The Last House on Needless Street Page 15

  My problems at school had already started, but my parents had not yet begun to take them seriously. I guess I was so well behaved at home, they must have thought there was some mistake. I was helpful and polite, or at least I always tried to be. ‘Teddy seems to have skipped being a teenager,’ Mommy would say, stroking my cheek. ‘We are lucky.’

  One morning the Chihuahua lady came to the house before I left for school. I was eating cereal at the kitchen counter. Mommy was wearing her blue gauzy dress that floated behind her when she moved. The Chihuahua lady settled herself on a stool and poured three sachets of sweetener into her coffee. Steam wreathed about her head. She liked her coffee molten hot and sweet enough to kill. She took her dog out of her bag and put him on the counter. He had a little smooth, dark face, intelligent. He sniffed delicately at the coffee cups and blinked in the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

  ‘How can you do it?’ Mommy asked. ‘How can you keep that poor creature in captivity? Can’t you see the suffering in his eyes? It’s monstrous to breed and keep wild animals.’

  ‘You’re soft-hearted,’ the Chihuahua lady said. (Of course, I realise now, this was pre-Chihuahua. She was the dachshund lady, then, so I’ll call her that.)

  The dachshund lady gave her a look and Mommy said, ‘Let’s go in the other room. Teddy, finish that math homework.’

  They went to the living room and she shut the kitchen door. I heard her say, ‘Oh, that dog. I can’t bear to look at him. And don’t let him sit on my upholstered dining chairs! It’s not hygienic.’

  I got out my math homework. I had a headache. It had been sitting there for a few days now, like a toad at the front of my skull. I stared at the page, which throbbed and swam. It was hard to concentrate with my brain pulsing like this. I seemed to have at least attempted some of the math problems last night, although I could also see that I had got most of them wrong. I sighed and took out my eraser. The dachshund lady’s voice drifted in and out. The kitchen door was thin pine board.

  ‘Something stinks,’ she said. ‘All week there have been these big meetings, and yesterday the cops came. They’re interviewing us all, one by one in the nurses’ lounge. It’s not very convenient. It means we have to go to the cafeteria for coffee. That’s three whole floors down in the elevator, and three floors back up again. It uses up all my break.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Mommy said. ‘What in heavens is that all about?’

  ‘I don’t know. They didn’t get to me yet; they’re going alphabetically. The girls won’t say. They all looked kind of upset when they came out.’

  ‘You know,’ Mommy said, ‘it doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘No?’ I can almost hear the dachshund lady lean forward, anticipating.

  ‘Think about it. All that business with money. Where’s the money going, I’d like to know? We’re running the same ward we always have, on the same budget. Why is there suddenly so little to go around?’

  ‘Wow,’ says the dachshund lady on an indrawn breath. ‘Do you think there’s some kind of … scam or something going on at the hospital?’

  ‘It is not for me to say,’ Mommy said in her gentlest voice. ‘But I wonder, that is all.’

  I heard the dachshund lady make a clicking sound with her tongue. ‘It never made sense to me, that they fired you,’ she said. ‘If I said it once I said it a million times. Now, that would explain things.’

  Mommy didn’t answer and I imagined her shaking her head with her gentle, quizzical smile.

  I started to feel upset, I didn’t know why. So I got into the old chest freezer. I pulled the lid down on top of me and I felt better straight away.

  I lost some time after that. When I came back I was still in the freezer, or there again more probably. I heard the dachshund lady’s voice, and the scent of cigarette smoke trickled under the kitchen door from the living room. The kitchen was a little different. The tulips that had been on the windowsill were gone. The walls looked dirtier.

  ‘It’s a scandal.’ Mommy’s voice. ‘Throwing stones! They have broken every streetlight on this road. I blame the parents. Kids need discipline.’

  I pushed open the kitchen door. The two women looked up at me in surprise. Mommy was wearing a green blouse and slacks. Through the window the day was cold, framed by bare twigs. The shaggy terrier sitting by the dachshund lady wasn’t a dachshund. It raised its brown-and-white head, blinking in the cigarette smoke. She was the terrier lady, now.

  ‘Go on, Teddy,’ Mommy said, gentle. ‘There is nothing to worry about. Finish the job application.’ I closed the door and went back to the kitchen where the application for the auto shop in town sat half finished on the counter.

  It wasn’t the same day and I didn’t go to school any more. I had been kicked out for punching the boy by the lockers. Mommy thought it was better I stay home anyway. I was a help to her. I had never before lost so much time at once. I tried to collect the brief flashes of memory that gleamed in my mind. I was twenty or twenty-one, I thought, Mommy worked at the daycare, now, not the hospital. But actually she didn’t any more, because she had just been fired again, because people were mean.

  I felt the difference in my body. I was bigger. Like, a lot bigger. My arms and legs were heavy. There was reddish hair on my face. And there were more scars. I could feel them on my back, itching under my T-shirt.

  ‘Meheeeeeco,’ the terrier lady is saying through the door. ‘I’m going to have a cocktail with breakfast every day. One with an umbrella.’ She has been looking forward to her vacation for weeks. ‘That nice Henry is coming with me. The one who packs the bags at the Stop and Go. Twenty-five years old, what do you think about that?’

  ‘You’re terrible,’ Mommy says. It sounds like a compliment and a judgement at the same time. I think about how old twenty-five is, and then how old the terrier lady is. Gross. She must be almost forty.

  ‘Sylvia thinks so too,’ the terrier lady says. She sounds sad, suddenly. ‘I never thought my daughter would grow up to be so judgemental. She was the sweetest baby.’

  ‘I am very lucky with Teddy,’ Mommy says, and I am filled with love for her. ‘He is always respectful.’

  I wonder where Daddy is, and then I remember. Daddy left because I punched him in the head. I recall the crack of the bone against my knuckles, and look of the bruises on my hand. It is one of the many times I have been grateful that I do not feel pain. He felt it. I know that Daddy deserved it, but I have to search for the reasons why. It comes back to me in flashes. I had to hit him because he was yelling at Mommy. Calling her bad names, saying she was insane.

  ‘Tsk,’ Mommy says, breaking into my thoughts. I look up at her, grateful that she is there. ‘You have cut yourself on that knife, Teddy.’

  I start and put the knife back in the drawer. I didn’t remember taking it out. ‘It’s fine, Mommy.’

  ‘Don’t take risks with your health,’ she says. ‘It needs disinfecting, and a couple stitches. I’ll get my kit.’

  No, that didn’t happen then. I am in the wrong memory, now. Never call a woman insane. The feel of Mommy’s cool hands on my face and the sappy green scent of the woods in the springtime. No, that is not right, either. I try to find the thread of that day. I am almost panting with frustration. There was something important about it. But it is gone.

  The second time Mommy brought me to the forest was for Snowball the mouse. I was in the living room, crying over the cage. What was left of him lay gleaming in a corner. The sawdust was brown and hung together in clumps. A lot of blood in such a small thing. I remember the taste of snot and fear. I clutched my yellow blanket to my face and it was soaking wet; the blue butterflies glistened with sadness.

  I looked up and there she was in the doorway, watching me in silence. She was wearing her blue dress, the floating one she called her tea dress. I didn’t know what to do. How could I explain?

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  I scream
ed and seized the Russian doll from the mantelpiece. I threw it at her. Tiny dolls flew in every direction. They all missed her head. They splintered on the wall behind. I screamed again and picked up the music box. But I was frightened of the bad feelings writhing through me. I let the box fall to the floor. It broke with a deep twang.

  ‘Look what you have done.’ She was calm. ‘You take everything from me, Theodore. Take, take, take. Are you quite finished?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Get a shoebox from my closet,’ she said. ‘Take the shoes out first. Then dump everything from the cage into the box.’ It was good that she gave exact instructions. I needed them, I couldn’t think. My brain was lit up with shame and excitement both. Poor Snowball. But I had found a deep and secret thing.

  I carried the shoebox in one careful hand. Mommy held the other. She pulled me along, not unkindly. ‘Quickly now,’ she said. Out the front door, down the street.

  ‘You didn’t lock it,’ I said. ‘What if someone goes into the house? What if they steal things?’

  ‘Let them,’ she said. ‘Only you and I matter.’

  What about Daddy? I thought, but did not say.

  When we reached the gate to the woods I pulled back. ‘I don’t want to go in there.’ I started to cry again. ‘I’m afraid of the trees.’ I remembered what had happened with the little wooden cat. What would I be asked to leave behind, today? Maybe Mommy would have to stay and I would be forced to return alone. That was the worst idea.

  ‘You don’t need to be afraid, Teddy,’ she said. ‘You are more frightening than anything that lives in these woods. Besides, you will feel better out of the heat.’ She squeezed my hand. In her other hand she held her gardening trowel, the one with the pink handle.

  We followed the path, which was a leopard skin of light and shade. She was right, I did feel better here, under the cool trees. I was still sorry, though. The mouse had been so little and I knew that we owe kindness to little things. So I cried again.

  We reached a glade lined with boulders and silver trees like bolts of water or light. I knew, as soon as I stepped into that circle, that something would happen here. This was a place of transformation, where the wall between worlds was thin. I could feel it.

  Mommy dug a hole with her pink trowel in a patch of sunshine, and we buried what was left of the mouse. The bones were picked clean; they shone almost translucent against the young grass. As the rich earth fell on top of the shoebox, covering it, something happened. I saw that what had been just a mouse was changed. Its remains became precious and powerful. It was part of death and of the earth now. It had become a god.

  She sat and patted the earth beside her. I remember the scent of sap and her hands as she cradled my face. It must have been spring. ‘You think I am hard on you,’ she said. ‘You don’t like it that I have rules, and remind you of the reality of things. That I take care of your health, and don’t let you keep pets or eat hot dogs like American boys, that we cannot afford doctors and I sew up your cuts myself. And I do all this anyway, despite your complaints. I take care of your health because it is my duty. As I care for your body I must also tend your mind. We have discovered today that you have a sickness, there.

  ‘You are probably promising yourself that you will never do such a thing again. You are thinking that you gave in just this once … And maybe that will prove true. But I do not think so. Yours is an old sickness, which has been in our family for a long time. My father – your grandfather – had it. I hoped that it had died with him. Maybe I thought that I could atone for it. A new world, a new life. I became a nurse because I wanted to save people’s lives.’

  ‘What is it? The sickness.’

  She looked at me and the beam of her attention was like a warm sea. ‘It makes you want to hurt living things,’ she said. ‘I saw that, the night that I followed Father to the old place, the tombs under the iliz. I saw what he kept there …’ Mommy put her hand over her mouth. She breathed hard into her palm.

  ‘What is iliz?’ It sounded bad, like the name of a demon.

  ‘It means church,’ she said. ‘Iliz,’ she said again softly, as though her tongue were remembering. I had never before heard her speak anything but English. I understood then that there was another, shadowy her, made of the past – like a ghost and a living person bound together.

  ‘Did you like it there?’ I asked. ‘Do you miss it?’

  She shook her head, impatient. ‘“Like”, “miss” – these are soft words. Such places just are. It does not matter what you feel about them.

  ‘In this country, all the people are afraid of death. But death is what we are. It is at the centre of things. That was the way in Locronan. In the iliz the ankou was carved on the altar. We left milk by the graves for him to drink, with one of his many faces. The cemetery was the heart of the village. It was there we came to talk, to court and argue. There were no playgrounds or parks for children. Instead, we played hide and seek among the gravestones. Life was conducted amid death, side by side.

  ‘But those two things can lie too close together. The line between them fades. So when the people heard the sounds from the iliz at night they said nothing because that was the way of things. When the dogs went missing, they said, “That is the way of things.” Death in life, life in death. But I did not accept that.’ She paused. ‘One morning the boy who slept with the animals, Pemoc’h, did not come to the door for his cup of milk and his crust of bread. I went to look for him. He was not in the stable. There was blood in the straw. All day I hunted for him. He had no one to care what happened to him, except me. I looked in ditches in case he had been knocked there by a passing car, and in the hen-house in case he had fallen asleep among the warm bodies – and, oh, many other places. I did not find him.

  ‘My father found me in the grain store in the afternoon and cuffed me round the ears. “There is the cooking and the laundry. You should not be idle.”

  ‘“I am looking for the boy Pemoc’h,” I said. “I am afraid that something has happened to him.”

  ‘“Go to the kitchen,” my father said. “You are neglecting your duty. I am ashamed.” My father looked at me. I saw that behind each of his eyes there burned a tiny candle.

  ‘When he went out that night, I followed him across the field, into the village, into the graveyard, to the place under the church. And there I saw his true nature.

  ‘What did you see in the church?’ I whispered. ‘Mommy, what?’

  ‘I saw them in the cages.’ She did not look at me. ‘Father’s pets. I saw what had become of Pemoc’h.

  ‘On Sunday, I denounced him in the church. I stood up before the congregation and I told them all what he had done. I told them to go and look, if they did not believe me. They did not go to look. So I saw that they already knew.’ She paused. ‘They preferred to close their eyes, to lose a stray dog, even a stray child, every so often. It had always been so. It was the way of things. People who have lived together for many generations share a special kind of madness. But when I spoke the truth aloud, they were forced to act at last.

  ‘I woke that night to fire. There were five of them, with kerchiefs over their faces and torches in their hands. They took me from my bed, dragged me outside. My father, they bound to his bed. Then they set the house alight. The ankou wore my father’s face that night.

  ‘I dropped to my knees and I thanked them. But then the world went black. I think they hit me on the head. The next thing I knew was that we were rattling along the road in my father’s van. It still smelled of his tobacco. They drove me through the night. By morning we had reached a town. “You are insane,” they said. “Tell your tales to the cobbles and the mud. We good men have no time for them.” And then they left me there, on the streets of that strange town. No money, no friends. I did not even speak the language, only the old tongue.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’ I wanted to hurt them. ‘That wasn’t fair!’

  ‘Fair!’ she smiled. ‘I had broken the silence of Lo
cronan. I understood their actions.’

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘What did you eat and where did you sleep?’

  ‘I used what I had,’ she said. ‘My face, my health, my mind, my will. I had some talent with helping the sick, and a neat stitch. So I did not fare as badly as I might have done. But anyone may kick a stray dog in the street, and that is what I was, until your father came through the town. I would be in that place still, but for him. He brought me here.

  ‘I felt the ankou follow me across the ocean, across the land, to this far coast. Once he has seen you he will not let you go. We know these things in Locronan. This so-called new world has forgotten them. On the day he comes to me with open arms, wearing my face, I will be ready.’

  I wasn’t upset by what she was saying, because it was clear to me that Mommy could never die. My fears were for myself. I looked at the disturbed earth, under which there lay the little god that had once been Snowball. ‘What is going to happen to me?’ I whispered.

  ‘One day, maybe soon, or maybe when you are a big man, you will want to do that again. You may resist but in the end you will give in to the wanting, over and over. And in time you will hunger for sport bigger than a mouse. Perhaps it will be dogs, and then cattle, and then people. That is how it goes – I have seen it. However it progresses, it will become all that you are, and you will grow careless. That will be your undoing. One day, after you have gone far, far beyond the reach of reason, they will get you. The police, the courts, the prisons. You are not clever enough to avoid them. They will find out your nature, and they will hurt you and lock you up. I know that you could not survive it. Therefore, you must take care. You must never, ever let them see who you really are.’

  It was a relief, in a way, to hear her say these things. I had always felt that there was something wrong with me. I was like one of the tracings I did on her baking paper, a bad one, where the comic book underneath slipped; the lines slewed across the page, and the picture became a monstrous version of itself.