Fiona’s hardly aware of Gracey beside her, a small figure bouncing on her toes as she tries to see over the kitchen counter and through the kitchen window at what transfixes her mother. Fiona can’t remember placing her hands upon her cheeks either, her fingers fanned. A pose reserved for troubled times. She briefly thinks of her own mother, who positioned her hands on her face when shocked by something on the news. A staple gesture of her childhood. A habit passed on as effortlessly as the colour of her eyes.
But Fiona doesn’t want to be a mother who sucks in her breath quickly as if she’s screaming in reverse, and who clasps her hands to her face when confronted by misfortune, real, imagined, or anticipated. But here she is, doing just that. When Fiona blinks again, her eyes are dry and gritty.
Out there, at the end of their Ypres of a country garden, Tom empties another jar, of what she guesses is a runny honey, into what appears to be a clay bowl; crockery of some kind she has not seen before. He’s placed this container beside one of the holes that he gouged into their lawn the day before; an excavation to remove one of the lead tiles he’d located with a borrowed metal detector.
This is the last thing she wants to see after a testing day at work, followed by the drive to Gracey’s after-school club in heavy traffic, followed by the long journey home. Tonight’s display appals her. Yesterday, his activities at dusk and in the middle of the night perplexed and upset her. Now, she is aghast and wounded, perhaps fatally. Despite her repeated warnings that he couldn’t fail to feel impacted by, and she saw the hurt in his eyes last night, he continues with this , whatever this is.
Tom discards the honey jar inside the cardboard box at his feet. Picks up a plastic bottle of milk, two litres, full-cream, from the same box. Milk that has not come from their fridge. He pours this milk into the bowl. The container is nearly empty, so she assumes the missing quantity of milk has been distributed between the other holes scattered about the garden.
As if adding a pinch of salt to a finely reduced stock, Tom taps a silver flask and sprinkles silvery splashes of water into the bowl. Kneeling, he then carefully places the brimming bowl inside the hole.
It’s not only that he is defying her request to desist from his crazy, paranoid behaviour that is recklessly costing them a small fortune; her ire finds additional fuel in the very fact that he believes them cursed. As if beguiled by some crazy evangelist, he must now believe that magic and the supernatural are real and ever-present forces within their lives. At his age , when he has always proven himself immune to such delusions. But to suffer such a derangement now is unforgiveable, and at a time when they need him to be as steady and solid as a pillar of stone, preventing their lives from crashing down; lives that he has altered beyond recognition by insisting they buy this broken house at the edge of nowhere that has lain derelict since the last owner committed suicide just inside the front door.
‘Daddy’s being silly!’ Gracey bolts from her side and makes for the back door, intent on investigating her father’s latest antics at the bottom of the garden. Fiona jerks away from the counter and snatches her daughter’s arm.
Gracey turns, her smile wiped away by the expression on her mother’s face and by the shock of the sudden grab; by the grip of a maternal hand and the iron force within it, usually reserved for the roadside as they prepare to cross busy lanes. But her mother has never looked this way before.
‘You’re not going out there.’
Gracey, for once, doesn’t argue.
When Fiona returns her glare to the garden, Tom is walking backwards around a hole. She can see his mouth moving as he incants something that she can’t hear. He’s reciting from a piece of paper pinched between his dirty fingers.
After the completion of the third turn, he lowers himself to the earth. Prostrates himself over the hole, face-down, his limbs forming the shape of a star.
While he lies still upon the ground, she notices that in the two corners at the top of the garden, wooden crosses have been erected. They resemble markers planted deep on frontier graves and are taller than the crucifix they flank, marking the resting place of their dead puppy.
* * *
Fiona hears Tom come in from the dark and scrape off his boots. The back door needs to be forced shut, the wood swollen in the frame. It takes him three pushes, the third firm but not hard enough to shake the wobbly pane of glass out. Like so many other features of the house, their movements are inhibited by small compromises. There are floorboards that cannot be stepped upon, windows too stiff to close that mustn’t be opened, surfaces that won’t take much weight, cupboards not to be opened, unless they’re checking the mousetraps, because of black rashes of fungus that stain the innards. There are sharp edges, splinters, bowls beneath bulges secreting milky tears, bloated spongy panels that fingers can be pushed through, a porch they dart under in case it comes down upon their heads. She now despises this house without reservation.
Fiona stands with her back to Tom, cutting sandwiches for tomorrow’s lunchboxes on a bread board. She struggles to even look at him. She had so much to say. Too much. It’s all stuck like a herd of jabbering people forcing themselves through a narrow gap at the same time, individual cries forming a crescendo in which nothing is intelligible.
But as Tom tries to sneak away behind her, to escape the room she’s frosted with her silence and her posture so stiff with anger and disapproval, she manages to speak. But she doesn’t turn to face him because she can’t bear the sight of him. Yet.
‘A word.’
The shuffle of his feet pauses.
Fiona stamps to the table. Points at her laptop screen, drawing his attention to the new evidence she uncovered after putting Gracey to bed; after she’d bathed her daughter in the two inches of barely warm water the rusting boiler coughed up; after she’d fed Gracey another bowl of tinned spaghetti that she’d nervously heated on an oven ring that filled the kitchen with black smoke and the smell of melting plastic. Like the boiler, a portion of the roof, numerous window frames, the plumbing in the bathroom and kitchen, the oven needs replacing.
‘We’re overdrawn. A grand.’
‘I’ll make it back. Soon. Sometime.’
‘We weren’t yesterday!’
Now that she faces him, Tom appears how she imagines he would appear if she ever confronted him about an affair.
The smell of the kitchen’s mildew and old rimy steel intensifies in the horrible silence expanding between them. Fiona swallows three times to rediscover her voice before grief can gag her or her despair smother her. She nods in the direction of the garden. ‘It was for that? The stuff you were burying? A magical service?’
Tom looks at his baggy socks and shifts his feet about. Clears his throat. ‘I know how it must look.’ When he raises his eyes, he smiles, sheepishly.
Nothing she can recollect, until that moment in her life, has made her as furious. ‘You really don’t!’ Involuntarily, the muscles of her face screw up to the first position of crying. She fans her fingers by her eyes, growls, recovers composure. ‘What did you bury in those holes?’
Tom blows out a long breath in exasperation, because he knows how his answer is going to go down. ‘Consecrated bowls. Look, I can see—’
Fiona holds a hand out as if she’s stopping traffic. Clears her throat again. ‘I looked at his website. This Blackwood. Some woo woo pirate sailing a ship of shit. And you’re now paying him from our overdraft. For consecrated bowls. Correct me if I am wrong, the latter purchased to remove a curse from our house that the two mad old bastards next door laid on it?’
Silence returns even more profoundly to the peeling kitchen. It looks dead to her now; in its final moments of existence before a wrecking balls pushes through the soft walls.
As if before a creature that will turn him to stone if he continues to look at its fearsome face, Tom lowers his head. His rangy shape and grubby clothes blur as her eyes swell with tears.
‘I’m doing it for us,’ he says. ‘Hard as it is to believe, one day you’ll thank me for this.’
Fiona stalks from the room. She can’t stop the tears. She wants to really hurt him. And herself. She wants to just pull the whole building down upon them.
Turning at the threshold, she lays down her own curse. ‘I see anything else like this and me and Gracey are gone. I’ll leave you. Make your choice. I ain’t telling you again.’