5 AUGUST

Twenty days before abandonment

13

Christie was shooting hoops when he heard the buzzing. He’d gone outside to empty his head, wanting the thwap of the ball on tarmac, the sting of it in his hands, the clunk against the hoop, the rattle down the pole. In the silence as he gathered the ball to start over—

Buzz-buzz. Buzz-buzz-buzz.

At first he ignored it; hearing noises was his sister’s thing, not his. He wasn’t going to encourage her by joining in. Mum was over the road with Mrs Dearman, asking if she could help with their shopping after Mr Dearman came home on crutches. He’d slipped in the garden which Dad said was daft of him since it hadn’t been raining and the decking was brand new and super solid. Only Mr Dearman said he hadn’t slipped, he’d put his foot in a hole in the lawn which made even less sense. Whatever, Mum was talking with Mrs Dearman so it wasn’t her making the buzzing. And it wasn’t Dad, who was with Trevor talking about the builders who needed a good bollocking for leaving the site unfinished.

‘Lazy fucking arseholes,’ Trevor had called them.

Christie liked listening to Trevor, hearing the rough edge in his voice, the smell of beer and cigarettes reminding him there was a whole world of adult stuff waiting for him at the end of this summer and the next. He’d sneaked a Brew Dog from the fridge, sucking it straight from the can. Next day he didn’t brush his teeth, liking the sweet-starchy taste in his mouth. He’d started watching Felix’s mum who sunbathed in a bikini and sometimes drove to the shops in short shorts and tight tops, although usually the baby was strapped to her, hiding the view. Trevor liked watching Janis, too. Casually, like he didn’t care. Women always eyed him, even mums like Janis. Trevor liked blondes best, like Sandra who was his girlfriend even though they fought most of the time. Christie studied the way Trevor walked and the way he stood. He got into the habit of being outdoors as long as he could, working on his tan. He was saving up for a pair of cowboy boots. Shooting hoops was giving him muscles.

Buzz-buzz. Buzz-buzz-buzz.

The sound was coming from the family bathroom upstairs at the front of the house. He bounced the basketball a couple of times then held it to his chest, listening.

Agnes was upstairs. He was surprised she wasn’t down here, asking if he could hear that and wasn’t it spooky, didn’t it freak him out? She’d been worse since the rabbit died. Walking round like a ghost, pulling at her hair and scratching her face. Yesterday he’d yelled at her to shut up and she’d lunged at him, spinning at the last second to start wrecking her bed instead, clawing at the duvet and pillow, slapping her hands like a lunatic. ‘Shit,’ Dad’d said, staring down at her bed. Christie went to look, imagining blood or puke or worse but it was just two wasps crawling in the sheets near her pillow. Big fat wasps, their feet leaving sooty marks on the cotton. Agnes had backed herself into the corner. She kept dragging at her hair, slapping her head like there were more wasps in there, like her hair was a nest and wasps and beetles and worms would burst out of it, emptying down her shoulders, all over the floor. Christie thought he might actually puke. He went to his room, slamming the door to let them know what he thought of this latest bullshit. He heard Mum and Dad moving around, pulling furniture away from the walls. Of course, she’d be saying the wasps came out of the rotten leaking walls of this house she hated so much.

Buzz-buzz. Buzz-buzz-buzz.

Christie held the basketball to his chest, trying to work out if the noise could be wasps again. Dad said they must’ve come down the chimney, that’s why they were covered in soot. He said he’d seen some crawling on the kitchen window but Christie hadn’t seen any wasps. Dad probably made it up to get Agnes to calm down. He and Mum buried the wasps in the garden, Agnes refusing to watch. Christie was surprised she wasn’t screaming right now, given how loud the buzzing was.

Unless she was making it.

His mind skipped to chainsaws, masks made of human flesh, family massacres. When his heart slowed, he dropped the basketball and went inside the house, climbing the stairs two at a time to get it over with. The sound grew louder the nearer he got to the bathroom. He shouted her name, to show he wasn’t scared and to warn her he was coming so she could stop whatever mad thing it was she was doing.

Buzz-buzz. Buzz-buzz-buzz.

The bathroom door wasn’t locked, wasn’t even shut properly. He pushed it wide, seeing his sister bent over the sink. Grey vest and shorts, bruises behind her knees. The whole room rang with the buzzing. She was the one making it: Dad’s hair clippers, glossy-black in her fist. She was shaving her hair off.

All of it, the hair falling into the sink and landing in black scribbles on the tiles by her bony feet. She was doing it like it was someone else’s hair on someone else’s head – one hand pushing her head down, the other running the clippers from the back of her neck to the front, over and over until he could see the shape of her skull which was small like a bird’s and weirdly beautiful with just a silvery fuzz left by the clippers. She stroked her hand over her scalp, dusting the last of the hair away. Then she straightened and saw him in the mirror, watching her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

It made him wonder if he looked sick or scared. Because that’s how he felt seeing the black curls on the bathroom tiles and clotting the sink – like a little kid who’d never understand what was wrong here, with his sister, or his house, or his family.

‘I want to show you something,’ she said.

He didn’t want to see anything she had to show him. He’d already seen too much. All the bones in her skull on show, the naked state of her head. She needed to clean up the mess she’d made. He pointed at the sink. ‘That’ll clog the drains.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Look—’

‘Clean it up!’ he yelled. ‘Mum’ll have a fit when she sees it!’ He didn’t know if he meant the mess or her shaved head. He’d shaved himself a couple of days ago, cutting his face with the razor, Mum shouting at him when she saw the blood.

‘I’ll clear it up.’ Agnes put her hands together in a prayer shape. ‘Please let me show you. I want you to believe me about what’s going on here. Binka died and the wasps . . . The wasps have a nest in the walls.’ She ran a hand over her head, making it sizzle. ‘That’s why I did this. It creeped me out having them crawling in my hair but it’s okay. That’s not what I want to show you.’

‘I don’t care,’ Christie said. His chest heaved. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t care.’

But he went with her down the stairs and out of the kitchen into the garden.

Agnes knelt where she’d been sitting with Binka in her lap. ‘See?’

She put her hand flat to the grass and it disappeared. Like the ground had swallowed her hand right up to the wrist.

Christie squatted to see what she’d done, so he could tell Mum and Dad about her latest load of shit, whatever story she was making up now.

‘It’s right across the lawn.’ She swung her arm at the elbow, her hand staying out of sight, buried in a trench that ran all the way to the rabbit’s hutch.

Christie’s stomach dropped the way it did on a roller coaster. ‘What’ve you done?’

‘It wasn’t me.’ She pulled her hand from the trench, brushing soil from her fingers. ‘It’s the garden. It’s splitting. All over the place. It’s like . . . it’s sliding, somehow.’

Christie bent over the trench which was about fifteen centimetres wide and thirty deep. The grass was long enough so you couldn’t see anything was wrong until you were standing right over it. Inside, the earth was wet and stank of rust. The trench didn’t look like it’d been dug with a spade. It looked like the lawn had split open, just as she said, the kind of crack you saw in roads and houses after an earthquake.

Agnes was watching him, waiting to see what he’d do. He wanted to ask what she’d used to make the lawn look like this. But at the same time he knew she hadn’t done it.

‘I bet this is how Luke broke his foot,’ she said.

‘He slipped on the decking, that’s what Dad told me.’

‘Luke said it was a hole in the lawn.’ She traced the edge of the trench with her fingers. ‘I bet this is happening in all the gardens. In all the houses.’

Christie thought of the kids next door. Felix who was his friend, and Chloe and the baby. They were out with Janis now but he’d heard Chloe earlier, crying about a lost toy. He pictured it lying in a trench like this one, hidden from sight. A trench full of foam bullets from Felix’s blaster gun, red enough to look like the lawn was bleeding.

‘This’s mental.’ He stood up. ‘I’m getting Dad.’

Agnes climbed to her feet. ‘Do you know where he is?’

‘With Trevor, down the end.’

He felt wobbly, the way he did after stepping off a waltzer.

‘Where’s Mum?’ she asked.

‘With Mrs Dearman . . .’

He took a step towards the house then stopped to see if he could still see the trench. He couldn’t. Just the grass growing a bit long, in need of mowing. He stepped forward: there. Stepped back: nothing. Like a magic trick.

He looked at his sister, standing with her shaved head. This mess suited her, was exactly what she’d wanted. Because now she was the one in the right and they were the crazies. After Binka died, she’d kept saying, ‘I told you,’ and he hadn’t believed her but it was true, it was happening. The whole place was cracking up, like her.

Christie made a promise to himself then. He didn’t care how he did it but he was going to stop her. He was going to stop his sister from wrecking this place.

He was being made to choose a side, that’s how it felt. He could choose Blackthorn Ashes, where Dad had worked so hard for so long, Dad and Trevor and Christie too, signing all those bricks with his name. Or he could choose Agnes, who’d left for London when he was a baby and only come back home because she was desperate.

Easy. He chose Blackthorn Ashes.