Dark Sister (2 page)

He flicked the pages open, as if looking for something
pressed between the leaves. Maggie was mesmerised. She felt a thrill of
possessiveness, almost childish in its intensity.
My book,
she wanted to
say.
My house, my chimney, my book.
She
objected to his large, sooty thumbs imprinting on the cover. She wanted to snatch
it from him, but instead she said, "Do you find many things?"

"I once found five hundred quid—"

"Sweeps are lucky," she blurted,
unable to take her eyes from the object in his blackened hands.

"You didn't let me finish. It was in
forged- notes." Finding nothing between the pages, he lost interest in the
book.

"Here." He passed it to
her and proceeded with the task of sweeping, or rather sucking,
the
chimney.

That evening they had a crackling
log fire going in the lounge. They all sat round it staring into the flames as
if it was some new form of light entertainment, except for Dot, who commanded
the place in front of the fire and immediately went to sleep, as if the entire
thing had been introduced for her benefit alone. The newly exposed fireplace
showed off to great effect. An ornate, black, cast-iron surround was inset with
beautiful ceramic tiles in rich autumnal colours. The design had an oriental
feel, depicting peacocks and other exotic birds entwined in mysterious looking
shrubs and trees. Maggie had polished them until they gleamed. The glaze on the
tiles was perfectly preserved, not a single chip or scratch anywhere.

It was, they both agreed happily,
even better than the
Suzman
specimen.

Alex was initially fascinated by what
had been found hidden inside the chimney and every now and then broke the
hypnotic spell of the fire by reading aloud from the book.

It was a leather-bound diary. It
was soiled and slightly charred, but still legible. Alex struggled to decipher
the handwriting, and insisted on reading out what seemed to be mostly shopping
lists. His first flush of excitement soon dulled though, as Maggie knew it
would. Maggie's had not; but for some reason she felt compelled to disguise her
interest in the thing.

"It belonged to someone who
lived here," said Alex.
"Actually lived here over a
hundred years ago!"

Maggie pretended to stifle a yawn.
"Will!
you
give it to your museum?"

"No, I bloody won't. It'll
end up in a box on a shelf in a cupboard in a back room on a forgotten
inventory."

"Some archaeologist you are."

"I know too much about the bloody business."

"Did Daddy swear?" said Sam.

"He said it's time for your bed," said Maggie.

"No, he didn't," said Amy.

Amy had a pageboy head of silky blond hair, and a habit of looking
suddenly from under her fringe. Her eyes were the impenetrable blue-grey of the
mist from a lake. They disarmed. They challenged. Sometimes it was mightily
disconcerting to be wrong-footed by a five-year-old.

"You never miss a trick, do you?" said her father.

"No," said Amy, looking into the fire.

TWO

Amy
had been home from school about an hour. She and Sam
had been playing spitting
games in the garden. It was three days after the discovery of the diary in the
fireplace. Maggie was busy at the kitchen sink—busy in that abstract way of
gazing into the soap suds as if they revealed fleeting, iridescent patterns of
the future—when a bespattered Amy and Sam hurtled into the kitchen.

"Dot dug it up! Dot dug it up!"

"And it wasn't dead and it's gone on the roof!"

"If you've been
spitting..." Maggie started, noticing the suspicious dribble on Sam's
chin, but something about the children's urgency arrested her.

"She did! Dot dug it up, so it isn't dead!"

"What isn't dead?"

"The bird we buried on Saturday. It isn't dead yet."

"Nonsense."

But Amy insisted Maggie should come and look for herself.

Out in the garden, Dot was snuffling in the corner by
the wall, looking vaguely guilty as Maggie approached. The dog was hacking, as
if trying to clear its throat of something unpleasant. Amy pointed to the spot
where Alex and the children had made a shallow grave for the bird they'd
removed from the fireplace. The earth had been disturbed.

"Dot dug it up and got it in her mouth and then
the bird flew away. I saw it."

"Yes it did," said Sam.

Maggie looked hard into the cloudless blue
of Sam's three-year-old eyes. He was going through a phase of lying habitually
about almost anything. But Amy was usually a more reliable witness.

"It can't fly away when it's dead, Amy. Dot must have eaten
it."

"Dot ate it," said Sam.

"No, she didn't!" Amy protested. "I saw it fly!"

Maggie took a stick and poked at the
disturbed soil. It was true, nothing remained there now.

"There it is!" Amy shouted, pointing above her mother's head.

Maggie turned. Perched on the rusting pole
of her washing line, not six feet away, was a sleek blackbird, feathers a
lustrous blue-black, its eye fixed on her. She motioned her arm, expecting it
to fly off, but it didn't move. It squatted there, immobile, watching her.
Maggie took a step backwards.

"That's not the same one.
There are hundreds of blackbirds around here."

"It is the same one," said Amy, "it is."

"Kill it," said Sam.

Maggie felt the prickly contagion
of their childish fear. It transmitted to her, like static. It paralysed her.
It left her shocked, unable to step out of the moment. She had a brief vision
in which she saw herself, all of
them,
her children
and the bird, all caught twitching at the fine strands of some miraculous web.

Then she became conscious that Sam and Amy were
waiting for her to do something. Ridiculous! It was ridiculous that this small,
unremarkable bird should make her afraid like this! At last she picked up a rotting
wicket of wood from the garden. Advancing slowly, she waved the stick before
her. The bird, in its own time, hopped from the pole to the wall before flying
away.

Maggie collected up the children and ushered them indoors.

THREE

Alex
came home late that evening complaining bitterly about
the dig at the castle. A
policy change had been enacted over his head. Since the episode with the bird,
Maggie had had a particularly tiresome afternoon with the kids. Amy had stood
on watch in the garden and had flatly refused to come in even when it had begun
to rain; and when Maggie took her eye off Sam for three seconds while fetching
Amy, he'd promptly emptied a box of breakfast cereal into the dog's dish.
What's more, her period was about to start, and she frankly didn't give a shit
about Alex's grubbing about in the castle ruins.

Meanwhile Alex directed at Maggie the
speeches he would like to have made at work. "Living archaeology they call
it! So now we have to build a walkway round our work just so Joe Public can
come and watch us in action. Maybe I should scatter a few dog bones around the
site."

"Haven't you ever stopped to watch
three men digging a hole in the road?"

Alex ignored her, tearing off his work clothes and
throwing them in a corner of the kitchen. "I told them, just so long as
you don't want to dress me up like Indiana Jones. Didn't know what I was
talking about.
Pretended not to.
How would they like
it?

How many people have to tolerate having their work
closely observed by the public?"

"Footballers.
Actors.
Policemen.
Dentists—"

"Exactly.
Run me a bath, would you?"

"Any particular temperature?"

Alex switched to a wheedling voice.
"Sorry; but you know how I like to be pampered when I get steamed up about
the job. And it's not as if you have anything to do all day."

Alex flinched as he heard his own
words crash. He reached out to her, but she pushed past him and went hammering
up the stairs. In the bathroom she slapped the plug in the hole and throttled
the taps open to release ferocious jets of hot and cold water; she then thumped
heavily back down the stairs, shoved him aside, and snatched up his discarded
work clothes. Alex made to say something conciliatory, thought better of it,
and quietly made his way up to his bath.

While Alex soaked, groaning and
cooing loudly in the tub, Maggie shepherded the kids to bed, nursing a
poisonous indignation. She came downstairs and put a match to their new
living-room fire. It was crackling nicely when Alex appeared wearing a
threadbare dressing gown she hated. He collapsed into an armchair and snatched
up a magazine.

She waved a glossy leaflet at him.
"This came today. Want to look at it with me?"

Alex glanced up, and winced. His
sciatic nerve always rebelled when this subject came up. It was a prospectus
for the local university. Maggie had a yearning to study for a degree in
Psychology.

"Do we have to go through this again? We've
discussed it enough times."

They had. Alex had expressed the view that psychology was
a pseudoscience. Maggie said she didn't give a pseudo-damn about that. Alex
complained that psychology promoted simplistic views of human nature. Good,
Maggie had replied, I'm a simplistic person. Alex had had a dream about
climbing through an open window one night, and made the mistake of telling it
to Maggie. Now he pointedly referred to windows as
"vagina-adultery-suicide-apparatus."

"Alex. I really want to do this course. It's
important to me."

"But it's such lousy timing. You've got a young
family to think about.
Responsibilities."

Yes, they had discussed it before; many times, and
without resolution. The language they used had been repeated so often it had
become symbolic. Maggie employed words like "important" as a stinging
missile. Alex in turn sent up big barrage-balloon words like "family"
and "responsibilities." The words were made available, but they'd
stopped talking to each other.

Underneath it all, Alex was secretly afraid he might
lose her. It was an unspecified anxiety he chose not to analyze. He never took
Maggie for granted; he counted her value above rubies and emeralds, and feared
that one day someone might plot to take her away from him. And the more Maggie
sensed this secret fear, the more trapped she felt.

"I'll go mad if I don't do something.
I mean really mad. I'm already going mad hanging around here. Weird things have
started to happen."

"What weird things?" He put down his magazine.

"Today.
There was a bird.
In the garden.
It
looked
at me."

"It looked at you?"

"Yes. It
looked
at me."

Alex laughed. "Well. I daresay it did."

Maggie stared at him. He pretended to duck
back behind his magazine.

"You," Maggie said at length.

"Uh?"

"You."

The magazine dipped again. "Are you
premenstrual?" he said. "Do you want a cuddle?"

She
outstared
him. The grin vanished from his face. She had to take deep breaths
between her words. "You don't— know—what—I'm talking about! You
just—sit—there and you— DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!"

"All right!
Stop shouting and tell me what you
are
talking about!"

She waited until she felt more
composed. "There was a bird, in the garden, and it looked at me! Not in
any ordinary way. And it frightened me. The children saw it too."

"What kind of a bird?"

"A blackbird."

"An ordinary blackbird?"

"It wasn't ordinary at all. It looked
into
me.
Through me.
I can't explain it." It was as near
to me as you are now, and it wasn't at all afraid. I tried to make it go away
and it wouldn't."

"Perhaps someone had tamed it.
Looked after
it."

"Not this one."

"How do you know?"

"You weren't there." She
chewed her lip, wondering whether to tell him the rest. "The children said
it was the bird you buried in the garden."

"What?"

"Amy said that Dot dug it up
and it flapped its wings and jumped onto the roof."

"Ridiculous."

"I know it sounds ridiculous, but the bird was
gone from where you put it and I told Amy that Dot must have eaten it or
something but I didn't believe it myself."

"Look, you're just—"

"I know! I know! I'm just neurotic! A completely
neurotic housewife with two children and a dog and a dog's dish and a husband
in a dirty old dressing gown! You don't seem to see the point!"

"So what is the point?"

"The point is..." Maggie had to draw a deep breath so that she
could remember the point. "The point is that every day I'm stuck here I
feel like a bird in a wire cage and I want to get out!"

They simultaneously became aware of
Sam standing in the doorway in his pyjamas. The shouting had woken him, and he
was blinking at them with moist, frightened eyes. Alex leapt to his feet,
gathered the boy to him, and brought him over by the fire. He kissed Sam's
neck, a big, bruising, wet, noisy kiss. He told him it was all right, they were
only playing a shouting game.

That night in bed, she did
something which she didn't do very often. When Alex put his hand on her belly,
she turned away from him. He said nothing. They lay awake in the dark, and it
was some time before either of them drifted off to sleep.

FOUR

Amy
was at school and Sam was asleep on the sofa. Maggie
had a precious moment to
herself. She'd been woken in the middle of the night by a thump from
downstairs, where she'd found Sam sleepwalking. She'd tried to pick him up to
carry him back to bed, but he'd woken to complain about nightmares, so she let
him climb in with them. Alex had snored on and Maggie had sighed with guilt.
She knew the shouting had disturbed Sam.

Sam had developed a touch of
conjunctivitis, and after a bad night his eye looked sore. Maggie had a large,
very old
Family Medical Dictionary
passed on to her by her grandmother.
Her family doctor told her the healthiest thing she could do with it was toss
it on a bonfire; he told her books like that only scared people. But she kept
it, consulting the brittle, yellowing pages every time her children suffered
some complaint or other.

She read that conjunctivitis was an
inflammation of the membrane that linked the eyelids and covered the white of
the eye; she read that any but the slightest cases required immediate attention
as blindness might result; and she read that a serious form was caused by
gonorrhoea. She felt rather alarmed by all of this information. The book was
returned to its shelf under the stairs, out of the doctor's sight.

Sam turned in his sleep. Maggie thought
about phoning the clinic for advice; it might even produce another visit to the
doctor. She liked him. He was a young, handsome Asian GP with a wonderful sense
of humour, who always seemed prepared to talk for longer than was strictly
necessary. She picked up the telephone, looked up the number, and then
something made her replace the handset.

She noticed the diary resting on the
mantelpiece above the fire. The diary the sweep had found up the chimney. Alex
must have left it there.

She made herself a coffee and sat down to
leaf through the pages. As well as what appeared to be shopping lists, the
diary contained lists of herbs, what Alex had called "folk remedies."
Her idea was to see if she might find some gentle salve to apply to Sam's eye.

Opening a page at random, she found a list
written in beautiful copperplate handwriting. In places the blue ink had
mellowed to purple and black with age, but the author was meticulous and neat:

That was all. There was no other
entry on the page. Whether it had any relation to the date at the head of the page,
7th February 1891, Maggie had no idea. Neither did she know enough about herbs
to deduce why this selection had been grouped together. The previous page
contained a similar list:

Balm of Gilead
        
Cedar
                    
Cinquefoil

   Cypress
                   
Fern
                      
Honeysuckle

On the following
page, another list of herbs, rather longer.

Maggie turned the pages more
quickly. Some entries seemed to be no more than shopping lists, with no
reference to herbs; occasionally there was a more intriguing entry. On one page
was written simply:

Sell your
coat and buy betony.

There were also
practical remedies.

All
headaches.
Make herbal
sachet of light-blue cloth, sew-into equal parts bruised leaves lavender
peppermint
mugwort
clove
marjoram tie on blue
thread and wear round neck. Sniffing is efficacious.

But beneath that
entry was written:

A. hates me
because of my red hair.

So, the diarist too was a redhead.
Maggie instantly felt an affinity with the writer, for reasons unclear. This
detail of physical appearance, trivial in itself, excited a disproportionate
wave of sympathy and identification. Sure, it was irrational: redheads weren't
denied the fruits of the earth any more than anyone else and, in her
experience, never laid claim to any sisterhood which might exclude a blonde or
a brunette. Yet there it was, and Maggie decided that whoever the diarist was,
she liked her for it.

She leafed through the diary
rapidly, alighting on whatever looked interesting. There were several
"remedies," listing the preparation of poultices, salves, ointments,
oils, and some which seemed simply intended to make smells. Many, however, were
useless, since they didn't say what complaint they claimed to remedy. The diarist
might have known, but Maggie couldn't guess. Then she found something for Sam.

Soreness of eyes all eye complaints,
wax.m
.
juice
of fern camomile eyebright. Salve the sachet w
clove garlic 1 eucalyptus 2 sage
2 saffron
.
Blue cloth.
Can also bring f. to light.

It all sounded
a bit messy. But, she reasoned, it couldn't be any worse than having chemicals
dropped into your eye, which was all the family doctor—however kindly he
was—would prescribe. These were earth remedies, Maggie argued to herself, natural
healing agents that had been handed down over hundreds and hundreds of years
only to be ridiculed and dismissed by a medical industry hell-bent on profit
and too clever for its own good.

She put down
the diary and moved to where Sam was sleeping on the sofa. She stood over him
for a moment. When she put her hand on his forehead, he opened his eyes. There
was still some inflammation in the corner of one eye.

"Want to come shopping with me?" she asked.

"No," said Sam.

"No?"

"Yes."