The next two days were very odd. It was as if I’d slipped into one of the videos I used to have of old Disney films, where families lived happily ever after. Mum seemed not just better, but even better than she was before. The night we made mince pies was like one from way back before her crying stage, her shouting stage, her silent stage. Back before she used to scream warnings at us all that the devil would not be happy with our activities and that we’d best not use knives and forks for our supper because ‘shiny things will attract him out of his resting place’. We had come to always live under the same fear that she had – fear of ‘Him’. Fear of ‘Him’ arriving, or causing her pain.
On the third morning of this new-old Mum, I was still feeling worried. She made us scrambled eggs on toast, the way she had done the previous morning, and the one before that. Even though she spoke with smiles and laughs and patted me on the head the way she used to, I couldn’t help feeling like there was something strange going on, and I didn’t like it. I went to my room, took out some of my felt tips and an old notebook I’d previously used to make up names for beetles, and ripped out a blank page. On it, I wrote down a list of all the reasons I was still worried about Mum.
Problems With Mum
That last one had made me happy to start with. I was pleased she hadn’t started screaming about the stream being poisoned. But Dad had glared at me and told me that I mustn’t ever take Mum outside until he specifically said it was OK. He had whispered this to me and looked cross. Thinking about it later on made me cross, too, and I had avoided him for the rest of the day. I found myself wishing I had told him he was being unfair, and that Mum would probably like to see the forest looking all autumny-orange, now the sun was out and the rain had stopped. But I had told him none of this. I had just glared at him.
Amanda stayed in the cottage the whole time, apart from moments when she nipped off in her car to the nearest town to buy us more food, particularly baking ingredients – baking was an activity she and Dad encouraged. Maybe because they liked to know where Mum and I were. Amanda slept on the sofa – actually slept there, it seems, rather than just pretending to. With Mum talking and acting less odd, Dad and Amanda hadn’t been having any late-night chats. He and Mum had continued to share a bed without any emotional flare-ups or him having to leave the room in the middle of the night.
‘Oh, I’ll be hanging around for a bit,’ Amanda said, whenever I said things like ‘Are you still here?’ Dad told me off for being rude, but I thought it was a perfectly fair question. Why was she still here? Father Tobias hadn’t come for a few days, and if she was only here to make Mum better, why hadn’t she now packed away the pillow and blankets and gone back to wherever she had come from? Only some whispered conversations from her and Dad had offered any real information, and they usually seemed to be filled with phrases like ‘no sign of regression’ and ‘more normal every day’. I assumed this was about Mum. And I also had to assume they, too, had noticed the weirder parts of how she was acting. Otherwise they wouldn’t need to whisper in the hallway while Mum and I were busy mixing up the ingredients for cherry bakewells. I didn’t think she was ‘more normal every day’. She wasn’t shrieking any more, but whatever she was now, it didn’t feel normal to me.
It was on the fourth day of the new Mum that something would happen to make everyone act more worried again.
It started with something that instantly made me panic: the front door was open, gently swaying in the breeze. I closed it, then walked back down the hallway to go and alert Dad. As I passed the tiny cupboard under the stairs, I heard a scraping sound, then something harsher, like a snip of some scissors. I was sure it had come from inside. I tried to pull open the door, but it wouldn’t move. Then I heard something that immediately made me step back.
‘Shhhh. Please. Shhhhh!’
I looked around, wondering if someone was telling me to be quiet from inside the lounge, but I knew really where it was coming from. It was coming from inside the cupboard.
‘I’m not allowed … Shhhh! Please. Don’t …’
And then there was silence. I was waiting, unsure what to do, when the door opened very quickly, making a loud grating sound. Mum stepped out, stooping so she didn’t hit her head. She must have been all bunched up in there, and a dead spider was dangling from her hair. As soon as she saw me, her face instantly changed into a smile, one of her warm let’s-bake-gingerbread smiles. But I’d seen her face in the seconds before she changed. It had been a face of fear.
‘Dearest love, why are you standing here in the dark hallway?’
‘Erm,’ I didn’t know what to say at first, so I tried to ask her a question. ‘Who were you talking to?’
For a very short second, I thought she was going to cry, but then she beamed even wider and said, ‘Talking to? No, no, sweetness, I was just looking for a dustpan and brush.’ She ruffled my hair and laughed, as if I had told her a silly joke, and then walked towards the kitchen. ‘Come on, dearest, let’s make a chocolate traybake.’ I looked back at the door of the now-closed cupboard, and for a moment had an urge to look inside and see what had made the strange snipping noise I’d heard. But Mum called me from the kitchen and I walked straight on.
I spent the whole time I was melting the chocolate and preparing the flour thinking about what I had heard, whilst the golden late-autumn sun shone through the window onto the back of my neck. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as other things I had heard Mum say. But that was when she wasn’t well. Now she was better. Or she was supposed to be. I decided to add it to my list when I got back upstairs.
‘Come on darling, you’re away with the fairies today. If you’ve measured the flour, let’s add the sugar.’ Mum passed me the bowl of white powder. I nodded and carried on.
I didn’t write it in my notebook, what I had heard earlier. But I did tell Dad.
I heard him coming up the stairs with Mum late – hours after I’d gone to bed. I set aside the book I was reading and tiptoed to the door. I could hear them saying goodnight to Amanda on the stairs. Mum never seemed to properly speak to Amanda. She wasn’t rude to her; it was more like she wasn’t aware she existed. She smiled and did things like give her cups of tea, but she didn’t seem to notice her. Not really.
‘I’m just going to brush my teeth while you change into your pyjamas, dear,’ she said to Dad on the landing.
‘OK,’ Dad murmured. I heard his steps go towards their bedroom, but before they faded away I opened my door quietly and whispered ‘Dad!’
He jumped – actually jumped. It was like he’d been expecting something to startle him, and now it had happened it was more of a shock than he’d ever imagined. He looked at me with a confused, slightly angry face. ‘Kitty!’ he hissed. ‘Why are you awake? We sent you up to bed ages ago.’
I ignored his cross words. ‘Can I talk to you?’
Dad flicked his eyes towards the bathroom door. We could both hear Mum brushing her teeth enthusiastically.
‘Can’t it wait until morning? You can talk to your mum and me at breakfast.’
‘It’s about Mum,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to you. Please.’
He cast another look over at the door. And then nodded. ‘All right. But it must be quick.’
He came into my room. I went over to the bed and sat in the middle, cross-legged; he sat down on the edge.
‘Come on, Kitty,’ he said, quietly.
I took a deep breath. ‘Well, it was when you were talking to Amanda outside. Earlier today. I heard a voice. Coming from inside the cupboard under the stairs.’
His face stayed still. I waited to see if he was going to say anything, but he didn’t, so I carried on.
‘And the voice was Mum. She was saying things. Strange things. Upsetting things. Saying “please” a lot. Like … like she used to.’
Dad raised a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes, then moved his fingers to the bit between his nose and his eyes and pinched a little. He did this when he was feeling stressed.
‘OK. Did she say anything else?’
I was cross with myself now for not writing it down, as I struggled to properly remember the words. ‘I think … I think she said something like “I’m not allowed”. Something like that. And there was shushing. Like she was telling someone to be quiet.’
Dad wasn’t looking at me now. He was looking at the wall, but I got the feeling he was actually looking a long way away. Into a different world, maybe. Or a different time.
‘Thanks, Kitty,’ he said at last. ‘Thanks for telling me. I thought this was too good to be true.’ He sighed deeply and rubbed his face now with both hands. His tiredness made me feel exhausted all of a sudden. ‘I’m sorry if I haven’t been … been very good at coping with this. I’ve been a bit out of my depth. But then, I think I always have been in the dad department.’
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by this. He still wasn’t looking at me, but I could see, by the narrow slice of light coming from the landing, that there was a tear slowly crawling down his cheek.
‘Maybe if I’d been older when your mum and I had you … I think I was too young. And your mum, being a bit older and wiser – she was so much better at this than me. And what with her not being herself … I never thought it would be this hard. She’d have done it much better, if it were the other way around.’
The end of his sentence made me think back to what I’d said – about how I’d wished it had been Mum who’d stayed normal. And when I saw the tear on his face, making its way down his nose to his chin, I wished I’d never said it at all. I hadn’t seen him cry like this before. Maybe once or twice in anger. But not like this. Slow and quiet. It made me feel bad, and scared, and strange, all at the same time.
Then the light snapped on and both of us looked up. Mum was standing in the doorway. She had changed into her night things and was wearing her snuggly pink dressing gown. Her big smile used to make me feel safe. Safe, warm, happy and comfortable. But it didn’t any more.
‘Well, well, well, is this a pyjama party I wasn’t aware of?’ She asked this in a sing-song sort of voice and then came to sit on the bed. If she noticed Dad’s tears, she didn’t say anything. Instead, she reached for the book at the side of the bed near the wall where I’d shoved it out of the way. She held it up close to her face and her eyes roved along the cover.
‘Goodness me, I haven’t seen this in a long time. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I think Father Tobias would approve,’ she said, with a little laugh. She handed it back to me and I took it, looking at her, trying to work out what the laugh had meant. Was she laughing at Father Tobias’s disapproval of my other books? It was the first time I had ever heard her say his name or properly recognise that he existed.
‘Just watch out for the White Witch,’ she said, still in her jolly, bright voice. ‘She tempts Edmund in with sweeties, don’t you remember?’
I nodded. ‘Yes. And he gets tricked by her.’
She smiled even wider, as if I’d just answered a very difficult question on a maths test. ‘Indeed he does. He’s a traitor. He betrays his own family. He conspires against them.’
I didn’t know why, but I found I couldn’t look at her. It was like her smile had become too bright, like I was staring into the sun.
‘And when he regrets his actions, when he realises what he has done, it’s too late. The White Witch knows everything. And she wants to punish him.’
I nodded at my duvet, still looking away.
‘I think that’s enough,’ Dad said. There was something new in his face. It was different to his tired, stressed face from a moment ago. Mum ignored him.
‘Because she has spies everywhere. Everywhere.’ She emphasised the last word, then leaned in, put her arms around me and kissed me on the top of my head. ‘And they’re always listening,’ she whispered, then drew away from me.
‘Even some of the trees are on her side,’ I said under my breath. I thought of the trees outside. The creaking, scratchy, barky, woody forest: so many trees, stretching for miles and miles. And Adah. Standing amidst them. Telling me about the woman named Jadis who lived in this house.
‘What was that, dearest love?’ Mum said, looking intently at me.
‘Nothing,’ I said, very softly, trying to avoid her eyes.
‘Well,’ Mum said, and put out a hand in front of Dad, which he took. She pulled him to his feet. ‘Have glorious dreams of sweet little nothings, Kitty Cat.’ She flashed me another wide smile, then led Dad by the hand from the room. It was like they’d swapped roles: her as the adult, him as the child. They left me sitting amidst my duvet and pillows, trying to understand what was happening whilst trying to forget it all at the same time.