Where Monsters Lie Page 3

‘Are you sure you can stay for dinner?’ Kathleen asked me. ‘Your mum’s not expecting you home?’

  ‘She’ll ring when I need to be back.’

  Finn and Rob walked me home later.

  Dad came to open the door just before I reached it and I knew immediately that something was wrong. He stood very tall, filling the frame.

  ‘Effie . . .’ Dad looked grave. ‘Your mum’s very upset.’

  ‘But I—’ I started to protest.

  ‘Just get in here and apologize to her, will you? She’s been tearing her hair out.’

  Mum was upstairs in the bathroom. I waited for her to come out onto the landing. I felt nervous, standing there, and I started rethinking what I had done that afternoon, trying to pick out the part where I had made a mistake. After a while, when Mum had still not emerged, I knocked on the bathroom door.

  ‘Who is it?’ Her voice sounded shaky and feeble through the door.

  ‘It’s me, Mum. I’m sorry,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for.

  I heard the lock being pulled back with a scrape, but the door remained stubbornly closed.

  ‘Shall I come in?’ I asked.

  ‘If you want to,’ said Mum, in a little voice.

  I took a deep breath and pushed the door open. The light in the bathroom seemed too bright, too garish, lighting up Mum’s tear-stained, red face.

  ‘I left a note—’ I began.

  ‘Effie, you can’t just gallivant off because you feel like it! I was worried sick when I got home and you weren’t there.’

  ‘I thought you’d see my note when you—’

  ‘I did find it in the end, but first I almost tore the house down trying to find you.’

  ‘I put . . .’ I started to explain that I had put mugs on the corners on the note to stop it flying away, and that the kitchen table had seemed like a good place because she always sat there with a cup of tea – but I could see it was pointless. ‘Why didn’t you call Finn’s? I would have come home straight away.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Mum sniffed.

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you would just ring Finn’s. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘I’m not sure you are, Effie,’ she said. ‘I think those are just words to you.’

  I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know where to look. I couldn’t meet Mum’s teary stare.

  After what felt like a long time she spoke.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked quietly. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘I had dinner at Finn’s.’

  ‘Oh right, of course you did,’ she said, as though it were the ultimate betrayal. ‘I think you had better go straight to bed then.’

  I left the bathroom without saying anything and spent the rest of the evening lying awake in the darkness. I kept going over in my head how I had written the note to Mum so clearly, how I had taken extra care to make sure she would find it, how all my efforts had been wasted.

  I was still awake when I heard my bedroom door open and Mum’s footsteps coming towards me. I shut my eyes tightly.

  Then I felt her hand upon my brow, stroking my fringe away from my face.

  I rolled away towards the wall, my back to her, and grunted a little as though she had disturbed my sleep.

  She left the room then, but not before I’d heard a sound escape from her.

  The unmistakable sound of a sob.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Your mum’s having a hard time,’ was how Dad put it when Mum and I fell out like this.

  ‘I just keep making her sad,’ I said.

  ‘Effie, it’s not you. Sometimes adults get sad about other things in their life and it makes them sad about everything.’

  ‘What’s making Mum sad?’

  Dad frowned then and gazed into the distance – though he was just staring at the white expanse of a wall.

  ‘It’s not quite that simple,’ he said in the end. ‘But you mustn’t blame yourself. Got it?’

  I nodded, but one day not long after the Christmas holidays, when I came home from school, I could feel Mum’s mood in the air as soon as I walked in – like a snake lying in the grass, ready to strike.

  The air felt stretched and tense, as though it were harder to walk through.

  ‘Here she is,’ Mum declared to Tommi when she saw me. ‘We were about to send out a search party, weren’t we? How are you, love?’ she asked, falsely jolly; and then, before I could answer, ‘Where have you been till now? It’s getting late.’

  ‘Just . . . out,’ I said vaguely. ‘With Finn.’

  The truth was, we had finally started work on a raft. We had sworn to each other to keep it a secret, knowing that our parents – and especially my mum – wouldn’t think it was a good idea. We had just spent an hour gathering materials and talking about the different ways we could build it. I just wanted to see what we could find and take it from there, but Finn insisted on listing everything we needed: we made a start on it before the light began to fail and we were forced to go home.

  ‘Effie,’ Mum began slowly. ‘You know how much I like Finn. You’ve got a good friend there. He’s a bright boy . . .’

  It was true that Mum and Finn got on well.

  For one thing, they were interested in the same things. Mum drew flowers so that they looked exactly like they do when they grow in the wild for her job, and so she knew all about plants. She taught Finn about bladderwort, which grew by the loch and fascinated him. If we all went for a walk together, Finn and Mum would end up sitting by the loch edge, looking for the bladderwort.

  ‘It’s got these little traps – like cups with a door, filled with water,’ she told him. ‘Then an insect comes along, and if it touches one of the levers that operate the door, it will open, and the water and the insect are sucked into the plant for digesting. It happens just like that!’ Mum slammed her hand down hard onto her thigh so that it made a smacking sound.

  ‘Then, afterwards, what happens? To the trap? Can it be used again?’ Finn asked.

  ‘It resets itself. The door closes and it fills with water again. Pretty incredible, huh?’

  ‘Yeah – I wish I could see it happen.’

  ‘It happens far too quickly for a human eye to see – in about a hundredth of a second.’

  ‘Can we go now?’ I would ask pointedly, but then they would be distracted by a little fly that was about to land on the bladderwort.

  There was one week when I was stuck in bed with a stomach bug: I was so weak I couldn’t leave my bedroom, let alone the house, for a full six days. On the seventh day I came downstairs, my legs wobbly, my head still throbbing, to find that Mum and Finn had gone off walking together.

  ‘Can I get you anything, love?’ Dad asked me.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll go back to bed.’

  The truth was, I had an odd sort of feeling about it. When I looked out of my bedroom window, I could see Finn and Mum on the hill behind the house. They were passing something back and forth.

  When they headed back down, talking animatedly, I saw what it was they had been holding: Mum’s old pair of binoculars, which her father had given her. She had never let me touch them before because she said they weren’t a toy.

  I suddenly realized that the strange feeling I’d had was born of jealousy. I felt jealous of Mum for spending time with Finn when I wanted to; and also of Finn for sharing something that I never had with Mum.

  I didn’t speak to either of them about my feelings that day. I tried to bury them away, telling myself it was just silly – although at times their closeness still annoyed me.

  Finn knew the names of all the plants that grew in Mivtown, thanks to Mum. When we were out walking, he would suddenly call out a name I didn’t recognize and pounce upon some unsuspecting wild flower. He picked it very carefully, taking care not to damage it, and when he presented it to Mum, she’d beam at him, delighted, and together they would study the delicate petals.

  ‘That’s lovely bladderwort, Finn
,’ Mum would say, putting the yellow flowers in a little jam jar on our kitchen table.

  She did try to teach me too, but I couldn’t remember the names or see the differences between the flower heads like Finn could. Soon my incompetence turned to indifference. When I saw Mum and Finn talking together quietly, I tried to ignore the feeling that I was stupid, that I was being left out. Their heads both bowed in a certain way, as though they were a reflection of one another.

  ‘Look, Effie,’ Mum might say. ‘There’s some more bladderwort, like Finn found.’

  I’d shrug, and the pretty little yellow flower seemed to shake its head jauntily at me.

  So I knew that Mum liked Finn – but sometimes she seemed to get annoyed, cross even, when I had been out with him – or wanted to go out with him.

  Whenever I asked if I could go and see Finn, it was as if Mum couldn’t hear me. She’d turn her head away as though I wasn’t really there.

  ‘Mum? Mum?’ I would say, louder and louder. ‘Did you hear me? Can I go and see Finn?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she would say in the end, acknowledging me.

  Later, I would ask again.

  ‘You’re really starting to annoy me now, Effie,’ Mum would say crossly. ‘I told you I would think about it.’

  Sometimes, if Dad was in, I would ask him instead because he just said, ‘Be back in time for dinner,’ without even looking up from what he was doing. I would slip out through the back door, round to the road that led to Finn’s house, and run all the way. Especially if Mum and I had had a falling out.

  At those times I used to spend hours in their kitchen, as though waiting the argument out; waiting for it to wither into just a memory.

  I would sit at Finn’s kitchen table, and Kathleen would pull something warm out of the oven for us to tear apart. Currant buns. Banana bread. Golden, treacly flapjacks. Before I knew it, it would be dark and Rob and Finn would have to walk me home with a torch.

  I never wanted to leave, though. Kathleen had to coax me out from under the table with her sweet, melodious voice; it sounded like she was singing, not speaking. She would pull me onto her lap and kiss my forehead.

  ‘Come on, pet,’ she’d say – words she usually reserved for Finn when he’d fallen over.

  She’d tell me it was time to go but I could ‘come again tomorrow, Effie, if you want to . . . And the day after that. And the day after that. OK, Effie? See you tomorrow.’

  Rob would sometimes have to prise me out of Kathleen’s arms with Finn looking on, his face creased with concern.

  ‘That’s my girl, Effie,’ Rob would say.

  ‘It’s OK, Effie, I’d hear Finn’s worried voice and bolstered by their gentle words, I would be able to leave them.

  I felt at home there, you see, while the place they were walking me back to was somewhere else. Somewhere familiar, yes, but not home somehow. I couldn’t help but wonder if they had got it wrong when we were born; if I actually belonged to Kathleen and Rob, and Mum and Dad were really Finn’s parents.

  But when Tommi arrived, beating her fists together and screaming as if triumphantly saying, ‘I am here, I am here,’ over and over, I forgot all about the silly stories Finn and I used to tell each other.

  I had found something I was good at: I was good at loving Tommi.

  I knew instinctively what to do to stop her crying, how to make her little round face crease into a smile, how to lull her to sleep. I didn’t want to think that Mum and Dad weren’t mine because if they weren’t, then Tommi wouldn’t be either. When I decided to stop thinking about Finn and me being mixed up at birth, I was relieved.

  Because, I mean, you wouldn’t want to grow up with a family that was not your own and not know it, would you? But there was another part of me that felt sad too. Sad that Kathleen and Rob weren’t my parents.

  And that made me feel guilty.

  And quite, quite ashamed.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘I know how close you and Finn are,’ Mum continued. ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t go on, Mum. I know what you’re going to say,’ I said daringly, impatient for her to finish.

  ‘What’s that then?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re going to say that we spend too much time together,’ I said, the words tripping over each other, my cheeks flushing as I spoke.

  ‘Well . . .’ Mum said. ‘It’s just that it’s dark now, Effie. You should have been home over an hour ago. Sometimes I think you spend as much time over there as you do here, and this is your home.’

  ‘Well . . . well . . .’ I blustered, and I could feel the words on the tip of my tongue. Maybe I prefer it there.

  ‘I don’t want to fight with you. It’s just that I worry—’ Mum started to say, but then she shook her head as though trying to shake a thought from it.

  ‘Fine,’ I blurted out angrily. ‘I’ll come home sooner. Will that make you happy?’

  ‘Oh, Effie,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t get so angry. It’s just that—’

  But it was too late. I was already angry. I could feel it growing within me like a fire that had just been fed a stack of papers. It blazed up inside me, fierce and tall and flaming.

  I ran out of the room, up the stairs to my bedroom, and slammed the door behind me. Somehow that didn’t seem enough of a barrier between us. I pushed my desk chair across so that its legs scraped and screeched on the floorboards, and propped it against the door.

  I felt like I was trapped in there, as though I had been caged, so even when I heard Tommi babbling downstairs and ached to go down to her, I couldn’t leave. I heard Dad come home from the distillery, and my parents’ voices through the floorboards, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  I sat on my bed and studied the most recent map I had made of Mivtown. I’d drawn in all the little places that Finn and I had discovered: the loch at its centre, and larger, at the bottom, our two houses, side by side. I traced my finger over the drawing of Finn’s house, wishing myself there, rather than trapped in my little room. When I’d finished, I wrote my name on the edge of the map, in capitals: effie waters.

  After a while Mum knocked on my door. ‘Effie, come down to eat. Let’s talk.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I called back, even though I was; my hunger was gnawing at my stomach insistently.

  ‘Oh, Effie,’ Mum said with a sigh. And then a small word, quietly, and so it was difficult to hear: ‘Please.’

  ‘I said, I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You need to eat, Effie.’

  ‘I don’t need to eat! I don’t need dinner,’ I said, my voice rising into a yell. ‘And I don’t need you.’

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I wished I could have caught them mid-air and stuffed them back in, but instead they lashed out with the force of a whip. All I could hear was a roaring silence.

  I thought Mum was going to say something else then; insist that I open the door. I would say sorry, I didn’t mean what I’d said, and go downstairs. I imagined sitting down at the table in front of a hot plate of food and feeling better. I even thought I heard Mum take a breath as if about to speak, but after that there was only the sound of her footsteps walking away, across the landing and down the stairs.

  That was the last time we ever spoke.

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning I woke up stiff and hungry, to hear Tommi crying in her room.

  I clattered out of bed so fast that I almost tripped over my boots that lay discarded on the floor.

  ‘What’s the matter, Tommi?’ I asked soothingly, and cradled her to me.

  Soon her cries turned to gulps and then to sniffs.

  ‘You’re all right, sweet girl,’ I said, just like Mum did if Tommi or I were upset.

  It was cold in the house and a chill hung in the rooms. Christmas had been and gone, and we were left in the cold part of the year when all the cheer has leaked away, waiting, waiting for the green shoots of spring to arrive.

  I started humming an old c
arol and Tommi gurgled along with me and then she looked up at me and said, ‘S’op now, ’Fie. S’op, S’op,’ until I stopped singing.

  ‘All right, all right,’ I said.

  ‘W’s Mumma?’ Tommi asked.

  ‘Let’s find her,’ I said brightly, and took her small hand in mine.

  ‘Mum?’ I called out through the house, alongside Tommi’s calls of ‘Mumma! Mumma!’

  I wanted to see her as well. I wanted to say sorry about the night before.

  Mum and Dad’s bed was neatly made and the old Arran jumper that Mum often wore was slung over the bedpost. The kitchen was tidy, just two mugs sitting the wrong way up on the draining board. But there was no sign of Mum.

  ‘She’s not here,’ I said, more to myself than to Tommi. ‘Must have gone into the village. Come on then. Let’s have breakfast.’

  I made us some toast and cut it into little triangles. I liked making Tommi’s breakfast. When she was a baby and switched to drinking formula milk, I was pleased because it meant that I could feed her by myself. It was quite easy once you’d learned how.

  Mum had let me do it now and again, but she watched everything I did, so even though I knew what to do, I got nervous.

  ‘That’s too much formula, Effie,’ she would say, her voice rising a little higher with each word. Or, ‘You’ve got to shake it really hard . . . harder . . . harder than that.’

  I found myself making mistakes, and the more Mum tried to direct me, the more I seemed to do it wrong. Dad was the opposite: he always asked me to help when it was his turn, but he didn’t bother looking as I made it, saying to me, ‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you, love?’

  I would nod confidently and enjoyed not having Mum watching over my every move.

  When we’d finished the toast, Tommi looked worried, and craned her head over her shoulder this way and that, and asked me again, ‘W’s Mumma?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Tommi,’ I said. ‘She’ll be back soon.’

  But I was wrong.

  Mum never came home.

  Chapter Ten

  The house was very quiet that night. Everyone had gone: the policemen from Abiemore, the oldies, the people from the village. Rob, Kathleen and Finn.