House of Small Shadows

FOUR

Catherine stood at the edge of a petrol-station forecourt that had not been in her childhood. The only thing she recognized was the humpback bridge over a stream of shallow brown water, referred to as a river when she was a child. Though even the bridge had been lowered and widened to allow freight lorries to shudder through Ellyll Fields in gusts of dusty wind.

The little paper shop where her nan had bought her ten-pence mixtures of sweets in a white paper bag was no more. Gone along with the little plastic boy out front, who’d held a collection box and had a spaniel at his feet. Beside the Wall’s ice-cream sign made of tin, covered in faded pictures of ice lollies that once made her mouth water, the plastic boy had stood sentinel in all weathers. She’d often been allowed to put a half-penny coin inside his box.

Catherine wondered what happened to all of the crippled boys and girls with their spaniels, who once stood outside sweet shops. Where the paper shop had been was now a decelerating lane into the petrol station.

There had been a chemist’s and a clothes shop beside the newsagent’s. Yellow cellophane behind their windows used to remind her of Quality Street chocolates that came out at Christmas. In the chemist’s she’d received her first pair of milk-bottle glasses in black NHS frames. Three decades would pass before that particular style of spectacle frame was considered cool. Fashion had not been on her side when she actually had to wear them.

And in the clothes shop she had been bought her first pair of school shoes. Even recalling these shoes made her breath catch. Nor for the first time was she astonished at what remained in her memory.

Few had worn that type of sandal. Even fewer had liked them. They had been brown and made by Clarks. Something else that had since become popular. The certainty of the adults surrounding her in the shop, that the sandals were a satisfactory purchase, nearly gave her the same confidence at the point of sale. Once home with the box and the horrible sandals in their bed of tissue paper, thoughts of the coming school term and what awaited her had created an empty feeling in her stomach, a cold tingling space in which no food would settle.

Her instincts about the sandals had been correct and she came to hate them. She’d cut them with scissors, but ended up going to school in damaged shoes. She’d also worn the sandals at weekends, so news of school shoes being worn in public on a Saturday had whipped round the playground. Everyone thought she did things like that because she was adopted.

Dopted! Dopted! Dopted!

In this dreary place of concrete and tarmac, built over her childhood, a burst of the chant returned to her mind. Followed by another inner refrain of Pauper! Riffy Pauper! Pauper! Riffy Pauper! Which of the chants had scalded her with shame and humiliation the most, she couldn’t decide. But their echoes still hurt.

In a moment of sympathy, and recognition that her burden might be greater than her own, even little Alice Galloway once asked her, What’s it like to have no real mum and dad? I’d hate it. And Alice had worn a large brown boot on one foot to correct her strange lurching walk. The boot, and an eye socket packed with gauze, had excused Alice from violence.

During a family holiday in Ilfracombe, Catherine remembered wishing on coins thrown into a fountain, and also after the candles had been blown out on an iced birthday cake, that she could be disabled like Alice. Her adopted mother had actually cried when she told her, in all sincerity, about her birthday wish. Her poor dad had even shut himself in the garage for a day. So Catherine never said anything like that again. The worst Alice ever dealt with was white dog shit packaged in tin foil and a Milky Bar wrapper, and given to her as chocolate by a group of girls from the next grove.

‘Jesus.’ Catherine shook her head at the side of the dismal road. Its expansion had not come close to burying the rubble of her childhood. ‘Jesus Christ.’ Who took bullying seriously back then? Maybe her nan, who persuaded her adopted parents to move away from Ellyll Fields for Catherine’s sake after Alice Galloway went missing. A relocation to Worcester that also took Catherine away from her nan. A move that broke both their hearts.

‘Oh, Nan.’ At the side of the traffic-blasted road, Catherine’s eyes stung with tears. She sniffed, looked about to see if anyone in the garage shop was looking at her. Then returned to her car on the petrol-station forecourt.

Behind the Shell garage the red bricks of a newish housing estate stretched away across what she’d once known as the ‘Dell’. Scrub really, full of litter and blackberry vines where adults sent rather than walked their dogs. The Dell had been full of dog mess, but local children had still eagerly raced through the narrow tracks on their bikes and sat in the two abandoned vinyl car seats that had been thrown over the fence.

Using the bridge as a landmark she drove through where she remembered the Dell to be, and the small dairy farm that bordered it. Since she’d been away, the farm had also been developed into new housing, and she was soon driving across what she remembered as an eternity of long wet grass only the most foolhardy kids ventured into because of the enormous cows and apocryphal tales of children being speared on bull horns. Once, the field had even been made available for the local populace during the Silver Jubilee. She’d seen photographs of herself as a baby in the field, her pushchair festooned with Union Jack flags.

The new housing estate that covered the Dell and the adjoining field had been created with identical three-bedroom houses arranged in cul-de-sacs. There were no children playing outside of them now. Every house confronted every other house with too many windows. When Catherine pulled over and stood on the empty pavement, the windows on both sides of the road made her feel exposed and small. Curiously, the road surfaces still looked new.

At the western edge of the housing estate she parked in the lay-by of a dual carriageway. The rows of concrete buildings where her nan had lived, set on perpetually windswept grass, all stained with rust about their outflow pipes and speckled with black clouds of soot near the guttering, had been erased from the earth. There was now a Tesco and another petrol station in their place, a DIY centre, a large traffic island, and three new roads leading to places people would rather be.

Her nan’s brownish living room with the painting of a green-faced Spanish girl over the gas fire, that looked like the front of an old car, and her ashtray on a metal stand, and the dark velour sofa, and the door with dimpled glass panes, and the smell of Silk Cut and sausage rolls, no longer existed.

Catherine’s throat closed on a lump the size of a plum she could not swallow. She decided not to buy petrol at this garage either. She needed fuel to get home to Worcester, but would fill up somewhere else between here and there.

Parked at the northern edge of the housing estate, Catherine discovered the old river had been funnelled into a concrete aqueduct, close to one side of the road. On what was once a riverbank stood a row of identical wooden fences at the rear of private gardens. With the exception of the humpback bridge by the Shell garage, the topography of her early childhood was non-existent.

She guessed her old den had once been on the other side of these garden fences. Until her sixth year, the den she and Alice Galloway shared, at the furthest edge of the dairy farm’s field, had been one of the few enchanting places in her life. Until Alice went missing and Catherine’s family moved away, the den was the only sanctuary outdoors that she and Alice ever found in Ellyll Fields. Being so close to its foundations returned tears to her eyes.

She and Alice had discovered a way to circumnavigate the field of cattle to get to the thin river that once trickled between the shadowy banks, carpeted in dead leaves and sheltered by tree branches that hung over the water. A sanctuary in days when children roamed freely and spent most of their time outdoors.

No one ever found out where poor Alice had been taken in the summer of 1981, but Catherine once believed her friend had found a new sanctuary in some other place. Alice had even suggested the potential of such to her, though only after she’d been gone three months.

How furious they all were at the very idea that she’d seen Alice again. The memory of Alice’s mother going hysterical in her parents’ kitchen, pulling her own hair out, which made her look like Cat Weasel with a red face, still issued the occasional pang of shame. Something Catherine would never forget, nor forgive herself for being the cause of.

She no longer believed she’d seen Alice after she disappeared either, and hadn’t for decades. As a child she had done, and also believed that Alice had come back for her that day. And for most of her childhood Catherine even wished she’d taken the opportunity to go away with her friend too, to follow her to some place better than this ever was.

On the opposite side of the river to their den, a wire fence once protected the special school’s grounds. The Magnis Burrow School of Special Education had been derelict when Catherine lived in Ellyll Fields thirty years ago, so it was no surprise to find the school had been demolished, along with everything else.

Landscaped mounds of long grass, dotted with buttercups and dandelions, had once formed an incline topped with a row of red-brick buildings, their windows covered in plywood boards. Now, even the small hillocks had been levelled to make way for the aqueduct and another dual carriageway.

Whenever she’d asked about the empty school next to the farmer’s field, she was told all kinds of things by her parents and her nan, who never seemed comfortable when they answered.

‘Used to be a home for handicapped children. Mongol children. You know them children that get old, but keep children’s faces.’

‘Thalidomide children that don’t live very long.’

‘Children in wheelchairs or invalids with their legs in callipers.’

Like the plastic boy outside the sweetshop who collected her coins? Like Alice? she’d asked. Like me? she’d meant.

‘Their mothers had them too late.’

‘They’ve gone a bit funny in the head.’

‘Some of them went missing, so don’t go anywhere near that place. It ain’t safe.’

The words of the adults made her sensibilities cringe now. But along with Alice’s unexpected return to the den, three months after her disappearance, Catherine had once believed that some of the special children had also been left behind.

Until her early teens, when therapists and doctors persuaded her to accept the idea that her hallucinations were just another example of an unhappy, if not ‘disturbed’ childhood, she’d been convinced the children she’d seen in those abandoned school buildings were real, while also seeming a bit unreal, like so much of her childhood had been.

Years later she accepted the children were hallucinations, inserted into her world as imaginary friends or guardians. And in hindsight, for the derided and lonely, no one knew better than Catherine how important an imagination was when you were small. If the only real friend you ever had went missing, you just made up the rest.

She must have been six when she tried to tell her nan and parents about the special schoolchildren who had been left behind.

‘It’s them tearaways from the Fylde Grove you’ve seen,’ her dad had said. ‘They’ve already smashed the windows. You shouldn’t be going over there. Keep away from it.’

The children from the Fylde Grove never went anywhere on foot. They rode around on bicycles they threw down with a clatter as they dismounted, and had loud voices and untucked shirts and florid faces and hard eyes. And you could only reach the special school by creeping around the perimeter of the field, or by going up a long drive to the gates covered in barbed wire, which were never open. The main entrance of the derelict school was also on the main road, where no child was permitted to go by bicycle.

Catherine never once saw children from the Fylde Grove anywhere near the special school, nor anyone else for that matter. The special school and its children had always belonged to her and Alice. And the children she had seen in those derelict buildings were very different to the ‘tearaways’ from Fylde Grove. Where the children inside the derelict special school came from had been one of the great mysteries of her childhood, but they were among the few children she could remember being kind to her and Alice.

Sat in her car, a recollection of that section of the school’s fence, fixed between concrete posts, returned to her mind so vividly that she could practically feel the wire again, clutched between her fingers, as she watched Alice hobble up the grass bank to the old buildings, during the afternoon of the day she went missing.

Catherine changed position in her seat and opened a window to try and ease away the discomfort that was nine parts psychological and one part heartbreak, an old crack that would never heal.

Only when she was alone in her den on the riverbank did she ever imagine she’d seen the children, on the opposite side of the wire fence she’d peered through, while she sat on the slippery tree stump with the three old paint tins around her like drums, a scatter of dried flowers upon the leaves she had collected to make a carpet, and the plastic tea set that had gone green from being left outside for too long. And only when she was so heavy with anguish that her misery had felt like the mumps, had they appeared. Children in strange clothes allowed to play outside when it was going dark.

She’d usually felt like that on a Sunday afternoon, when the sky was grey and the air drizzly and even her bones were damp. Right before she walked home for a tea of beans on toast that she could barely swallow at the prospect of school the next day.

After the police interviews, she never spoke about the children again outside of a therapist’s house.

But the longer she looked out through her windscreen at the dual carriageway, and the garden fences along the border of the estate, and the concrete ditch that diverted her little river, and considered all of her memories and the way they’d haunted her, the more foolish and insignificant they all seemed to be now. She wondered if coming here had finally allowed her to let go of all that. And in a curious way being here again after all of these years did feel necessary.

Her thoughts drifted to the evening ahead, and to her boyfriend, Mike, and she held precious an image of his smile. Even though he’d not been his usual self for a few weeks, she believed he genuinely looked forward to being with her. And she thought of dear old Leonard behind his vast desk and how he had come to rely upon her and think of her as a favourite niece. A month ago he’d even become tearful over a lunch that involved a lot of wine, and had explained to her how important she was to his business, and that he wanted her to ‘keep it’ once he’d ‘been wheeled off to that great auction in the sky’.

Catherine thought of her own flat in Worcester with its whites and creams and quiet interior. A place she always felt safe. There was no more London to endure now. She even had a great haircut, which could never be underestimated. She was happy. Finally. This is what happiness felt like and this was her life now. Career, boyfriend, her own home, her health. As good as it gets. What happened all of those years ago was over. Let go of it. The past had even been physically removed and its ground covered with tarmac, bricks and concrete. It was gone and it wasn’t coming back.

Catherine dabbed at her eyes and checked her make-up in the rear-view mirror. She sniffed and started to smile. Turned the ignition key.