The House That Was Eureka (3 page)

He stopped and corrected himself, in a pedantic way that Evie would grow used to over the weeks to come. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not my favourite movie, it’s the only movie I really like at all.’

Evie was confused. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Evie usually wouldn’t admit ignorance to a stranger, certainly not to a male one, but you could see from this person’s looks that he didn’t count. He was weird. And, despite the partition, Evie could see that he was shorter than her.

‘
If
,’ he said again. ‘That scene at the end where the kids are up on top of the building and they mow down all the enemy on the ground with machine-guns. Whenever I see it I always get a funny feeling that it’s
me
up there, shooting down – as if I’ve done it all before, in real life. What’s your name?’

‘Evie.’

‘Yeah, I’m Noel. Mum will be collecting the rent from you, I suppose. Though it’s not her house, it’s the despot’s. The despot stays in bed nearly all the time, though she can get out, and she speaks too sometimes. That’s a secret. What’s she charging?’

‘Eighty, I think.’ More than for their nice house in Campbelltown; but then, rents were high in the inner city.

‘Of course, she has to cut the price, they reckon it’s haunted.’ Noel burst out laughing. A wild, violent laugh.

How stupid, to try to scare her. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ Evie said, but he was rattling on and on.

‘That’s your father, I suppose, the guy with the beer gut. Your mother looks like Loretta Young in a midday movie, but spunkier. How old are you?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Yeah, I’m fifteen.’

He didn’t look it. Or rather, his body didn’t, for he was a little shorter than Evie. And he was thin, like a primary-school kid. His face though could be old when he wasn’t laughing.

‘What music do you like best?’ He fired questions like bullets.

‘Oh, most things. Everything. I don’t know. Nothing in particular.’ That was part of the trouble with Evie. As far as music went, and food, and people, and possible jobs, and everything else, Evie had no particular opinions. She neither hated things nor loved things. She was just middle-ey Evie. Middle-ey-muddle-ey-piddle-ey-puddle-ey-fuddle-ey-Evie-Peevie. That was one of Maria’s songs. Evie hated being asked what she thought of things, or what she wanted to do, because everything seemed as grey and floppy as everything else. Perhaps the strongest feelings she had were of disliking Ted, and liking Mum and Sammy; but even then it didn’t seem very strong. It wasn’t like love or hate. Or not like love or hate seemed when you saw them in movies. And so people got annoyed with Evie because she was always so uncaring and undecided; and Evie thought less of herself too, because other people thought she was boring, and because it was very frustrating for Evie herself, never knowing what she liked or she wanted.

‘The only music I like is Bob Dylan,’ Noel said. ‘But only his early stuff, not the stuff he’s into these days.’

One thing about Noel, Evie thought, is that he’s so full of his own opinions that he doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t have any. Evie knew that the guys she talked to in Campbelltown thought she was boring.

‘What I wish,’ Noel went on, ‘is that I’d been around in the sixties, when Dylan was good and people fought if they felt things, like the kids in
If
. That’s why I look like I do.’

Evie was confused again. The sixties were as far away as Ancient History. But she could now sort of recognize Noel’s looks as being like those people with messy hair and black jumpers and duffle-coats that you see on old record covers. Evie looked, and sure enough, Noel had a black polo-neck jumper on, though it wasn’t all that cold.

‘People think I’m a creep,’ Noel said.

Evie didn’t say anything.

‘It always kills a conversation,’ Noel said, ‘to let people know you know what they’re thinking of you. Adios amigo.’ Noel handed her the rifle. ‘I found this in your front yard this afternoon. Sweet dreams.’ And Noel’s face disappeared around the partition and then Evie heard the mouth-organ in the room.

Evie’s watch had stopped and she didn’t know where she’d packed the radio, so she couldn’t find out the time. It was dark and lonely upstairs now that Noel was gone, so she felt her way down the stairwell. Tripped at the bottom. Went through the dark diningroom and into the lounge, looked at the divan and decided: I might as well sleep out there, right from the first night. Evie rarely had such a positive feeling about something.

She made her way back through the diningroom, through the half-lit kitchen, and unlocked the back door. There was the empty, narrow breezeway, and then the scullery…

It seemed odd to Evie, the wasted space of the breezeway, but Mrs Cavendish next door had explained it to Mum and Mum had told Evie: In the old days, about a hundred years ago when these houses had been built, the scullery was where people had a fuel copper for the washing, and to boil up water for baths. They used to use the scullery too for washing up, and for peeling the vegetables, plucking chooks, and other messy things. In lots of houses they’d built a narrow passage called a breezeway in between the kitchen and the scullery to stop the scullery smells and heat from getting into the house. The scullery at 203 had been used as a combined laundry-bathroom until ten years ago, when they’d converted the tiny upstairs storeroom next to Sammy’s room into a bathroom. But at the end of World War I, Mrs Cavendish had said, they’d got the gas on, and they’d got new gas coppers and had stopped using the old fuel ones in both houses. Mrs Cavendish knew all these things because her mother, who owned the two houses, had lived in 201 all her life. Mum said Mrs Cavendish’s mother was evidently bedridden, poor old thing, but Mum hadn’t met her yet…

Evie found a box of matches and went in. She’d had a good look by daylight, but just wanted to make sure.

It was a small room – small and square. The walls were unplastered brick, cracking a bit, painted grey. She could repaint them. The floor was concrete, covered with yellow lino; not too old, not too bad. There was a window looking out onto the side passage and 205’s fence.

On the other side of the room, the back corner was completely filled in with a big diagonal cupboard. Evie had looked in there that afternoon, and that was where the old fuel copper was. It was a tall, brick structure, with the copper set right into it. Under the copper was a space that came up to Evie’s knee; that was where the fire used to go. You could still see the fire-marks on the bricks, and on the floor too – for when they’d cemented the room they’d stopped at the cupboard, and under the copper there were still the old flagging stones. In the farthest bit of the corner was a rusty tin chimney pipe. No attempt had been made to turn the cupboard into a proper cupboard, with shelves and things: it was just a big, dirty, triangular, closed-in space, containing some broken odds and ends like an old push-mower and bike tyres and old paint tins and some old flagon bottles containing little bits of sedimented, noxious-looking liquids. Mrs Cavendish had told Mum that the cupboard had been built in 1920, and it sure looked it.

Evie glanced a bit dubiously at the cupboard now, struck a match, and had a quick look inside just to make sure no one was hiding in it, or anything. One day soon she’d clear out all the junk, and then she’d get Ted to put some shelves up in there. Ted was good about things like building shelves, and got wood cheap because he worked for a builder.

Evie dragged a mattress through from the dining-room, psyching herself into liking this room.

...It’ll be good down here. A place to be private. I can play the radio at night, and if I put up some thick curtains I can lock the door and sleep in the daytime and no one will know…

The last few months, Evie had been sleeping a lot. She’d get up and help Mum, and then as soon as Mum had gone to work and Evie had taken Sammy to the play centre, Evie would come home and go to bed again. Then she’d get up and do some housework, and then she’d go back to sleep again. Sometimes she was late picking Sammy up because she’d been fast asleep. Ted worked odd hours, and sometimes he’d come home in the afternoon and find her asleep.

‘Lazy bloody kid,’ he’d rave at Mum. ‘You’d think she’d be out looking for a job. I only wish
I
could have a kip in the afternoon.’ When he was really vicious, he’d call her Sleeping Beauty, or Wee Willie Winkie…

But down here, no one will know if I’m in here asleep, or out looking for work…

Evie went in and got a couple of blankets and a pillow, snapped off the kitchen light, stepped into the breezeway, and pulled the kitchen door hard shut behind her.

She heard the lock click, tested the door with her shoulder just to be sure, then crossed into the scullery and locked her own door too against the Newtown night.

Evie always went to sleep the instant her head touched the pillow. If she had dreams, they disappeared completely before she woke. Maria and Sammy sometimes screamed themselves awake with nightmares, and Jodie dreamed a lot that she was a fish, but Evie couldn’t remember ever having had a dream in her life.

This night, though, something happened.

It was the sound of the footstep first, treading stealthily across the roof above her, only one foot, then two feet, more feet; and more feet too, a new set of feet, six more feet, lots more feet, running fast down the side passage in rhythm with the feet above. But only the sounds; she couldn’t see anything.

Then it stopped, then it happened again.

But visually this second time, and soundlessly, she saw the shape of a foot plant itself silverly above her. Not a naked foot, with toes, but a boot-shape, rounded at the front, a heavy heel at the back, heavy though soundless the footstep now grew above her till it seemed to cover the ceiling, silver first then changing to black.

Then outside, in the passage that ran along beside her mattress, she could see feet in black boots planting down fast. One after the other, rhythmically running, a sort of running march-at-the-double; she could see them though she was inside and they were outside and there was a wall of bricks between her and them. She could see them, though not hear them this time, and nor did she see bodies growing up from the feet but just felt the feet.

Then maybe she awoke, if really she’d been asleep (for it hadn’t felt like sleep) because it stopped again.

Evie concentrated, listened, there was nothing. Got up and peered out the window, and there was nothing. Evie lay down. Mum and Ted would have to be home soon. Maybe they were already, maybe they’d come home and were lying on the double mattress upstairs in their room. Evie felt nearly half-inclined to go into the house and see; but more inclined just to stay fast in her room behind the locked door. A private sanctuary.

Time passed then; time that was so shapeless that Evie might as well have been asleep. Time that wasn’t negative, and wasn’t positive, time like most of Evie’s time, that seemed just to exist as part of her life, moving Evie from one day to the next, time that made her hair grow by the month, that made her body grow by the year, but that didn’t ever do anything more eventful.

Time that didn’t press on her, that didn’t impinge.

Not like this new time that had her again now, gripping her blood in its urgency, sending its feet pounding along her veins in boots as it ran up-and-over on-the-double through her head. Time that pressed now, meaning something, happening too fast, drawn out like ages; time that pressed just as space pressed, for the room now had shrunk to the size of the diagonal cupboard and Evie was in it, standing up, balancing on top of the copper, wanting desperately to cough but holding her breath for dear life.

Noel’s face swam through her mind, the pale colour, the believer’s eyes, the flame of his smile as he bang-banged and laughed down into the street.

Balancing, the face threw her off balance, and might have tipped her off the copper if she’d really been standing on it instead of lying down on the mattress as she had been all the time. She could feel the button-things beneath her hand, for she had no sheet.

Evie shifted, and shuddered with the memory, now that it was over.

Though it wasn’t over, for it happened again.

This fourth time, the state Evie was in while it happened was more like a regular dream. Or rather, when she thought back over everything the next day, and again for days afterwards, the fourth time seemed more like other people’s descriptions of dreams.

The fourth time, things came together, sound and seeing, and the things she couldn’t see.

There is the cupboard, the closed air inside it, the sight of the wooden door as I look at it from inside. Then sounds of footsteps, first one, two, three, then lots running left-right, on-the-double, down the side there, overhead
.

Shouts and crashing. The gang of thugs, trying to crash through into the kitchen; crashing over the roof into the upstairs back room
.

Sammy! Evie thought. But she couldn’t move.

And screaming more then, and more crashing, a sound like the kitchen door crashing open from inside, and bangs echoing over everything like a car backfiring. No one’s voice that I can pick.

Legs stiff, feet stuck to the top of the copper, eyes fixed in the darkness to the slatted wood of the cupboard door. Too scared to step out and look. Fear cold, like time all around. A hurry and slowness. And suddenly his face. Thin and white, too white and too thin, the dark eyes of his fear and hurry as he hands me the gun and disappears
.

It was dawn when Evie got up. She could see the light then, coming in the window. She could hear sounds, coming from the kitchen. But okay sounds, this time.

She unlocked the scullery door, and went in.

‘What a night!’ Mum was making tea and toast and scrambled eggs. Ted was sitting at the table, waiting with his plate.

‘
We
’
re
up early!’ Ted said. By ‘we’ meaning Evie.

‘Yeah, that’ll do me for a night and a half.’ Mum had a habit of repeating herself.