It was after a few hours of sorting and cataloging that she remembered the attic. There had been no more strange noises, but passing under it again with a mug of tea clutched in both hands, she found her eyes drawn to it. The man in the loft, she thought to herself. When I was little, granddad used to blame the Man in the Loft whenever anything went missing.
It wasn’t a reassuring thought, and Heather knew she would have to go up and check it out, or be doomed to lie in bed that night, listening for the Man in the Loft—or even worse, the soft footsteps of her mother.
“Christ, what’s wrong with me? There are no monsters in the attic. A couple of days alone in the house and I’m behaving like a hysterical five-year-old.”
An hour later and she was sitting, legs crossed in the surprisingly comfy space, sorting through a box of old vinyl records. There was a lot of dreck—a lot of bands and singers in strange suits that she did not recognize, and a handful that were promising: Led Zeppelin, Siouxsie Sioux, David Bowie. Her dad’s, no doubt. He’d told her once that when he and her mother had been dating, he had been trying to form his own band; he had been learning the bass guitar, but never quite got the hang of it. Smiling faintly, she put the records to one side, thinking that she would either keep them or put them on eBay, and when she went back to the box, she saw that they had been hiding an old, battered biscuit tin. She levered it out and popped the lid, wrinkling her nose at the dust. Tightly packed inside were two fat bundles of letters, secured with elastic bands.
Each one was addressed to her mother, and the ones in the first bundle looked very old indeed, the envelopes stained and creased, the ink faded to shadows. The ones on the top of the second bundle looked right up to date—she even recognized a recent set of stamps featuring old Doctor Who villains. Unable to resist, Heather pulled out one of the letters from the second bundle and began to read. The correspondent had untidy, expansive writing, and the black inky scrawl stretched from one edge of the paper to the other. The spelling was extremely erratic.
Dear Colleen,
Today has been quiet. So still. I have very little to do here, and when I have done the jobs they ask of me, I feel the emptiness closing in on me on all sides. Its in the yellow lights and the cleen floors, an emptiness that is more than emptiness, it is nothingness. A place that is so sour with man made things has no real life in it so I think of the time we spent together. On the grass and in the feelds thats how we were best. I cant see the grass here, or any trees.
Heather blinked. Without reading further, she plucked another, older letter from its envelope, and recognized the same messy handwriting immediately.
You discribe these places so well. That you would still do this for me after all these years just tells me that I was always rite about you. Your joining us at the commune changed my life.
“Commune?”
Another, to find the same. All of these letters were from the same person. And her mother appeared to have replied to them. The handwriting was not her dad’s, she knew that straight away; he had only ever written in neat, block capitals, a consequence of his construction work and a need to write legible receipts. Who was this person with such strong feelings about her mother?
“You never mentioned a pen friend, Mum.” The words sounded odd and flat in the warm air of the attic, as though they, too, were covered in dust. Because underneath her surprise, and even her slight amusement, a cold feeling was settling in Heather’s gut. “I don’t think I ever heard you talk about writing letters at all.”
Its so noisey here at night. Do you remember how quiet it would be in the feelds, under the stars? When we were in the woods. Like we were the only people in the world even though we werent. The other people who came and lived under the stars, they didnt feel it like we did Colleen.”
Heather scanned to the bottom of the page and squinted at the name there. A Michael? Next to the scratchy signature was a green tick stamp, and then printed next to it in a different pen and handwriting were the words REAVE and APPROVED. Reave, thought Heather. Michael Reave.
Her stomach turned over slowly. The name felt oddly familiar, although she couldn’t say why. She stood up, putting the letters back in the biscuit tin, and took them with her down the ladder. Back in the kitchen, she spent some time making a quick sandwich and a pot of very hot coffee.
She removed the elastic bands from both piles, and for the next hour read through twenty or so of the letters. By the end of it, her throat felt hot and her head was thumping steadily, the sandwich abandoned on its plate. With a slightly shaking hand she put the letters back in the tin, and thought about all the things she knew about her mother, and all the things she didn’t.
Quiet, well-to-do, respectable Colleen Evans had been writing to a man in prison for the last twenty-five years. She had, in fact, been writing to this mysterious man even before that—while Heather’s father had been alive, all through the early years of their marriage. It also appeared that in the ’70s, her mother had been a part of some sort of hippy commune, somewhere up north.
Heather rubbed her hand across her eyes, trying to make sense of this new information. Her mum had never been the type for
