Where Monsters Lie Page 4

  As soon as word of Mum’s disappearance got out, the villagers had started arriving at our house. First Finn came with Kathleen and Rob, and after that, everyone followed.

  ‘Just heard,’ they said. Or ‘Any news?’ ‘Terrible business,’ they muttered under their breath.

  Without fail, they had all brought something to eat – a lumpy-looking stew, a baked apple pie – and there were so many of us that Rob had to bring some more chairs from their house; even so, people had to sit on the arms of the sofa or cross-legged on the floor. It gave the whole thing the feel of a party or a celebration – it was wrong and misshapen, like the entire day.

  It felt empty in the house now, without Finn, not to mention the rest of the village, despite the fact that the three of us – Dad, Tommi and I – were still there.

  Tommi took herself off behind the coal scuttle with one of her teddies, and only now and again did we catch snatches of her whispered conversation.

  I heard her say, ‘I love you,’ and ‘My vey speshul one,’ and hearing her talk so tenderly to her battered old bear made me feel quite awful. Wretched. Raw in a way I had never felt before, as though every limb were exposed and aching.

  I remembered the way I had spoken to Mum the night before. The terrible hardness in my voice, the sharpness of my words. It replayed in my mind, over and over.

  Mum had been gone less than a day. I overheard the policeman saying to Dad that it hadn’t been that long, but it didn’t feel that way to me. Mum not being at home for this length of time felt alien to us all.

  I could tell that Dad was worried in spite of what the policeman had said. A sort of mist had descended over his eyes the moment he realized that Mum was missing. It made him look different somehow, as though he were wearing a heavy cape that weighed his shoulders down. It made him talk and act slower than normal.

  ‘Mum is coming back?’ I kept saying to him when we first realized she was missing.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course she’s coming back.’

  That evening, when I asked again, Dad stopped answering me.

  Instead, I started saying, ‘Mum is coming back,’ with a confidence I did not feel, and Dad said nothing in reply.

  Rosemary Tanner, who lived by herself in the small stone cottage nearest the loch, said she’d seen Mum walking towards the path that led to the water at seven o’clock that morning, and that was the last anyone had seen of her.

  Because Rosemary Tanner was the last person to see Mum, she seemed at the centre of things; wherever she was in the house, there was a crowd around her. She looked small, fragile, amongst the others. For some reason Rosemary Tanner made me think of the small sparrow that Finn had found dead in his garden the year before, its delicate wings folded precisely, its body light in our hands.

  ‘Why’d she walk to the loch?’ I asked out loud when the house was full of people – the policemen talking to Dad in the living room, Mrs Daniels handing round a tray laden with steaming mugs of tea, the Wellses clustered near Rosemary Tanner like iron filings around a magnet, and Finn always, always beside me. The villagers had gradually appeared, and now they were all here. Congregating together as we had just days ago on the night of the offering. All but Mum.

  No one answered me but Finn.

  ‘Did she mention the loch at all? The day before?’ he asked me. His brows were twisted, thinking hard.

  ‘No,’ I said quietly, remembering our last conversation.

  Everyone spoke in hushed tones around me, but it didn’t stop me from hearing what they were saying. Someone – I think it was Mrs Lamb – said something about Mum being unhappy, but when I spun round, she stopped abruptly. Mr Daniels, who rarely talks when we are all together, even muttered that Mum was ‘troubled’, but when I looked at him, his lips pursed together as if they had never been open and he looked intently out of the window, studying the panes of glass as though they were pages of a book in front of him.

  After a little while some people began to talk more freely and Mr Wells said, ‘I suppose it was inevitable. Tori was . . . well, she’s always been a bit of an outsider.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence. I looked over at Dad, who was still talking to the policemen. He was sitting oddly straight in the armchair and I wondered if he had heard.

  It was Finn who moved first. He stood up, standing in front of me as though he could shield me from the mindless words, the meaningless chatter.

  I stepped forward, next to him, feeling a strength I didn’t know I had.

  Mr Wells shrank back into the room as we stood there, looking at him, saying, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ his hands held up in submission, and in that brief moment, standing beside Finn, I felt as if things were all right again. It was the pair of us against the world. Together, I felt strong.

  But then I remembered that Mum was missing, and my body was flooded with pain and confusion, intermingled in a knot that I couldn’t untangle.

  ‘It’ll be all right, Effie,’ Finn told me when we’d escaped upstairs. ‘Your mum will come back.’

  Every time I started to feel weak and sick about it, I remembered Finn’s words. Your mum will come back. Your mum will come back.

  I couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t, and it was the only thing that kept me upright. It stopped me from falling over, as though it were a stick I had to lean on.

  But Mum was never found.

  They sent divers into the loch and they used Mr Daniels’s boat to trawl it, but nothing, nobody, was found.

  Chapter Eleven

  I wanted to go down to the loch to watch the divers, but everyone had stopped me from going.

  First Dad, who seemed to be talking to me as though through a fog. ‘No, no, Effie, definitely not.’ But he was still sitting on the chair he had sat on when he was talking to the police. It didn’t feel like he really meant it.

  I’d pulled on a hat defiantly, but Dad was staring at a spot on the carpet and hadn’t noticed. I went towards the door, but Kathleen caught me.

  ‘Effie, my darling, your dad said no – stay here with us.’

  For a moment I stopped struggling and let myself relax heavily into Kathleen’s arms. But as soon as she let me go, I made a dash for the door.

  ‘Finn!’ I heard her shout. ‘Get Effie back!’

  ‘I’m not stopping her,’ he said. ‘She wants to go.’

  But Kathleen must have said something else to him because before I knew it, Finn was racing along the path next to me.

  ‘I can’t stop you,’ he said. ‘I’ll even go with you if you like. But I think you should stay with your dad. He needs you right now. You need to stick together.’

  It was the first time Finn had said anything other than Your mum will come back and it halted me, hearing him speak like that.

  ‘You think she’s gone too,’ I accused him.

  ‘I think . . . something’s happened,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know what, Effie, but something has happened to your mum. Something’s wrong.’

  I fell to my knees. The pain of hitting the cold, hard ground sent a shock through me.

  ‘It can’t be, it can’t be,’ I said. ‘Finn, I don’t want it, I don’t want it, I don’t want it.’

  My words turned to meaningless sounds and then to sobs. I could feel them pouring out of my mouth. Something in me was telling me that if I cried hard enough, if I protested loudly enough, then I could make it not true. I could undo it just by willing it so.

  I banged my hands on the freezing ground with all my strength, and then again, and again, as though the pain of my bruised hands could replace the pain in my heart, which was sharp and heavy and took my breath away.

  When I had no energy left, I simply collapsed there on the earth. I didn’t care what I looked like or how cold I was. I would have stayed there for ever.

  Then I felt Finn next to me; he was on the ground too, an arm slung round my back.

  He didn’t make me get up or say any words to soothe me.

  He
joined me there, in my despair, and by his side I found that I could bring myself to leave it.

  I can’t stop thinking about that smallest of gaps, the distance between life and death. It means everything and nothing all at the same time. You could take a step in one direction, a moment too soon, a moment too late, and unknowingly you could be on the wrong path.

  I don’t see it in the faces of the others. They don’t think like I do. They wear smiles because they’re happy, not because they tell themselves to. They look at the world around them with wonder and amazement, as though it is a miracle existing for their pleasure.

  But I . . . I feel terrified.

  Chapter Twelve

  I once heard a story about a woman living in the city who died in her flat; no one found her for three whole years. She was just sitting on her sofa with the television on all that time, but when the police finally went into the flat and found her, she had turned into a skeleton.

  ‘How could nobody have found her for so long?’ I asked, talking to myself more than anyone else.

  ‘Cities,’ Dad had muttered, in answer.

  Cities. As if they were a plague.

  I’ve seen pictures of cities, but I still can’t believe they really exist. That many people, all packed together, brushing past each other’s shoulders because there isn’t any room left. It sounds plain crazy.

  ‘I guess you’d never get lonely,’ Finn said once when we were watching the telly: the grey, towering buildings and the jumble of people streaming down roads, as fast as the water swells the loch.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. No one looked that happy to me.

  I couldn’t imagine living in a place like that.

  Here in Mivtown, there’s not enough of us kids for a school. A bus comes to pick us up, along with a few other children from nearby, and takes us to a school of only about twenty kids in total.

  When Mum disappeared, it sent a wave through the whole village. Every day we had visitors – sometimes the same people more than once. They all brought something with them – usually food, like a loaf of bread or a tub of casserole, but sometimes a bunch of flowers. Our kitchen table was crowded with bowls and Tupperware and all manner of things; there wasn’t even room to eat dinner and we had to push our plates in between them all to make a space. It was as though everyone had to fill the gap that Mum had left. Most referred to it as ‘that terrible business’ with sad shakes of the head and a nod – or was it a bow of respect? – towards the loch.

  One morning, not long after Mum had gone, I was at Finn’s house when we heard something like a screech or a yell come from downstairs, followed by the sound of raised voices. We stopped what we were doing and leaned over the banisters of the landing to listen.

  ‘I’m just saying, Rosemary, that sometimes people need some space, some privacy,’ Rob said. His voice sounded strained as though he were trying to stop himself from shouting.

  ‘Space?’ we heard Rosemary Tanner mutter. ‘This is the Mivtown way. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t live here,’ she said sharply. Finn and I quickly stood back as we saw the black-clad figure of Rosemary Tanner striding out of the front door and slamming it behind her.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Kathleen said, coming through from the kitchen.

  ‘Rosemary and her rota for Kev and the girls. She wants us all dropping in on them round the clock.’

  ‘Her heart’s in the right place,’ Kathleen said.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s more like she just can’t stand anyone disagreeing with her way of doing things.’

  ‘There’s that as well,’ Kathleen said. ‘You know what she was like with Tori.’

  I knew that Mum and Rosemary Tanner had never been close, although I didn’t know much more than that. I just knew that Mum didn’t like Rosemary Tanner really. I noticed her voice would change in tone when she spoke to her at village things, but she never spoke about it to me.

  But although they weren’t close, after Mum went missing, I noticed Rosemary Tanner standing alone at the edge of the loch, looking out over the water. Then, a few days later, she was standing there again. Not long after that I saw her again, in the exact same spot. It was as though she were in a trance or waiting for something to happen. It seemed to me she was looking for Mum too.

  We were all feeling her absence. One day I saw Finn walking on the hill above our house; when I went to join him, I saw him looking about on the ground for something.

  ‘Wotcha Finn!’ I called to him. ‘Dropped something?’

  He shook his head, but his face was set, hard and straight. He looked upset, as if he were about to cry, but the wind was blowing and perhaps that was making his eyes water.

  Later he confided in me that he had gone out searching for a flower that Mum had shown him once, but it wasn’t the right time of the year, so there weren’t any.

  Quite often, Tommi would suddenly stop what she was doing and look around, asking ‘W’s Mumma?’ just as she had on the first day Mum disappeared.

  However, I’m not sure that anyone, even me, with my insides knotted themselves together at the very thought that Mum had gone, felt it more than Dad.

  About a month after she went missing I came home to find the house empty.

  I rushed from room to room, calling Tommi’s name. Dad’s. Tommi and Dad, over and over in an endless loop. But no one answered my calls.

  I was quite alone.

  I was about to go and look for them in the village. Part of me felt sure that they were there. They could have been taking a walk around the loch, as Rosemary Tanner did every day, or perhaps they had gathered round the fire in someone’s house. But another part of me worried that they had left me too, like Mum had.

  Just as I was about to head downstairs, I heard something in Dad’s bedroom. It wasn’t loud, more like a whisper or a sigh.

  ‘Hello? Dad?’ I tried again, and took a step towards the door.

  I heard it again. A little shuffle. A tiny movement.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I said sharply.

  I was sure I’d heard something, but then there was only thick silence and I wondered if I’d been mistaken. Suddenly I sensed a movement on the wall, and when I turned I saw them, inching their way across: two shiny black slugs. They looked as though they were heading for my hand, which was resting lightly on the brass doorknob.

  I shivered when I saw them, moving so silently, so stealthily, towards me, leaving a silvery trail that I could just make out in the dim light.

  I was about to open the door, but then a voice called out to me from the other side.

  ‘It’s just me, Effie,’ I heard Dad say thickly. ‘Give me a minute, would you? Had a foul cold today . . .’

  I let go of the doorknob as though I had been burned.

  I heard Dad coughing and muttering to himself.

  ‘You want a cup of tea?’

  A few coughs later, Dad shouted a ‘Yes’ back. ‘That’s my girl,’ he added, and I went down to the kitchen to put the kettle on the fierce blue flame of the stove.

  I emptied the teapot and rinsed it out carefully, just as Mum used to, and when the kettle began to whistle, I poured the steaming water onto the tea bags so they floated up to the top, and fitted the tea cosy snugly over the pot.

  When Dad came down, he looked a mess: he was wearing an old jumper that I had not seen in a long time. It was too big for him, swamping his body, and the cuffs were frayed and looked like they would unravel with a good tug. His eyes and nose were red.

  ‘How are you, Effie? How are you doing?’ he asked me. His face creased, wincing almost, in expectation of my answer.

  I didn’t want to tell him how I really was. That when I came home that day, I had feared to find not just Mum gone, but him and Tommi too. That I could no longer remember Mum’s eyes exactly – though I imagined them full of tears because of something I’d done.

  ‘I’m, you know, OK,’ I answered. ‘How are you feeling, Dad?’ I put a hand on his forehea
d and poured him a mug of stewed tea, adding a small splash of milk, just the way he likes it. Mum was always better than me at making Dad’s tea just right, but it looked the right sort of colour.

  ‘I’ve felt better, Effie,’ he said with a very small smile. ‘Just need to, you know, rest. I feel so . . . tired.’

  ‘Where’s Tommi?’

  ‘I asked Deidre to have her round today. She was very good about it. Said I’d send you over to get her once you were back.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, standing, eager to retrieve Tommi from Mrs Daniels’s over-tidy stone house. ‘Why don’t you go back to bed? I’ll get dinner on for us. And collect Tommi. What do you fancy? Toasted cheese sandwich? Baked beans?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Dad said. ‘That’d be great.’

  ‘All right then,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right back. You go back to bed,’ I repeated. ‘Get some rest.’

  ‘All right,’ Dad said, but he was still sitting at the kitchen table when I went out into the dark to get Tommi.

  By the time we got home, though, he had shuffled back upstairs. The mug of tea I’d made him was still sitting on the table. He’d barely had two sips.

  I sat down in his chair and wrapped my hands around the cup. There was no warmth left in it, but I didn’t let go. I kept my fingers wrapped around the chilly porcelain, until, sitting there, I began to feel very cold myself.

  I couldn’t stop thinking that I was the reason why Mum had left.

  It was because of what I had said to her that last night. The way I’d said it.

  I’d made her think that I didn’t need her.

  But I did. We all did.

  Chapter Thirteen

  After a couple of months there was a funeral. Of course, there was nothing to bury – Dad said that we needed to talk about it.

  ‘I’ve got something to ask you, Effie. About the funeral,’ he said as I sat down next to him. In the short time since Mum had gone, he seemed to have shrunk. His face had lost its open friendliness; his eyes were permanently red-rimmed.