Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

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.’