Souls Dryft Read online

  "Go away," I shouted up at him – or something similar. I cannot remember exactly the words I used, but it was to that effect and in language a filthy rogue, such as he, would comprehend.

  His head withdrew and out popped the far handsomer visage of his companion, who shouted, "Who makes all that noise below? Ply your trade elsewhere, Strumpet."

  His laughter chased me out of the passage and into the market square.

  * * * *

  A few days later, the letter came from my uncle.

  To Masters Chippchase, Chippchase, Jowchett and Scroggs;

  It has come to my notice that I am remiss in my duty to my late sister’s child. Send her to me with all good haste, and I shall remedy the matter.

  Sydney

  Suddenly, the welfare of a niece, who was previously nothing more than an unfortunate reminder of his wayward sister’s sins, became a matter of conscience for a man who possessed very little of that commodity. To my wry amusement, he drew a thick line through the second Chippchase in his salutation — clearly an afterthought. The sight of that line, erasing her son so casually, caused Old Mother Chippchase to renew her wailing. But only until she was struck by a merrier idea. "Thanks be! Let him take on the expense of the hussy’s guidance for once."

  Her squawking woke Master Scroggs, who, sprawled in a corner of the hearth, fell in and out of a noisy sleep, his hands resting on the great curve of his belly. Now he hauled himself upright, wiping a sliver of drool from his chin, and, always one step behind, demanded to know what happened. When he learned that my uncle had summoned me at last, he was saddened, exclaiming he would miss me.

  Poor fellow. Scroggs was my only ally in that house. It was he who first encouraged my imagination by placing a book into my small hands and later teaching me my letters. As he lamented my departure, his partners, glad to be well rid of the burden, already bundled me through the door and while the fish cart was not the most romantic conveyance, it was timely and required no outlay of coin. Therefore, it was the perfect transport for me as far as Mother Chippchase was concerned. So I was, that very morning, packed off to my uncle’s old fortress in the countryside and a new Chapter.

  Chapter Nine

  Grace

  The train was almost full. I kept to my book, shutting out the noise with my iPod. The man across the aisle sat stiffly in his seat, his elbows tight to his sides, even when turning the pages of his paper. Whenever his neighbor moved, his eyes shot little sparks sideways, like misfired rockets. I was on the receiving end, only once, and after that he carefully avoided me. It was several weeks now since the unhappy coincidence of our blind date, organized by the evil mastermind Marian, but it was clearly not long enough for the memory to mellow. Although it seemed we were destined to run into one another, we both did our best to ignore the fact and feign disinterest. Which was amusing, since he was my creation in the first place.

  Now he ran about masquerading as a real person with a proper life, suits to be cleaned, a cell phone and an over-inflated ego. He might not know where he came from, but he definitely knew something was my fault.

  The windows went black as we rumbled through a tunnel. He shook out his paper with a quick jerk of his elbows, his gaze supposedly buried deep in an article. The woman next to him juggled a large coffee in a Styrofoam cup, while shouting at her children in the next row and trying to squeeze a finger inside her shoe, because her foot was, as she apologized loudly in his ear, "itching like a bugger." She finally took off the shoe, hitched her foot onto her knee and scratched it through a hole in her socks. His gaze searched desperately, looking for a vomit bag perhaps.

  We emerged from the tunnel and into flickering sunlight. It was years since I’d been to Norfolk – since Marian and I were kids, when we spent a few weeks there, every summer, with Uncle Bob and Aunt Rose at Souls Dryft. Those were the best days of childhood. When I closed my eyes, I could still smell the sweet lavender in their garden and hear the moths tapping at our bedroom window each night.

  "Uncle Bob’s been in that house almost fifty years," my mother said two days ago, on the phone to me. "Always swore they’d have to take him out in a box."

  Well, he didn’t quite get his way. The postman found him, sitting in the lane in his underpants. Now the family discussed what ought to be done with Uncle Bob, as if he was a dog leaving his turds in guests’ shoes. "I suppose he’ll have to go in a home," she'd burbled on. "I told your father, years ago, he shouldn’t have been left in that house alone. He really went downhill since Rose died."

  I was sent to make a report on Uncle Bob in hospital, because, as my mother explained, I had nothing else to do. I was out of work, and they were all too busy.

  We pulled into a station and the woman across the aisle began herding her sullen children into action. A large shopping bag swung around, hitting Richard across the shoulder. I saw him bite his lip, his eyes darkening. The woman leaned over her seat, just as the train jerked, and she must not have replaced the lid of her coffee quite firmly enough, for a splatter of steaming, brown liquid flew through the air, scalding his hand. His face scarlet, he shut his paper abruptly and stood. Stepping to the side with a muffled comment, he lowered himself again, this time into the seat directly opposite mine. Our eyes met once again. He gave me an irritable nod, as if he felt obliged by our slight acquaintance. Then, leaning his head back, he pretended to nap, but with his long legs bent up so uncomfortably to avoid mine, there was no possibility that he could actually be asleep. He chose to pretend, however, rather than interact with me.

  Once the woman and her children were gone, I expected him to return to his seat, but when the train pulled out of the station, he remained there, eyes closed tight. Or were they? His eyelashes twitched, and I was sure I could see a little color under there.

  "Must be quite an experience for you," I said finally. "Traveling with the unwashed mob, instead of in your fancy car."

  His lips parted, just enough to squeeze out a sigh. Apparently I was so far beneath his notice that he couldn’t even spare me a reply. If his phone rang, he’d answer it though, I thought.

  His phoned buzzed. Aha! He flipped it open, treating me to a flinty glare. I quickly looked down at my book.

  He snapped into his phone with disgruntled monosyllables, but apparently the conversation was prematurely cut off and now he glared at me, as if the poor reception was my fault and it only happened around me.

  I closed my book. "How’s Lucy doing at the new school?"

  "She misses—"

  "Since you reduced the old one to a pile of bricks." Well, how could I resist?

  His left eyebrow quirked. "Lucy’s with her mother at the moment."

  "Why, what happened to her father?" Shot by a vengeful lover? In Jail? In rehab? In hiding?

  "My brother Reece is out of the country, visiting our father."

  "America?"

  "New York." Then he paused, as if weighing up whether he could spare the breath. "Our father is apparently ill."

  "Oh, I hope it’s not serious."

  "Supposedly he’s dying."

  Before I could even offer my sympathy, he snapped, "It’s not the first time. He does it for attention, whenever he realizes what a mess he made of his life and feels guilty for abandoning his family. It will pass. Like all his moments of repentance."

  Crikey! Finally, some stifled emotion burst out of the old stuffed suit. "Aren’t you going to visit him?" I pried my way in through that little hole left by the sudden explosion.

  "Later." He stared out at the passing scenery, his expression bland now, closing himself off again.

  "So why are you on this train anyway?" He didn’t strike me as the sort to suffer the inconvenience of public transport. He was hardly a "save the planet" type. In the words of Joni Mitchell, he would pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

  "Car trouble," he confirmed.

  Still I was surprised he took a train when he could have hired another car, surely.

 
His phone buzzed again and, putting it to his ear, he turned his body away from me, but I could hear the bad connection, spitting and hissing like a chip-fryer. He shoved it back under his jacket and began cracking his knuckles.

  "It seems to me," I said carefully, "your life would be much less stressful without that phone."

  Of course, he wouldn’t take my advice. He spent those final miles glaring out of the window, pretending not to look at me, but slyly studying my reflection in the glass.

  At the station in Norwich we parted company, going our separate ways, making no phony exclamations of hoping to meet again. He strode confidently away across the platform, very tall and straight, receiving more than a few admiring glances – none of which he appeared to notice. I, on the other hand, struggled with the broken strap of my shoulder bag when the safety pin holding it together suddenly snapped open, spilling tampons and make-up across the platform. People carefully avoided catching my eye, just in case they felt obliged to offer assistance.

  * * * *

  Two hours later I sat in an empty hospital waiting room, reading a note from Uncle Bob.

  My dear Grace,

  I am off to see Rose at last. We left you the house. I know you will take care of it. Genny is waiting there for you.

  He was gone, and I never had a chance to say goodbye. Apparently it happened the night before and he went quietly in his sleep, which I supposed was the best way to go. He’d left this note for me, although, as far as I knew, no one told him I was coming.

  Aunt Rose always used to say that house would be mine one day, but I never really believed it. She was a storyteller – like me.

  A television, mounted on the wall, played a report about a plane going down in the sea. The sound was muted and I wouldn’t have heard in any case, concentrating hard on the short, shallow sighs of shock coming out of me, the kind that often precede uncontrolled sobs. But I held on to my tears, never being one for grand displays of emotion. If I let it start, all the sadness I held inside would roll out after it and I would shed tears about many other things, as well as Uncle Bob. So I couldn’t risk it. In my family we kept our grief, love and heartbreak to ourselves.

  I looked around the stark room, with its beige walls and plastic orange chairs, the chipped coffee table stacked with outdated magazines and leaflets about heart disease. I hadn’t been in a hospital since I lost her — the baby. The odor of pine floor cleaner and institutional food was enough to make a person nauseous.

  How easy it was to be lost, I thought, one minute here and gone the next. Like those poor souls on the plane that crashed. Like Uncle Bob.

  I concluded that "Genny" must be another of his imaginary friends. Odd coincidence though – her name being the same as that of my lost unborn daughter. How would he know that, since I’d only given her that name myself, a few months ago? Still, Uncle Bob often seemed to know what I was thinking. And he heard voices. My mother always warned that he would give himself a hernia if he didn’t watch out. How she came to the conclusion hernias were caused by voices in the head was anyone’s guess, but our mother was her own peculiar encyclopedia of medical knowledge. My problems, according to her, were because I didn’t "go" regularly. "You should eat Weetabix every day. It does wonders for your father and me," she said, when I told her I’d been made redundant, suggesting, in a roundabout way that if I had more frequent bowel movements I would still have a job.

  I marveled that Uncle Bob should be considered mentally incapable, when the standards of cognitive thinking in my family weren’t exactly high in the first place.

  Now here I was, hearing voices too.

  In any case, he liked his practical jokes, did our Uncle Bob. This note was probably just another, but, now I was here, I should go and look at the house. My mother would expect a full report.

  Chapter Ten

  The taxi bounced slowly down the rutted lane, the driver’s face grim as he contemplated the high grassy tufts, tall angry thistles and deep gullies. He kept asking if I was sure this was the right road. I sat forward, gripping his headrest, searching for landmarks. It was much more overgrown than the last time I visited, but finally I saw the flint and pebble wall, where Marian and I had practiced handstands, and the elaborate, rusty iron gates that seemed too grand and ornate for the house.

  "There it is!"

  The driver pulled over, peering doubtfully through his windscreen. "You sure you don’t want me to wait?"

  I told him I’d be fine. I could always walk to the village from here. It was no more than a ten minute stroll as far as I remembered. Marian and I used to walk there on fine days to buy sweets and comics. When he drove away, I did suffer a twinge of second-thought, but it passed when I pushed on the gate. The warbling shudder of the old hinges, the deceptively complacent sound, perfectly mimicked the call of a wood pigeon. Whenever I heard the five-note coo of those birds on a lazy summer afternoon, I thought of Souls Dryft.

  The blossom was in full glory; the air was sickly sweet, blown around the side of the house from the old orchard. I took a great breath of it, drinking it down greedily, and then I opened my eyes.

  The house was always falling down. Not toppling over, but sinking slowly into the earth. It was a bulky, unprepossessing creature, lurking there in the grass like a toad, waiting for unsuspecting insects to pass within striking distance of its sly, quick tongue. My mother, who didn’t have much time for the picturesque, thought the best thing to be done with Uncle Bob’s house was to level it and start again. But when Marian and I spent those idyllic summer weeks there, the precarious, leaning walls, creaky stairs and uneven floors all added to the charm and adventure.

  Surrounding the yard, there were several buildings. The smallest one, Aunt Rose had referred to as, "the necessary". We loved going outside to use it, preferring the novelty of an ice-cold toilet seat and wind whipping under the door, to that fancy indoor plumbing we could use any day of the week at home.

  I still remembered Aunt Rose’s voice— soft and creamy, all the vowels melting slowly off her tongue. She laughed a great deal and was never angry, even when Uncle Bob played tricks on her; like the time he told her that her budgie had laid an egg and, for weeks, she watched over the smooth, white, pebble-shaped object, telling everyone about it, marveling over the miracle about to hatch. Finally she took it to the vet in the village, where she was informed that her budgie’s egg was, in fact, an Imperial Mint.

  I smiled sadly at my reflection in the window, thinking of Uncle Bob sitting there alone all those years, with only the voices in his head for company. The window was left ajar and when I pushed it with my fingers, it swung open all the way. Caught up in the adventure, I crawled over the stone ledge and into the house, scraping my knee in the process. I hadn’t felt this much excitement since I was twelve and Marian fell out of a rowboat.

  The ground floor was converted, some time ago, from one large room into three, with a small pantry and an added on bathroom beyond that. Uncle Bob rarely used the other rooms, preferring this one that looked out toward the gate. After Aunt Rose died he said he was looking for her to come back, as if she’d just nipped out to the shop in the village for a packet of custard creams. Today the windows were filthy. I didn’t remember them being that bad before, but at home our mother had kept everything so spotless, it was a relief to go to Aunt Rose’s house and wallow in a little dirt. These days a woman called Mrs. Tuke came up from the village three times a week to "see to" Uncle Bob, which meant she gave the place a rough going over with a broom and did his laundry. Apparently, Mrs. Tuke didn’t do windows. As I studied the small, crooked glass panes, I realized the marks I’d mistaken for random fingerprints in the grime were letters written on the outside.

  emoc sah ynneG

  I stared at the window. Above me the wooden beams creaked and stretched in the warm air. Or were they footsteps passing up and down in the rooms above?

  At the foot of the staircase, there was a door meant to keep out those drafts that stil
l found their way in, even with all the windows and chimneys closed. It was warped and rotted, the paintwork chipped, a large portion of wood missing from the bottom, as if an extremely hungry dog once had a go at it. The door still creaked, just the way I remembered, and the whisper of a breeze tumbled down the tilting stairs, disturbing the fragile remnants of a cobweb above my head. Out of respect for the house’s unseen residents, I tiptoed upstairs and onto the narrow, musty landing. Each bedroom door had a rusty, iron latch with a loop that hung down. It was once a favorite game of ours to run along the hall, setting all the latches rocking. Then, one day, the latches stopped, all at the same time – some mid-swing – before they suddenly began rocking back the other way, even faster. After that, Marian, being a wimp, would never go upstairs alone again.

  Our old bedroom door required several shoulder thumps to open, and the cloud of stagnant air was so thick I could bite it. Clearly no one had been inside for some time; yet, when I went to open the window, there was an apple core on the ledge and it was still white, as if someone just took their last bite before setting it down.

  I sat on the bed, resting my hand on the pillow. Of course, it must have been the sun that made it so warm, as if another soul just rose from it.

  "You took your time coming to me."

  Waves of sun moved in a gentle ebb and flow around the room, just like the voices. It lifted me, held my spirit and warmed it.

  "I came when I could, I do have other things to do with my day."

  "For Pity’s Sake, ‘tis only a little wound."

  "Stockings?"

  "Like recognizes like."

  "Stockings?"

  The sunlight dimmed.

  Someone shouted up from below, "Hello! Is anyone there?"