All Sorts of Possible (20 page)

‘If it means something’s here, maybe we can find out what it is.’

He put his hands on the wall and pushed as if expecting it to roll back. He knocked on it, listening for any off-key sounds that might alert him to something out of the ordinary. He knelt down
and felt along the skirting board, trying to discover if it lifted away. Defeated, he sat back on his haunches for a moment and then he knelt forward to inspect the black rubber doorstopper in
front of him. It had been screwed down through its rubber centre into an old floorboard secured by nails that had clearly been hammered into each corner decades ago. He gripped the stopper and
tried to twist it round. But it didn’t turn.

He sat back and looked at the symbol again and then stood up and disappeared into the kitchen. Rosie watched him pick up an old silver knife from the floor and return to the pantry and kneel
back down. The tip of the knife fitted the head of the screw and Daniel pushed down hard as he tried to turn it between his hands as if preparing to make a fire with a spindle. With a yelp, the
screw turned and he spun it looser until the doorstop came free from the floor.

But there was nothing beneath it except for the screw disappearing into the floorboard. He was about to twist the rubber doorstop back when Rosie stopped him.

‘There’s something odd about it.’ She ran her finger over the wood the doorstop had been covering. ‘The doorstopper must be new, otherwise the wood beneath it would be a
lot brighter and cleaner, wouldn’t it? And look at the screw: it’s shiny. Not like those,’ she said, pointing at the old brown nail heads, one in each corner of the floorboard.
‘Perhaps Lawson put it on?’

‘Why?’ But Rosie shook her head. Daniel bit the inside of his check as he tried to figure it out and then he screwed the doorstop back in and stood up and brushed himself down.
‘Let’s see if we can find another of those,’ he said, pointing at the symbol. ‘You said there were more. It might help.’

They went from room to room, inspecting the walls, window frames, the ceiling. They kicked away the dust from the floorboards where it had drifted into piles.

Rosie found it eventually, the same symbol as the one in the pantry, drawn in black marker pen on the skirting board in a room that might once have been a library or a study, with bare shelves
lining the walls. Daniel knelt beside it, knocking on the skirting and making a hollow sound. There were old nails hammered into the wood, but he worked his fingers all the way down the top edge,
trying to see if it would come away. When he felt a small section move, he pulled harder, his fingernails trying to find some purchase. He pulled again, his nails turning white, until suddenly a
small section of skirting came free with a clunk, disengaging from two round magnets stuck to the wall behind it. He ran his fingers over the two other magnets fixed to the piece of skirting in his
hand, observing how the old nails hammered into the front of it had been sheared off flush to the wood on the other side.

He rubbed their clean silver ends. ‘It’s supposed to look like you can’t take it off.’

‘Look! Daniel, there’s something behind it.’ Rosie reached into a nook lined with cotton wool that had been gouged into the plaster behind the piece of skirting and drew out a
gold wedding band. A piece of black twine was knotted round it with a loop tied at the free end, just like a Christmas tree decoration ready to hang. Inside the ring was an inscription that
read:

David and Helen Forever

‘We should go back to the pantry,’ said Daniel.

When he knelt down again, Daniel gripped the black rubber doorstop and pulled as hard as he could. The piece of floorboard came away cleanly, popping free from four magnets
attached to the joists below. On its underside were four more magnets with the old brown nails sheared flush to the wood, just as they had been on the piece of skirting board that had been hiding
the wedding ring.

Lying in the cavity below, between the joists on a bed of cotton wool, was a silver–plated, rectangular box.

‘It looks like something my mum would keep her jewellery in,’ said Rosie as Daniel lifted it out. When he opened the lid, Rosie gasped and put her hand to her mouth, muffling a
string of swear words. There were four wooden compartments, each of equal size, and lying in the furthest one to the left was a man’s severed finger. The nail was long and yellow and pointing
at them. A tangle of black hairs covered the knuckles. Black twine was wound round the finger and a loop had been tied at its other end and hooked through a small metal clasp fixed to the underside
of the lid.

Daniel placed the ring in the compartment next to the finger and hooked the piece of black twine around it through the clasp after pinching it open. Nothing happened after he shut the clasp. But
Daniel wasn’t sure if anything should and he shrugged at Rosie.

‘Perhaps there are two other things to go in the box,’ she said.

‘So two more symbols, you think?’

Rosie nodded.

‘And then what? What do you think it does?’

‘I don’t know.’

They searched the house for more symbols, rubbing walls free of grime, pulling apart cobwebs, looking in nooks and alcoves and under the mildewed corpses of cushions and behind
curtains.

Eventually, they found another one, drawn on a yellowed window cornice in a large bedroom. Daniel stood on the wooden sill of the big bay window, pressing and pulling with his fingers until he
worked a piece of dirty plaster free from the magnets fixed behind it. Hidden in a hollow was a lock of blonde hair with a slim red ribbon tied round the middle in a bow, the top half of the hair
above it braided carefully like a corn dolly and its bottom half left flared.

‘Lawson made all these hiding places very carefully,’ whispered Rosie as she opened the box and Daniel placed the hair inside, hooking the piece of black twine that was attached to
it through the clasp on the underside of the lid.

‘There must be one more to find,’ he said. But, when Rosie started coughing, Daniel took hold of her greasy white fingers and held them until she had stopped. ‘Let’s take
a break,’ he said and led her downstairs.

He dragged the mattress they had found into a room that was full of the most sunshine.

They sat for some time – in what might have once been a dining room – watching the golden spokes of sunlight drop lower through the windows as the day drew on. The
house seemed to grow colder little by little, like some newly dead creature with the heat fading from it. Daniel dozed and when he woke up a shaft of sunlight had lanced the wall beside him, like a
spear just dodged.

Rosie slept too, on the mattress, stretching her legs out in front of her when she woke up. It seemed to Daniel that she was disintegrating when she moved, sending up little streamers of dust
all around her.

‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied, trying to flush the thought about her from his mind.

‘Liar. You’re going red.’

‘I was thinking about my dad. That I haven’t been to see him today.’

Rosie picked out a tiny green burr from her hair and studied it, rolling it between her finger and thumb, wishing she had found the seed for her tumour. ‘Would talking about him
help?’

Daniel sighed. ‘I’m not sure it would.’

Rosie flicked the green burr away and nodded. ‘You’re right.’ She drew up her legs and hugged her knees, resting her chin in the groove between them. ‘Tell me something
funny instead.’

Daniel looked at her to see if she was serious. And she was. Nodding at him to go ahead.

‘You know what people say behind my back at school? That I’m the person in the year least likely to succeed, that I won’t be anybody at all. Ever.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Ask Bennett. It’s written on the wall of the ground-floor bogs if you don’t believe me. Last cubicle down. On the left-hand wall. Someone took a crap and thought of
me.’

‘Daniel,’ deadpanned Rosie. ‘That’s hila-
rious
.’

‘It’s the best I could do.’

‘OK then, get this. My dad is officially an asshole. We’re in debt up to here.’ And she put her hand above her head, ‘mortgaged to the hilt because of some cowboy
investment that went wrong. So now, even though he’s a doctor, my mum works three jobs to pay the bills and put enough food on the table. It means I feel guilty every time I need something
new to wear, which is every few months because it seems like somebody’s still putting Miracle-Gro in my socks or shoes or my bra. All our family manages to do is get by. We
survive.’

‘So do lots of people, Rosie.’

‘Yeah, but the point is we never used to have to.’

Daniel nodded. ‘Well that, Rosie . . . is . . . hyst-
eri-cal
.’

Rosie stared at him. Her eyes blazed as she tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn’t and ended up punching the mattress to let it all out. ‘Do you think it’s supposed to
be this hard?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you think we’ve been doing something wrong?’

Daniel shrugged. ‘I don’t think it’s us.’

‘Then
why’s
it so damn tough?’

Daniel picked at a blackened knot in the floorboard beside him. ‘Maybe that’s not the right question.’ He looked up at Rosie and shrugged. ‘One of the doctors told me I
should only be thinking about the “what” not the “why” when we were talking about dad. He said I should focus on figuring out who I want to be, whatever happens, because
it’s impossible to know why things turn out the way they do.’

And Rosie thought about that.

‘So who do you want to be, Daniel?’ she asked eventually.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I think I’m still figuring it out. I guess I’m waiting to see what happens next.’ He rubbed his face because he didn’t want
to cry. But he missed wiping away a tear and it splashed down on to the front of his hoodie, darkening over his heart. ‘But I do know I don’t want to be left on my own. That I
don’t want Dad to leave me here all by myself.’

‘You won’t be alone,’ said Rosie. ‘There’s Bennett. There’s your aunt. And I’ll be here too. I promise.’ He watched her stand up and then slump
down beside him, laying her head on his shoulder.

When she looked up at him, he felt goosebumps flicker on his arms and legs. Her eyes were shining like wet pebbles. She smelt of apples and sunshine and talc and dust. In the gloaming, her face
seemed to be moving and breaking apart and he gripped her harder, fearful she might fade away. ‘You can’t make a promise like that, can you? That you’ll be here.’

She kissed him on his cheek and snuggled in close. ‘No, you’re right, I can’t. But I promise I’ll stay with you for as long as the world lets me.’

‘It’s more than that, Rosie. You need to make sure you stay here to do all the things you want to in your life.’

They held on tight to each other in silence for some time, as the grainy evening fell around them like a curtain being lowered.

Gradually, the walls and the floor turned paper-white in the moonlight. The window frames looked like they were made from bone.

Tiny scutterings inside the walls set their eyes wandering, but they saw nothing out of the ordinary and they sat musing on what the noises might be, trying not to let their imaginations catch
fire. The night brought out something ancient in them, and they heard it in their breathing and felt it on their skin, like electricity, making them charged and alert.

‘Are you scared?’ whispered Rosie eventually.

‘Yes,’ said Daniel, staring into the dark places hiding from the moon to try and see if anything was there.

‘More scared than you are of Mason?’

‘No. I want to stay. We need to find that flask. Give Mason what he wants and get him out of our lives for good.’

‘Yes,’ said Rosie. ‘We certainly both want that.’

He opened the silver-plated box lying on the floor beside them and stared at the gold wedding band and the finger and the lock of hair in their separate compartments, all hooked to the clasp on
the underside of the lid with black, woolly twine. Daniel kept looking at them for some time in the moonlight. But he shut the lid eventually.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

Rosie sat up and looked at him and smiled. And then she closed her eyes.

When Daniel started to feel little pricks of pain in his chest, he knew that Rosie was trying to make the fit again. ‘Rosie, be careful,’ he said. ‘Please. Let’s try
looking for the last symbol instead.’

But her face twitched and jerked and he wasn’t sure she could hear him.

When the pain rang clean in his chest like a bell, he gasped and tried to move his arms to shake Rosie out of her trance. But they were turning numb. There was no strength in them at all.
‘Rosie!’ But his voice was so pitiful that he could barely hear it himself.

He started to hear the ticking sound inside his head. Like an alarm clock about to go off. Or a bomb about to explode. He remembered how Lawson’s hand had detonated in a red mist and it
scared him so much that he managed to summon all his strength and raised his arms towards Rosie as well as he could.

‘Rosie! Stop!’

When she collapsed forward, he had no strength to catch her and her head cannoned on to the floorboards with a crack.

The pain was gone from him immediately and, as the strength flowed back into his arms, he lifted up her limp body gently. ‘Rosie! Rosie! Wake up! What have you done?’

There was blood coming from her nose and it was thick and dark and velvety. It fell in drops to the floor, splashing into the dust. He checked her hands. Inspected her for any signs of damage.
But there were none that he could see.

‘You said you wouldn’t leave,’ said Daniel, rocking her gently. ‘You promised.’

He felt her tense in his arms and then shudder, her eyes popping wide open as if waking from a terrible dream.

‘Oh, Daniel!’ she gasped as more blood came out of her nose, making her sputter and cough. ‘I saw Lawson. He was here in this room. He was kneeling.’ And she waved a hand
towards the hearth.