‘OK. OK. Your slave is coming.’ I’m not keen on attics. I don’t like dark, enclosed spaces. They give me the heebie-jeebies, but I can’t just leave her up there stranded.
There’s nothing to be scared of.
I start up the ladder. Mrs Danvers watches me. I know who is top dog in this house and it’s a cat.
She disappears as I get to the top. Typical. I put my head through the opening. While it’s not pitch black, it is dark enough to be scary. Something swings right in front of my face and I jolt and have to grab the ladder tighter with sweaty hands.
It’s just a light cord. Jumpy, much?
I reach forward to pull it. The attic floods with light. ‘Wow!’
‘I know. Right?’ Mrs Danvers doesn’t actually voice these words out loud, but her expression says it all. She looks well pleased with herself and I’m not surprised. This is no ordinary attic.
‘I expected a couple of suitcases and a few broken boxes.’
She purr-laughs and I do too.
There are trunks everywhere. A spinning wheel with gold thread on a bobbin. An old Singer sewing machine with a peddle. Boxes upon boxes tied with chiffon scarves or string. Hats of every shape and colour. Fear forgotten, I clamber up to investigate.
The temperature is at sauna level, but there’s an oval window I squeak open on its hinges. A vague draught struggles in. Looking down, I can see the flowers we rescued from the conservatory. Mrs Danvers wanders out through the porthole across the roof. I guess she must be able to get down? I’ll leave the window open anyway.
Pictures of birds of all sorts – some ink drawings, some oil paintings, all museum-old. A galleon in a bottle. Satin ballet shoes, pale blue and moth-eaten. A ship’s wheel, which is heavier than I expected. Stars dangle from the ceiling, made of something silver and flimsy, so they flitter and swirl. Swathes of materials make billowing seas. I sift jewel-coloured buttons through my fingers. A chorus of marionettes dangle from hooks. I find a mirror and wrap taffeta around my head, so I look like a pink palm tree.
‘Hello?’ Dorcas’s head pops up through the hatch before I can rip the taffeta off. School must have finished. ‘It’s a good look for you.’
‘I thought so.’
‘No one answered, so I let myself in. I hope you don’t mind?’
I don’t.
‘You missed precisely nothing at school.’
I’m glad. I wouldn’t like to have missed anything important.
‘Yowzers. This place is awesome to the maximum.’
‘I know. I only just found it, but it’s unbelievable, isn’t it?’
Dorcas picks up the ship’s wheel and steers it, proving she is stronger than me, then grabs a gold-and-silver turban and puts it on. ‘A real collection of curios. Your family are way cool.’
My chest bursts with pride.
Dorcas scoots about, gasping at everything. She kneels down, opens a big trunk full of clothes and starts rummaging through.
Dad said some of my mum’s things are stored in this house. I go back to the cold smoothness of the multi-coloured buttons, let them giggle and jingle through my fingers into the jar.
She finds a pair of frilly bathers and shakes them at me. ‘Just the thing for our current weather.’
‘Have you been to the waterfall the others have been talking about?’
Dorcas looks at me through an iridescent purple sari. ‘Yes. The Seven Sisters and the Falls of Snow. Beautiful. We should definitely go. You’d love it.’
‘I have been there before. When I was a baby. There’s a photo of me and my mum…’
‘It would be so lovely and cool there right now. Wild swimming is the absolute best. I went in a lake in Cardiff once and a seriously Baltic one in Snowdonia in the snow. The waterfall would be perfect in this sweltering heat. Sure you don’t want to change your mind and put these on?’ She shakes the bathers at me again.
‘No chance.’
She’s having so much fun going through the trunk I decide to brave one myself. I find a donkey’s head on the top. It’s made of felt and the ears used to have wires to hold them up, but the material has slipped so the ears flop forward and cover the eye holes.
Inside, there are wands painted gold, part of a cardboard wall, and an elaborate moon on a stick. I know what this is. It’s the costumes for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production where my dad saw my mum and fell in love with her. I handle each one with care, laying them down gently next to another. Puck. Oberon. A lion’s head, that I guess must be one of the players’.
It’s there, inside a cotton cover-all. The costume I’ve seen photos of my mother in. Hermia’s dress. It’s so beautiful. A shimmering moss-green with leaves around the neckline and a brocade skirt. Tiny gold threads run through the material and it has silver spiderwebs embroidered all over it. I’ve heard so many stories about it. It doesn’t feel real to hold it and know she once wore it. I feel a tear roll down my nose and plop on to the bodice. Then another. I have to sit back from the material or I’ll spoil it.
‘Are you OK?’ Dorcas kneels in front of me. She has an eye patch and a toy seagull clipped to her shoulder.
‘It’s my mother’s. It was my mum’s.’ I rub my tears away with my palms, but they just keep on flowing. ‘They used to put on plays in the garden. This was one of her costumes.’
‘That’s amazing. It’s so beautiful.’
Dorcas is the very best friend I will ever have.
‘I don’t know why I’m crying. It was so long ago that she died that I can’t even really remember her.’ I’m trying to stop the tears, but it’s no good. ‘I think I’m crying for the … I don’t know, I think it’s the space she left behind. Her absence. Does that make sense?’
I rub more roughly at the tears.
‘Of course, it does.’ Dorcas moves closer and puts her arm around my shoulders. ‘And don’t stop crying. It’s a moment of joy and sadness and it deserves tears. That’s what my nan always said to me when I was upset.’
I cry hard then. Really, properly cry for everything that isn’t. Soon, the tears start to subside, as if I’ve cried so hard and so fast, they’ve run out.
‘Better?’
‘Much.’
‘Tears carry excess stress hormones out of your body, it’s a well-known fact.’
We both burst out laughing. Our friendship has moved into something new, something more honest and real. It’s never happened to me before, but I can feel the shift so clearly and with my whole heart. I can talk to her about anything. I know it.
I ask, ‘Who do you think The Witch is?’
‘That’s so peculiar. I was just wondering the same thing.’
‘It could be anyone, couldn’t it?’
‘I suppose so but, let’s look at the facts. It has to be someone who has knowledge of people’s histories.’