Dark Sister (11 page)

EIGHTEEN

The
Maggie dig turned up a third knife identical to the first two,
and another half a tin
plate. Alex
was having
to keep an eye on both
archaeological efforts simultaneously. He didn't entirely trust his mainly
volunteer crew to do a decent job. He needed to be in both places at once. He
was afraid they might miss some vital but unspectacular piece of scientific
information in their eagerness to turn up museum-quality artefacts.

"Just slow down, for God's
sake!" he was always telling them. "It's the fine details that
count."
He'd started bawling people out, and never heard
himself until it was too late.

When the third dagger and the
second half-plate appeared, he marshalled the crew into working around the
objects with a fine brush until
he—and
only he—could
lift them out. The half-plate was a perfect match to the first, cleanly sliced
down the middle. It was found at a distance of eighteen inches from its other
half. The first two daggers had been set at approximately two feet apart. The
third was two feet from the second dagger and four feet from the first.

Alex marked the points of each find
and connected the markers with a line of tape. It produced an isosceles
triangle, its equal sides each intersecting the position in which the half-plates
had been found. Alex instructed the three student volunteers he'd assigned to
the job to dig round the apex of the triangle.

"WHAT'S THAT?" he screamed at
one of the students, a youth with his hair tied back in a ponytail.

"This?" said the student, holding up a delicate trowel.

"Yes! That, that, that stone-breaking implement! What is it?"

The boy looked at the object in his hand
as if someone else had put it there. At length he said, "It's a
trowel."

"This is not a fucking quarry! This
is surgery! Use SOMETHING ELSE!"

Alex stormed back to his main dig,
leaving the students to exchange looks.

In the playroom Maggie was prising up wooden tiles.
Every evening Amy took a great delight in checking on the worsening stain
under the rug and reporting back that it was taking on the semblance of a face
more and more with each passing day. Maggie made a great show of scoffing at
the idea to Amy, but admitted to herself that it was indeed easy to discern a
face in the pattern of the staining.

She'd moved the rug aside herself
from time to time and saw what
was unmistakably a pair of
eyes
(though rather far apart), a nose (though set at something of an
angle) and a mouth turned back in an expression of sadness and suffering.

Alex had already established that there was no damp
rising through the floor. There was nothing spilled or running between the
tiles. Now Maggie had decided to leave the stained area
untiled
.
Beneath the tiles was the bare concrete which Alex had put down over the
original cellar floor. She simply laid the rug across the exposed concrete and
tossed the stained tiles in the bin.

While his mother was upstairs discarding the tiles,
Sam charged around the playroom brandishing his plastic sword. He hacked and
slashed at an opposing army, single-handedly putting them to flight, ran his
sword through a few small enemies, and stabbed a bean bag for good measure.
Then he slumped on the bean bag, recovering his breath while deciding what to
do next.

Something moist struck him sharply on his cheek.

Something had spat at him.

He heard a hiss. He stood up from the bean bag and
turned unsteadily. Slap. It struck him again, stinging and wet on the cheek. It
burned like a smack to the face.

He knew where it was coming from. He turned to face the
potted geranium.

Inside the plant was a living, full sized face.
An old woman's face.
Sam recognized her. She leered at him
and grinned, blinking her eyes. Her face was made of leaves, her skin green,
wrinkled, and veined like the leaves of the geranium, her teeth yellow.

It was the old woman who had stolen his doll. Who had
beckoned him along the catwalk at the Gilded
Arcade.
She hissed at him. She produced hands out of the branches of the plant, brown
hands with cracked yellow fingernails. She hissed again and opened her mouth.
Her long black venomous tongue unfolded from between her cracked lips, a foot
long, like a snake, inching toward him.

Sam's screams brought Maggie running down the cellar
steps. She found Sam stamping his feet, screaming in
an
hysterical high-pitched wail, sucking in air in huge gulps between screams, his
eyes streaming. He was hacking violently at a plant on a low table with his
plastic sword. Maggie scooped him up in her arms, but he did not stop screaming
or swinging his plastic sword.

"What is it, Sam?"

He only shrieked more hysterically.

Maggie carried him out of the playroom and up the
stairs. The leaves and broken branches of the geranium lay in an untidy
scattering at the foot of the low table.

NINETEEN

"Never put a geranium where there's a child."
This was Old
Liz's
advice.

Maggie had changed her mind about
not visiting her again. It bothered her that there was simply no one to whom
she could turn for support; at least no one who could remotely understand what
she had to say, let alone help her to say it. Alex wouldn't begin to listen.
Ash at the shop was sympathetic, but somehow always on guard. However senile or
even lunatic the old woman had originally appeared, Maggie decided she was the
nearest to a kindred spirit available.

If there was a conclusion to be drawn from that,
Maggie had steered away from it and had returned to Old Liz's house to recount
the episode with Sam and the plant. Ash had told her Liz had a taste for
sherry, so Maggie had brought her a bottle. The old woman had accepted the
bottle without a word, setting it down and withdrawing from her pantry a bottle
of homemade elderberry wine. "As for geraniums, no child will thrive with
one. I know that. And you should know that."

"Why should I know that?"

Liz took a sip of blueblood elderberry wine.
"Why, she says?" tapping her stick on the rug. "Why? Because
you're a one as knows, or says you are."

"I've never said anything!" Maggie
protested.

Liz grinned and made the same melodramatic gesture
she'd made on Maggie's first visit, hugging herself like some deeply repressed
thing. "But," she said, dropping the pose, "I see you're
opening. Like a flower."

Liz pulled such faces when she spoke that Maggie
wanted to laugh. "Is that what you see?"

Liz became serious again. "A one's got to be open
to the world if a one's
goin
' to find her way. That's
why you've got a money box. Open to the world." Maggie smiled. She hadn't
heard it called a money box since she was a girl.

Liz
uncrooked
a finger and
jabbed it at her, backwards and forwards. "Stick it in, stick it in,
stick
it in. That's all those
fellas
can do. Stick it in. Good for
nowt
else. That's why
they don't know anything. They can't."

"Don't you get men who ..." Maggie picked up
Liz's circumspect language. "Who are
ones.
Can't
men be ones?"

"Oh, you do get 'em. Oh you do. You do." The
old woman leaned forward. "Some."

"Is Ash one?"

"
Pssshhttt
!!!"
Liz waved her stick. "What you want to talk another for? Eh? You don't
talk another! Eh?" She seemed quite angry.

The rebuke made Maggie feel like a little girl. She
couldn't understand why Liz tolerated her when her presence so easily inflamed
the old woman. And then her acid manner would dissolve instantly, with equal
unpredictability. She began to suspect the old woman might be teasing, playing
with her.

"I'm sorry—"

"Do you like it? I said do you like it?"

Maggie realized she was referring to the
elderberry wine. "It's lovely. Do you make it every year?"

"Take one o’ them bottles for that husband o'
yorn
."

"That's very..." Maggie tailed
off. She'd suddenly spotted a way in. "Would you show me how to make it as
good as this?"

"How much will you give me?" Liz said, in a flash

"Whatever you want."

Liz rocked with laughter. She
pulled a grubby handkerchief from her sleeve to wipe the tears from her eyes.
"There's a good un! That's a good 'un, ain't it?" She laughed again,
a high-pitched laugh. "That's what Ash says." She recovered. "I might
show you. I might. There's a lot to know about the
owd
gal."

Old girl.
That was a term Bella used for elder in the diary. Maggie took the diary from
her handbag and tried to show it to Liz, but the old woman seemed to grow
annoyed. She waved it away.
"Books!
You don't
want books!
Books'll
do you no good at all, and no
one any good. Them as write 'em is the worst, and them as read 'em; there's no
good in any of 'em.
Books!"

It seemed important to put up some
kind of argument. "There must be some good books! What about the Bible?"

"Bible?
Eh? That only gives the worst ones an excuse to argue. Did it mean this, did it
mean
t'other
? No. We don't want these books."

Maggie slipped the diary back
inside her handbag. "When do you pick the elder? For the wine, I
mean."

"
Owd
gal, well now . . ."

The old woman was a fund of both
lore and practical information regarding the virtues and vices of the
magnificent elder. Not only concerning the making of wine, but also of jam, and
a lot more besides. It was a plant, she observed more than once, "as runs
both ways." Maggie took this to mean it could have both beneficial and
malign properties, something Liz had also said of the geranium. She wouldn't
have elder wood in her house, and said a child's cradle should never be made of
elder. Maggie wondered if
Mothercare
knew about
these things. But the leaves kept flies away from a house, Liz maintained, and
were useful for toothache and depression. Pinned on a stable door it would stop
any horse from being hag-ridden, and before Maggie could ask about that, Liz
told her an elder cure for warts and a conciliatory rhyme used by woodcutters:

Owd
gal
give
me some o' thy wood

And
I'll give thee some o' mine

 
When I grow into a tree.

Maggie's head was spinning with
information when the old woman surprised her by suggesting they go out and pick
some from the hedgerows.

"Can you get about on your
stick?"

Liz chuckled and pulled herself to
her feet. "We'll see. Pull that door to behind. Let's look to the
owd
gal. Come on, what're you waiting for?"

Alex was fast losing patience with
the volunteers at the dig. He claimed they were drifting from the precise spot
where he'd instructed them to work. If he didn't supervise them on the
original dig, they disturbed and confused his sophisticated system of depth
markings; if he neglected to oversee them on the Maggie dig, they started
hacking at the earth like navvies.

"You do understand plain
English?" he'd shouted.

"Yes," said the boy with
the ponytail, "I've secured a place at Oxford University to study the
subject."

Alex glowered. The other students
turned away to hide their smirks. He was livid, clenching his fists at his
sides until his knuckles turned white. Someone came up behind him and said he was
wanted on the telephone.

"What?"

"Said it was
urgent."
The man from the ticket office pointed across the site.
"You'll have to take it in my pay box."

Alex had to walk fifty yards to the
ticket office. He snatched up the phone. It was their childminder.

When they returned from the field,
Maggie looked at the clock and let out a groan.
"Oh no.
I'm going to be late for Amy and Sam!" She laid her bag of elderberries on
the table. "I'm going to have to fly!"

"Eh? But you've only just got
here." Liz protested. "What's the use o' coming if you're going to go
before you've arrived?"

"Can't be helped!"
Maggie swept out
of the door.

"Bugger off then," the old woman shouted.

She followed as far as the gate and
watched Maggie scurry down the cinder path, climb into her car, and speed away.
"Aye," she said to herself. "You might or you might not
do."

When Maggie arrived home, Alex and the
children were at the kitchen table, eating sandwiches.

"Sorry," said Maggie. Alex
remained tight-lipped. She brushed Amy's hair from her eyes. "You all
right?" she said. Amy nodded, holding a crescent of a sandwich to her
mouth. Sam, too, was all right. Everyone was all right.
Except
Alex.

Maggie put a hand on his shoulder.
"Alex, it's just that I met this wonderful old lady and she wanted me to
go for a walk with her ... I know I've let you down again."

Alex spoke so calmly, and in such measured
sentences, it was obvious he was boiling inside. "I was summoned today,
summoned, from my place of work, by no other than my son's child-minder. I had
to leave off the responsible task of supervising several incompetent and
insolent layabouts, risking the project and thus my professional reputation, in
order to mollify said angry childminder ..."

"Alex—"

He held a finger in the air. ".. .
in
order to carry out one of the few simple tasks allotted
to my wife in any working day. In the general ratio of distribution of tasks
and workload in a relationship between two' people, I must declare—no,
protest—that this is just a
tad
unfair."

"Alex, I'm sorry. Look. I
brought you a peace offering." Maggie handed him the bottle of elderberry
wine.

Alex looked at the unlabeled
bottle, stood up, and took it outside. There was the sound of it smashing in
the yard. Alex disappeared past the kitchen window, looking intent on a visit
to the Merry Fiddler. Maggie held her head in
her
hands.

"Daddy's angry," said Amy.

Sam smiled, because he thought it was all a kind of game.