The Safe House, page 25
A woman and a little boy hurried past her and Esther didn’t know what made her stop and watch them. The woman had long glossy brown hair that she wound up in one hand and flicked over her shoulder in an irritated fashion, her other hand dragging the little boy who was in turn dragging his feet. There was nothing in his face that Esther recognised, no hint in the tilt of his head or the shape of his jaw, nothing that called out to her. His was just another face in the hundreds she walked past every day.
They headed into Adam’s room and Esther did not follow them. Not today.
Chapter 69
Another door.
Further down the street was a sugar-coated house with metal butterflies feeding from it. But she no longer wanted to see inside what had once been her childhood home. She was here for a different house.
The door opened.
‘Tomeeee!’ A shape launched itself at Tom, stood next to her.
‘Oof!’ He staggered backwards as Maisie gave him a death-choke hug, wrapping her arms around his neck. Today she had added a knitted hat with dinosaur scales on it to match her slippers and T-shirt.
‘Maisie Jane Lawson! How many times do I have to tell you? Do not open the front door without—’ Olivia’s scolding came to an abrupt stop when she saw Esther on her doorstep.
‘Umm … I have something for Maisie, if that’s okay?’ Esther faltered. ‘And, umm … sorry for, well, for the last time—’ But she didn’t get to finish as Olivia had already enveloped her in a hug.
‘Lovely girl, come in, come in! No apology needed.’
‘What’s my present?’ Maisie twisted in Tom’s arms and pushed her face into Esther’s. ‘What is it? What is it? What is it?’
‘At this rate, missy, it’ll be a lump of coal – in!’ Olivia stood back to allow them to enter, Maisie jumping down from Tom’s arms and whispering very loudly to herself as she walked past her mother that she liked coal a lot and it would be a brilliant present.
There was the room with its walls hung with prints and pictures and brass things that tinkled softly. There were the brightly patterned throws and rugs with edges beginning to fray. There was tea and that sweet, smoky smell, though Olivia pinched out the incense stick, whipped it away and opened a window.
‘Tea party!’ Maisie ordered, dragging Esther by the hand through the living room and out into the back garden where a tent had been set up on the grass. Calling it a tent was probably an ambitious word for it – it was a blanket fixed by hope and two broom handles. Underneath was a tea set and an arrangement of dolls and toys, each one with a cup next to them, Mittens the toy lion in pride of place at the centre.
‘Tea.’ Maisie pushed a cup into Esther’s hand. It was full of a liquid that certainly looked like a kind of green tea, with some added bits of lawn in it. A bear toppled into his drink, nose first. ‘Are you going to run off again?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Esther fished out a blade of grass from her tea and took a pretend sip, not willing to trust Maisie’s tea-making skills just yet.
‘Mummy says that your mummy died and I’m not to talk about it.’
A sigh. A breath on her neck. ‘That’s right.’
‘You must be sad.’ Maisie straightened the drunken bear.
That word “sad” would do for now because there wasn’t an actual word for the maelstrom of emotions that gut-punched her at the oddest of times. ‘I am.’ Maisie nodded and poured more tea. ‘I’d like you to meet someone.’ Esther fished into her bag, not the rucksack from before but a proper handbag – the kind she had seen women carrying on that first visit to the village, smaller and sleek with a gold clasp. It had been hard to stuff him into the space. ‘This is Mr Wiffles.’
Maisie stroked him. ‘Hello, Mr Wiffles.’
‘You see, Mr Wiffles is mine. I had him when I was little like you and I’ve kept him for a very long time, but I don’t think I should keep him forever. I think he’d like to join your toys.’
Once more, the bear slid into his cup of tea.
‘I’d keep him?’ Maisie stared at her, wide-eyed.
‘Yes. I think he’d like to swim here from now on.’
‘But he’s yours.’
Esther smoothed the velvet nap along his fin. ‘I’m too old for him.’
Maisie sat back on her heels and frowned. ‘Mummy has a teddy with one ear that she’s had since she was little and she loves him. She wouldn’t give him away.’
How to explain it? Doing this wasn’t even about Mr Wiffles, not really – doing this was a line in the sand, a symbol, a ceremony. A jumping-off point. She didn’t know what it was, but she needed to do it.
‘How about a holiday then? Can Mr Wiffles stay for a bit?’
‘A holiday … like sandcastles and ice lollies? Mummy could knit him a swimsuit.’
If Mr Wiffles was ever going to talk to her again, it would have been now. She could imagine what he’d say about sporting a knitted one-piece. And that was the thing – she could imagine it, but she couldn’t hear it. Not anymore.
‘Yes, like that.’
‘I guess so.’ Maisie pushed the teddy bear into a seated position, sounding more convinced. ‘A holiday would be fun. And you could come back and get him when you miss him too much.’
‘Yes.’
‘Mummy!’ Maisie jumped to her feet and raced inside. ‘Tom’s girlfriend has given me a whale!’
Esther smiled. Then she gave Mr Wiffles the cup she had been drinking from and propped him next to Mittens, who was sporting bows in his mane, ‘Goodbye, Mr Wiffles,’ she said, smoothing his nose. What she meant was goodbye, rosary days; goodbye, Checklist; goodbye, the sighing of the air-conditioning system.
What she hadn’t been able to say yet: goodbye, Mother.
She waited for a response.
In the silence she got up and had actual tea inside with Olivia and Tom whilst Maisie ran about with a cardboard dinosaur tail strapped around her waist and all the while, during every sip and in the pauses between conversation topics, she waited for a familiar gruff voice in her ear.
It never came.
***
On the way back to Tom’s flat they passed the pub they had first stayed in when she had left the House, the one where they had sat in the darkness with the stars wheeling above them.
Stopping seemed the right thing to do.
There was the same beer garden bench except now there were couples and families around them and it was just warm enough to remember what summer felt like. There were no stars this time, but they sat with their backs to the table so they could lean and watch the clouds.
‘Fat dog’s nose.’ Esther pointed at a tattered cloud.
‘Weird eagle with fish tail.’ Tom pointed at another.
They sat in silence for a while and considered the sky. The stars were there, Esther thought, they just couldn’t see them. It was only because of the earth’s atmosphere that the daytime sky was blue, without it the sky would be black and the sun would shine down like a massive spotlight, turning the world into one huge amateur theatre production.
‘Can I drive the rest of the way home?’ she asked.
‘Oh God. I’m going to need a stronger drink.’
Learning to drive felt important – the ability to escape if she needed to, to go far away. Though going anywhere further than a mile or so would take a while as she currently did not like using anything over second gear.
Her chest tightened but her demon would always be with her, inside her. She couldn’t reach in and rip it out of her body. The rattle of her inhaler was a comforting sound. So far she had not had a bad attack but she knew one would be coming at some point and she couldn’t hide from it. More importantly, she didn’t want to.
She sat up and bent over as she took drags from the little plastic lifesaver always in her pocket. At once, Tom was by her side.
‘Okay?’
‘Okay.’
But he didn’t move back to his original seat. The blue sky above them was not the blue of aquarium water, however, and no fish swum around them. Esther could feel his shoulder next to hers and it would take hardly any movement to lean in to him. It felt like she knew him, the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck when it got too long, the ready smile, the way he bit his lip when thinking. It felt like he knew her. But the thing was – she didn’t know her yet – not this her, the one who walked around Out Here and bought takeaway coffee after getting off a bus. She could not let herself lean on anyone’s shoulder just yet because she had done far too much of that in her life up until now. Time to do the heavy lifting herself.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
But she wanted a bit more time in the sun. She wanted his hand next to hers and his shoulder close to her own. She wanted invisible stars and a sky that was the colour of the sea.
She knew there was one more door left.
Chapter 70
The final door.
The only one that had mattered to her for sixteen years.
Esther was alone. It had been a few months since she had moved out of Tom’s flat. She needed to be on her own, so that if her washing machine broke, she would be the one who would have to fix it, so that she would buy her own shopping and work out how to set up broadband. By herself. She would have to go into the Out Here to get those things done.
No more apartments with their thin walls and ghost noises. No. She had chosen to rent a tiny end-of-terrace house in a village that was never going to be big enough to be a town and where the nearest city was a forty-minute car ride away. Old habits died hard.
Road, to dirt track, to path, to gravel, to … House.
One last time.
She got there before the rest of them. She had been up so early that the sky was still deciding what colour it would be and the trees hadn’t yet shaken night from their branches. That was okay. She was happy to sit and wait.
She had had the option to sell the land and everything on it. That was what had been expected. Who would want to keep such a place? You couldn’t have a fresh start with a whiff of rot following you everywhere you went. You had to get rid, move on.
Except.
As much as she liked her end-of-terrace rented house in the village that would never be a town, so far away from the city, every time one of her neighbours had a bonfire or barbecue, or she saw exhaust fumes in the air, she wanted to hide in the house all day. The sound of her neighbours’ cars out in the street were animals growling warning snarls, snouts pointed to the sky, sensing the poison in the air.
She read a lot, about eco technologies and super plants that could filter out noxious traffic fumes and deadlines and agreements and treaties and breakthroughs.
But they were only words.
The diggers rumbled in first along a dirt track now widened enough to use. They had known Esther was going to be there and the lead driver touched his cap in what looked almost like a salute.
She gazed at her narrow bedroom window, realising with a jolt that she was right back at the beginning. Tom had stood here, where she was, such a short and also achingly long time ago and she had watched him from that window, a willing captive, sometimes imagining an Other Her out there living a different life.
Here she was.
Not Other, just Her.
The hairdresser’s appointment had been one of the first things she had done. Textbook apparently, for people like her, people who’d been through some kind of trauma, to hack and dye their way to a different person. Except that wasn’t what she was doing – she was whittling, shaving away the curls of wood until she could see her true shape in the block.
Someone sighed at her shoulder.
If she let her eyes wander a little, she could almost kid herself that she could see a flicker at that window, a pale face gazing out, trapped in her slice of glass: a scruffy figure in a baggy cardigan with a clipboard in her hand.
More machinery rumbled into the clearing.
She planned to sit through the whole thing, however long it took – though she had learnt that destruction was quick. Years to build and maintain, gone in minutes, the time it takes to open a door and allow someone in.
The man who had saluted her earlier, paunch straining the T-shirt he wore under his hi-vis jacket, raised his hand to her again, waiting.
Esther felt like a Roman emperor at a gladiator game. Thumb up, or thumb down: one movement from her hand holding the power to bring down what had once been her world.
She did not believe in ghosts. But, if there were any attached to this building, she meant for the diggers and trucks in front of her to so completely turn the place to rubble there would be nothing for them to haunt.
She raised her hand.
The man nodded and swung back into his seat.
The first digger chugged into movement, its arm lifted in front of it as it wobbled forward. Giant metal teeth met concrete and bit down hard, tugging and shoving until the stone began to crumble and then crack.
Esther settled in.
Her hand instinctively went to her pocket, her fingers finding the shape of the inhaler, tracing over it like a talisman. The camping chair was comfortable enough. She had a flask of coffee with her and a warm jacket. She could sit here all day.
The metal teeth continued to chew.
Earlier that month there had been a graveyard with two glossy black headstones, their gold lettering shining in the sun. A father she had never known, a mother she thought she had. People came to speak to the dead, she knew. They brought flowers and told them about children and grandchildren, about their feelings and what the weather was doing. Esther had not known what to say. It would take a while before she worked that out, if she ever did.
She would build a different home on this land. A home with big windows and a garden … a driveway in block paving that invited visitors up to a normal-sized door, not made of metal. This, here, amongst the trees and the whispering grass was where she felt safe, but it was no longer where she wanted to hide. This new home would sit on the hill, not under it, it would be visible from the path – a glint of glass and soft cream stone. Esther could see it in her mind.
It occurred to her that once again, she was sitting and watching as the action went on around her. But this time, once the last wall had fallen, once the window frames had buckled and twisted and the rubble as it fell sent clouds of dust into the air, she would get up from her spot on the ground and she would turn to that dirt path, free to keep walking for as long as she wished into a world where the sky had finally settled on a startling bright blue.
She took a deep breath.
Gripped by The Safe House? Don’t miss Sleepless, another unputdownable novel from Louise Mumford. Available now!
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Keep reading for an excerpt from Sleepless …
Chapter 1
There was already a gridlock of cars stretching away behind the accident. Her accident. Thea felt a weird ownership over it, like a cat licking at her poor dead kitten.
Her fault – no doubt.
It had to be. In total, she’d probably only slept for four hours … that week.
Behind her was the three-vehicle sandwich in which her car was the crushed metal filling. She staggered back and tried to close the mangled door.
Someone pulled at her elbow: a man, dragging her back from the road where she stood gazing into the traffic. He was uninjured but shouting something, and Thea couldn’t focus, her mind slipping off him in the same way his glasses slid down his sweaty nose.
The actual moment of impact had been strangely soothing. Thea couldn’t remember any sound really, so there had just been this lovely, pillowy-white cushioning as the airbag deployed and then – whoosh! – like a fairground ride, she was spun around.
She hadn’t done it on purpose. She’d thought about things like that quite a few times, in those dead, red-eye hours of the night when she felt like the only person left on earth who was still awake. Ironically, as her car smashed into the one in front, she had actually been congratulating herself that she’d got through the day, that she could do this living thing, even without any sleep, with just a cold sponge for a brain and sandpaper balls for eyes.
She could do it.
But clearly, she couldn’t.
How many years of sleeplessness? Too many. Too many achingly long nights that then smudged themselves into joyless, grey, listless days before lights out and another eight hours of frantic panicking. Too many nights etched into the bloodshot spiderwebs in the whites of her eyes.
There was a woman with the man now and Thea looked for blood on her, expecting broken limbs and jagged wounds, but there was nothing, not even a torn blouse. Both of them worked their mouths madly, like gulping fish, expectantly looking at her and then the cars and then back to her again. She should respond, she thought, but she didn’t know what to say. The words were there, but they were busy dancing in her brain, enjoying themselves – shaken loose by the impact and free to partner up however they chose.
Her car was concertinaed. It was a shock, how impressively the whole thing could crumple, yet keep her whole as a seed inside its tattered fruit.
But, if she was fruit, then she was the rotten kind, she realized with a gulp that turned into a choking gasp. She could have hurt that man and woman staring at her now. She could have killed them. Up until that point, the only damage her insomnia had done had been to herself – her social life, her concentration, mood, skin, memory and general joy in living. It had never affected someone else, never nearly crushed them in a smoking metal box.
There was pain now. Her nose a tender, pulsating blob, her knees suddenly shakier than they had been, blood on her collarbone where her seatbelt had taken a bite.
Abruptly, she sank to the cold ground at the roadside. Soon there would be flaring emergency lights and sirens; there would be gentle fingers prodding at her and questions asked and, dimly, she realized she would have to get herself together for all of that. More people gathered, but from her viewpoint sat on the ground, they were just feet, their voices so far above her they may as well have been stars.
