The Water Room

11. THE HEART BENEATH

Kallie sanded and undercoated the front door before applying a rich indigo gloss to the wood. She had repainted the bedroom and put up some cheap curtains, working her way down a list of chores, but felt as if she had barely scratched the surface. She hadn’t lived in a house since her parents were together. She was crouched in the hall, trying to thump the lid back on the paint tin without crescenting her palms, when Heather walked past laden with shopping bags.

‘How are you getting on?’ she asked, peering in. ‘Isn’t Paul giving you a hand?’

‘He’s been called up to Manchester,’ Kallie explained. ‘He’s still waiting to find out if he has a job. I thought I’d get this done before it started raining again. I don’t like the look of the sky.’

‘I don’t suppose he’d be much help anyway. He’s never been very practical, has he?’ Heather wore full make-up and was dressed in a smart black suit and heels, hardly shopping attire. She was never casual, or even relaxed. ‘Still, it’s very good of you, doing all this yourself. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

‘It’s a case of having to. I used up my savings securing the house. There’s hardly anything left over for fixtures and fittings, and nothing for renovations. God knows what will happen if Paul is made redundant.’

‘It’s still better to invest in property, darling. Look at what’s happening to pensions. George lost a fortune in Lloyds, but luckily he has his own business these days. Has anybody told you about the party tomorrow night?’

‘I got a note through the letterbox yesterday from the couple who live at number 43.’ She straightened her back with a grimace. ‘They’re not holding it just for us, are they?’

‘No, it’s their son’s tenth birthday, and Tamsin thought it would be nice for you to meet the neighbours, get to know a few people.’

‘What are they like?’

‘Oh, public school and a bit dim, but friendly enough and well-meaning. They communicate almost entirely through the boy, dote on him a bit too much, really, but she can’t have any more children so he’s become very precious to them. Actually, they always take our milk in when we’re away so I can’t complain. The child’s called Brewer-an extraordinary choice, but it seems everyone has to come up with a novelty name these days.’

‘I haven’t seen George around.’

‘He’s gone on to Montreal. I hate it when he does the Canada office; he always brings me back scarf-and-jumper sets. That’s if he remembers; otherwise it’s an airport headscarf. Who wears those things? He’s back on Friday, but three days after that there’s a trade fair in New York. Never marry a successful man if you hate spending time alone. Come over for dinner if you like, I’m just doing venison sausages and grain-mustard mash with onion gravy.’

Kallie pushed back the bandanna on her forehead and left a smear of blue paint. ‘Thanks, but I want to finish washing the lounge walls tonight. We’ve still only got lights in three rooms. I need to find a decent inexpensive electrician.’

‘You’re in luck. We’ve got one in the street, at number 3, our rough diamond Elliot Copeland. Actually he’s a builder, but he’ll turn his hand to anything. He’ll probably be at Oliver and Tamsin’s tomorrow night. Pour him a couple of drinks and you’ll be able to beat a decent price out of him.’

‘I guess I have to come, then.’ Kallie rose and wrapped her paintbrushes in a cloth. ‘I just hope Paul’s back in time.’

Heather started to leave, but returned. ‘You haven’t seen Cleo in your garden, by any chance? She’s not allowed out of the front door. Her food bowl hasn’t been touched all day.’

‘No, but I’ll keep an eye out for her.’ She had seen Heather’s cat picking its way through the foliage of the back gardens.

After cleaning the brushes in the basement’s butler sink and thrashing them dry on newspaper, Kallie made some tea and decided to get clean. She had soaked the ancient copper shower-head in descaling fluid, but it had made no difference to the years of stony accretion caused by London’s infamously hard water. She stripped and padded across the cold parquet, setting the torch beam at the ceiling. The steep curve of the bath made standing up treacherous, but she had never enjoyed soaking in tepid water. Paul could lie there for hours, but she-

She could hear it again.

Not coming from the right-hand wall of the bathroom this time, but seemingly from under the floor itself. She had assumed that the foundations were solid concrete, so it had to be an acoustic trick of some kind. Copies of the house plans had still not turned up, probably because of a delay in locating the originals. Although the bathroom was below street level, there didn’t seem to be any actual damp, but the noise was worrying.

She pressed her palms against the cold plaster of the adjoining wall and tried to sense the arrhythmia of liquid life within the bricks. She could hear it clearly now, a channel of rushing water, pounding and rebounding before it was constricted within some kind of man-made sluice. She could trace its faint pulse in her cold fingertips, a vein pumping waste in freezing peristalsis from the city’s hidden heart.

Crouching lower, her eyes drew level with the underside of the bath. Although she had sprayed the dark space with disinfectant, several hairy brown bowls of spider-nests remained beneath the shadowed legs.

The tops of her feet were prickled with pimples that itched when she touched them. They had appeared when she’d discovered the spiders, and now she wondered if they were bites, or even tiny stings.

She told herself that the room would be transformed with fresh plaster and paint, and lights that worked, but resolved to keep her showers short until then.

‘Floorboards creak, pipes expand and contract-you’ve never lived in such an old house before. You have what doctors used to refer to as an overactive imagination; it comes from being too creative, and of course Paul’s away. .’ Her mother managed to hang sentences filled with insinuations of mental instability and general uselessness in the air like embarrassing items of washing. Helen Owen loved her daughter, but not enough to stop herself from being cruel.

‘I’m coping brilliantly,’ Kallie rallied. ‘And before you say it, I know it wasn’t the best time to take on something like this, but it was a lucky opportunity. Nobody knew she was going to die so suddenly.’

‘That’s simply not true, darling. There’s a lot we can do to maximize our health and reduce stress, and I think you have to ask yourself if Paul has your interests at heart. He seems barely employable, he has trouble controlling his temper, and then he leaves you with all the stress of moving, into a house that sounds entirely unfit for habitation-’

‘I have to go, Mum. I’ll call you later.’ Kallie knew better than to talk with her mother when she was like this; Helen was alone and angry and probably drinking.

There was still much to do before going to bed. She pulled on her jeans and ventured out into the garden. The sodden bushes hung like overcooked spinach, or foliage in a drained fishtank. The steps to the small patch of grass were so overgrown that she had to cut her way through with a kitchen knife. She heard the cat’s peculiarly human cry before she got to the top. Somewhere inside the tangles of bindweed, she could see Cleo’s piebald torso flexing and twisting in an effort to free itself.

Cutting through the bindweed was slow work. When she was finally able to reach in and grab the cat, it slipped away with a whimper of pain. Her foot caught on a broken plastic drain lid, and she tipped over into a wet bed of weeds. Withdrawing her left hand, she was surprised to find her fingers covered in blood. The cat had stopped wriggling now, and was lying on its side under a bush. Even in the watery cloudlight of late afternoon, she could see that its fur had been parted by a number of short, deep cuts that looked like knife slashes.

‘Come on, baby, let me help you.’ Kallie reached out her hands and gently lifted it up. As the cat feebly batted her with its paws, she could see that its back left leg had been almost severed. Torn sinews gleamed with pearlized whiteness. There were more cuts across the creature’s face.

As she sought to regain a foothold in the dark snarls of weed, she knew that the poor thing was dying. She wondered if foxes could do something like this. They had been drawn into the city to scavenge on junk food, but did they also prey on cats? Cleo was covered in mud and blood. It was as if something had clawed its way up through the moist earth to attack her.

By the time she was able to gently lift it free, the cat was dead. Kallie glanced back at the little terraced house, its interior darkened, its brickwork retreating from sight under cover of rainfall, as if the property was disassociating itself from her palpable distress.