The Safe House, page 8
Hannah sighed. She was prepared for this question, had been waiting for it since she’d walked up the drive. ‘I just want … to be left alone.’ She braced for the other questions she knew would be hot on its heels.
Lady Tregellen fondled the dog’s ear. ‘Sensible girl.’ She plonked herself into an armchair squashed against what had once been a stuffed fox, though now it was mostly wire and skin. ‘The ones who don’t – they’re the ones I don’t understand.’ It felt like Hannah had just played a really good move in a board game where no one had shown her the rules. She waited. The dog snarled but in a lazy way, its tail thumping a few times. ‘It would take some … obscurification.’
‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘How long have you lived here?’
‘My whole life. When I was a girl we used to have weekend parties – hunting, shooting, fishing – then these big evening dinners. Awful, noisy things full of awful, noisy people. Papa died, and then Mama and my brother moved to Singapore and so there was just me. It’s been glorious.’ Lady Tregellen pulled some of the stuffing from the arm of the chair and placed it carefully on top of the fox’s head as a little cloud-puff wig. ‘There’s that old bunker on that land I’m selling.’
‘I know.’
‘So you want to be alone in a bunker and you want to make sure no one finds you. Correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sounds like bliss. I have just the man for you.’
‘A man?’
‘For the obscuring. My solicitor. He’ll work out the details. But no backsies, let me be clear.’
‘Backsies?’ Hannah was turning into one of those dim-witted people who repeated the final word of someone else’s sentence because they could not keep up.
‘Exactly. I don’t want you clawing your way out of that place in a few years and banging on my door asking for sugar, got it? If you want the hole, then you have to stay in it, my unexpected little worm.’
Somehow, in this place with a smell of mildew catching in the back of her throat, amid beaten furniture and soggy cardboard boxes, decomposing foxes and dust shimmering in the light – she had found a kindred spirit.
Hannah smiled.
‘Want to see the old place?’ Lady Tregellen asked.
Chapter 20
‘God, I love it out here!’ Lady Tregellen stomped on ahead of her, wearing a headscarf and a man’s wax jacket with loose seams and one pocket missing. Her dog raced around them in circles, swiping past them at speed and them dashing away again, tongue lolling.
Hannah waited for it. The feeling. It was the feeling that the countryside was meant to evoke: safer. Cleaner. Except – and Hannah knew this because in the months since Esther’s demon had woken up, all she had done was read and watch programmes about this kind of thing – the rate of rot was too fast and had been going for too long. Everything posed a risk. The seas? Choked with plastic, its coral dying. The earth? Poisoned by chemicals. The animals? Their meat stuffed with drugs. And the sky? Well, the sky was worst of all.
You couldn’t escape it. Not even here where birdsong and the rasp of branch against branch were the only sounds. You could buy your plot of land and build your house and sit in your garden with your home-grown fruit and filtered water and the rot would still get to you somehow. It would stroke your cheek as the soft wisp of a breeze. That air would bring the wheeze in your chest, the growth in your lung, the tightening band of heart muscle.
You had to be smarter.
Today was a Tuesday and it had already been three. Three asthma attacks. And she wasn’t imagining it but every week, each time, one attack was always just a little bit worse, in a way that Ned could simply not see. Each week in one attack, the pauses between gasping breaths were wide enough for that black void of nothing to creep in. Hannah never wanted to sit in that ambulance again.
They marched on, Lady Tregellen setting a pace that Hannah struggled to maintain in a borrowed pair of wellies a size too big. Her feet slid about in them, making each step treacherous, her ankles wobbling, and there were so many of those steps. Hannah guessed it took them about an hour to reach the place where the trees thinned out.
She paused.
‘Welcome to my little Cold War throwback.’ Lady Tregellen swept an arm out towards the shape in the hill ahead of them. ‘You can get rid of it if you need.’
Hannah wouldn’t get rid of it. It was the reason she was here. The reason why she’d sent Esther to school that morning despite feeling sick and sweaty at the idea of her being out of sight all day. The reason why she’d used a day of annual leave and driven for hours and then walked until her toes throbbed.
It was their future.
The hill stretched up in front of them and in it like a tooth trying to break free of the gum was the bunker, only the front of it visible. Concrete. Hidden.
Home.
‘Can I go in?’
‘Do what you like. If you trip and fall in there though, I’ll let my dog eat you up.’
The block of concrete in front of her was beautiful. A wall. Built to last and to protect. Hannah wasn’t worried about the world ending. That missed the point. The world would probably end at some time – that was what worlds did eventually – but that was unlikely in her lifetime. What was more likely was the world limping on getting sicker and more diseased with every step, the bloated, parasitic people clinging to it.
This place would hide them from all of that. It was something to give to Esther. Not cuddly whales and pretty lace-topped socks, or flower hair grips and dolls with vacant smiles. All of that was useless. This would be a gift to last. Somewhere to stay, safe and secure, hers forever. She would never need to go into the world again. Hannah would make sure of it.
The door had been chained shut with a padlock but at some point someone or something had tried to force it open and there was a sliver of space through which Hannah could squeeze part of her shoulder and half of her face.
If the door hadn’t let in a strip of light then she knew it would be the kind of dark where a person wouldn’t know where they ended and it began. The kind of dark that got behind the eyeballs.
It was a dark that didn’t say she was being ridiculous, stupid, that she was careering off with a half-baked plan that would never work, that she couldn’t spend her inheritance on this.
Instead, it was a dark in which she could see the rest of her life – and the rest of Esther’s too.
‘It’s amazing.’
It was hers.
Chapter 21
Three months on from buying the land, Hannah got out of her car, keys in hand, and froze. She recognised that laugh: joyful, delighted, high-pitched.
It sent her running in the opposite direction from her house, away from the car, across the road and straight into the park opposite with its patch of cracked safety matting and rusting play equipment.
‘What are you doing?’ She didn’t like the shrill edge to her voice.
The four of them turned to her, frozen mid-frame in their fun family action shot that would have fitted perfectly into an advert for something wholesome. Ned paused his conversation with his younger brother, as Esther stood high on the stocky turret of the pirate’s ship, which was really a few monkey bars, a grimy wheel and two slides on either end. The neighbour’s child was at one lookout – that skinny boy a bit older than Esther whose name Hannah had forgotten. Esther was all she saw.
‘Han—’
‘We agreed! Not this park. Never this park!’ Hannah barged past Ned and Adam, the smoking chimney stacks cutting chunks out of the skyline. She reached her arms out to her little girl with those big baby seal eyes. ‘Esther, come down.’
She had not told Ned about the building site in the trees many, many miles away. Of course, she had tried, but there had never been the right moment and she knew he wouldn’t understand. But once the place was finished, once she got the three of them there, once they had closed the door and were safe in the darkness then he would finally get it. He would see how she had saved them all.
And if he couldn’t see that? Well, the fact that her name was hidden from the Land Registry was her safeguard because, if need be, she would take Esther anyway and no one would be able to find them. To the outside world Lady Tregellen owned the land and had the legal title but held it in trust for Hannah as a beneficiary, her name not registered. It was an unusual agreement, but not an illegal one.
‘Can’t you just leave her? She’s having a bit of fun. No harm done,’ Adam said. Hannah could hardly look at him, but that was okay, she didn’t need to. She just had to keep her eyes on Esther. Ned was always more difficult when Adam was around, but that was fine because he wouldn’t be around for much longer. ‘No harm done.’
Harm, Hannah thought, reaching again for Esther who hesitated on the turret, twisting the edge of her jacket in her chubby hand. What did Adam know about harm? He hadn’t been there through all of those nights when Esther had woken, hot and afraid, struggling to breathe, taking great gulps that almost stopped Hannah’s own heart, the pauses between them too long, too full of fear.
‘Esther, come down. Now.’
Esther moved closer to her mother’s waiting arms and then Adam was between them, trying to get in the way.
‘Can’t you just let her play? This once?’
Hannah turned on him. ‘Can’t you just stay out of it and mind your own damn business? This once?’
Though the daylight was fading, Hannah saw Adam’s sneer. Light and dark, the two of them, their mother had once told her. And it was Adam who was the darkness, despite his blond hair and handsome features, he was the one who was quick to snipe, quick to incite, too quick to get caught. Stood side by side like that, Hannah could see the similarities between the two brothers, but Ned’s softer edges were chiselled to a sharpness in Adam’s features – a sharpness that continued all the way to his tongue.
‘Can’t you just let her play?’ Esther played, Hannah thought, she played all the time. Inside. With the windows shut.
Esther continued to scrunch up the edge of her jacket, her eyes moving between them, caught on the pirate ship sailing a sea of indecision. The boy with his curly hair and snub nose stuck his head further out from the lookout, ‘It’s been fun,’ he said, rubbing his sleeve over the handrail in an awkward way. Giving up on getting her to move, Hannah stood on tiptoe and reached up, half-pulling, half-dragging the little girl closer.
She felt Ned’s hand on her sleeve. ‘Enough, Hannah. She’s been enjoying herself.’
Hannah turned to him. ‘You know! You know the reasons why. Look at it. It’s right there. Do you think it’s a bloody coincidence that we move to this hell town and Pips’ asthma starts? You’re not bloody stupid. We said, we agreed not to let her play anywhere near here.’
‘It’s just this once. While Adam’s here. It’s his last visit for so long.’
And Hannah couldn’t have been happier about it. Soon he would be on the other side of the world for a job opportunity he couldn’t pass up in whatever he did, something slimy in banking mostly involving the attempt to hide rich clients’ money from the taxman.
‘Stop it, you’re making a scene. Listen to me.’ Ned’s voice was low but there was nothing light about it this time. He kept his grip on her arm; she kept her grip on Esther.
The little boy rubbed some more at an imaginary spot on the handrail.
Most of Hannah’s problems had come from listening to Ned. ‘We’ll get a better place, further out from the works,’ he’d told her when he showed her his job application. ‘We won’t live right by it,’ he’d said and, fool that she was, she’d believed him. And now he said, ‘We’ll move as soon as we can, to the edge of town.’
She wouldn’t be a fool any longer.
It didn’t matter where they went. The demon was in her baby girl’s chest. It would never sleep properly until they were under that hill, behind a thick door with an air-conditioning system that would filter out the poison.
Hannah shrugged Ned off and lifted Esther down. ‘It’s getting late.’ She aimed this at the boy. ‘You should go home.’
‘It’s only five,’ he sniffed and ran his sleeve over his nose before rubbing it back on the handrail.
In her arms, Esther did not complain but her body went floppy, a dead weight drooping onto Hannah’s shoulder. She thought she heard Adam mutter, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ as she walked past but she didn’t care.
And then the wheezing began, as Hannah knew it would.
‘Bag,’ she said, not looking at Ned but holding out her hand.
‘We haven’t got it.’
‘Oh my God – how many times do I have to tell you?’ She shifted Esther’s weight, the little girl’s head on her shoulder, and felt her hot, laboured breath in her ear as she hurried off towards the house.
‘We can literally see our front door, Hannah! We don’t need the bloody bag!’
Wrong. There were too many what-ifs in the world for that kind of thinking. What if they forgot their keys and were locked out? What if they couldn’t get Esther back to the house in time? What if something happened to the house while they were gone – fire, flood, burglary – and they couldn’t get to the inhalers?
Crouched on the hall floor, Hannah grabbed the bag from under the bench where they sat to put on their outdoor shoes. She shook the plastic tube and Esther sucked in deep, refreshing breaths; Hannah breathing along with her as she watched Ned and Adam saunter closer through the open front door. That was the problem with Ned, she realised, that saunter. Too slow. Whilst she waited for him to catch up, that aching black void of nothingness that had nearly swallowed her in the ambulance when Esther’s breaths had stopped – that was still waiting for them, around every corner, in every playground, garden, street and schoolyard. He would be too slow to save Esther from it.
She couldn’t trust him to do it.
Later that evening, when the two of them thought she was busy putting Esther to bed, Hannah crept down the stairs to hear their hushed conversation.
‘She needs help, mate,’ Adam’s voice floated to her.
Hannah couldn’t disagree with him. She did need help. But it wouldn’t come from a therapy session, or mindfulness, or the kind of antidepressants she sold every day to beleaguered doctors. No, her help was sealed thick concrete and narrow windows as far away from smoke and traffic fumes as she could get. Her safe house.
Chapter 22
Esther
All eyes were fixed on the gun.
Mother had never looked that way before: the set of her jaw, the narrowing of her eyes and the way her body tensed, as if she could leap and attack at any moment. That soft shabbiness of her cardigan was merely fur on a wild animal and beneath it were claws.
‘Mother?’
‘Mrs Allbright—?’
But Mother did something Esther had never heard her do before: she roared, with a brutal vehemence, ‘GET OUT!’
Tom’s words stuttered to a halt. Esther could not stop staring at the gun in her mother’s steady hand: it was not the familiar shotgun because that had been left in the House. No, this was a slim handgun, something that could be hidden easily – something that must have been, for years, because Esther had never seen it before.
‘GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!’
‘Mother!’ Esther stood and instinctively put an arm out in front of Tom as if he needed shielding, as if this scene was hazardous material and he should keep back.
Esther pushed Tom behind her as he tried and failed to get to his feet. She had been mistaken, when she had first tried to identify that scent on him; it wasn’t spiced but something else, something other people probably instantly recognised but which baffled her, though she liked it. However, it was instantly wrong to be facing Mother, to not be on her side. She could rectify that with a few steps, but there was too much new information swirling in her brain, too much doubt.
‘Mother?’ she said softly, her hands raised in surrender. ‘You can’t do this.’
Mother’s hands shook, and there was a harsh edge to her voice. ‘Get out of the way, Esther.’
Esther, fetch this; Esther, read that; Esther, stand here – Esther, Esther, Esther. Sixteen years of it.
Esther stood firm.
‘I don’t care who you are.’ Mother pointed the gun at Tom but looked at her daughter. ‘Get out of my house.’ Her voice broke. ‘And you, Esther, what are you thinking? You let him in, this … this … man, and now—’
‘I had to – he was hurt by one of your traps!’
Her words dropped like tombstones. Quiet settled.
‘You went outside?’ Mother’s voice was strangely toneless and her question was followed by a sigh that made her shoulders sag.
‘It was—’
‘Without your mask?’
Esther had never seen her mother look like that, the way her eyes widened and the colour drained from her face.
She opened her mouth to speak but Mother cut her off, keeping her gun trained on Tom but her eyes on Esther. ‘Are you okay? How’s your breathing? Do you need your inhaler? Where is it? Should I get the nebuliser? Get your inhaler now—’
‘I’m fine, I promise!’
‘You wore your mask the whole time?’
The lie, when it came, was so easy: ‘Yes.’ And a little voice only she could hear added, ‘When I took it off, the fresh air helped me stop my asthma attack. And the air did seem like that – fresh. Not dirty, not polluted.’
Mother sighed again. ‘Well, I guess you’ve been lucky. The mask saved you. And it is cleaner here, but it’s not just the air, Pips, it’s never just been about that. It’s dangerous out there. What has he told you?’
Esther thought, The only danger at the moment is that bear trap – and that gun …
‘He hasn’t said anything.’
‘Good.’ She waved the gun at Tom. ‘You don’t speak to my daughter, is that clear? You keep your mouth shut. Why are you here?’
‘Trust me, I—’
‘No! I don’t trust you! Do you think I’m stupid? Esther and I, we only ever trust each other … and the House.’
