The Considine Curse Read online

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to listen to him. He’s always been a few hymns short of a sermon. He’s probably talking about that silly beast of Wilderdale story.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘That’s what this area is called: Wilderdale. And there’s this local myth about a wild animal that roams at night. It’s all nonsense of course.’

  ‘What’s nonsense is to have flown across the world to bury a woman you haven’t spoken to in years and meet a family you’ve been avoiding since I was a baby,’ I say.

  ‘Mare, we’ve talked about this. We came here to pay our respects.’

  ‘To a woman you cut out of your life?’ I say. ‘Have we really flown all this way for that?’

  ‘And I wanted to check,’ says Mum.

  ‘Check what? That she was dead?’

  Mum’s silence answers my question.

  ‘You cried when you got the news,’ I say.

  ‘I was just relieved that . . .’ Once again, Mum appears to forget the rest of the sentence. ‘Sorry, love, I really do need to concentrate on driving.’

  Mum has always got an excuse why we can’t talk about the things she doesn’t want to talk about.

  All my life, whenever I asked why we didn’t see or even talk to her mother, Mum would answer that they didn’t get on and it was ‘best for everyone this way’. Her story was that as she was an ‘only child’, like me, and since my dad was ‘never on the scene’, when her own father died she saw no reason for us to remain in England so we moved to Melbourne. I was two years old at the time.

  Since then it has always been just the two of us. Mum’s boyfriends never last very long and rarely come too close to what she calls ‘our compact little family unit’. People say we act more like sisters than mother and daughter. Most of the time, I feel like the older one even though I’m fourteen and she is thirty-seven. But when we argue, she switches back into mother mode. I always know she’s about to do it because she uses my full name. The only time she ever mentioned Grandma was if we were in the middle of an argument and I had said something hurtful. She would shout something like, “I knew I should have named you Flora.”

  For the remainder of the journey I watch the thick snowflakes melt as they hit the windscreen and then get dismissed by the windscreen wiper. I wonder what Grandma could have done that caused her and Mum to fall out so badly.

  Uncle Harkett’s car turns right, heading up a hill away from the lights of a nearby town. The road takes us through a dark wood into a village with pretty snow-topped cottages that look like something out of a fairytale. A sign on the outskirts of the village welcomes us to Goodling. We follow the car up a gravel driveway, which crunches noisily beneath the wheels.

  The snow is coming down heavily and I am covered by the time I reach the front door. Aunt Ruth has already taken off her coat and put her slippers on like she’s been there awaiting our arrival all along.

  ‘Come in, welcome, welcome,’ she says. ‘Shoes on the shoe rack, please.’

  I step inside and slip my shoes off.

  ‘Here, let me take your coat, Mariel,’ says Aunt Ruth. ‘The living room is upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs?’ I say.

  ‘Harkett designed the house himself.’

  ‘The idea was to give us a better view from the living room, where we spend most of our time. And it means there are two floors between our bedroom and that racket teenagers call music these days,’ explains Uncle Harkett.

  ‘That was Flora’s idea, giving the boys the ground floor,’ says Aunt Ruth.

  The house is baking hot, causing my cheeks to flush red. We go upstairs and into the spotless kitchen. Gerald is sitting silently on a sofa in the living room.

  ‘Gerald, dear, why don’t you make yourself useful and show your cousin where everything is,’ says Aunt Ruth.

  Gerald looks at me, nods and, without a word, leaves the room. He glances at me on the way out which I think is his way of asking me to follow him. He hasn’t spoken to me since we met in the churchyard, but rather than say anything I decide to meet his silence with silence and see how long we can go before one of us speaks. We step on to the top floor and he opens a door to a bathroom. I look inside and nod to indicate that yes, I understand it’s a bathroom. He looks at me suspiciously but still says nothing. We go into his parents’ bedroom. Like everything else in the house it is meticulously clean and tidy. Again, I silently nod, beginning to enjoy the game. He shows me two spare bedrooms then leads me back down to the ground floor.

  He stops outside his bedroom door. ‘You should stay away from us.’

  ‘Are you always like this or are you making a special effort because I’m family?’ I ask.

  He grabs my elbow and grips it tightly. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave. You’re not a Considine. You’re not one of us.’

  I try to laugh this off but I don’t find it very funny.

  ‘I’m as much your cousin as any of the others. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Yeah, what’s wrong with us, Gerald?’ Oberon asks, appearing at the door.

  Gerald looks at him fearfully.

  ‘Your brother was warning me to stay away,’ I say to Oberon.

  A broad grin crosses Oberon’s face. ‘That’s not very nice, bro. Mariel’s our cousin. It’s nice to have another cousin. It’s like finding an extra bit of bacon on your plate.’ He laughs at this as though it’s the funniest joke in the world.

  ‘I’ve never been compared to a piece of dead animal before,’ I say.

  ‘No, you’re a live animal,’ replies Oberon, his nostrils flaring. ‘Talking of which, I’m hungry.’

  Having watched him guzzle down the mountain of food at the wake I find this difficult to believe, but we all go back up to the kitchen where he opens the fridge and starts pulling out food and constructing a huge sandwich.

  Gerald watches him nervously. Mum, Uncle Harkett and Aunt Ruth are sitting at the table drinking tea.

  I stifle a yawn, not because I’m bored but because exhaustion is catching up with me. My sudden tiredness has a strange effect on me. The lights seem too bright. My eyelids feel heavy. Aunt Ruth shows me to one of the spare rooms upstairs and Mum comes to sit on the bed.

  ‘How are you?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I say.

  ‘You will try to make an effort, won’t you?’

  This annoys me but I haven’t the energy to start an argument. She kisses me goodnight and leaves.

  I close my eyes, then open them and realise I’ve been asleep. My throat is dry. I check my watch. Two hours have passed. I can’t get back to sleep without a drink so I get up and go downstairs in search of a glass of water. My uncle, aunt and mum are chatting in the living room. I slip into the kitchen unnoticed and find a glass.

  ‘Gerald will be going to university in September,’ Aunt Ruth is saying.

  ‘Where’s he hoping to go?’ asks Mum.

  ‘DeCrispin University. The campus is only a couple of miles away from home. Besides, Sewell and Dee can look out for him.’

  ‘Does he need looking out for?’ asks Mum.

  Aunt Ruth coughs.

  Uncle Harkett says, ‘He’s fine. He’s just quiet, always has been. At least Gerald has some intelligence. Oberon is failing everything.’

  ‘He just hasn’t found his strengths,’ says Aunt Ruth.

  ‘He needs to pull his socks up. I keep telling him but he won’t listen. Neither of them will. Flora had more influence over them than either of us.’

  ‘She certainly seemed to have got on with the grandchildren more than she ever did with us,’ says Mum.

  ‘Oh, she was obsessed with them,’ says Uncle Harkett. ‘We took the boys away on a two-week summer holiday to France once without her and she didn’t speak to us until Christmas. And she was pretty vile to Chrissie until Madeleine finally showed up.’

  ‘They’ve not been married that long, have they?’ says Mum.

  ‘They’d been trying fo
r a baby long before they tied the knot,’ replies Uncle Harkett.

  ‘A grandparent loving her grandchildren is completely natural,’ says Aunt Ruth.

  ‘Not all of them,’ snaps Mum. ‘She didn’t give two hoots about Mariel.’

  I take my glass of water upstairs. I lie in bed wondering why Mum took me away all those years ago. As my mind is weighed down with sleep, the thought grows that she did it because she didn’t want to share me with anyone. She wanted me all to herself. She wanted me to grow up under her shadow. My selfish mother, running away from her family so no one could intrude on ‘our compact little family unit’.

  The next time I wake up it is still dark outside. I check my watch and see that it has just gone three o’clock. I feel strangely awake so I get up and walk to the window. There is a crescent moon in the sky. Fresh white snow on the ground reflects its light, making the scene unusually bright. It has stopped snowing for the moment. Out in the darkness, at the top of a hill, is a tiny orange glow. I wonder what it is. It flickers but it is too far to make out properly.

  A movement much nearer catches my eye. Something in the garden. It is too quick to identify. It’s pretty big though and I wonder if the foxes are bigger over here. I wonder what other things run around at night in England. In Australia it could have been a possum or a wombat. I think about Father Gowlett’s warning.

  I go back to bed and find I am able to sleep again, although it is a fitful restless night until daylight finds its way into the room through a slit in the curtains.

  Chapter 5

  Percy’s Ruin

  Downstairs, nice morning smells are coming from the kitchen: toast, eggs, coffee. I follow my nose and find Aunt Ruth making breakfast. Mum is sitting at the table with a cup of coffee.

  ‘Morning, darling,’ she says.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ asks Aunt Ruth.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘Gerald and Oberon haven’t surfaced yet. It’s always the same during half-term. But teenagers need more sleep than adults, don’t they? I read that somewhere. I expect you’re the same, Mariel.’

  ‘Mariel’s a terrible sleeper, aren’t you?’

  I know what Mum is about to say and glare at her to try to stop her but as usual she doesn’t notice.

  ‘She used to sleepwalk when she was little,’ says Mum.

  ‘Mum!’ I protest.

  ‘It’s all right. Lots of people do it.’ Mum laughs. She has told this story a million times before. ‘The first time she did it I thought there was a burglar in the house so I called the police, only to find it was Mariel walking around in her pyjamas. Sometimes she would go into the living room and turn on the TV and wake herself up with the noise of it.’

  They are both laughing now but I have never found it particularly funny because Mum never mentions how much of a problem it became. She conveniently forgets the time I turned on the cooker and almost burnt the house down or the time I almost jumped out of an upstairs window. She forgets all the experts we went to see and how it made me feel like I wasn’t in control of my own body. She forgets all this because a few years ago it stopped happening, but the memory of how it made me feel hasn’t gone away.

  ‘And when you woke up did you know why you were there?’ asks Aunt Ruth.

  ‘No,’ I reply.

  ‘So you weren’t dreaming about it as you walked around? I’ve always thought sleepwalkers must be dreaming about what they’re doing.’

  ‘I don’t dream,’ I say.

  Aunt Ruth laughs. ‘Everyone dreams.’

  ‘Not me.’

  The experts we saw said everyone dreams only not everyone remembers it, but I don’t think that’s true. My nights are blanks. For me sleep is black timeless nothingness.

  Aunt Ruth says, ‘Well, I think my boys would sleep all day if I didn’t wake them. I have to lure Oberon out with the smell of breakfast.’

  ‘He’s certainly got a healthy appetite,’ I say, choosing my words carefully.

  ‘Yes.’ Aunt Ruth laughs. ‘I sometimes wonder whether he’ll become a chef one day, he’s got such an interest in food. But he seems more interested in eating it than making it.’

  ‘Perhaps a food critic then,’ Mum suggests.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Aunt Ruth looks pleased that she is indulging her motherly fantasies then adds, ‘Only he’s never terribly critical when it comes to food.’

  I hear the front door and Uncle Harkett comes up the stairs and into the kitchen holding a carton of milk.

  ‘At last.’ Aunt Ruth snatches it off him. ‘I was beginning to think you’d had to milk a cow.’

  ‘Mrs McDonnell next door collared me and you know what she’s like when she gets talking. It seems another one of her guinea pigs has gone missing.’

  ‘That woman and her guinea pigs. Morning, Oberon.’

  Oberon pads into the kitchen, yawning loudly, wearing a stripy dressing gown.

  ‘Smells good. What’s cooking?’ he says.

  ‘I’m making a traditional English breakfast for our guests.’ She places a plate in front of me piled high with food including three rashers of bacon and two sausages.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t eat meat,’ I say.

  ‘Oh yes, you told me yesterday,’ says Aunt Ruth, getting flustered.

  ‘I’ll have hers.’ Oberon snatches the plate from me. ‘Mm, black pudding,’ he says, tucking in.

  ‘What’s black pudding?’ I ask.

  ‘Congealed pig’s blood,’ says Oberon, holding up a piece on his fork, then shoving it into his mouth.

  ‘Everything but the bacon, sausages and black pudding would be lovely thank you, Aunt Ruth,’ I say.

  ‘You used to love sausages when you were little,’ says Mum.

  ‘Apparently I used to love putting my feet into my mouth too. It doesn’t mean I want to do it any more,’ I reply.

  ‘Oberon, I thought you and Gerald might like to take Mariel for a walk while we’re at the reading of the will today,’ says Aunt Ruth, as she dishes out a new plate for me.

  ‘You want to go for a walk?’ asks Oberon, reaching into his mouth and pulling out a string of bacon rind from between his teeth.

  ‘My shoes are no good in the snow,’ I say, not relishing the idea of going out with Oberon.

  ‘We can lend you some wellingtons,’ says Aunt Ruth.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, although I don’t mean it.

  ‘You could take her up to Percy’s Ruin,’ suggests Uncle Harkett. ‘There’s a lovely view from there.’

  ‘Percy’s Ruin,’ says Mum wistfully. ‘I can’t believe it’s still standing.’

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s a folly,’ says Uncle Harkett. ‘The local authority has been trying to get it pulled down for years but there’s a campaign to keep it as a local landmark.’

  ‘What’s a folly?’ I say.

  ‘Something that was either built foolishly or which has no purpose. Or, as in this case, both. It was built by an ancestor of ours, your great-great-grandfather. You can see it from here.’

  ‘You wanna go after breakfast then?’ says Oberon.

  There is something unnerving about the way he looks at me. I have no desire to be alone with him but I don’t want to appear rude in front of my aunt and uncle so I say yes.

  ‘I’ll come with you too,’ says Gerald, entering the kitchen.

  ‘Ah, morning, sweetheart. How nice, yes, all three of you can go.’

  ‘Hungry, Gerald?’ says Oberon, shovelling a forkful of food into his face.

  Gerald doesn’t answer but he sits down to eat.

  Before leaving with Uncle Harkett and Mum, Aunt Ruth finds me some hideous purple wellies with yellow flowers. They are a size too big but they do keep my feet dry in the thick snow. Most of the conversation is with Oberon as we trudge up the hill. Gerald walks behind us, as silent as ever. Oberon asks a lot of questions about my life in Melbourne.

  ‘So you go to the beach every day?’ he says.

&
nbsp; ‘In the summer, yes.’

  ‘And it was summer there when you left?’

  ‘Yep. Blue skies, hot sun, long days.’

  ‘I like it like this,’ he says.

  ‘What, getting dark halfway through the afternoon?’ I say.

  ‘I like the dark.’ He grins at me. ‘There’s a good nightlife here, isn’t there, Gerald?’

  He looks at his brother.

  ‘You mean, like clubs and things?’ I remark, finding it hard to believe.

  Oberon laughs. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘How far are you planning on taking this?’ asks Gerald.

  ‘We’re going all the way to Percy’s Ruin,’ replies Oberon.

  I can tell this isn’t what Gerald meant. Considering that he’s the oldest he does appear to be scared of his brother.

  ‘You want to know why it’s called Percy’s Ruin?’ Oberon asks me, not bothering to wait for an answer.

  ‘Old Percy was Grandad’s grandad. He bought the piece of land on top of the hill and built the tower. The problem is the ground is soft around here. Dad says it was crazy to think about building on ground like that. Even while it was being built it started to lean. It cost him loads of money. Then, just after he finished it, a chunk of outside wall fell away. Percy climbed up to the top and threw himself off.’

  ‘He killed himself?’

  ‘That’s the story. Poor old Percy.’ Oberon smiles.

  We have left the village, following a path alongside a field heading towards the woods. The field has a covering of white snow, spoilt only by a few pairs of animal tracks.

  Oberon glances over his shoulder at Gerald. ‘Let’s get him,’ he whispers. ‘Do what I do.’ He scoops up a handful of snow and presses it together. I do the same. ‘When I say “now”, turn and lob.’

  The idea of a real snowball fight is exciting.

  ‘Now!’

  He spins round and throws his snowball. It smacks Gerald in the chest. I do the same but mine hits him in the face. Gerald doesn’t react. Ice drips down his glasses. He takes them off and wipes them with his scarf.

  ‘Oh, come on, Gerald, retaliate. It’s supposed to be fun,’ says Oberon.

  ‘This isn’t my idea of fun,’ he replies.