‘Come on, let’s go – you should have been in bed hours ago.’
Mum takes Amy’s hand and they follow Dad back to the van – Dad’s white van he drives for work. Amy uses her thumbnail to try to get rid of the green stains what’s got themselves all over the inside bits of her hands. The flowers here are supposed to be very puffy, which is why they’ve come here today, and you can make really really nice drinks out of them if you put in enough sugar, but that takes a grown-up because of the heat and how hot it gets. Hot enough to make your finger fall off if you put it into the saucepan. With blood and everything.
Amy’s teddy, Buttons, is on the front seat. She clambers in after Mum and snatches Buttons up, holding him to her face to get his fluffiness on her. When Dad turns the engine on with the keys, Amy moves the seat belt around so she can kneel up, put her nose to the window and look back at the woods. Mum doesn’t stop her.
Dad drives the van off of the grass and on to the road. It’s bumpy going along and Amy bounces around, but she doesn’t stop watching the trees. She wonders if the reverse Santa Claus man will find the puppy’s owners.
When the van gets further up the road and she can’t see the trees any more and can only see the road and the other cars and buildings whizzing past, she sits down and gets the seat belt more comfortable. She puts Buttons in her lap. He looks up at her with his nose what needs mending and his bad paw, just like the puppy.
‘Mummy,’ she says when they get to the place that’s at the end of their road, the place where someone has sprayed a picture of a Moshling on to the road sign. ‘Mummy, what word does it make if you put that “huh” letter Miss Redhill makes when she puffs on her hand—’
‘Aitch you mean?’ says Mum.
‘Yeah – what happens if you put aitch next to eggy “e” and lollipop “el” and the “puh” sound. You know, that letter you make when you blow out candles on your birthday cake? “Puh”?’
‘Aitch, ee, ell and peee?’ Mum says. ‘That spells “help”. Why?’
‘Help?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what about umbrella “uh”, and snakey “sssss”?’
‘You and esss? That spells “Us”. Help us.’ Mum looks down at Amy, a puzzled smile on her face. ‘Help us? Why? Why are you asking that?’
Amy bites her lip. Something was attached to the puppy-dog’s collar. A teeny-weeny piece of paper what had been writed on in blue pen. It was all torn and the letters were all smudged and spread into big blue pools so you couldn’t read them properly. Except for those letters.
Help us.
‘Amy? Why’re you asking?’
Amy looks at the side of Dad’s head. If she mentions puppy-dog again, Dad’s going to start shouting. So she shakes her head.
‘Nothing,’ she says as they pull up outside the house. She wishes she had a little puppy-dog. And different parents. Parents what would not get cross when she told them things what are true. ‘Nuffink.’
Earlier that Day: the Pig Man
THE PIG MAN. That’s how Oliver Anchor-Ferrers views himself. Like something lifted whole from the pages of a Victorian bestiary. Nine weeks ago the doctors in the Mayo Clinic in London gave him drugs to thin the blood. They opened his pericardium with stainless-steel rib retractors, connected multiple cannulas to his body and rerouted his blood to mechanical membrane oxygenators which carried out the job his heart should have been doing, delivering oxygen to his tissues and organs. His own heart the medics stopped by injecting a cardioplegic solution to induce paralysis. For almost an hour on the operating table Oliver was dead. Once they’d cut out the valves he’d had from birth and replaced them with valves from a specially bred pig, the surgeons closed the aorta and secured the sternum with steel wire. In spite of his appearance – that of a perfectly normal man in his sixties – the truth is that Oliver Anchor-Ferrers is being kept alive by a piece of foreign flesh flickering inside his heart. He’s half man, half swine.
Valve replacement is a common enough procedure, an operation that’s been in use for years – there must be several thousand pig men walking the planet, by his reckoning – but Oliver can’t rest easy about it. Since the moment he woke in the ward he has been listening to his pulse, wondering how it is linked to his brain and whether the mechanical, ancient survival parts of his cerebellum have yet recognized the foreignness. Since the op he lies in bed at night listening to it thrum-thrumming in his chest. He wonders what control he has over it. He wonders who is choosing to live – him or the pig.
Keep beating, he sometimes whispers under his breath, pig-heart, keep beating …
Oliver is sixty-four and he is worth several million pounds. England is his native country – he owns two properties here. His chief home, a Regency end-of-terrace, is in Knightsbridge. But it is in the second, where he is now, a rambling Victorian house set high on a hill in the Somerset Mendips, that he feels most at home. His favourite chair, scruffy and old and moulded to his skeleton, is in its usual place, next to the inglenook. He’s been looking forward to this chair for what seems like ages. It’s taken almost two months for the London doctors to give him the all-clear to come down here.
He stretches out his legs and settles back, gazing around in contentment. The fire isn’t made, not now that it’s summer, and there is a basket of dried flowers in the hearth to fill the space. But all the familiar hallmarks of a family visit are here. They left London at the crack of dawn and arrived late morning and it’s a typical first day, passed in amiable chaos. Everywhere are dotted the groceries and bits and pieces that Matilda brings down from London: endless Waitrose bags and papery deli bundles and boxes of cereals and fruit juices. The only unwelcome addition is his pale pink medication tray on the windowsill.
Matilda comes hurrying in from the boot-room, all colour and fragrance. She is dressed in her blue-and-pink gardening apron – the one Kiran gave her years ago. She’s tying a spotty-print tool pouch to her waist and Oliver notes that, as is her custom, she has wiped her face of London make-up. Instead of postbox-red lipstick and foundation her skin is bare and peach coloured. Her lips are their natural soft pink, like the inside of a fig. Matilda is sixty, and grey now, but her skin is as clear as a cloudless sky, and when Oliver looks at her the light still does the same strange dance around her that it has always done, from the moment they first met all those years ago.
‘Sweetheart.’ She stops and smiles at Oliver. It’s a smile that conveys everything: love and pity and a shared desperation that it’s come to this – to heart surgery and medication in numbered boxes. ‘Sweetheart, do you mind if I …?’
She wants to go into the garden. It’s less than half an hour since they’ve arrived and already she wants to be outside. In the twenty-eight years they’ve owned this house she has poured her heart into the flowers, shrubs and borders. He smiles. ‘You must, darling. In fact, I think I can hear the plants calling you.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Of course, of course, I am perfectly fine.’
Matilda finishes tying the belt and leans over him. She slides her hand into his shirt, presses the palm coolly across the scar on his chest.
‘How’s it feeling?’
‘It’s behaving.’
‘Not grunting? Not squeaking or squealing? Doctor says I’ve got to listen out, especially for the squealing.’
He presses his fingers over hers and holds her hand tighter to his chest so she can feel the thud thud thud down there.
‘Good.’ She takes a moment to button up his shirt, smoothing it until she’s satisfied. She kisses his head. ‘Nurse Matilda’s a bit of a dragon, so get ready for the regime. Drink your tea, pills in three hours. And that cake’ll be ready in twenty minutes, so I’ll be back.’
She leaves the room, rummaging in the tool belt for secateurs. He watches her straight back, her refined profile. No one would know how tender she is inside. Just like no one would look at him and think there were pig parts keeping him a
live.
‘You all right?’
He looks up. Lucia is sitting in the window seat, the kitchen table pulled up close, drawings and magazines and poems spread out everywhere. The sun is spilling in behind her, catching all the highlights in her spiky black hair. Her skin is white, and her eyes are outlined so many times with make-up they make deep smudged holes in her skull. She’s studying him in her challenging way. Steady and dark. He and Matilda call it ‘the Lucia look’. Lucia might be nearly thirty, but she still behaves like a sullen teenager.
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Just …’ She puffs out a bored breath. Shrugs. ‘You know, just think I’ve got to ask. Be polite.’
She goes back to her work and Oliver watches her scribble and scratch her head, poring over her books, every few moments reaching automatically for one of the black grapes that sit in the bowl in front of her. Bear, their Border terrier, is asleep under the table, half draped across Lucia’s feet. Bear doesn’t look like a bear at all, more a small teddy with unevenly set ears that have to be cut differently to make them sit parallel. She is little but she runs like the wind and has to be tied up the first day they arrive here. She’s got a habit of making a bolt for it, heading for the forests, so she’s wearing her collar. The lead is under the leg of Lucia’s chair, Bear’s head is resting on Lucia’s boots – Doc Martens with pastel trolls’ faces covering them. Ridiculous children’s cartoons, all over her feet.
Oliver picks up his cup of tea and sips slowly. The familiar musty tartan blanket he loves so much is over his legs, there’s the smell of Matilda’s cake in the oven and he’s holding tea in the chipped mug she sometimes uses when she’s gardening. It’s got a cheesy photo of Kiran and Lucia on it, their arms around the old golden retriever they used to have when they were children. A year ago he wouldn’t have drunk from this mug, he’d have been embarrassed by its sentimentality.
‘Oliver.’
Matilda has reappeared in the doorway, secateurs still in her hand. Her expression is no longer calm – it is wary and alarmed. Immediately the pig valve flutters.
‘Yes?’ he says guardedly.
At the table Lucia lifts her chin and stares curiously at her mother. ‘Mum?’
‘Oliver,’ Matilda says, levelly, ignoring her daughter. ‘Have you got a moment? A chat?’
‘What sort of chat?’ Lucia says.
Matilda won’t meet her daughter’s eye. Instead she tips her head meaningfully at Oliver, suggesting they need to speak in private. With an effort he gets to his feet, ignoring the now familiar swoop of nausea that sudden movement brings. He clutches up the walking stick and crosses the room as fast as he can, feeling Lucia’s eyes on him all the way. When he draws level with the pantry Matilda puts a finger to her mouth and touches his wrist, pulling him out of the kitchen.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispers. ‘Sorry to do this to you. But you’ve got to see it. Or else I’ll think I’m going mad. I’m so sorry.’
Silently beckoning him to follow, she steps out of the back door. He moves after her, conscious of the air wheezing in and out of his lungs. Keep beating, pig-heart.
Outside, the sun has almost reached its midday summit and is glaring down on the hilltop. Matilda puts a hand under his elbow to help him walk away from the house. They go slowly. In spite of its location, high up on the hill, surrounded on all four sides by sky, the garden feels more like a series of rooms than an open space. A path leads from a walled garden to a walnut orchard, through a hedge into a formal knot garden, then through a gate to three descending parterres with crumbling, ornamented balustrade steps. One can wander through the areas in any imaginable sequence, from a paddock of grass that sways knee-high, studded in the summer months by meadow flowers, to the moss-covered stone walls of the kitchen garden where giant rhubarbs spring from the ground like fountains. It’s a maze, a maze and a monument to Matilda’s love. Her energy.
Every now and then the eye catches on a black spot. Like dots of fungus. Or a scatter of pathogens on a Petri dish. These are the places Lucia has sabotaged Matilda’s colour scheme on the many occasions she comes back to live with them. She sneaks into the garden and secretly plants black tulips and blood-purple hellebores; her way of staking a claim on the property, making sure her mark is made. It drives Matilda mad and the moment Lucia leaves home again, the moment she appears, even temporarily, to have got her life back on track, Matilda takes the opportunity to weed out the offenders.
At the bottom of the flights of steps the land drops away, leading to a series of small, half-sunken coppices; from afar they resemble a puckered string in the landscape. At the first coppice Matilda lets go of his arm and hurries on ahead. He follows at a short distance, using his stick for support. She stops about twenty yards away in a small clearing where a rake leans against one of the trees. Next to it is a trug, cast aside, as if Matilda has been interrupted in the middle of picking up leaves.
‘There.’ She turns to him. Her grey hair is pulled back from her face, her lips aren’t pink any more but white. The bottoms of her teeth where they meet the gums are visible. ‘There. See what I mean? Or am I going mad?’
His eyes track back to the silver birches beyond her. He sees what is there and for a moment has to lean against a tree for support. Every muscle begins to shake.
It can’t be. It just cannot be.
The Haunting
MATILDA ANCHOR-FERRERS believes the house is haunted. Not haunted in the conventional sense, by the spirit of the long dead, but haunted by the shared memory of an event that occurred fifteen years ago, when Kiran was sixteen and Lucia was just fifteen. It was, in Matilda’s eyes, a watershed in their lives. A happening that changed everything beyond repair. It happened on a summer’s day, not unlike today. And in woods identical to these.
Lucia in particular hasn’t recovered. She was the most affected and to this day carries the dark energy of those events, which is why Matilda didn’t ask her to come out here now. She is the one who must be protected from the unbelievability of what is in the trees.
‘Was it like this when you found it?’ Oliver stands in the clearing, one hand wedged on the trunk of an elder to support himself. The sudden walk and the shock are etched in his face. ‘Was it?’
‘Yes. I was gathering up the leaves and I …’ She trails off. She doesn’t know what to say. ‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.’
‘It’s pure coincidence. Chance.’
‘Coincidence?’ she echoes. ‘What sort of coincidence, Ollie?’
‘Something’s been brought down by an animal – it’s just fluke the way it’s …’ He waves his hands vaguely at the bushes. He’s trying to sound gruff, confident, but he looks as if he might be sick at any moment. ‘The way it’s ended up like that.’
‘What sort of animal would be big enough, tall enough to do something like—’
‘Mum?’
Matilda breaks off. Behind Ollie, standing timidly at the entrance to the copse – all black T-shirt and white skin – is Lucia. It’s hot out here but she’s wearing Ollie’s old Barbour as if she is cold. It swamps her, hanging to her knees.
‘Dad?’
Oliver sways away from the tree and turns awkwardly. ‘Lucia.’ He begins to walk painfully up the path towards her. Pointing to her with his walking stick. ‘Didn’t see you there. Let’s go back to the house.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing.’ Oliver puts out a hand to try to shield her view. To move her away. ‘It’s nothing. Go back to what you were doing.’
‘So fake.’ She tries to sidestep him, craning her neck to see down into the clearing. ‘I know you, Dad. You’re lying.’
Matilda comes forward, trying to block her view as well. ‘Lucia, darling, why don’t you go inside and get the cake out of the oven. It’s going to burn.’
But Lucia has seen it. ‘Oh,’ she says, her hand coming up to her mouth. ‘Oh, no.’
Matilda takes her daughter by the shoulders
. Turns her bodily in the direction of the house. ‘Listen to me. Do as I told you. Go into the house and get the cake out of the oven. Your dad and I will deal with everything out here. It’s not what it looks like. All right? Lucia? Is that all right?’
The skin around Lucia’s mouth is blue. After a long time she nods numbly. She takes a stiff step towards the house, then another. Her head is down, her legs awkward and uncoordinated. Watching her go, Matilda feels that familiar pang of guilt … as if she’s somehow let her daughter down. Maybe every mother is like this and has one child destined to be a worry. For Matilda it’s not Kiran, it’s Lucia; she just can’t seem to settle in life. She’s started and ended careers more times than can be counted – one minute she’s performing with a punk band, the next she’s designing clothes for a goth store – and as for boyfriends, well, the rapidity with which they change leaves Matilda dizzy. Every time a job or relationship goes sour Lucia comes limping back home to lick her wounds. She’s been back with them for the last two months. Fate, of course, would put her here now, of all times.
Matilda raises her eyes to the house, with its dark walls built of the local blue lias. It’s a four-storey building, including the vast towers put in place by the second owner in the 1890s, hence its name: The Turrets. Dark as a crow. God, she thinks, they should have sold this place back when it all happened. But fifteen years ago there wasn’t a property in the area that would have sold – you couldn’t have given them away. People were superstitious and scared and nothing could induce them to come and live out here, especially in a location as remote as The Turrets. How long would it take the emergency services to get here? they asked. Look at that driveway – it must be more than half a mile long. And the nearest police station is in Compton Martin.
The sound of Lucia opening and slamming the back door punctuates the silence. Neither Matilda nor Oliver speaks. Somewhere a bird sings, the breeze shifts the branches.