Hearts in the Hard Ground

swear word that doesn’t earn you a smack; the first dirty joke. The first time sharing a bottle of wine and talking frankly about sex. You have to yank her out of someone’s way in the supermarket because she’s staring into space again, blocking the vegetable aisle, and though she soon forgets, you replay it over and over in your head, more violent each time until you expect to see bruises on her arm where there are none.
Did I pull her so hard she stumbled?
Did she grow as pitiful, as frightened, as this bird when I locked her bedroom door to stop her wandering out at night? If she fretted, if she tried the door or the window or ever cried out in wordless confusion, I didn’t hear her.
I didn’t want to.
There was no use apologising for something she couldn’t remember so I atoned by painting her nails. I seemed to paint her nails every day. In the few rudderless minutes between one layer of varnish and the next, I used to say, Mum? You okay?
What I really needed to ask is: Mum, am I kind? Am I kind anymore?
I brought the dead bird up to my bowed forehead. I’m sorry I locked you in, I murmured. With the gull tucked safely under one arm, I opened the window. Frigid sea air rushed in and the gull launched itself out. It didn’t go far; just to the end of the garden. The house was clingy that way.
The gull returned with a beakful of twigs and installed himself in the utility room sink. On laundry day, the little sod liked to hop down and steal my socks. I appreciated the company, however dubious the smell. I hung tree-shaped air fresheners in there and hoped that would be the worst of it, but he turned out to be a harbinger.
A Marley, as I called him.
My new home needed caring for. Every old and rare thing does, no matter how well made.
You’d think Mum never died, the way I worked. I black-leaded the fireplaces, had the fanlight restored, and Brasso’d the doorknobs and hinges. I buffed woodwork in tight spirals the same way I’d rubbed lotion on Mum after a bath, and I scrubbed those stained floorboards in the master bedroom over and over until my hands cramped as if I’d been holding her down during one of her fits; and still the stain endured, and the brass dulled, forcing me to start over.
I was being unfair. Mum never asked to become a to-do list.
At least handling Marley prompted me to finally wash Mum’s cardigan, although when I pulled it out of the dryer, it didn’t smell right anymore. I hadn’t thought to save a bottle of her perfume. Meanwhile, the musk of my failed one-night stand refused to go away. I lay in bed thinking, Cheap aerosol and beer — what a miserable haunting. My laugh turned to a wet snort and suddenly I was crying.
That’s another thing about living alone: there’s only a house to comfort you. The creak of wood contracting in the cold, the bang of old pipes in the wall, the secret sounds you only hear when you’re awake in the early hours, soggy with grief.
You realise you know your new house about as well as you know yourself.
So, I dried my face and listened. More than one hundred years jostled within the house’s walls, confined and airless as a bell jar. Early morning frost glittered on the window pane behind my vanity, washing the room in a beryl haze while the night’s last, weak shadows played tricks: the notches in the base of the bedroom door seemed like creeping fingers, eldritch and extra-knuckled, reaching up through the gap.
I turned my reading lamp on. It was no trick.
The fingers scraped down the wood, leaving trails of something black. Whatever owned those fingers pounded on the door, spraying splinters across the bed, and when the door didn’t give, a thick, angry boiling sound started up on the landing. Like a child, I threw the covers over my head. Worse; so much worse. My mind was all too eager to invent what I couldn’t see.
In the sober light of day, the scratches on the door looked terrible. That’s what truly unnerved me. If it could mark the house, it could mark me.
Whenever I was scared about Mum, information had been a comfort. Prognosis. Treatment plans. Cause of death. Facts gave me a sense of control. I rang the estate agent far from the house, where reception was better; from the city’s memorial garden, actually. I visited every Sunday. It didn’t matter that Mum’s ashes were scattered in the harbour so there was nothing of her there. You feel like a shitty daughter if you can’t find time to stare at a stone marker once a week. Anyway, the woman who took the call introduced herself as Annika, covering compassionate leave for the guy I’d always dealt with. His mum had passed away too, she sighed, and I felt a stab of sympathy.
Annika took a steadying breath — she was nervous, a temp; perhaps she felt she’d crossed some professional line, divulging her colleague’s loss. She asked how she could help. I asked who’d died in the house. Besides the previous owner, Claire Dockett, of course; when I made my offer, I was told in the interest of full disclosure that she’d collapsed in the master bedroom. My bedroom.
Sordid murders? She laughed brightly. We’d have to tell you something like that before now.
Oh, yeah, I said — I turned my back on Mum’s stone marker, surprised to find myself smiling. Annika’s laughter spilled out so naturally only to be tucked away again. Sunny patches glowing then quickly fading on an overcast day — Sorry. Yeah, no, I knew that. I’m just interested in the history, really.
Why, have you seen something? A conspiratorial chuckle. The distant zip-zip of a mouse wheel.
The exorcist is due next week, I joked —