The Red House (9 page)

I had originally assumed that Rowena had moved into the barn later in life, the way that lots of grandparents do, after she’d retired from working at the hospital. But as Fiona and I had explored the barn’s contents, it had become clear that Rowena had been there for a long time, even before Fiona was born.

I don’t know what’s in all the boxes, but they’re stacked up past my height. Some of them are plastic and have tops and their towers are straight. Others are stacks of open-top cardboard, and they sink into one another and list. I follow the one possible path deeper in. The little kitchen is there only in part: the sink, yes, but the stove is gone, the kettle too. Maybe a fire hazard? Or just too dangerous for Ro to operate alone? I remember Fiona saying that the small refrigerator had stopped working last year, and that she’d had to bring Ro every meal, not just the cooked ones, after that.

The stuff back here is out in the open, not boxed. Toilet paper rolls, jarred instant coffee, sealed bags of cereal, raisins, nuts. It’s stocked as if for a siege. Overhead, the loft is crammed with old-looking equipment, precarious and too heavy. I wonder why any of it has been kept. Maybe Ro has refused to let it go, and Fiona’s mum at least got it out of the way. I wipe sweat off my face.

The heavy velvet curtain that separates the bed area is pulled to. There are no windows back there, so it must be all dark inside. Or, maybe there’s a lamp. I try to remember how Fiona and I had lit the place when we were younger, but I don’t know if we ever did. We only
played in here in the daytime, with the door wide open, on the rug in its mouth.

‘Rowena? It’s me,’ I say, letting Ro think that I’m whoever Ro wants me to be. If she doesn’t always remember Fiona, she certainly won’t know who I am. The dusty air dries my throat. I reach for the curtain.

A squeal and a thud behind me. I hold still. A muted clank. I drop the heavy curtain.

I rewind the path quickly, too quickly, bumping and scraping. A box stack wobbles and I shove it back, which slides its bottom out from under. The contents get under my feet. I scrabble in place, kicking magazines up behind me, and something else. Pill wrappings, little popped packets. There are lots of them, peeking out from under the jumble, spilt out of a tin box I recognise.

I listen. No more construction engine in the field. It’s stopped.
Builders are usually big men, aren’t they?
Fiona had told me that Rowena was afraid of one of the men, that he had a shotgun. I shiver despite the heat.
What had I heard?

I get my feet off the spilt pages and push out a held breath.
Calm down
. I carefully make my way down the rest of the thin, winding aisle back to the door. It’s closed.

Had I closed it?
No, I’d wanted the light.

I grab the iron handle and tug sideways. It resists. I brace my feet and bend my knees. I pull so hard that my feet slide forward, but the door doesn’t budge. I have to catch myself from falling on my back. There’s a heavy clacking of metal against metal on the other side. I shake the door hard. Padlocked.

I pound with the flat of my hand. ‘Mrs Davies?’ I call
through the cracks between boards. I tiptoe to get my eye up to a knothole.
No one
. My bike is still there, up against the White House. My bag, everything, is in the panniers.
My phone.

‘Fiona?’ I try. ‘I’m in here!’ I call, as if it were an accident.
It must be an accident, right? Maybe they lock Rowena in, for her own safety?

I turn. ‘Rowena?’ I call, back towards the curtain. Ro could be asleep. Ro could be hiding. I retrace my steps.

Maybe it was Grandma Ro who locked me in. Maybe there’s another path to the door from her bed, and my coming close drove her to escape. Fiona and her mum will come home and try to check on her and find the barn locked and find me. That’s what will happen.

The curtain. Fiona and I used to use the bed alcove as a theatre. The heavy fabric had been difficult for us to sweep aside in the kind of grand gesture we’d been after, and we ended up wrestling it much of the time. It should feel lighter now that I’m older, but it still resists. It sticks at the top. The rings aren’t sliding on the rod.

‘No,’ I say out loud. I’m not talking to the curtain; I’m telling off my stupid imagination. I pull hard.

Rowena had made the curtain when she moved into the barn fifty years ago
. No, not the barn,
she’d corrected herself as she sewed
. The Red House.

The sewing machine had plunged the needle, dragging the thick thread through the heavy material. She used this same needle to make coats and upholstery fabric. She used the same machine but a finer needle to make clothes. This is what she’d originally cleared the barn for, for her
sewing. Pumping the foot pedal, the answering whirr of the machine would calm her.

Her mother-in-law, Petra, always refused to enter the ‘dirty barn’. That had been most calming of all.

At first, Rowena had retreated here only when each day’s housekeeping had been completed. Petra ruled the White House, but did none of the work of it. She demanded petty errands anytime Rowena sat down.

‘Where are you going?’ Petra always wanted to know, whenever Ro readied to leave the house.

‘I’m working,’ was how Rowena answered. Work was always to be admired. Petra couldn’t fault that.

Ro used those early afternoon hours to scrub the barn clean and fix up old wooden furniture that neighbours were getting rid of. They were redecorating in a modernist style and wanted their old, dark, thick-legged and claw-footed furniture out. Rowena stroked the wood with polish and gloated over her good luck. She was sure that they would come to regret their new, fashionable orange vinyl and translucent plastic. Ro worked in the barn until she had to make a hot meal for her husband, Alun, and a separate meal for Petra, who preferred broth and sandwiches to slabs of meat.

Rowena first slept in the barn one night after a fight. Petra had accused her of poisoning the food. The old witch overturned her tray and called for her son. The sandwiches fell open, exposing damp lettuce and ragged cheese that had been cut from a block with a dull knife. Coffee stained the unvarnished wood floor. The women had both shouted at one another, then both at Alun, demanding that he arbitrate.

‘Please,’ he’d begged Ro, having pulled her into another room. ‘Just apologise. Then she’ll stop.’

‘I won’t apologise! You know it’s not true and I won’t say that it is!’

Rowena had just reupholstered an old chaise in the barn, so she slept on it that night, to demonstrate clearly to him where her line was. She woke the next day, peacefully, without his snoring, to streaks of morning light in lashes across the floor.

She returned to the White House only to carry her clothes across the garden, her well-mended full skirts and sweater sets, and hung them from a bar. She pillaged a mattress from a spare room in the White House and hauled it atop a platform under the loft in the newly-christened Red House. She moved out, and moved in.

She still took care of the White House, appearing cheerfully and early each morning for her duties, and again in the evening for dinner. When Alun wanted sex, he had to detain her after she washed up the dishes, Petra glaring at them as they went up the stairs. Ro never said no. She always left the room right afterwards, washed in the bath and then crossed the garden back to the Red House, where he was not allowed.

As she spent more and more time in her domain, she began to delineate areas within the open space. Another neighbour was refurnishing after a fire and gave up her velvet curtains that smelt of smoke. Rowena bagged them with charcoal, then hung them in the sunlight and beat them. She sewed them together to make a single grand drape. She fixed a rod under the loft to hold it. She made an elaborate tieback for when she wanted to gather it to one side in a sweeping curve.

Petra died of heart disease, and Alun assumed that Rowena would return to the White House, to take her place as its mistress. But she didn’t come. She began training for work in the afternoons. She continued to clean in the mornings and cook at night and not say no, but she slept in the Red House, and wouldn’t allow him in.

Alun was unhappy. After dinner one evening, while she washed the dishes, he walked across the garden. The kitchen is at the back of the White House and Rowena didn’t see him go. He slid open the door to the Red House.

He picked up a teacup and threw it. It chipped, but didn’t break. He threw it again so that it shattered.

He lifted a chair and beat it on the table until a leg snapped off and the back detached on one side. He overturned the table and tried to break a leg off that as well but it was too strong, and only lost a carved cherub from a corner.

Her pillows were flung about and stomped on by his muddy boots. He climbed onto the cream-coloured chaise to scrape footprints along its length. Lastly, he pulled on the curtain, stretching and tearing it, practically hanging from it to get the rod to detach at one end from the underside of the loft. The rings slid off the downed end and he dragged the velvet wide over the floor.

Rowena stood in the open doorway, hand over mouth. She ran at him, but he grabbed her wrists and twisted her down to the ground onto the spread curtain. He raped her there and left her in the mess.

Ro moved back into the White House. Thirty-five weeks later, she gave birth to a premature daughter. Once the girl was weaned and sleeping through the night, Ro righted
everything in the Red House and cleaned and rehung the curtain. She added one new thing.

That’s why the Red House door has a hasp on both sides for a lock.

The curtain gives in. I shove it aside.

The bed is heaped with pillows. Rowena’s face is nestled between two stiff ruffles, and the quilt edge is pulled up to her chin.

‘Grandma Ro?’ I say. I want to jostle Ro’s shoulder, but her whole body is under layers of thick blankets.

But it’s summer.

‘Rowena!’ I snap, hoping my voice will bring Ro to.

Rowena doesn’t move. Not at all, not the blankets on her chest, nor the ruffle by her mouth. A dangling cord hits my face. First I bat it away, but it’s not a spider’s web. I then fumble for it, in hope of turning on a light.

Outside, a sharp, echoing bang pierces the construction rumble.
Gunshot
.

That fucking siren. I can’t think. I’m sweating.

There, again.
No more shots, but for sure a voice, a woman’s: ‘No!’

I run for the buildings. In the summer light I’m visible from all angles on the exposed path. There’s no breeze, just my motion churning through the still air. A stitch seizes up my side; I’m out of practise and out of breath. The path curves and brings me up to the front of the buildings: a white house and, to its side, a red barn. The door of the barn is open. The siren sound is coming from in there, just that horrible sound, over and over until—

A smash and a clatter, a grunt and a crack, rattle the barn. I rush the doorway, tripping over a shotgun on the ground. I catch myself and stagger-hop into a maze. Box towers balance precariously on both sides of me, and the strip of space between them pulls me around the corner in the only direction it’s possible to move. It’s like walking into sudden twilight. I squint, to try to see her. ‘Imogen?’ I
call over the siren. I can’t find any button or lever to stop it.

Around the next turning, the box-walls lower and spread out into what appears to be a sort of pantry area. Opposite, a curtain hangs from a loft. In front of that curtain, a man’s legs stretch out from under … something. I lean forward. It’s a small refrigerator, tilted off the man’s back. I look up.

I squint.
Legs, metal legs
, is all my brain processes. I twist before the thing hits, giving it the back of my head instead of my face. It pushes me hard down, straddles me, then rolls off me to one side. It’s some kind of a gym apparatus. I rub my shoulder. The stretch of reaching across my chest triggers pain in my back that makes me gasp.

A scraping sound above alerts me. I spring back. A box is advancing towards the loft edge, slowly, slowly. Whatever’s inside the box must be heavy for it to resist so hard.

In an instant, I monkey up the stacked crates that make something like a stairway up. I push the box back, against the force squealing behind it. I’m groaning with the effort, and the siren sings round and round, louder here, louder than it was at the door, and the box scrapes along the wooden loft floor. I keep pushing, even when the box stops, until the squeals turn into words: ‘Stop! Stop!’ Behind the box, a flash of nut-brown hair.

‘Imogen!’ I shoulder the box aside, and she pops out from behind the old equipment and appliances, blinking, crying, dirty. I pull her out by the arm, by the shirt, though I don’t mean to, and it rips. It’s only a small tear, on her sleeve, that makes a triangle up her arm as if it were unzipping. In the dim light her skin is barely different from the dull-coloured shirt. The lack of contrast makes the rip
seem less violent. ‘Imogen?’ I say, squinting into the dark. Something isn’t right.

The woman, the not-quite-Imogen, springs to push me, and I topple back towards the edge. I roar and return the push, pinning her down by her shoulders, on top of her. Her ribcage pulsates and twists under my thighs. I hover my weight so as not to crush her, but I don’t let her go.

‘Mr Gant?’ she says, suddenly still. Everything is still, except the noise.

The siren hurts, it physically hurts. I can’t think. I must be hearing things.

‘Mr Gant, get off me! Please,’ she begs. A girl, not a woman. A young voice, an alto. Dora, from the concert hall. ‘Please.’

The siren expires. Its absence fills up the barn, fills it like water. I feel like I’m floating in it, floating in nothingness. I hear my own heartbeat; I imagine hers. I hear panting below.

Three beeps; a phone. ‘I’m calling the police,’ a male voice announces.

I get off of her. Dora sits up and clutches her torn sleeve. It’s only a sleeve. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve only defended myself.

I lean over the edge and see the new man more clearly. There are two of them, in green. Paramedics.

‘There’s a man on the ground,’ I tell them. ‘He needs help.’

The men approach but stop short of the loft. The one with the phone shines a torch on me. I cover my eyes. ‘Let her come down,’ the man says. Dora scampers down the makeshift ladder of boxes shored up by a large wardrobe.
She barely rattles it. She’s young, and light. And fast.
She’s scared of me
, I think, wincing. Once her feet hit the floor, one of the paramedics uses a broom handle to prod the top of the stack over so that I can’t follow. It falls into the next tower, which wobbles but, thankfully, holds.
Idiot
. What if it had all dominoed to block the way out?

The torch remains trained on me. That man watches me while his partner attends to the man under the mini-fridge. ‘Don’t move,’ torch-man warns me, and the fridge is rolled off the man below with a crash that rattles the barn. I can hardly see anything, just the brightness, but I hear Dora.

‘He had a gun,’ she says. ‘He locked me in. I hid up there. And when he got too close, I pushed it.’ Pronouns are fragile things.
It
, the fridge.
He
, the man down there … or me.

‘Not me,’ I say from my perch. My hands are up, though they haven’t asked for that, because I watch too much American television. ‘Him,’ I say. ‘Him down there.’

‘Shut up!’ says the man with the torch. Its beam wavers. He’s nervous.
Thank God this isn’t … Florida, right? Where, on TV at least, even the CSIs carry guns.

‘Are you hurt? What did he do to you?’ the calm, kneeling paramedic asks, apparently, Dora.
Why isn’t he performing CPR?

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Dora asks. Panic, she’s panicking.

‘You just tell me what happened to you. Did he hurt you?’

Again with the
he
. ‘I did not hurt her,’ I say.

‘Shut up!’ Again, the man with the torch. And, immediately following, a siren, a real siren, one that
you can tell is moving, approaching. Police.
Thank
God
. Anything to defuse the situation. With police added to the paramedics, surely I won’t seem a threat any more, not one against many. They’ll let me come down and explain myself.

Dora says, ‘He had a gun. The first man,
him
.’ She must be pointing at the man on the ground. She must have finally twigged my awkward position. ‘
He
tried to help me,’ she adds, kindly, presumably pointing up. I had entered to help her, but in defending myself her sleeve had got torn. I’d pushed her. I’d pushed her to save myself from pitching backwards, but I did push her …

The man with the torch asks, ‘Who is he? You know him?’

‘He’s my teacher,’ she answers simply.

I close my eyes.
Oh, shit. Oh, shit, shit, shit.
She’s what, fifteen years old? In the evening, in an isolated barn, with her teacher.

‘I did not know that she was here,’ I say. ‘I heard screams. I came to help.’ It sounds ridiculous, even to me. There’s nothing here, nothing but one barn and a house, and it’s not a through-road. I had no way to know that Dora lives out here. But, looking around, what else would I be here for? There are no other houses.

I’m not the only one thinking along those lines. ‘You live here?’ the paramedic asks her. The new siren seems to fade briefly, but that would be from the wide curve necessary to access this road. They’re coming.

‘No,’ Dora says, and my hopes rise. ‘No, my friend Fiona does.’ My stomach clenches. The police have rounded the bend.

‘Bloody hell!’ exclaims the man without the torch.

Dora sobs. ‘That’s Ro,’ she says. ‘Grandma Ro. She died.’

Phone sounds again. He requests more police. The sirens are deafening, and I can see the lights now, spinning and flickering. I feel woozy.

‘You pulled on this?’ shouts the man. ‘You called for help?’

Dora says, ‘I thought it was a light!’ She has to shout too. She’s still crying. ‘Then it made that noise.’ Some kind of emergency pull-cord, for … an apparently dead old woman. I lower my arms to steady myself.

‘Don’t move!’ says torch-paramedic, in a tone that reveals that he watches American television too.

Two officers jog in and flank him. ‘Please let me come down,’ I ask, meekly.

They allow it and I lower myself over the edge to hang from my hands. I could drop, but the other man is right below, still spread out. He can’t be alive. They would have removed him on a stretcher. He would be on his way to hospital by now.

The officers catch me by the middle and plonk me, standing, into a corner. Not a corner made by walls, but of
stuff
. At least the torch is off me.

The man on the floor is still. When I came in, the mini-fridge had been on the man’s back; now it’s beside him, partly pinning one hand. His head is just under a low table. He likely hit its edge as he fell. It’s too dark to see blood from here, or to see the rise and fall of shallow breath, but the lack of action from the paramedics is all too apparent.

I don’t resist the handcuffs.
If that’s what they need to keep calm, so be it.

‘He didn’t do anything!’ Dora wails. ‘It was me! I did it,’ she says. ‘I killed him.’ She repeats it, seemingly mesmerised by the realisation: ‘I killed him.’

They repeat for her the caution that they have just recited to me.

‘He was coming for me,’ she says. ‘He was angry that I tripped the alarm. He had a gun. Mr Gant tried to help.’

I would have given anything for a pronoun at that moment. ‘Mr Gant’ screams teacher more loudly than a whiteboard and a desk. Police eyes hit me with new disgust.

‘Call my father!’ Dora commands. ‘Morris Keene. Call him. Call Chloe.’ She’s sobbing again.

‘Who?’ asks one of the police, the one who’d cuffed me.
God, they look like teenagers.
More sirens round the bend.

Dora pulls herself together, announcing herself imperiously. ‘My name is Dora Keene. Call Major Investigations. Detective Inspector Chloe Frohmann of Major Investigations. She’ll help me.’

If you’re the type to become a policeman, chances are that you don’t appreciate being told what to do, at least not by someone you’ve just cautioned. To my surprise, the man makes a show of the call, and, after some transfers, says ‘Detective Inspector Frohmann, I think you should get out here. We have two bodies, and a teenager who feels in a position to order you from off the menu. Dora Keene.’

The conversation doesn’t continue beyond the giving of the address, so apparently those were magic words.

More flashing lights. Dora and I are escorted out. The door hangs, as if off-track, but it’s more than that: the whole latching apparatus is hanging. A broken chain dangles, its still-closed padlock hanging on like a charm.

If he’s the one who locked her in, why did he have to shoot the lock to get in himself?
I wonder.

What if the dead man isn’t the one who imprisoned Dora? I eye the broken chain.

I think he was using the gun to get her out.