The howling of the figures in the trees showed no signs of stopping. Freya fell against the inside of her front door, silencing the wind and the screams. In the hallway, all was still. Lamplight shone from the kitchen and a soft ticking reached her ears, of the grandfather clock to her right. She realised she still held Eaton’s leash in one hand. Her fingers were white, where they clasped it tightly. Slowly she placed it where it belonged, on the coat-pegs with her Parka.
“George,” she called. The word was followed by movement upstairs, as he stepped onto the landing. The stairs creaked three times beneath as he began to descend.
“Hello?” he said. His face appeared over the banister.
She realised she didn’t know why she had called him. There was nothing she could say to explain what had happened. “Nothing, darling. Just... Nothing.”
He stared at her a second longer, then started to withdraw from the stairs.
“George, wait.”
“Yes?” he said, reappearing.
“Have you seen your sister?”
“She’s in her room,” he said.
“Thank you.”
She didn’t ask him what he was doing upstairs in his room. Nor did she mention Eaton. Alone she moved through the cottage, inspecting every room, as though viewing them for the first or last time. In the sitting room, her eyes lingered over the case of butterflies. She stared at their delicately preserved wings, their withered bodies and fading colours. They were beauty and revulsion, change and growth and colour, captured in the glittering scales of their wings, and she had hung them from her wall, as though to remind herself of these things, to celebrate them. In the kitchen the black mass of the AGA held her attention, a testimony to man’s appetite for containment. He bound his hunger to the flames of the cooker in an attempt to manage it, just as he displayed decaying remnants of the wild in cases on his walls.
In the bathroom, she studied herself in the antique mirror, as her mother had done so often before her. She wondered if they saw the same things now, if that was why Harriet had spent so long diligently masking herself beneath make-up and blusher each morning.
The cottage sounded with movement as she exited the bathroom and crossed the landing. She might have been walking through a dream; the haze of outside having followed into her home. George had fallen asleep on his bedroom floor, beside the window. She left him where he lay, curled up like an animal in its den.
She knocked at Lizzie’s door. When there was no answer she knocked again. Still there was no response, so she pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The room was dark with night. Strange silhouettes leapt out at her; sculptures, illuminated in moonlight. She looked past the twisted fey figures, the screaming face casts, the abstract shapes that she realised with growing concern might have been mouths; papier mâché versions of the lost brooch –
Her daughter lay on the floor. Where George was curled comfortably into his chest; however, she was sprawled against the wood. Freya saw for the first time how pale Lizzie looked beneath the light of the moon, how thin her arms had become; like sticks of bone, her face gaunt, as though stripped of flesh and life.
She rushed to her daughter and gathered her in her arms. She was cold and hard to touch, and proved horribly light when she lifted her to the bed. A thin line of blood emerged from her nose, where she must have knocked herself. It was brown in the dark and crusty when she tried to wipe it away. How long her daughter had been lying there she couldn’t tell. All she knew was the terrible state of the girl, who, it seemed, had denied her simple hunger at every turn, where everyone else had indulged it.
* * *
When Lizzie woke some hours later, she shared her private hell with Freya. It was a story of denial, driven to extremes by the growing hunger inside. There was no escaping the cycle of eating and purging. It was, in itself, all devouring; sapping Lizzie’s strength, her health, her life. Only her will remained, and what an iron will it was, to maintain such strictures, to uphold her monstrous habits even as they ate her up, pound by pound! If she wouldn’t feed the hunger then it would feed on her, until there was nothing left. Mother and daughter wept together, and hugged, and Lizzie unburdened herself further.
At first, she said, she hid the changes easily. They were slow and she was resourceful. She wore loose clothing and blamed tiredness on late nights, or too much pressure at school. Still, her friends looked slimmer than her. The boys at school followed Rachel as dogs to a scent. It seemed demeaning and yet she craved those base attentions, their lingering eyes on her body, their noses sniffing her scents. If only they would look! She couldn’t remember a time before A-levels, before reflections in the mirror, before complex carbohydrates and glossy magazines. Reduced to these things, she was not a person. She might as well not have existed.
Food, she said, began to lose its appeal. She noted the way spots of grease swam on the surface of gravy. Meat revolted her. This was no moral choice, no personal preference, as Freya’s vegetarianism had once been – how long ago that seemed now. Lizzie spoke of plucked chicken like drowned men’s flesh; bare and white and bloated. Sausages glistened with fat. Bacon shrivelled and grew hard. Even as Freya celebrated her new-found hunger with cooked breakfasts each morning these sickened her daughter, so that she barely touched them, and in private regurgitated what little had passed her lips.
“How could you do this to yourself?” Freya said, when her daughter had finished speaking. “Boys don’t want this. Nobody wants this!”
“It wasn’t about the boys,” she said, shrinking into her covers. “That was just how it started. But then it became more. I started getting hungrier. It felt like I was losing control and the worse that got, the more I wanted to fight it. And when I couldn’t, when I couldn’t cut out food altogether, I had to throw it up to get it out of me.”
They continued to argue, her daughter’s expression so much like the hares’, caught in the headlights on the road through the village.
“I don’t understand,” said Freya. “This isn’t normal, darling. Your body needs food to grow, to live. You know this!”
“It’s under control!” she said.
“It isn’t, Lizzie! Let me get you something to eat.”
“No.”
“Please,” she said, “Lizzie. You’re starving yourself.”
“I can’t lose control! Look at the rest of the village! Look at what they’re turning into, at what they’ve become!”
“It’s normal,” said Freya, and even as she spoke she realised that she was right. Lynnwood had always taken pride in its rich array of produce. Temptation had always been near. Breads, cheeses, wines and preserves; the village expressed itself through the unique brand of its New Forest flavours, as all places do, unconsciously or otherwise. There were the Allwood’s jams, Catherine’s wines, McCready’s meats, never mind Lynnwood’s wilder appetites, which said more about the village than words ever could. The revelation seemed to rise through her, dizzy and distancing. “It’s normal to feel hungry. It’s normal to want boys, to feel confused and scared, but that’s what I’m here for. To talk to you, to help you, to be your mother. The only thing that isn’t normal is this.” She reached out to touch her daughter’s arm. For a second she graced the skin, cold and hard again, before it vanished into the bedcovers.
“It’s normal,” Freya said, and the last vestiges of doubt faded from her own mind. “You must be starving.”
Her daughter’s sallow eyes rose to meet hers, and in the darkness of her bedroom, swaddled in her sheets, she nodded.
* * *
Freya stayed with Lizzie all night while she slept. At some point she also fell asleep, her daughter wrapped in her arms. It felt good to hold her close, impossibly good, as though holding her somehow made up for the weeks of disregard. She felt stronger, more whole, completed by the closeness of her offspring.
They woke before dawn to shouting. At first she was confused, still deep in her dream by the brook. Then she realised the shouting was real. Lizzie was recoiled into the bedsheets and the sound coming from outside. Moving to the window, she stared down at the street and the man crouched in the middle of the road. Stripped of clothes and humanity he could have been anyone. It was the mask that betrayed him. He continued to shout; wordless noises, wild and unchallenged.
Then a second voice reached her ears, not from the street or the village but the room next door. It was a small voice, high and raw, like a feral cat screaming into the light blue of dawn. Each scream resonated inside her. Time seemed to slow, everything else fading into the background. All that mattered were those screams, which she realised then came from George’s bedroom. She rushed from the window and Lizzie’s room, across the landing and into her son’s room. George was nowhere in sight. She raced to the open window, tearing back the curtains in time to see him vanishing with Mr. Shepherd into the village.
She stood at the window, watching him as he raced from view. She wasn’t especially upset, as she thought she should have been. Nor was she happy. Instead she felt a surge of relief that she couldn’t hope to explain. Her son, at least, was free now.