Stevie yanks the door open so hard she staggers backward, her face comically alarmed. Then she’s laughing and through the door, kicking off her shoes, feet pounding on the stairs. “Bye-bye, Bert! Bye-bye, Man and Mina-Lady!” over her shoulder.
Sam waits until Stevie is inside before saying, in a low, confidential voice, “Mina and I just paid a visit to Tanner’s Row.”
Bert and Fern exchange a bemused glance.
“Whatever for?”
I tell them both a brief, condensed version of Alice’s story of the previous winter. When I reach the bit about the bottle in the chimney, Bert nods solemnly.
“Witch’s bottle.”
“A what?” Sam shields his eyes from the sun, stepping under the shade of the awning.
“Witch’s bottle. It’s an old folk magic. Traditionally they were filled with sharp metal objects and vinegar or urine. Sometimes they’d pack them with hair or thread. The idea was that the thread created a maze that the witch would get lost in, trapping her inside. Did you say Alice broke it?”
I nod, fanning myself. It’s so hot, so close. The air is thick in my lungs. I think of that shoe just lying there buried beneath the ash and feel sick and dizzy.
“Mind, it’s a shame they’re knocking those old places down,” Bert says sagely. “They’re full of history, you know.”
“There’s old marks on the rafters, and the ceiling has come down in the kitchen, but I caught a glimpse of the floor in there,”Sam tells him. “It’s proper Cornish slate. Someone should recover what they can before the developers move in.”
“They won’t stop building work for some old graffiti,” Fern spits, her face flushed with what looks like real anger. “These money-grabbing bastards will raze the lot to the ground without a second thought.”
“Not graffiti, Fern.” Bert grins, giving us another flash of his dentures. “‘Apotropaic marks.’ I’ve seen similar before in old farmhouses. Thosearehistorically significant. They should take those beams out and put them in a museum.”
I think of the little tadpole shape, burned into the wood.
“What were the apotropaic marks for?” I ask Bert. He looks animated, as if he has been waiting to talk about this subject for years. It reminds me of Oscar when someone asks him to explain black holes. That flare of excitement and enthusiasm.
“Belief,Mina. The marks were protection against the witches and devils. Look around you, we’re still doing it even now, hundreds of years later! Hanging hagstones and saluting magpies, hoping it will keep us safe from bad luck and bad dreams.”
“Mummy!” From inside the house. I can see Stevie’s shadow on the stairwell. “Tuttles is on!”
“I better go,” Fern tells us all, smiling apologetically. “One day I’m going to cook those ninja bloody turtles into a big old soup. Thanks, Bert.”
She kisses him affectionately on the cheek and waves goodbye to Sam and me. I smile, but I notice Sam is more subdued, pained and lost in his thoughts. I think again of that shoe with the yellow stitching—Maggie’s shoe—just waiting to be found.
FIFTEEN
The air is heavy with fragrant heat; melting rubber, hot clay. The tails of smoke. Sam, Bert and I walk slowly down Beacon Terrace, washed in a vast blanket of stillness. We talk quietly about the curfew and the heat wave. I tell Bert about Oscar and our impending marriage and he congratulates me. Bert tells me he’s just celebrated his seventieth birthday and laughs when I tell him he looks like Des O’Connor, adding, “You must tell my wife that, she’d be thrilled!”
As we draw up outside his house, directly next door to the Webbers, we all fall silent, looking at the chalk markings on the ground, the small pile of offerings by the door. A votive candle has been left, guttering in a glass. Bert sighs.
“That poor girl. She must be scared stiff. I hope you can help her, Mina.”
“Mina thinks that breaking the witch’s bottle triggered an intensely psychological reaction in Alice.” Sam is smoking, leaning against the fence where the chalked writing readsbE Not afrAId.He looks more settled now, less like someone peering over the edge of an abyss.
“Ah, interesting that you think it’s a psychosomatic symptom. It’s amazing what the mind is capable of. You know my grandfather fought on the western front back in the First World War? He was a stoic man, very brave but very quiet. He came back with tinnitus and a limp on his left side but at least he came home. A lot of men weren’t so lucky. Right up until he died, my grandfather insisted he and the other members of his battalion had seen an angel with long white hair walking across the battlefield on a cold November morning. One of the soldiers had actually called out to her, ‘Hoy there, are you mad?’ but she had kept on walking, smiling as if she knew a secret. My grandfather said she was barefoot and that’s how they all knew she was divine.”
“Wow.”
“There’s a lot of those stories that came out of the war. They became a tool for propaganda, a divine providence that served to boost morale. Angels and ghostly bowmen and riders with flaming swords. But my grandfather, and the ninety other men that were with him that morning, would swear on the Bible that what they saw was a guardian angel walking through the barbed wire and the mud and bodies with no shoes on her feet. How do you explain that?”
“I wouldn’t try to,” I answer. “It’s a form of collective consciousness, it doesn’t need explaining. What it needs is dismantling, slowly. Taken apart bit by bit so that the lack of plausibility becomes evident.”
“Is that what you intend to do with Alice?”
I think of that soft scratching in the chimney.