Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

‘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.

‘Well, they seem pretty keen to work with you, my girl, because you have been cordially invited to the Masons’ home, the Red House, no less. To discuss an evaluation this Friday. It’s out Magbar Wood way. Can you make it?’

Leonard’s unfolding of the letter, fussing with the desk lamp, and the removal of his other glasses from their case was slow and methodical, as was every administrative chore he performed behind his desk. Part of Catherine still operated on deeply ingrained London time and something inside her chest, that she would never be able to extract, turned and tightened as these lengthy preparation rites preceded the most simple of tasks.

But his fastidious rituals were also a source of reassurance. Because at Leonard Osberne’s in Little Malvern, life was never frantic or tense with power struggles. No one undermined you and there was no favouritism. She never felt sick before meetings, or stayed awake an entire night transfixed with rage after one. By the time she left London, she’d come to believe that human nature forbade places like Leonard Osberne’s from existing. The closest Leonard ever came to a reprimand took the form of requests for her to ‘please don’t worry’ and to ‘slow down’. He always tempered his most judgemental remarks about the oddballs they dealt with into something warm. Leonard was genuinely kind, a quality she would never take for granted. And some days, she and Leonard did little besides eat biscuits, drink tea and chat.

Catherine hung her coat over the back of her chair. ‘Of course I can. My gut is telling me this is going to be the equivalent of a lottery win, Len.’

Leonard grinned across his desk. ‘This is the type of auction that happens once in a career, Kitten. When you’re my age you’ll still be boring your assistant by recounting the story.’ He smoothed a hand over his fringe and Catherine tried not to stare at the futile gesture at tidying an unruly strand of hair. Because the only thing she would change about her boss was the terrible grey hairpiece. Though even that she was getting used to. It may have taken her six months, but it was the one facet of the meticulously dressed man that didn’t fit. The wig was ghastly and left a small space between his thin face and the false hair. Today, he hadn’t fitted it properly again, as if he were deliberately trying to provoke derision from anyone who saw him. When she met Leonard for the job interview, a few minutes were required to discipline herself to not stare at his wig while they talked.