The Crooked House (7 page)

‘Can we go?’ Alison said stiffly. Letting go of her hand Paul looked at his drink in surprise. She pushed back her chair and
the woman dangling her sandals at the bar looked over at the sound. Paul stood and half-drained his glass, and it seemed to Alison as though the bar stilled to watch them leave.

She walked fast in the dark, a buzzing in her ears, Paul at her side keeping up in silence. At the village sign she slowed fractionally and he put a warning arm on her elbow. ‘What’s got into you?’ he asked, and she stopped. She was out of breath.

‘I just … just … it’s been a long day,’ she said. ‘That place wasn’t exactly welcoming.’

‘There’s something else,’ he said, his hand on her elbow.

She placed herself in front of him, hip to hip, blocking him.

‘Let’s get to bed, shall we?’ she said boldly, and in the dark she lifted her face to his.

He said not a word, but once in the room he averted his face from hers as he undressed. The kiss he’d given her on the edge of the village had been cool, as light and dry as a shed snakeskin. She took the slip from her suitcase and laid it on the chair, but he didn’t look or comment.

‘You’re right,’ he said, turning on his side as she climbed into bed naked. The heaped pillows were on the floor and his shoulder was towards her; he reached a hand back and squeezed hers gently, then let it go. ‘Let’s just get some sleep.’

She lay in the dark, her body electric all down its length, sounding its alarm. The old man, Paul, the wedding, this place. This place.

They
came in the night, thick and fast: images, pictures, names, places all returning, stepping up to her out of the darkness. The bad things that had happened here before the one great catastrophic thing, her big bang, had wiped them from her conscious mind. Beyond the window in the night, among the houses and lanes and hedges, the poplars and the reed beds, all the way down to the estuary the village stirred and whispered, reminding her. It seemed to Alison that she didn’t sleep for a minute, the curtains at the big arched window weren’t lined and she saw the leaded pattern of the glass through them, she listed the horrors.

A baby died. It had got on to the front page of the local newspaper.
Newborn dead in blaze.
Eyes closed she knew the house, down to the colour of the front door and the littered front garden. The child’s father howling abuse on his doorstep before collapsing. Mum in tears over the newspaper on the kitchen table, looking up at Dad.

An uncertain summer’s day, hot but cloud thickening on the horizon, a sticky Sunday afternoon and trippers watching
the big boat glide up the brown river, a windsurfer dipping and swerving in its path. The big boat silent under sail, unable to slow or stop, a woman lifting her hand to her mouth as the windsurfer tipped and flattened and was under. A horrified laugh soon stifled as they all watch and wait for the bright triangle to reappear, the big boat’s master stepping leisurely out from behind his wheel to look. They wait, and wait.

A boy’s body in a ditch.

A young girl walking in the street hairless from chemotherapy, alone as if she’d escaped a bomb blast.

Not statistically unusual. Cells mutate; accidents happen. Every place had those tragedies, London must have a hundred million of them, people die wherever you go, for reasons just like this. No such thing as a cursed place.

She didn’t sleep, and then she did. As the sky lightened she sank like a stone drifting soundless into deep water and she was blessed by unconsciousness for a bare half-hour. And then it was over and she was jackknifing back to the surface, gasping for breath. Steadying herself she reached for her glasses, careful to lift them off the side table without a clatter. Beside her on the bed Paul didn’t stir, his face pale and still in the early light. This man. How could she think it would work? A man who could sit and work through historical matter for hours at a time, patient and unmoving, a man who never raised his voice. And her? He thought she was the same, with her glasses and her quiet facility with numbers and her refusal to need him – he thought her cool and in control.

But there was the gun, buried away in its stained cloth. Alison watched, remembering the thing’s cold weight in her hand, and his eyelids fluttered as something played out behind them. Did he dream of chaos, of battle scenes? She thought of him stroking her, stroking until she was calmed. She imagined the gun as some historical artefact to him, a totem, a
touchstone. Perhaps he brought order to chaos in his sleep and the gun served as a warning from a violent past.

Six o’clock. She slid out of bed.

Outside there was a wind. Alison put her face between the curtains and saw the heavy cypresses being buffeted but the sky was a clear bright blue, a couple of clouds scudding fast and high. She opened her suitcase silently and extracted her trainers, the old shorts, the sports bra she hadn’t worn in months; Paul wasn’t to know she’d run barely a handful of times in the previous year. Pausing in her scruffy disguise she went back to the suitcase and took her mother’s scarf, twisting it into a bandana around her head. She hadn’t known how exposed the cropped hair would make her feel.

Six ten as she closed the door carefully behind her. She calculated she had an hour, maybe two, before it started looking weird. She’d left a scribbled note,
Back soon!!
The exclamation marks would give it away, she realised, even as she started downstairs – not her style, or Paul’s. Too late.

Downstairs there was some life, she heard kitchen sounds and a voice raised but mercifully the reception desk itself was empty. She could imagine Jan looking at her curiously, storing the information for later, for Paul.
She’s an early bird.
The hotel’s door was on the latch and she slid it open and was out, tiptoeing over the gravel and on to the road, alone.

The wind was warm and blustery, the sound of it in the trees exhilarated her as she headed down towards the sea, a cleansing rush inside her skull. It had been high summer when they’d come here first, the start of the holidays spent unloading the van in a green twilight and she and Joe skipping and running and getting in the way and the next morning a rinsed blue morning just like this. A new start.

She began to run: making herself go slow, and breathe, down the blustery lane between hedges. The village appeared ahead of her, bleached and empty in the morning sun and she thought
of the dingy little pub down on the waterfront shuttered up against the light.

It was silent – or almost. She had passed no more than a handful of houses when she heard it, a sound you never heard in London. The whine and clink of a milk float. It appeared now, swaying in the turning to a little close as she crossed the road, jerking to a halt to let her past and she turned her head to examine the milkman. He yawned, a stranger, twenty or so, but he still wore the old-fashioned white coat with the dairy’s insignia.

The boy who’d died in a hit-and-run had been found beside the road by another milkman coming in to the village at dawn, pulling his float to a halt on the verge. The man had gone himself to tell the boy’s mother, taking off his cap at her back door, the float still loaded with undelivered milk. Not the first time the boy had stayed out all night, only this time not drunk in a hedge but dead. His brother had told Esme about the milkman, days later when he reappeared at school, black rings under his eyes and his breath sour with sleeplessness. A friend of Joe’s. The name was there in some recess of her memory along with those of his brothers, but Alison didn’t pursue them, not now. Her boys had been all the woman had, she remembered that: three sons, her husband had drowned in a storm just after the youngest’s birth.

Leaving him behind her, Alison heard the sound of the milk float recede. As she headed down, the village street narrowing to the occasional glimpse of marshland, her breath burned in her chest. She’d never been much of a runner: bad at pacing, reluctant to take instruction. She had a tendency to speed up, and to let her heart beat too fast. She’d bought the trainers to get herself through a bad patch a year or so earlier, the time the boy wouldn’t stop calling. Exercise resets the body, the counsellor had said. Even if it’s just to fill the time, just to get out of the house. Just to stop yourself thinking.

She
bounced, slowing herself down. The shoes were perished with underuse and she could feel the tarmac through them. She dodged to the left and down between tall brick villas put up by the same Victorian developer as had built the crooked house out on the edge of the marsh, back when Saltleigh must have looked like a prospect, the wind off the estuary healthful and full of ozone, and not a muddy backwater. Names like Avonlea and Camelot and Burnside on weathered stone lintels and built in pairs, propping each other up where Creek House had been left to slip and tilt alone. Some were double-glazed, with rows of china birds and artificial flowers in the windows and polished cars out front, but there were others still tatty as she remembered, with overgrown front gardens and bicycles rusting in the salt air.

She felt the road surface grow uneven as the houses thinned and the village petered out. At the end of the road there should be fields with a path between them that ended on the sea wall, but instead she saw new brick, link fencing, some kind of development. Alison felt her breathing turn erratic. She kept on, all the same. It was all right, she saw as she got closer, there were no more than a handful of houses, and unfinished at that, with churned mud between the buildings. She slowed to negotiate the fence. She didn’t stop altogether: some superstitious ticking in her head set up when she had started to run told her, Not till you get there. Don’t stop till you’re there.

And there it was, at the last minute, a lopsided arthritic tree she recognised, and a gap in the undergrowth she knew of old. Still there. She darted down it. The foliage closed around her. The air trapped between the hedges smelled of dusty dogshit, and Alison felt the sweat prickle between her shoulder blades, her eyes stung and she squeezed them shut.

This had been their route up into the village, she and Joe on errands to the post office or the cluttered village mini-market or the baker’s with its cottage window half full of plain
loaves and iced buns that was now, she’d seen in passing, net-curtained and silent. The girls had just started going, the two of them on Saturday morning begging to be allowed. Dad was always bad news on a Saturday morning by then, cursing as he filled the kettle and swallowed painkillers, so Mum had let them go reluctantly, frowning as they raced each other along the top of the sea wall. The twins, skipping silhouetted against the endless sky, bright and wicked and loving – and strange.

They’d turned more so, towards the end, hiding in cupboards together, writing in secret notebooks; there’d been a reason. Alison faltered, almost stopped. She remembered Mum pale and depleted, unloading the two of them from the car after a hospital visit, when had that been? When had that started? Mum distant. There had been other trips to the doctor’s, blood tests, the girls tired and scrappy and bickering afterwards. How could Alison have forgotten? Mum had made light of it, routine, she said, but Joe had said one evening,
She’s worried.
And whispering back to him Alison remembered observing then that Mum still thought of her and Joe as extensions of herself, she didn’t understand that they saw things. Understood things. Such as, not everything grown-ups said was true.

Another hundred yards downhill, fifty, with the stones loose and treacherous under her feet, and then the hedges parted and there it was. The horizon: the power station, the church, the grey tufted marsh and the sparkling distance where the flat water met the sky. At an angle to her path the wide bumpy track led out from the back of the village and where they intersected it still stood. The crooked house, its brick dark and its angles wrong, a blotch on the pale lovely morning. She had to make herself breathe.

As she ran that last stretch, its tilted shape jumped and shifted until she was dizzy so Alison just stared at the path and then she was in its long, cool shadow. The tide was low but not fully out yet. She looked up.

The
house was boarded and derelict, weathered plywood splintered and graffitied at each window and the purple spikes of some plant sprouting above the lintel over the front door. The little enclosed yard behind where they had hidden and whispered and left secret messages. Thirteen years.

Approaching in the lee of the seawall, hidden from the village view, she skirted the house. She put a hand to its brick flank and found it already warm from the sun. The brick was crumbling and pitted with neglect and salt erosion; looking up she saw that the roofline sagged, a piece of guttering fallen away.

Her heart would not slow down, in fact she felt as if it would rise and swell into her throat and choke her. What had she expected? That the house had been sold, renovated, extended, a family living there? The truth was she had expected nothing: in her brain she had forced the house into the setting of a horrible story, of a bad, bad dream, branching into cellars and cluttered attics and corridors that had never existed except in her imagination and she would come here to find nothing at all. A windswept marsh, a bumpy track that led to nowhere but another empty berth. That hope blew away on the wind. Because here it stood.

The graffiti on the boarded bay window to what had been the sitting room was layered and faded, scratched messages and crude diagrams. One word isolated itself,
Joe
, written in pale marker almost gone and if there’d been anything else attached to his name it had been written over or obliterated.
Joe
. Other names, some she recognised, some were strangers.

And then her brother was there in her head after everything she’d done to hold him at bay all this time. Watchful, quiet Joe, helping unload the car right here the day they arrived. And later, years later, fierce tongue-tied Joe, out on the beach below the power station, smoking dope with the other boys, getting angry about something. Those boys. Joe surly and
refusing to come home. One night on the beach with Joe, Esme the only girl tagging on the fringes. Late summer and Esme just thirteen. The year before her family died.

She pressed her cheek to the plywood, she closed her eyes. Behind the boarded window the sitting room sat dark and silent, she felt it waiting for her on the other side. She would not go in, she didn’t need to know what was or was not still there, who might have been in there since, leaving cans and dirty blankets. She moved on, pressed close to the wall as if she’d climbed out of a high window and might fall. She came around the window bay to the porch and then stepped back.

The board over the front door had a word scrawled huge in white spray paint. If it had been on council property someone would have come along and removed it, scrubbed it clean or replaced the board, because it couldn’t have been allowed to stay there. It was an offence. Her scalp prickled.

BITCH
.

Backing off, Alison stumbled, corrected herself.
Who?
She turned to look inland. The village could barely be seen from here, not much more than the pointed line of the sail-lofts’ roofs, the tilted shapes of boats beached behind the yard, the tops of grey-green trees buffeted in the wind. The pub was invisible from where she stood; even thinking of the place the smell was in her nostrils, the smell of beer slops and fag-ends.

BITCH
.

It could mean anyone, it could be any kid raging because he’d caught his girlfriend out. And for a moment the house looked like a crooked ugly lightning rod out on the marsh, hatred narrowing and finding its way like electricity to the battered boarded front door. She lurched away from the porch, her legs jelly – after the run – round to the other side of the house and the tongue and groove door she knew she’d find in the wall. The door that led into the yard: paint peeling, it hung skewed from a broken hinge.