The Family Upstairs(67)

This time he hit me hard enough to throw me across the floor.

‘Get up!’ he yelled. ‘Get up, and go to your room. You are in isolation for a week.’

‘You’re going to lock me up?’ I said. ‘For talking to you? For telling you how I feel?’

‘No,’ he snarled. ‘I am locking you up because I cannot bear to look at you. Because you disgust me. Now, you can either walk or I can drag you. What’s it to be?’

I got to my feet and I ran. But I didn’t run to the stairs, I ran to the front door. I turned the handle and I pulled and I was ready, ready to fly, ready to flag down a stranger and say, God help us, we’re trapped in a house with a megalomaniac. God help us please! But the door was locked.

How had I not known this? I tugged and tugged and then turned to him and said, ‘You’ve locked us in!’

‘No,’ he said. ‘The door is locked. That is not the same thing at all. Now, shall we?’

I stamped up the back stairs to the attic floor, David following behind.

I heard the sound of the lock on my bedroom door turning.

I wailed and I cried like a terrible pathetic overgrown baby.

I heard Phin shouting at me through his bedroom wall: ‘Shut up! Just shut up!’

I screamed for my mother but she didn’t come.

Nobody came.

That night my face ached from where David had hit me and my stomach growled and I couldn’t sleep and lay awake all night staring at the clouds passing over the moon, watching the dark shapes of birds in the treetops, listening to the house creaking and gasping.

I went a little mad, I think, over the course of the week that followed. I scratched marks into my walls with my fingernails until my nailbeds bled. I banged my head against the floor. I made animal noises. I saw things that weren’t there. I think David’s idea was that I would emerge from my imprisonment feeling subdued and ready to start afresh. But this was not the case.

When the door was finally unlocked a week later and I was once more allowed to roam around the house, I did not feel subdued. I felt monstrously consumed with righteous ire. I was going to finish David off for good.

There was something else in the air when I finally got my freedom back, a huge secret wafting about in the atmosphere, carried along by the dust motes and the sun rays, stuck in the strands of the spider webs in the high corners of the rooms.

As I joined everyone at the breakfast table that first morning out of isolation I asked Phin, ‘What’s going on? Why is everyone acting so weird?’

He shrugged and said, ‘Isn’t that how everyone always acts round here?’

I said, ‘No. Weirder than usual. Like there’s something going on.’

Phin was already ill by now, it was clear to me. His skin, once so smooth and flawless, looked grey and patchy. His hair flopped greasily to one side. And he smelled a little off, a little sour.

I mentioned it to Birdie. ‘Phin seems ill,’ I said.

She replied prissily, ‘Phin is absolutely fine. He just needs more exercise.’

I would hear his father through the door of the exercise room imploring him to try harder. ‘More – you can do it. Push back. Really push back. Come on! You’re not even trying!’ And then I’d see Phin leaving the exercise room looking wan and agonised, taking the steps up to the attic floor slowly as if each one caused him pain.

I said, ‘You should come into the garden with me. The fresh air will help.’

He said, ‘I don’t want to go anywhere with you.’

‘Well, you don’t have to come with me. Go into the garden alone.’

‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘Nothing in this house will make me well. The only thing that will make me well is not being in this house. I need to leave. I need’, he said, his eyes boring into mine, ‘to leave.’

The house, it felt to me, was dying. First my father had faded, then my mother, now Phin. Justin had abandoned us. The baby was dead. I couldn’t really see what the point of any of it was any more.

And then one afternoon I heard the sound of laugher coming from below. I peered down into the hallway and saw David and Birdie leaving the exercise room. They were both glowing with health. David swung an arm around Birdie’s shoulders and drew her to him, kissed her hard on the lips with a sickening mwah noise. And it was them; I knew it clearly. It was them, draining the house, like vampires, of all of its decent energy, of all of its love and life and goodness, draining it all for themselves, feasting on our misery and our broken spirits.

Then I looked around myself at the bare walls where the oil paintings had once hung, at the empty corners where the fine pieces of furniture had once stood. I thought of the chandeliers that had once sparkled in the sunlight. The silver and the brass and the gold that had gleamed on every surface. I thought of my mother’s wardrobe of designer clothes and handbags, the rings that used to adorn her fingers, the diamond earrings and sapphire pendants. All gone now. All gone to so-called ‘charity’, to help the ‘poor people’. I estimated the value of all these lost possessions. Thousands of pounds, I suspected. Many thousands of pounds.

And then I looked down again at David, his arm circling Birdie, the two of them so free and unburdened by the things going on in this home. And I thought: You are not a messiah or a guru or a god, David Thomsen. You are not a philanthropist or a do-gooder. You are not a spiritual man. You are a criminal. You have come to my house and you have plundered it. And you are not a man of compassion. If you were a man of compassion, you would be sitting now with my mother while she grieves for your lost baby. You would find a way to help my father out of his living hell. You would take your son to the doctor. You would not be laughing with Birdie. You would be too weighed down by everyone else’s unhappiness. So, if you have no compassion then it follows that you would not have been giving our money to the poor. You would have been keeping it for yourself. And that must be the ‘secret stash’ that Phin had told me about all those years ago. And if that is the case, then where is it? And what are you planning to do with it?