Mr. Flood's Last Resort(34)
“Seven.”
She leans forwards, her voice a whisper. “She left with him, in the car that day. They caught the ferry and moved to Rhyl. She was having a baby for him. That was the plan.”
“What about the guards? Why couldn’t they find her?”
“There were no guards. She never went missing.”
I frown. “There were the ones that sat in the kitchen, the ones that talked with Mammy.”
St. Dymphna smiles bitterly. “Mammy never had guards in the kitchen. Didn’t she help Deirdre pack and give them a tin of sandwiches for the journey?” She tucks her brown plait back under her veil. “Didn’t Mammy give them her blessing?”
“That’s not what happened.”
St. Dymphna stretches her legs out on the bed, smoothing her robe around her lovely dim ankles. “Do you remember Tommy McLaughlin?”
“No.”
“Early fifties, bald, butcher’s assistant?”
“No.”
“A dirty feely old fella?” She rolls her eyes. “Jesus, there was enough of them.”
“No.”
“He came out from the back of the shop and showed you his little flabby flute, wiggled it, when Granny was up at the counter buying liver?”
I think back, to the smell of fresh sawdust and old blood, the green plastic parsley between smeared trays of red, the joints hanging in the window: bone, sinew, tissue, flesh. And Tommy McLaughlin with his white coat open just a little. His trousers undone just a little, pale slug, graying mound. He stared down at me, lips parted, breathing through his nose.
“I remember.”
“Well, that didn’t happen either,” St. Dymphna says, with a cold kind of delight in her eyes. “Memories are fickle creatures, you ought to know that, skittish and in no ways trustworthy.”
“I know what I remember.”
St. Dymphna holds up her hands. “You do of course! After all, weren’t you there with your big round child’s eyes?” She mimes a vacant expression. “Looking around yourself, spying at things that didn’t concern you, taking it all in.”
“I was scared, there in the dunes. I was only small.”
“You’d do well to tighten the screws,” she murmurs, right in my ear. “Or the nightmares will start again.”
When I look up she’s gone.
MR. FLOOD has been tucked away in his workshop all morning. I’ve not heard step nor roar from him. The National Geographics present a solid wall today. I could have dreamt the land beyond, where stuffed stoats play cards, four-headed taxidermy angels keep watch, and paperweights move of their own volition.
The house has a locked-down, shuttered, tight-lipped vigilance today.
The cats feel it: they are acting skittishly, flattening their ears and thrashing their tails, skulking low and jumping at nothing. I stand at the kitchen door, listening, watching. Not knowing what I’m listening or watching for.
The house is ominously quiet: it’s holding its breath.
I turn to put the kettle on and then I hear it.
My blood stops flowing.
A girl is singing in the hallway, her voice high and lovely, with the hint of a caught sob. Half a phrase, four words at the most, and I understand none of them.
Then: nothing. Only ringing silence.
*
THE CRACK in the Great Wall of National Geographics has reopened, wider than before, and I am stepping right through it. Just watch me. I am a beaver. I am tenacious in the face of stacked odds and singing ghosts.
Botticelli’s Venus winks at me as she unravels her duodenum. The glass eyes spin and the stoats smirk into their playing cards. The raven is nowhere to be seen and the shrunken head smiles as if it’s nursing a nasty joke. The four-headed angel appears to be looking in any direction but mine. I stand at the bottom of the stairs, biting my lip, hesitating.
“What now, Mary?” I whisper and survey the staircase.
The staircase Mary Flood fell down.
Did she hit the floor headfirst and black out? Or did she lie at the foot of the stairs drifting in and out of consciousness? A wheezing bag of broken bones and hemorrhages. Perhaps she landed right here, where I’m standing?
Does her ghost fall still, over and over again in the afterlife? Reliving, in perpetuity, those terrible moments? The accusations, the look in his eye, the step backwards, the brief tussle—
*
WHERE DO schoolgirls go when they disappear? Into a cave, into the sea, into a basement with the windows boarded, into a bedsit in Rhyl?
It’s a vanishing trick.
I imagine Mary standing next to me at the foot of the stairs, an urgent, silent presence. She turns the melted hole where her face once was to me. I can see right through it. She points up the staircase.
I am a fecking beaver, and so, with my breath held and my heart beating backwards, I climb the stairs.
*
THE FLOOD of objects flows to the top step, then stops and laps there, rising no higher. Before me is an empty landing. I count six doors obstructed by nothing and a table that holds nothing more than a silk-shaded lamp.
I survey the hall below and I’m staggered.
I am Ariadne: I have made it through the maze, without even a ball of string. Through an ocean of glazed cases and taxidermy, polished wood and medical curiosities. I have eluded the raddled old Minotaur.