The Sea House: A Novel Read Free Page A

changed at dusk into funny, stupid creatures. The crinkly orange plaster neatly fastened to my skin, the wound clean and smelling of Germolene, she had bent over and kissed my head, told me I was her mo ghaol.
    Mum came from the islands, though she brought me up in London. I grew up in a block of council flats with long brick balconies that smelled of bleach and stairwells that smelled of wee.
    She never told me which island she came from exactly.
    I snapped the first-aid tin shut with my good hand and manhandled it back into the little cupboard. I sat back down in front of the drawings but the rain had come in like buckets of grit being poured over the roof. It was impossible to concentrate.
    I sat watching the flattened marram grass through the blurred window. Then I took a fresh piece of paper and began to sketch out another anatomical drawing, from what I could remember of that poor child in its makeshift, rusty coffin. I stared at what I’d drawn, at the bony appendage where legs should have been. I thought about the child’s mother. Wondered if it was she who had dug down into the earth beneath our house, covered the little trunk over, nailed down the boards.
    As I sat tapping my pencil on the Formica table, it occurred to me that I knew someone I could ask about such an odd foetal mutation. I gave a little laugh not to have thought of it before. After I’d rooted around for the number of my old anatomy professor in London, I decided to go back over to the Sea House where our new phone was sitting on a chair in the hallway. I hesitated for a moment, knowing that Michael and Donny weren’t there, but roundly scolding myself for being so weak-minded, I wrapped up in a huge oilskin jacket of Michael’s and walked over to the house – or rather I was bodily driven there by the strength of the wind.
    I closed the Sea House door behind me, glad to be out of the rain, and hung the dripping oilskin over the banister. I was ready to feel purposeful about calling Professor Carter. I turned round to get the phone, my eyes glancing back over the cold space of the hallway. The same tightening in the air. The anxiety seeping in again, creeping through the systems of my body; my heart was starting to hammer; my hands felt clammy and slippery. Once more, I was overwhelmed by an urgent and unpleasant instinct to get right out of there.
    But this time, I wasn’t going to let her get to me. I pulled the phone number out of my pocket, picked up the receiver and started to dial.
    I waited in the empty hallway for someone to answer, tensing the muscles in the back of my neck against the cold air on my skin. Against her. I knew it was a she. And I understood something else – this child was no newborn. She was older, knowing.
    And I wanted her gone. I listened to the phone ringing somewhere in London, and felt a flood of relief as I heard Professor Carter’s sensible voice answer.
    We talked for quite a long time. He said that he’d heard of such a condition, but it was very rare. He promised to get some information together and send it in the post.
    ‘Don’t forget, Ruth,’ he said, ‘any time you can make Christmas dinner again. We miss you.’
    I put the phone down and let myself out of the front door.
    Speaking with him on the phone had left me feeling a bit homesick for the professor and his wife. That first Christmas at university, when the halls of residence cleared and everyone went home, they had rounded up all the strays with nowhere to go. It was the best Christmas I’d had for years, even though it was shadowed by an odd resentment, a memory of the broken train sets and scraggy-haired Sindy dolls wrapped up in Christmas paper and left in a giant scrum in the dining-room hall of the home. No idea who sent those parcels.
    But then if I hadn’t hated the children’s home so completely, I would never have spent so much time hanging out in the local library.
    You don’t want to live with twenty-nine teenage girls like