The Sea House: A Novel (2 page)

I got the fire going again in the grate and had a horrible cold wash in the sink in the corner of the bedroom. I pulled on my jeans and a flannel shirt, feeling guilty that it was Michael who was doing all the back-breaking work, while I got to sit in the only good room and draw lizards. The book was on reptile neurology and I’d just started the last chapter: ‘The Brain and Nervous System of
Podarcis erhardii,
commonly known as Erhard’s Wall Lizard’. Michael had got used to sleeping in a room with the dry aquarium and its lizard family, and the faint acrid smell of waxy chrysalises that collected at the bottom of the tank.

I lifted the insulation wadding and looked through the side of the lizard tank to see how they were getting on; immediately, a flick of a tail and a scuttle; the two lizards flashed into a different position and then froze. The thing about lizards is you can never tame them. They have a very small, very ancient brain that operates on one principle: survival. They spend their whole lives on high alert, listening out for danger, scanning their surroundings with their lizard eyes, their toe pads picking up every vibration in the earth, ready to send back one message to the brain cortex: flee, flee now. They don’t consider, or think; they simply reach a certain overload in feedback criteria and then run. They are sleek little bundles of vigilant self-preservation with an evolutionary strategy so effective, you can find a lizard brain tucked inside every developed species.

I pushed back the sleeve of my jumper and carefully lowered my hand into the glass tank. There was a flicker and they both scuttled to the other end in a flurry of sand and tiny sideways straggle legs. But there was nowhere else for them to go. I slowly moved my hand towards the corner; another quick scuffle, and my hand closed round one of them. I could feel the little whip of muscle working inside my palm and the scratching of its back legs.

I held the chloroform bottle against my chest with the top of my arm and unscrewed the top. Then I covered the opening with a wad of cotton wool and tipped it over with my free hand. I held the damp cotton over the struggling lizard. Waited till it stopped. I put the lid back on the bottle, and sat down at the desk. The lizard was lying across the piece of card, its arms and legs something between a minute plucked chicken and a cartoon frog in its anthropomorphic arms-up pose. I picked up the scalpel and started to slit along the belly skin, ready to map out the nerves.

I realised that the banging and splintering from downstairs had stopped. I have an amazing ability to sit through noise and not notice it once I begin to work, but the sudden silence was unsettling. Not even the sound of digging. Something’s come up, I thought, and went downstairs with my arms folded. I only hoped it wasn’t more problems. Michael’s father had lent us enough to get the manse ready to take our first bed and breakfasters, but we needed to be open as soon as possible if we were to keep up the payments.

I made my way down through the hallway, crossing my arms across my chest against the chill. Down in the sea room, every one of the square sash windows was filled with views of the Atlantic so that the place always felt more sea than room. Michael and Donny were standing thigh deep among the floor joists, looking at something. When Michael saw me coming in he didn’t look pleased.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Just tell me the worst. Is it dry rot?’

Donny looked upset and serious. Michael was white under his summer tan and the grime from ripping up the old wood. It was freezing in there. There was a fusty smell of rot and damp.

‘I don’t want you to look,’ he said. ‘You won’t like it.’

‘What is it? Oh God, not another rat.’

I walked round the edge of the walls where there were still some floorboards down and then lowered myself into the floor space between the joists. The floor was damp and sandy and littered with dirt and debris. Michael and Donny were standing one each side of a small dark-brown box, or rather a little metal trunk that was rusted away in places. It had evidently just been dug up from the sandy soil.

The lid was open.

I squeezed next to Michael so that he had to hold on to the joist behind him.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

I squatted down and looked inside. The earth smelled very sour and close there. I could see a jumble of tiny bones mixed in with a nest of disintegrating woollen material. There was some kind of symmetry to them; a tiny round skull, like a rabbit or a cat. The bones had a yellowish tinge, scoured clean by beetles and other organisms that had got into the trunk as it rusted, probably over many years. I wondered why someone had buried a cat under the house. Then I tipped my head sideways, frowned.

This was no family pet or small animal. No, this was the skull of a human baby, but everything so tiny that it must have been born either very underweight, or premature. My eyes traced along the arm bone and then down the bones of one of the legs.

Something was wrong. Where was the other leg? I shuffled closer, and noted the strange thickness of the single leg bone, the long central indentation along its length, and then I realised that it wasn’t so much that any of the bones were missing but that both legs had been fused into one solid mass, the feet barely there and oddly splayed out like tiny appendages.

My heart missed a beat. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.

CHAPTER 2

Ruth

The same day we found the remains under our house, the police arrived from Tarbert. They parked several cars on the grass in front, churning the green turf with muddy tyre tracks.

As I watched them through the kitchen window, for a moment I was there again, a child standing alone beside the canal, watching from my hiding place behind the police van while they worked to bring something up from under the water. I felt dizzy, my breath short as I saw the muddied body rising up from the water again.

A wave of nausea made me grip the back of the kitchen chair. I dipped my head and concentrated on breathing. After a while, I straightened and looked around the kitchen.

Michael went out to see them and I left him to it. I focussed on sorting out the mess in hand, clearing away the breakfast things, but I couldn’t stop shivering.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and jumped.

‘You going to be okay?’ Michael said.

‘It’s just cold in here with them going in and out of the front door all the time.’

‘I’ll ask them not to leave it open.’

For the rest of the morning, Michael kept shooting worried, sideways glances in my direction each time he came in.

Michael knows about my past of course. It was always out in the open. On the first day we met, I told him: I was brought up in a children’s home. After Mum died. After she drowned herself.

He knows, and he doesn’t know. So many things I’ll never tell him about those years. Things I don’t even tell myself any more.

I pulled on an old jumper that Michael had left hanging behind the kitchen door and clutched a mug of tea in my frozen hands. I could hear them tramping in and out, their voices calling, doors slamming.

I went out into the hallway and saw the tracks of brown mud being brought in by the police, staining the new hall floorboards before we’d had a chance to seal them clean with layers of varnish. Sounds of them digging deeper under the floor coming from the sea room. Trembling with anger, I went back into the kitchen and closed the door.

‘I’m afraid it will be at least two more days before Forensics arrive from Inverness,’ said Sergeant MacAllister, coming into the kitchen where Michael and I were holed up together eating lunch, pretending to live a normal life. ‘Perhaps it would be better if you moved out for a few days, until we can take the remains away.’

The caravan felt damp and unused when we went back. It smelled like the inside of an old biscuit tin. And it was freezing in there, even with the paraffin heater on. Every surface I touched leached the heat from my skin.

The day was now wasted. I sloshed formaldehyde into the prepared lizard’s tray and slid it into the bottom of the tiny caravan fridge.

‘I can’t believe we’re being driven out of our own home by that thing,’ I said to Michael as we lay in the cramped bed.

‘They’ll take it away soon, and given time, we’ll forget it was ever there.’

He sounded so certain and so confident. We huddled together, waiting to feel warm, waiting for sleep.

*   *   *

The next day, high winds came in. I woke up to the stale smell of the caravan. The memory of the rusting trunk and the bones inside like the remains of a small animal made me feel too nauseous to eat any of the porridge that Michael had made.

Michael went back to the house to carry on papering the upstairs bedroom, and so he was there when the call came in from the police about the forensic team who were supposed to be coming over from the mainland. I heard the wind slam the caravan door against the van. He came in looking gloomy, his hair wet and blown about by the squally rain.

‘Ferry’s being held up in Uig for the weekend.’ He sat down at the tiny caravan table, the water running off his yellow sailing jacket. ‘We’re not going to be back in the house any time soon I’m afraid, love.’

‘You’re dripping on the paper,’ I said, irritated that nothing was going right. ‘This is going to set us back weeks. Could jeopardise us opening in time for next season, and starting to pay off the loan.’

I glanced up; saw Michael’s face anxious and white.

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do till they take the … you know … the remains away.’ He sighed. He turned a drawing of the lizard’s nervous system round and looked at it. ‘How’s it going? This looks beautiful, like the veins of a leaf.’

‘At least when these are finished we’ll get paid.’

‘I’d better get on too. We’re out of woodchip and we need more paint. Donny and I are going to drive up to the store in Tarbert.’

I kissed his cold, wet cheek and dabbed at the sploshes he’d left on the table.

For the next hour, I worked solidly on the illustration, absorbed in minutely delineating the nerve pathways and intricate blood vessels that lay ready to flood the lizard’s muscles with blood at the first semaphoring of danger.

All the while, the wind thumped vengefully on the side of the van. I could feel the compressions of air like waves of dizziness, the vibrations travelling through the table. As I took up the scalpel and started to open the tiny muscles in the lizard’s forearm, a vicious blow thudded into the van; I jumped and sliced into my thumb, dropped the knife and swore.

I found a plaster, struggled with the sticky adhesive.

For a moment I caught a whiff of Mum’s talcy smell as she had unwound a strip of plasters; a memory of how she’d leaned over to wash my gouged knee, the lilt of her voice as she took out the playground grit. She was telling me about the island siths, the scattered boulders left by ancient glaciers that changed at dusk into funny, stupid creatures. The crinkly orange plaster neatly fastened to my skin, the wound clean and smelling of Germolene, she had bent over and kissed my head, told me I was her
mo ghaol.

Mum came from the islands, though she brought me up in London. I grew up in a block of council flats with long brick balconies that smelled of bleach and stairwells that smelled of wee.

She never told me which island she came from exactly.

I snapped the first-aid tin shut with my good hand and manhandled it back into the little cupboard. I sat back down in front of the drawings but the rain had come in like buckets of grit being poured over the roof. It was impossible to concentrate.

I sat watching the flattened marram grass through the blurred window. Then I took a fresh piece of paper and began to sketch out another anatomical drawing, from what I could remember of that poor child in its makeshift, rusty coffin. I stared at what I’d drawn, at the bony appendage where legs should have been. I thought about the child’s mother. Wondered if it was she who had dug down into the earth beneath our house, covered the little trunk over, nailed down the boards.

As I sat tapping my pencil on the Formica table, it occurred to me that I knew someone I could ask about such an odd foetal mutation. I gave a little laugh not to have thought of it before. After I’d rooted around for the number of my old anatomy professor in London, I decided to go back over to the Sea House where our new phone was sitting on a chair in the hallway. I hesitated for a moment, knowing that Michael and Donny weren’t there, but roundly scolding myself for being so weak-minded, I wrapped up in a huge oilskin jacket of Michael’s and walked over to the house – or rather I was bodily driven there by the strength of the wind.

I closed the Sea House door behind me, glad to be out of the rain, and hung the dripping oilskin over the banister. I was ready to feel purposeful about calling Professor Carter. I turned round to get the phone, my eyes glancing back over the cold space of the hallway. The same tightening in the air. The anxiety seeping in again, creeping through the systems of my body; my heart was starting to hammer; my hands felt clammy and slippery. Once more, I was overwhelmed by an urgent and unpleasant instinct to get right out of there.

But this time, I wasn’t going to let her get to me. I pulled the phone number out of my pocket, picked up the receiver and started to dial.

I waited in the empty hallway for someone to answer, tensing the muscles in the back of my neck against the cold air on my skin. Against her. I knew it was a she. And I understood something else – this child was no newborn. She was older, knowing.

And I wanted her gone. I listened to the phone ringing somewhere in London, and felt a flood of relief as I heard Professor Carter’s sensible voice answer.

We talked for quite a long time. He said that he’d heard of such a condition, but it was very rare. He promised to get some information together and send it in the post.

‘Don’t forget, Ruth,’ he said, ‘any time you can make Christmas dinner again. We miss you.’

I put the phone down and let myself out of the front door.

Speaking with him on the phone had left me feeling a bit homesick for the professor and his wife. That first Christmas at university, when the halls of residence cleared and everyone went home, they had rounded up all the strays with nowhere to go. It was the best Christmas I’d had for years, even though it was shadowed by an odd resentment, a memory of the broken train sets and scraggy-haired Sindy dolls wrapped up in Christmas paper and left in a giant scrum in the dining-room hall of the home. No idea who sent those parcels.