house with Mrs Mauchlen in tow, Rene is sitting up in bed, sipping tea and eating a piece of toast with butter. She’s still pale, and coughs several times so hard that her eyes water, but she tells them all how she’s fine. Mrs Mauchlen, who has wrung her hands and fretted all the way to the house, is visibly annoyed with Ella, who wasn’t able to explain what was wrong. They both get a telling-off for staying out, but no punishment is mentioned and Rene climbs onto her mother’s back to go home, linking her arms around her neck.
As they’re leaving, Rene looks over her shoulder to Ella, and there is something in her eyes that she’s trying to communicate, but Ella doesn’t know whether it’s regret, accusation or apology. It will bother her later that, though she can recall the expression exactly, she still doesn’t know what it means. Then they are gone.
* * *
A new day breaks. Ella swings her legs out of bed, toes sinking into the colourful rug that her mum made with scraps of fabric, pulling them through hessian. When they read the Arabian Nights in school, she imagined the flying carpets looking like this one. The rug is colder than she expected. She pads to the window in her nightie and, rather than pulling the curtain back, steps around it, as though stepping on stage.
It has snowed. Isn’t it too early in the year for that? Ella isn’t sure. But it has snowed. Not good snow, sure enough. Not snowball snow, or snowman snow, or sledging snow. A dusting as thin as a sheet, pulled over the streets and rooftops as far as Ella can see. It frosts one side of every drainpipe, silvers the acres of roofing slate. Only the warm chimney pots are free of its shroud.
Though she knows it to be false, Ella cannot shake the feeling that today is Christmas. A day for presents, special food and no school. It annoys her that she can’t get this out of her head, because she will be disappointed when she has to get her uniform on. School is no fun without Rene, and she has been off all week, since they came home from the park.
Still, Ella doesn’t feel like sleeping any more. She may as well find out if her parents are awake in the next room. Often, she will peek around the crack in the door to see if their bed has been folded into its recess. If not, and she sees the forms of her parents, rising and falling out of sync, she will sit and hum tunes in the corridor until they wake up and notice her. Sometimes she will crawl into the bed between them, though her dad doesn’t like this. Ella likes those mornings.
Today, there is no doubt. The bed is up, and the door to the front room is open a little. There is a soft glow – the lamps are lit. And there is a smell, unfamiliar on a school day. Frying bacon. Ella breathes big lungfuls of it in disbelief. She has skipped forward in time to Christmas Day, that’s the only explanation that makes sense.
A smile breaking involuntarily over her face, Ella steps forward, puts a hand to the door and pushes into the warmth and light and good smell of the front room. She stands in the space vacated by her parents’ bed and looks expectantly at her mother and father, who are surely waiting for her with presents.
They haven’t seen her.
Both of them have their backs to her, her mother hunched slightly over the cast iron range, prodding the frying bacon with the wooden spoon that she cooks everything with – clootie dumplings, onion soup, rice puddings with jam. Usually her father will be sitting in his chair at this time, polishing his shoes or trimming his nails. Always quiet, self-contained, as though he has not really woken up yet, and is performing these actions in a trance.
But today he is not in his chair, he is standing next to her mother, one hand on her shoulder. Ella has become fully convinced that today is, if not Christmas Day, a special occasion, and this is the first inkling that something might be amiss. She watches for a moment, tempted (as she always is when she has entered a room undetected) to creep up and startle them.
‘Morning.’
Her voice is cheery, but she does not shout. Nevertheless, her parents startle and spin around.
‘Eleanor!’ her mother says, taking a step forward hesitantly, still holding the wooden spoon. Her father doesn’t move, doesn’t say good morning. Her mother seems to think better of walking across the small room to get her.
Ella walks around the low sofa where she and her mother sit in the evenings, while her dad sits in his wingback armchair facing them. Without the sofa in her way, she can see that something is lying on the hearth rug. It makes her stop. She was right after all – it’s Christmas, or her birthday, or some other special day which doesn’t come every year. Her parents have got her a present. A big one.
She looks at the present. How did they know she wanted one? How did they know she wanted a guitar exactly like Rene’s?
No.
Not a guitar like Rene’s, but Rene’s guitar. The blue case painted with an apple tree in four colours – light and dark brown for the trunk, green for the leaves and red for the apples. She knows the painting, done by Rene’s pa, like a face, with all its asymmetries and wrinkles. Her parents say nothing. Ella says nothing. In the silence, she kneels down.
Ella has never seen a child’s coffin. She’s only been to the funeral of her great-aunt Lydia. Suddenly she is possessed by the strange notion that if she opens the case, she will find a body inside. Of course, the dimensions do not allow for that – the legs would be too squashed up in that long neck of the case.
‘Mrs Mauchlen came by this morning …’ her father begins, but her mother puts a hand on him and he stops abruptly.
Ella crouches forward and puts her hands on the case, then feels around the lid, undoing the clasps. She lifts the lid, which crackles as it hinges upwards. Gleaming in the warm light, Rene’s guitar is as beautiful as it ever was. Ella’s eyes trail over the floral pattern around the sound hole, the gleam of the tuning pegs, the thick velvet lining the case.
For all this, Ella doesn’t want it. She feels no desire for the guitar, to own it or even touch it. This absence of desire is the most troubling thing she has ever felt, so keen it is. She thinks this not-wanting must be a mistake and reaches to take out the guitar.
She lifts it slowly by the neck and body and places it on her knees. She does not strum the strings. She does not want to hear them. Both hands are placed over the strings, muting them, like a hand over a mouth. She hopes they stay silent forever.
* * *
Ella supposes it’s because she’s a child that she keeps waiting to see Rene. She doubts that adults expect to see their dead friends turning a street corner, or sitting on the step outside their close, waiting for them to come and play. She doubts they feel the same missed-step jolt in their belly when they remember. She doubts adults see those person-shaped holes in the world. It is a stupidity unique to childhood, she thinks, and cannot wait to outgrow it.
She goes to the funeral, undistinguished as Rene’s best friend among the rest of her class. She sees Robert, through the crowds, but does not speak to him. He’s wearing a black jacket and tie, with black shorts and a black cap. The whole outfit must have been bought for the occasion. Ella thinks he looks like a crow with skinny white legs. She watches as he’s hugged by a succession of relatives. They look like they’re trying to squeeze the breath out of him, and Ella wants to tell them to stop. Robert just stands there, unmoving, until they let him go.
Back at school, Ella sits at the edge of the playground. It’s not because she’s mourning, but because she can’t think of anything else to do. She comes home every afternoon, spends the evenings with her parents, half-listening to the radio until it’s time for bed, where she goes without complaint. On Sundays
