Love Notes from Vinegar House (3 page)

I love cats.

Just not those cats.

I think Grandma loved those cats better than any human. She always referred to Grandpa Theo as dear Theo in a dry way so that I was never sure if she missed him or mocked him. A large oil painting of Grandpa Theo, set in a heavy frame, reminded us of his absence every time we visited Vinegar House. It was painted by a semi-famous artist and had won a prize when Dad was a teenager. Grandma said it was a good likeness of her husband, though the suit hid the wide set of his shoulders and the huge expanse of his chest. Isabella and I agreed that what Grandma really meant was that he was fat. It was strange to think of my grandfather being so big, as my grandmother was a dry twig, withering with age. I often wondered how they looked together.

I am taller than Grandma, by at least a head, but she has this way of making you feel small. Everyone says that I am going to be tall like my dad, but I guess he got his height from his dad. I am shorter than Luke Hart, but not too short that I couldn’t stand on my tiptoes and kiss him straight on the mouth …

I was talking about my grandfather.

The painting of Grandpa Theo sits above the marble fireplace in the drawing room. No one else I know has a drawing room, and when I was younger I used to think Grandma called it that because of the many paintings on the walls. Which should have made it the painting room, I suppose. Grandma always dressed as though visitors might drop in at any moment, but I never met any of her friends. Usually, it was just the family; Mrs Skelton, the cook-come-cleaner; and Mr Chilvers, the gardener- come-handyman at the house. Grandma did sometimes talk about the girls in Port Eden whose average age would have been eighty not out.

Don’t get me wrong. I like old people. But eighty is not the age of a girl. I’m very fussy about using the right words for things. Except for the word “death”.

The drawing room is where we hand out the Christmas presents every year. Just once I would like a Christmas day at our house, but all the important events on our family calendar happen at Vinegar House. We gather there on special occasions such as Christmas or birthdays, or even just ordinary occasions, when Grandma decides she needs the family about her. The gatherings are a great time to catch up with the cousins.

We used to play games like Spotlight or Spies (our very own special game) or Murder in the Dark when we were younger. And there were always board games. There wasn’t much else to do at Vinegar House. Grandma believes that unless children are doing chores (this is where you do work for no money) then they should use their imaginations (this means all TV watching, laptops and electronic games are banned). Mobile phone coverage at Vinegar House is touch and go, but that isn’t usually an issue as all mobiles are checked at the hallstand in the entry.

Like the United Nations, I’m guessing.

Or a really strict trivia night at the Homsea Town Hall.

This used to cause fury in my older sister Isabella, who said it was like living in a police state. She stopped trying to sneak her phone into Vinegar House after Grandma threw my cousin Lee’s mobile through the open dining room double doors when it rang during one of her dinner parties. (Lee and I found it later in the azalea bushes after everyone had moved into the drawing room for cake.) Even the adults turn their mobiles off. The only one who doesn’t is Uncle Stephen because he is a doctor and is very important.

Murder in the Dark was a favourite game of the cousins, but it was only fun when there were more than three players. Rumer was always in charge of the rules. She ordered us about and acted like she was years older than everyone else, when in fact she was younger than Isabella, Julia and the twins – Lee and Angus. The first time I played, I had just turned eight. Up until then I had been part of the younger cousins gang that played downstairs under the watchful eye of our parents.

I was very excited to be part of the Blue Room gang that day. I remember it well. It was the day I found out what sort of person my cousin Rumer really was.

“Lee, guard the door. Are we ready?” demanded Rumer.

It was Grandma Vinegar’s birthday, and the whole family had gathered to sing “Happy Birthday”, watch her blow out the candles on her cake, and give her presents that she would stick in the bottom of her wardrobe drawer and never use. All the cousins were there, and the younger ones had been seated at the children’s table, which was really just a low coffee table covered with a white tablecloth. I was at the adults’ table and feeling very pleased with my promotion.

Dinner had gone on forever, and I was sick of trying to remember my table manners, trying to use the right cutlery, and keeping my elbows from popping onto the table as if they had a mind of their own. There was a lot of laughter coming from the kids’ table, and they were already up to dessert before we’d even started on our main meal. My cousin Lee and his friend Bryn sat opposite Isabella and me, and spent the whole dinner trying to make Isabella laugh out loud. I got bored with their game and found a tiny hole in the white tablecloth that hung down past my knees and picked away at it making a larger hole until Isabella asked if we could leave the table. Grandma nodded her head once, giving us her permission.

There was a scramble of chairs as we made a beeline to the Blue Room upstairs, away from the adults. For years the Blue Room had been used only as a guest room and the dried lavender on the dressing table couldn’t mask its damp mouldy smell – think a wet towel left in the bottom of a swim bag. The room was easily as big as our living room at home, and the ceiling rose so high up that it ended in shadow. Blue floral wallpaper lined the walls. It was a fuzzy kind of wallpaper and it sent a shudder through me whenever I touched it. There were heavy blue velvet drapes on either side of the window. The bed was high off the ground and looked very lumpy, and a hatstand stood in one corner of the room holding an old wool coat and a large straw sunhat. Other dark furniture was pushed up against the walls, including a floor-length, gold-framed mirror and a large armchair.

“Are we allowed here?” I asked.

“Dad’s sleeping here,” said Rumer, “so I’m sure
I’m
allowed here. And if I’ve invited you in, then that’s okay. You write the notes, Julia,” she said in her bossy way.

“Did you say this room was haunted?” asked Bryn.

Angus looked at me quickly then punched Bryn in the arm and told him to be quiet.

Lee kept guard on the door while Julia wrote on a piece of lined paper. She then tore the paper into long thin strips and folded them over so the writing on the paper was covered. Bryn and Angus, Lee’s twin brother, pushed each other to see who would fall over first, while Isabella watched them with a little smile.

“Now, do we all know the rules?” asked Rumer.

As usual, Rumer was bossing people around, and it annoyed me so much that I kicked the dressing table. A crystal trinket box fell to the floor with a muffled thud, spilling hairpins, tiny loose pearls and a small key onto the floral carpet.

“Freya! Do you want to play or not?” Rumer stood over me, hands on hips, as I picked the box and its contents up off the floor. Isabella helped me.

“Shut up, Rumer,” said Isabella, calmly.

“She always ruins things,” said Rumer. “We should have left her with the babies.” Rumer sighed theatrically. “She’s probably going to cry and tell the adults everything we’re doing.”

“That’s enough, Rumer,” said Isabella. “Don’t be a pain.” Then Isabella looked at me sternly. “Do you promise to cross your throat and hope to choke if you tell any adult about this game?”

I nodded solemnly. Then I decided to kick Rumer instead of the dressing table, but Angus grabbed my shoulders and held me fast as if he could read my mind.

“She’s no baby, Ru,” he said. “Anyway, it’s better with more people. Hurry up.”

“I don’t get what she’s doing,” said Bryn.

I’d met Bryn several times at Vinegar House, although I didn’t know why he came along with Lee, and I never thought to ask. He seemed nice enough. He was Isabella’s age, and I could tell she liked him, because she kept punching him in the arm whenever he teased her.

“Murder in the Dark,” said Rumer. “There are seven of us playing, so there are seven strips of paper.”

“Yep,” said Bryn, seriously.

“A word is written on each piece of paper. Six strips will have the word ‘player’, and one strip will have the word ‘murderer’ written on it.”

“Finished,” said Julia, and she looked about before grabbing the straw hat from the hat stand and shoving the folded strips of paper inside.

“So we all take a strip and read the word,” said Rumer, pulling a scrap of paper from the hat. “But you can’t tell anybody what note you have–”

“Murderer,” read Bryn, laughing loudly as he read his note.

Lee groaned. “You don’t tell anyone, idiot.”

I thought Rumer would get cross, but instead she laughed a little and said, “Let’s try that again.”

All the pieces of paper were returned to the hat, and Julia shook the hat to shuffle the paper about.

“Then we turn the lights off,” continued Rumer. “The players have to stay out of the way of the murderer who needs to find a victim. The murderer needs to tap another player three times so that the player knows they’ve been murdered.” She walked over to the heavy drapes and pulled them across the window so that they met in the middle. It was already quite dark outside.

“Can we go downstairs?” asked Bryn.

“No,” said Rumer in her best bossy voice. “We need to keep it up here. In this room. And we can’t make too much noise. We don’t want the oldies to know what we’re up to. The victim has to say ‘dead’ when they’re killed, then the lights go on and we have to guess who the murderer is. Okay, this time no telling,” she said to Bryn.

Bryn jostled against Isabella as he tried to beat Angus to the hat. I was happy when I pulled out my note and read “player”. Then someone turned the light out, and that’s when I remembered that I was afraid of the dark.

At home, I can always pull my curtains back and see the streetlight and the lights of houses around me. So it’s never really too dark. And there’s a darkness you face when you turn out the lights that will gradually allow the ghostly outlines of shapes to appear before you. Like when you’re outside in the dead of night with no moon to light the way. Then there’s a darkness that’s an absence of light. Am I making sense? It’s like being in the bottom of a well or a deep cave or a mine. I don’t know about the well or cave, but I did a mine tour once, and they turned out the lights – that’s the darkness I’m talking about here. But the darkness in the Blue Room was something different again. There was an oily movement to it as if something could form out of the nothingness. A heaviness to it that felt solid. This was the darkness I faced that night. So I closed my eyes to a more comforting dark.

When I heard a giggle nearby, I dropped to the floor and headed towards the dressing table. At least, that’s where I thought I was going. A shoe made contact with my leg, and I froze until it moved off again. There was a moan behind me, like a tortured ghost, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise in fright. There was more laughter and someone, it sounded like Julia, said, “Shut up, Lee.”

I began my scuttle again until I bumped into some furniture, which I soon discovered was not the dressing table but the large armchair up against the window wall. I pushed the chair away from the wall a little, then burrowed under it like a rabbit.

There were rustlings and muffled footfalls as people moved around the room. Across from me there was a knock against wood followed by a curse, and I imagined someone had run into the wardrobe.

I could hear heavy breathing, so I held my breath in case I was listening to myself. But the heavy breathing continued, and I curled my body into a tight ball. My logical self knew that it was just one of the players, but Bryn’s words echoed in my mind. “Did you say this room was haunted?”

Was the breathing thing coming to get me?

Was it a monster?

A ghost?

I opened my eyes to the oily darkness, and it pressed down on me. I was still holding my breath and felt like I might explode, but I’d forgotten how to breathe. I stretched out and tried to scrabble my way out from under the chair, shutting my eyes to see flashes of colour like neon worms, but a solid something blocked my way.

Then there was a thud and the creak of bedsprings and a muffled, “Ooof”. I heard Angus say, “Dead on the bed.” And someone laughed. With the flick of the light switch I gasped and gulped the fusty air, realising that the solid barrier blocking me in was in fact a heavy tallboy.

I heard someone say, “Who cracked the mirror?” As I peered out from under the chair I noticed the floor-length mirror had a crack in the bottom right-hand corner. Someone was going to be in big trouble from Grandma. I scrambled out from under the chair and as I grabbed at a drape to pull myself up I revealed the hiding space of two more players. It was Bryn and Rumer and they were locked in a kiss, or rather, Rumer seemed to be locked onto Bryn like a limpet on a jetty pylon, for Bryn’s arms stayed loosely at his sides. Bryn pushed Rumer off, his red face a picture of confusion, and Rumer stepped back and gave a little laugh. She had a triumphant smirk which I didn’t understand until I glanced at my sister and saw the tight disappointment on her face.

“So, who’s dead?” asked Rumer.

Things between Isabella and Rumer were never the same after that game. Bryn had been Isabella’s first real crush, and even though he tried being extra nice to Isabella whenever they met, and though she was polite to him, I could tell that she hated him even more than she hated Rumer. He stopped coming to Vinegar House, and Isabella never mentioned him at home. I tried to tell her, in my eight-year-old way, that it wasn’t Bryn’s fault and that Rumer had latched on to him, but she would just say, “He’s older. He should know better.”

If Bryn had been Isabella’s first crush, then Luke Hart was mine.

There, I’ve said it.

Maybe you guessed already?