Young Arthur’s mother and father stood at their kitchen window, their brows furrowed, their eyes wide and their mouths scrunched as though they had eaten a fruit salad made out of lemons. They looked through the spaces in their side fence where palings had once been; they could see everything going on in their neighbour’s yard whether they wanted to or not.
‘Let him be. He’s just lost his wife, for goodness sake,’ said Jack Puce.
‘Wife or no wife, he can’t be taking our fence apart,’ said Daphne Puce.
Egged on by his wife, Jack leaned out the window and called, ‘What are you doing to the fence, Paul?’
Paul ignored him so Jack looked back at his wife and shrugged his shoulders. He’d tried, hadn’t he?
Paul had scavenged discarded planks of wood and old pickets from where they had hidden, happy and undisturbed for years against the corner of the garden shed. When he realised the old timber wasn’t enough to do the job, he had viciously pulled the palings from the fence, creating gaping holes between his and the Puce’s back gardens. On and on he pulled paling after paling from the fence and Daphne said to Jack, ‘Well, when are you going to do something? The entire fence will be gone soon and then what?’
But Jack wasn’t keen on disturbing Mister Cottingham even when Mister Cottingham wasn’t grieving his wife. The man had a way of seeing right through you when you were trying to convince him that the fence boundary was three feet out in his favour when really it was in yours. To disturb him when grief and the searing sun had got into his brain was asking for trouble Jack couldn’t be bothered with, so he told Daphne he’d have a word. And he did have a word. He said hello to Paul on his way to the pub. When Jack came home from the pub, feeling much better about life after four pots too many, his improved optimism was shot to pieces by the sounds of hammering ricocheting through his head and their house. The rhythmic thumping made the walls shudder as if the house was wrenching itself up from its foundations, and the effect made Jack swear he was done with drinking. The hammering went on well into the night. Jack and Daphne turned and moaned in their beds and Daphne said, ‘For Godsakes, Jack, do something to shut him up,’ and Jack snapped, ‘Just what do you expect me to do, Missus Puce? You tell me and I’ll do it pronto.’
Paul’s mind was filled with such a vicious tornado and his soul was so broken into dust that he wasn’t able to think about anything other than hammering. So on and on he went, nailing plank after plank over the windows and then the door of her room. He would entomb her bed, her chaise lounge, her pictures and books, her linen, her summer skirts and bodices. He would seal up the nights they had shared together in that room, wrapped in each other’s arms, keeping each other’s souls safe from the rest of the world. He would seal it all up forever. He couldn’t bear to look at it and he couldn’t bear to have anyone else gaze at the site of their intimacy. He drove each nail through the wood cruelly. He banged and thumped and crashed about.
Beth tried to sleep with a pillow over her head.
Edie couldn’t stand the noise any longer and clambered out of bed and stood a little way away, out of range of the flying splinters of wood, and watched her father in his frenzy. Finally he hit his thumb with the hammer.
‘It was bound to happen,’ she said.
Paul shook his finger in the air and then kept on hammering. The pain seared through him but it was an insignificant pain compared to the pain in his soul. He wasn’t even aware of Edie standing there and he hadn’t heard her speak.
‘Father,’ Edie said. ‘Papa!’ she cried.
He turned then and saw Edie shivering in her nightgown and bare feet even though it wasn’t cold. She looked like a lost little girl, hungry and cold, brought into the court to be admitted to the orphanage. For a moment he started to drop the hammer and go to her. She has no mother, he thought, and the grief consumed him again.
He bent and picked up the next nail. A big dirty one that he’d yanked out of the wall of the garden shed. It was a permanent sort of nail, it was nasty and strong and convincing and once he got it in, it wouldn’t be easy to yank out again. He needed it for the door, it would stop people entering this sacred place. He held it up to the light so Edie could see it.
But she looked unimpressed.
‘This’ll do the job,’ he said.
‘Papa, I’ve been standing here hollering, I called umpteen times but you’ve been making such a racket. Papa, are you listening to me?’
He wasn’t listening. He couldn’t hear her words as he banged the nail into position. He stood back and looked at the door.
That would do it.
Job done.
‘Papa, I need some sleep,’ she pleaded. ‘Are you going to bed now?’
He didn’t know what he might do next, he might go to bed — he might not. How could he know what he wanted?
He saw Edie was frightened. It was he who had frightened her and this brought him back to himself.
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he said, and he went over to her and wrapped her in his arms.
‘I’ve just lost my mother and it looked like I’d lost my father as well,’ she said. And it’s all the baby’s fault, she thought.
Nine
The Lake
Wednesday, 13 December, when secrets are kept hidden.
If you went down to Fairy Land and stayed very still, you might see a platypus. Fairy Land is
