We spent that first day getting unpacked. Mum even started to feel better enough to help at one point, although she kept getting distracted. Most of the boxes she opened led to her sitting cross-legged on the floor examining her own collection of mugs or balls of Dad’s socks, as if they were really interesting things from another planet that had just been discovered.
We had lunch later – about 2.30, according to the old metal clock above the fireplace that was already there when we arrived. Lunch consisted of toasted stale bread again, with Marmite this time, and Dad said he’d drive to the nearest shops later and get us some supplies. I think he was getting tired of checking each slice for mould before he bit into it.
‘Can I come with you?’ I asked. I was keen to see the world outside the woods. Just to make sure it was still there.
‘No,’ he said, gruffly.
‘You want me to stay here alone?’ I was annoyed with him, mainly because he was doing this stupid thing where he didn’t look at me properly. He did it when he was going against what he knew I wanted.
‘You won’t be on your own,’ he replied, quietly. ‘You’ll be with Mum.’
I looked over at Mum, who, having cut off all her crusts, was now eating them one by one, leaving the main (and best) part of the slice of toast on the plate.
‘She could come too.’ It seemed like a reasonable suggestion to me.
‘Just stay with her. We’ll see if we can get that old TV working.’
I didn’t jump for joy at this. He knew I didn’t really care about TV. ‘I think I’d still rather come,’ I said, simply.
‘And I’m the adult so what I say bloody goes,’ he said, angrily. He was looking at me now, his eyes sharp and filled with warnings. I often ignored signs like these and he would get into a rage where he’d go white and then red and then white again and have to go and lie down.
‘I wish Mum was the one who was still normal,’ I said.
I heard him drop his knife with a clatter. I didn’t look up. I was staring at my plate. Trying not to move.
‘Are you trying to upset me, Kitty? Is that what you want? I’m doing my fucking best, you understand! I’m—’ He stopped. Got up. Then walked out of the room. I heard him putting his coat on in the little hallway cloakroom thing. He took a long time doing it. Mum was already crying, but not making as much of a fuss about it as normal, just wiping her tears on the plastic bag the bread was in. ‘I’ll be back in about an hour, hopefully.’ Dad didn’t come back to say this. Just called it from the doorway. ‘Do not let your mum go outside. Keep the door shut. Keep talking to her. OK?’
I let a few seconds pass before I finally called out ‘OK’ in response. I heard the latch and the door slammed. And then he was gone.
And I was left at the kitchen table, watching the ‘o’ of the word ‘Hovis’ go all blurry from my mother’s tears.
Eventually, I finished the unpacking. I thought I might as well do it on my own, even if I couldn’t quite reach the high things and the chairs didn’t look too safe to stand on. I got the things all packed away – saucepans in the cupboard, clothes in the rough, scratchy old wardrobes and drawers. Mum even helped me fold my cardigans neatly, humming the theme tune to Coronation Street as she did it. With the clean, though slightly tatty, carpets and light green curtains now feeling a little more familiar, the place had started to feel more like a home. Just not our home.
I didn’t hear the door go. I was sitting on the stairs, so wasn’t far from it, but I was concentrating on encouraging out a large spider I’d seen crawl into a hole at the bottom. I thought it would make a nice replacement for the beetle I’d been forced to cast out earlier, so I spent a good few minutes trying to coax it into a bowl, though without success. I’d just given up and had gone to put the bowl back in the kitchen when I saw that Mum had disappeared from the lounge. I went through, into the hallway. The front door was open, swinging in the breeze. It was starting to get dark. Darker than I had expected. How long had passed since Dad left? It must have been more than an hour. More than two, if it had got dark already?
I ran and put on my wellington boots and a coat, then went outside into the twilight. Although not as new-cold-crisp as it had been this morning, the wind was blustery and I hugged my coat close to me as I walked around the outside walls of the house. ‘Mum!’ I shouted, peering around the corners, hoping to see her crouched on the ground, playing with some leaves or something. Right around by the back wall, I did find something. But it wasn’t Mum. It was on the wall. A word in big, black letters, scrawled in what looked like paint.
LEAVE.
I knew I probably shouldn’t have, that I should have gone back inside immediately, but the glinting of the letters made me do it: I reached out and touched the bottom half of the ‘L’. My fingers came away wet. It smelled like paint. And if the paint hadn’t dried in the blustery wind, that meant it hadn’t been done very long ago. My mind started racing. I remembered a creak I’d heard just before I found the spider – a sound I’d dismissed as a tree moving in the wind. Could someone have sneaked up on us in the dark without me knowing? Was someone watching me as I stood there, at the back of the house, just a tiny insignificant figure amidst the enormous woodland?
‘Mum!’ I shouted again. I heard a noise to my right. A strange scratching noise, as if someone was scraping something against the side of the house. Someone I couldn’t see. I looked all around me, but I couldn’t focus on anything. It was like the forest was closing in, the light getting dimmer by the second. A flurry of birds suddenly erupted from a nearby tree, screeching and squawking, and I felt my pulse increase, my temperature drop and goosebumps break out across my skin. I tried to call for Mum, or Dad, or anyone, but my throat was tight and croaky. In the end, I just ran.
I ran as far away from the house as I could in my wellington boots. When I was completely out of breath, I crouched down behind a big thick tree trunk and peered around it. The house was a small speck of light through the trees. I watched and waited for a little while, listening hard to the rush of the leaves and the wind. Then I saw something move, up near the house. Did they go inside? Or had they gone round the other side again?
My heart was pumping, my thoughts racing, wondering if it was one of the murderers I’d seen pictures of on TV and in the newspapers Dad read. Or if it was someone else. Something else. It was the worst ‘or’ in the whole horrible world. Because it would mean something really, really bad. It would mean Mum was right. They were listening. The trees were listening. The animals were listening. And they didn’t want us here. They were not going to let us live.
I ran again, blindly through the woods until suddenly the trees vanished and I was standing on a road. A long, winding road, with trees either side. It was completely empty – no cars, driving or parked. No signs. No glimmer of light to suggest the house in the distance or the direction I’d come from. Nothing. I’m lost, I thought to myself with a flash of fresh new panic, wondering how long it would be before the wolves or cannibals would arrive to eat me. I walked along the edge of the road – away from the house, I thought, but I wasn’t completely sure. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a light. A glinting light. It was a car.
I once saw someone in a film waving down a car. They had put their hand out and the person driving stopped and the other person got in. I thought that was maybe what I should do, but before I’d decided I saw the car slowing anyway, so I just stood there, at the edge, watching it crawl to a stop. There were two people in the front seat and the driver wound down their window. It was a woman. She looked like she was about to speak, but before she could, the passenger-side door burst open and a man jumped out. A man I knew. I’d been crying already without realising, but at the sight of him I immediately burst into full, gasping tears.
‘Dad?’ I sobbed.
‘Kitty! What the hell are you doing out here? What’s happened to you?’
He was staring at me as if I looked a fright – and when I looked down I saw that I did. There were mud marks on my coat, one side of it was scratched so much the material had almost ripped, and my hands were cut and bleeding.
He saw that I was crying, trying to speak, and he came round to me and clasped my hurt hands. ‘Kitty, darling, tell me. Where’s Mum?’
I shook my head, and the tears rolled down my face.
I saw the worry growing in his tired eyes. Then he looked back at the woman, now standing by the door of the car, looking at me with big, curious eyes. She was rather beautiful, and slightly older than Dad. Her hair was short and modern-looking and she was wearing a brown leather jacket. ‘We need to find her,’ Dad continued. ‘Let’s get back to the house.’ The woman didn’t say anything, just nodded and got back behind the wheel. Dad led me by the hand to the car and helped me into the passenger seat.
‘Drive,’ he said, and she zoomed off. The trees blurred past the window. I was pulled away from them by Dad, who was trying to ask me questions. ‘Kitty, when did you last see Mum? Where was she when you last saw her?’
I tried to think about it, about how much time had passed, but I couldn’t get my thoughts in order. He got impatient. ‘Kitty! Please, answer me.’
‘I … I think she was in the lounge. I left her painting her nails with her favourite violent colour.’
‘Violet,’ he corrected automatically. ‘And how long ago was this?’
I shook my head again. ‘A little while. I forgot what the time was. You were gone so long. Why were you gone so long?’
He looked at me and I thought he was about to say something, then he turned back to face the way the car was going and carried on looking ahead.
It didn’t take us long to get back to the house. The car wound into the thicker parts of the trees and up towards the front door – still open, as I had left it.
‘There’s something else,’ I said, but he didn’t wait to listen.
‘Marjory!’ he shouted at the top of his voice and ran into the house.
‘Don’t worry,’ the woman said, turning round to face me. If she had been a new class teacher, or one of the team of women who gave me milkshakes at the café in the high street, I probably would have liked her. But right at that moment, I just wanted to get back in the house with Mum and Dad and close the door. ‘I’m sure your dad will find your mother soon.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
She didn’t seem to know what to say to this straight away. She paused for a moment, then said, ‘Whatever will happen, will happen.’
A noise to my left distracted me, and I turned to see Dad running out of the house. He still looked frantic. ‘No sign of her in there,’ he said.
‘I’ll get Kitty inside,’ said the woman in a businesslike way. ‘I’ll come and help you look for her in a sec.’
He shook his head. ‘No, both of you stay—’
A scream stopped him mid-sentence. Then another. Then a cry. It sounded just a short distance away.
‘Marjory!’ my dad shouted.
Another scream answered in return.
Then he set off running and I followed, even though the woman was shouting at me to wait. We kept running and I realised we were going down a slope. At the bottom of it was a river, the water glinting and flickering, a big shimmering line through the woods. And in the stream was Mum. She was floating on her back, her arms slowly caressing the water, the movements making her look like an angel.
Except that angels didn’t scream.
‘Fuck!’ Dad shouted and looked around him. I’m not sure what he was hoping to find – maybe a boat which he could use to sail out to get her. ‘Stay on the bank, Kitty.’
‘But—’
‘It’s deep around here. Do as I say.’
He threw down his coat, pulled off his shoes, socks, and jeans, and started wading in.
‘Christ!’ he said. The water must have been cold. He should have kept his trousers on, I thought to myself. Then I remembered that there are few things in the world worse than wet jeans. Mum always used to say so when I was younger if we were caught in a rain storm in the park. Back when she did trips to the park.
Mum’s screams got worse as Dad grew nearer to her. He took her hand and pulled her back to the edge of the water. She was shivering, and so was he, although Mum didn’t let it interrupt her wailing. ‘I need you to walk, Marjory,’ Dad snapped at her. I was alarmed to see something dark on her arms, dripping down into her clothes, but as they came closer I realised it wasn’t red like blood, but rather deep, dark black.
It was paint.
‘What the hell is this?’ he shouted when he saw it.
‘At the back of the house …’ I said, struggling to get my words out, ‘I think she’s painted on the wall. It said LEAVE.’
He glanced over at me, his face filled with worry. ‘Kitty, go back into the house,’ he said, but I didn’t move. I was watching Mum walking slowly, leaning on his side, crying as she did so. As her breathing got slower, I managed to work out what she was screaming. ‘Poison. Poison. Poison. It burns him. It burns him. It burns him.’