Judi James - Naked Angels

‘What are you doing?’ Grandma Klippel perked up a bit, though her voice still sounded as though it came from far away.

‘Looking for my lucky picture.’ She pulled out the shot of Lincoln in the mouse ears. ‘Look.’ It just had to make the old lady laugh. That picture made everyone laugh, guaranteed.

Grandma Klippel took the photo from Evangeline. Her arm smelt of perfume, which was strange, because Thea only wore perfume when she was going somewhere special. She watched the old woman’s face. It was a while before she could turn her eyes towards the shot and when she did she didn’t laugh, she looked as though she’d been kicked. A bit of her mouth sort of crumpled away and her eyes got thinner, like stick-beans.

‘He doesn’t mind people laughing,’ Evangeline told her, in case she thought it was rude or something.

The old woman raised a finger and touched it to the part of the photo that had Lincoln’s face on it. The crow swooped so close its wing touched the window. Evangeline cried out and when she looked back the photo was back on her lap and her grandmother was gazing out at the sea again. Only this time the hankie was stuffed harder against her mouth.

Evangeline was asleep by the time they reached the house and she only woke up as the chauffeur tried to lift her out of the car seat. She wriggled a lot. She didn’t want to be lifted. She wasn’t a baby. Then she took one look at the house and she knew more than anything that she wanted to go home.

They were absolutely in the middle of nowhere. There was the house and the car and there was them and then – nothing, just the sand and the sea and a handful of gulls overhead who screamed as though they were being gutted alive. Evangeline hated the sea. She turned to look up at her grandmother. This couldn’t be true. This couldn’t be her home.

‘You live here?’ she asked. She didn’t mean to be rude, she just wanted to check the facts.

Grandma Klippel nodded. ‘Will you come inside? It’ll get chilly out here soon.’

Evangeline swallowed. ‘I think I ought to be getting back.’ No wonder they’d never had the grandmother to visit – she’d have melted away in all the noise and doggy racket of the house in Boston.

The old lady looked down at her then, looked her right in the eye for the very first time: ‘This is your home now, dear,’ she said. ‘You must live here, with me.’

Evangeline looked back at the house. The place was huge. There must have been over a hundred windows staring back at her. She could see the sky reflected in those windows – flat and grey, like curtains that needed a rinse. Saul Peterson would have needed a whole month off tending the cranberries to paint a place that size.

It was made of clapboard that was painted a dirty blue colour, like the sea should have been, with white around the windows and the doorway. Someone had made an ugly garland around the porch by pressing clamshells into cement. In front of the house were sand dunes and behind the house was the sea. It looked as though the house had turned its back on the ocean altogether because there were no windows on the lower floors on that side. The view from everywhere but upstairs would be of the grass-spiked dunes out front.

‘Patrick won’t like it here,’ Evangeline said. The sand would blow into his eyes and between his paws. They’d taken him onto the beach last year and he’d come back whining with sores between his pads. There were no trees to climb, either. She’d promised Lincoln they’d be climbing trees before the fall. What were her parents thinking of, moving out here?

Her grandmother was going into the house anyway. Evangeline picked up her school bag and ran after her.

By the fifth day the joke was wearing thin. Evangeline’s family was not hiding in the house; the place was huge but she’d checked it all over and anyway she would have heard Lincoln yelling at night, the rooms were so quiet. Which meant they were on their way, coming for her.

Maybe the clue was in the bit about being so good and truthful. Her grandma had said she had to be good and tell the truth, always. Good children always got their reward; she’d been told that at school often enough. Maybe they were seeing just how good she could be before they came back and surprised her. Being good would be hard, then, because she didn’t feel good, she felt mad that they’d gone at all.

Grandma Klippel lived mainly on her own, apart from a handful of staff. As well as the chauffeur, who lived in, there was Mrs O’Reilly, an elderly Irish woman bent up with arthritis who nevertheless hobbled the length of the beach each day with a bag full of half-dead flowers for the house, to cook and serve the meals. The flowers were always anemones. Grandma Klippel liked vases full of them all around the place. By the first day their heads would start to droop and by the next they were powdering tables and mantelpieces with their pollen. Mrs O’Reilly was a good person, even though she’d once been bad. Mrs O’Reilly had been good for many many years now, according to Grandma Klippel, and she didn’t seem to have that much to show for it.

Then there was the woman’s son, Evan. Evan was simple, like a child, but he could polish like a demon and came up for an hour each morning, just to clean the place. When he cleaned he made a racket with his breathing, like an old man. Evangeline wondered whether he was allergic to all the pollen he dusted.

Evangeline waited for her parents, watching at the window of her room, where she could see for miles. Few cars came by, though, and none ever stopped, apart from the vans with deliveries.

Twice a day a small plane flew by and either buzzed over the house or trawled along the shoreline like a lazy fly. Mrs O’Reilly swore it was Evan’s father flying the plane and Evan himself waved at it sometimes and did a mad frenzied sort of hopping dance along the beach after it. But Grandma Klippel told Evangeline it had nothing to do with Mrs O’Reilly or her son. She said Evan had no father, which was why he was simple.

The waiting made Evangeline cry a lot. She wasn’t scared, exactly, but she was tired and impatient and her head ached because it was full of so many questions.

The house was mainly hollow inside and a lot of the rooms stood empty. The ones that didn’t were filled with old things – dangerous things that broke if you only looked at them. Darius had brought home a few antiques once but these rooms were crammed with them. They were mostly too fancy for Evangeline’s taste; she liked new things you could play with. Grandma Klippel’s belongings made her feel jumpy and nervous. She wondered how Evan, who was fat and hopped about almost as much as Patrick, ever got by without breaking much as he polished. Then she discovered that Grandma Klippel stuck the ornaments down with tape each morning before he came.

The sea made her twitchy, too. Sometimes she would wake up frightened that it had come right up to the house. It might seep in through the doors and flood the cellar. She could hear it in the dark like a whispering, and often she thought she could make out whole words.

‘They’re not coming back,’ the sea whispered one night.

‘What?’ It woke her. She stood shivering at the window and watched it heaving. Her eyes were popping and her ears almost fell off her head, they were straining so hard.

‘They’re not coming back.’ Did she hear right or was she dreaming? What did it know? She listened till her ears actually ached with the effort. When you listened so hard to silence you thought you could hear anything. She even thought she heard her grandmother crying away in her bedroom.

‘They’re not coming back.’ The idea was ridiculous. Parents didn’t just leave their kids – not responsible parents, like hers. Besides, she’d been good for weeks and she’d even picked a spot on the bed for Patrick to sleep on. Sleeping on the bed at night might make up for all the sand.