A Trick of the Mind Read Free Page B

and May allowed us to stay up, our bare feet curling into the cooling sand. I could feel the warmth from the fires we built with driftwood. May baked potatoes wrapped in foil on them. I
remember burning my fingers trying to pull them out, the sweaty white flesh searing my tongue. I could remember the white ashes that spiralled up when finally we had to admit that the dark and the
cold had beaten us and it was time to dowse the flames.
    As I stood, cherishing those memories, the house stirred, creaked. I don’t believe in ghosts, but that day, I felt Aunty May’s presence. Her breath and her footfall. She had not left
yet, or perhaps the house had not released her spirit. The wind chime placed on the back porch (it would have been rattled to death by the easterly winds on the front) tinkled as if she’d
just passed, even when not a breeze stirred the air. And in the fine veil of sand that coated the worn boards and linoleum inside I could make out the fresh imprint of her slippers.
    As I moved into the kitchen, something fell onto the counter – rocked there for a moment, making that faint, regular sound a coin makes as it spins to a halt. I went across to peer at what
had dropped but couldn’t find a thing.
    There was the corner of something jutting from one of the floorboards. An edge of fabric. I pulled at it and wriggled it and tugged at it and at last it slithered out. It was a child’s
bib, made of cotton with a hand-painted picture on the front – in May’s distinctive style, a fabric painting of a small lopsided figure with a crooked leg outside an old house with the
words ‘Crooked House’ above it, and the words from the rhyme inscribed beneath it. Where had I last heard that song? Even in the Key Stage One classes at school we didn’t sing
nursery rhymes any more – it was all calypso or African call and response chants or Indonesian folk songs. But I could hear a voice sing quite distinctly: ‘
There was a crooked man
and he walked a crooked mile and he found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
’
    The bib. It might have been mine, or Ben’s. Perhaps it had lain hidden under the floorboards since I was a child and first came down to stay with her?
    I tucked it into a drawer in the duck-egg blue, Fifties sideboard that had been there forever. Ben and I would sort these drawers later. They were stuffed full of tea towels and linen and
trinkets that didn’t fit on the shelves – napkin rings and half-used birthday cake candles and biscuit tins rusting at the edges with faded pictures on the top. I picked up one of these
tins, with a Victorian reproduction of a little girl on the lid, and prised it open. Inside was a piece of paper inscribed with the words ‘A piece of you’. I lifted it up. Underneath, a
lock of fair hair. I gagged, put the paper back and the lid back on the box, stuffed it into the drawer and closed it.
    Beside me, the curtains moved almost imperceptibly.
    I took a step back. Let some quiet seconds go by. Someone, I was convinced, stood in the doorway through to her back room. I thought I saw a shadow. I had the sense of a presence. But when I
turned, there was no one there.
    I knew without question that May hadn’t fully left yet.
    So to clear out her paintings and canvases and to sell her house to a stranger seemed brutal to me. Like a violation of everything that made May who she used to be, who she
still was.
    That night I’d shown Ben the bib and, gingerly, the hair, and he laughed and reminded me that May had always been a bit eccentric, although we knew her so well, it hadn’t seemed so
to us.
    ‘Always collecting odd bits from the shore. Bird skulls and dried starfish and bones for her art. And remember when she took us right out in that tiny rowing boat, onto the sea, and you
were crying and saying you wanted to turn back and she seemed not to hear you? And in the end I shouted at her and she did finally turn the boat around?’
    The memory began to