Thornhill Page 2

  All the years I have been here I could never have imagined that I would have a week like this one. I feel part of things. Part of a normal life—well, as normal as life in a place like Thornhill can be.

  Have things changed for me at last?

  It’s so different to walk to school as part of the group, to hear laughter and chatter around me. Now I understand what their jokes are about and why they are teasing each other, and knowing what’s going on makes it sound less cruel and threatening. I like the noise of being surrounded by a group. It’s as though there are little stories whizzing around—dreams of pop groups and boyfriends, gossip about eyeliner and shoes and teachers. I don’t have to join in, but still I feel part of their gang—on the edges looking in, watching, listening, but happy to be included.

  Even at school it makes a difference. I know what they are talking about because I have watched some of the same TV shows and on Monday they’ll be chatting about Dallas, and I’ll know who Sue Ellen is at last and why J. R. is so nasty.

  I wonder if they have accepted me because she has? It’s odd, because before she came back, the rest of them behaved as if I was invisible—as if being silent meant I didn’t count. But now they include me in conversations and chat around me. Even she has talked to me a few times too.

  I feel part of the group.

  I remember how it was before, how frightened I used to be. I know what she can be like—or used to be like.

  April 4, 1982

  I can’t believe what has happened.

  I can’t believe I have been so stupid.

  She told me yesterday afternoon that they were going to meet after dark to have a moonlit picnic, to celebrate Sophie going to a new foster family next week, and that she wanted me to come along. She told me that the old days, when they would have considered going without me, were gone, and that I am one of them now.

  I left my room at midnight and crept down to their landing. The wind outside was whistling through the chimney pots and made the whole adventure seem more dramatic. I was so excited. They were smiling and welcoming, grinning and winking at me as we tiptoed down the main staircase and past Jane’s door.

  It was only when we got to the dining hall door that I realized I hadn’t even thought about where the food was coming from.

  She was standing by the pantry door.

  She put one arm around me and said, “This treat is for us. Just you and me, Mary.”

  She unlocked the door and we went down the thin flight of steps into the cupboard-like room, lined with tins, packets, jars, and bottles. She pointed to a bottle on the top shelf, up by the tiny window.

  “That’s Kathleen’s cooking sherry.” She grinned. “Come on, give me a leg up!”

  She hooked her foot into my interlocked hands and tried to heave herself up a couple of times, but she didn’t even get close to the shelf.

  “Hang on, Mary. I’ll get a chair.”

  I stood there, waiting for her to come back. I noticed a thin trail of ants threading along the baseboard. I watched them almost absent-mindedly as I waited.

  When she did return, the others followed. They gathered around the door as she brought the chair in.

  “If we use the back of the chair to stand on we should be able to reach. You go, Mary. You’re lighter than me. I’ll hold the chair steady.”

  She gave me one of those beautiful smiles.

  I stepped onto the seat of the chair and put one foot on the chair’s back. It had gone quiet. Their eyes were all on me. A prickling unease crept over me.

  “Go on, Mary. Climb up,” she said as she held down the seat of the chair.

  I reached out and held on to one of the highest shelves, then brought my other foot up onto the chair back. My hands were sweaty. I was shaking. I looked down over my shoulder at them all.

  “God, you’re an idiot!” she said.

  And she let go of the chair.

  I fell. Suddenly clattering to the ground. Swiping jars to the floor which smashed all around me as I landed in a heap.

  There were howls of laughter. The chair was pulled out. They ran back up to the kitchen. The door slammed shut and the pantry light went off.

  I lay there in the darkness as they shrieked with laughter.

  I had banged my head and my cheek was bleeding. I tried to sit up and felt the sharp pricks of glass shards in my hands and heels. I couldn’t see what I was sitting in but it was cold and sticky and there was a lot of it.

  “You didn’t really think we could be friends with you, did you?” she said through the door.

  The other girls’ voices drifted away.

  I felt an ant crawl between my fingers.

  Another over my ankle.

  “You didn’t really think I could be friends with you, did you? Just look at you. You’re a mess!”

  She knew it without seeing me.

  She was right.

  I was a disgusting mess.

  “Look at you, Mary. Who would want you?”

  The kitchen light went out and the thin sliver of light beneath the pantry door vanished, leaving just an eerie glimmer of moonlight from the high window above the top shelf.

  And it began as I knew it would.

  She began to thump on the door.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  The noise filled my head.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  The darkness swelled and vibrated around me.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  And then the fear swallowed me into blackness.

  Kathleen found me this morning.

  I had jam in my hair.

  A bruised and bloody cheek.

  My hands and feet were cut from shards of glass and I was sitting in my pajamas in a pool of jam, honey, and my own pee.

  She came right in and knelt there in that pool of mess and hugged me and stroked my sticky hair and told me it would be all right.

  But I know it won’t be.

  I know that this is just the beginning.

  April 18, 1982

  I have spent days and days in bed.

  I can’t face school.

  I don’t want to see anyone.

  I can’t even read.

  I have just been sitting here, wrapped in a blanket, watching the clouds pass the window. My hands won’t stop trembling. My mind runs over it all again and again. I am so stupid. I should have seen it coming.

  I ache with the effort of not crying. I won’t let her make me cry. Not ever. But I want to. I want to let tears roll down my cheeks as I tell someone how scared I was. I want to sob out my disappointment that really they were all just pretending to like me.

  Instead I sit here in the quiet, watching the birds and the clouds.

  The cuts on my hands and feet are healing. The outside signs that anything happened are disappearing.

  But inside I am broken.

  Of course, from that day onward, the night visits started just as they had done before she left the last time.

  She waits until the quiet hours then creeps up here.

  While the rest of the house sleeps she stands and scratches and scrapes and bangs at my door.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  The noise is terrifyingly loud to me in the darkness, but protected from the rest of the house by the heavy fire door at the bottom of my stairs.

  I barely sleep at night, and during the day I sit here shaking, quaking, the sound of those thumps echoing in my head.

  April 30, 1982

  My life is a nightmare.

  It has begun as I knew it would.

  I have only been back at school a week but already they are making my life hell.
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  My days are full of taunts, tricks, and practical jokes.

  My nights are haunted by her.

  I am suspicious of everyone.

  Jumpy.

  On edge.

  On the edge.

  Today it was the old nudged-elbow trick. I had a tray loaded with steaming beef and cabbage and a glass of water when one of her minions shoved into me, knocking my arm and sending the tray clattering to the ground. I looked straight across the room to her in time to catch her nod of approval to the culprit, Julie, who was now making exaggerated apologetic noises as the others sniggered. I had gravy down my skirt and beef splattered on my shoes. The water had formed a puddle at my feet.

  “Have you peed yourself again, Mary?” someone asked.

  I helped Kathleen clear up the mess.

  The problem is that she is being so careful not to be caught. She is never anywhere near when disaster strikes. But I know it’s her.

  I had PE earlier this week. She had switched the sneakers in my gym bag. The sneakers there weren’t mine and they were way too small. I squeezed into them (the usual giggling sounds from the other side of the bench) and hobbled onto the hockey field. Then, right under Miss Greene’s nose, they made sure I was the target, swiping at my ankles instead of the ball whenever I was involved in a tackle. They kept passing the ball to me—and straightaway another girl would be there, hacking at my legs with her hockey stick. At one point they actually knocked me down and a group of them gathered around—all fake concern and cooing noises. Miss Greene just blew her whistle and play resumed. The girls running off down the field, laughing, leaving me in a muddy heap on the field. It felt as if the game went on forever.

  When I got back into the changing rooms, I waited until they were out of the showers before I went in alone, the bruises already beginning to show on my legs. I stood under the warm spray, but then someone turned off the cold so that scalding hot water spurted over me. I know it was her. More sniggering as I rushed out, naked, to avoid being burned. My towel had fallen off the hook outside the showers and was sopping wet. At least when I got back into the changing room my own sneakers were there on the bench under my bag.

  And that was just PE. It’s been like that all week.

  I don’t know that she arranged for all the water jugs in the dining hall to have salt in them—and that everyone else knew except me.

  I don’t know how she got ahold of my history book to write “Mrs. Evans is a fat cow” all over my homework. I had two lunchtime detentions for that.

  I don’t know when she got into the art room to carefully slice the head and arms off my sculpture. It had been done cleanly with a knife—she hadn’t even bothered to make it look like it had been accidentally knocked over.

  Even today, as I came back up here to change, the door handle came off in my hand. How did she do that? It took Jane and Pete ages to fix it while I stood there like an idiot, gravy drying into a crispy brown sludge on my skirt. I know it’s her, but I just can’t prove it.

  And, of course, I know as I write this from the safety of my room that tonight, when the whole house is asleep and silent, she’ll be back up here and the scratching and scraping and rattling and banging on my door will start again. And I know I will lie here cowering and shaking.

  In The Secret Garden, when Mistress Mary heard noises in the night, she was brave enough to explore that creepy old house. But I am not so brave. I can’t just open the door and face her. I know that she will be on one side of the door and that I will be on this side and that, although there is a barrier between us, she has a way of making the fear creep into my bones and pulse in my head that is more terrifying than I can describe.

  I can live with being tormented by her during the day, but the terror I feel at night is unbearable.

  May 1, 1982

  A few more of them left today. Some of the quieter ones who I think would be okay if they weren’t scared of her too. Jenny and Karen are going to that new home in the next county and Tracy got into a posh school that takes boarders. Sophie went while I was recovering from the pantry incident.

  The numbers are dwindling. With fewer of us here, Thornhill seems bigger, colder. Even less friendly than before, if that’s possible.

  May 3, 1982

  Today has been mostly okay, at least it was once I found where they had hidden my schoolbag.

  In history Mrs. Davies quietly called me to her desk at the front, where she was marking a pile of exercise books. She asked me why my homework had been stuck together with mysterious yellow sludge. She didn’t want to say the word snot, although as I peered at it across her desk, that was the word that came to my mind. How did they do that? If it was snot, how did they get that much of it? Mrs. Davies was going on about how I should take care of my work and my appearance when she stopped midsentence.

  “Mary, are you okay? You look as though you haven’t slept for weeks. You look very pasty. You’ve got even darker rings under your eyes than usual—you look awful … ” and then I think she realized she sounded a bit rude and she got all flustered. Then someone threw an eraser at the board, and she was distracted.

  I took my history book and tried to carefully unstick the pages.

  I saw Mrs. Davies glance at me a couple of times during the lesson, as if she was puzzled by something, as if she suspects that something is wrong, but can’t put her finger on it. I know she won’t take it any further. I am surrounded by adults at school and at Thornhill, but none of them can really see what is happening. They don’t want to know. I wonder why that is. What is it that stops an adult from sitting down and really saying, “How are things with you?” or “Is everything okay?” I suspect that they are afraid they might get a truthful answer and then they would have to do something, get involved. Or maybe they just can’t imagine anything unpleasant or nasty. Maybe they don’t want to think that something horrid can be happening to people they know.

  May 4, 1982

  I decided this morning that I am going to try to get out a bit more. Not downstairs, obviously, but out into the gardens. They are trimmed and mowed and look more like a park or the gardens of a stately home than the kind of gardens ordinary people have—those real lived-in gardens with bikes and trikes and laundry on the line. The gardens here are lovely, but a bit unfriendly—I half expect to see a “Do not walk on the grass” sign. But there isn’t one. Not yet anyway.

  I have been here for years, but have never spent much time exploring. Rereading The Secret Garden has made me want to look around. I’m not foolish enough to think that I will find new friends out here, but I do think being away from her would be good. A bit of head space.

  I spent this evening exploring. I crept out while they were all together watching Buck Rogers. The farther away from the house you go, once you are beyond the gravel drive where Pete parks his car, the more amazing the gardens become.

  Just past the apple orchard, I found a lovely spot, surrounded by bushes. It is almost like an outdoor room. The bushes are trimmed like a wall and there is an archway cut into the trees with a wooden door in it. In the middle is a statue of a child on a pedestal. It’s beautiful. It is lovely and quiet and from inside those green walls I can’t see Thornhill—so they won’t be able to see me.

  On my way back I bumped into Jane and Pete in the garden. They looked surprised to see me and then went a bit red. Are caregivers allowed to get together? I don’t know. It’s none of my business, I guess.

  I came back in and went to my room. The other girls were busy crashing in and out of each other’s rooms, raving about their favorite bands, laughing in an exaggerated, overloud way, or rehearsing lyrics to songs they had recorded from the radio. I walked past doors with posters from Smash Hits stuck on them, through wafts of sickly sweet hairspray, and up into my room. None of the others had seen me go in or out. I am invisible again and I am glad.

  I have found my own secret garden.

  May 8, 1982

  I have had a lovely day. Alon
e, but quiet and calm. I have spent it outside in the garden, my garden, completely absorbed in making body parts for my new puppets. I prepared my materials last night: the scraping tools for shaping clay and needles for definition and an airtight tin for keeping the bits in, and put them all on a tray. I sneaked down to the kitchen at seven a.m., before everyone else was awake, as Kathleen was just taking off her coat and slipping into her apron. She must have seen me slope out with a yogurt and an apple in my pockets on the way to wedge open the wooden garden door, because when I went back to collect my tray of puppet-making stuff, she had prepared a bacon sandwich wrapped in tin foil and a flask of tea—which she balanced alongside the rest of my stuff with her usual wink.

  I can’t tell you what a sense of relief I have to be outside, how it feels as though the shadow, the weight of Thornhill, evaporates as I step farther away from its walls. I feel a thrill of freedom to know that I can’t be seen or heard by any of them, even though I am within the grounds.

  I spent the day in my enclosed garden, hidden from the house, sitting at the base of the statue with my tray of equipment spread out on the stone step. It wasn’t sunny but I didn’t feel cold—I was too engrossed in making arms and hands, upper arms, thighs, lower legs, and feet. I am making Colin and Dickon from The Secret Garden to keep Mistress Mary company. As I designed all the shapes and measurements, I knew exactly what I was aiming for, exactly what would evolve from my fingertips, as long as I concentrated.

  Unwrapping Kathleen’s bacon sandwich was a treat. I sat under the statue, munching away, surrounded by teeny body parts, listening to birdsong and the hum of invisible traffic somewhere, and felt as safe and calm and happy as I do when I am up in my room.

  I write this back upstairs, the row of arms and legs laid out on my bedside table with the darkness outside my window. I know my night will be disrupted. I know she will be here. But I can smell fresh air on my skin and have made and planned and feel more myself somehow.