Weird Sister (12 page)

‘Cheers,’ I returned and felt dizzy with lust and happiness as Agnes slipped her arm through mine.

Work was going well in the rooms we had decided to renovate, and the builders were back in on Monday morning. We lived in a world of plaster dust; it got into everything. Restoration work was needed on the carved ceiling in the ballroom downstairs as well now, and that would require specialists. At the instigation of Agnes, we decided to try to find out whether the local council or the National Trust or Department of Heritage or somebody like that would be able to help us. I had never thought about the house as anything other than our house before, our old house with its cobwebs and dignity. Certainly not a house that warranted the attention of outsiders. Agnes declared she would take on this task, she would sort it out.

We hadn’t discussed what she was going to do after the wedding. In fact, as the early days of our marriage progressed it became clear to me just how little we had discussed in the weeks since we met. I knew she had money, that she wasn’t going to have to work, and I wouldn’t have wanted her to have to work anyway. That sounds so old-fashioned – what I mean is, she could have worked if she had wanted to work but it was great that she didn’t have to, that I didn’t need her to. Even if she hadn’t had her own money our household could have expanded to include supporting her as well. One more person would not have broken the bank. And I suppose I thought she would keep Karen company, lighten her load a little. I know how silly that sounds now, with hindsight. Housework was not Agnes’s forte.

I never found out how much money Agnes had, and I never discovered where it had come from. I did ask her once, I asked whether her parents had made their money in Las Vegas, thinking perhaps they’d been gamblers, or casino-owners, or – who knows – perhaps her mum was a show-girl and her dad a croupier. But Agnes laughed at my speculations. She didn’t like answering questions about her past. ‘I’m here for you now and that’s all that matters,’ she’d say. And for me it was true, that was all that mattered.

Nothing else concerned me.

Agnes tells Jenny stories

Sometimes at night Agnes tells Jenny stories. She sits on the edge of the bed in Jenny’s room, the light dimmed low, and she talks, her voice deep and quiet. Graeme used to read Jenny stories every night when she was small; he stopped when she was thirteen and Karen said she thought it wasn’t such a good idea any longer. He misses it though, and so does Jenny, but Andrew came along and Graeme started at the beginning again, back to A A Milne. Agnes doesn’t read to Jenny – she talks her stories, she keeps them stored in her memory.

‘There is a town, a small town, in the mid-west, a town like any other town. In it lives a girl, her name is Jenny –’ the girls are always called Jenny in Agnes’s stories ‘– and she lives with her mother, her parents are divorced. Jenny and her mother don’t get on too well, and her father, well, he is a cop and he has a bit of an alcohol problem. Her parents have been divorced for a number of years and her mother is no stranger to the bottle herself.

‘Jenny has a group of friends at school, good friends, they watch out for each other. They are in the twelfth grade, which in American high school is called the senior year, they are seniors. There are twelve grades in American high school. Anyway, a group of boys and girls and they are good friends. None of them comes from particularly happy families and it might be this that binds them together. Some of Jenny’s best friends have boyfriends and for them the big question is whether or not they should go all the way with these boys, whether or not they should –’ Agnes pauses and looks at Jenny knowingly, ‘have sex. Jenny’s very best friend, Lolly, decides that yes, she is going to go ahead, she and her boyfriend Ron are going to have sex.

‘Jenny has a boyfriend, his name is Tim and Tim would like to sleep with Jenny but she isn’t certain. She likes Tim a lot, but she doesn’t know if she loves him, and she believes you should love someone if you are going to sleep with them. But Tim is patient, he thinks she will change her mind if he kisses her well enough.’

Jenny interrupts. ‘I don’t know anyone called Tim.’

‘Who says this is about you?’ says Agnes. ‘You don’t live in the American Midwest either, do you?’

Jenny snuggles down.

‘Okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘Around this time, Jenny and her friends start to have the same dream. Jenny dreams that she goes down into the basement of her house, down where the furnace is – American houses are like that, they don’t have kitchen boilers, they have furnaces, usually oil-burning, sometimes wood, occasionally both. They always have basements, at least houses in small towns always have basements, basements that are dark and a little bit creepy, houses in the suburbs that have garages and front lawns and backyards and that kind of thing. Creepy.’

‘Did you grow up in a house like that?’ asks Jenny.

‘No,’ says Agnes, ‘I grew up in an apartment in a hotel.’

‘What’s Las Vegas like?’

‘It’s a kind of paradise. The sun shines all year round. It’s in the desert, but there is water everywhere. It’s a city built on money. Money and chance.’

‘Do you miss it?’

‘Sometimes,’ Agnes says, ‘when I’m very cold.’ She reconsiders. ‘Not really. So anyway, Jenny dreams that she goes down into the basement and the furnace is roaring and she is very, very frightened. She wakes up, she makes herself wake up, and she is covered in sweat, her heart beating fast. One night she has this same dream but this time when she goes down into the basement there is a man there, an evil man. He is living inside the furnace. His face is horribly mutilated and instead of fingers he has fists full of razorblades. He chases her through the basement which suddenly isn’t the basement any longer but a kind of factory, an underground industrial factory, windowless, with no exits, and Jenny can’t wake up, she can’t make herself wake up. And he chases her and chases her and she runs and runs, screaming, until she begins to feel very tired, and he catches up with her. He grabs her and she feels one of the razors sink into her arm – and finally, she wakes up.

‘She wakes up in her own bed, in her own room, in her own house, safe and sound. Except when she lifts her hand away from where she is clutching her arm she finds it is soaked in blood. There is a deep cut where the man in her nightmare has sliced her.

‘That day when Jenny gets to school she discovers that her best friend Lolly and her boyfriend Ron are dead. Some monster, some psychopath, sliced them both up with knives in Lolly’s own bed.’

Jenny interrupts. ‘Really?’

‘Shh,’ says Agnes, ‘listen.’

‘Jenny and her friends gather together in the school cafeteria. Terrified by what has happened to Lolly and Ron, they begin to talk about their nightmares and, suddenly, they realize they are all having the same nightmare. They know who murdered Ron. The man who lives in their nightmares. The man with knives instead of fingers. He is somehow breaking through the sleep barrier into real life. He is trying to kill them, each and every one one of them.’

Jenny shudders. ‘Oh god, Agnes,’ she says, heartfelt, ‘that’s horrible.’

‘Are you sure you don’t know this story?’ Agnes asks. ‘I thought everyone knew this story.’

Jenny shakes her head. ‘Why? Why is he killing them?’

‘Listen,’ says Agnes, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

‘One after the other Jenny’s friends start to die. They die terrible deaths at the razor-hands of this evil man in his filthy black and red striped sweater and his battered fedora hat. It is always the same. They try to stay awake, they do anything to avoid going to sleep, keep each other talking on the phone, trying to make sure they are safe. They are terrified of falling asleep. But night after night one of them succumbs to sleep, and when they do he is waiting for them. And he gets them, and kills them, he always does.

‘The parents in the town are going crazy. There seems to be nothing they can do to stop their children dying. Jenny’s mother is hysterical about the situation, Jenny finds she can’t talk to her about it at all. Jenny’s father, the policeman, is desperately trying to do something. But even though he is armed, he is powerless against this monster, completely ineffectual. At first the adults refuse to believe the children are being murdered by the man from their nightmares but Jenny has a feeling that her own parents know more than they are letting on. She thinks they know the identity of the man in the nightmares but for some reason are unable to face up to it.

‘Jenny herself does battle with the razor-fingered man night after night but she always manages to escape although her escape inevitably leads to the death of another one of her friends.’

Jenny is curled up under her blankets. She pulls one over her head.

‘Do you want me to stop?’

‘No,’ she says, muffled.

Agnes continues. ‘Jenny confronts her mother. She demands she tell her everything she knows. And so her mother confesses.

‘Jenny’s mother and father grew up in the same neighbourhood, the very neighbourhood where Jenny and her mum still live. There was a man, an evil man, who worked as a janitor in the school and who got his kicks from molesting children. He was a clever man and the police were unable to pin anything on him, so he kept evading arrest. And he continued to molest children. Jenny’s mother herself was one of his victims, she won’t say anything more than that.

‘One day, the parents in the neighbourhood had had enough. The men – Jenny’s grandfather and the other fathers in the area – got together and decided to take the law into their own hands. They went after the man they knew had been molesting their children. They trapped him in the basement of the school and they forced him into the furnace where he burned to death. This is the man who is now killing their own children.’

‘He’d come back,’ says Jenny, horrified.

‘He’d come back to seek his revenge.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, armed with this knowledge, Jenny goes to bed that night determined to meet the man and destroy him. He chases her through the endless basement, up ramps and metal stairways, past roaring furnaces, until she can’t run any further. Summoning up all her courage and strength, she turns to meet him face to face. They battle for hours, through the night, at great cost to Jenny. But, in the end, she overwhelms him. She is victorious, his evil cannot sully the essential goodness and purity of her character.’

‘She wins? Because she is good?’

‘Yes. He cannot destroy her. She destroys him.’

‘He stops killing?’

‘Yes.’

Jenny slumps back down on her pillows. ‘Wow,’ she giggles nervously. ‘That’s a horrible story Agnes.’

‘I’m fond of it.’

‘I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

Agnes laughs. ‘You’ve led a sheltered life.’ She stands to go. ‘School tomorrow. Is there anything you’ll need help with in the morning?’

‘No, I’ll be fine. Thanks.’

Agnes nods and goes toward the door. Before she can leave, Jenny speaks again. ‘Is he gone forever?’

‘Forever?’ says Agnes. ‘No. Revenge is a powerful thing.’

Elizabeth

I loved Warboys. Even though the sodium lights of London drew me away for a time, I always loved our village. There’s something about the fens that I find very beguiling. It’s like the low quiet notes that a symphony orchestra plays; most people prefer the loud bits. All that water, the land criss-crossed with canals and drainage ditches; when I was a child my parents used to take me out to the fens to skate in winter. Skating made me love the diluted low-land, the sharp air on my face, my blades scraping against the ice. Of course these days the winters are usually too dreary and mild to force a freeze. But I still love Warboys. I still feel it is my place.

I didn’t see Robert and Agnes for nearly a fortnight after the wedding. I wanted to keep away from them, and besides, I was busy. I had started working for Julia and David Trevelyan.

I was the office dogsbody, except that David usually made the coffee. He was very particular about his coffee and had his own espresso machine. I’d arrive around about nine a.m. and open the post while David made me cappuccino. I thought I’d given up coffee but he persuaded me differently. There wasn’t that much mail of the old-fashioned variety but there were often faxes and there was a great deal of e-mail. Our computers were networked and Julia and David both received dozens of messages every day. They said they were tired of being enslaved by e-mail and that it was one of their main reasons for hiring somebody; I didn’t know enough about computers at the time to know whether they were joking or not. I read the messages and deleted those I considered to be junk-mail, there was an awful lot of that, messages sent ricocheting around the world notifying anyone and everyone about different services, academic research, that kind of thing. The rest I would print out, ridiculous as that might sound in an office devoted to information technology, but I would print the messages out on to paper and sort them into three piles, personal, urgent business and general. That way Julia and David could prioritize them. I answered the phone and, as I became more knowledgeable about the work they did, dealt with a lot of the enquiries myself. I did the banking and the book-keeping, most of it electronically, sent off invoices and reminders, and kept on top of the computer database. It was busy work, not mindless, but not demanding. They paid me by the hour and sometimes I’d be finished by eleven a.m., sometimes I’d be there the entire day. It was an amicable set-up and I think we all benefited from it. I grew accustomed to the hum of computers in the background and came to like the way their blue screens lit up our faces. Most of the work I did had fallen on Julia’s shoulders and employing me freed her up for other things, kind of like hiring a cleaner. Except they had one of those already. I felt incredibly relieved that it wasn’t me.

Robert and Agnes’s wedding had been a big event in Warboys and the buzz from it lasted for weeks. As the weather grew darker and colder it was something people talked about as though to warm themselves, reminiscing, going over the details, what the bride had worn, what music had been played, who had said what to whom at the party. I was sick of hearing about it, I would have been happy if it had happened and never been mentioned again, but that isn’t how life works in a small village. Of course I smiled and nodded my head as though I agreed it had been the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, Agnes the loveliest bride. Barbara, in the shop, was one of the worst offenders, but she was always a bit extreme in her reaction to things. She wasn’t a gossip, she wasn’t that interested in what the people of the village said or did provided they didn’t say or do it in her shop, and so when something was happening you could usually rely on Barbara not to have noticed. But she did feel strongly about certain things. I remember when Princess Diana died she wept for a full two weeks. You couldn’t buy a paper from her without coming away with a front page made soggy with tears. Barbara loved Agnes almost as passionately, I think she thought Agnes had stepped out from the pages of her beloved
Hello
magazine.