The Safe House, page 24
‘But … but …’ Mother twisted at the belt of her cardigan.
Black amoebas swirled lazily through her sight, but Esther stretched upwards, one hand grabbing Tom’s and the other flailing for the stuck metal sheet that had failed to make it all the way across the skylight, its edge sharp under her palm. Her plan was to balance on that metal disc first and then stand on it to haul herself out of the hole.
Tom’s face turned red as he yanked on Esther’s arm, his grip twisting her wrist hard. Another thing the films had got wrong – she had quite a list of them now. If this had been an action scene, then Tom perhaps would have strained and grimaced but he would have slowly dragged her upward, hardly breaking a sweat, before the two of them rolled out onto the grass above for the obligatory end-of-film kiss.
The reality was a lot more ungainly.
Despite the wheezing in her chest and her churning vision she pushed down on her hands, trying to hoist herself so she could get a knee onto the metal and he could get another arm under her armpit and across her back.
She felt her wrist bones grind under Tom’s fierce grip.
Scraping one knee over the edge of the metal disc she paused and took another breath, her chest tight, before beginning to move the leg that was dangling. Nudging her knee into position, her muscles complained but they did their job, limbs moved and the disc stayed steady. Her second knee was about to join the other and soon, she told herself, she would be crouched on the shutter, safe. From there she would be able to stand and then climb out of the skylight.
‘Come on!’ he yelled through gritted teeth, as if she was in labour and he was the midwife. But no, Esther thought madly, as she heaved herself upwards, that was wrong – the House was the one in labour, forcing her out, a bruised and battered newborn into a chill fresh world.
Success. She had done it. Despite demons and shutters and poisoned air, she was going to make it out – the House would not have her. She stretched upwards to grasp Tom’s hand, sweat, or maybe tears, making her eyes sting, ready for warm sunlight on her skin and the feel of grass under her hands. Blinded a little by the bright sky above her, she smiled and Tom’s face was a faithful planet always in her orbit.
But at that moment, as she put more weight onto her knee, she felt the metal underneath shift and throw her off balance. She wobbled and slid out of Tom’s grip with a painful wrench, slipping off the edge of the disc until she hung on by her upper arms, her hands clawing for purchase, the sharp edge digging into her chest, legs dangling into the room below where she heard Mother gasp.
A familiar sound made her stomach dip.
Metal began to grind.
Chapter 66
Esther counted her blessings. It didn’t take long as there was just one: the skylight shutter only moved a few inches and stopped short of crushing her against the wall.
Stillness.
Esther froze. If the metal moved again and then carried on moving it would squeeze whatever air was left right out of her lungs as it tried to carve a path through her torso.
The metal vibrated.
‘Give me your hand!’ Tom yelled.
Stupid idea, she thought. She needed both hands to grip on, most of her weight being taken by her upper arms. From below her mother screamed and the metal trembled as if in response.
‘I can’t!’ she whispered, not sure why she felt she had to lower her voice – as if the House was listening in on her. She glanced down, past her red boots that she had been so proud of in the shop, thinking this was the new her, the kind of her that wouldn’t be dangling from a skylight in the home that now wanted to kill her.
‘Drop the bag!’ Tom shouted. ‘It will give you more room!’
At first she didn’t know what he meant because she wasn’t carrying a bag, didn’t have the hands for it, both of them busy helping her not get crushed by a vicious-looking metal edge. But she realised he meant her rucksack, which wasn’t a bag – it was a part of her. She had taken it everywhere in the Out There and it was filled with the things she had hoped would keep her safe.
Mr Wiffles was in it.
She tried moving an arm and the metal squeaked. Below her the stairwell gaped. She wondered, if she dropped and fell, whether she would keep falling straight through that hole as well, arms and legs flailing, a frightened Alice definitely not going to Wonderland.
‘Get rid of the bag!’
Careful not to make any sudden movements she shrugged out of the rucksack’s straps and it swung down one arm, coming to rest in the crook of her elbow. She waited for Mr Wiffles to say, ‘Don’t even think about it, girlie,’ but he didn’t. A breath, a flailing with one arm and she watched it fall into the gloom.
Esther looked around her.
The pressure on her chest eased and now she had enough room to wriggle and haul herself up by the arms until she was once more kneeling on the disc. Her muscles trembled as she began and each movement brought with it the fear that she would set the metal sliding again.
Slow.
Slower.
Slowest.
‘Reach for my hand!’
‘I know! I’m trying!’
‘Come on!’ Tom shouted.
She tried to move her foot. It felt as if her stupid boot with its even stupider heel had partly unzipped and had now wedged itself tight, not that she could see properly, though she twisted to get a look as Tom pulled on her arm.
But her boot was not stuck – it was being held by Mother.
Esther didn’t know if her mother planned to drag her down again, into the darkness, but she knew that even if she did Esther would crawl up here, again and again. No matter how many times she was pulled back, she would clamber and drag and sweat and even if the shutter closed, she would prise it open, not caring if it made her fingers bleed.
The metal disc that she was precariously balancing upon jolted …
… Jerked …
… And then began moving.
Esther gave a half-strangled scream and lunged for Tom’s hand as the moving shutter pushed her away from it. Her one foot was trapped by Mother’s hand and her ankle was right in the path of the inexorably grinding piece of metal that would soon slice flesh and splinter bone until her foot became a sinewy pulp.
‘Quick!’ Tom tried to keep a grip on her arm.
Mother’s muffled voice came from below.
The House would not give her up. Even at the very end, even as she could feel the wind on her face, its teeth held her back, caught onto her in a death choke, which would not let go.
But she was wrong, as she had been wrong about so many things in the past. Her mother was not trying to tow her back into the darkness, she realised as she felt her foot rise, a blessed lightness as, underneath her, Mother supported her weight, giving her a boost.
There was no time to say anything because then she was moving, wiggling her foot through a rapidly closing hole as Tom yanked her upwards, through the skylight window and there was hardly time to turn and watch the metal disc close with a final clang over Mother’s face.
But Esther had heard it. That whisper, that murmur, what her mother had said to her as she pushed on her foot and those two words brought tears to her eyes as she collapsed with Tom onto the roof in the fresh air.
Her mother had said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Tom and Esther both knelt in silence, chests heaving, Esther’s lungs burning as she took big cooling breaths of air and flopped onto her back where her world became sky. Stretched out and sweat-drenched, she realised there was something missing: the hard weight of the handgun that had been tucked in her waistband. She put a hand to her spine to check. It could not have fallen by accident during her escape – she had wedged it in too tightly for that.
It was only when she heard the noise from below that she understood.
From the House came the sound of a single gunshot.
Chapter 67
Esther always knew that she would end up back in the tunnels, standing on the bare earth floor amongst the shelving, the concrete, the shadows.
After all, she was the only one who knew where the body was buried.
It was a few hours after she and Tom had escaped, staggered down from the roof, sat with Adam, found a signal. Phoned for help.
The next thing Esther remembered was the rustle of the foil blanket over her shoulders. She stared at the warning red of her boots, which were now scratched and muddy. Behind her was the ambulance and she didn’t look up because there were too many people scurrying about the place. The House.
Red and blue lights flashed. Sirens blared then stopped. Footsteps, crackle of radio, shout.
Too much noise, too much colour.
Tom came to sit with her as the body was carried out. She had been given tea in a strange squishy plastic cup that spilled most of the stuff on her and she felt exactly like that cup – one squeeze a tiny bit too hard and everything would just overflow, a hot torrent of emotion and words that would break her apart as easily as the plastic cup snapped in her hand.
Tom didn’t say anything.
The sound of metal cutters set her teeth on edge.
A shape in a body bag. It didn’t matter that Esther couldn’t see her face because that face would always be there, in her head. Her voice would always be in her ears.
‘What keeps us safe?’
‘The House.’
There she was, breathing in her brain once more. No one would ever know why her mother had done what she had done at the end. Perhaps she had killed herself rather than face the consequences of her actions, or perhaps, with Esther gone, she had thought there was nothing left for her; whatever the reason she had, at least, let Esther go, had even helped at the end. Esther remembered that ghost touch of a hand on her ankle, boosting her up.
Adam had already been taken to a hospital. Pale and bloodied on the stretcher, he had not met her gaze but had turned his head away instead.
‘Take your time.’
The policewoman next to her was just a low voice, the soft tone meant to be soothing, but, of course, the woman did not understand that time didn’t work here, standing at the open door. It never had. The House had always gulped hours and spat out stretchy saliva minutes.
She stepped into the darkness.
The footprints were the first things she noticed. Mud on the floor and the imprint of all the people who had trooped in and out over the past few hours, scuffing earth across the concrete.
‘What day is it?’ She turned to the policewoman.
‘Wednesday.’
Wednesday. On the chores rota, her tasks for the day would have included cleaning the kitchen and swapping the cushions around on the sofa, giving them a bang together that made a satisfying thumping sound. If Mother had seen the state in which the emergency services had left the floor, then mopping would have been added to that list.
Except Esther had dismantled the mop to use in her escape.
‘Just take your time …’ the policewoman whispered.
One foot in front of the other. That was all. It was easy when you reduced it to that. One foot moving, then the other. Taking her time. Except her time had already been taken, the minutes and hours and days, all sixteen years of them gone.
There were the shelves. Esther had a wild impulse to try to hide amongst them, hunker down amid the tins and first aid and wait for everyone to leave: her personal maze. Maybe in the silence she would have been able to think.
One foot in front of the other. There was Mother’s clipboard, the Checklist never to be checked again. As she walked past she tucked the pen back into its holder, her hand lingering over the rows of neat ticks.
Though the round wall lights were switched on, it remained gloomy and, in the murk, she could have been six, ten, sixteen. She half expected to hear Mother’s voice one more time, to see her come from the laundry room, or the gym, her glasses on her head, the belt of her cardigan hanging loose …
‘Do you need a break?’ The policewoman once more.
Esther shook her head.
One foot in front of the other.
Through the storeroom and into the tunnels with its alcoves.
Her father should have died in a warm place, near a window, at a ripe old age, with someone’s hand in his, even if he no longer knew who that person was. Instead he had died in the dark, cold and terrified, and had been buried next to machinery and dried food.
One foot in front of the other.
Mother had died in the dark too, alone, the cold barrel of the handgun pressed against her skin.
The tunnel widened out and now the shelving was set back into the walls themselves, some stubby branches ending in alcoves of their own, each one packed high with tools, machinery, sacks, boxes, crates, barrels and a thousand other things.
Except for one.
The one that had always been empty.
She got there too quickly.
All she had to do was confirm, a nod of her head. A dark archway.
Final resting place.
She couldn’t really cry for a man she couldn’t remember, who she thought had died years ago and had only briefly been resurrected only to fall to bone again. So she cried for her mother, for the only love she had ever had, even if that love was a darker and more twisted thing than it should have been. She cried because it was gone and the hole it left in her was raw and open and she didn’t know how to fill it.
In the swinging beam of her torchlight, there, high in the corner, hidden so you had to go right into the room and then turn, in a little niche above the entrance, dug out especially for that purpose was a very familiar type of object.
A little wooden figure in the shape of a man. Hand-whittled. Grave marker.
Esther turned and made her way back out into the light.
Chapter 68
Another door.
It seemed that Esther was doomed to always be stuck on a threshold, not knowing if she should go through. A week had passed after she had climbed, half choked, out of a skylight window and collapsed in a heap on the roof of the House with Tom.
The week had been dizzying. She had been assessed and checked over, left waiting in overheated hospital corridors, and there had been a police station and bitter coffee in disposable cups. She could not remember much of either. Toxicity reports told her what she already knew: that there were traces of sedatives in her system but, other than that, she was fit and well, even with the asthma.
And then there were no more corridors or cups. She was spun into the Out There, no other family left apart from her uncle, no friends, no money, a home that was a crime scene.
When she stopped spinning, there was Tom.
He was waiting in the car. The awkwardness of that day at the aquarium had faded like breath on glass. Too much had been survived and there was too much to do, a web of paperwork and requirements to start a life in this Out There, that without him, she would not have known how to build.
She had spent a few nights in the spare room in his small flat in the city but soon there would be money from a fund her father had left her and some from her mother too, hidden in the House. That money would allow her to decide where she wanted to live … and not have to share a bathroom with a man she had tried to snog. She had thought that she would like the city apartment block where he lived in the bay, big windows with a view of the boats, giving the illusion that the polluted streets and roads behind them were not there.
At night though, when she tried to sleep, she could hear people moving in the upstairs flat – footsteps on tiles, blurred voices, snatches of music. It made her feel haunted and she slept badly, the voices and footsteps and music leaking into her dreams. Those big windows let in too much light so it gave her a headache, and she might not have been able to see the roads and the traffic and the litter and smoke, but they were there all the same.
She stayed inside a lot.
Esther peered through the window of the door where she currently stood. It reminded her a bit of the door in the House with its metal trims and the heaviness of it. Inside was a room with a hospital bed and a side table under a window where there was a vase of tulips, their heads already drooping in the warmth.
In the bed was Adam.
Visiting had felt like the thing to do. He was her uncle. He had spent years trying to find his brother, her father, and he had succeeded.
He had broken apart her crab-shell world.
She could only see the back of his head, that silver hair, the bulk of him under a blue blanket and white hospital sheet. The smell of bleach was overpowering in the corridor but only barely concealed a hint of something rotten underneath.
He turned.
Esther gasped as he gazed at her. She had to go in now, she thought, her hand flat against the door, except she made no move to push on it, unable to drag her eyes away from him. She couldn’t read his expression – probably there was no expression for this moment, nothing that could completely convey the pain and guilt and anger and sadness. Facial muscles weren’t up to the job. Perhaps he wasn’t even seeing her, too drugged up on painkillers to realise that she was really there and not a figment of his imagination.
Esther willed herself to push her hand and open the door.
He stared at her some more and though the expression was difficult to read she could see it wasn’t pleasure to see her washing over his face. Maybe that would never come, even if they did manage to forge some kind of relationship. Every time they saw each other, the pain would needle first and they would have to grit their teeth to get through it before any other emotion could nudge in.
Esther turned from the door.
She could almost hear the sigh that breathed softly against her neck and she shook her head as she walked to the main entrance. No. Not her today either. Ever since she had left her mother’s body cooling in the darkness she had had a tingling feeling in her head that she was only a step behind her – that if she turned fast enough then she would see her standing there, arms crossed, shabby cardigan, fierce stare.
