Sophie (6 page)

Nick considered. “No, not really. Like I said, she seems OK to me. Bright kid.”

“Too right. She knows things I don’t know. And her stories were pretty damn good, too. Maybe I’m just overreacting still. I haven’t got over the shock of being dragged out to the recluse’s abode yet. Nearly scared me shitless, middle of the night and all.”

I padded upstairs with my book, smiling to myself that Caitlyn liked me. In the corridor below, the voices continued, sometimes murmuring, sometimes laughing. And, later, in bed, I wondered what it might be like to live somewhere else, to go home with someone different and never come back.

The next day, my mother came home.

It was all over very quickly; my father drove her to the house. With them was a white plastic carry-cot with the baby wrapped up inside it, silent among blankets. For once, my mother seemed to notice Sophie and me: she took us into the kitchen, and, resting the cot on a chair, let us see the baby. Its tiny face was swollen and dark, and in front of its mouth it held two minute fists, as if in the throes of some terrible rage.

“This is your brother,” my mother said. We both looked at the baby in silence, unsure of what to say. “He’s asleep at the moment.”

Caitlyn came through to the kitchen. “Isn’t he adorable?” she said. “Look at him—all snuggled up.” My mother shot her a glance.

“Have Matthew and Sophie behaved themselves?” she asked.

“Oh, they’ve been perfect,” Caitlyn said easily. “Nick! Come and have a look at him. He’s gorgeous.” When I looked at her face, though, I suddenly had a strong feeling that she was concentrating more on saying the right things than being genuine.

“Hello,” Nick said to my mother, awkwardly. My father was somewhere in the background, moving between rooms, sorting things out.

“What’s the baby called?” I asked.

“Have you decided yet?” Caitlyn added.

My mother nodded. She didn’t look tired, as Caitlyn had said she might; she looked the same way that she usually did. “We’ve decided on David,” she said.

“That’s a nice name,” Caitlyn said. “Hi, Davey.” The baby stirred uncomfortably, and made a little coughing cry.

“Really, we mustn’t keep you,” my mother said. “I’m sorry to have troubled you like this, really I am.” She pressed a sealed envelope into Caitlyn’s hand. “I’d be most grateful if—”

“Oh, come on,” Caitlyn said. “Families don’t do that sort of thing. Besides, I really enjoyed myself. It was great fun, wasn’t it? We did lots of things, and these two were good as gold. In fact, it’s a shame I don’t see more of them. Perhaps they could come round once in a while? It'd be no problem, I promise.”

“That’s very kind,” my mother said, and I saw Sophie’s face—which had become tinged with expectation—fall at the words.

“It would be lovely,” said Caitlyn, but now that I had noticed Sophie’s reaction, I thought I could hear defeat in her voice as well. She put the envelope on the table and left it there.

“I guess we’d better be off,” she said to Nick. Then, abruptly, she bent down and kissed the end of my nose. “Bye, Mattie. Keep good care of yourself, you hear? Colour some pictures for me.”

“Bye, Caitlyn,” I said. It was strange, I hardly felt sad at all.

She kissed Sophie, too, “Bye, Sophie. I really liked the tree you showed me. Take care, OK?”

“Bye,” Sophie said, carefully. “Thank you for looking after us.”

“Run along, you two,” my mother said. As we left the kitchen into the garden, I could hear her talking to Caitlyn again; the mention of colouring pictures seemed to have caught my mother’s attention. I could hear her saying, “At least let me reimburse you for . . .”

There was a low smear of cloud in the morning sky as I followed Sophie down the garden. I saw a bottle top lying in the grass, near where we had eaten lunch on the lawn. Sophie was walking very fast, heading for the holly bush.

“Wait for me!” I said, but she ignored me. I reached the holly bush after her, and pushed my way in through the curtain of dark leaves clumsily, ignoring the scratches I got as a result. Sophie was sitting in the middle, her back to the trunk, breathing hard as if she had been running. I knew immediately that something was wrong.

“Sophie? Are you OK?”

As I watched, her hands gripped the canvas covering the floor, then unclenched. She opened her mouth a little way, and made a noise that was almost like the beginning of a sob. As if this was all that was necessary to break open what she had been holding back inside, she struck the ground with both hands, and cried out loud, “You fucking
bitch
! Fucking bloody cocksucking
bitch
.” There were tears running down her cheeks, but instead of crying she shouted obscenities, on and on, words I had never heard and didn’t understand. I sat in terrified silence until, at last, her voice grew quieter, and finally she stopped. She was still breathing in little irregular gasps, but her face had become more normal again.

She seemed to notice me for the first time. The last of the anger and violence went out of her, and she reached across and hugged me to her tightly. With my face pressed into the comforting warmth of her shoulder, she whispered, “It’ll be OK, Mattie, it’s going to be all right. Don’t worry, everything’s going to be OK.” I hugged her back, scared for her, not knowing what was happening, not aware that there
was
anything wrong, anything I should have been worried about. After a long time, she pulled away a little and looked into my face.

“Hey,” she said, and there was a fleeting glimpse of one of her old smiles. “Don’t look frightened. Everything’s going to be all right. I promise. You’ll be all right. I’ll look after you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

I was only six; I really thought she was talking to me.

six

We stare at each other across the boards. The hollows of his eyes are pooled in shadow, and the candle on the floor makes an eerie reversal of the normal contours of his face. It makes it difficult to judge what he is thinking. I am starting to realize that the need to make that sort of judgement about him has become very strong.

Matthew frightens me: I have never seen him like this, never suspected, before tonight, that he was capable of anything of this nature. I have been taken by surprise, and now there is nobody except myself to look to. The pieces of Matthew’s story are joining together, beginning to form a more coherent whole than before. Disjointed memories are giving way to a more consistent, more linear account. I do not know, yet, where this is leading, but I am sure that what happens here, now, in this room, will be determined by what happened years ago.

The dream-like quality of our conversation is offset sharply by the constant reminders of the world outside—the storm, the sounds of the wind and rain, the sudden whipping to and fro of the candle flame. Once there has been a crash as a slate has torn from the roof and shattered against something hard; at other times, there have been void-like moments of quiet when the wind has dropped, and only the hammering of the rain has continued in the background. I can’t remember a night as fierce as this.

I have tried to stop myself regretting how I came to be here; there is no point, and I need my concentration on what is happening
now
, not what happened hours ago. But every so often, I can’t help but think—there must have been a way to avoid this earlier! Before it reached this! I don’t think there was, though. Matthew has kept his secrets too well, and it is only now that I am being allowed to see them, being allowed to share them.

But now I have a secret as well. Not much, yet, but the first taste of something. Because I am getting to know Matthew Howard from the inside for the first time, and although I don’t yet know how to use what I am discovering, it is the only edge that I have. I don’t mean to waste it. There is still enough time.

Life almost returned to the way it had been; almost, but there were subtle differences. My father was around the house more often. My mother, who had practically disappeared from our lives for the past few months, was now to be seen on her normal circuit of movement around the ground-floor rooms. Upstairs, the books and shelving were cleared out of the little room at the end of the corridor, and a crib was brought down from the attic and set up. The baby, whose normal expression of rage occasionally softened into something resembling normality, became a part of life overnight. In his white room with the pale blue blankets and curtains, we could hear his baby-noises sometimes when walking along the top corridor. Our family doctor, a large man with cool, dry hands, dropped in one morning, looked the baby over and pronounced him fit and well. Maybe, in our sleepy little village, he had nothing better to do.

A house with five people in it was unusual and claustrophobic. Sophie and I went to the quarry to escape.

Soon, the first of the wasps were evident in the garden, scanning the trees in the orchard and zooming around the drainpipes of our house. Once the initial excitement over the arrival of the baby had died away, I grew used to the idea, although it was not nearly so much fun as I had imagined it might be. There was no pram to push, for example, although my mother sometimes took the carry-cot out into the sun on the edge of the lawn. That in itself was a new departure; the back garden was usually territory into which my mother never strayed.

Being six was not noticeably different from being five; I still played the same games, was scared of the same things, liked the same stories. Growing older was a transparent process, and I only saw the evidence of it later, and from a new perspective.

Sophie and I went fishing for sticklebacks in the pond behind the hill. The sunlight was hazy through the trees, and played across my back as I bent, laboriously tying a worm on the end of my piece of cotton. The little fish lived in and among the old bottles and cans and pieces of metal that had been dumped long ago in one end of the pond. Once they’d attached themselves to your worm, you could haul them straight up out of the water and they wouldn’t let go.

We returned home happily exhausted. My mother had prepared supper while we had been out; we ate it quietly. We had both long since given up trying to interest her with what we had been doing. At bedtime, Sophie told me a story about a fool who won a princess’s hand in marriage by presenting her with a dead crow and some mud. I found the idea extremely funny, and giggled quietly to myself once or twice as I fell asleep.

In the night, in my dreams, there was a rustling in the corridor. Only now I recognized some things that had not been there before: the blue curtains were dark against the pale walls, and there were bars all around me. The crack of light down the hinge of the door was abruptly covered as something passed outside. The door opened, and it shuffled into the room.

My body had frozen, motionless, unable even to breathe, as the long-armed, faceless figure of Ol' Grady edged along the wall, its mumbling words taking shape in my memory.
If you’re a bad boy, Matthew, Ol' Grady will come.

And with the cry half out of my throat, I shuddered awake.

I must have made some noise. The light down the corridor snapped on as I fumbled for the inhaler that always rested on my bedside table. Sophie opened the door and slipped into the room.

“What is it?” she whispered as she knelt down beside the bed. “Is it the same one?”

I nodded helplessly, and took another gulp of spray. Gradually, the aching tension in my upper chest relaxed, and I found it easier to exhale.

“OK, it’s all right now,” she murmured, and brushed the hair back out of my eyes.

“Sophie, I’m scared,” I whispered back. “There were bars.”

“There were bars round you?” she asked, understanding immediately.

“Yes.”

“Shit.” She paused. “Mattie, you’ve got to listen to me. Ol' Greedy’s gone now. He’s dead. Do you understand? It was just a bad dream.” She stared into my eyes, as if willing me to believe her, and saw it was no use. “Shit,” she said again. There was a struggle evident on her face, as if she wasn’t sure what to do. Then she came to some decision.

“Do you feel better?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was just a dream, I think.”

She rubbed my head and smiled. “You
know
, you mean. That’s all it was, Mattie, just a bad dream. Ol' Greedy’s been dead for a long time. You want to see?”

I looked at her with incomprehension.

“Put on some trousers and shoes,” she said. “And your coat. It’s cold outside.”

“Are we going outside?” I asked. “It’s the middle of the night!”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t worry, I’ll be with you. Just put some clothes on, OK?”

“OK,” I agreed, confused but unwilling to let such an opportunity for excitement pass. I had no idea of what Sophie was thinking. She went back silently to her room and reappeared a few minutes later with clothes pulled on over her pyjamas. I was having trouble with my shoelaces, so for once, instead of letting me tie them myself, Sophie knotted them quickly and neatly.

“There. Are you ready?”

“Where are we going?” I asked, fascinated.

“I’ll tell you on the way. Quiet, now. You don’t want to wake the baby.”

“No,” I agreed.

We went downstairs, through the silent and empty kitchen. Sophie unbolted the back door, and we stepped out into the moonlit garden. Shadows under the bushes were black as oil, and the sky was riveted with stars.

“It’s dark,” I said.

“I’ve got a torch,” Sophie replied. “Don’t you worry. This way, now.” We started down the lawn towards the stream. As we walked, Sophie talked to me quietly.

“It’s not easy to understand,” she said. “I want you to try, though. You see, Ol' Greedy doesn’t exist. He’s like a fairy story, right?”

“Right,” I said, doubtfully.

“He’s just an idea to frighten people with. He's—ah—like a bogeyman.”

“I’ve got a book about a bogeyman,” I whispered.

“What I’m trying to say is, even if Ol' Greedy frightened you once, he won’t again. Careful, this bit’s slippery.”

We crossed the little bridge and made our way through the orchard. The little grouping of sheds loomed up out of the night. Sophie clicked the torch on, and the shadows leapt up like black flames. I reached out tentatively and held her hand.

She smiled. “There’s nothing to be frightened of. It’s a bit spooky, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said in a small voice.

“It’s OK, though. I’m here.” We passed by most of the sheds and came up against one that was crouched against the wall at the end of the garden. Sophie took a key from her pocket and held it in the torch beam as she undid the padlock.

“You’re not to be scared, OK?” she said. “You’ve got to be brave.”

She opened the door to the shed. For a moment, there was nothing, and then a long arm snaked out of the opening, brushing against the door frame. My heart stopped for a long second, and then pounded in my throat. I gripped Sophie’s hand as if I were drowning.

The door swung fully open. Hung on the back of the door was the skin of Ol' Grady.

Sophie played the torch on it. “You see?” she said.

I looked. It wasn’t a skin; it was some sort of coat.

“Come in,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

Still nearly rigid with fear, I followed her without protest into the shed. Sophie shut the door carefully behind us, put the torch down on a shelf, and seated herself on the edge of a big metal drum. Silently, we stared at Ol' Grady.

“What is it, then?” Sophie said, after a minute or so had passed.

I swallowed. “It’s a coat,” I said.

“But you thought it was something else . . . ?” she prompted.

“Mm,” I said. “It looks scary.”

“There’s nothing scary about a coat,” Sophie said. “This is a special coat. It’s for rainy weather. They wear them on boats. It’s called an oilskin. You can see it’s quite long, yes? So your knees keep dry as well.”

Reduced to these mundane descriptions, the skin of Ol' Grady did seem to lose some of its terror. I relaxed my grip of Sophie’s hand just a little, but kept hold of it firmly just the same.

“It’s just a coat,” Sophie said. “If you put it on normally, it looks like a raincoat. It’s got a hood, see?”

“Mm.”

“Let go a second,” she said. She took the oilskin down from its peg and held it up. “It’s way too long for me,” she said. “I’m going to look like a dwarf if I put this on.” I giggled nervously. “Do you want to try it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Gradually, the blind panic I’d felt when the arm of the coat had swung round the door was seeping away. I reached out deliberately and touched the coat. It felt heavy and smooth.

“Go on,” Sophie said. “It’s all right.” She helped me put my arms into the sleeves, and then drew it around me. The hem of the oilskin trailed on the ground. “It’s just a coat, right?”

I laughed. “Yeah, it’s just a coat.” The laughter welled up inside me. “It’s just a
coat
!” I said. Sophie nodded, smiling.

“You want to pretend to be Ol' Greedy?” she said.

“Yeah. How?”

“Take it off.” She helped me. “Now, just turn it around, see? Put it on back to front. Now you look like it’s not a coat at all. And if you put the hood up now, you look like you haven’t got a face. Go on, try it.” Nervously, I pulled the hood up over my head. Inside, the coat smelt warm and slightly sweaty. I found there was a rip in the cloth that I could see out of.

“Wow,” Sophie said. “Pretty scary, Mattie. I think you’d better make some ghost noises now.”

I giggled. “Whoo!” I said quietly.

“Louder than that. No one can hear us down here.”

“Whoo! Whoo!”

“That’s better. You’re a really scary ghost.”

“I am?”

“Yeah.”

I flapped my arms. “I feel scary.” Sophie grinned.

“And if you walk with your back to the walls, then no one can see the opening,” she went on. “Understand? So it doesn’t look like a coat anymore.”

“You’ve been a bad boy, Matthew,” I said. “If you’re a bad boy, Ol' Grady will come.” I pulled the hood down again. “So Ol' Grady isn’t real?”

“No. He’s just an old coat. Pretty silly, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Really silly.” I paused. “The bars . . .”

“The bars in the dream?”

“Yeah. Those could be bars on a cot, couldn’t they? Like the baby has.”

“That’s right. I think that’s how it was, Mattie.”

“But it was all a long time ago, and now Ol' Grady’s dead.” I yawned. “I think I understand.”

“You ready to go back to bed now?”

“OK,” I said, and yawned again. “Put Ol' Grady back.” We hung the oilskin on its peg and went outside. There was the first lightening of the sky beginning to show behind the hills to the east. I held the torch while Sophie locked up the shed again, and we hurried back through the cold night air to the kitchen door.

Once inside, Sophie settled me down again in my bed. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“OK. You’re a pretty brave boy, aren’t you?” I blushed.

She closed the door quietly behind her, and I heard her footsteps move down the hall, and then the gentle click of her door closing.

He moves his hands against each other uncomfortably; his voice has become tense. I sit frozen against the wall, not moving, not speaking, trying to give away nothing of what I am thinking.

He says, “You can only have been about five. What did you do, Sophie? How did you kill Ol' Grady?” He lapses into silence briefly. Then, “She always seemed afraid, almost. Afraid of you. Half hating you, but too afraid to do anything.” There is a rough edge to his laughter. “Which one of you ended up the victim? Can you tell me that? It was you to begin with, but you sorted that out pretty fucking quickly. Things got turned around. By the time you’d finished, Ol' Grady was dead, and Mummy was just a shell. Venomous, yes, but nothing compared to what she must have been before. When you knew her.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” But, if I am truthful, I begin to think I do.