A Trick of the Mind (3 page)

As I stood, cherishing those memories, the house stirred, creaked. I don’t believe in ghosts, but that day, I felt Aunty May’s presence. Her breath and her footfall. She had not left
yet, or perhaps the house had not released her spirit. The wind chime placed on the back porch (it would have been rattled to death by the easterly winds on the front) tinkled as if she’d
just passed, even when not a breeze stirred the air. And in the fine veil of sand that coated the worn boards and linoleum inside I could make out the fresh imprint of her slippers.

As I moved into the kitchen, something fell onto the counter – rocked there for a moment, making that faint, regular sound a coin makes as it spins to a halt. I went across to peer at what
had dropped but couldn’t find a thing.

There was the corner of something jutting from one of the floorboards. An edge of fabric. I pulled at it and wriggled it and tugged at it and at last it slithered out. It was a child’s
bib, made of cotton with a hand-painted picture on the front – in May’s distinctive style, a fabric painting of a small lopsided figure with a crooked leg outside an old house with the
words ‘Crooked House’ above it, and the words from the rhyme inscribed beneath it. Where had I last heard that song? Even in the Key Stage One classes at school we didn’t sing
nursery rhymes any more – it was all calypso or African call and response chants or Indonesian folk songs. But I could hear a voice sing quite distinctly: ‘
There was a crooked man
and he walked a crooked mile and he found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
’

The bib. It might have been mine, or Ben’s. Perhaps it had lain hidden under the floorboards since I was a child and first came down to stay with her?

I tucked it into a drawer in the duck-egg blue, Fifties sideboard that had been there forever. Ben and I would sort these drawers later. They were stuffed full of tea towels and linen and
trinkets that didn’t fit on the shelves – napkin rings and half-used birthday cake candles and biscuit tins rusting at the edges with faded pictures on the top. I picked up one of these
tins, with a Victorian reproduction of a little girl on the lid, and prised it open. Inside was a piece of paper inscribed with the words ‘A piece of you’. I lifted it up. Underneath, a
lock of fair hair. I gagged, put the paper back and the lid back on the box, stuffed it into the drawer and closed it.

Beside me, the curtains moved almost imperceptibly.

I took a step back. Let some quiet seconds go by. Someone, I was convinced, stood in the doorway through to her back room. I thought I saw a shadow. I had the sense of a presence. But when I
turned, there was no one there.

I knew without question that May hadn’t fully left yet.

So to clear out her paintings and canvases and to sell her house to a stranger seemed brutal to me. Like a violation of everything that made May who she used to be, who she
still was.

That night I’d shown Ben the bib and, gingerly, the hair, and he laughed and reminded me that May had always been a bit eccentric, although we knew her so well, it hadn’t seemed so
to us.

‘Always collecting odd bits from the shore. Bird skulls and dried starfish and bones for her art. And remember when she took us right out in that tiny rowing boat, onto the sea, and you
were crying and saying you wanted to turn back and she seemed not to hear you? And in the end I shouted at her and she did finally turn the boat around?’

The memory began to surface, fleetingly bright and hard, before it shimmered and slipped away again.

‘I thought we were going over the sea to France,’ Ben said. ‘I wasn’t afraid that she was taking a risk, I was afraid because I thought there were dragons across the
sea!’ He laughed. Now Ben mentioned them, other things began to come back to me.

Moments when May seemed to not be there. Times when she kept us up so late at night it began to feel wrong, as if she had simply forgotten that children need to go to bed. Once she had fallen
asleep herself and Ben and I were still playing around her and I had taken it upon myself to take Ben up to bed. I must have been six or seven then, and Ben only three or four.

A sort of darkness, underlying the things that we did that were more exciting than anything I’d known before.

The house had lain empty over the winter. It had needed time. I had needed time.

After Christmas I had come down with Finn a couple of times. I didn’t know much about houses, how quickly they deteriorated when no one inhabited them. As if they languished from grief
themselves. Finn didn’t know much either, I was soon to discover. I told my mother not to worry, though, that we’d do our best to maintain it. We aired it – throwing open windows
– and went around sweeping away cobwebs and mouse droppings and the dead insects that collected far more quickly than I would have imagined.

I painted the back porch.

Finn managed to fix a lock on the back door. He put up a banister on the rickety stairway, using, ingeniously, an old broomstick. He was resourceful like that, any old bit of driftwood and he
could turn it into a shelf, or a stool, a table. May had met Finn, and she had liked this about him. His inventiveness. Now he hung curtains on pieces of rope he found down by the fishing huts. I
used to love this about Finn too when I’d first moved into the Mile End flat. His makeshift constructions – everything he touched he could turn into something useful, or into a piece of
art.

But it was dawning on me that I didn’t want this here. If this was going to be my house I wanted to do it my way, bring something different to it, bring new life into it. I wanted to
renovate it with my own, more minimalist ideas. It was the first time I’d ever owned something that was completely mine. And I wanted to make the decisions.

‘We don’t need money, we don’t need to consume,’ Finn argued, bending a piece of wire into a loo-roll holder for the downstairs bathroom. ‘Most things can be
constructed out of recycled found-objects.’

I began to find his presence irritating, stifling. He never gave me any space.

‘Show your mum you can look after it and she’ll stop badgering you to sell up,’ Finn said, sitting outside on the dune, smoking a roll-up. That was when he’d put his arm
round me and said the words in my ear. The words that tipped everything over the edge so I knew it had to end. ‘We can bring our kids up here,’ he said.

And now I’d decided to come, invite friends, bring some life back into the house, to do it my way.

I wanted to let the last feather-like ashes of May’s memory fall back, to settle out there on the salt flats.

Then I could start afresh.

CHAPTER FOUR

My mobile sounded in my bag, startling me out of my catatonic state after hearing the radio news. I stared at it, as if it might explode in my face.

It was Louise.

‘It’s taken us forever. The road was closed. There was some accident, and we went on a mad diversion through the depths of the countryside. It really is the sticks out here! But
we’re nearly there now. We’re in the high street by a pub. What’s it called, Guy? Oh. The King’s Head.’

I gave her directions and went downstairs to tell Chiara.

‘Great.’ She filled our glasses. Liam held his up and tiny bubbles shot out of its top in a fountain. I saw him through the golden liquid, smiling, his face distorted by the
glass.

‘Congratulations, Ellie,’ he said. ‘Happy house-warming, and bloody ace job getting those paintings into the exhibition.’

Had I hit something on the road back there? The impact had slammed my wing mirror back against the door. Who was to say it wasn’t me who had hit the man, injured him, maybe fatally, and
hadn’t stopped?

The car had jerked, tilted to the left. I’d been distracted by Pepper. I hadn’t gone back.

‘Ellie?’

‘Yes?’

‘I said shall I put the pasta on now?’

‘Sorry. Yes, of course, let’s get the dinner on the go.’

No. I was being a fool. Letting irrational thoughts control me, when I’d resolved not to, any more.

A beam lit up the table in the sitting room as a car swung onto the shingle and there was the crunch of tyres and the slam of car doors, and the door burst open and Louise stood there, bleached
and blonde and tall and gorgeous and we hugged each other. I realised I’d been feeling a little anxious about seeing her after all this time. Louise, like me, had continued to work as an
artist, when we’d all left art college, and had emailed to say she’d sent some of her work to the same gallery, when she heard they were looking for contributors. There were only six
artists exhibiting, however, and Louise hadn’t been chosen. In her shoes, I might have found this tricky, but perhaps this new man she’d met in Australia, who, by all accounts, she was
madly in love with, had helped cushion the blow.

‘Louise!’ I said, and we kissed on the cheeks and hugged each other the way we’d always done.

‘I bought you these,’ Louise said. She thrust a huge bouquet into my arms. ‘Lilies for your new house!’ Her curly hair had grown long and her teeth looked very white,
like the lilies.

‘You look fantastic, Louise,’ I said. ‘Even more beautiful than you already were.’

I filled a large vase with water and arranged the flowers so they fanned out, their stiff waxy petals white and bloodless, leaving a dusting of pollen on my sleeve. A vision of roadside shrines
of flowers like these burst into my head. I’d had the music on loud, and I still heard a thump. Does a branch make a thump? I’d been looking at Pepper, not at the road. I hadn’t
listened to the thoughts in my head that told me to turn the car around, go back, check.

And now someone was in hospital and I had no idea how bad it might be.

‘We’ve got three things to celebrate,’ Louise said, taking a glass from Chiara.

‘Ellie’s exhibition, Chiara and Liam’s new addition, and . . .’ She stopped and smiled up at Guy, the tall blond Aussie she had brought with her, and he took her hand and
held it out.

‘We’re engaged,’ she said, ‘and just look at the ring.’

‘It’s gorgeous, Louise. Congratulations.’

I don’t think anyone noticed that I hardly ate. I moved the pasta about my plate, and smiled, but all the time the thoughts kept coming at me. The impact on the car, the
way it had swerved as I looked at Pepper. I rifled through the images in my memory – could I have been mistaken? Were those broken branches I saw in the mirror, lying on the road? Or were
they bits of a body, broken and scattered?

But the impact would have been bigger if I had hit a man, wouldn’t it?

What if the man was dead? Might I be his
killer
?

When we’d cleared the dishes, I ran upstairs. It was eleven o’clock. There would be local news. I turned on the radio and listened. The item told me that the young
man in the hit-and-run incident on the A1095 was in a worse condition. No one had come forward. The incident had happened at approximately eight forty-five.

Well that sorted it.

It had been eight fifteen when I’d gone along that stretch of road. I remembered glancing at the clock. It couldn’t have been me.

No way.

‘Police are appealing . . .’ I switched it off. Went downstairs. In the kitchen I smoothed my hair in the glass, composed myself. The others had rolled a joint and the pungent smell
of weed permeated the sitting room. Liam lolled back, a hole in the knee of his baggy jeans, with Chiara dressed in her assortment of mismatched vintage clothes leaning back against him. I loved my
friends. I wanted to join them in their happy haze, but the thought wouldn’t leave me.

It was a quiet road, and there were all those shadows. If the man, boy – the radio hadn’t specified his age – had been lying there, unable to get up, it could well have taken
half an hour before another driver spotted him, which would mean he could have been hit at eight fifteen, as I drove round that bend.

If the driver had knocked the man over and only realised later, what would they do? If they only realised after hearing the news item that it was them?

Would they go to the police?

Or would they keep quiet?

If they went to the police, how crazy that would sound.

‘I only just realised.’ As if they wouldn’t have noticed before.

The police would think they were crazy, or a liar, and they
would
be crazy or a liar, because no one could hit a person at that speed on a road and not know it straight away.

Everyone was dazed with fatigue by now, discussing the cultural differences between London and Sydney.

‘I’ll just take Pepper out for a wee,’ I told them, and clipping on his lead I went outside. The wind had dropped a bit but the rain was coming down in a fine mist. The sea
swished and crashed against the beach, over the dune. There was a smell of rotting things. Was it the same smell I had breathed in with such relish earlier? Now it smelt rancid, fishy, unpleasant.
The wind must be blowing up from the fishing huts huddled over to the west of here, where lobster pots and abandoned boats and discarded fish carcasses had been left in the brine and were beginning
to fester.

I opened the passenger door of my car and switched on the ignition and the lights. I walked around it.

Nothing I could discern, no dent, no scratch. Pepper was snuffling away at something on the car, licking at it. I looked more closely. Or was there something there, close to the wing mirror,
where it had folded in with the impact? A dark patch. My heart rate sped up again. I pushed the wing mirror back into place and saw that the glass had shattered. No! I imagined a person stepping
out from the shadows, taking the impact from the wing of the car without my seeing, then being thrust back against the tarmac into the depths of those tall hedges. My hand strayed to the dark patch
on the car that Pepper had been licking. It came away with a dark sticky brown stain. The same as the stuff on my dress?

It was blood.

I knew what I had to do.

I would drive back the way I came. I would remember, if I went the same way and looked into my rear-view mirror, re-creating my journey, whether I had hit a man or whether I hadn’t.