Frankie fixes me with a firm gaze as he gets ready to leave. ‘You have my number. You can call me if you need to. If I don’t answer just keep trying – I sleep like the dead.’
‘Won’t your wife mind?’
He looks down at the plain band on his wedding finger, almost as if he is surprised to see it.
‘If she does she’s going to need to use a Ouija board to tell me about it.’
It takes a moment for me to make the connection.
‘Oh, Christ, oh, Frankie. I’m so sorry. I feel like – oh – I’m so sorry.’
‘Well, you didn’t know, and it was a long time ago now. Take that look off your face, Stella, you’ve done nothing wrong. She had a brain aneurysm as sudden and lethal as being hit by a fourteen-wheeler. There was no warning, no history and no second chance. I’ve made my peace with it, so you mustn’t worry. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Again, with feeling.’
‘Okay.’
Chapter 18
It has been just three days since I stopped taking my pills – the ‘drifters’ – and I’m wide awake. It feels like a circuit has blown in the soft tissue of my brain. My thoughts knot and tangle and the clarity, when it comes, is so stark I immediately shrink from it. The room is cold. Blue, lying at the foot of my bed, lifts his head and barks once, sharply. He looks at the ceiling and stands, whining uneasily, ears flat against his skull. The air feels electrically charged, an imperceptible buzz. I check the time, it is nearly a quarter to three in the morning, and I am starting to shiver. Blue begins to pace, and I cross the room to open the door for him, pulling my blanket around my shoulders. In the hallway the smell is rising like heat. Something like lakes and deep water slightly corrupted. Vegetative and overripe. With the light on I can see another huge damp patch on the stairwell. It covers nearly a third of the wall, right down to the skirting boards. I can see the places where it has dripped down onto the carpet. It looks to me like a figure in profile, one hand raised. I think of immurement, of being walled in. I can even see cracks in the plaster spreading out like tendrils of hair.
Blue is whining downstairs, back and forth in front of the back door. I open it for him and he disappears into the dark garden. I switch on the lamp and see another damp patch on the wall, blooming like a toxic fungus. Another in the sitting room, slightly hidden by the sofa, so wet it is almost black. I call for Blue but my voice has shrunk. It is a whisper. ‘Blue.’ There is a patch of water on the floor beside the back door. I’m sure it wasn’t there when I let the dog outside. I smell it but it is not urine, it is briny and rich. Seawater.
‘Blue!’
This time I hang in the doorway, peering into the darkness. There is no movement in the garden, no barking. The rain has stopped but the branches are still dripping, I can hear it.
‘Blue?’
I go outside. The moon is barely visible behind the clouds and there are no stars, just a perfect darkness. I cannot see the dog anywhere and I think of the cliffs and their lethal drop-offs and I am suddenly afraid. I call him again and turn back to the house thinking I should go after him, thinking I should get some wellies and a torch.
It’s not the movement I see first, although something has drawn my eyes to the upper window, my bedroom window.
There is a hand pressed against the glass, long, pale fingers which leave no residue, ghost-white. I stare and stare and then something shoots past me, moving at speed, and I see it’s Blue cowering in the doorway, and when I look up again there is nothing there at all.
The next afternoon I take Blue to the beach. We take the main road, walking carefully along the overgrown grass verge. The bluster of the wind lifts my hair, fussing it about my ears. Blue walks ahead a little way, always throwing cautious glances behind him as if to reassure himself I am still there. By the time we reach the outskirts of town I am so hot I have tied my jumper round my waist. I have noticed that the waistband of my jeans is roomy and my engagement ring has worked loose, sliding to the first knuckle of my finger. I must remember to eat.
‘Blue!’
He is sniffing around the wall of the house selling the eggs, the one with the old Range Rover marooned on the grass.
‘Blue!’
Too late. His head lifts and he sees a chicken in the yard, scratching in the dirt. He barks once and takes off, bounding over the low wall and into the front garden. The chicken makes a noise like an engine sputtering and lurches for the doorway. Blue utters another volley of barks, and I call him from the road. ‘Come back! Come back, Blue!’ Just for a moment I think he will, but then he pushes his nose against the gap in the door and slides through it, following the chicken into the house. I am just in time to see his tail disappear into a thick wedge of darkness. I stand there for a moment, breathless. Any second I expect to see him creep back out, looking up at me with a guilty expression, but after a minute has passed I realise I am going to have to go and get him. I can remember the way the woman in the doorway had looked at me, the way she had lifted her red hands. A warning, or a bloodied supplication. Lady Macbeth. Head down, I cross the yard quickly.
The doorbell is hidden beneath a screen of ivy. The button is missing, leaving just a small black hole like the pupil of an eye. I knock and wait. The red paint of the door looks new but the frame around it is rotting, the soft wood splintering away. This close I can see that the house is in a state of quite advanced disrepair. The windows are streaked with bird shit and dirt, and most of the panes are cracked. Gaps in the roof like a mouthful of rotten teeth. Brown, scorched grass, moss stippling the walls. A chicken appears from a little outhouse and pecks at the ground by my feet. One of its claws is shrunken and deformed, curled against its belly.
I push open the front door. Looking in, I can see a length of faded red carpet, worn wooden floorboards. There is an archway to the left of the stairs leading, I assume, towards the back of the house, to the kitchen or the dining room. There’s a closed door immediately to my left, and next to it a telephone mounted to the wall, the old-fashioned type with a rotary dial. There are no pictures or ornaments or decoration of any kind. It smells warm and musty, like a sunlit barn. I call out.
‘Hello? Blue?’
I am walking slowly down the hallway, listening. I can see holes in the wall where the plaster has fallen out in great chunks. It crunches beneath my feet. There is a sudden clatter just up ahead behind the closed door, something falling to the floor. I walk towards it beneath an archway where plaster cherubs gaze at me with sightless eyes. I push the door open and go into the kitchen.
It is full of chickens. A large black bantam is roosting in the sink. Others clutter the shelves and scratch on the surface of the table. A pot rack is suspended over the table and the metal pans rattle together tunelessly as more birds settle on the bars. A drift of snowy white feathers like snowflakes. Everything is covered in bird shit, white and hard and cracked like old porcelain. Blue is darting about the room, mouth agape while the hens shriek and shuffle. I make to grab one to lift it away from him, and it pecks at the ridges of my hand, where the skin is thin and easily torn. I cry out, dropping the bird, cradling my injured hand to my chest.
A voice from behind makes me jump, and I have to stifle a scream.