As She Left It: A Novel Read online

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  As She Left It: A Novel © 2013 by Catriona McPherson.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2013

  E-book ISBN: 9780738737409

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover image © Woman: iStockphoto.com/Jaroslaw Wojcik

  Cover illustration: © Dominick Finelle/The July Group

  Editing by Nicole Nugent

  Neighborhood diagram by Llewellyn art department

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Diane Nelson,

  with love and thanks and no apologies,

  because you’re not superstitious.

  In a cottage in a wood,

  A little old man at the window stood,

  Saw a rabbit running by

  Knocking at his door.

  “Help me! Help me!” the rabbit said,

  “Or the farmer will shoot me dead.”

  “Come little rabbit, come with me.

  Happy we shall be.”

  —Traditional children’s song

  The outhouse, the outhouse,

  The hold your nose and shout house.

  Grab thee by thy lug-hole,

  Put thee down the plug-hole.

  Grab thee by thy left hand,

  Put thee down the muck pan.

  Pull the chain, pull the chain,

  Wash back up again.

  The outhouse, the outhouse,

  The hold your nose and shout house.

  —Children’s skipping song

  PROLOGUE

  17 May 2000

  There’s a line on the yard wall that shows where the outhouse used to be. Red bricks above it, white paint below it. That’s where the roof started. That’s where the jaggedy castle top was, where the arrows came from. Or the path along the fort walls to shoot baddies off of, or the top of the mast where the sail was tied to.

  Except now it’s gone.

  And here on the ground there’s another line too. That’s where the door was (or the drawbridge, or the gates where the stagecoach came galloping in, or the hole in the hull where the gangplank went through).

  All gone now. So there’s nothing to do.

  But outside this yard is the lane, and up and down the lane are all the other yards with their castles and forts and pirate ships still there. Only steps away. All the houses joined together in a big long row and easy to run and play at any of them. And then there’s the van. The van’s best of all. Sometimes it starts moving. And it’s a train, an army tank, a spaceship that goes to the moon.

  In here, there’s nothing.

  But if he stretches up as far as he can stretch and wiggles his middle finger under the little hook there and stands on his very, very tiptoes maybe … the gate swings open. Quick look back at the house. No one shouts his name.

  So out he goes.

  And all the other gates have handles he can reach. And when he swings on a handle, the gate falls open. And the outhouses aren’t locked. One’s been cleared, all the stuff piled up outside in the yard and inside the stink of new paint. One’s so full of boxes there’s hardly space to wriggle in there. The van’s not locked either. It’s empty today—a cannibal cave where his feet boom and his voice is like monsters!

  Then he remembers what’s down the end. The canal! Full of sharks and submarines and shipwrecks.

  So he’s limping on his peg-leg when an angry voice says, “Hey!”

  Turn round, head down, ready to cry if it means less trouble.

  But it’s not who he thought it would be.

  ONE

  21 July 2010

  Tuesday

  It’s all connected. Everything’s joined to everything. You think you can keep things out of your head, if you concentrate hard. You think your brain’s in charge. And then blammo! From nowhere, one little thread starts to fray, one little rock gets lifted, and the light shines in. That’s when you know it’s your blood that runs the show. Your bowels. Your guts and your glands. When you’re shaking so hard you can’t talk and you’re breathing so fast you can’t think and all of your careful stories have blown away.

  “Tell me,” he says, as the van rocks along. There isn’t another car or a single house in sight. No sign of life. The moor fog’s coming down. “Start talking.”

  “Dunno where to start. Dunno if there’s time.”

  “Make time,” he says. “Talk fast. Tell me now.”

  “Okay … Okay … Well, it’s all connected, see? That’s the main thing. I see that now. The mum and the dad and the boy and the girl.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “And the little old lady and the poor old man. The baby that’s lost and the baby that’s … ” Big breath. Try again. “They’re all the same.”

  “Start at the start and tell me,” he says. “Keep on talking right till the end.”

  “The start?”

  “When does it start?”

  “I suppose … I dunno.”

  “So … once a upon a time,” he says, and the words make gooseflesh pop out on her arms.

  “No! No more stories. No way. It’s … a month ago, I guess.”

  “So,” he says, “once upon a month ago then.”

  TWO

  19 June 2010

  Saturday

  Opal came at the house the back way—old habit, that. Along the lane, over the waste ground, in at the yard gate, bolting it behind her. She put down her big bag and stretched her fingers, shrugged off her small bag, and fanned her tee-shirt, looking round. Of course it seemed smaller; she’d been ready for that. She hadn’t been here since she was twelve. But she wasn’t prepared for just how small: three strides from the gate to the back door, and nearly narrow enough to stretch her arms out and touch both sides. When she was little, she played here for hours. What did she find to do? And was it always this shabby? Flaking red brick walls, water-stained from blocked gutters, peeling paint on the door, the wood underneath cracked and greying?

  Even still—she couldn’t help it—there was a little lifting up inside her, as if she was glad to get home. Maybe she’d have been glad to get anyw
here. Her head still ached and stomach still churned from the journey—the train carriage getting to the end of its long, hot day, coming back from the coast, food and drink and bodies, everyone who’d dozed and sweated, slipped swollen feet out of shoes, tucked sandwich wrappers down the side of the seats and left them there. The bus up here from the station had been worse: still all the food and sweat but with perfume too, from the first of the Saturday-night crowd.

  If the key wasn’t where it had always been, she would wrap her hand and smash the kitchen window. She would listen to make sure the neighbors weren’t out in their yards first, but then she would do it quick and confident and mend the glass herself. It wouldn’t be the first time. But when she wiggled the loose brick down by the side of the step, there it was the same as ever, and she fitted it into the lock and shoved the door with her shoulder as if she had never been away.

  Inside, in spite of the heat, a shudder went through her and left her tingling. It was a smell. Or it was the ghost of a smell—cigarettes and old coal—just wisps of it that memory could fan until it grew and grew, strong enough to choke her. She reeled back out into the yard again, sinking down and pulling her knees up close under her chin.

  It wasn’t empty! She’d thought everything would be gone. She’d imagined getting an airbed and sleeping bag to tide her over, taking the bus out to Ikea or scouring the charity shops. But there was the kitchen table with the stools that fitted under it, there was the arm of the big couch and the dark pattern of the carpet through the open living room door, and she’d seen dishes upside down on the draining board, the same brown Pyrex mugs and Nicola’s glass—a good heavy tumbler that sat square on its base no matter how carelessly you set it down, that never tipped over no matter how hard you knocked it, reaching out in the dark, your rings clinking against its sides.

  For two pins, whatever that meant, Opal would have gone straight back to Whitby. Or if she’d had a car, or if it hadn’t been so hot and Saturday night … but the thought of lugging those bags back into town, through crowds of dressed-up girls clacking around on high heels, flipping their shiny hair at the boys in their shiny shirts, doused in cologne … the thought of finding the right train, and then Steph and Baz, and asking Jill for her job back …

  And she had to pee.

  Anyway, when she stood up and went inside again, the ghost had vanished out through the open door. She hauled herself up the steep box stair from the kitchen to the narrow landing and the sliver of a bathroom sliced off the back bedroom (which didn’t have it to spare), smelling nothing except the ordinary staleness of a house left closed too long. My house, she thought, putting her hand out and trailing it along the bumpy gloss of the bathroom wall.

  My home.

  “It’s a cottage,” she had said to Jill at the salon on her last Saturday, because once, on holiday with Steph and her dad in Norfolk, when Michael was a baby, she’d seen terraces of flint houses, one window beside the door with one window upstairs, and they were called cottages. “In a wood,” she had said to Jill. Meanwood, the district was called, after all.

  “Watch out for the little old man then,” said Jill. Opal stared at her in the mirror and forgot to pass her the next square of foil.

  “You know … in a cottage, in a wood,” sang Jill. Her lady, whose hair was half-covered with folded foil, joined in. “A little old man at the window stood.” Then they both stopped with their mouths open, before laughing.

  “I forget the rest of it,” said Jill.

  “I’ve never heard that,” Opal said.

  “Your mum never sang it to you?” said the lady, then shut her mouth and opened her eyes wide.

  “It’s okay,” Opal said. “I don’t mind talking about her. It. Her.”

  Jill and her lady both shook their heads, and, instead of poking her with the handle of her tint brush like usual, Jill gave Opal a gentle nudge to restart the supply of foil.

  “Poor mite,” said her lady. “When did she die then, love?”

  “About eight weeks ago,” Opal said.

  Jill’s lady tutted. “Early days yet. You’ll have had a lot to do. Funeral and paperwork and all that.”

  Opal nodded, but Jill flashed a warning look.

  “Don’t you think about the funeral again, Opal,” she said. And then into the mirror. “It nearly floored her. She came back here a physical wreck. Didn’t you, love?”

  The lady clucked in sympathy. “Well, it’s a lot to ask of a young girl. What about your dad? I mean, I take it they were divorced, but even so … ”

  “My dad died five years ago.”

  Now Jill’s lady made a kind of whooping noise, like the audience at a circus when an acrobat falls into the net. “Eh, dear,” she said. “Both your mum and your dad gone, and you only … ”

  “Twenty-five,” said Opal. “I’ve still got my stepmother. I could stay here. Be near her.”

  “Is this Stephanie?” said Jill, as if Opal could have more than one stepmother, and she frowned as she paddled the tint onto the foil and crimped it shut like a pasty. Opal hadn’t realized Jill knew Stephanie’s name.

  “But a stepmother,” said the lady. “No, you go, love. Make your own way. Bright lights, big city.” She made it sound like London or something. Opal wished it was: hundreds of miles away, the farther from Whitby, the better. But an hour away in Leeds would have to do.

  She smiled into the mirror.

  “You can’t pass all that up to stay put here,” the lady was saying. “Not with nobody but a wicked stepmother to tie you.”

  Opal nodded, but inside she was blotting the words out. She wasn’t running away. Baz was nothing to her. Baz was the mayor of Nothingtown in Nowhere County. Free as a bird, she told herself, moving on to better things, plenty more fish in the sea.

  Where to sleep though? she asked herself, back out on the landing again. Her old room—what was left after indoor plumbing had replaced the outhouses on Mote Street and the bathroom had been carved out of it—didn’t seem to have a bed anymore. She stopped in the doorway and stared. The pink woodchip was the same and the fuchsia-pink nets crossed over the window and held with ruffled ties, but her pine bed with the drawers underneath was gone and with it the white unit that made up her dressing table, homework desk, and wardrobe. The room was full of nothing but black sacks with that lumpy shape Opal knew so well. She kicked one gently and felt the scrape and clunk of the bottles inside it. So upstairs she went again, up to the attic, telling herself her bed would be stored there. But before she reached the top of the stairs, she could see the rough sea of bin-bag tops stretching all the way across to the front wall. There was the odd cardboard-box island, but no furniture at all. If her old mattress was on the floor under a bag of empty brandy bottles, it could stay there.

  And so she would have to sleep in her mum’s room, in her mum’s bed. She came down the attic stairs and edged along the corridor. The door was ajar, and she stretched out a foot to push it all the way open.

  The curtains were shut, like always, and the bed was heaped up with pillows and cushions, like always, piled high with quilts and blankets. A nest, a lair. Magazines and a toilet roll, some clothes, some bottles of course, an ashtray and a big soup tin without its label for emptying the ashtray into. Where the quilts and blankets were pushed back and the pillows and cushions were flattened, was a round hole. Tiny. Big enough to hold her mother? Must have been.

  She hadn’t died here; she had gone to the hospital, admissions, acute medical—or that bit of acute medical that was basically the drying-out ward really—then HD, ICU, and there she had died. But it had started here. One night—or one morning more probably—Nicola had climbed in, and she had never climbed out again.

  But looking at it, it was her dad dying Opal couldn’t get out of her mind. She could picture him, lying in the hospital with a mask over his face, tubes in him, needles on the backs of his hands. Steph would have had to bend close to his mouth to hear him whisper.

  “Tekk care ot l
ass.”

  Except that was her granddad’s voice she was hearing, and it was her granddad who had had the mask and the needles. Her dad never even made it to a bed, pronounced dead on a trolley in Accident and Emergency—or maybe even in the ambulance. Couldn’t have been at the house, or they would have taken him straight to the mortuary. And it was A&E Steph had phoned from to tell her.

  “Look after Opal,” her dad would have said. “Tell her I love her. Let her have something of mine to remember me by.”

  Which Steph completely hadn’t. And Opal wouldn’t have chosen anything big—like his camera or bird binoculars or the sound system from the house or anything like that—but by the time his funeral came round, everything was gone. Every last thing. His clothes and his jewelry, even his scratchy bathrobe that hung down to Opal’s ankles, that she would have curled up in whenever she wanted to remember him. Although, thinking about it, that bathrobe must have been long gone because he’d got it when he was still with her mum.

  Missing out on a keepsake wasn’t the half of it, though. And she’d never have known the rest if Steph hadn’t gone off for a long weekend and left Michael in charge. One of the envelopes had come that very weekend and Michael, who didn’t know he shouldn’t, or maybe because he missed her and wished he was still her brother …

  Well, he’d phoned to tell her anyway.

  THREE

  “WHEN’S SHE GETTING BACK?” Opal had asked, the cheap handset creaking from how hard she was gripping it.

  “Monday teatime,” Michael had said.

  Opal took the afternoon off to be on the safe side and was there at three o’clock. At four, Steph came huffing in with her little case on wheels and three carriers of shopping she’d done, and Opal was sitting there with the big brown envelopes—seven of them, still unopened—on the breakfast bar in front of her.

  Stephanie’s eyes literally bulged as she took in the scene.

  “Did Michael give those to you?” she said and then bellowed with her head back. “Michael! Get down here.”