Lacey's House Read online

  Time had been spent organising the studio so that I could eventually resume work, everything had to be perfectly set in its place and exactly where I needed it to be. Though my living space was cluttered and unstructured, here in my working space I had to be able to reach a hand out without looking and find the exact thing I needed. I found the organising process cathartic and fulfilling, a ritual I had always completed since I began painting.

  I set up my canvasses against the far wall, placed my easel where it could catch the best of the light. My paints were lined up alongside palettes, brushes, pots and knives on the old trestle table, the splashes of colour across the surface evidence of previous works. Now the room was ready for me to start work again and I felt as though at any time of the day or night, I could simply step through the door and begin.

  As the light began to fade I curled up on the sofa with a glass of wine. It was an indulgence I didn’t allow myself too often; alcohol was not one of my favourite things. I knew more than most where it could lead.

  Where the carers at the home had been reluctant to share information about our lives, my foster parents had not. They had held me, patiently answering my questions and not shied away from the truth when I sought it. I knew it had been hard for them, to take my dreams of my absent mother and turn them into something dark and unwanted. There had been times when I was younger that I wished they had kept it to themselves. But now I was grateful for it. The truth, though painful, was easier to deal with than the uncertainty of not knowing.

  My mother had been an alcoholic and I was taken away from her at 15 months old, severely neglected and underweight. I was alone when the police broke down the door and took me away. As far as my foster parents knew, she had never sought me out. I don’t know if she wrote to the home, if she enquired after my whereabouts. The scant information I had was bleak enough to prevent me from reaching out for more. I knew that her name was Margaret and I knew that her addiction had meant more to her than I had. It was enough, more than enough.

  A hand moved absently to my stomach and I pressed against it, feeling the flat, soft plane through denim. I cursed its lack of shape, longing to feel an answering kick from within; wishing things could have been different. I wondered how it could be that I had grasped so tightly to my mother’s hostile womb yet my own longed for child had loosened her grip and died. Sighing, I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat. Tomorrow would have been my baby’s due date and no matter how far I moved or how much I changed, there were some things I would never be able to leave behind.

  I closed my eyes and let it wash over me like a tidal wave. How long had it been since I had given the baby any amount of thought? I had pushed past thoughts of her and focused on the mundane. Now, as well as the grief, I felt the guilt of that dismissal weighing down on me.

  All of a sudden I felt it was too close in the house. I felt trapped, hemmed in by the walls around me with the TV flickering in the corner of the room like a warning beacon. Throwing open the door I ran barefoot out into the dark garden.

  I sank down into the too long grass, leaning forward to press my face into the ground. I cried for my lost baby and the sound filled the silent garden before fading into the night. The grass pressed against my face, cold and damp against hot skin as I drew ragged breaths that caught in my throat. How could this ever be alright? How could I have believed for one minute that I could leave this in the past? I had lost the one thing I had always wanted, a family of my own.

  I flinched at the hands that suddenly touched my shoulders, gentle but firm enough to pull me to sitting.

  “Are you okay, lady?”

  I sniffed and smelled lavender and clean linen. I tried to answer but found I couldn’t because I wasn’t okay. Through puffy eyes I saw the woman who had been planting roses in the graveyard. Warm, blue eyes looked back at me with curiosity and concern. She knelt down next to me in the grass looking a little embarrassed as if trying to work out why she had come here.

  “Who are you?” My voice hitched half way through and I watched her gesture vaguely towards the hedge.

  “I thought you was a wounded animal. That’s why I came in, I thought you was an animal needing help.” A gentle West Country accent softened her voice, making it sound sleepy.

  “I’m Lacey, I live next door.” She held out her hand and looked down at it as if it were an alien thing, as if it didn’t quite fit there.

  “I’m sorry, I’m fine really. I’ve just had a bit of a bad day,” I replied, shaking her hand. I could hear the awkwardness in my voice, the stilted words. Her eyes swept over me and I hurried to my feet taking a step backwards. I was uncomfortable with this stranger looking at me and seeing my vulnerability. I brushed myself down, feeling awkward as my clothes clung damply to hot skin.

  The woman held up her hand, stalling me.

  “Could you help me up please? My legs tend to hurt.”

  I hesitated before reaching down to support her as she stood, stumbling slightly and I held on tight, worried that she would fall.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” She looked away, her eyes gazing beyond my shoulder into the darkness of the hedges and beyond, as if she were uncomfortable at prying into something she shouldn’t have been.

  I shook my head, “No, thank you.” My own words were clipped, polite but distant and she flinched from them before nodding.

  “I have to go anyway, I’ve got Charlie waiting for me.”

  She turned quickly and hurried down the path leaving me looking after her as the gate swung closed and she disappeared into the darkness. I went into the front room and sat for a while staring into space, all the emotion spent. After a while I stood and headed towards the bedroom.

  Chapter 15 ~ Lacey

  The letter came six weeks after she had been arrested. She didn’t realise it was there at first because she didn’t always check the box down by the hedge.

  The weeks leading up to its delivery were tortuous and slow. She had arrived home from the police station, dropped off without fanfare to a house that looked exactly the same. Even the cat appeared unchanged, not seeming to notice she had been gone. But for her nothing could be the same.

  She spent hours looking at the walls of her house, the sturdiness of them, the familiarity of them. They were her fortress, her anchor. They lived in symbiosis, her and the house. She brought it energy and kept it clean and the security of those walls kept her safe and rooted in the present. She could tell where she was in the year by the way the sun shone in through the windows, by the various hues that washed across the floor.

  Apart from little trips into the village centre, she never left the cottage anymore, finding the world outside increasingly baffling and hostile. She had been born in this house and she rarely left it. Though her memory often failed her there were many things she could remember, images that stood out in sharp focus. She remembered other times she had left, other times she had been taken from here; confusing and chaotic images that put a tremor in her hands and made her stomach leap and turn. Nothing good ever seemed to come of leaving. She wanted to die in this house.

  But now it seemed that something threatened that wish. What if she was found guilty? What if she was sent to prison? She knew it would be the end, that she would go from the court to the prison and never again set foot here, where her life had begun. The solidity of these walls became tenuous and uncertain, as if they could crumble and leave her exposed to the elements. She had never before doubted that she would always be here, but now she feared it would be prised away from her by strangers who knew nothing of her life.

  By the time the letter arrived, Albert was in the ground next to his wife. She had been told to stay away from the funeral, she wasn’t welcome. The vicar had come to see her, had cleared his throat and tried to explain it in his apologetic way, never quite meeting her eyes. She had understood, though she would have gone if she had been given the chance. Instead she had sat at the end of the lane and listened to the sombre churc
h bells calling him home. She had wondered for a moment whether they would have the wake at Dove Cottage, but the hours passed and no-one made the journey to this end of the village.

  She spent the day thinking about Albert and the evenings they had spent together, talking about everything and nothing, putting the world to rights. She would miss him. Not just for the company on those occasions but for the smaller things. She would miss the way he would wave and say good morning when he encountered her, or how she could hear him singing through the open windows in summer. Sometimes his was the only voice she would hear in a day filled with silence.

  As evening fell, Lacey went into her garden and gathered up some wild flowers and grasses. She tied them together with string and when it was fully dark outside and the night was about to shift to morning, she made her way down the lane and up the road to the churchyard. Moving towards the more recent graves, she glanced around her, afraid to be seen. But there was no-one out at this time and she picked her way carefully through the mounds that were hidden in shadows.

  She approached the newest grave and sat beside it breathing in the scent of freshly turned earth. She talked to him for a little while, telling him about the police station, the ride in the police car. She tried not to imagine him down there among the cold and the worms. She told him about the mouse that Peachy caught that was still alive and ran around the house in panic. She told him that she was sorry she hadn’t been there for him, that she would miss him because he was the only one who treated her with decency and kindness. She laid the flowers on the mound and clambered to her feet, wiping away a tear and leaving a smear of dirt across her face.

  Sometime after that she found the letter. It was tucked in with a routine doctor’s appointment that she wouldn’t attend and a local nursery flyer. She looked at it with curiosity and fear in equal measure and then she sat at the kitchen table and stared at it while she drank her tea. She moved around the house, following her usual routines, gathering laundry, washing up. Each activity was punctuated by a step into the kitchen to stare at the white envelope and worry about what it contained.

  When she sat down to lunch, the envelope rested near her bowl looking like a name tag at a wedding, Ms L Carmichael. She placed it upside down so she couldn’t see the name and saw instead the return address of the Devon and Cornwall Police. She turned it over and over as she spooned soup into her mouth, watching as the sharp edges caught the light from the window.

  With a sigh she opened the letter in one sharp movement. There among the black typewritten words, among the phrases and technical information that she didn’t understand she saw the words no further action. She read them over and over, tried to put them into context with the rest of the letter that explained how in light of forensic evidence, there was no case to answer. She didn’t understand it all but she knew enough to know that it was over.

  It hadn’t been simply the thought of going to prison that had scared her so much. There was more to it than that. It was those words, those simple words that had been typed up by a secretary who had no emotional attachment to them. For Lacey, the freedom wasn’t just from the charges. Because now she knew, it was there in black and white. The forensic evidence showed that she had not been responsible for the death of Albert Allen.

  She passed a hand over her forehead and intense pain followed. She frowned against it, but the buzzing started in her head. She winced from it, could feel her heart hammering and as her vision started to fade she felt herself stumble and fall into the black, black hole.

  She woke in utter darkness and wondered where she was. It couldn’t be her bedroom because there, even on moonless nights, there was a faint lightening around the edges of her window frame, from the streetlamp at the end of the lane. The smell was wrong too, vaguely musty and earthy. It was familiar but she was not yet aware enough to work out how she knew it.

  She tried to remember and waited for the little clues to appear. The tiny fragments of memory, flashes of colour and conversation needed to coalesce to form a whole image that might make sense to her. Sometimes it happened, but sometimes they remained apart and those lost hours, occasionally days, disappeared forever.

  She reached out her hand and it brushed against a rough wall that left her skin dry and dusty, she reached out the other hand and felt the same. And then she knew. She was in the cupboard under the stairs. She was glad that she had found out before standing up.

  Carefully she pressed her palms forwards until they touched the door and moved them over the surface until she found the handle. It was dark and she limped her way on painful feet to the light switch, shielding her eyes as she flicked it on.

  The letter still sat, half folded on the kitchen table. A sack of cat biscuits had been knocked over and some of the contents spilled onto the floor. Apart from that everything was normal. When she moved a sharp pain pressed into the soles of her feet, stretching up to her ankles and she winced. Sitting down, she looked at the thickened pads of skin and discovered several thorns like tiny spikes protruding from the pink surface; they looked like blackberry thorns.

  The field next door to her house had blackberry bushes in the hedgerows, they followed the edge of the field all the way down to the old stable by the stream. Why had she gone there? What had she done? In that moment she felt exposed and afraid. Vague images jumbled in her head, a glimpse of a hand reaching for her, the cold stab of fear. They were gone before she could grasp them fully and she couldn’t tell if they belonged in this moment, or from another time.

  She moved towards the front door, as quickly as she could and turned the key, sighing with relief as the lock slid home.

  Chapter 16 ~ Rachel

  The air hung heavy and still over the field. From the five-bar gate at its entrance, the meadow looked like a picture. Nothing moved, and the sky beyond was cloudless, the light so bright that it brought everything into clear, sharp focus. Hidden among the blades of grass, splashes of colour like drops of paint nestled and around the edges of the meadow, fingers of light forced their way through tree branches and dappled the ground.

  Knee-high meadow grass had dried to the texture of straw beneath the blazing sun and the flowers had begun to wilt, the deep red earth baked hard and cracked. The peace and stillness so total that even the insects seemed unwilling to disturb it.

  In the far left corner of the field, where the trees grew thicker and provided blissfully cool shelter was a stream. Little more than six inches deep, it bubbled a shallow path over loose stones bringing with it a cooling breeze and the gentle melody of dancing water. Here, there was also an old stable. Open to the field on one side but so overgrown with blackberry bushes and honeysuckle, that anyone stepping beneath the beautiful scented blooms was rendered invisible to prying eyes. The light becoming green tinged as it seeped through the leaves that covered the opening. There were two stalls here but they had not been used for a long time, the plants finally claiming the structure for themselves.

  The dramatic change in temperature as I stepped into the shadows of the trees brought a sigh of relief to my lips. My eyes adjusted slowly to the change in the light, seconds passing as the dark shadows retracted into hues of green, soothing and gentle beneath the canopy.

  I sat on the shallow bank, the earth damp and cool through my clothes. Inside, I felt as though I was looking into darkness so intense I wondered if I would ever be able to fill it. In an alternative reality was there another me somewhere on the verge of labour, pain tearing through me as my baby fought to enter the world? Or would the result be the same no matter what reality existed? I wanted to believe that somewhere my baby had made it, that somewhere she was whole and new. It was so much easier than thinking she had never mattered.

  Drawing my knees up, I rested my chin. I had dreamt of her, before the night I had woken to blood on the sheets. I dreamt of a baby crying, and I had gone in search of the source, moving from room to room in a mansion with too many hiding places. The crying had gotten louder, but every ro
om contained only an empty crib. Then I had found myself in a garden with the full moon shining down and turning all the trees silver. The crying had been coming from beneath the branches of a cypress tree. I ran to it and stood among beautiful white lilies. I peeled back the petals from one of the flowers and found the baby there, tears all gone as she smiled up at me. Tiny hands rested on a round belly, legs curled up and crossed at the ankle. Sorrowful eyes looked up and met mine. I reached out a hand, but before my fingers brushed the soft skin, the petals began to close. When I pulled at the petals and opened them again she had gone, and I had woken up in a cold sweat.

  After that, whenever I thought about her it was the dream image I saw. Chubby arms with folds at the wrist and dimpled cheeks beside a rosebud mouth, dark eyes framed by beautiful long lashes that fluttered contentedly into sleep; a light brushing of dark hair covering a soft pink scalp.

  I reached into my bag and withdrew my sketchpad and pencil and began drawing tentative lines in the centre of the page. I drew the baby from my dream, tiny and perfect, surrounded by petals. The image took shape slowly at first, speeding up as my fingers gained confidence in their subject. The swell of full cheeks, the delicate mouth curved into a slight smile that seemed sad and lonely. Tiny crescent shape fingernails on folded hands. Beautiful and lost, realistic but never real enough. If I picked up my eraser and wiped it across the paper, my baby would be gone as quickly and silently as before. A dandelion seed floating on the breeze.

  I laid my pencil down and carefully tore the sheet of paper from the pad. The drawing only occupied the centre of the page, my perfect baby but only three inches high. I began to fold the paper, tucking in the edges but being careful that the image was never covered. The shape of the origami boat formed easily beneath my fingers and when I was done I put a finger to my lips, kissed it and pressed it onto her graphite face.