Hold My Hand (4 page)

“Jesus,” says Bridget. “Like living on beans is going to sort my problems.”

They drink again.

“I don’t know what I'm going to do,” she says, “if I don’t get it.”

“I know,” says Carol. “I know.”

Chapter Six

The figurines won’t stay still.

There are only three of them now, since the house was let out to holidaymakers; the family were doubtful about leaving anything at all that could fit so easily in a pocket, but Landmark let it be known that the sort of tenants who take Cornish manor houses rather than marina flats or villas on the Costas tend to be disappointed if those houses come free of embellishment, in the same way they would always rather an old brass bedstead than a modern, germ-free divan. Even Americans will put up with antique plumbing if they find enough chipped Meissen and oils of the surrounding countryside scattered about the place.

“Gen-yew-whine,” he mutters as he passes through the dining room and sees that they've turned again: Charles II, Prince Albert and Disraeli, facing in toward the mantel mirror, gazing sternly out, downturned mouths and steely porcelain eyes reflected into the room.

He’s used to it, now. It’s been happening since his childhood – he remembers his grandmother muttering, much as he is doing himself, as he turns them back out again – and the fixed and disapproving faces in the glass no longer have the power to make the back of his neck prickle as they did when he was an imaginative teenager. They’ve tried everything, over the years – Blu-tak, even superglue – but nothing seems to hold them in place. It’s just another feature of the house. Another reason why not one member of the family wanted to take it over when Granny died her lonely alcoholic’s death at the bottom of the back stairs in 1975.

He has the last of Frances’s belongings in a bin liner, is taking them out to the shed. The bag contains clothes and shoes and other stuff that won’t be best suited by the damp out there, but he feels that it’s no more than she deserves for leaving him in the lurch like this. It’s been a bloody long day, thanks to her, what with having to wait for the two no-shows and the sole interviewee who did bother to turn up, and he’ll be glad to be gone. It gets no better after dark, this place. When they were children, they used to refuse to come after sunset; became hysterical even though they were allowed to share a room, if his parents tried to leave them for the night. Not that they often did: even at the age of five, he sort of knew that there was something wrong with Granny. He remembers why, now: it’s not just that Rospetroc is full of dark corners and inexplicable moving shadows; it’s the noises. Scutterings and murmurs; odd clatters in other rooms and whispers, as of silk on silk.

Old houses are full of sounds. He knows this only too well, having lived in them all his life. But his own home makes sounds of adjustment: groans and thumps as it expands and contracts with heat and cold; the creak of a loose floorboard, the judder of window-frames in the wind. Not these anticipation-filled silences that suggest that someone is hiding round the corner, holding their breath, waiting to jump out. Not the feeling that someone is peeping out from behind the curtains, stifling their laughter.

Will she stay the course? He wonders. I can’t be going through this every couple of months. She seemed… there’s something she’s not saying, that’s for sure. Is she going to take off with the contents of the house? Or is she just one of those people who’s running away from something? It attracts odd-bods, this job. Normal people won’t put up with it: the isolation, the unremitting slog of keeping the dust down and being discreet and tolerating the sort of people we get down here, sometimes. Doesn’t pay enough for people with ambition.

They’ve had the lot through their doors, and none has lasted: not even the couples. Writers, artists, dispossessed Zimbabwean farmers, hippies, people with ambitions in the tourist trade, downsizing city folk, history freaks, retired school caretakers, Eastern Europeans to whom five-hundred-a-month-plus-accommodation-and-bills must have looked like a fortune: each, in turn, has handed in notice (or, in the case of Frances Tyler, not), packed bags and headed for civilisation. Leaving, more often than not, some sort of chaos behind them – breakages and daubings, beds unmade and doors unlocked – and spreading tales in the village that make it practically impossible to get backup labour even for crowd events like weddings.

Why do the working class have to be so bloody superstitious? He thinks. It’s all very well selling the Daphne du Maurier line to the tourists, but when the locals start buying into it, it leads to nothing but chaos. He turns the figurines back to face the room again, picks up the bin-liners and heads out of the back door.

In the courtyard, no longer surrounded by six-foot-thick walls, his phone picks up a signal, beeps twice. It's annoying, the way the phone signal comes and goes down here, but it's the same across most of the county: as though the phone companies are part of some great conspiracy against the Celtic Fringes. He checks it, sees the message icon, dials through to voicemail. There's a light Bodmin drizzle in the air, but he stays in the open because he will lose the signal if he gets under cover.

Two messages. One from his three o'clock: his wife doesn't want to uproot herself from Sheffield, sorry, hopes he understands, no point in coming all the way down there and wasting both their time. Tom stabs at the 3  button and deletes it. Don't worry about wasting
your
time, he thinks.
I've
just been hanging around here all day waiting for you.

“Yes, well,” he says out loud, “at least he had the manners to ring, I suppose. Which is more than the other one did.”

The second is from Bridget Sweeny, at four o’clock. He notes the time because she can’t possibly have got back to London by then. Keen, he thinks. Imagines her in the car park at the Exeter services, pacing up and down by that run-down little banger as she speaks. She looks run-down herself, he thinks. Tired, but perhaps that’s not so surprising, with a six-year-old and no husband. Perhaps I'm being too suspicious. She looks like someone who needs a break.

And possibly,
he smaller voice tells him,
like someone who doesn’t have too many options to leave once she gets here, either.

“Hello, Mr Gordhavo,” she says. “It’s Bridget Sweeny here. Your one o’clock interview. I just wanted to say that I enjoyed looking round the house, and meeting you, and…” he hears her pause to think, hears her consider her words so she doesn’t sound too eager, too desperate. Notes it with a tiny tingle of hope. She wouldn’t be looking to uproot a six-year-old just before Christmas unless there were pressing reasons, after all.  “…and I’d just like to say that I’d be happy to come and work for you if you thought I was suitable. I checked out the village, and the school, and I think that… anyway… that’s beside the point... Anyway, I wanted really to give you my number, just in case… you know…” she reels off a list of figures – a mobile, not a landline, he notices; one of the signs of economic change, that the poor have cellphones, these days, because you don’t have to have a contract and a credit rating “... and I’ll look forward to hearing from you. Thanks. Goodb– oh, actually: one other thing. We can come fairly much whenever. Whatever suited you. Ok... Well, bye.”

Tom finishes his walk across the yard, unlocks the shed door. The single light bulb fizzes slightly as it comes to life, illuminates an interior where spiders have run unchecked for a hundred years. This is the old smithy, beams hung with chains, a platform for animal fodder less than a foot above his head which trickles woodworm dust onto his hair as the breeze enters with him. It’s used as storage only for the stuff that’s too far gone, too ugly, too worthless, even for the attic. Stuff that people have occasionally thought might come in useful as timber, or lumber, or kindling at least, which has been forgotten over the decades as new loads of stately logs more suited to a tourist’s idea of fuel for Rospetroc’s great fireplaces have been stacked on either side of the porch. It smells of rot and beetles.

The trouble with families like ours, he thinks, is we can never throw anything away. Once something has meant something to someone in the family – even something as little as their simply having bought it – we are constitutionally incapable of letting it go, however inconvenient. History (at least the stuff that reflects well on us), property – even clothes stay in trunks and wardrobes until the moth has eaten them away to nothing but a pile of brownish fluff. This place, for instance: there wasn't a single Gordhavo who wanted to live in the place after Granny died, but selling it was out of the question. We could have bought up half of Rock, before it got trendy with the Fulham set, for what this place would have fetched, and each of those Cornish fisherman’s bedrooms would have brought in twice as much in rent as they do here, and would have been far more likely to be occupied, to boot.

Yes, but if we sold it we’d have to clear it out. Far better to leave that to the next generation, he thinks. Like the last one did to us. Shudders. God knows what's up there on that platform. The ladder must have given way decades ago and no-one has had any reason to poke their head up there to see. There are so many places like that about this property. No-one’s been into the coal-shed since the heating was turned over to oil – he doesn't even know where the key's gone – and the upper floor could have gone out of the boathouse altogether, for all he knows. Certainly, no-one's been near the place, apart from to change the padlock and put a DANGER NO ENTRY sign up, during his sentient lifetime. The pond's a nasty, weed-choked thing, its source spring too feeble to keep it clear, and he can’t imagine that the boathouse can have been very appealing, even in the house’s heyday.

Gosh, we live differently, he thinks. Other people would think we were so spoiled, letting entire building fall to wrack and ruin, but we have too many. The simple truth is, we have too many.

He half-drops, half-throws the bags onto a shard of empty space to his right. Hears something break and feels a small twinge of satisfaction at the sound. That’ll teach her to bugger off without a word.

Bridget Sweeny. Doesn’t look like she’s going to run off with the first surfer she comes across in the summer. Didn’t seem too appalled by the workload. Didn’t ask a single stupid question about the house’s history or make any silly remarks about atmosphere. Didn’t come across as one of those people who have hysterics at the first problem. Seemed pretty sensible.

He throws the light switch as he turns to leave the outhouse, and the circuit in the main house trips.

She’ll need to be, he thinks, as he feels his way back across the courtyard under a starless sky.

Chapter Seven

Crash.

Oh God, did I lock it? Did I lock it? Did I remember all the locks?

Sudden terror throws her rigid in bed, straight as a plank, sweat starting out on her forehead as though she has just walked into a Turkish bath. And yet she is cold, she is freezing under the thick covers because she knows that Kieran is outside, knows what he will do if he gets in.

Crash.

Now Yasmin is awake, too: eyes like soup-plates in the light creeping in round the curtains, she lies flat against the mattress as though some unseen force is crushing her downward.

Crash. He's using his foot. If I forgot to put the bolts on, forgot the mortise, the Yale won't hold for more than a few of those kicks.

Instinct tells her to hide, to get as far away from the noise as they can, to crouch somewhere in the dark, hands over heads, hope he’ll go away. But he won’t go. Not if he gets inside, and in this cramped flat there is nowhere to run to.

I've got to go and check.

No-no-no-he'll-kill-you

Crash.

Oh, Jesus, help me now.

She sits up. Feels naked, vulnerable, once the covers are off and all that's between him and her skin is a pair of flimsy pyjama trousers and a cotton camisole, and maybe a flimsy lock. Swings her feet toward the carpet.

Yasmin realises what she is about to do, that she will leave her, that she will be alone, starts up a wail. “Mummy! Mummmeeee!”

“Hush, darling.” She tries to keep the tremble from her voice. Need to stay calm. Need to stay brave for Yasmin. My baby. Don’t let him get my baby. “Shhh. You need to be quiet now, baby.”

Her voice sounds like a stranger’s, heard underwater. She feels the rush of blood in her ears, feels her tongue struggle to unstick from the roof of her mouth. “I’ll be back,” she assures her. “I promise.”

“Don’tleaveme Dontleaveme Don’t
leave
me!”

I don’t have time. I don’t have time for this. I have to go, don’t you see? I have to go. It’s unbearable. To protect you I have to leave you, oh, baby, don’t you see?

Crash.

She reaches for the bedside lamp, remembers the electricity is still out. Well, that’s one strike in our favour. He doesn’t know his way around the way we do, in the dark. It’s two years since he was last inside, and everything’s moved about since then. Won’t be able to see us, straight off. Maybe we can make a run for it.

Run where? This bloody city.  No-one moves themselves for a scream in the street. The yuppies on the first floor, the same ones, no doubt, that couldn’t be arsed to double-lock the front door when they came in tonight, never registered anything that happened up here while he was still in residence: never called for help, came to investigate. Used to pass her on the stairs and turn their gaze away from the bruises, embarrassed. They’ll shout out of the window about a car alarm, but they'll let a man beat his family half to death on the floorboards above and not raise a bloody finger…

Come on. Come
on
, Bridget. You have to go. You have to go and check.

“Get under the bed,” she tells her daughter. “Come on, quickly. Just hide under the bed and don’t come out till I tell you. Don’t come out for anything. Go on. Quickly.”

Yasmin moves quickly now, understands that speed is the only defence, that hiding is the only way. Rolls out of bed and slips beneath, wriggles up behind suitcases and storage boxes, curls herself up as small as she can go.

The hall: pitch black because all the doors are shut. The noise much louder here, crammed down into the tiny space. She can hear him swearing, muttering on the other side of the door. Can see him in her mind’s eye, tendons like hawsers on his neck, formal shirt half-buttoned in the post-drink City-boy fashion, his mouth twisted with venom and rage. Why can’t they see? Why can’t they see what he’s like, these people he works with, the ones who stood as moral references to keep him out of jail?

Of course they don’t care. He brings in results, after all, negotiates the snake pit with grit and skill, and so what if a guy’s a bit aggressive if that’s what it takes to bring in a bonus?

 She stubs a toe on her travelling bag, barely notices the pain as she creeps toward the door, into the lion's jaws, feeling each inch along the wall. Did I lock it? Did I? Is he just using soft blows right now, so he knows I’ll be right there when he finally goes for force, brings it crashing through onto me?

She’s there. Can feel him now, face suffused with drink, leaning against the wood and listening for her, sweat from his exertions slicking down his dealer’s quiff. “Fucking fucking fucking,” he mutters, “you’re fucking in there, I know you are.”

She can’t bear to look through the spyhole, to see his face. Pressed back against the wall, she feels out in the dark for the mortice key, permanently in the lock as protection against picking. Twists it to the right. It turns, takes with a tiny click. Not so tiny he doesn’t hear it.

“I fucking hear you, you fucking bitch!” he shouts. “Let me in! Come on! Let me into my fucking flat!”

It’s not your flat. It never was. It’s mine, though thanks to you that won’t go on for much longer.

And now he’s kicking with full sincerity, throwing his whole body against the panels, thundering with his fists, boots raging on the timber. Bridget jumps back, instinctively, has to force herself closer again to take hold of the bolts and shoot them home. Has to struggle with the bottom one, because the door is jumping in its frame, fourteen stone of estranged husband ramming himself against it in an effort to get to them. Oh, Yasmin, oh, my baby, he won’t get you, I promise. I’ll do anything. Anything.

It shoots home and the rasp brings on a renewed battering from the other side. “I'll fucking get you, Bridget! You can’t keep me out! You can’t fucking shut me out of my own home!”

Come on, come
on
. Where are you? Someone! Carol! Someone!

She can’t remember where she put her bag. Now the door is secured she has bought some time until the police arrive, but she has to call them to bring them here. She crawls along the floor, feeling, blind with hands outstretched, for the familiar touch of leather bought in better times. Finds discarded toys, cardboard boxes in place of chests, shoes, books, and hears his rage pump through the house.

And then she hears Carol, at the top of the stairs. No hint of the fear she must be feeling, just her booming voice, commanding. “Kieran! I've called the police! They’ll be here in a minute. You’d better go.”