‘Hi, Steph.’
I was in the kitchen, the cool blue light of my laptop shining out across the table. Even a few hours later, I was still shaken after dealing with the rat. I’d lit a candle to cheer myself. The tiny flame danced in the corner of my eye as Steph’s face wobbled and blinked and came into focus.
‘You okay? You sound a bit down.’ Steph’s voice was a surprising beacon of familiarity.
‘Oh. I’m fine, but it’s horrible going through all her stuff.’
Steph nodded. ‘I can imagine. Rather you than me. How’s the weather? We’ve had a great blizzard here in New York. All flights are cancelled. I didn’t get to Miami. The whole place is under wraps, state of emergency and all that. We’re not supposed to leave our homes even to go to the shops whilst it’s like this.’
I nodded. I’d watched the news whilst eating my tea, seeing the reports of a sequence of east coast blizzards in America and how they’d reached us from across the Atlantic.
‘Yeah, it’s a whiteout here too, I won’t be able to drive anywhere for a few days in this, but I’m well stocked up. Craig, my neighbour, has been round with a load of logs.’
‘Has he?’ Steph was smiling, reaching out for a mug of coffee. ‘And?’
‘Oh, he didn’t stay long.’
There was a pause. Maybe Steph was hoping I might fill the silence with more details.
‘I’ve got a cat in the sitting room,’ I said.
It was still there, supplied with a plate of cat food and a bowl of water. I’d have to let it out in a bit.
‘Really?’ Steph sounded distracted, disappointed perhaps that I wasn’t giving up more information about my kind neighbour.
‘Yeah, the cat turned up in the attic. God knows how it got up there.’
I decided not to say anything about the rat.
‘And how are things with your work, are you managing to do some painting too?’
‘Oh, it’s good. My agent’s sent me a new commission for fairy tales and some of the stories are …’ I brought my hand up to cough. I wasn’t sure exactly what word to use, but I didn’t want to admit the effect they were having on me. ‘I’ve got loads of ideas.’
I didn’t mention the book included the story of The Pear Drum.
‘That’s nice.’
My sister sipped at her mug, hands curled around it, clothed in a casually elegant mohair sloppy jumper. There was an awkward silence.
‘Which one are you working on at the moment?’ she asked.
‘The Juniper Tree.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s about a young boy and his stepsister. His father has remarried and the stepmother hates him, wanting his inheritance for her daughter.’
‘Oh right, that sounds familiar. Why are there so many evil stepmothers in those stories?’ Steph leaned back in her seat.
I laughed. ‘This one’s particularly gruesome. The stepmother kills the boy and feeds him to his father.’
‘Yuk! Murder and cannibalism, what happened to happy ever after?’
‘Fairy tales aren’t always what Disney would have us believe. It’s not like my usual commissions, this one’s not really for children.’ I grinned.
Steph laughed. ‘I should think not, from what you’re telling me!’
Later, after the call ended, I started to paint.
The house was quiet, the cat asleep on the sofa, apparently no longer distressed. I glanced outside. The night was arctic clear, the snow sparkling. As I stood in front of the kitchen table, brush in hand, I felt calmer, happier, I was in control with a paintbrush. Time didn’t matter, here on my own, surrounded by nature’s very own blank canvas.
Already I was filling in the purple blue berries and evergreen needles of a juniper tree. The story had so many starkly visual elements. It began with a young woman, desperate for a child, praying at the base of a juniper tree.
She cuts an apple, but the knife slips, slicing into her thumb, blood staining the snow on the ground.
‘I wish,’ she says. ‘I wish for a child, as blood is red and the sun hangs in the sky.’
A child arrives, a little boy, exactly as the mother wanted, except she does not live to see him beyond a few hours. The juniper tree is her grave.
I sketched out the tree, its branches close and dense. I could feel its empathy for the mother, her love for the baby to come, its grief at the mother’s death.
A new mother arrives, with a daughter of her own. Though the woman hates the boy, her daughter loves him.
The stepmother scowls with distaste. ‘Would you like an apple?’ she says to the boy.
‘Yes,’ he says, surprised that she has offered.
She points. ‘Look inside the chest.’
The boy moves across the room. There’s a wooden crate on the floor, the wood heavy and rough. He struggles to lift the lid and looks inside. But as he leans in, the stepmother slams the lid shut and the boy’s head is cut right off.
I painted an open crate, the boy’s bloodied head staring back at me. I spent time on his face, I couldn’t let it go, his cheeks, his mouth contorted by death. It was as if I’d seen that face. I painted a green apple rolling beside his cheek, his stepsister looking down in horror.
Now the stepmother cooks a meal, a stew for the father home from work.
‘Mmmm, this is very tasty, my dear. But where’s my son? Why isn’t he here to eat?’
‘Oh, he’s gone to visit his uncle, my love. He’ll be back within a week.’
I painted the stepmother smiling at her husband, her lips twisted with delight, and the little girl, too small for the dinner table, perched on her chair. She was staring at the stew, a finger rolling to the surface.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever tasted a meal as good as this!’ says the father, stripping the bones with his teeth, throwing them over his shoulder onto the kitchen floor.
I drew the little girl on her hands and knees, gathering up the bones, placing them inside a folded handkerchief. I painted miniature bees and butterflies embroidered on the silk.
The girl carries the bones to the juniper tree, arranging them on the grave like flowers. They move, scuttling across the stone, nudging each other, jostling for place, shaping the figure of a bird.
I painted the bird as it sprang to life, its wings a shimmering kingfisher blue, flying over the girl’s head, its beak open as it sang.
‘My mother, she killed me,
My father, he ate me,
My sister, she gathered my bones …’
I painted the bones again, re-creating the shape of a bird. Except it wasn’t the same bird. Not even a living bird. This time the image was that of a bird like the one in the butcher’s shop, its head hanging down, its feathers limp and wet, its beak breathless and hanging open. I stared at it, my mind struggling to move on. My fingers plucked a fine-tipped pen from the stash of pens and I added more detail, lines and dots and strokes of ink, hunched over with an intensity I couldn’t relinquish, until it was no longer identifiable as a dead bird, but a solid block of black.
Later, I climbed the stairs, looking for somewhere to sleep. I was Goldilocks searching in a strange house. I didn’t want to use my old bedroom – it was small and depressing. The room next to Elizabeth’s was too close to hers and I didn’t want to use Steph’s old room. On the far side of the hall was a fourth room, directly over the kitchen. It had been the guest bedroom, not that we’d had many guests. It had a side window, through which reared the black shapes of the derelict barns and a second window overlooking the garden. I felt my body relax.
I hadn’t really paid much attention to the garden since I’d got there. I stood at the window looking out over the lawn with its flower beds draped in white. The moon shone directly down onto a wrought-iron bench on the patio where a bird had left delicate marks in the snow. Trees dominated the far end of the garden, their thick limbs piercing the sky. Beyond was a snowy hexagonal roof, a summerhouse. My eyes slid across to the fields and the spectral hills gleaming in the distance.
This last room had been stripped of everything. The bed was unmade, the shelves bare. Good, I thought, this would do fine.
But sleep evaded me, my head still creating pictures.
Clack, clack, the noise echoed through the house. And when I closed my eyes I saw the attic, with its blanket-covered bumps and frozen window.
Clack, clack, the window was opening, slowly spilling moonlight onto the floor.
Clack, clack and a long finger of silver white reached out, stretching across the room, pointing towards one lump in particular. It moved, the covers lifting, two beady eyes peering from beneath. The covers dropped and the eyes disappeared. But the larger shape remained. Ominous but familiar. In the furthest, blackest corner of the eaves.
The morning was bright, light reflecting back off the snow. The attic was at the forefront of my mind. I’d chucked the cat out the back door and she kicked a leg in protest as she stalked off, waving the tip of her tail, shaking her paws in the snow. I climbed the stairs, this time prepared with a torch.
The attic smelt of mushroom damp, cold air still blowing through the gap in the window. A pile of snow clung to the inner window sill and I brushed it away in a useless gesture of distaste. The bulb popped, finally giving up, but there was enough early morning sunlight to shine across the room. I didn’t need my torch. The sheets that covered the floor looked a whole lot less sinister by day as I pulled them off, one by one, like a waiter in a Michelin-starred restaurant.
There were toys I didn’t remember, boxes of Lego and farmyard figures, adventure books and tennis racquets. Surely, if we’d had these, I would have known? I felt a surge of frustration, I had remembered the books in my room, the Monopoly game and soft toys, but these things felt alien to my hands. They must have been Steph’s. It was normal, wasn’t it, to not remember stuff from when I’d been so young? I searched my mind, but it was obstinately unresponsive.
My hand reached out again, then stopped, dropping to my lap.
There was another shape, much bigger. I felt a twinge of recognition, the images from the night before hovering, like the fingers of a hand too close to the nape of my neck, enough to make the hairs stand upright and crackle with electricity.
It was a crate. But different. This was the one I’d been looking for. The one that had been obsessing me.
It was large and wooden, rectangular and deep, with a brass lock. The timber, the rough, heavy wood, the way the lock levered up, unhooking itself from a double catch, it was exactly as I’d drawn it the day before for the story of the juniper tree. The realisation startled me. I had recreated it with such accurate detail, the image must have been buried in my head.
I dragged it towards me, hands reaching for the catch. It wasn’t locked. Perhaps Elizabeth had known that it was safe from prying eyes up here in the attic. My fingers pushed the lever and the lid flipped open like a toy nutcracker’s head.
I’d known what was inside, despite my reluctance to name it. With its life-sized wooden belly, a handle at one end and that long arm with its own secret box, reaching into the full length of the crate.
I’d found it.
The pear drum.