A Trick of the Mind Read Free Page A

ever.
    At May’s house I always had to touch the gatepost the right number of times, check outside the picture window before sitting down anywhere, look over my shoulder three times whenever a bad
thought came into my head. Talismans I’d thought up as a child and still relied on to keep people – my aunt in particular – safe.
    I knew these things made me look odd – tapping, counting, moving things into the right position. Finn thought they were funny, light things. He laughed at me. He didn’t know how I
depended on them – especially when it came to anything to do with May.
    ‘You’re taking steps down bonkers alley here, Ellie. Tapping a gatepost, avoiding cracks in the pavement, sacrificing lambs – none of these things affect what was going to
happen anyway. You should have been an ancient Greek. Or a character from the Old Testament.’
    I knew this. I wished I could be more rational.
    They found Aunty May on her bed, two empty pill bottles beside her, a hastily scrawled note saying she had simply had enough, that she had reached her journey’s end.
    When I heard she had left me her house it felt like a strange, mixed blessing. I was grateful, of course I was – no one gets to own a house at my age unless they have extremely wealthy
parents who can fork out for them. But it was all tangled up with the feeling I’d got something badly wrong. The owning of it was tinged with guilt. Why did I deserve the house? And why
hadn’t she left it to my brother as well?
    It was clear my mother wasn’t too happy about it either.
    ‘You must sort it out immediately and put it on the market,’ she said. She was so agitated, so restless when it came to anything to do with Aunty May. ‘Before it gets damp over
the winter.’ She was quite adamant about it.
    ‘Sell it, repay your student loans early. Get the debts from round your neck. You might want to start a family one day, but if you don’t clear them you’ll be forty before you
know it. And still in the red. You think you’ve got forever. You haven’t.’
    ‘It’ll need a lot of maintenance, Ellie,’ my father said. ‘For once I agree with your mother! You’d be better off putting it on the market the minute we get probate
and letting someone else sort it out.’
    ‘I’m worried Aunty May would be upset if we sell,’ I said. ‘Surely she left it to me for a reason?’
    It didn’t occur to me then that my parents were reeling, as we all were, from May’s suicide, that getting shot of her house was their way of obliterating the pain of this, the
shock.
    My brother seemed unfazed by my inheriting it, however, and offered to help me sort it, get rid of May’s clothes and other personal things – bottles of shampoo, packets of
paracetamol – that had been left as if in suspended animation, in her kitchen and bathroom.
    ‘We’ll clear it up, it’ll be a way of putting Aunty May to rest,’ Ben said.
    Perhaps May had left me the house because she and I were both artists, something that had always bonded us. And because she knew I
would
hang on to it, value its quirkiness, its
idiosyncrasies, however impractical, while if she left it to my mother – or Ben even – it would have been a photo in an estate agents’ window before the earth had settled on her
grave.
    The house still contained her in those first few weeks after she died, back in October.
    I thought the house was watchful, or perhaps it was Aunty May who was watchful. I stood in the front room on the day after her funeral, and looked out over the sea grass to the shingle
dunes.
    I saw my child self holding Aunty May’s hand, with my little brother Ben, moving west into the wind with our heads bent and our buckets and crabbing lines clasped to our chests, our voices
snatched up and carried out to sea. Seagulls swooping and crying overhead. I remembered perfect evenings that went on forever, when it never grew dark, the light simply fading as the stars appeared
one by one,