The Safe House, page 7
She breathed again.
Fine.
No harm done. She had been lucky.
‘I’m sorry—’ Tom began.
‘If I’m outside, I need the mask, my mother says. Asthma – I have asthma and this toxic air—’
‘The air?’
‘You probably think you’re safe out here, but Mother says we’re not. We’re only safe here, in the House.’
Tom rubbed at his leg, his face angled downwards so she couldn’t see his expression. Now her chest demon had slunk away, Esther remembered metal teeth rearing upwards. Closer to him, she could see that he had amber-flecked brown eyes and a face that seemed too young, too wrinkle-free, too tanned by a sun Esther’s skin hadn’t felt in years. She shifted away, scraping the hair from her face and twisting it behind her, hopefully neat, hopefully not too sweaty.
She tried to remember why she had gone out to this man in the first place. ‘I guess we need to sort out your leg.’
Nuclear-strength heat rushed into Esther’s cheeks. She didn’t want to touch him; in fact she had only said those words because that was what she was meant to say. She was meant to want to help him, but really all she wanted was for him to leave – he took up too much space in this small porch.
Kneeling to him, she pushed the material of his trouser leg up a little further and made a mental note of the first-aid things she would need to get from the storeroom: tape and antiseptic lotion and bandages and—
He reached down to still her hand. ‘You’ve been here a long time?’ His voice and touch were soft but Esther gasped as if she had been burnt. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—’
‘No. I … umm …’ She sat back on her heels, keeping her breath steady and holding the hand he had touched to her chest as if it had been hurt. The bruises on his skin were waiting to appear, sea creatures currently submerged, but they would come to the surface soon enough: big, dark shapes. She fixed her eyes on the hairs on his calf and it was a while before she could say, ‘Sixteen years. I’ve been here for sixteen years.’
And she wanted to explain, to make him understand. Everything. About the demon in her chest and that this was to save her, that Mother had built a world for them both and that world had protected them … that he didn’t have to look at her the way he was right then.
‘Esther—’
Her name spoken by someone who wasn’t Mother. The way he said it was gentler, and the “s” sound made her shiver.
‘There,’ she said, making as if to stand up. ‘I need to get some first-aid stuff.’
He reached out again and caught her forearm this time. She snatched it away as if he’d tried to bite it, but too late – once more the warmth of his fingers brushed hers. There was nothing but concern in his gold-flecked eyes and the shock of his touch on her skin.
‘Esther, your mother is lying to you.’
Chapter 18
Tom talked and Esther watched his mouth move, knowing the words coming out of it should make sense but she couldn’t make them fit together. She wasn’t used to it, this new voice with its strange cadences and rhythm; she couldn’t follow it fast enough.
Instead, she calculated how far he was to the door, how much it would take to force him to it and then out – out of the porch, out of her brain. Because he was wrong, she could see that. He was bad. The House did not want him.
‘… but I mean … where do I start?’ Esther said nothing. ‘How do I even …?’ Tom fumbled in his jacket pocket and brought out something that to Esther looked like a flat black piece of glossy plastic. Under his touch it sprang into colour, revealing itself to be a screen of some sort. ‘It’s probably best to just show you.’
‘Is that a television?’ Esther couldn’t stop herself from asking.
‘A television?’ Tom smiled a little. ‘Well, kind of, I guess, but mostly it’s my phone, which connects to the internet so you can do pretty much everything on it.’
To Esther a phone was big, clunky and plastic and often attached to a wall with a long bouncing cord on the end of the receiver, which the people in the films she watched wound around their arm whilst they made plans and gossiped.
In order to see the screen, Esther had to move closer to Tom. He had his own smell too, she discovered: soap with a warm, spiced edge, though she didn’t know what the spice was.
‘We have no phone signal here,’ she said, a headache beginning to pound her temples.
Tom tapped at the screen. ‘Umm … I think you’ll find you do.’
‘What?’
‘See?’ He touched the plastic and it sprang into colour again. ‘See those bars there – two are filled in. That means signal.’
‘But … we have no need for a phone. It’s an electric … net …’ She faltered.
‘Net?’
He didn’t need to say it.
She had read about tinnitus, an insistent low-level humming or buzzing that suddenly happens for no apparent reason, that only the afflicted person can hear, and can continue for years. It felt like that, or as if she been left in the tumble dryer for too long, hot and full of static, liable to touch something metal and give herself a jolt.
She took a breath. Okay, Mother had lied about the phone. But there would be a reason, there would be an explanation.
Esther sank onto the bench next to him because her knees had suddenly disappeared. ‘I do have asthma. You saw.’
‘Yes.’
‘Mother says that the air is wrong for me, too polluted. Everywhere.’
Tom tugged at his trouser leg. Esther tugged at the tattered remains of a life she’d thought she’d known.
‘But you’ve been outside and you’re fine,’ he said.
It was coming, what Tom was trying to tell her. It was a volcano smoking away on the horizon, about to start pouring its lava down the hillside, killing all the tiny villagers in its path. She wanted to hold the lava back.
Remembering the name he had called her when she had first met him, Esther asked, ‘What’s a doomsday prepper?’
Tom turned back to his phone and she wondered if he was going to call someone and put them on the line, a calm voice to explain to her how Mother had been wrong, wrong, wrong all these years. So when he tapped at the screen again and swiped at it as if trying to remove a speck of dust, Esther couldn’t help but crane her neck to get a better look.
‘Here, this is from a newspaper. Doomsday prepper.’
He tilted the screen to her.
***
Saturday Feature: The Doom Boom
In search of people who close their door on the world
The end is nigh. The end is always nigh. War, nuclear weapons, pandemic, pollution, global warming. The fact that it hasn’t ended so far, that’s the miracle – but it’s a miracle that some people aren’t willing to take for granted.
And there is always someone around to cash in on fear. The Doom Boom is well and truly upon us. Out in the desert, in forests, farms, underground and in all the other forgotten spaces of the world, entrepreneurs have their eye on an apocalyptic future and are building for it.
Especially in America.
Oscar Stamp is ahead of them. Now in his fifties, he lives in a place I have vowed to not disclose where a small group of concrete fortresses jut out of the earth. He has a weather-beaten face that makes him look older than his years, a ready smile and a well-stocked armoury.
We drink coffee in a scene from an apocalyptic film.
‘I don’t want to go back,’ he tells me, pouring us coffee the consistency of treacle. There is a level of luxury here that I am surprised to note. This place has a self-sufficient power supply, water from a nearby well, furnishings, cushions, even the odd decorative throw. This is no dark bunker; it has windows, even if the glass is bulletproof. The end of times looks pretty neat.
Twenty years ago, Oscar worked in a bank. I ask what made him give up a relatively secure job and life in a city. ‘I was a Boy Scout – maybe that was the start of it all?’ He laughs croakily, his voice unused to long conversations. ‘Be prepared, hmm? People think I’m crazy, to have done this, but to me they’re the crazy ones – I mean, with everything going on in the world, why wouldn’t you get yourself a place like this? Somewhere safe, or, at least, safer, to wait out whatever catastrophe happens next. Disease, war, riot, wildfire, drought – you can’t trust the government to look out for you no more.’
So, Oscar decided on the bunker life. ‘I had the money and the know-how to build this little community, so I thought, heck, why not? The other plots are for my family, or my friends, whoever wants them. Though they don’t want ’em just yet, unlike me!’ He knows that he would be seen as an oddity, the doomsday prepper who didn’t wait for doomsday. ‘Me? I’ve had enough of people. I like the quiet.’
I tell him about my little apartment, my home comforts and a bit about my life. He listens patiently enough but then frowns. ‘Frogs in a pot, hmm. Heard that saying? You’re still a young’un. You’re going to have it worse than me because odds, y’know? You’re the frog in the pot – you just don’t realise the water’s boiling.’
I can’t help but shiver. It feels like a story come to life, an ancient mariner predicting my doom. Oscar can live the rest of his life in this place and never have to come out if he doesn’t want to. He has something called a deep larder with enough freeze-dried food to last for twenty-five years, a remote surveillance system, a panic room, and a nuclear-fallout shelter that doubles as a games room.
‘Aren’t you worried about falling ill? Or accidents?’
Oscar frowns again. ‘Worrying about those things don’t change ’em none, do they? If I get sick, I get sick. It’s my choice how I deal with that …’ Rather chillingly, he nods towards the guns locked in a cupboard on the far wall.
A 2017 survey by the financial-tech company Finder suggested that roughly 20 per cent of Americans spent money on survival materials that year, and a further 35 per cent said they already had what they needed for an emergency. This year, those figures are bound to be higher. Meeting Oscar, who is friendly and thoughtful, has shown me that preparing for a less than rosy future needn’t make you an oddity – it might actually be the only sane thing to do.
***
Esther handed back the phone, the glare from the screen making her temples throb even more. She pictured Oscar with his games room and deep larder and guns. When he died, however he died, perhaps no one would find him for months, maybe years … if at all. He would be bone and mulch. She gripped the cold bench. ‘People think Oscar is mad, to do what he’s done?’
‘Well. I mean, he’s got a point, y’know. There are wars and diseases and fires and floods and pollution’s pretty bad and when you look at it, it’s a wonder more people aren’t doing what your mum has done …’ He caught the horror on Esther’s face and added hurriedly, ‘But there’s all sorts of things being done to tackle pollution, to clean up the cities …’
‘Mother isn’t a doomsday prepper, though, and we’re not in America. We know the world goes on outside. We don’t think it’s ended or anything …’
‘No, but … you’re still hiding from it, aren’t you, like Oscar? Reading that feature, what I got from it – it’s all about trust. Oscar doesn’t trust anyone else to look out for him. Your mother doesn’t trust anyone else to look out for you.’
Trust. Esther was having some problems with that word, mostly because of those hard little lumps in her jeans pocket. ‘Mother has some pills. I mean, I found some pills of hers. She’d hidden them in a bear—’
‘A bear?’ Tom looked around as if a lumbering creature was about to swipe at him with one huge paw.
‘A wooden bear. An ornament. Can your phone tell me what they are?’
‘What do the pills look like?’
Esther held out her hand with the tablets nestled in her palm. Tom tapped and swiped at the screen once more, a whole universe of information at his fingertips. ‘Can I?’ he asked and she tipped the pills into his palm. People must be so clever, she thought, watching him. The knowledge they have, the ability to quickly get the answer to any question in moments. They were gods.
‘To what do we give thanks?’
‘The House.’
‘What protects the air we breathe?’
‘The House.’
‘What gives us plants and water and power and comfort?’
‘The House.’
The House. Mother. These were the things she knew. Enough. Tom, this stranger, this piece of grit in the eye of the House – he couldn’t stay. Once he gave her the answer, she would make him leave.
‘Diazepam,’ he said, just as Esther stood up. ‘It’s a sedative.’
Esther paused. Sedative. The kind of thing that settles to the bottom of rivers? Silt?
Tom continued to read aloud, ‘This medication works by calming the brain and nerves and can treat anxiety, muscle spasms and seizures …’ He glanced at her.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They … sedate. Make you calm – sleepy even – easy to manage …’
‘Mother wouldn’t take those …’
A silence and then Tom asked, ‘So if they aren’t for her … then who are they for?’
And just like that, the volcano belched and spewed. Had her quiet clockwork convent days been the result of little tablets dissolving into her bloodstream? Why would Mother have needed to do that? The weight of the last half an hour pushed at her and she felt like she needed to crouch under its pressure. This morning she had waved Mother off on the Yearly and everything had been like normal and now, as outside the light gave up against the darkness, here she was stood with a strange man who had ripped a hole in her life and wanted to keep on tearing.
Tom got up and shuffled a little towards her, limping on his injured leg, one arm slightly outstretched as if to stop her, as if to touch her again, and Esther flinched.
‘Esther, I need to tell you—’
But he didn’t get to finish his sentence. Instead, the outer door opened behind him and in the doorway stood Mother. Her face obscured by her mask, she pushed back her hood, saw the man in front of her and gripped what she held in her other hand.
‘What keeps us safe?’
‘The House.’
‘And the bloody gun.’
Chapter 19
Hannah
Sixteen years ago
The door opened and Hannah was faced with her future self.
‘Didn’t you read the sign?’ The woman frowned, gripping on to the collar of a dog that strained against her hold and lunged at Hannah. The sign had been hard to miss: it had been nailed to the gatepost and had used many red capital letters.
‘I did but I—’
‘No cold callers, no salespeople, no junk mail—’ The door slowly began to close.
‘I want to buy your land!’
The door stopped.
Hannah had found the listing whilst killing time before an appointment at an unfamiliar GP surgery. In the two months that had passed since the will reading she had been taking a lot of those appointments lately, the ones further afield where she could grab a coffee in the nearby town or village and stop by an estate agent’s window.
‘I want to buy your land for cash.’
‘Good for you. I have an estate agent, so contact him.’
‘I’m willing to pay a good price for it if we can keep this a private sale.’
The woman yanked on the dog’s collar and gave Hannah a stare that could have kick-started a new ice age.
‘You have five minutes.’ She held the door open.
Future-Hannah was everything she would have wanted her to be. It wasn’t just that this woman lived in a forbidding great fortress of a house in the middle of nowhere with antisocial signs and an even more antisocial dog. It was the stare. Her stare was one that pinned a person to the spot and kept them there, unable to remember what their limbs were for whilst she studied them.
The hallway that Hannah stepped into was a jumble of boxes piled high, bags, an upturned table and chairs stacked on top of each other. Just like Hannah had been sure there was actually a house under all that ivy as she’d walked up the drive, so she was sure there were walls and a floor somewhere underneath all of the stuff.
‘Flood in the lower east wing. I’ve had to decamp.’ The dog being held by Future-Hannah lunged again, its teeth almost grazing Hannah’s coat. ‘Sit, you stupid animal.’
Hannah nearly did.
‘Your five minutes is fast disappearing.’
‘Yes! Mrs …’ Hannah left an expectant pause.
‘Lady Tregellen.’
‘Lady Tregellen. I want to buy your land, for cash, for much more cash than you’re asking, actually—’
‘I said SIT!’
The dog gave one more rather half-hearted lunge and then did as it was told, almost as if it too was waiting for its mistress’s reaction to Hannah’s offer. A trail of slobber began to stretch from its chin.
Lady Tregellen raised her eyebrows. ‘Go on – the catch …’
‘I will pay you much more money for the land if … you agree to keep my name out of it.’
‘Out of it?’
‘Out of all records. Land Registry, the contracts – everything. I will pay in cash, upfront, one lump sum.’
In the light from a nearby lamp Hannah took in how eccentrically Lady Tregellen was dressed: corduroy trousers tucked into knee socks and a padded gilet over a flowery shirt, bright green fingerless gloves topping off the outfit. Her hair was white and thin like strands of dried glue on paper.
‘Drugs?’
‘Sorry?’ Was the woman asking for drugs? Is that what bored rich people did out here in the countryside all day? Actually, Hannah thought, that would explain a lot.
‘Is this drug money?’
‘Oh. No – an inheritance.’
The slobber from the dog’s chin stretched out, longer and longer, and Hannah couldn’t keep her eyes from it, until the animal shook its head, sending spray she could feel land on her neck. It gave a yawn.
‘So why the cloak and dagger?’
Fine.
No harm done. She had been lucky.
‘I’m sorry—’ Tom began.
‘If I’m outside, I need the mask, my mother says. Asthma – I have asthma and this toxic air—’
‘The air?’
‘You probably think you’re safe out here, but Mother says we’re not. We’re only safe here, in the House.’
Tom rubbed at his leg, his face angled downwards so she couldn’t see his expression. Now her chest demon had slunk away, Esther remembered metal teeth rearing upwards. Closer to him, she could see that he had amber-flecked brown eyes and a face that seemed too young, too wrinkle-free, too tanned by a sun Esther’s skin hadn’t felt in years. She shifted away, scraping the hair from her face and twisting it behind her, hopefully neat, hopefully not too sweaty.
She tried to remember why she had gone out to this man in the first place. ‘I guess we need to sort out your leg.’
Nuclear-strength heat rushed into Esther’s cheeks. She didn’t want to touch him; in fact she had only said those words because that was what she was meant to say. She was meant to want to help him, but really all she wanted was for him to leave – he took up too much space in this small porch.
Kneeling to him, she pushed the material of his trouser leg up a little further and made a mental note of the first-aid things she would need to get from the storeroom: tape and antiseptic lotion and bandages and—
He reached down to still her hand. ‘You’ve been here a long time?’ His voice and touch were soft but Esther gasped as if she had been burnt. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—’
‘No. I … umm …’ She sat back on her heels, keeping her breath steady and holding the hand he had touched to her chest as if it had been hurt. The bruises on his skin were waiting to appear, sea creatures currently submerged, but they would come to the surface soon enough: big, dark shapes. She fixed her eyes on the hairs on his calf and it was a while before she could say, ‘Sixteen years. I’ve been here for sixteen years.’
And she wanted to explain, to make him understand. Everything. About the demon in her chest and that this was to save her, that Mother had built a world for them both and that world had protected them … that he didn’t have to look at her the way he was right then.
‘Esther—’
Her name spoken by someone who wasn’t Mother. The way he said it was gentler, and the “s” sound made her shiver.
‘There,’ she said, making as if to stand up. ‘I need to get some first-aid stuff.’
He reached out again and caught her forearm this time. She snatched it away as if he’d tried to bite it, but too late – once more the warmth of his fingers brushed hers. There was nothing but concern in his gold-flecked eyes and the shock of his touch on her skin.
‘Esther, your mother is lying to you.’
Chapter 18
Tom talked and Esther watched his mouth move, knowing the words coming out of it should make sense but she couldn’t make them fit together. She wasn’t used to it, this new voice with its strange cadences and rhythm; she couldn’t follow it fast enough.
Instead, she calculated how far he was to the door, how much it would take to force him to it and then out – out of the porch, out of her brain. Because he was wrong, she could see that. He was bad. The House did not want him.
‘… but I mean … where do I start?’ Esther said nothing. ‘How do I even …?’ Tom fumbled in his jacket pocket and brought out something that to Esther looked like a flat black piece of glossy plastic. Under his touch it sprang into colour, revealing itself to be a screen of some sort. ‘It’s probably best to just show you.’
‘Is that a television?’ Esther couldn’t stop herself from asking.
‘A television?’ Tom smiled a little. ‘Well, kind of, I guess, but mostly it’s my phone, which connects to the internet so you can do pretty much everything on it.’
To Esther a phone was big, clunky and plastic and often attached to a wall with a long bouncing cord on the end of the receiver, which the people in the films she watched wound around their arm whilst they made plans and gossiped.
In order to see the screen, Esther had to move closer to Tom. He had his own smell too, she discovered: soap with a warm, spiced edge, though she didn’t know what the spice was.
‘We have no phone signal here,’ she said, a headache beginning to pound her temples.
Tom tapped at the screen. ‘Umm … I think you’ll find you do.’
‘What?’
‘See?’ He touched the plastic and it sprang into colour again. ‘See those bars there – two are filled in. That means signal.’
‘But … we have no need for a phone. It’s an electric … net …’ She faltered.
‘Net?’
He didn’t need to say it.
She had read about tinnitus, an insistent low-level humming or buzzing that suddenly happens for no apparent reason, that only the afflicted person can hear, and can continue for years. It felt like that, or as if she been left in the tumble dryer for too long, hot and full of static, liable to touch something metal and give herself a jolt.
She took a breath. Okay, Mother had lied about the phone. But there would be a reason, there would be an explanation.
Esther sank onto the bench next to him because her knees had suddenly disappeared. ‘I do have asthma. You saw.’
‘Yes.’
‘Mother says that the air is wrong for me, too polluted. Everywhere.’
Tom tugged at his trouser leg. Esther tugged at the tattered remains of a life she’d thought she’d known.
‘But you’ve been outside and you’re fine,’ he said.
It was coming, what Tom was trying to tell her. It was a volcano smoking away on the horizon, about to start pouring its lava down the hillside, killing all the tiny villagers in its path. She wanted to hold the lava back.
Remembering the name he had called her when she had first met him, Esther asked, ‘What’s a doomsday prepper?’
Tom turned back to his phone and she wondered if he was going to call someone and put them on the line, a calm voice to explain to her how Mother had been wrong, wrong, wrong all these years. So when he tapped at the screen again and swiped at it as if trying to remove a speck of dust, Esther couldn’t help but crane her neck to get a better look.
‘Here, this is from a newspaper. Doomsday prepper.’
He tilted the screen to her.
***
Saturday Feature: The Doom Boom
In search of people who close their door on the world
The end is nigh. The end is always nigh. War, nuclear weapons, pandemic, pollution, global warming. The fact that it hasn’t ended so far, that’s the miracle – but it’s a miracle that some people aren’t willing to take for granted.
And there is always someone around to cash in on fear. The Doom Boom is well and truly upon us. Out in the desert, in forests, farms, underground and in all the other forgotten spaces of the world, entrepreneurs have their eye on an apocalyptic future and are building for it.
Especially in America.
Oscar Stamp is ahead of them. Now in his fifties, he lives in a place I have vowed to not disclose where a small group of concrete fortresses jut out of the earth. He has a weather-beaten face that makes him look older than his years, a ready smile and a well-stocked armoury.
We drink coffee in a scene from an apocalyptic film.
‘I don’t want to go back,’ he tells me, pouring us coffee the consistency of treacle. There is a level of luxury here that I am surprised to note. This place has a self-sufficient power supply, water from a nearby well, furnishings, cushions, even the odd decorative throw. This is no dark bunker; it has windows, even if the glass is bulletproof. The end of times looks pretty neat.
Twenty years ago, Oscar worked in a bank. I ask what made him give up a relatively secure job and life in a city. ‘I was a Boy Scout – maybe that was the start of it all?’ He laughs croakily, his voice unused to long conversations. ‘Be prepared, hmm? People think I’m crazy, to have done this, but to me they’re the crazy ones – I mean, with everything going on in the world, why wouldn’t you get yourself a place like this? Somewhere safe, or, at least, safer, to wait out whatever catastrophe happens next. Disease, war, riot, wildfire, drought – you can’t trust the government to look out for you no more.’
So, Oscar decided on the bunker life. ‘I had the money and the know-how to build this little community, so I thought, heck, why not? The other plots are for my family, or my friends, whoever wants them. Though they don’t want ’em just yet, unlike me!’ He knows that he would be seen as an oddity, the doomsday prepper who didn’t wait for doomsday. ‘Me? I’ve had enough of people. I like the quiet.’
I tell him about my little apartment, my home comforts and a bit about my life. He listens patiently enough but then frowns. ‘Frogs in a pot, hmm. Heard that saying? You’re still a young’un. You’re going to have it worse than me because odds, y’know? You’re the frog in the pot – you just don’t realise the water’s boiling.’
I can’t help but shiver. It feels like a story come to life, an ancient mariner predicting my doom. Oscar can live the rest of his life in this place and never have to come out if he doesn’t want to. He has something called a deep larder with enough freeze-dried food to last for twenty-five years, a remote surveillance system, a panic room, and a nuclear-fallout shelter that doubles as a games room.
‘Aren’t you worried about falling ill? Or accidents?’
Oscar frowns again. ‘Worrying about those things don’t change ’em none, do they? If I get sick, I get sick. It’s my choice how I deal with that …’ Rather chillingly, he nods towards the guns locked in a cupboard on the far wall.
A 2017 survey by the financial-tech company Finder suggested that roughly 20 per cent of Americans spent money on survival materials that year, and a further 35 per cent said they already had what they needed for an emergency. This year, those figures are bound to be higher. Meeting Oscar, who is friendly and thoughtful, has shown me that preparing for a less than rosy future needn’t make you an oddity – it might actually be the only sane thing to do.
***
Esther handed back the phone, the glare from the screen making her temples throb even more. She pictured Oscar with his games room and deep larder and guns. When he died, however he died, perhaps no one would find him for months, maybe years … if at all. He would be bone and mulch. She gripped the cold bench. ‘People think Oscar is mad, to do what he’s done?’
‘Well. I mean, he’s got a point, y’know. There are wars and diseases and fires and floods and pollution’s pretty bad and when you look at it, it’s a wonder more people aren’t doing what your mum has done …’ He caught the horror on Esther’s face and added hurriedly, ‘But there’s all sorts of things being done to tackle pollution, to clean up the cities …’
‘Mother isn’t a doomsday prepper, though, and we’re not in America. We know the world goes on outside. We don’t think it’s ended or anything …’
‘No, but … you’re still hiding from it, aren’t you, like Oscar? Reading that feature, what I got from it – it’s all about trust. Oscar doesn’t trust anyone else to look out for him. Your mother doesn’t trust anyone else to look out for you.’
Trust. Esther was having some problems with that word, mostly because of those hard little lumps in her jeans pocket. ‘Mother has some pills. I mean, I found some pills of hers. She’d hidden them in a bear—’
‘A bear?’ Tom looked around as if a lumbering creature was about to swipe at him with one huge paw.
‘A wooden bear. An ornament. Can your phone tell me what they are?’
‘What do the pills look like?’
Esther held out her hand with the tablets nestled in her palm. Tom tapped and swiped at the screen once more, a whole universe of information at his fingertips. ‘Can I?’ he asked and she tipped the pills into his palm. People must be so clever, she thought, watching him. The knowledge they have, the ability to quickly get the answer to any question in moments. They were gods.
‘To what do we give thanks?’
‘The House.’
‘What protects the air we breathe?’
‘The House.’
‘What gives us plants and water and power and comfort?’
‘The House.’
The House. Mother. These were the things she knew. Enough. Tom, this stranger, this piece of grit in the eye of the House – he couldn’t stay. Once he gave her the answer, she would make him leave.
‘Diazepam,’ he said, just as Esther stood up. ‘It’s a sedative.’
Esther paused. Sedative. The kind of thing that settles to the bottom of rivers? Silt?
Tom continued to read aloud, ‘This medication works by calming the brain and nerves and can treat anxiety, muscle spasms and seizures …’ He glanced at her.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They … sedate. Make you calm – sleepy even – easy to manage …’
‘Mother wouldn’t take those …’
A silence and then Tom asked, ‘So if they aren’t for her … then who are they for?’
And just like that, the volcano belched and spewed. Had her quiet clockwork convent days been the result of little tablets dissolving into her bloodstream? Why would Mother have needed to do that? The weight of the last half an hour pushed at her and she felt like she needed to crouch under its pressure. This morning she had waved Mother off on the Yearly and everything had been like normal and now, as outside the light gave up against the darkness, here she was stood with a strange man who had ripped a hole in her life and wanted to keep on tearing.
Tom got up and shuffled a little towards her, limping on his injured leg, one arm slightly outstretched as if to stop her, as if to touch her again, and Esther flinched.
‘Esther, I need to tell you—’
But he didn’t get to finish his sentence. Instead, the outer door opened behind him and in the doorway stood Mother. Her face obscured by her mask, she pushed back her hood, saw the man in front of her and gripped what she held in her other hand.
‘What keeps us safe?’
‘The House.’
‘And the bloody gun.’
Chapter 19
Hannah
Sixteen years ago
The door opened and Hannah was faced with her future self.
‘Didn’t you read the sign?’ The woman frowned, gripping on to the collar of a dog that strained against her hold and lunged at Hannah. The sign had been hard to miss: it had been nailed to the gatepost and had used many red capital letters.
‘I did but I—’
‘No cold callers, no salespeople, no junk mail—’ The door slowly began to close.
‘I want to buy your land!’
The door stopped.
Hannah had found the listing whilst killing time before an appointment at an unfamiliar GP surgery. In the two months that had passed since the will reading she had been taking a lot of those appointments lately, the ones further afield where she could grab a coffee in the nearby town or village and stop by an estate agent’s window.
‘I want to buy your land for cash.’
‘Good for you. I have an estate agent, so contact him.’
‘I’m willing to pay a good price for it if we can keep this a private sale.’
The woman yanked on the dog’s collar and gave Hannah a stare that could have kick-started a new ice age.
‘You have five minutes.’ She held the door open.
Future-Hannah was everything she would have wanted her to be. It wasn’t just that this woman lived in a forbidding great fortress of a house in the middle of nowhere with antisocial signs and an even more antisocial dog. It was the stare. Her stare was one that pinned a person to the spot and kept them there, unable to remember what their limbs were for whilst she studied them.
The hallway that Hannah stepped into was a jumble of boxes piled high, bags, an upturned table and chairs stacked on top of each other. Just like Hannah had been sure there was actually a house under all that ivy as she’d walked up the drive, so she was sure there were walls and a floor somewhere underneath all of the stuff.
‘Flood in the lower east wing. I’ve had to decamp.’ The dog being held by Future-Hannah lunged again, its teeth almost grazing Hannah’s coat. ‘Sit, you stupid animal.’
Hannah nearly did.
‘Your five minutes is fast disappearing.’
‘Yes! Mrs …’ Hannah left an expectant pause.
‘Lady Tregellen.’
‘Lady Tregellen. I want to buy your land, for cash, for much more cash than you’re asking, actually—’
‘I said SIT!’
The dog gave one more rather half-hearted lunge and then did as it was told, almost as if it too was waiting for its mistress’s reaction to Hannah’s offer. A trail of slobber began to stretch from its chin.
Lady Tregellen raised her eyebrows. ‘Go on – the catch …’
‘I will pay you much more money for the land if … you agree to keep my name out of it.’
‘Out of it?’
‘Out of all records. Land Registry, the contracts – everything. I will pay in cash, upfront, one lump sum.’
In the light from a nearby lamp Hannah took in how eccentrically Lady Tregellen was dressed: corduroy trousers tucked into knee socks and a padded gilet over a flowery shirt, bright green fingerless gloves topping off the outfit. Her hair was white and thin like strands of dried glue on paper.
‘Drugs?’
‘Sorry?’ Was the woman asking for drugs? Is that what bored rich people did out here in the countryside all day? Actually, Hannah thought, that would explain a lot.
‘Is this drug money?’
‘Oh. No – an inheritance.’
The slobber from the dog’s chin stretched out, longer and longer, and Hannah couldn’t keep her eyes from it, until the animal shook its head, sending spray she could feel land on her neck. It gave a yawn.
‘So why the cloak and dagger?’
