Behind the Scenes at the Museum (14 page)

The worst things of all are the nightmares – terrible dreams of drowning, of falling, of being trapped, of flying. Flying dreams are the worst – we’re pitched headlong from the top of the stairs onto a vertiginous, non-stop flight over which we have no control. We accelerate faster and faster until we reach the hallway down below when we wake up just before crashing into the stained-glass panels of the front door.

These dreams are bad enough when they take place on the stairs at Mirthroyd Road, but even worse when they are in the doll’s house. Its stairs are too narrow to negotiate properly and after a night in the doll’s house Teddy and I wake up with bruised elbows and battered ankles. Whichever stairs we’re on, we also have to dodge the Unnamed Dread lurking on the landings, or worse – Grandpa shouting out at us like a mad cuckoo clock screaming, ‘Who’s that?’ and I wake up crying, ‘It’s just Ruby,’ but now, even I’m not sure who ‘Just Ruby’ is.

And then something
really
horrible happens – I begin to walk in my sleep. And now I not only dream about the staircases – I am sometimes shaken awake by Auntie Babs and find that I’m really there! Just Ruby – all alone except for the Unnamed Dread. Once, I wake up and find I am alone in the dark, no Auntie Babs – perhaps I have shaken myself awake? I am standing in front of the doll’s house and the dim street light filtering through the attic curtains reveals a complete muddle in its little rooms as if some small creature desperate to find something had ransacked it from top to bottom. Horrors!

Another Sunday comes around. We go to church. This week Rita introduces a visiting medium called Myra, who looks like Alma Cogan, but without the frocks, and Myra gives us a little talk on ‘Animals in the Spirit World’. Myra claims that animals as well as people pass over into Spirit, posing many unanswered questions, not least of which is how there can be enough room for everybody. If all living things exist in the afterlife then there must be zillion upon zillion of plankton, amoebas, bacteria, spinning off to the astral plane every day. If not, then where do you draw the line? Domestic pets only? Nothing smaller than a Yorkshire terrier? A wasp? And are they segregated – do dogs float around with dogs, giraffes with giraffes? Puy with Ktn? Does chicken flock with chicken? Bluebird fly with bluebird (birds of a feather)? Or all the birds of the air? And what of teddy bears – is there one section where all the spirit teddy bears are corralled or are they allowed to live with their children? Questions, questions . . .

I devote myself to the alphabet. Teddy and I sit, day after day, on the magic carpet in front of the fire and study its arcane messages – ‘A is for Apple’, ‘B is for Bus’, ‘C is for Cat’, ‘D is for Dog’. I understand the meaning all right, it’s the form that escapes me. The cards have pictures on them – Apples, Buses, Cats, Dogs, Elephants, Fish, Goats – hermeneutic symbols that drive me into a frenzy. ‘I’ is for Indian and in the night the hostile tribes gather on the landings, their eyes and beads shining in the darkness, their feathery headdresses forming a barricade behind which huddle the Unnamed Dread. The things that live under the bed crawl out and join them and here and there, a cutlass flashes. We fly past them all on our unstoppable, roller-coaster dreams.

Perhaps the flower-twins, the cabal of two, have bewitched me – put a flying spell on me that dooms me to fly, wingless, every night. Or perhaps they have made a wax doll of me and have slipped it unnoticed into the nursery of the doll’s house and practise telekinesis on it at night, throwing it down the narrow little stairs while lying ‘innocently’ in their beds. When I wake in the mornings they are both lying there, looking at me; their eyes are pinpoints of darkness boring into my skull as they try and probe my brain. I will not let them read my thoughts. I will resist them.

There are so many things I want to ask and nobody who has the answers. One of the twins, chin held down to avoid identification, shows me one of her school books (I’m surprised they bother with language when their telepathy is so advanced) in which Janet helps Mummy bake a cake while John makes a bonfire with Daddy. And I thought ‘J’ was for Jam! One afternoon, Auntie Babs comes into the living-room and finds Teddy and me sitting on the magic carpet in tears – in front of us a ouija-board of letters spelling the mysterious word P-E-A-R-L. Auntie Babs’ face is pinched in fury so that she resembles a Picasso portrait. She picks up the letters and throws them on the fire. Fools that we are – ‘P’ is for ‘Puy’ not ‘Pearl’.

So the days fly by in the alchemical pursuit of reading and the nights speed past in flight and all the time I try to find the secret spell that will take us out of our mysterious exile and back home. How long have we been imprisoned in Mirthroyd Road? A year? Five years? Two and a half weeks really, but it seems like a hundred years. How will my family be able to recognize me when I return? I have no handy freckle to mark me out as the Ruby Lennox who left them so long ago. Perhaps they will cry ‘Impostor!’ and refuse to let me back in.

Before I go to bed that night I harass Patricia into helping me translate
Puppies and Kittens
. I regret ever having doubted her talents as a teacher, for the way she explains it now it all suddenly makes sense and, as if by magic, I am able to unlock The Mysteries – ‘Here is a Puppy, Here is a Kitten, Here are Puppies and Kittens.’ I am powerful! I have the key to the Temple of Knowledge and there’s no stopping me – we get out crayons and form letters. No need for Puy and Ktn any more, now there are enough letters to make all the Puppies and Kittens we want, enough letters to make everything. Slowly, with a red crayon, I create my own hieroglyphics – R-U-B-Y spells Ruby! My name is Ruby. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.

I go to sleep in my own bed for the first time in what seems like a long time. It’s strange to be alone in my bedroom and I have a distinct feeling that something – or somebody – is missing. There is a space in the room that wasn’t there before, not a vacuum but an invisible cloud of sadness that drifts around, bumping into furniture and lingering at the foot of my bed as if the domestic phantoms had been joined by a raw recruit. The fur on Teddy’s neck stands up and he growls nervously.

My night-time perambulations do not stop when I’m home and Bunty often wakes me from my parlous state in order to tell me how annoyed she is at being woken by my ghostly odysseys. But what of the times when she doesn’t wake me? Why do I have such unquiet sleep?

Something has changed Above the Shop. Patricia, for example, has definitely taken a turn for the worse, there is a look of troubled confusion in her eyes that’s quite distressing to behold. On my first night back, as I race to the end of
Puppies and Kittens
(‘Puppies and Kittens are sleeping’), I can see she’s trying to say something. She bites her lip and stares at the picture of sleeping puppies and kittens. Then she speaks in an urgent, ferocious whisper – ‘Was it Gillian, Ruby? Was it Gillian’s fault?’ – but I just look at her blankly because I haven’t the faintest idea what she’s talking about.

And as for Gillian herself – Gillian is being nice to me! She says I can keep her
Puppies and Kittens
and have untrammelled use of Mobo (not much good as I’ve outgrown him and he’s on his way to the knacker’s yard. Outgrowing the Mobo is a kind of rite of passage and I can now understand Gillian’s feelings when it happened to her.) Furthermore I can borrow Sooty or Sweep – I am even given a free choice and I choose Sweep because he has a voice. Of sorts. For a brief, pleasant period of time, Sooty and Sweep have a friendly relationship, until Gillian’s natural animosity reasserts itself and with one last
Izzie Wizzie let’s get busy
she breaks Sooty’s wand over Sweep’s head and reclaims him by pulling him violently off my hand. I don’t really care – I still have Teddy and an Alexandrian library of books, in the form of the Children’s Section of the York City Library, is waiting to be deciphered by us.

Rachel sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat from her face with the back of her hand. She nodded in the direction of the table. ‘I’ve made snap for you.’

Frederick picked up the bread and cheese that was wrapped in a cloth. ‘Tha’s a grand lass, Rachel.’

And so I am, thought Rachel. A grand lass, who will set this lot right. And they’d be grateful to her, whether they liked it or not. She was all they’d got in the end, now that their dizzy, idle mother was gone. Their only kin too, for Rachel was no hired servant, but cousin to Alice Barker. Their family tree had been split down the middle, a bifurcated trunk – Alice’s mother, Sophia, and Rachel’s mother, Hannah, were sisters but Sophia had married up in the world and Hannah had married down and been disowned by her father. So while Rachel had gone into service as a scullery maid at the age of ten, little Alice was still brushing out her blond curls and having piano lessons. And where had all her fancy ways got her? A clarty midden, that’s where, Rachel thought, pausing for a moment to look round the kitchen. Hadn’t she ever dirtied her pretty, white, schoolteacher fingers in this place? Not to judge by the amount of soot and grease in the kitchen, the lamp-black on the walls, the unswept dust on the floors, the unmended, unpatched linen. Now ‘t’master’ had been forced to send for Rachel from Whitby because he had very carelessly lost his pretty wife.

And as for her children! They were a disgrace, unruly and sullen, ignorant of their Bible, their hems hanging down, their handkerchiefs filthy – if they had them at all, that is. The girl, Ada, had hair that was so tangled that the first thing Rachel had to do was shear half of it. She’d screamed like a stuck pig when she’d seen her curls falling around her feet. She was so like her mother it was uncanny. Those children might resent her now but in another few months they’d be thankful for the order she’d brought into their lives, something clever, silly Alice Barker could never do.

From upstairs came the thin whine of the baby, followed by the more articulate cry of an older child. Rachel ignored both, they were going to have to learn that she wasn’t there to dance attendance on them all the time, she had a floor to scrub for a start. Something glinted in the weak November sun and Rachel tweaked it out from a crack in between the flags – a button. Pink glass, fancy like a flower – Alice’s no doubt. Rachel slipped it into her pocket, it would go in her button tin. All Alice Barker had in her button tin was an old George IV coin and a violet cachou. That was the kind of woman she was.

A little lead soldier skidded across the flags and Albert clapped his hands and laughed. He was watching her from the passage where he was playing with his soldiers and bricks, tied by makeshift reins to the newel-post of the stairs. ‘Aye, you can wipe that smile off your face,’ Rachel said, pocketing the soldier as well. Out of all of them, he got on her nerves the most, always trying to suck up, putting his arms around her and kissing her. He was like a little girl, the mirror of his sister and his mother.

Rachel threw the bucket of dirty water out into the yard and left the door open to try and dry the flags, but the sun was already a fading bruise beyond the hill. She went back to the sink and picked up a limp rabbit, and was about to get about skinning and paunching when she stopped and fetched the cleaver that hung by the range and smartly chopped off a paw. It was luck, a rabbit’s foot, everyone knew that, and tonight she’d turn a silver threepence under the new moon and, all in all, that should take care of the future, please God. A great clattering of pattens on the cobbles of the yard announced the arrival of the older ones, home from school. They hardly seemed to be out of the house in the morning before they were back in it again.

They all three stood framed by the door, like a sentimental photograph, and then Ada pouted and said, ‘Yon bairns are roarin’, can tha not hear them?’ and, kicking off her clogs, broke free from the frame and marched across the wet floor. When she spotted Albert tied up to the stairs she went pink and yelled at Rachel, ‘Tha’ve got yon poor bairn tied up like a dog, it’s you that should be tied up!’ and while she was untying him she kept saying, ‘Poor wee Bertie, poor wee Bertie, Addie’s here,’ and when Rachel told her to leave him be she turned to her and said, ‘Tha’s not Mother, tha canst tell me nowt,’ and then smiled that artificial smile that nearly split her face like a big sliver of moon and Rachel picked up a discarded clog and bowled it overarm so that it bounced off Ada’s shorn curls. Even that didn’t stop her, and she stood there with a heavy Albert hoisted awkwardly in her arms, a patch of blood no bigger than a button staining her hair and her face white with shock, and screamed hysterically, ‘Tha’s not Mother!’ over and over again until Frederick’s shadow suddenly darkened the kitchen and he bellowed, ‘Frame thissen, yer tyke!’ and then he brayed each and every one of them in turn except for baby Nelly. ‘Yon childer need a mother,’ he said to Rachel when he’d finished. ‘Aye, they do that, Mr Barker,’ she agreed, trying to look as solemn and righteous as she could so he would appreciate the contrast to her cousin.