Sophie (14 page)

As I had thought, the rain had slackened. The quality of light was different. I set my shoulder to the cage door and pushed, sending miniature avalanches of slate cascading down from my feet. I rested against the bars for a moment, and then retrieved the padlock, locking it firmly into place. It was a solid, heavy-duty model, far stronger than the cheap ones that secured the other cages.

I checked the quarry books were safe, grimacing at the discomfort of my sodden clothing, and then headed off back across the quarry. Above me, the first grey hints of late afternoon sunlight were visible through the clouds.

“I translated them all,” he says. I have come to recognize the vacant, tranquil expression that comes over him at times like this. It shows he is trying to deal with something that is difficult for him. I keep quiet and let him talk without interrupting.

He says, “The earlier codes were the easiest. I expected that, of course. The later ones took much longer. You kept changing them. It’s astonishing, I suppose—the way you kept them all in your head. You used to write them without even thinking.” He stops, turns his head slightly. “That’s strange. You know, I can’t ever remember you reading things from the quarry books. You never looked back in them. You just wrote things. I never thought of that before.” There is a long pause, and it starts to look as if he is not going to speak.

I say, “Maybe that’s what they were for. Just to write things down.”

“Yeah. I think so, too. That’s how it felt, when I read them.”

Carefully, I try to draw him out a little more. “What did you think? When you’d read them?”

He doesn’t look at me. His eyes focus instead on the dying candle, and he gets up to light a new one from it, kicking the spent stub from the floorboards and rolling it absently into a corner of the room.

And I realize. Abruptly, without warning, I realize, and I am suddenly terrified. Something inside me freezes. I say nothing. I try to show nothing. But the fragments are falling into place, and I can see at last the picture that they create.

He is talking again, but I can hardly hear him over the rushing in my ears.

Translating the quarry books was painstaking, and although I used every spare hour that I had, it still took two months before I had finished the last of them. Because of what they were, I had to use one of my secret places so that there was no chance of anyone discovering them, which limited the opportunities I had to work on them still further.

There were things in them that I had suspected, and other things I had not. I guessed that they began when Sophie was five or so. I made little sense of the earliest entries; they referred to things that I had never heard of, and people I had never known. She mentioned me often; it surprised me. And then, as the entries progressed, I began to notice references to things I recognized.

bad dreams still i try to make things ok but theres only 1 way to do that properly which will have to wait shes getting worse and i wont have her scaring him hes too small to know now but i will tell him someday

She talked about Ol' Grady, and for a time I thought that perhaps I had the answer to the mystery of how she killed him. But the only entry in the quarry books that came close to a description of that incident was, itself, mysterious, and I never understood it fully. It was too short—perfunctory—almost as if she was unwilling to talk about it.

longer than i thought so i had to wait two days ago when mattie was asleep i did it so now ol greedy is back where he used to be i wish i could finish it now but i am too young we both are

The last phrase I did understand, and it chilled me.

The Sophie of the quarry books was different to the Sophie I’d known; revealed starkly, through words, she lost all her humour and warmth and became perplexing, unnerving, even alien. More than at any other point, I realized just how right Andy had been when he told me she was not normal. The Sophie of the quarry books was too deliberate, her actions too sharp. I began to feel that I had known her hardly at all. She had inhabited a different world; things had happened, after I was asleep at night, that I had never known about. As I read the quarry books, I found myself reliving events that had been buried for years.

its going to be anyway last night i waited very late so they were all in bed and at 4 i went down the hall and downstairs to see if they were asleep and they were so i went upstairs and did it i didn’t want to but it was important everything would have come apart otherwise strange how it felt very warm when i touched it and quite soft so i stroked it with my fingers keeping calm and it moved just a little i was very quiet i shut the door before i started so then i knew i was going to do it properly now and i was breathing quickly i knew from the biology books where to touch where the opening was so i rested my hand there on it with my fingers where soft places were it was very dark but i could see all right and then i did it and squeezed as hard as i could very hard with my hand on the soft places and then it moved a lot and its eyes came open but it didnt make any sound when i finished i could see the dents in its head where the books said the openings were when it was over and not moving i checked the door again and stroked it some more and closed its eyes so it looked like it was sleeping and wiped the spit from its mouth where it had come out and it had wet itself but i left that i opened the door and went back to my room and waited for them to find out then i slept

I got to know her through the entries in these coded diaries—got to see our childhood through her eyes for the first time. So I understood that she had done everything not out of impulse, or because of perverse pleasure, but in order to protect the two of us. Sophie, far more than I, was aware of the threat that the rest of the world posed. She disguised certain things, like her careful masking of her own abilities, and she anticipated others, like her decisive experiments with adolescence. And some, intrusions that she saw as endangering the two of us, she dealt with. To begin with, when I read these entries, I was horrified; but eventually—when I had read them again and again—I began to understand. To understand Sophie wasn’t easy, because the quarry book writings made no concessions, no explanations, no excuses. I thought at first that this was because Sophie had never intended anyone else to see them. I was wrong in that, of course.

its because of that anyway steve and andy are working out better than expected do we credit fate with the coincidence i don’t think so if only i can get a way into this i can use it and turn things around the important thing is to know beforehand i can use that i know i can the thing thats worrying me is the gap i mean how do you tell what something is before youre there you cant be sure ever so this is a good chance to try things at least ill know

That passage I tagged; when I read it the first time, I assumed that Sophie was talking about her apprehension of the shift out of childhood, the concern that I had seen plaguing her all that last summer. That, after all, was why she had been reaching out, trying to gain a toehold in the next stage of her life. But after the second or third reading, I started to see a different meaning in the words, a meaning that suggested something strange and almost painful: that everything had been planned not just days, or weeks, but months in advance. When I realized that, I was overcome by a completely unexpected flood of emotion; a sort of awe and respect for Sophie—something I had never thought I would feel again.

Later on, I caught a section that was a clear reiteration of something she had written a very long time before.

its going to but i havent forgotten what i said about her not for one day i remember each time mattie wakes up at night and each time i think of when i was little i said before that id do it and ive never lost hold of that just waited and waited on top of the old promise i make a new one it wont be easy for her she doesnt deserve that she never made it easy for mattie

All the time, as I read them, I was searching for the place where Sophie had written,
But of course I do all of this for myself, not for anyone else.
There was no such line. No matter how many times I read the journals, I never found what I was looking for most. In the diaries, just as in everything else, Sophie and I were not distinguishable as separate people with separate identities; we were part of the same thing, part of each other, and whatever Sophie had done she had done for the good of the two of us. There was no way I was able to deny this, and it made no difference how hard I tried.

and afterwards i said what would happen if he told anyone he was frightened in any case but this just scared him more it was so funny with him sitting there straw in his clothes and his trousers round his knees but i didnt laugh it wasnt anything like i had thought really strange and it hurt a lot but didnt last long weird to let someone do that anyway

And, each time I read them through after the first time, it was with the memory of the last page in my mind. The page that Sophie had written in the quarry just before she threw the bag into the cage, just before the summer ended and everything finished. I could remember her sitting there, writing, and knew now that the reason she had been in a hurry, had taken so little time over that last entry, was because she wasn’t bothering with the code. The message was simple enough, but I knew that no one except me would have made sense of it.

I could burn these, which would end everything. But there’s still the need for them, otherwise you wouldn’t be holding this now. I hope it explains some things. I hope you’ll understand. Once you’ve read these, you’ll know everything. They’re for you. Only you know what they are.

I hope everything’s worked out.

I love you always.

The beating of my heart is very loud now. I have realized where this is leading, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. And I have finally pinpointed the gnawing, frustrating sense of near-knowledge that has been in the back of my mind all along—fixed it down, seen it clearly for the first time. The spent candles in the corners of the room. I should have realized earlier.

There is nothing left but to carry it through. He said that he had never never got far enough, before; maybe, if I push him to finish this—this time—it will change things. It
must
change things. Because if it doesn’t, then I know already where this will end.

“I want to know, Mattie,” I say. He looks at me, his eyes confused. I press on regardless of what he may be thinking. “I want to know everything about that night. All of it.”

“I—I don’t want to,” he says, and his voice is child-like. It scares me. I have no idea what I am forcing him into.

“You have to tell me,” I say. “Don’t you think it’s about time you told someone?”

“I don’t know if I can.”

I can’t control the trembling in my voice when I speak. If he won’t do this, then it is finished.

“Take me back to it,” I say, trying to put as much force into the words as I am capable of. I feel drained. I know I am drawing on strength I don’t have. “Take me back to the evening when Sophie took you to the quarry, at the end of the summer. The last evening. What happened, Mattie? Where did you go after that?”

“We went home,” he says. He is telling the truth.

“Why did you go home?”

His face is contorted, his hands clenched white.

I say again, “Why did you go home, Mattie?”

He says, “We went home to see Mummy.”

fourteen

The quarry books were never clear about the hold that Sophie had over my mother. To a large degree, I don’t even know whether it was based on any concrete foundation, or whether it was simply the result of a battle that Sophie had long since won. The relationship between the two of them was, from my point of view, generally irrelevant; as my childhood progressed, so my mother’s part in it became smaller and smaller, until at the end she was hardly a person at all. Inhabiting her dusty, closed-up room for longer and longer periods of time, she had become so distanced from me that, for much of the time, I didn’t consciously recognize that she was still there.

With Sophie, I suspect it was different. She saw more of my mother than I did, partly because Sophie acted as intermediary between Mummy and her shadowy household, and partly because Sophie took a limited interest in Mummy’s world, for reasons that were only ever apparent to Sophie herself. It was never that my mother actively trusted Sophie with the everyday workings of our life, but rather that Sophie left her no alternative. After that night—for several years—I would look back over the rare occasions where I had seen any kind of contact between the two of them, and replay the incidents in my head, looking for details. Sophie had interceded for me that frightening afternoon when school was over and I had been on the brink of understanding the quarry books. Sophie, time and again, had extracted from my mother permission to do things or go places without, so far as I knew, ever revealing exactly what we were planning. And, at some time in the past, in the time when I was too young to know what was happening around me, Sophie had found out that Ol' Grady was still alive, and had dealt with him.

In the quarry books, there was scant reference to those times, and no reference at all to Sophie’s memories of Ol' Grady. But she must have had memories—she had heard the name differently, and she recognized the shuffling, faceless figure the moment that I mentioned it had crept along the walls in my dream. With Sophie knowing all this, then, and telling me about it only when it became necessary for
my
benefit, it seems less unlikely that there were other things Sophie knew about, and remembered. Later, I found quarry book entries that made no sense to me, but which might have made sense if I had known all of Sophie’s own story.

asking myself whether it was worth it but i think it is going to be one day we have to keep on reminding ourselves about next year and the year after that i need to have something back here i can use if it becomes important later on shes quite able to understand if i make it clear and that i think will be all the lever ill need

And, later, there were passages where I could detect real emotion under the words. It was rare, in the quarry books, to find this; as rare as finding it in Sophie herself, who was so used to keeping her emotions locked away out of sight.

in this family there are rules if you know the rules you can use them mummy thinks she knows the rules but she only knows half of them the half she sees i know them all and thats why were safe here if i wanted i could show her whats really going on

As we walked back from the quarry that evening, I didn’t know what Sophie was thinking. She was quieter than usual, almost withdrawn, and although when she spoke her voice was even and calm, I could tell that her mind was elsewhere. It may have been that she was reviewing some of the things written in the books she had just thrown away into the mouth of the cage, some of the things about control, about knowledge, about the unspoken and hidden rules in our family.

The sun was grazing the tops of the trees when we reached the house, and there was birdsong from the wood. It was a beautiful, light evening in late summer, and the pale turquoises and rose pinks of the sky were veiled with delicate and translucent clouds. I hadn’t really thought where we would go after the quarry, but I was surprised to find that we were back in our own garden. Sophie wandered over to the stream and touched the water, then straightened up and smiled at me.

“Come on,” she said. “There are some things we have to do.” She led the way over the small bridge into the orchard. The sheds, in their familiar places, huddled under the trees. Sophie retrieved a key-ring from her pocket, sorted through the keys, and unlocked the shed where the skin of Ol' Grady was kept. The night when she had taken me out here to see it was still firm in my memory, but the terror had drained out of the place since then, and the old sou'wester, still hung on the back of the door, didn’t have very much of the nightmares clinging to it anymore. Sophie took it down, looked it over, and slung it over her arm. I didn’t say anything. We walked back down the garden together in silence.

When we were at the back door, she stopped. “You can wait here,” she said. “I shan’t be long.”

“Where are you going?” I said.

“I’m going to talk to Mummy. Then we’ll go to the barn, OK?”

I nodded.

Sophie said, “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry.” She fingered the material of the coat thoughtfully. “I think she knows what’s coming in any case.”

“I don’t want to wait here,” I said.

“It’s best,” she told me. “Really. I shan’t be long.” She smiled a little, and went inside, taking the coat with her.

I waited a while, growing more and more uncertain. I knew what I wanted to do, but at the same time I was very afraid. In the end, I shrugged off my trainers, and, walking very slowly and quietly, crept through the kitchen and into the downstairs hallway. The door to the drawing room was slightly ajar, and a thin sliver of light cut across the hall carpet. There was the sound of voices from inside, barely audible. I moved slowly closer, adrenaline making me tremble. I could just make out Sophie’s voice. She sounded calm, in control, reasonable.

“We’ll be gone about four hours, I should think,” she said. “I’ll phone Dad after that. I’ve got his number. That should be long enough for you.”

Then my mother, her voice distorted and almost unrecognizable with hate. “You little cunt,” she said.

“It may take a day or two to get things sorted out,” Sophie went on. She didn’t seem to have heard Mummy at all. “I’ve got money, so that should be OK. Mattie’s pretty grown up now, you may have noticed.”

“You’re a monster,” Mummy said, and then she spoke out loudly, and for an instant my heart lurched and I thought she was talking to me. “I have a monster for a child.”

“Try to concentrate,” Sophie said. “I really don’t want to have to go through all this again.”

“Monster,” my mother said. Her voice was weaker, as if she had suddenly lost touch with her hatred. “I should have got rid of you when I had the chance.”

“Your mistake,” Sophie replied evenly. There was a pause. “You knew this was going to happen eventually. Four hours. It’s generous. You’ve got more than enough time for regrets.”

I heard the boards creak under the soft pile as Sophie turned. Quickly, I retraced my steps and put my trainers back on. A minute or so later, Sophie emerged from the house again. She no longer had Ol' Grady’s coat with her.

“We’ll go to the barn now,” she said. “It’s a beautiful evening.”

“Yes,” I said.

“How much of that did you hear?”

I blinked. “Not much. The last part.”

She was thoughtful for a moment. “Well, it doesn’t matter.” She looked at me. “You’re too young to understand,” she said, her eyes fixed on mine.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I’m only eleven.”

She smiled. “Well done, Mattie,” she said. “Now, let’s move. It’ll be sundown soon.”

We set off across the fields together.

He stares at the wall behind me. “Sometimes I think maybe she was right,” he says.

“Who?”

“Mummy. Objectively, I suppose she was. But it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

“Of course not,” I say. “You were only a kid.”

He frowns sharply. “What?”

“You couldn’t know any better.”

“What would you know about it?” he says. I try to smile.

“Quite a lot, I should think.” I let him take that in for a second, and then go on. “What do you think you meant when you said you were only eleven?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. He doesn’t sound confused, though. He sounds angry, almost defensive.

“Yes you do. Sophie said you were too young to understand, and you agreed with her. But you didn’t mean it, and neither did she. So tell me the truth, Mattie. Were you really only a kid? Is that excuse good enough any more?”

“I don’t
know
,” he shouts. Then, after a second, he takes control of himself again. “I don’t know. Yes, actually, I do think it’s a good enough excuse. I wasn’t like her. I was pretty much normal, and I didn’t understand half of what went on.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say.

“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” he says wretchedly. He runs a hand through his hair. “You don’t understand.”

Abruptly, I realize that neither of us is maintaining the pretence that I am Sophie any longer. It strikes me with the force of a blow.

“I understand more than you seem to think,” I say, desperate to fill the sudden silence. “You’ve told me enough, Mattie. Enough to know that you knew Sophie far better than you’d like me to believe. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“I really didn’t know what was going on that night,” he says. “It all happened too quickly. I wanted to go with her, but I was too scared. And I hardly heard anything outside Mummy’s room.”

“But you did know what she meant,” I persist. “Isn’t that right?”

He rubs his mouth, his eyes darting about the empty kitchen. Finally, he says, “Yes, I knew what she was talking about. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“I only want to hear the truth,” I say, although even as I speak the words I am not sure if I mean them. He swallows, stands up. The candle stubs are visible, pale as corpses, at the periphery of my vision. I try to ignore them.

“Really?” he asks, as if he has read my mind.

“I think so,” I say. “I think we both need to hear it. Am I right?”

“Maybe.”

“You haven’t said this part before, have you?”

“No.”

“I need to hear it, Mattie. Keep going. Go back to when you left the house. I want to know what happened.”

His eyes are fixed in space, unfocused. From nowhere, the thought comes to me—based on something he said about Sophie—that he is seeing landscapes I will never know.

We walked on across the fields, taking care to stay by the dry-stone walls as much as possible, until we reached the lane that overlooked the farm. Again, as we had at the edge of the quarry, we stood and stared at it for a long while before going any farther. We had walked slowly, talking a little at intervals, and in the time it had taken us to go from the quarry to the farm the sun had sunk below the horizon. The sky to the west was still a ruddy orange, but the grass underfoot had gone grey-blue with darkness and there was no longer any sound of birds from the woods.

We followed the same route down to the farmyard as we had the first time we had come there, keeping the body of the barn between us and the lights of the village. The hinged panel swung aside easily, but inside the barn it was pitch dark.

“Wait a minute,” Sophie said, and fumbled in her pocket. “Here we go.” She struck a match, and I watched in fascination as she lit the stub of a candle. I recognized it at once as the brand we had bought to fill the small candle-altars in the holly bush. As the wick caught, a warm yellow radiance pooled out around us. Sophie’s eyes gleamed. She walked over to the foot of the straw fort and sat down on a bale. I followed. She dug one finger into the tough straw and then wedged the base of the candle stub into the hole; an inch or so of wax protruded when she had finished.

“There,” she said. I kept quiet, knowing what was happening.

We watched the motes of chaff dance in the candlelight, and I swung my feet against the side of the bale as the dribbles of wax ran on to the straw and set there, gradually cementing the candle in place. The flame eased its way downwards very slowly. Sophie’s face was dreamy, her expression vague.

“This is a good place,” she said. I nodded. “We never went in the farm buildings,” she went on. “That might have been interesting. I think we did all right, though.”

“I think so, too,” I said.

“Do you mean that?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She smiled, a sad smile, which was unusual for her. “Thanks, Mattie. You’re all right, you know. We both are.” I watched as the flame sank slowly down.

She said, “I don’t want to grow up, Mattie. I don’t want to be like Mummy.”

“You won’t be like Mummy,” I said. “You’re different.”

“Yeah. I know. But it’s all the same thing, really.”

“Do you want never to grow up?” I asked.

“What, like Peter Pan? No, I don’t think so. It would get boring, don’t you reckon? Like always eating the same food, every day, every meal. And always wearing the same clothes. I don’t think I could stand that. You just have to make your decisions and get on with things.”

The candle flame licked tentatively at the first wisps of straw, and a thick curl of white smoke slid up towards the distant ceiling of the barn. At last, she said, “It’s time to go. There’s one thing we have to do here.”

Not comprehending, I followed her out. Behind us, the candle burned strongly, spreading, its growing flame seeming to challenge the barn’s dark recesses. I said nothing; this was Sophie’s time, and I knew it. We went to the open shed, and found again the iron bar with which we had struck the heads off the rivets. We took it to the barn doors, and there Sophie slid it through the chain, and twisted it around and around until it was pulled very tight. We took one end of the long bar each, and continued to turn it slowly, winding it still further. Sophie’s knuckles were white where she gripped the bar. There was a sharp crack, and the tension slackened immediately. I let go of the bar, and looked in astonishment at the link of the chain that had burst; I picked up one of the two pieces that had dropped, and while Sophie went back to replace the bar, I examined the two sections of bright steel that had been revealed inside its brown casing. It was hot enough to make me swap it from hand to hand. I put it in my pocket, and helped Sophie slide the huge doors open. The candle was still burning steadily.