The Safe House, page 4
‘Hello, bird,’ she said, her words briefly steaming up the inside of her mask. ‘My name is Esther and you flew into my window.’
Flick. Bird glance.
‘I don’t come outside much. Well, I never come outside. The last time I was out here I was five.’
She remembered coming in through this front door for the first time, gripping Mother’s hand as she was pulled through and into the quiet. It settled over them like a blanket too tightly tucked. Their old home had whistled and banged; footsteps had thudded and taps had dripped; the traffic had purred outside.
Eventually she had got used to the silence.
‘I think you’re hurt, bird.’
Flick.
‘Do you have family? Are there other birds waiting for you somewhere?’
And where was that ‘somewhere’? Mother had told her that, long-term, the air was dangerous for every living thing. When she imagined people Out There, she imagined them hollow-eyed, grey of pallor with a constant dry cough. So how come this bird was here, healthy enough, energetic enough to hurl itself happily into what it had thought was the sky?
Was Mother … wrong?
There was only the laboured rise and fall of its little bird chest to suggest the thing was still alive.
‘Bird?’
If it died out there then for weeks, months afterwards she would have to watch its slow decay from her bedroom window: feather to flesh to flaking bone. She would make herself watch it – as punishment for her weakness.
‘Bird?’
But there was no more eye flicking.
All she had to do was crawl forward a bit. She could do it, she had to, because if she couldn’t actually leave the House then going on the Yearly with Mother would be pretty difficult. She was safe. She was suited. She had the mask and her demon was asleep.
Then she heard it.
It took her a moment to realise what it was. But there carried on the wind that made the grass sway and the trees wave, it came again.
A voice.
A man’s voice.
A man stood where no man should be. He was far enough away that she could not see his face properly but also much too close and a part of her brain told her that made sense because he’d come down from the roof, their roof, the top of their hill. Whilst she had been putting on her suit, he had run down the side of the House, after peering into their periscope skylight, and then he had circled around her so that now he was halfway between the House and the trees. Now there was an open door for him.
She stood and grabbed the handle, knowing the door would lock automatically from the inside, as soon as it was closed.
‘Hello?’ he called.
He probably thought he was dressed for the terrain and weather. It was spring but his coat wasn’t thick enough for the cold here, the padding lightweight and cheap, nothing like the thickness of Mother’s. And his boots were thin-soled things with probably no grip. She couldn’t get a handle on his face though, to look at his eyes and try to work out the person behind them. Just blurred tanned skin and curly brown hair.
His next words were carried on the wind and fractured like a bird’s wing: ‘Esther Allbright? Can you help me?’
Can you help me?
A question directed to her and only her by the first new person she had seen in sixteen years. Then it hit her. He knew her name. The weight of it rooted her to the spot, her fingers tight on the door handle, heart loud in her ears and her legs hollow china.
She slammed the door closed.
Chapter 9
He had known her name.
Names had power – that was what the fairy tales had taught Esther. Like Rumpelstiltskin. The miller’s daughter would have had her baby taken by Rumpelstiltskin if she hadn’t found out his name and this had made him so angry he had stomped down hard enough to trap himself waist-deep in the earth until he eventually tore his own body in two.
Names could kill.
The stairs. Esther wrenched off her mask and ran up them, needing to get away from the door, the metal threshold and the man beyond who held her name so easily on his tongue.
Stumbling on the top step she nearly sprawled onto the floor of the living room but steadied herself and, without thinking about it, raced into Mother’s bedroom where she came to an awkward halt. Of course she knew this was not what she was supposed to be doing.
A strange man knew her name.
But there was no reason to think he wanted to hurt either of them, she argued with herself. It would be like wanting to hurt the shy little creatures that scampered away in the woods. Esther sat on the bed. But people did, didn’t they? They hunted those shy little creatures because they could, because it was fun to hurt things that couldn’t hurt you back. To cause fear.
That was when the thudding began.
Esther knew it was him, knocking on the metal door but the sound of it here, in a place usually so silent made her crouch and cower. The door would hold. He was just a man. He couldn’t get in.
Thud, thud.
The sound reverberated into her brain and she thought of Rumpelstiltskin stomping away in fury, slamming his foot down with unnatural force. Each thud was the stamp of a foot, except it should have been her stamping her feet, enraged at losing her name to the monster at her door.
Thud.
‘Esther Allbright?’
Instinctively she scuttled backwards on the bed, bringing her knees up to her chest and accidentally swiping the things from Mother’s bedside table with her foot.
A large wooden carving of something that looked like a melted bear fell to the floor and broke open along a seam Esther had never noticed before. She remembered Mother whittling it years ago – ‘a little night-time guardian is what I need’ – and since then he’d stared a bit cross-eyed over her bed whilst she slept.
Esther had never realised that it twisted open.
She’d never realised that it was hollow.
Or seen what was inside.
Pills.
Thud.
Mother did not suffer from high or low blood pressure, or cholesterol. She didn’t have heart disease, or diabetes. She hardly ever got a headache or a cold. The pills were glossy capsules and there were a hundred reasons why she would have had them hidden by her bed. They were perhaps indigestion tablets, or laxatives. They could be anything.
But why hide them?
With shaking hands, Esther scooped them up and stuffed them back into the bear, keeping a few in her pocket before fitting the two halves of the carving together again. So easily done. She could almost believe that there was nothing inside it, that it was just a silly wooden carving like all the others scattered around the place.
Thud.
Dying birds, shouting men, pills in the pit of bears’ stomachs – it was all too much. Esther pulled the covers over her head and waited for the noise to stop.
***
Time, elastic with fear, stretched and then snapped back.
Silence. Esther stared at the stitching on the underside of her mother’s bedspread.
‘Get up out of that bed, girl!’ She couldn’t see Mr Wiffles, but she could hear him shouting from her room.
‘I just need a moment.’
‘What do you think those pills are for, hmm? Come on, think, girl, use the old brain cells, I know you’ve got ’em!’
Medication for an illness: that’s what they were, though Esther hadn’t known her mother was sick. The man calling her name and now this, the broken bear and the contents of its stomach, these things felt like they were adding up, a horrific sum. It felt like they were leading somewhere …
Esther should have spent more time thinking, she realised, continuing to stare at the stitching. She had been an insect in a cocoon, safely hidden from the Out There, but all cocoons have to be broken eventually; all baby insects have to haul their fragile bodies out of the mucus and slime and …
What?
What happened to them then? If the nature documentaries were anything to go by then those insects were quickly snapped up by a long sticky tongue. They were dinner.
‘Come on, girl – UP!’ came Mr Wiffles’ voice again.
So she did. She dragged herself out from under the covers, wondering if the man had given up, if – when she went to the window – she would see him at the door, still like a statue, waiting for her. Her Rumpelstiltskin.
But that wasn’t what she saw when she gripped the windowsill and forced herself to look.
What she saw was Mother.
Chapter 10
Bent double, moving slow.
Esther watched the figure bundled up in a coat, which she knew had a tattered lining, in boots whose leather was as soft as a tongue and it could have been any time in the last sixteen years: Esther at the window, watching, Mother Out There.
She rolled a tyre in front of her.
The man was gone.
Had a whole day passed whilst she had cowered under the covers waiting for the man to give up banging on their door? Then she noticed: that was no new tyre. The sky was morning-bright and the papery-thin quality of dusk was still a full day away. It was too early.
This day, a day that had hardly changed in all those years, had suddenly shattered into sharp edges. Esther put a palm on the glass and tried to slow her breathing.
There was no denying what she had seen. A man. She had to tell Mother.
Everything.
Mother zigzagged across the grass to the House, as if following a path only she could see. She paused before nearing the front door, let the tyre fall and bent down.
Esther had forgotten the bird.
Mother straightened and Esther was close enough to see the expression on her face, the frown and the way her eyes darted around to the top of the House and then directly to Esther’s window. Esther didn’t need to step back because the window was mirrored for privacy, but she did anyway. That frown was not sadness or disgust.
It was anger.
She disappeared out of view for a few minutes and came back with a shovel, which she used to jab a few times at the spring-soft earth, the grass shorter in front of the door. Esther wondered if the bird had died. A brown clod came away and Mother shook it onto the ground nearby but she didn’t start digging again. Instead, she leant against the shovel, head bowed. Perhaps, Esther thought, she was briefly overcome with the fragility of life, the poignancy of the little dead carcass.
Perhaps she was praying.
‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today for Bird …’
But Mother’s next movements weren’t mournful. She let the shovel drop and kicked at the earth she had uncovered, scattering some of it back into the small hole. Then she picked up the bird in her gloved hand and, with one powerful swing, she hurled it away from her.
Esther stared.
Maybe it had been the way the injured or dead bird had dangled from its wing, head lolling, or maybe it had been the viciousness of how the bird had been sent arcing into the sky, but there was something about what she had just seen her mother do that made Esther take another step backwards. The bird might still have been alive, but she had thrown the poor creature away from her as if it were a bit of rubbish.
Esther moved. Out of the room and down the stairs, hand on its chill rail, until she was back at the door once more, a blank of steel grey, huge and forbidding.
It opened.
Mother appeared, dusting her hands onto the back of her jeans, face calm.
‘Was it alive?’ Esther asked, too loud, too high.
Mother gave her a long look. ‘The bird? No. Dead. They just can’t cope in that rotten air, not even out here, away from the cities.’
It hadn’t been dead, Esther thought, except she hadn’t thought those words – she had said them.
Mother stopped dusting her hands. ‘Sorry?’
All of the heat in Esther’s body rushed to her face. ‘It wasn’t dead. I … I … saw it – from my window.’ Mother tilted her head in an ironically bird-like gesture. ‘You just threw it away. You could have … helped it.’
A blanket-lined box, seeds, water in a tiny bowl.
‘The bird was dead, Pips.’
So you could have buried it, Esther thought. You could have folded its little wings neatly against its body and you could have laid it in the earth. With care. Instead you tossed it away. Esther made sure these thoughts stayed in her head this time. Her fingers traced the outline of pills in her pocket.
‘Why are you back early?’
‘Bloody flat tyre on the van!’ Mother pushed past her, removing her mask as she headed into the tunnels.
‘Wait!’
Mother paused and turned. She worked too hard, Esther thought, looking at the bruised hollows under her eyes, her sunken cheeks and reddened hands. Day by day: the constant checks and maintenance, the worry of being the only person in charge. Except that was where she was wrong, wasn’t she? She was no longer the only person who could be in charge. It was time she let Esther share the load.
She pictured a man in a poorly chosen jacket, and she remembered the sound of those thuds echoing through the House.
‘Mother, there was—’
‘Esther, can’t this wait?’ Mother fluttered her free hand weakly.
‘No! Just now—’
‘Why are you wearing your overalls?’
Esther’s heart lurched. She looked down at herself, at the overalls that normally hung on a peg by the front door, the ones she never wore because she never went anywhere. The ones she was quite clearly wearing right now.
‘I …’ She watched Mother’s eyes flit about the porch, looking for other signs of disobedience. ‘I was … I put them on in case you needed help with the tyre …’
She wasn’t quite sure where that excuse had come from but it was good. She could tell by the way the frown between Mother’s brows smoothed out a little. ‘I don’t need help.’ She went over to where Esther’s mask hung and stared at it for a second too long. Esther’s heart would have lurched again but it seemed to have frozen in her chest. She would know, Esther thought, she would be able to tell that the mask had been used, that it had been worn. There would be something to give her away, a thumbprint or smudge of lip balm on that treacherous clear plastic.
Mother adjusted the strap on the mask. ‘Take the overalls off, Esther,’ she said and then walked into the darkness of the tunnel, returning a few minutes later rolling a new tyre in front of her.
There was no point telling her about the man who needed help because Mother wouldn’t want to help him. No point in thinking that dead birds would be buried. Esther sighed and watched her mother readjust her own mask and roll the tyre out of the doorway into the bright daylight outside. But it was pollution and the air from which Esther had to be protected – not people.
‘Can you help me?’ the man had said.
A man, not a fairy-tale monster – possibly lost, bigger than a bird, harder to launch into the undergrowth, but no less vulnerable out here in Mother’s kingdom. She could not let Mother get to him first.
***
Outside again, the world a dizzying swirl of colour.
Esther had waited an hour after Mother had left, just to be sure. Standing in the open doorway, masked and suited, she wondered if he would return, if he had even been real. But she did not have to stand there long. First as a small stick-like smudge under the trees and then growing larger and larger, he came towards the House. It was as if he had been waiting for her.
Esther’s heart swelled in her chest, squeezing up against her demon who opened an eye and snuffled. She took a measured breath and gripped one hand in the other.
On he came, walking with long, purposeful strides and now he was a distinct figure in the scrubby grass and bracken that was the House’s personal moat.
Heading straight for her.
Esther instinctively moved backwards, one hand stretched behind her, feeling for the reassuring solidity of the door frame at her back.
It was the intent with which he was moving. This time, there was no hesitant standing and staring. This time he was walking in a direct line to the door, as if he knew exactly what he was planning to do and wanted to get on with it. It didn’t matter if previously he had asked for help, it didn’t matter about his stupid unsuitable clothes or his brown curls. His moving forward made her want to scoot back, despite everything.
Of course, she was not expecting what happened next. How could she have expected that? She had not known about the danger lurking right there in front of the House. If she had known she would have warned him; she would have run out and yelled for him to stop.
But he did not stop. He kept on and Esther could only watch in horror as up from the long rough grass reared two huge snapping metal jaws. They caught the man’s leg, mid shin, and brought him crashing to the ground.
Chapter 11
Hannah
Sixteen years ago
The afternoon it happened seared itself, barbecue-hot, onto the pink meat of Hannah’s memory.
It started with sunshine and a back garden decorated with bunting and balloons and enough party food to give twice the number of children a sugar rush for days.
‘I am five today!’ Esther occasionally paused in her racing around to come and shout this at Hannah in case she had forgotten.
‘I know, Pips.’ Hannah smiled and smoothed her hot, flushed cheek. ‘Now sit here by me and calm down a bit.’
‘But I’m in the middle of a game!’
Hannah had seen the game, which was really a group of girls tearing around in a circle; girls she didn’t know, just like she didn’t know anyone in this new town.
‘And now you’re in the middle of a hug!’ Hannah grabbed Esther and squeezed as the little girl giggled at first and then, as Hannah did not let go, wriggled, squirmed and twisted free.
‘Great party! Grace is having a blast.’ Another mother’s face got in her way. Hannah couldn’t remember her name. The woman took a swig from her glass, one she had filled from the wine bottle she had brought with her. ‘Sunday afternoon treat, eh? Especially as Jonny’s driving.’ She smiled at Hannah and Hannah lifted the corners of her mouth in response, making a note to never let Esther go to a party at Grace’s house. ‘Want some?’
