Andrew Hurley - The Loney

Perhaps that was what made me stop and look across the sands at our footprints. To know that there was a place we could go back to.

The mainland was a thin strand of grey, the pillbox barely distinguishable in the range of dunes. Only Moorings stood out, white against the trees of Brownslack Wood that moved in the wind like the pelt of a huge, dozing animal.

Seeing it like that, so thickly heaped over the fell, I reckoned Mr Belderboss was right. Maybe no one had set foot in there for centuries. There must still be places like that, even in England, I imagined. Wild woods left to themselves.

Hanny tugged at my hand and we carried on through the heather. As we walked, I became aware of a faint ringing sound, like someone running a finger around the rim of a wine glass.

‘Can you hear that?’

He stopped and I touched my ear.

‘That sound,’ I said.

He shook his head.

The grass rustled and then a flash of white fur made us both turn at the same time. A slender, staring cat emerged and mewed with a tiny voice. Hanny put out his hand and it came to him. It had no collar and no name tag, but it wasn’t feral. The fur had been well looked after.

It was an albino, with eyes that looked as if they had been marinated in blood. It mewed again and sprayed its musk onto a rock, its tail erect and shivering. Again came that faint, high pitched smoothing of the air. It seemed to be calling the cat. It licked its paw and then sprang off through the grass towards Thessaly.

***

Hanny got there before me and was standing at the end of a cutting that led to the house through the black stems of heather and the ferns that had yet to unfurl their little crosiers.

The ringing sound was stronger here and I realised that I had been hearing the wind moving the bell in the small brick tower that they said the Devil had built for Alice Percy to entice poor foreign sailors onto the rocks.

The wind wasn’t strong enough to swing it against the clapper and it shimmered over its surface instead, producing a delicate, liquid sound that floated on the damp air.

The girl we had seen at The Loney was sitting under the lopsided portico of the house in her wheelchair. After a moment she held up her hand and Hanny started to walk towards the house, following the albino cat.

Standing close to it for the first time, Thessaly was an ugly place. Built low and long to withstand the weather, it seemed to have emerged from the earth like a stunted fungus. Every window was black and stains ran from the sills down the grimy plasterwork as though the place was permanently weeping. The portico was an attempt at elegance that had failed in the most spectacular way and reminded me of the gateways to the vaults in the graveyard at Saint Jude’s with their life-sized angels and broken gates.

Hanny stopped a few feet from the girl and was staring at her as she smoothed her hands over her swollen stomach. Perhaps it was the dry, russet hair and its attendant dribble of freckles across the bridge of her nose; perhaps it was pregnancy that had given her a fleshiness about the face, but she seemed even younger than I’d first thought. The prettiness that Mrs Belderboss had noticed came and went too quickly for it to be a constant quality and it disappeared altogether when she grimaced as the baby moved.

The door behind her was open and Laura’s voice came from inside the house.

‘Is that him back?’ she said, and then looked disappointed as she came out and saw me and Hanny standing there.

She was smoking a cigarette and was dressed in a matching liver-coloured skirt and jacket. She had pearls around her neck and, like her husband, smelled strongly of fragrance.

‘Can I help you?’ she said, touching the edges of her painted mouth with her little finger.

I told her that we’d come for the watch.

‘Watch?’ she said.

‘Your husband found a watch yesterday at The Loney. It belongs to us.’

‘The where?’

‘The beach,’ I said. ‘He found it in the sand.’

‘I don’t recall seeing you there,’ she said.

‘Well, we were.’

Laura took another drag and tapped the ash from the end with her forefinger.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked, gesturing towards Hanny.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Why is he staring at me? Is he a bit slow?’

I nudged Hanny to stop and he looked at his feet instead.

‘Do you live around here?’ Laura said.

‘No.’

‘On holiday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Poor you,’ she said, as the rain started again.

She looked at us both and then turned back into the house.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if he’s left it lying around. Give Else a hand over the step.’

The girl smiled at Hanny again, hoping that he would do the honours.

‘He doesn’t understand,’ I said.

But Hanny took hold of the handles and wheeled her backwards through the doorway and into a long corridor lined with empty coat hooks on which a smell of old, damp gabardine hung. There was room for little else other than a pair of wellingtons and an umbrella.

There were no stairs, only doors either side and one at the end, next to which there was an upturned plant pot for a telephone to sit on.

The rain came down hard outside and the hallway darkened. I had been right to think of the place as a tomb. The plaster had been left unpainted, the woodwork without varnish, as though it had been built and immediately abandoned. Its walls had never contained a family. No one had ever laughed there. It had a kind of airlessness, a heavy silence, that made it immediately unsettling. I’ve never felt it anywhere else since, but there was definitely something that I picked up with a different sense. Not a ghost or anything ridiculous like that, but something nevertheless.

‘Wait here,’ Laura said and went along the hallway to the door at the end where she paused to sort through the bunch of keys. She unlocked the door, there was a brief glimpse of a bare kitchen, and then she closed it behind her, locking it from the inside.

‘What’s his name?’ Else said to me.

‘Andrew,’ I said.

‘That’s a nice name,’ she said and smiled at Hanny.

Hanny smiled back and touched her hair.

‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

‘No, it’s alright,’ said Else, rearranging it back behind her ears.

She shifted in her chair and winced a little and breathed out.

‘The baby’s moving,’ she said to Hanny. ‘Do you want to feel it?’

She took Hanny’s hand and placed it on her belly. He hesitated but Else put her hands over his and a grin spread across his face as he felt the baby kicking against his palm.

Laura came back out of the kitchen and then went to a different door, moving the keys around the ring until she came to the one she needed. She was about to go into the room when the telephone rang.

‘Let them in here,’ said Laura.

Else looked at her.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘This room is alright for them to be in.’ And she went to pick up the phone.

Like the hallway, the room was bare and cold. There were no curtains, only yellow nets covering windows that were thick with cold condensation. The fireplace was boarded up and there were footprints in the dust where someone had walked in and out of the room carrying the boxes that were stacked against the wall. A porcelain doll in a bonnet and pinafore sat on top of one of the boxes staring at us. Hanny went over and picked it up. He smiled and showed me how its eyes closed and opened when he tipped it back and forth.

‘He might have put it there,’ said Else pointing to the battered desk in the alcove of the chimney breast. ‘That’s where he keeps the things he finds.’

I went over and looked through the various shells and bits of glass and bone. There was a sheep’s skull resting as a paperweight on a pile of brown envelopes and next to it was an old toothbrush in a mug. Leonard had evidently got halfway through cleaning off the green mould stuck between the sutures. I picked up the skull and looked into one of the eye sockets. The white worm of the optic nerve was still attached, though the eye and brain had long since been eaten or rotted away.