In Kate’s bedroom there were blackout curtains, and on the morning of Christmas Eve she slept until ten o’clock. She woke to the sound of Joni Mitchell’s Blue playing from the living room. Kate had put this album on every morning one summer, had left it playing through the house when she’d packed her bag and gone to school, on those days when Alison couldn’t get out of bed. She buried her face in the pillow. Why she had thought this album might help Alison, she had no idea.
Alison soft-boiled eggs for them both, and they sat in their little kitchen with the door open so she could hum along with Joni’s voice. Kate got up and turned the music down without saying anything, and then felt sorry that she had done so. After breakfast, Alison went to the corner shop to buy milk and bread. She came upstairs to find Kate sitting on her bed, looking around her room.
“I feel old,” she said. “I’m too old for this room.”
It took her all afternoon to clear it out. Alison helped by filling plastic bags with clothes and belongings she would take to the council to be recycled, and boxes with possessions of Kate’s she could not bear to throw away. As they sorted their way through everything, Kate thought how strange it was to have another person piece together a history of her own life which was to her unknown; that Alison’s memories of Kate’s childhood, of her preverbal existence, had a life to which she had no direct access. When her wardrobe and chest of drawers were clear, and the pile of possessions on the armchair had been condensed into a few boxes, Alison helped Kate to push the bed from the middle of the room to the alcove in the corner of her room.
When she went to bed that night her room smelt faintly of polish, but the air was thinner, colder: cleared of the dust that had built up over the years. Again that night she slept deeply, falling quickly under, too quickly for her to turn off her bedside light even, and when she woke her skin was clean, her pajamas and her sheets smelling of her mother’s laundry detergent, and the duvet over her feet heavy where Alison had crept in in the night and left a stocking on her bed, just as she’d done when Kate was little. Downstairs Alison was listening to Joni again.
She opened her gifts at the kitchen table: a pack of cards with pictures of her university on the back, a bar of lavender soap, and some plastic-coated earrings she knew she would never wear. Once she was washed and dressed and smelling of soap they drank coffee and listened to music loud enough to negate the need for conversation. They had chicken this year; there were only two of them, not enough to justify a turkey, and Kate watched her mother stuff it with the pork meat and herbs she’d bought from the supermarket a few days earlier. The fridge was glut full, and the prepackaged sauces, puddings, and creams made Kate feel slightly nauseous. So too did the chicken, whose freshly plucked skin was stretched so thin that it had begun to tear over its fatted torso. Alison thrust handfuls of pork meat up inside the chicken, pressing into the moistened meat half a lemon and two peeled cloves of garlic, rubbing butter and salt into its skin.
At lunch, Alison slowed her eating pace to match her daughter’s.
“You do seem better than last year,” she said when Kate pushed away her half-finished plate: she had picked over the breast meat but hadn’t quite been able to dislodge from her mind the image of raw flesh, bound and pierced. Her mother had spoken as if picking up an earlier conversation.
“What do you mean?” Kate said.
“You were so very sad this time last year,” Alison said simply. “I didn’t quite see it at the time, but I can see it now, now that you seem a little happier.”
Alison’s incisiveness came as both a surprise and a relief to Kate. It was much like the feeling she’d had when she’d first got drunk as a teenager, and when, after being driven home by her mother and put to bed, believing herself to have behaved with the perfect impression of sobriety, she’d woken to find that Alison had gone to work leaving a packet of paracetamol and a packet of bacon out on the kitchen counter. Then, just as now, Kate had realized that her mother had deduced far more than she allowed herself to believe. In the afternoon, when they went out for a walk, Kate told her mother that there was a sadness she could not name, and Alison kissed her on the top of her head, looped her arm through her daughter’s. When Kate grew weary, and the sky began to run, they went home and Kate lay on the sofa with her head resting in Alison’s lap, her eyes closed, listening to the voices on the television, not yet ready to sleep.
Claire rang Kate two days after Christmas to complain of weight gain and boredom.
“There are no good-looking people in Randwick,” Claire said, sighing. “I’m wasted here.”
“Haven’t you just been with your family?”
“Well, exactly.”
“We can go somewhere but you have to come and collect me. And you know nowhere will be open.”
“It’s fine, I’ll take Mum’s car,” said Claire. “I’ve got an idea.”
When Claire first suggested that they go to Bisley House, Kate refused. If there was even the smallest chance that Lewis was still there, she told Claire, she wouldn’t go. Once they’d set off, though, Kate agreed to go through the village so they could catch a glimpse from afar.
“Aren’t you curious to see it?” Claire said.
“I’ve already seen it.”
“Yes, but to see it now, wouldn’t it be different? Now they’re moving everything out?”
“What, you think it would be cathartic seeing it empty?”
“Yeah. I dunno. Some symbolic shit.”
The sky was pink, just as it had been when Kate and Max had driven this way the year before, and the houses on the lanes were lit with Christmas lights. By the time they got to Bisley it was almost dark. As they rounded the corner at the top of the lane above the house, Kate began to feel excited. They wouldn’t be seen in this light, particularly if they parked in the lay-by opposite. They could get out of the car, perhaps get close. She knew it was possible that Lewis was still there, but it was more likely that he would have gone back to London at the same time as Max.
“Actually,” she said to Claire as casually as she could, “I think Max might have said they were all going back yesterday.”
Claire smiled. “So you do want to see it.”
“Maybe,” Kate said. “I don’t know. I don’t want anybody to see us.”
They parked, as Kate demanded, in the lay-by. There were no streetlamps on the lane, and the hedges were thick and high. The gates were open, and Kate crossed the lane, stood at the entrance. It was Claire’s turn, now, for hesitation.
“Are you sure?” she said.
Kate put up the hood of her coat and stepped onto the driveway. The house was less glowing than she remembered it, more gray, its bricks dirt-worn. Her feet crunched on the gravel as she moved closer, and she saw that there were lights on in some of the windows, and a car, a four-by-four she didn’t recognize parked out front next to a yellow dumpster. On the cool air she could smell faintly the smoke of a wood fire. There were people still, but it was dark out here, so even if he was there, she would see him before he saw her.
“I’ve been here before,” Claire whispered to Kate. “They held the village fair here when the school fields were shut with foot-and-mouth. We were about twelve. Do you remember?”
Kate shook her head without looking away from the house.
“They had to evacuate the paddling pool after David threw up in it.”
“Why does he always throw up?” Kate whispered back.
“He has a weak constitution,” whispered Claire.
Kate took another step forward, and the motion sensor above the doorway blinked, flicking on the security lamp and flooding the driveway with white light. Instinctively, Kate pulled her scarf up around her face, and they both shielded their eyes. With black dots in her vision, Kate loosened the scarf and looked to the uppermost window, her face bathed in light. For a second she stood there before she turned, and walked back to the car.
“It’s like being in a thriller, this rape stuff,” said Claire, as she pulled her seat belt across her chest and slammed on the accelerator. She glanced sideways at Kate. “Sorry, that was a bit insensitive. I just don’t have any real enemies, you know. Not since school, anyway. I miss that, having enemies.”
“I hope it was him in there,” Kate said quietly. “I hope he saw me.”