Hunter’s Turn

I draw the curtains against the cherry blossom in the gloom. The night is closing in.
INDENT‘I’m so sorry,’ I say.
INDENT ‘You don’t have to say that,’ Scarlett says. ‘He was your father too.’
INDENT ‘Thank you though, I think that’s what you mean to say, isn’t it?’ Emilia frowns at her from the depths of the armchair. ‘Thank you,’ she says to me. ‘I’m sorry you missed the funeral.’
INDENTI’m not sorry I missed it. My mother would have only used it as an opportunity to make a terrible situation worse for everyone but her.
INDENT ‘I can’t believe she didn’t tell you,’ Scarlett is perched on the edge of the sofa. ‘She knew the day after it happened. Can you imagine how hard it was to make that phone call?’
INDENT ‘I’m sure she had her reasons,’ Emilia says.
INDENT ‘That doesn’t mean they were good reasons,’ Scarlett leans back. ‘Did she at least tell you what happened?’
INDENT ‘She just said that he was driving back from town at night, past the reservoir and the car went off the road at up Hunter’s Turn.’ This is not quite true. She did tell me but she told it like she was reading out the winning lottery numbers. I want them to tell me. I sit on the sofa and notice again how the light from the lamps never quite reaches the corners of this room.
INDENTEmilia takes a very deep breath that ends in a damp wheeze and gives me a smile crooked with sadness. ‘The police said that he was going too fast for the bend in those conditions. The storm was terrible that night. He skidded over the edge of the cliff. Somehow.’
INDENT ‘Too fast. What do they know?’ Scarlett drags her hand through the short hair she cuts herself, untidying it even more. ‘They said he’d been drinking and if they knew him they would know that was ridiculous, the idea that he would drink and drive.’
INDENT ‘They didn’t say that,’ Emilia says. ‘They said he’d had a drink. He wasn’t over the limit.’
INDENT ‘I didn’t like the way they said it,’ Scarlett says. ‘Like it was his fault somehow, even though they started the whole thing by staying there had been an accident.’
INDENT ‘I didn’t like the way they said anything,’ Emilia smooths her skirt down like this tiny act of ordering the world will make any difference.
INDENTEveryone knows about Hunter’s Turn round here. It’s the sharpest bend in a lonely road that twists along the high edge of the ravine they flooded to make the reservoir. The trees up there are the first to lose their leaves in autumn and the last to bloom in spring. There are no warnings, no lights, no barriers, nothing but a narrow hairpin separating a dangerous drop from a safe arrival.
INDENT ‘There must have been something else, more to it,’ Scarlett says. ‘He was an excellent driver, no points on his licence or anything.’
INDENTEmilia doesn’t look sure, her forehead crumples under weight of the thoughts. The lamp light catches the red strands in the fair hair that’s almost down to her waist now.
INDENTMy bedroom door slams and there’s an avalanche of footsteps across the ceiling.
INDENT ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I say. ‘It was a complete accident.’
INDENTThey look grateful and I’m glad I can help after everything they’ve done for me. I know that grief will, in the end, make antiques of these feelings. Emilia will put them on a high shelf where they will watch over her and never gather dust. Scarlett will wrap hers in something bright and silken and put them in the back of a bottom drawer, out of sight but on her mind.
INDENT ‘It was instant,’ Emilia says. ‘They did say that and I believe them.’
INDENTScarlett nods. ‘It was definitely instant, there’s no doubt about that.’
INDENTIt sounds like someone is dancing a slow jig upstairs. She is moving around, looking in all the obvious places, the desk and the bedside table, before she starts on the wardrobe. This house loves a conspiracy. Every sound travels along the joists and beams, carrying messages back and forth, telling me what’s happening. It groans like a much older house, all the things we don’t say aloud have worn it down.
INDENTEmilia stands up and starts her usual inventory of one of the old dressers that looms over us, its dark shelves crammed with figures of animals and dancers. She pushes her hair back from her face and I can see that blood is running from her hairline to her jaw. When she picks up the same ceramic duck she always looks at and turns it over in her hands she leaves bright red fingerprints on its white back.
INDENTThere’s a crash from upstairs that makes both of them jump.
INDENT ‘What’s she doing up there?’ Scarlett’s wide eyes drift from my face to the ceiling.
INDENT ‘She’s looking for something,’ I don’t need to look up. I can see what she’s doing as clear as if I were standing the doorway judging her. ‘She’s going through all my things to see what she can find.’
INDENTEmilia puts the duck down, it’s bright among the dark shelves and I can see why she’s drawn to it. ‘She won’t find anything, will she?’
INDENTI shake my head. I don’t want to talk about her so I try to steer the conversation in another direction. ‘Is that his ring?’ I point to the thick signet ring with its elaborate, engraved initials Scarlett wears on her thumb.
INDENT ‘Yes, he let me borrow it,’ she twists it around. ‘I keep forgetting he’s not here anymore, he was always very here.’
INDENTAs she turns the ring I notice that all her fingernails are torn and splintered, the edges are full of dirt.
INDENT ‘For us,’ Emilia says. ‘He wasn’t here for everyone.’ She comes to sit next to me and puts her arm around my shoulders.
INDENT ‘That wasn’t his fault, it was hers,’ Scarlett jabs a thumb at the ceiling and flinches at the answering creak as my mother walks over the loose floorboard by my bookcase.
INDENT ‘He did love you, you know,’ Emilia says. ‘He often talked about you.’

I hid behind the curtains and watched the man get out of the car with only half of one of my eyes. I couldn’t see his face because he had a hat on but his chin was like something out of a comic book. He was wearing a very long coat and as he walked towards the house it flew out behind him like a cape.
INDENT ‘Get away from there,’ my mother said.
INDENTHer fingers were very sharp above my elbow as she pulled me backwards across the living room and into the dining room.
INDENT ‘Sit in that chair and do not move,’ she pointed. ‘If I find you have moved.’
INDENTShe didn’t need to tell me. I knew.
INDENTThe doorbell rang. I sat down.
INDENTThe man followed my mother into the living room. I could see the colours in the patterned panes of glass in the door, his black hat and beige coat and her blue dress and red apron, like a kaleidoscope. When he took his hat off it rippled down the door. They started to talk but it was too quiet for me to hear so I just watched them dancing in the glass. Then they got angry and their voices got louder.
INDENT ‘I just want to see her,’ he said. ‘She is my daughter and I have rights.’
INDENT ‘You gave up any rights to her when you left her.’
INDENT ‘I didn’t leave her.’
INDENTShe didn’t say anything to that, the red and blue just disappeared.
INDENT ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Look, I just want to see her. The girls want to meet her. She’s part of our family.’
INDENTThe red and blue leapt towards the brown then.
INDENT ‘She’s my family and you can’t take her away from me,’ she said.
INDENT ‘I don’t want to take her away, I’m talking about a weekend here and there. Once a month.’
INDENTI could hear a high whining sound going on and on in my ears which I knew was not good. I counted my breaths and thought about the air going all the way to the bottom of my lungs.
INDENT ‘No,’ she said.
INDENT ‘I can take you to court,’ he said. ‘I can afford it.’
INDENT ‘A court will never agree to it, not after I tell them what you did.’
INDENTIt was his turn to not say anything then, his shape stayed still. The whining was getting louder. Their voices sounded further away.
INDENT ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake, but I’d like to do the right thing by her.’
INDENT ‘You could have done the right thing by her if you’d left them like you said you were going to.’
INDENTI wanted to lie down somewhere cool, like the bathroom where I could put my face on the cold tiles and wait for the noise to stop. I stood up. The dining room started to shrink away from me, far away down to the point of a black cone inside my head. I could see the table, the chairs, the sideboard and they were starting to dance and spiral into each other. The carpet twisted up and then I could see the ceiling and it disappeared into the blackness getting smaller and smaller as a front door slammed somewhere very, very far away from where ever I was.

There’s a dull thud from upstairs which I know is the sound of someone stamping their foot in frustration. It’s almost funny.
INDENT ‘Do you know what I want to do?’ Scarlett stretches her arms high above her head as though testing their length. ‘I want to talk about something else.’
INDENT ‘Me too,’ Emilia says. ‘Is that terrible?’
INDENT ‘No,’ Scarlett says. ‘It’s just us anyway.’
INDENTUs. I like that there’s an Us. The Three of Us. Or the Two and a Half of Us.
INDENT ‘Are you working on anything new?’ Emilia says to me.
INDENT ‘Maybe,’ I say.
INDENT ‘You’re so shy,’ Scarlett folds her long legs up and tucks her feet underneath herself. ‘If I could draw like you I’d be shouting about it all over the place.’
INDENT ‘I don’t think it works like that,’ Emilia says. ‘Besides you shout about everything all over the place already. You couldn’t get a word in about drawing.’
INDENTScarlett grins and sticks her tongue out. It is true that she has a thousand mile an hour mouth, but this is a difficult time for them so she’s not on her best form.
INDENT ‘What are you maybe working on?’ Emilia says.
INDENTI stand up so I can fish it out of my pocket. I pass it to her.
INDENTShe unfolds it and unfolds it until she can spread it out on her lap. I realise, looking at it with her eyes, how dark it is. Not just how much black there is on the paper but how tight and close the shapes seem, how little space and light there is.
INDENT ‘This is different,’ Emilia says.
INDENTShe doesn’t like it.
INDENT ‘I love it,’ she says. ‘It feels closer to what you have in your head.’
INDENT ‘I can’t see,’ Scarlett says. ‘Fold it up again for me, I want the full experience.’
INDENTI fold it up even tighter than before and give it her. She makes a ritual of discovering it again and then looks at me with such a serious face I think I’ve got her and Emilia mixed up.
INDENT ‘We need to talk about art school,’ Scarlett says. ‘You can’t work in that tiny gallery, it’s no substitute.’
INDENT ‘You shouldn’t have to work there anyway,’ Emilia says. ‘It’s not fair, I don’t know how you can stand it.’
INDENTI have got them mixed up. ‘I haven’t got any money,’ I say. It’s the first of my excuses.
INDENT ‘Just get a loan,’ Scarlett says. ‘You’ll never have to pay it back if you’re an artist, you’ll never earn enough.
INDENT ‘Or a scholarship,’ Emilia says to be sensible, just like she should. ‘Then you don’t have to worry about being in debt.’
INDENT ‘You have to do something,’ Scarlett says. ‘You can’t stay here.’
INDENTI don’t want to talk about this. I’m not sure how this has happened. There are a million reasons why it’s impossible and they know them all as well as I do. I can’t walk into art school with all my work screwed up in my pockets. All on my own.
INDENTScarlett tries to pass me the paper but I notice that her arm is twisted at a strange angle and she can’t seem to send it the right instructions to extend it towards me.
INDENT ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Emilia says. ‘You’ve upset her.’
INDENT ‘I haven’t upset her,’ Scarlett fidgets, uncomfortable. ‘You started it.’
INDENT ‘I’m not upset,’ I say. I don’t know why I’m bothering to lie to them. I do know. It’s because of the sheer size of what I’m upset about. It’s so big I can’t see it all, at least not with enough certainty to get the words out of my own mouth.
INDENTA series of crashes from upstairs makes it sound as though something large and angry is trying to come through the ceiling.
INDENT ‘What is she doing now?’ Emilia says.
INDENT ‘She’s probably trying to lift up the mattress,’ I say. ‘It’s always the last place she looks.’
INDENT ‘She’s -’ her sentence is interrupted by a violent cough which doesn’t stop until she brings up a thick, dark liquid that smells of old coins and damp earth.
INDENT ‘You can’t stay here,’ Scarlett says. ‘And that’s all there is to it.’
INDENTShe makes it sound so simple.

I’d only asked if I looked like him. I’d only asked because I looked nothing like her and I wanted to know something about the other half of myself. I knew she had pictures, I’d seen her looking at them. The next thing I knew we were at the bus stop, then we were on the bus and then we were walking up a road in a village I’d never been to. It seemed like time had shuddered.
INDENT ‘Here you are,’ my mother said. ‘This is what you want. This is his house. Nice, isn’t it?’
INDENTShe didn’t want me to say it was nice. It was much bigger than ours, the front door was made of two doors like the ones to the gym at school. The house was painted cream and the tiles on the roof where shiny and green like the scales of a dragon. We stood at the gate staring up at it.
INDENT ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Off you go.’
INDENTThere was someone in a downstairs window. Then they disappeared.
INDENTMy mother pushed the gate and it swung open without a sound. ‘Go on then.’
INDENTI walked a few steps up the gravel drive and when I turned back she had started back along the road. I felt the air all the way in the bottom of my lungs for a few breaths because I didn’t know what else to do.
INDENTThere was a very big black car in the driveway with a silver statue of a panther leaping off the bonnet. The front door opened and two girls came out. One was running ahead, she was all windmill arms and legs and her hair was short and weird. The other girl was a couple of years older and looked much tidier. She had long fair hair. When the first girl got close she stopped and stared until the other one caught up.
INDENT ‘It’s all right. We know who you are,’ the fair-haired girl said.
INDENT ‘You’re our half-sister,’ the other one said. ‘I used to think you were literally half a person, like chopped right down the middle but I was only little then.’ She laughed.
INDENTI stared at her hair. I thought maybe she wasn’t well.
INDENT ‘I cut my own hair,’ she said. ‘Dad said he wouldn’t take me to the hairdresser to have my haircut short so I just did it myself. What do you think?’ She turned around so I could decide.
INDENTHer hair stood up in funny tufts. They were all different lengths and at the back where she couldn’t see there was a longer bit like a tail.
INDENT ‘She’s got to go to school with it like that tomorrow,’ the older girl said. ‘Otherwise she won’t learn.’
INDENT ‘I don’t care,’ the one with the haircut said. ‘I had someone else’s hair before anyway, it was like having a bit of someone else stuck to my head so I like this better.’
INDENTI could hear a buzzing noise very close to us. I thought for a second that it wasn’t real but it was a wasp. My mother said they would sting you for no reason, that hurting people was the thing that made them happiest in the world. We went on a picnic once but we had to go back home because of a wasp.
INDENT ‘Don’t flap about like that,’ the one with the homemade haircut said. ‘You’ll make it cross.’
INDENTThe older girl smiled at me. ‘You don’t need to be so frightened,’ she said. ‘Wasps are just like bees, except they make jam not honey. They aren’t so bad really.’
INDENTI stood very still and waited for the wasp to go away. It buzzed around my head for a bit and then went on its way. I was pretty sure they didn’t make jam but maybe it didn’t matter.
INDENT ‘Who’s that?’ the older girl said.
INDENTI knew who it was without even looking. My mother had come back for me.
INDENTI imagined that the two girls followed us back to the bus stop. They ducked behind cars and into gardens every time I looked around but I knew they were there. After a while my mother told me I better stop looking around and walk like a normal person. While we waited all afternoon for the bus home I pretended that they sat behind a hedge opposite and that they were watching out for me.

Scarlett is standing by the curtains wringing dirty water from her skirt and watching the puddle soak into the meaty red swirls that pattern the carpet. She doesn’t understand what is happening to her but I do.
INDENT ‘Things will have to be different now,’ Emilia says. ‘Everything has changed.’
INDENT ‘What if we don’t want things to be different,’ Scarlett throws herself on the sofa. ‘It doesn’t have to be, we can stay here as long as we like.’
INDENTI know that Emilia is right. I feel pulled inside out like the empty sleeve of a child’s coat.
INDENTMy bedroom door slams. We watch the ceiling over by the door in silence and, sure enough, we hear the long groan as she crosses the landing to the top of the stairs.
INDENT ‘She’s coming down,’ Scarlett says.
INDENT ‘She won’t come in here, will she?’ Emilia tries to move closer to Scarlett but her injured, useless leg drags along beside her.
INDENT ‘She’ll want to show me what she’s found,’ I can’t do anything for them now.
INDENT ‘You said she wouldn’t find anything,’ Emilia says.
INDENTI point at the picture next to her on the sofa. ‘I did another one,’ I say. ‘Like that.’
INDENT ‘She’ll ruin it,’ Scarlett says.
INDENT ‘Maybe she didn’t find it,’ Emilia says. ‘It was hidden really well.’
INDENT ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘I don’t care about that anymore.’
INDENT ‘You’ll always have us,’ Scarlett says. ‘We’re family, you’re our little sister.’
INDENTOnly half. Like something was chopped down the middle. When I was little.
INDENT ‘It’s the best half,’ Scarlett reaches across and takes my hand.
INDENTBut it’s still only half.
INDENT ‘You’re not like her,’ Emilia takes my other hand. ‘You’re like us.’
INDENTEvery footfall on the stairs is like the blade of a guillotine falling.
INDENT ‘We’ve found each other now,’ Scarlett says as we sit here like a séance.
INDENTShe’s outside the door. I hear the ring she’s never taken off chime against the door handle.
INDENTThey look at me, as they sit side by side on the sofa, and I begin to see them as they are. At first it moves too fast and I can’t make sense of the whirl and tumble of it all. There’s a pause and everything hangs in the air for a moment, still, and I see a skull that has given way under the impact, white splintered against ruby. I see where too much blood is beginning to swell in burgundy rosettes on clothes. There’s glass everywhere, tiny pieces of a scattered aquamarine mosaic tangled into hair and stuck on skin. Then I can look, really look, and see right into Scarlett, see the tear from one shoulder to the other hip, one leg ripped to red, wet tatters. Even though everything is falling then, rolling over and over, faster and faster, I can see that there’s blood everywhere, not just on clothes, on bodies, but on seats and ceilings, in the air. I can see what of Emilia has been smeared across the upholstery, I see that she tried to reach through the empty window to stop it all and her hand is filled with dirt and broken blades of grass and they’re all sliding together towards the dark water, coming to rest upside down, still hanging from the seatbelts on the back seat of the crumpled car. I see its useless wheels still spinning in the rain, one headlamp still shining up into the night sky.
INDENTThe light spills from the hallway, slicing the living room into two black halves.
INDENT ‘What are you doing sitting in the dark?’ my mother says. She puts the lamp on, the sound of the switch is as loud as a blowout in this silence. ‘I can hear you muttering to yourself you know.’
INDENTShe is empty-handed, she couldn’t find a thing. As she walks over to the window to peer out at nothing, I realise, maybe for the first time, how old she seems to me. I’d thought of her as frozen, trapped in the aspic of his leaving, never moving forward, holding everything back. Yet here she is, bent under the weight of all the time that has passed since.
INDENT ‘You’re not crying, are you? You’ve got nothing to cry about,’ she is clinging on the curtain as though I am dangerous in some way, ‘me, I’m the one who should be crying. They were nothing to you, remember that, nothing.’
INDENTI will not answer her.
INDENT ‘You only met them once. And you don’t even remember him,’ she sits on the sofa and picks up the paper. ‘What’s this?’
INDENTI say nothing.
INDENTShe doesn’t even look at it, she just holds it in a hand that trembles a little and then puts it back where she found it. We stare at each other for a minute, or maybe for an hour, and then she gets to her feet and leaves, putting the light out before she shuts the door. I feel about for my work, fold it up and push it deep, deep into my pocket. Then I listen to her going out to the kitchen, running the tap to fill the kettle, clattering crockery around on the draining board. The kettle is still boiling as, without making a sound, I open the front door and slip outside.

The shadows are as black as the silence that shrouds the street, but the moon is as high and bright in the star-stippled sky as I have ever seen it. I begin to make my way across the fields but just before it’s too late I look back at the house. And I know that all that’s left there is the pale echo of voices I’ve never heard, that I’ll never hear.
INDENTThere are eight miles of countryside between here and Hunter’s Turn, and there’s not much of the night left now.