Some passengers disembarked at stops before ours. Most people lived and worked in the city – I had worked that out. Our stop was Bruagh Halt. Nobody but Gregory and me got off or on. Why would they get off? To sight-see Maud and her shop? Maud and her shop predated the pyramids. The track got smaller and disappeared in the distance. We couldn’t see the track from the Manse; we only knew of its existence because the train went by. Just because things are invisible doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Somebody said that about God. I followed Gregory to Maud’s shop unquestioningly.
When he opened the door a bell rang, and Leslie, Maud’s peculiar son, came out from an anteroom. Slender and handsome, never smiling, older than Gregory by about ten years – an adult, really – Leslie looked all right to me, but Mother called him peculiar, so he must have been.
‘Hello, Les,’ said Gregory. Maud came out from the anteroom, nudged Leslie aside, and stood grimly across the counter.
Leslie retreated to the anteroom.
To my amazement, Gregory bought cigarettes: five single ones without a box. Mother would kill him! Father would kill him harder!
After his purchase, Gregory left the shop. I stayed behind. I had a question for Maud.
‘Are you really older than the pyramids?’
She called me a cheeky bugger – I didn’t know why – and ordered me out of her shop before she called Leslie.
Night had started with teatime an hour off and me, afraid of the dark open space, hungry enough to eat a ghost if one jumped out. Gregory always carried a torch. I wanted one of my own, but Father said I wasn’t old enough. How old do you have to be to know how to press your thumb against a button? His actual words were batteries cost money. The tall shrubbery at either side of the road, and who, or what, might leap from it, frightened me. They did that at school: leapt from doorways on to victims returning from a bowel movement after lights out. You could shit yourself twice.
After Gregory finished his cigarette, the rain came on. Gregory walked quickly. I ran in short bursts to keep up.
The first turn on to, or off, the Road in all that distance was the Lane, the potholed, mossy entry that led from the Road to our courtyard, a distance between fields of about half a mile. Father used this lane when going to work. Mother used this lane once a month when she went for the train to get provisions obtainable nowhere other than in a town shop. The workmen would use this lane when they came to build our bathroom.
The rain became harder, faster and wetter, and we ran the last stretch to the back door dodging potholes. I had seldom seen Gregory running. He jumped, tumbled, bounced and skipped a lot, and ran, when he did, only out of necessity. Ahead of me, his lower legs kicked out to the sides like a woman running in high heels. For all I know, I might have looked equally ostrich-like. Panting as if third from last in a marathon, I arrived some seconds after my brother with the longer legs, and found Mother embracing him. Having submitted to the embrace, his arms were limp at his sides.
Sophia entered the kitchen from the inner door at the same time
as
I entered from the outer. She grinned from ear to ear, and I grinned even wider. Regardless of the fact that I looked like a drowned rat, she launched herself at me as I found an extra lung and launched myself at her. She felt bonier than I remembered. Three months seemed like three years. Mother released Gregory and gave me a bear hug with Sophia clinging on. Edgar came to see what all the fuss was about and leapt on to Mother’s back because there was no room for him anywhere else. Gregory, nauseated by the outpouring of affection, slunk off.
Father greeted us with a nod and an aye-aye when he returned from work.
The traditional Christmases celebrated by us Pikes differed from the traditional Christmases celebrated by my peers at school. This discovery threw me into some confusion about the nature of traditions. Gregory, Edgar, Sophia and I never knew the joy of tearing to shreds colourful wrapping paper. Santa, reindeer, mistletoe, stockings, crackers, turkey and the trimmings were irrelevant to Christmas for the Pikes. Father permitted no paganism. The Manse went without adornment. We went without a fir tree. We shunned baubles, stars and fairies. Father said that the gifts from the three wise men, of gold, frankincense and myrrh, were for the newborn King of Kings, and that was no reason for us to reward each other with gifts when we had done nothing to deserve them.
Baby Jesus hadn’t done anything to deserve his gifts either. He was a newborn, for Heaven’s sake! If one of the wise men had dropped a gold brick on his head and killed him, Jesus would have gone straight to Hell – him not being a born-again Christian. Father said all the newborns that die in China go straight to Hell because they’re Communists.
On Christmas Day mornings, Gregory, Edgar, Sophia and I received sensible items we were in need of. Sophia would get ‘say’ a new pullover. Edgar would get ‘say’ new shoes, I would get ‘say’ a new
blanket
for my bed, and Gregory would get something like a pencil case containing a pen, a pencil, a sharpener, a rubber and plastic shapes you could draw lines against. The gifts were more or less the same each year, with slight variations, such as a coat instead of shoes or trousers instead of a skirt.
The second term of my first year at school, January to mid-June, thanks to the increased workload and greater library access, passed faster than the first. In next to no time my first year had ended. I returned to the Manse for the long summer break.
‘There’s good news,’ said Mother that evening. I thought something good had happened to someone other than me. But not so. ‘I hear they’re sending you to year three next year.’ Sophia looked at me, not knowing whether going into year three was good or bad. ‘You needn’t look so smug.’ I didn’t know I looked smug and immediately tried to unsmug my face by frowning. ‘I received a letter from your Miss Walker. She says she has reservations about your social development. She says you don’t mix with the other pupils.’
Indians lived on reservations. ‘I don’t like most of them.’
‘You’ll have to do better on that score in future.’
I nodded my head.
Sophia said, ‘Why are they sending him to year three?’
‘Apparently because he’s good enough at reading and writing. That doesn’t surprise me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a match for anyone in year four or five … You’re looking smug again.’
‘Pride comes before a fall,’ said Father without looking up from his bible.
The summer break rained from June to September with occasional sunny breaks like holes in a pullover. Sophia and I amused ourselves, or failed to, indoors most of the time. Edgar showed me his new skill – shoelace tying – sometimes twice daily. Gregory left the Manse in the mornings and didn’t come home for days at a time. Father went
to
work, came home, read his bible, ate and slept. Mother fell asleep each evening in front of the fire, sobbing, because the authorities were sending someone to talk about taking Edgar into care.
One night a dream disturbed my sleep. My heart beat rapidly. A nightmare visited and fled as I woke. A nightmare deposited its seed.
The curtains were open. I could see darkness but no stars. Cloud obliterated the moon. A memory of light came through the window and painted silver abrasions across the glass. The Manse held its breath. In such quietness there are sounds inside your head muttering louder than the occasional tweaks and creaks of masonry and timber outside it. When you listen harder, with one ear pressed into the pillow, the quietness gets louder until you try to stop listening but cannot. I turned from my side on to my back – which partially relieved the suffocating-in-my-own-deafness sensation – and gazed big-eyed into the black.
Something unnatural and external had wakened me. But what? Should I get up and peer into the corridor? Too cowardly and too cold. I lay there for ages, arms under sheets pulled up to my chin.
At last, unable to bear the nothingness any longer, I braced myself to climb from my cold bed into freezing space. Before I moved further, I heard a noise. It came from Sophia’s room. I waited for her to knock on the wall – our code: knock-knock meant hello. Knock-knock, knock-knock meant are you happy? Knock-knock, knock meant are you sad? Knock-knock-knock meant yes, I am. Knock meant no. No knocks came. The noise from her room had been something else. Prevaricating, should I or shouldn’t I, alertness and curiosity got me out of bed before I had time to question the wisdom of following my instinct.
I moved carefully across the floor to prevent the boards from creaking – not wholly successfully. At the door, I still had doubts about the wisdom of going next door to Sophia’s room. Fear of being caught by Mother, or much worse: Father. What would I say? What
excuse
would I give? And what would I do if I entered Sophia’s room and found her fast asleep? Wake her and say I heard a noise but it must have been the timbers? Yes, probably. I wanted to get into bed beside her and snuggle warm. But all Mother’s talk of Sophia’s needing her own room meant, for some unclear reason, that snuggling and keeping warm, once permitted, had become forbidden. Those days were over.
The cold penetrated my bare feet and into the rest of me. My dressing gown hung on a peg across the room. I could open the door and go into the corridor or go back to bed. Gently, I turned the handle.
… but I had no trouble whatsoever resisting an advance into the corridor. Candlelight dimmed dimmer, down and out, and all upstairs looked blind, black as soot. Someone had gone downstairs. In a moment, I put two and two together. The noise in her room; it must have been Sophia who had gone downstairs. Only Sophia carried so little weight on her feet she could descend without making the stairs creak. I considered following, although Heaven knew why if she only intended going to the toilet (we had pots for pee, but plops were outside only). But something told me to wait … and listen … and watch into the black where the corridor should have been. I heard the back door opening.
The back door had become stiff over the years with damp and needed a tug. If it was Mother, she might have wakened Father, and he might decide to prowl. The corridor would be suicide. I closed my door firmly but quietly and went across the bedroom, less carefully than I had minutes ago, to the window.
A steady light shone outside. Father, or Mother, or Gregory had a lamp … a lamp? But the person on the stairs had a candle! Sophia, Edgar and I were forbidden lamps. They were too dangerous and we had to make do with candles, which usually blew out. The strangest thing was that Father, Mother or Gregory – the lamplight – didn’t move towards the toilet, but into the cemetery. Then it stopped and
… nothing
for a long time. Nothing until I shivered, and nothing even then. I needed to get back under the sheets, for dawn might arrive and still nothing, and me standing there, frozen. And somebody frozen solid in the cemetery with a lamp.
But before I got back into bed, the light moved. It moved rapidly, but less rapidly than if it were running away from something. It moved as rapidly as someone would who had completed a task and no longer needed to be there. When the light came out of the cemetery and crossed the courtyard, I saw legs, and maybe an arm. Most clearly, I saw a gait. It was not Father’s gait, nor Mother’s, Gregory’s, Edgar’s or Sophia’s. And it certainly wasn’t mine – not even if I had been down there instead of up here. The only other person I could think of who came anywhere near the Manse was Farmer Barry. But it wasn’t his gait either.
The stairs in the Manse were wide with a banister at either side. Sophia and I could walk on the stairs side by side and often did.
Normally, I held the banister on my left going up, and the other banister on my left going down. This time, however, I went up the middle of the stairs without holding on to either banister.
I felt watched.
Aware of the ceiling above me, as I’m occasionally aware of a teacup that might fall off Mother’s tray and hit my head, and aware too of the wall above the ceiling that separated my parents’ bedroom from Granny Hazel’s, I tried to keep the top of my head in line with the wall as if I were balancing a book, or a jug of water like the black woman in the encyclopedia.
‘Edward?’ I heard Mother’s voice as if it came from a world next door to ours. ‘Edward?’ she repeated. I turned round and shuffled, a little dizzy and in danger of falling, to my left to hold on to the banister. Mother stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up, with a bundle of washing in her arms fresh off the line. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Why are you walking like that?’ Because Sophia said that was how the White Lady with the fuzzy face walked up the stairs before Granny Hazel died. Mother didn’t know that Sophia had seen her. It seemed to be the kind of thing to hold my tongue about … And because of last night too, of course.
‘What are you up to?’
‘Nothing,’ I repeated, as innocently as possible.
‘A little white lie, Edward?’
‘I just wanted to see if I could go up without holding on.’
‘Well, don’t. You’ll fall, and then where would you be?’
‘At the bottom.’
‘Don’t be facetious. Where’s Sophia?’
‘In the toilet.’ The toilet was the only place we went to without each other – apart from when I went off to school, of course.
Mother, unconvinced of my innocence, asked, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To my room.’
‘Why? What’s wrong with waiting for Sophia?’
I shrugged.
‘I have to iron these,’ said Mother, and went to the kitchen.
Although she’d gone, I still felt watched.
I didn’t try walking up the middle of the stairs again because doing so made me dizzy. I held the banister and proceeded, recapturing the thoughtfulness of before. At the top, the landing was a corridor of equal distance left and right. The very old carpet had no colour left, just browny greyness. A word existed that described what I became aware of when at the top of the stairs. I didn’t know ‘symmetrical’ then, but I felt as though if I could fold the Manse like paper all its inner edge would meet.