Dad ignored me seven times. When he drew in a long, deep breath I thought I’d finally worn him down, but he didn’t say anything.
After a while, I said: ‘If it’s somewhere horrible – like Epping – I won’t be happy.’ We went on a camping trip to Epping Forest once. It rained. We were forced to either stay in our tent or go to a café near the service station filled with big bald men who drove lorries. I wasn’t able to go searching for little creatures once during the whole weekend.
‘It isn’t Epping,’ he said, shortly.
I was encouraged that he at least reacted to my statement, but then he went back to saying nothing again.
‘The Shepherd will soon be tempted to leave his flock and give in to his darkest temptations.’ My mother said this whilst staring out of the window, pressing her forehead to the glass.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Dad muttered. ‘We’ll be there soon, now.’
Dad didn’t seem to quite understand the meaning of the word ‘soon’. It took hours more, through the afternoon and into the night. We passed woodland, towns, and big signs saying ‘The North’ and ‘Newcastle’ and ‘Northumbria’. We stopped for tea at an old pub with growling dogs. Instead of making a scene at this one, Mum managed to go to the car to have her ‘moment’. After a while, though, she started to use the horn to attract our attention and Dad went out to calm her down. I stayed in my seat, picking at the chicken in a basket he’d bought me, but eventually I got unnerved by all the old men at the bar pointing to me, a child on her own in a pub, so I went out to the car too.
‘I need to tell you, Kitty,’ my dad said when we went back in to the pub to finish our food. ‘This holiday may not be like other holidays.’
I stared back at him, unsure of what he meant. ‘But we don’t really go on holidays. Not any more.’ I was tempted to add that even when we did go away, we didn’t usually take so much stuff or let people stay in our house, but I decided too many words might annoy him.
He nodded, thinking about what I’d said. ‘That’s true. But if we did, this wouldn’t be like them.’
I dipped one of my chips into the little pot of mayonnaise the waiter had brought. ‘Why is that?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer, just got up to go and pay at the bar. I looked out of the window and watched Mum talking to the steering wheel.
We travelled for an hour more. I know this because I watched the clock on the dashboard of the car turn from 20.00 to 21.00, which means nine o’clock, apparently. We journeyed deep into the thick countryside, through dark trees. They bent and twisted around us, as if they were inviting us into their strange world – though once we were admitted, I did wonder if we’d ever be let out. Mum seemed to have the same idea, because she kept up a steady wailing sound, like a radio signal going in and out, and murmured things like, ‘Oh no … not into the darkness … oh no … please.’ But she didn’t fully ‘kick off’, so things couldn’t have been that bad. I tried to ignore her and nestled my head on the pillow I was clutching. I’d been stealing them from other parts of the car along the journey and now I had a little nest of comfort in the back. It had almost caused a bit of an avalanche earlier, with some of the books Dad had allowed us to bring slipping from their bag, but he didn’t notice. He was too busy trying to navigate, glancing at a map in the gloom whilst driving with the other hand.
Finally, a little bit after nine, Dad announced, ‘We’ve arrived.’ He looked over at Mum. ‘Marjory. We’ve arrived. Remember. Our little holiday?’
She just nodded and looked at her hands. He sighed and got out of the car. I was sleepy – I’d been dozing on and off since the pub. ‘How far have we travelled?’ I asked.
‘Far,’ Dad said. He sounded tired and annoyed. The window to my left was completely dark. I tried to look past all the stuff into the front of the car, but I couldn’t see anything out there either.
‘We’ve fallen. And I don’t think we’ll be able to climb back out again.’ I heard Mum speaking in a flat voice, then saw the shape of my father move to the right and open the car door.
‘I’ll come round and get you out, Kitty,’ he said before he closed the door.
He did as he promised, half lifting me out of my little nest in the back, more gently than I expected. ‘I realise this might all be a bit strange. And it might get stranger. But it’s all for the best.’ He nodded as he spoke and didn’t look me right in the eyes. Just off over my shoulder, into the darkness.
‘Where are we?’ I said. I looked around, making out the outlines of trees. They surrounded us. I gasped. I couldn’t help it. We were in the woods. In the middle of the woods. I didn’t know what woods, or forest, it was, but we’d been driving for a whole day and a bit, so we could be anywhere. Then I looked directly ahead and saw a building type of thing. A house type of thing. It was like a cottage, only a little bit larger. You could tell it had an upstairs because of the windows.
‘Come on,’ Dad said. ‘Let’s go and wake the place up.’
‘Waking the place up’ wasn’t as nice as it sounded. The house, which had strange-looking plants crawling up its walls outside, and strange-looking wallpaper crawling up its walls inside, was like something in the old picture books I used to get out of the library. Ones that involved little children getting lost in woods. At least I had my dad with me. And my mum. Although, with each day that passed, she was becoming more of a child than I was.
‘There are spiders,’ I said as I looked eagerly around the living room.
‘The devil’s creatures!’ my mother shrieked.
Dad sent me one of his sharp looks and put his arm around Mum. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get rid of them. Won’t we, Kitty?’
I frowned at him. ‘So long as I can keep them and make a spider colony.’
He huffed and puffed a bit and settled my mum on the sofa while he and I began to bring some of the boxes and bedding in from the car.
‘Prioritise the stuff we’ll need for tonight and the morning,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll bring the rest in tomorrow.’
I thought about telling him that it was hard to ‘prioritise’ stuff like that when we couldn’t really see what was in the bags unless we unpacked them, but I decided not to. He’d given me too many sharp looks already today. One more could be the final straw for the both of us. I did as I was told, even though I didn’t want to, and tried my best to bring in just the things I needed. Sometimes I got it wrong (‘Kitty, why the hell would we need our wellington boots for either bed or breakfast?’) but it all had to come in eventually, I said, so I didn’t know why he bothered complaining. While I did this, he took the majority of the bedding upstairs. I heard him rifling around up there, then a loud creaking noise. He must be moving the furniture, I thought. In the end, bored with bringing things in, I went up to have a look. The stairway groaned as I trod on it and I imagined how many wonderful animals must be living underneath it. Rats and mice with razor-sharp teeth and spiders the size of dogs.
There were three rooms upstairs. A big one, which Dad was in now, a smaller one and a bathroom. I thought about Ebenezer Scrooge, going about his house after seeing the face of Jacob Marley in his door knocker, and wondered if I too would see any apparitions. Part of me hoped I would. It was one of those things that seemed to only happen to people who wouldn’t enjoy it. They just screamed and spent the rest of their lives boring everyone with how they ran away instantly and would never go back in the room or house or hotel or museum or wherever they’d been ever again. I would try to talk to a ghost. I think I’d have a lot to say. Like whether all this was worth it, just to reach the other side, and if they had food in the afterlife. Mum and I played ghosts once on Halloween. My classmates at school were having a party, but I’d had flu that week and was still feeling tired and worn out by little things. So Mum made our own party: we had sheets with holes in and watched Casper cartoons on the TV. Later on in the evening, I said something that spoilt things a little. I said to Mum I’d like to have a little ghost as a pet, like Casper. He’d float around when I’d want him to, then when I didn’t he would be invisible and sit on my shoulder, so nobody else would know I had a little friend, but I could still talk to him and he could speak to me, like a voice inside my head. She’d gone quiet when I said this. Then she took off her ghost sheet and said she needed to have a lie down.
The sound of her crying lasted for most of the next three cartoons. After that, I started to understand Mum probably did have a little ghost on her shoulder, or inside her head. But it didn’t say nice things.
‘Kitty, come in here and take the other end of this sheet.’
I went into the room Dad was in and watched as he struggled with a large bed sheet, trying to wrap it over an ancient-looking mattress, only to have the ends ping off each time he tried to secure them. I held it still for him and he finally got it all secured. ‘There, that’s done.’ Without speaking, he picked up all the pillows and duvets from the floor and tried to make them look tidy on the bed. ‘Right, now for your bed, Kitty.’
We went back downstairs to get the remaining bedding stuff, but Dad froze statue-still as soon as we got to the lounge. ‘Where’s your mother?’ he said, loudly and angrily.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I tried to sound defiant and not worried, but I was scared. It wasn’t too much of a worry when she went off wandering when we were at home. This was a rather recent thing, and I got the feeling Dad wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it. I don’t think he wanted to lock her up or force her to stay in the house all day while he was at work, and mostly she just kept to the lounge or the kitchen. But sometimes she wandered, usually to the local shops, just to try on some clothes. She never bought anything, but the staff now knew her by name and were very nice to her. They would allow her to sit down in one of the changing room cubicles for a bit if she got upset, then telephone for my dad to walk down the street to get her and help her home. But we weren’t at home now. And Mum couldn’t have gone to Debenhams. We were alone, in the middle of the woods in a fairy tale house, and it was dark and strange. And worst of all, I think it was me who had left the front door wide open.