Sleep Sister: A page-turning novel of psychological suspense (4 page)

T
he small terraced
house with the yellow door was in darkness. Beth knocked twice, relieved when a light flashed on at an upstairs window. The wind blew the rain into the wooden porch where she was trying to shelter. She heard footsteps on the stairs and a boy in his late teens opened the front door. He had pulled on a pair of jeans and was still struggling with the zip. When he saw her standing outside with the rain in her hair, her clothes sculpted to her body, his hands paused, as if frozen with embarrassment, then he gave a quick jerk and the zip slid into place.

‘Does Barry Tyrell live here?’ She tried to speak calmly but her teeth chattered as she swayed forward, exhausted from the effort of hitching lifts to Dublin and walking long distances between them.

He nodded, the sleep still in his eyes and the warmth of four safe walls behind him. ‘You’re Beth,’ he said, opening the door wider and beckoning her forward without hesitation. ‘I’ve seen your photograph.’

‘Is he here?’ she repeated. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for him.’ Rain ran from her coat and formed a puddle on the hall floor. She heard footsteps crossing the landing and her father’s voice on the stairs. He was wearing a pair of rumpled pyjamas. His beard was bushier than she remembered, a balladeer’s beard, which he chewed in mortification when he saw her. ‘Beth! Jesus, Mary and holy Saint Joseph! What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.

‘Don’t blaspheme in my house, Barry Tyrell.’ The Cardigan’s voice was soft but it was also firm enough to demand attention. Her hair was dyed so black it shone with a hard blue sheen under the hall light. She clutched the lapels of her dressing gown across her chest and surveyed Beth. ‘Can’t you see the poor child is half dead from exhaustion? Come into the kitchen, love, and get them wet clothes off you.’

‘How did you know where to find me?’ her father demanded.

No one interrupted Beth as she described how she had searched for the house where her father used to live only to discover it had been replaced by a building site with a hoarding around it. An old man with string on his coat waved his hands towards the hoarding and shouted insults at an invisible army of speculators who were tearing the soul out of his city. He’d taken her to a nearby pub where Celtic Reign played every Wednesday. The bar manager, seeing her distress, had rung the singer in Celtic Reign, who had given him her father’s new address.

‘He’s gone to live in the sticks,’ said the manager, scribbling down the address. ‘There’s not too many buses go to Oldport but let’s have a look and see.’ He took a timetable from behind the counter and ran his finger over a page. ‘If you rush you’ll just catch the last one.’

Beth didn’t mention the tears and the despair that had swept through her as she’d tried to follow his directions to the bus stop or how the city had swamped her with its indifference. Nor did she describe her terror when the bus had headed northwards, racing through grey housing estates and out into the country, brushing against overhanging branches and swerving around corners until her stomach had heaved and she’d been afraid she was going to throw up over the seat.

‘If you’d had the decency to write Beth a letter and tell her where you’d moved she wouldn’t be tramping the little legs off herself searching the city for you.’ The Cardigan spoke sharply to Barry then turned to the young man who had answered the door. ‘Stewart, you get up them stairs as fast as your legs can carry you and wake your sister. Take no nonsense from her. She’s to bring down that flannelette nightdress from the hot press and make room for Beth in her bed.’

Beth listened to the raised voices above her. An argument was taking place between Stewart and his sister, who was obviously furious over being woken in the middle of the night and told to share her bed with a stranger. A door banged and he reappeared with a tall, sulky girl in tow. She was older than Beth and flashed a hard look at her before sighing loudly in Barry’s direction.

‘You want my bed and my clothes for your daughter. What next?’ Dramatically, she held her wrists forward. ‘My blood? Go on, take it. You’ve taken everything else.’

‘Be quiet, Marina, and sit down.’ The Cardigan placed a towel over Beth’s head and began to dry her hair. ‘No one wants your blood but some manners would be appreciated around here. Barry, bring that pot of tea over to the table and get some heat into the poor child.’

Barry pushed at the sleeves of his pyjamas and glanced at The Cardigan. ‘Well, we’d better let her stay the night,’ he said, pretending he was glad to see Beth when it was obvious that he wanted her to vanish from his life as suddenly as she had appeared.

Marina did not believe in pretence. ‘Your father’s to blame for everything,’ she stated when they were alone in her bedroom. She forced a bolster down the centre of the bed to separate them. ‘Parasite! All we need now is his other daughter – and his wife – then we’ll all have the perfect happy family.’

The Cardigan’s name was Connie McKeever. She was a supervisor in a local clothes factory where her son also worked. Over the following days she did her utmost to make Beth feel welcome, advising her to ignore Marina, who, she sighed, had a tongue sharp enough to cut through steel.

‘I’ll talk to Mrs Wallace about getting you a job in Della Designs,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we’ll be able to fit you in somewhere on the production line.’

H
igh green railings
surrounded Della Designs and the bars across the windows reminded Beth of a squat, ugly prison. The factory was silent on the outside until the doors opened and she was swept into the clack of machinery, music booming over the loudspeaker, the smack of irons and the steaming smell of freshly pressed fabrics. Female voices rose and fell like water over her head. She was petrified by the noise and the rows of women in blue overalls who ignored her, their hands moving with such speed at their machines that she wanted to turn and run weeping back along the road she had taken. Connie escorted her up wooden steps and into her employer’s office. Mrs Wallace laid down the rules in a rasping voice. Beth would go on a month’s trial and train as a machinist. There would be no smoking in the Ladies. Flirting with the boys in Dispatch was strictly for after hours. Punctuality was next to godliness, she said, and as for slacking off at the machines or absenteeism, she shook her head threateningly. No words of warning were necessary. She simply jerked her finger towards the exit door.

‘I’ll leave her in your capable hands, Connie.’ She waved Beth from her office as if she were swatting a fly from her sight and picked up the telephone.

The glass front wall of her office overlooked the production floor. Nothing, Beth was to discover, escaped the hawkish gaze of Della Wallace. Stewart was an assistant to the production manager. He attended night classes in electronics and read technical manuals, propping them against milk bottles on the kitchen table and staring with fierce concentration at the pages whenever Beth sat down beside him. He blushed when he caught her eye, as if he, like Marina, hated having to speak to her. She soon realised this was shyness rather than hostility and a slow friendship began to grow between them.

‘Is Marina giving you a hard time?’ he demanded one day when he discovered her in tears at her machine.

Beth shook her head. ‘I’m just homesick,’ she admitted, not mentioning the letter that had arrived the previous day from her mother. Bitter and short, the words had jumped from the page, shocking her with their venom. ‘Since you have refused my request to return home and insist on living with your adulterous father in his whore’s house I no longer recognise you as my daughter.’

She had burned the letter, watching the notepaper blacken and curl the words into ash.

A
t night
, when she tried to sleep, the bolster firmly established as a no-man’s-land between herself and Marina, she heard creaking noises from the bedroom next door. A rhythmical, boisterous sound that forced her head deeper into the pillow. She suspected that Marina was also awake, restlessly turning away from the evidence of her mother’s lovemaking.

‘If my father was alive he’d break every bone in your father’s pathetic body,’ she muttered one night after the sounds from next door had ceased. Beth pretended to be asleep. She knew the story of Marina’s father. How he’d drowned at sea, his body swept ashore many miles from where his fishing trawler had sunk. When Marina called her a culchie parasite it no longer hurt so much. She realised she was simply a target for Marina’s anger, nothing more.

O
ldport was
different to Anaskeagh yet many things reminded Beth of home. On sunny mornings the sea had the same fierce glitter but it flowed into a calm estuary. The land around it was flat, miles of fields filled with straight rows of vegetables and flowers for the markets in the city. It had once been a fishing village, but the old harbour beyond the estuary was no longer in use, and the remains of sunken fishing boats could be seen at low tide, arching from the water, smooth and sleek as seals. The biggest difference was the sense of space. Beth could look in all directions, unlike in Anaskeagh where the headland loomed over everything.

In the evenings, Connie’s house was filled with noise and music. Barry practised his tin whistle, Stewart played his records and Marina giggled in a high trilling solo whenever Peter Wallace entered the house. He was Stewart’s best friend, the son of Mrs Wallace, and Connie had known him since he was a baby. She called him her ‘almost son’ and treated him the same as the rest of her family, scolding him when he teased Beth or flirted with Marina.

‘Keep your eyes to yourself if you don’t want them scratched out,’ warned Marina one night after he left. ‘Peter Wallace is madly in love with me. He’s going to immortalise me in oils.’

‘Oh! So that’s what it’s called nowadays?’ said Connie, overhearing. ‘In my day it was called ‘getting a girl into trouble’. You concentrate on your studies, Marina McKeever and you’ll be far better off.’

‘You should know all about trouble.’ Marina cast a belligerent look towards Barry, who was watching television. ‘When’s he leaving? I’m sick of putting up with strangers in my dead father’s house.’

‘Stop your nonsense, Marina. I won’t have it.’ Despite the firmness in her voice, Connie looked distressed.

‘And I’m sick of all this.’ Marina’s chin jutted. ‘You’re the talk of Oldport… Living with a married man when my father’s hardly cold in his grave. Don’t give me any lectures about morality unless you understand what it means.’

From the frying pan into the fire, Beth thought. Trouble and strife, no matter where her father laid his head. She wanted to return to Anaskeagh and climb to the top of the headland with Jess. She longed to see Sara, to snuggle against her in the dip of the mattress, to hold her warm and cosy as they drifted off to sleep. But Anaskeagh was also her dark shadow and she knew she would never return to its shade.

B
eth had spent
six months on her machine when she discovered that a typist had been sacked for arriving late. She approached Mrs Wallace and told her she had studied shorthand and typing for a year before leaving the Star of the Sea Convent.

‘If you give me a chance to show you what I can do you won’t regret it.’ She tried to sound confident under the astute gaze of her employer and succeeded.

‘A week’s trial,’ agreed Della Wallace. ‘One mistake and you’re out on your ear. Start on Monday.’

The office staff ignored Beth. It was the first time anyone from the factory floor had become part of the clerical section and her sudden promotion upset the insular pecking order that existed in the company. The machinists were also suspicious of her.

‘Stuck-up cow,’ said Marina. ‘She thinks she’s too good for us since she moved up with the la-di-das.’

Marina had been expelled from school for smoking. She did it openly during her commerce and bookkeeping class and blew smoke rings at her teacher. Shortly afterwards, she joined Della Designs, sulking as she sewed collars onto coats, only brightening up when Peter came to the factory to tease the older women and whisper in her ear. She ignored Beth, making jokes about culchies and bog accents when she walked past. Sandwiched between the factions in the factory and the office, Beth kept her head down. The sales manager’s secretary had become engaged. She flaunted a large solitaire and confided to her friends that she intended conceiving a baby on her honeymoon. When her job fell vacant, Beth would be ready to take it over.

At the weekly disco, called the Sweat Pit by those who packed the small parish hall, Marina danced with her friends until the music slowed and she could twine her arms around Peter’s neck. She confided intimate secrets to Beth across the bolster. She ‘did it’ regularly with him on bales of blue velvet material in the stockroom. She posed nude for him in his artist’s studio when his mother was out. She was his Mona Lisa. She laughed at Beth’s shocked expression and tossed her long dark hair. ‘When he finishes art college he’s going to become a famous artist and we’re getting married. I’m going to live in Havenstone – then we’ll see who’s the la-di-da around here.’

Havenstone, where Mrs Wallace and her son lived, was a large house set in its own grounds with a back view over the estuary. Beth imagined Marina in her high boots and leather trousers strutting through the rooms and smiled to herself. She suspected that Marina’s escapades mostly happened in her head. But untangling the lies from the truth was a tedious task so she stayed silent and listened to fantastic stories that ended abruptly in the Sweat Pit when Peter danced the slow numbers with Sharon from quality control. Later, reported Marina’s best friend, they were seen outside, kissing each other against the wall.

‘She’s a bike,’ Marina sneered. ‘Cheap peroxide slut.’ She was going to move to London and become a proper model on a catwalk instead of a canvas. Oldport was the tomb of the living dead.

‘I have my eyes set on higher things,’ she said when Beth found her in the bedroom wiping mascara from her eyes. ‘Peter Wallace can stay down on his bended knees forever but he won’t make me change my mind.’ She blew her nose and applied a heavy layer of panstick make-up, demanding to know why Beth was staring. Peter Wallace was nothing but a swollen ego and a tiny prick. She hated his guts. Beth left her weeping into the bolster.

A week later Marina left for London, armed with her portfolio of photographs and a letter of introduction to a modelling agency from Della Wallace.

The sales manager’s secretary duly became pregnant on her honeymoon and Beth moved smoothly into her place. Andy O’Toole, the sales manager, filled the office with cigar smoke and refused to allow windows to be opened because he suffered from draughts. She discovered a bottle of vodka in the filing cabinet and understood why his wife rang in so often with excuses about his ill health. His bullying became a ritual part of every day. She quickly realised that no matter how hard she worked she would never please him.

‘What a diligent young lady you are,’ said Mrs Wallace, coming upon her one night when everyone had gone home. ‘It’s the third time this week you’ve stayed on. Don’t you have time to do those invoices during the day?’

‘I didn’t get them until late,’ replied Beth. ‘And Mr O’Toole wants them on his desk first thing in the morning.’

‘Does your boyfriend mind you working such long hours?’

‘I don’t have a boyfriend so there’s no problem.’

‘At your age I would see that as quite a problem.’

Beth was surprised at the personal direction the conversation had taken, especially when Mrs Wallace smiled, a rare occurrence that softened the tough lines around her mouth. Not knowing how to reply, she stayed silent, knowing that her employer understood this need to work compulsively, even if she pretended otherwise.

T
he Wallace money
came from spinning – three generations of tweeds and worsteds making the family fortunes. But Mrs Wallace’s childhood had been far removed from the graciousness of Havenstone. Connie, her childhood friend and neighbour, liked to remember those humble beginnings: one room on the top floor of a tenement; a dismal block of flats in the centre of the city where the walls wept in winter and rats froze to death in the outside toilets.

‘Such hard times, Beth,’ she would sigh, remembering, a hint of nostalgia in her voice. ‘But Della always vowed that one day she would wear pearls and live in a mansion higher than the highest tenement.’

Mrs Wallace was fourteen when she set up her first factory, making overalls for a local businessman in a cramped back room of the same tenement block. Her second factory, a ramshackle building that was always damp- and rat-infested, burned mysteriously to the ground. Beth asked if Mrs Wallace had organised the fire to collect the insurance money. This question made Connie shake her head so vehemently that Beth knew it was true. By the time they moved to a custom-built factory in Oldport, Della Wallace had her pearls, many strings of them, and Connie was still by her side, still supervising.

Bradley Wallace was sixty years old when he married the young Della. She was in debt to his textile company and wrote it off by signing her name on their marriage certificate. He gave her security and she gave him a son whom she never had time to love. Connie shook her head sadly.

‘She could have married many times before Bradley waved his chequebook in her direction but a man was only of use to Della if he could balance her books or run an efficient production line. Poor Peter – he has everything and nothing.’

One evening, shortly after their late-night chat, Beth’s employer brought her to the stockroom where rolls of fabric were stacked on shelves. Mrs Wallace unrolled a thick bale of tweed that had been delivered that afternoon and asked her opinion.

‘There’s nothing different about it.’ Beth rubbed her hand over the rough texture, imagining the heathery flecked coats being assembled piece by piece along the production line and, finally, draped on the shoulders of mannequins in department stores. ‘It’ll make up into the same coat style we’ve been manufacturing since I started working here.’

‘What’s wrong with that, may I ask?’ her employer demanded. ‘It’s proved to be a very successful design for this company.’

‘But it’s so old-fashioned. People want modern styles, not something their grannies wear to Mass on Sunday.’

Della Wallace seemed startled by her blunt reply. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

‘Sixteen.’

‘Aren’t you rather young to be so opinionated?’

‘You asked my opinion so I assumed you wanted the truth.’

‘That’s not Mr O’Toole’s opinion and he’s the one who brings in the orders. I haven’t noticed any decline in our customer base – have you?’

‘But there’s no growth either. Young people don’t even know the label exists.’

‘We’re not in the business of pleasing young people. Perhaps that’s just as well if they’re all as outspoken as you. Are you as honest when my son asks your opinions on his paintings?’

‘Yes,’ Beth replied. ‘But Peter only pays attention to his own opinions.’

She wondered if she would be fired for her outspoken views. If so, she would emigrate to London and live with Marina, who wrote occasionally, boasting about her success on the catwalks and offering Beth a bed if she ever decided to leave the tomb of the living dead. She could do worse, Beth supposed. Like lying down on a bed of nails. She could endure Andy O’Toole and his small-minded meanness. When he finally took the bottle of vodka from the filing cabinet she would be ready to take over his job.

A
t first she
had refused to visit Havenstone. The thought of entering her employer’s home intimidated her. It looked so big and grand with its tree-shaded walls and high wrought-iron gates but Stewart had finally persuaded her to come with him.

‘You never go anywhere,’ he argued. ‘Come on. Peter’s a big mouth but he won’t bite you. All we ever do is listen to music.’

To her surprise she had enjoyed the evening, which turned out to be the first of many. Peter led them up a curving wooden staircase into his studio, a large L-shaped room, south-facing and filled with natural light. He was in his third year at art college and planned to study in Italy when he graduated. The studio was filled with what looked like rubbish: pieces of driftwood, broken glass, jagged bits of steel, all marked with ‘Hands Off – Artist at Work’ warnings in case his mother threw anything out. The only nude Beth saw was a self-portrait of Peter hanging from the moon in chains of barbed wire. He looked mortified when he realised it was among the canvases she was examining.

‘It’s a protest against the Apollo moon landings,’ he explained, quickly turning the painting to face the wall. He believed that man had desecrated the moon by trespassing on its surface. She did not agree. Neil Armstrong was right: the moon landing had been a giant leap for mankind.

Stewart joined in the argument, insisting that technology was the new religion. One day the world would be ruled by robots with human brains. This suggestion then triggered another discussion about the integrity of the human psyche. They listened to Michael Jackson and David Bowie, lolling on bean bags as the music pounded around them.

‘That was good, wasn’t it?’ Stewart said on the way home. ‘Aren’t you glad you came?’

‘Very glad.’ A full moon reflected on the estuary. A melon moon pitted with craters, desert landscapes, a vast empty space – but all she could see was the long slim body of Peter Wallace filling it.

On Saturday afternoons they drank mugs of coffee and listened to music. Peter talked about artists who had influenced him, Cézanne and Picasso, and his favourite artist, Paul Klee, who had painted a famous golden fish with a flower instead of an eye. He said Beth had incredible eyes. He wanted to paint them. Cats’ eyes. The mirrors of the soul. She was the perfect Muse for his Cat-astrophic Collection.

‘Cat-astrophic,’ he would chant. ‘Cat-apult, Cat-aclysmic, Cat-walk, Cat-atonic, Cat-erpillar, Cat-holic, Cat-hedral.’

She sometimes wondered if he was mad. Mad in a harmless way that translated itself into crazy paintings of cats, destructive, dangerous cats, sometimes so distorted that they resembled nothing she could recognise, apart from their eyes – familiar eyes that she saw every time she stared in the mirror.

In his first completed painting – which he called ‘Cat-apult’ – a cat figure with a grotesquely large head and elongated body hurtled through stars; a flaming comet hell-bent on destruction. In his Cater-pillar painting, he painted the bank in Oldport, recognisable by the ornate pillars at the entrance. A cat with blazing eyes arched against one of the pillars, an almost playful pose until it became obvious that the building was buckling beneath the force of the animal’s fury.

‘Have you ever wanted to destroy something and obliterate it from the face of the earth?’ he asked when he was doing ‘Cat-walk’.

‘Yes,’ she said and, just for an instant, the past rushed back and threatened to overwhelm her. She focused on the painting he was holding up for her inspection. A monstrous misshapen cat that looked more like a bulldozer, it crouched in the centre of a green shady space that would soon become a building site. Beth’s eyes were the headlights, glowing vengefully.

Afterwards, away from the studio, she was uneasy, aware that she was being manipulated. He painted such emotion into her eyes, as if they were indeed the mirrors of her soul. She felt like a vessel, his voice pouring into her, opening her up with words that touched her fears, the anger she tried to suppress. The loneliness that swept over her when she allowed herself to remember. Yet she went back each Saturday, drawn by the growing intimacy between them, the sense of being part of something they were both creating. There were layers to his paintings that were not always apparent. She suspected the completed collection would contain a lot more of herself than she, or even he, realised.

At the end of each session he drove her home in a red low-slung two-seater that always attracted attention when he drove too fast through Oldport. Flared denims sat low on his hips, his sallow skin showing between the hip band and his paint-streaked T-shirt. His hair hung to his shoulders, scraggy, uncombed. A true artist at work.

‘Artist, my arse!’ hooted Connie, soon after the painting sessions began. ‘That brat couldn’t whitewash a wall if I stood over him with a whip. If he touches one hair on your pretty head I’ll tear his heart out. There’s no need to look so shocked, Beth Tyrell. All that painting nonsense and the two of you alone up there in his bedroom for hours on end – it’ll come to no good.’

‘It’s his studio, Connie.’

‘Oh, so that’s what he’s calling it now?’

‘Yes, Connie. I’ve never been inside his bedroom.’

‘Well, there’s many a girl in Della Designs can’t say the same thing,’ warned Connie. ‘Not to mention my poor Marina with her broken heart. Drinking, dancing and double-dating – that’s all that fellow wants from life.’