pillow talk occurred behind the dreadful door of David and Birdie’s room; I didn’t like to think too hard about anything that happened beyond that door. I heard things which even now, nearly thirty years later, make me shudder to think about. I slept with my pillow over my head every night.
In the mornings they would descend the stairs together, looking self-satisfied and superior. David was obsessed with Birdie’s waist-length hair. He touched it constantly. He twisted it around his fingers and bunched it up in his hands; he ran his hands down it, twirled shanks as he talked to her. I once saw him pick up a strand and hold it to his nostrils, then breathe in deeply.
‘Isn’t Birdie’s hair wonderful,’ he said once. He looked across at my sister and Clemency who both wore their hair on their shoulders. ‘Wouldn’t you like to have hair like this, girls?’ he asked.
‘You know,’ said Birdie, ‘in many religions it is seen as highly spiritual for women to wear their hair long.’
Despite not being at all religious David and Birdie talked a lot about religion in the early days of their relationship. They talked about the meaning of life and the terrible disposability of everything. They talked about minimalism and feng shui. They asked my mother if it was OK if they repainted their bedroom white, if they could move their antique metal bedframe into another room and have their mattress on the floor. They abhorred aerosol cans and fast food and pharmaceuticals and man-made fibres and plastic bags and cars and aeroplanes. They were already talking about the threat of global warming and worrying about the impact of their carbon footprints. They were, looking back on it from the point of view of the end-of-days scenario currently playing out during this ominous heatwave of 2018, with the ocean full of plastic-choked sea creatures and polar bears sliding off melting ice caps, well ahead of their time. But in the context of 1990, when the world was just waking up to all that modern technology and throwaway culture had to offer and embracing it, they were an aberration.
And I might have had some respect for David and Birdie and the strength of their commitment to the planet if it hadn’t been for the fact that David expected everyone else to live according to his will. It wasn’t enough for him and Birdie to sleep on mattresses on the floor. We all must sleep on mattresses on the floor. It wasn’t enough for him and Birdie to eschew cars and aspirin and fish fingers. We all must eschew cars and aspirin and fish fingers. It had become very clear to me that what I had predicted subliminally all those weeks ago when I saw David and Birdie kissing had come to pass. She had unlocked something terrible in David and now she wanted David to control everything.
We were no longer, it seemed, free.
33
It doesn’t get dark until nearly ten. Libby and Miller talk to each other across the garden table in the encroaching darkness, not noticing that it has come until they can no longer see the whites of each other’s eyes. Then they light candles which jump and dance in the breeze. They’d spent the last hour of daylight searching the house and this is what they talk about: the things they have found.
Apart from the words ‘I AM PHIN’ scrawled on the inside of the table drawer, they found the same words scrawled on the underside of the bath on the attic floor, on the skirting around one of the bedroom doors and inside a fitted wardrobe in one of the bedrooms on the first floor. They found a handful of musical strings in one of the smaller reception rooms downstairs and a music stand crammed into a corner cupboard. They found a pile of clean terry nappies, safety pins, nappy cream and Babygros in the wardrobe in the room where Libby had been found in her cot. They found a pile of books in a trunk in the back hallway, mouldy and grey, books about the healing properties of herbs and plants, books about medieval witchcraft, books of spells. The books were wrapped in an old blanket and covered over with upholstered cushions that must have once adorned a set of garden furniture.
They found a thin gold band ring wedged between the wooden floor and the skirting board. It had a hallmark which Miller photographed with his camera and