Using the bridge as a landmark she drove through where she remembered the Dell to be, and the small dairy farm that bordered it. Since she’d been away, the farm had also been developed
into new housing, and she was soon driving across what she remembered as an eternity of long wet grass only the most foolhardy kids ventured into because of the enormous cows and apocryphal tales
of children being speared on bull horns. Once, the field had even been made available for the local populace during the Silver Jubilee. She’d seen photographs of herself as a baby in the
field, her pushchair festooned with Union Jack flags.
The new housing estate that covered the Dell and the adjoining field had been created with identical three-bedroom houses arranged in cul-de-sacs. There were no children playing outside of them
now. Every house confronted every other house with too many windows. When Catherine pulled over and stood on the empty pavement, the windows on both sides of the road made her feel exposed and
small. Curiously, the road surfaces still looked new.
At the western edge of the housing estate she parked in the lay-by of a dual carriageway. The rows of concrete buildings where her nan had lived, set on perpetually windswept grass, all stained
with rust about their outflow pipes and speckled with black clouds of soot near the guttering, had been erased from the earth. There was now a Tesco and another petrol station in their place, a DIY
centre, a large traffic island, and three new roads leading to places people would rather be.
Her nan’s brownish living room with the painting of a green-faced Spanish girl over the gas fire, that looked like the front of an old car, and her ashtray on a metal stand, and the dark
velour sofa, and the door with dimpled glass panes, and the smell of Silk Cut and sausage rolls, no longer existed.
Catherine’s throat closed on a lump the size of a plum she could not swallow. She decided not to buy petrol at this garage either. She needed fuel to get home to Worcester, but would fill
up somewhere else between here and there.
Parked at the northern edge of the housing estate, Catherine discovered the old river had been funnelled into a concrete aqueduct, close to one side of the road. On what was
once a riverbank stood a row of identical wooden fences at the rear of private gardens. With the exception of the humpback bridge by the Shell garage, the topography of her early childhood was
non-existent.
She guessed her old den had once been on the other side of these garden fences. Until her sixth year, the den she and Alice Galloway shared, at the furthest edge of the dairy farm’s field,
had been one of the few enchanting places in her life. Until Alice went missing and Catherine’s family moved away, the den was the only sanctuary outdoors that she and Alice ever found in
Ellyll Fields. Being so close to its foundations returned tears to her eyes.
She and Alice had discovered a way to circumnavigate the field of cattle to get to the thin river that once trickled between the shadowy banks, carpeted in dead leaves and sheltered by tree
branches that hung over the water. A sanctuary in days when children roamed freely and spent most of their time outdoors.
No one ever found out where poor Alice had been taken in the summer of 1981, but Catherine once believed her friend had found a new sanctuary in some other place. Alice had even suggested the
potential of such to her, though only after she’d been gone three months.
How furious they all were at the very idea that she’d seen Alice again. The memory of Alice’s mother going hysterical in her parents’ kitchen, pulling her own hair out, which
made her look like Cat Weasel with a red face, still issued the occasional pang of shame. Something Catherine would never forget, nor forgive herself for being the cause of.
She no longer believed she’d seen Alice after she disappeared either, and hadn’t for decades. As a child she had done, and also believed that Alice had come back for her that day.
And for most of her childhood Catherine even wished she’d taken the opportunity to go away with her friend too, to follow her to some place better than this ever was.
On the opposite side of the river to their den, a wire fence once protected the
special school
’s grounds. The Magnis Burrow School of Special Education had been derelict when
Catherine lived in Ellyll Fields thirty years ago, so it was no surprise to find the school had been demolished, along with everything else.
Landscaped mounds of long grass, dotted with buttercups and dandelions, had once formed an incline topped with a row of red-brick buildings, their windows covered in plywood boards. Now, even
the small hillocks had been levelled to make way for the aqueduct and another dual carriageway.
Whenever she’d asked about the empty school next to the farmer’s field, she was told all kinds of things by her parents and her nan, who never seemed comfortable when they
answered.
‘Used to be a home for handicapped children. Mongol children. You know them children that get old, but keep children’s faces.’
‘Thalidomide children that don’t live very long.’
‘Children in wheelchairs or invalids with their legs in callipers.’
Like the plastic boy outside the sweetshop who collected her coins? Like Alice? she’d asked.
Like me?
she’d meant.
‘Their mothers had them too late.’
‘They’ve gone a bit funny in the head.’
‘Some of them went missing, so don’t go anywhere near that place. It ain’t safe.’
The words of the adults made her sensibilities cringe now. But along with Alice’s unexpected return to the den, three months after her disappearance, Catherine had once believed that some
of the special children had also been left behind.
Until her early teens, when therapists and doctors persuaded her to accept the idea that her hallucinations were just another example of an unhappy, if not ‘disturbed’ childhood,
she’d been convinced the children she’d seen in those abandoned school buildings were real, while also seeming a bit unreal, like so much of her childhood had been.
Years later she accepted the children were hallucinations, inserted into her world as imaginary friends or guardians. And in hindsight, for the derided and lonely, no one knew better than
Catherine how important an imagination was when you were small. If the only real friend you ever had went missing, you just made up the rest.
She must have been six when she tried to tell her nan and parents about the special schoolchildren who had been left behind.
‘It’s them tearaways from the Fylde Grove you’ve seen,’ her dad had said. ‘They’ve already smashed the windows. You shouldn’t be going over there. Keep
away from it.’
The children from the Fylde Grove never went anywhere on foot. They rode around on bicycles they threw down with a clatter as they dismounted, and had loud voices and untucked shirts and florid
faces and hard eyes. And you could only reach the special school by creeping around the perimeter of the field, or by going up a long drive to the gates covered in barbed wire, which were never
open. The main entrance of the derelict school was also on the main road, where no child was permitted to go by bicycle.
Catherine never once saw children from the Fylde Grove anywhere near the special school, nor anyone else for that matter. The special school and its children had always belonged to her and
Alice. And the children she had seen in those derelict buildings were very different to the ‘tearaways’ from Fylde Grove. Where the children inside the derelict special school came from
had been one of the great mysteries of her childhood, but they were among the few children she could remember being kind to her and Alice.
Sat in her car, a recollection of
that
section of the school’s fence, fixed between concrete posts, returned to her mind so vividly that she could practically feel the wire again,
clutched between her fingers, as she watched Alice hobble up the grass bank to the old buildings, during the afternoon of the day she went missing.
Catherine changed position in her seat and opened a window to try and ease away the discomfort that was nine parts psychological and one part heartbreak, an old crack that would never heal.
Only when she was alone in her den on the riverbank did she ever imagine she’d seen the children, on the opposite side of the wire fence she’d peered through, while she sat on the
slippery tree stump with the three old paint tins around her like drums, a scatter of dried flowers upon the leaves she had collected to make a carpet, and the plastic tea set that had gone green
from being left outside for too long. And only when she was so heavy with anguish that her misery had felt like the mumps, had they appeared. Children in strange clothes allowed to play outside
when it was going dark.
She’d usually felt like that on a Sunday afternoon, when the sky was grey and the air drizzly and even her bones were damp. Right before she walked home for a tea of beans on toast that
she could barely swallow at the prospect of school the next day.
After the police interviews, she never spoke about the children again outside of a therapist’s house.
But the longer she looked out through her windscreen at the dual carriageway, and the garden fences along the border of the estate, and the concrete ditch that diverted her little river, and
considered all of her memories and the way they’d haunted her, the more foolish and insignificant they all seemed to be now. She wondered if coming here had finally allowed her to let go of
all that. And in a curious way being here again after all of these years did feel necessary.
Her thoughts drifted to the evening ahead, and to her boyfriend, Mike, and she held precious an image of his smile. Even though he’d not been his usual self for a few weeks, she believed
he genuinely looked forward to being with her. And she thought of dear old Leonard behind his vast desk and how he had come to rely upon her and think of her as a favourite niece. A month ago
he’d even become tearful over a lunch that involved a lot of wine, and had explained to her how important she was to his business, and that he wanted her to ‘keep it’ once
he’d ‘been wheeled off to that great auction in the sky’.
Catherine thought of her own flat in Worcester with its whites and creams and quiet interior. A place she always felt safe. There was no more London to endure now. She even had a great haircut,
which could never be underestimated. She was happy. Finally. This is what happiness felt like and this was her life now. Career, boyfriend, her own home, her health. As good as it gets. What
happened all of those years ago was over. Let go of it. The past had even been physically removed and its ground covered with tarmac, bricks and concrete. It was gone and it wasn’t coming
back.
Catherine dabbed at her eyes and checked her make-up in the rear-view mirror. She sniffed and started to smile. Turned the ignition key.
‘Well, they seem pretty keen to work with you, my girl, because you have been cordially invited to the Masons’ home, the Red House, no less. To discuss an
evaluation this Friday. It’s out Magbar Wood way. Can you make it?’
Leonard’s unfolding of the letter, fussing with the desk lamp, and the removal of his
other
glasses from their case was slow and methodical, as was every administrative chore he
performed behind his desk. Part of Catherine still operated on deeply ingrained London time and something inside her chest, that she would never be able to extract, turned and tightened as these
lengthy preparation rites preceded the most simple of tasks.
But his fastidious rituals were also a source of reassurance. Because at Leonard Osberne’s in Little Malvern, life was never frantic or tense with power struggles. No one undermined you
and there was no favouritism. She never felt sick before meetings, or stayed awake an entire night transfixed with rage after one. By the time she left London, she’d come to believe that
human nature forbade places like Leonard Osberne’s from existing. The closest Leonard ever came to a reprimand took the form of requests for her to ‘please don’t worry’ and
to ‘slow down’. He always tempered his most judgemental remarks about the oddballs they dealt with into something warm. Leonard was genuinely kind, a quality she would never take for
granted. And some days, she and Leonard did little besides eat biscuits, drink tea and chat.
Catherine hung her coat over the back of her chair. ‘Of course I can. My gut is telling me this is going to be the equivalent of a lottery win, Len.’
Leonard grinned across his desk. ‘This is the type of auction that happens once in a career, Kitten. When you’re my age you’ll still be boring your assistant by recounting the
story.’ He smoothed a hand over his fringe and Catherine tried not to stare at the futile gesture at tidying an unruly strand of hair. Because the only thing she would change about her boss
was the terrible grey hairpiece. Though even that she was getting used to. It may have taken her six months, but it was the one facet of the meticulously dressed man that didn’t fit. The wig
was ghastly and left a small space between his thin face and the false hair. Today, he hadn’t fitted it properly again, as if he were deliberately trying to provoke derision from anyone who
saw him. When she met Leonard for the job interview, a few minutes were required to discipline herself to not stare at his wig while they talked.
‘You know it. I haven’t seen dolls even close to being in that condition since my days at the Museum of Childhood. Which reminds me, I need to call them. Put some feelers out. I
still have a few contacts down in Bethnal Green. They might take a few. And there were so many in that room. The Masons even have a perfect Pierotti!’
‘All in good time.’ Leonard peered over his glasses. His watery eyes were framed between tortoiseshell spectacle frames and a thicket of ungroomed eyebrow that looked as rigid as
steel wire, and didn’t quite match his hairpiece. ‘We haven’t signed a contract yet. I sold some of her uncle’s pieces in the seventies, and Edith Mason led me a merry
dance, I can tell you. This was before I even laid eyes on what she wanted to sell. One of M. H. Mason’s dioramas, some voles in their whites playing cricket. I’d never seen anything
like it. The umpires were field mice and the groundsman was a weasel. You should have seen the pavilion. Absolutely marvellous. Though from what I understood from Edith Mason, her uncle never
recovered from the Great War. You know he killed himself?’