom explained to Esther. ‘I don’t know if—’
‘Mother liked bunkers, not bigots,’ Esther snapped. Across the room from her that incense stick trailed out a thin line of smoke and she could feel it rasp against the back of her throat.
‘Sensible woman.’ Olivia fiddled with her bangles. ‘Y’know – I don’t blame her, for what she did. You can’t imagine it now maybe with the steelworks gone but I can see why your mum would have worried for you. It’s not as if anything’s got much better, has it?’
‘Mum—’ Tom interrupted.
‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? I’d move to the country in a heartbeat, maybe not in a bunker. I mean, that’s a bit … but the country, yeah. Cleaner air, trees, little woodland creatures coming to do your washing-up – that’s how it is, isn’t it, love?’ Olivia gave Esther a nudge.
Once again, Esther proudly understood this reference. ‘Pretty much. I couldn’t move for deer polishing the silverware …’ Olivia scrunched up her nose and laughed and Esther added this to her list of accomplishments: she was funny. Intentionally. She would have laughed too but the demon bit on her throat and she settled for a shallow breath.
‘But, y’know – you play the hand you’re dealt. We can’t just up sticks and move. I’ve got work. Maiz has school.’
‘I could miss school,’ Masie offered hopefully.
She was ignored.
That thin trail of smoke from the incense stick lingered in the air and the walls seemed much closer than they had a minute or so ago. It was such a small room, smaller than the circular living space and kitchen in the House and there was no comforting whispering from an air filtration system, nowhere for that scented smoke to go except straight into her lungs. Esther fidgeted, wanting to be back in the car, back in the village with its pub, which had been green, green, green. Green for trees. Green for go. Safe.
Her chest demon snorted awake and she gripped the edge of her chair, willing it to back down, to snuffle and snort and settle into a dozy slumber. One breath, two but then all the breaths wanted to come at once and suddenly none of them could; instead they balled up in her throat and Esther knew what to do. She had spent her life knowing what to do in this situation but she also needed out of this incense-filled room in the middle of this fume-choked town …
She headed for the door.
Chapter 51
Esther could not remember how she got into the turret.
She knew she had lurched to her feet, voices and arms around her, but she had twisted free and then there had been the street and a sky above her so big it could have been a hand about to crush her flat.
The car had been locked and she had urgently needed a roof above her so … the turret.
The ladder climb into it was a blur and then she huddled, breathing shallowly, the little peaked roof of it keeping the sky at bay. Around her, the children’s playground was empty.
When Tom had first told her about the Out There he had made it sound as if Mother had been wrong, paranoid, obsessed, crazy. But she hadn’t been, had she? In the time since Mother had taken them both to hide in the hill the world had carried on and done little to stop the fumes that filled the air. Esther knew that because she could feel the scratch of that pollution in her chest right now.
Her breath hitched.
She knew what was coming.
Who.
The demon who lived in her chest. This is what Mother had warned her about, the thing would grip hold of her windpipe and squeeze until her vision blurred and blackened, its foul tongue licking up the poisoned air. She would die, gasping for breath in a turret in a children’s playground.
She wheezed, sobbed, wheezed again.
However, her breathing did something unexpected, something marvellous, miraculous, something almost completely unaided … It slowed. Esther hugged her knees and waited but her demon had not even bothered to stir. Maybe it was biding its time until she climbed down the ladder, ready to catch her on the middle rung and would come roaring out so she would gasp and also fall headfirst, her neck breaking with a click like snapping fingers.
She breathed.
There were voices below her.
‘Esther, it’s okay—’
‘Was it that damned joss stick? I swear I forgot I’d lit it earlier—’
‘Come down!’
For a few seconds, her cheeks burning, she considered staying in this musty space because clearly she could never face any of them ever again. But her shaking legs found the rungs of the ladder. Her breath remained smooth, and this was her chance to get away whilst her demon lay sleeping, because that was now all she wanted. She should never have come here; she should never have gone further than that village with the pub in it. She should never have gone from green to amber to red.
She reached the final rung.
‘I want to go home,’ she said and she did not know what she meant by that.
‘Oh, honey – you’re okay.’ Olivia’s face swam into focus, a slash of purple lipstick below big sad eyes.
Behind everything was a gentle shushing sound that could have been the sea but Esther knew it wasn’t. It was the motorway they had driven on to get here, the cars swerving around each other as if preprogrammed. All of those cars with their exhausts and the fumes that came from them, despite electric cars and eco-friendly deadlines to hit, despite legislation and politics and protests and all the rest of it.
A little warm hand slipped into hers.
‘Would you like to hold Mittens?’ Maisie gazed up at her, offering the toy lion by its ear.
Esther wanted to scream. She was a stupid girl, a baby with her own cuddly toy she still carried around with her. She had no idea what she should be doing, who she should believe or what would happen to her next.
‘I want to go home.’ Had she not made it clear? She slipped her hand from Maisie’s and headed to the car, the susurration of a motor vehicle river loud in her ears, watching her own feet, red like a warning flash as they marched over the grass to the cold grey of the pavement.
In the back of the car she hugged her rucksack tight as Ned and Tom said hasty goodbyes. They drove away. In her head she moved through the traffic light colours:
Red.
Blocks of houses and parked cars went by, front doors the colour of sludge, litter at the edge of the roads. Esther stared at the tarmac as it rushed by underneath the car and this time it really was a river, black and oil-sheened, and they were sailing on top of it.
Amber.
The houses thinned out and the trees stepped forward to line the road they drove along, politely pushing back the houses and streets and curiously bending towards the car as if to have a good look at the crazy girl inside. Old stone walls, cracked and crumbling, were the boundary lines of unseen estates that no longer even existed.
Green.
Esther sighed. Soon enough there was the pub again with its moat of gravel and thatched roof. Her hair smelled of incense and she longed for a bath and to wash herself free of the pollution she could almost feel as a greasy coating.
‘Esther?’
She couldn’t look at them so she stared at the top of her rucksack as she clambered out of the car and then straight in, all the way to her room in the eaves with its sloping ceiling and cupboard kettle, a safe little space. From the window she imagined she could see it, across the hills and valleys, an ink blot that hid secrets, a place she was not done with yet, lodged deep in her like a broken bone shard.
The House.
***
She woke to a voice outside her window.
Next to her, a little red clock display told her it was only eight in the evening. After having a shower, she had flopped onto the bed where she had thought her racing mind would never drift into sleep. But here she was, two hours later.
She rubbed her neck, realising the voice was Ned’s. Her mouth was dry. The last drink she had had was Olivia’s bitter tea, which she hadn’t finished, so she got herself out of bed and headed for the cupboard kettle with its tiny plastic pots of never-curdled magic milk and mugs that held a mouthful of liquid at best.
It was a coincidence that the cupboard was right by the window.
When she had got back from Olivia’s, she had noticed it was open and her instinct would have been to close it but she had been too concerned with getting in the shower. It had taken all of her energy to get from the bathroom to her bed where she had hardly pulled the cover back before the darkness claimed her.
Her window looked out onto the side of the pub, a view of the car park and the flat porch roof of the side entrance, its covering beginning to curl at the edges. Not particularly scenic unless you liked your scenes to involve a massive rectangular bin and a variety of cars but it was the perfect place for someone to wander whilst on the phone, trying to avoid the general background noise of the outdoor seating at the back.
Esther heard her name and her hand froze holding the kettle. She leant closer to the window.
‘… yeah, she found it tricky … That’s to be expected, of course …’
Below her Ned paced: five steps from the porch nearer to the car park and then a turn and five paces back again, his voice getting fainter each time he got furthest away from the window.
The kettle was hot, but Esther’s cheeks flared hotter. He was talking about her. She knew what this was – it was eavesdropping, though she had never had a chance to do it before. Who exactly would she have heard Mother talking to, except herself?
Ned chuckled. ‘Ah, she’s lovely but, y’know, what you would expect …’
What did people expect of her? A wild-haired hermit, who would stumble in the daylight, confused by the modern world? A pale-faced grub, a mole?
‘Timid …’
The word stung like water up her nose. That wasn’t how she saw herself at all. Timidity did not allow you to successfully live with one other person in a concrete house under a hill for sixteen years. That took will. It took a determination to not go mad and sit burbling in a corner somewhere.
Timid did not get you out of that House.
‘… but amazing too … I mean, what she’s lived through, anyone would be … a bit odd …’
Another shot of water up her nose. Until perhaps this afternoon, she had really done her best there. She hadn’t spoken to Mr Wiffles, she hadn’t openly stared too long at anyone or anything, she had stood under that flat palm of the open sky and she hadn’t cringed.
‘Yeah, I know, love, there’s not been the right moment …’
Love. Esther snagged on that word like a nail run across wool. Love. Who was the love he was talking to? When he’d spoken about himself, he’d said he lived alone, though Esther supposed you could say that and still have a partner somewhere, someone you did not live with. Or he could be speaking to his mother, her grandmother, she thought with a jump in her stomach, though it was an odd endearment for a mother. She had never called her mother ‘love’.
‘… yeah … uh-huh … no, don’t put him on the phone. It’s past his bedtime. Tell him Daddy loves him very much’ – the kettle clunked against the side table as Esther stood, slack-jawed – ‘and tell him I’ll be home soon …’
Esther retreated from the window, clutching the kettle.
She remembered the conversation over dinner, the dim room in the pub, the glint of brass decorations on dark-wood-panelled walls and her father saying that he hadn’t had any more children.
He had lied.
Chapter 52
At breakfast the next morning, Esther tried to balance two bananas, a bowl, two peaches, an orange and too many pots of yoghurt.
She had not slept. A nightmare of a sigh, a shuffling sound and a dry, earthy hand on her shoulder had kept her awake as well as imagining what her half-brother was like …
… and why her father had not told her about him. Why he had lied to her and said he had no new wife, no children.
It made no sense. Even if she was too odd, too timid to meet him, too embarrassing in social situations, there was no reason she could think of why she shouldn’t know about him. It was not as if she would know how to find him.
Why had her father lied to her?
Tom was already ahead of her and about to sit at Ned’s table but Ned stood, took him lightly by the arm and leant in, intent on whatever he was saying, his eyes serious. Esther paused, not because she could hear what they said but because of the look on Tom’s face.
She hadn’t seen an expression like that on his face since he’d been trapped by the leg outside the House, the frown, the set of his jaw. She actually saw him angle away briefly as if Ned had bad breath that he wished to avoid. Then he brushed the older man’s hand away and shook his head, walking over to Esther.
‘Getting your five a day, I see.’ He tried a smile on for size but quickly discarded it.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Hmm?’
‘You seemed a bit annoyed?’
‘Oh. No. I mean, yes. Everything’s fine. Haven’t had my coffee yet, that’s all.’ But he didn’t pour himself a cup; instead he stood by the table, tapping his fingers on the back of a chair.
‘Esther!’ Ned came towards her, arms outstretched. As he crushed her in a side hug, she caught a scent of lemons. After being in the House for so long, all these new smells gave her a perpetual headache. ‘I’ve already had breakfast, so I thought we—’
‘No. We haven’t had breakfast yet. We will let Esther sit here and enjoy her …’ Tom gave her plate a glance. ‘Fruit, mostly fruit.’
His words were normal but he was speaking in the kind of clipped tone Mother had always used when Esther had done something thoughtless.
Ned’s hand was light upon her shoulder and it reminded her of that other nightmare hand, the one that crumbled to dirt. ‘Of course, Tom. My mistake. Us early birds forget that the rest of you need sustenance too.’
Esther slid out from his hug. Tom got his coffee and enough croissants for three people. Esther seriously considered getting some more fruit, possibly to put in her pockets for later, and swirled her spoon in her yoghurt as the table fell silent. She tried to work out what she could say to get her father to tell her the truth, because admitting she had been listening in on a private conversation was not going to be the best place to start.
Ned fiddled with a napkin whilst she cut up her second peach, the flesh decadently juicy. This morning, he was dressed in the same beige trousers but had changed into a striped top that made him look a bit like a barcode. Staring at it for too long made Esther’s vision waver. Ned opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment Tom interrupted, ‘Good coffee, yes? Good coffee.’
Strictly speaking Esther didn’t know the difference between good and bad coffee, though she was beginning to suspect that the powdered stuff she had been drinking with Mother was perhaps not what Tom would consider “good”. That stuff had had a burnt edge to it that she realised now was not part of the experience.
They fell silent again, though Esther had a feeling that Tom and Ned were still communicating via a complicated system of eyebrow raises and pointed glances.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
Tom clattered his spoon into the saucer.
‘Everything is fine,’ Ned said in a tone that would have been easily used on a six-year-old. It was a tone Esther had thought she’d escaped.
‘So, I was thinking, right, about what you do next?’ Tom pushed his cup out of the way and put his elbows on the table. ‘And it’s up to you, right? You do what you want to do. But I think your mother needs help, and I think you could do with some time away from her.’
She didn’t want to think of next; she just wanted to enjoy now: peaches and dinky pots of yoghurt and chubby mini milk jugs.
Ned made a little huffing noise and scrunched up the napkin he had been messing with. ‘What—’
‘No. Wait. Let Esther talk. Esther, what do you want to do now? I mean, we can stay out longer, see something else today if you want, maybe a film, a modern film, not one from the Nineties …’
Peaches and pots and mini milk jugs.
She opened her mouth and then closed it again. Like a fish. Like a whale – she thought of Mr Wiffles in her rucksack and wished he’d say something.
‘Don’t hector the poor girl. I thought you wanted her to eat her breakfast in peace?’ Ned sat back in his chair and pushed his plate away, a lone piece of bacon rind left on it like a white worm. Thinking of worms made the peach in her mouth suddenly sour. ‘Look, I’ll be straight with you,’ Ned said, as Esther wondered if she could just spit out the bit of peach that didn’t want to be swallowed, ‘Tom doesn’t want me to broach it but, well, we’re just treading water here at the moment, aren’t we? Putting off the inevitable. So, I’m going this morning even if you two don’t want to come.’
‘Going?’
‘Back to the house. I’ve got unfinished business with your mother.’
Chapter 53
Hannah
Present
Hannah did not like the way the wooden bear was staring at her.
Accusatory. It was a stare that said, ‘Get off that sofa and do something. You have chores, you have the Checklist to get through, you have a million things to do before Esther gets back.’
