The Silent Girls

‘I’ll give you a hand if you like, I’ve got nothing on today.’ Sam said.

‘Would you? It’s pretty bad mind, you might want to bring some rubber gloves.’ Edie said, mildly embarrassed by the comparison between Dolly’s home and Lena’s immaculate haven. Or was she embarrassed by the prospect of finding his company desirable? Not that it mattered. She wasn’t Rose. She was the annoying one.

‘No problem, I’ve seen worse. Finish your breakfast and we’ll crack on with it.’ he said, leaning over and stealing a piece of toast from Edie’s plate.

Lena frowned at him and poured them all more tea.

Edie led Sam into the dingy front room with its dusty tat and old-fashioned furniture. Ugly old cabinets bulged with kitsch china objects d’art, and bookshelves bowed under the weight of mouldering magazines and foxed hardbacks. ‘I thought we’d start in here, it seems the least sullied.’

Sam scanned the room. ‘Don’t you want to get the worst over with first?’

Edie shook her head. ‘I did that yesterday; the kitchen was an absolute biohazard. I probably should have donated it to science as a research project. Besides, I have to build myself up to face the rest of it.’

Sam smiled at her. ‘Where do you want to start?’

Edie patted a cushion, releasing a cloud of dust and fluff into the musty room. ‘With a dust mask?’ she suggested.

Sam laughed and pulled a huge handkerchief from his pocket. ‘Your wish is my command, I came prepared.’ He moved towards her and folded the fabric into a triangle, ‘Here, I’ll tie it on for you.’

Edie almost stepped back, but didn’t and submitted, grateful that the handkerchief was covering her glowing cheeks. She hadn’t been in such close proximity to a man in some time, and was ashamed of how she was reacting. At forty-six she thought she might be over such silliness but Sam had grown up rather nicely, better than she had. There was little of the gawky boy left in the man and his unexpected proximity was having a strange and unguarded effect on her.

‘There, sorted. You look like a bandit.’ he said, resting his hands on her shoulders and looking at her. He was at least six inches taller than she was and she was forced to look up.

‘What about you?’ Edie asked, aware that she was blushing like a loon under her mask.

‘Thought of that, I pinched this from Mum.’ He pulled a tea towel out from his back pocket and tied it around his own face. ‘There, ready for action. Shall I start with the books?’

Edie nodded and turned to one of the cabinets, glad of the distraction. ‘I’ll fetch some black bags. Most of this looks like rubbish.’

After an hour it looked like they had made more mess than they had started with. Sam was insistent that some of the books were worth money and he had pointed out that several of the ornaments that Edie had been throwing away with conscious malcontent might be worth something. ‘How am I supposed to tell the difference? It all looks hideous to me.’ she said. It did, but not just because it was old and tacky. Each piece felt like a few ounces of recrimination. For every ornament she held in her hands an equal weight of guilt settled in her heart. She had not cared about the people who had lived in the house; she had let them die. One by one, alone and neglected.

Sam climbed down from the chair he had been using to reach the top shelves and knelt down beside her. He took the ugly china spaniel from her hands and turned it over. ‘Look, this is Staffordshire, you can see by the mark.’ He pointed to the base of the object. ‘People collect this stuff, they pay good money for it.’

‘Lord knows why, it’s horrible.’ Edie said, grimacing at the creature’s painted gaze.

‘I agree, but horses for courses. Who are we to argue if people want to part with their cash? The object of the exercise is to raise as much money as possible, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose.’ Edie said. ‘You’re right, but I just want to get it over with as quickly as I can.’

Sam pulled off his impromptu mask and sat back on his heels. ‘I can see that, it’s not the most stimulating task, raking through other people’s belongings, is it? Why don’t you make us a drink and I’ll sort through the rest and pick out anything that might be worth keeping.’

Edie was glad of the reprieve, every time Sam came within a foot of her she started to feel like an overheated teenager and it was making her feel both stupid and uncomfortable. Even the smell of his damned handkerchief was making her feel queer, she pulled it down and let it settle around her neck while she tried to get a grip on herself and make the drinks.

When she returned to the front room Sam was pulling something out of the bottom of the china dog’s twin. ‘What on earth is that?’

‘I don’t know, it looks like a scarf. Someone must have poked it inside.’ He pulled the fabric out as if he were performing a low budget magic trick.

‘Who on earth would do something like that?’ she asked.

‘No idea, someone who wanted to hide something?’

‘Why hide a scarf?’ The strip of fabric lay creased and colourful on the dirty carpet.

Sam shrugged and picked it up. ‘Who knows? I hate to say it but your relatives were a strange bunch at the best of times.’

Edie took the scarf from him and threw it into the box where she had been collecting the smaller ornaments that she figured were probably worthless. She thought about the wooden heads upstairs wearing their scalped hair and of Dickie’s strange inventions. ‘Yep, they were an odd lot.’ She passed Sam his tea and wandered towards the window, moving the grimy net curtain aside to get a view of the street. The murder tourists were back, congregating around the drain, eager to hear its grisly history.

Sam came up behind her and draped an arm casually about her shoulder, leaning forward to follow her gaze. ‘I see the ghouls are out in force.’

Edie was acutely aware of the weight of his arm. ‘Doesn’t it bother you, that they do this right outside the house?’

‘Not a lot we can do about it, they are all legal, it’s a perfectly legitimate business. No one cares about the morality of it.’ he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze before dropping his arm.

The pressure of his fingers burned and tingled like an old scar on her skin. She shivered and turned back to the room. ‘I’m going to dump this box outside and make some space, hopefully someone will take it off my hands.’ she said, hauling the box of tat into her arms and carrying it out of the room. She manoeuvred it out of the front door and dumped it by the gate, hearing the satisfying chink of broken china as it hit the concrete. Removing the weight from her arms hadn’t lessened the heaviness in her heart, she was acutely aware that she had just unceremoniously dumped a handful of the totems that had marked her family’s existence. It felt wrong and it felt brutal. She noticed that the tour guide was staring over again, looking as though he hadn’t yet forgiven her for her previous sarcasm. She turned away from his gaze and went back into the house.

Sam had sorted through the books and offered to take them to the nearest charity shop. Edie was both grateful for the offer of help and the opportunity for a break from his company. Sam Campion was having a strange effect on her and it was becoming a most disconcerting experience.

When he had loaded the books and left, she took the opportunity to pause her activity and review the situation. When she had agreed to the task of clearing the house, she’d had no idea that she would be letting herself in for this level of challenge. Not only was the house a daunting nightmare of effort, she hadn’t bargained for the discovery that she still had feelings and female reactions that she had believed were withered and gone. For some reason she’d thought her dysfunctional relationship with Simon had killed the possibility, and was mildly surprised that he hadn’t stifled her regard for men in general. Not that being attracted to Sam was a scenario worth thinking about – she was here to dispose of the past, not cultivate thoughts of a future.

The room looked almost naked now, stripped bare of its fripperies and exposed. Its representation as a slice of life had been obliterated by the hatchet job she and Sam had performed. Now that she was alone her determination to get on with her task felt brutal, two generations of her family had lived and loved in the house and this dismantling felt like desecration. With abject disregard she had simply thrown away Dolly’s treasures. In a fit of regret she ran outside to retrieve the box of trinkets, only to find that it had already gone. Someone had been as eager to take it as she had been to get rid of it; she hoped that they wouldn’t regret their actions as much as she regretted hers.

Back inside there was little option but to carry on, but this time with a little more reverence. While she waited for Sam to return she concentrated on sorting the wheat from the chaff. By the time he came back she had rolled up the rug, piled it on top of the chaise longue and set the pieces of furniture worth money against one wall. Across the divide of dusty floorboards, under the window, lay the rest of the junk. In the middle of the room was a single box containing letters and photographs that Rose might want, on its side Edie had written KEEP ME.

Sam smiled and nodded his approval at the progress she had made. ‘Nice work Edie, I didn’t think we’d get this far.’ He wandered over to the box and peered in.

‘Not bad progress I suppose, but I’ve had enough for today. It kind of gets to you after a while – throwing away the bits of people’s lives that we find irrelevant and valueless.’ she said, feeling bizarrely emotional for a moment and hugging herself to contain it.

Sam didn’t notice, he was busy rifling through the photographs. ‘Hey look, here’s one of Mum when she was a kid.’ He moved over to where Edie stood and showed her the picture.

Five children, forever frozen in monochrome, leaned against the railings that enclosed the garden at the centre of the Square, each squinted at the camera, telling them the photograph had been taken in summer. ‘Which one is Lena?’ she asked.

Sam pointed to a skinny girl in a smocked dress and ankle socks. She was scowling at the camera. ‘That’s her, you can tell by the expression on her face. She still pulls that face when she’s pissed off with something. That one there is Sally.’ He pointed to another of the three girls in the picture. Sally had looked a little like Lena, but had more meat on her bones and a rounder, prettier face. Edie thought about the drain outside and suppressed a shudder.

‘I’m assuming that’s Dolly then, and that one is Dickie.’ She pointed to the last girl, thin and dark haired – she looked timid. Dickie just looked like a younger version of the man she remembered. ‘So who’s the other boy?’ The second boy was dark too, swarthy looking and with an intense, confident stare. He was a good looking child, whoever he was. As she peered at the picture she could see that the sun had created a halo-like aura around the boy’s head. It was quite a strange trick of the light.

‘No idea, never seen him before. I’ll ask Mum later.’ He put the photograph back in the box. ‘Right, if you’ve had enough for the day why don’t we get cleaned up and head off to the pub, you can buy me a pint for all my hard work.’

As appealing as the idea was, Edie hesitated. ‘What about Lena, won’t she mind?’

Sam chuckled and shook his head. ‘Edie Byrne, how old are you, twelve? I’ve been able to come and go as I please for a long time now, and I don’t even live there.’

Edie flushed with embarrassment, it wasn’t what she’d meant. ‘I know, but I am staying there and I don’t want her to think I’m treating it like a hotel.’

‘Don’t worry about it – besides, it’s Wednesday, she’ll be at the community centre playing bingo until six.’

Across the square, in a third floor window, a curtain twitched and someone watched as Edie and Sam left the house and made their way along the street to the pub on the corner. When they were out of sight he let the curtain go and turned to face the room. He called the place his office, but in reality it was a museum stuffed to the gills with a chaotically un-collated mess of detritus. What other people called rubbish, he deemed important artefacts of social history. Where other people saw junk, he saw evidence. One such item was now sitting on his cluttered desk forming a puddle of colour amidst the piles of buff folders and grey document boxes. He would like to think that the scarf was final proof, the one piece of evidence that he needed, but long and bitter experience told him that it wasn’t enough. Nothing ever seemed to be enough.

He looked at the fabric, at the swirling colours and the distinctive pattern and compared it to the photograph above the desk. The photograph was old, the paper yellowed and the ancient ink formed an indistinct, grainy image. Jean Lockwood had owned a scarf like this; she was wearing it in the photograph. There could be no colour match, the picture was in black and white, but the pattern was familiar, it had the same hypnotic print as the scarf on his desk. As evidence it might not be enough on its own, but it was an addition to the body of proof. Every little helped the cause.