Hold Your Breath Read online

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ I said, louder than necessary, as Dad packed stuff around me and I nestled up against one of my pillows.

  ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘I really, really just need you to do as you’re told and not ask questions. I will explain when we get there.’ I saw, through the gaps in the boxes loaded around me, that he turned to look at Mum, as if he was scared she’d flip. She didn’t flip. She was staring into space and humming ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ to herself.

  ‘Does Mum know where we’re going?’ I asked, ignoring his previous plea.

  Dad glared at me. ‘She knows we’re going away for a peaceful break,’ he half-whispered to me, ‘and while she seems content with that, I ask you not to say anything that may make her upset again.’

  After a tense pause, I nodded, and he moved away to get another bag.

  I don’t know what time it was by the time we were packed – the boxes hid my view of the clock in the front of the car – but it was starting to get warmer. I think it was probably 8.30 or 9. ‘Will we be stopping for food on the way?’ I asked, ignoring Dad’s instruction again. I just got a short ‘Yes’ from him as a reply.

  We set off eventually, driving away from the streets I’d always known and out into the big wide world. I’d only really been out of our town twice – once on a trip to London when I was really young, and another time to France to a place called Lourdes. The London trip was a disaster. A bomb went off somewhere near some soldiers’ barracks and everyone started screaming and crying. We didn’t see the bomb, but we heard it and saw the smoke. We were standing outside Buckingham Palace when it happened. I was on my dad’s shoulders, back before he was blunt and liable to ‘flamin’ rages’. Back when he’d pick me up and spin me around and tell me I was special and bright and clever. He’d been especially happy during our trip to London – he’d got some qualifications at his work that meant he could earn a bit more money, and he’d let me sit on his shoulders for ages, not once telling me to walk for a bit because his back was aching. When we’d reached the gates of the palace, I’d been trying to see in through the queen’s bedroom window – my friend Gwendolyn had told me she only ever wore knickers made of gold and I was desperate to have a look. Then there was a loud bang and everyone started running and Dad lifted me off his shoulders and shouted at Mum, ‘Christ, it’s the IRA. It’s the fucking IRA.’

  The visit to France, a few years later, went a lot smoother. No bombs. No fucking IRA. Although by that time, Mum had started to change. She’d drifted around the place, touching things and crying silently, while Dad shook his head and moaned about the lack of food choices. ‘I can’t stand hunger,’ he had said. ‘I wish they had a cure for that, here.’

  The food choices on the way to wherever we were going weren’t that amazing either. We’d eaten the last pieces of cold pizza early on during the drive, so ended up stopping at a café called Susan’s Sausages. Upon sitting down, we were told they’d run out of sausages. When I said to the woman taking our order (she wasn’t Susan; her badge said Janice) that they should change their name if there weren’t any sausages and it wasn’t even Susan talking to their customers, she glared at me and then said to Dad, ‘She fuckin’ retarded or something?’ Dad slammed his fist down on the table and said, ‘Just get the food,’ and she went off and started crashing things around in the kitchen while a little boy played with chewed Lego bricks on the filthy floor. We managed to get through most of our three portions of ham, egg and chips before Mum started to suspect the chips had been poisoned. ‘Marjory, please, just eat the damn chips,’ Dad hissed. ‘You’ll be starving.’ She hissed something back about preferring to starve than eat what he fed her.

  ‘Are we going to a hospital?’ I thought hazarding a guess might make Dad want to share some more details on where we were actually going.

  ‘Why would you ask that, Kitty?’ He was sprinkling a lot of salt onto his food – something I’d learned at school wasn’t a healthy thing to do.

  ‘Because that’s what Miss Reid said about Mum, after that time she came running into the playground to take me home before the devil could take me. She said “Christ, she needs to be in hospital.” So I thought that might be where—’

  Dad, whose eyes had flared at the word ‘devil’, cut me off with another slam of his fist on the table. ‘We’re not going to a hospital. Nobody is going to any place like that.’ He glanced at Mum, who had flinched at the fist-slam, but she carried on moving her food around her plate nonetheless.

  ‘Why not? Miss Reid is a very sensible teacher, you know. If she said it would be a good idea, I think it probably would be.’

  ‘I won’t tell you again, Kitty,’ Dad said back, still hissing in a whispery voice. ‘People don’t come back from places like that. Unless you want your mum to end up like your grandmother—’

  He stopped himself mid-sentence, as if he’d realised what he was about to say, then changed his mind. ‘Anyway,’ he said in a calmer voice, ‘hospitals like that won’t be around much longer. I heard them say so on the radio.’

  Dad mentioning Granny had made me confused, since he couldn’t have been talking about Mum’s mum, since she had died in a car accident when I was younger. I could only really remember her a tiny bit. He must have been talking about his mother, my other Granny who I never met and neither him nor Mum spoke about much. I thought about asking more about her, but decided this might make his mood worse.

  After the food, I asked to use the toilet. The moody Janice woman pointed to the back of the café without saying anything, so I found them by myself and peed in peace and quiet, until a little boy who looked around five wandered through the door.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Could you go away and close the door?’ Then Janice burst in and shouted, ‘Tyler, you nasty little pervert, get out,’ and he scurried away, giggling. ‘Sorry, it’s his dad’s fault,’ she said. ‘He lets him get away with murder.’ She said all this to me without looking at me. She was tired – I could tell from the dark rings around her eyes. And there was a purple bruise on her cheek that she’d tried and failed to cover with make-up. ‘How did you do that?’ I asked, pointing at her face. She looked at me as if I was something vile. ‘Piss off,’ she said, then slammed the toilet door.

  I got myself together and washed my hands, then went out to find my parents. Dad was trying to stop Mum from making a scene. She’d become quite an expert at ‘scenes’ in the past few months. When she’d first started to get bad, a couple of years ago, she used to do it quietly, finding a corner to cry in or waiting until she got home. Then she stopped seeming to care where she was or who was around to see it. She had caused quite a few major scenes in Debenhams, at the swimming pool, in the park, at the newsagents run by the little man with no teeth, and at the theatre when Dad took us as a treat to see Grease on Ice. In each of these situations, Dad had shoved us all into the car and said, ‘I’m flaming mortified.’ He hadn’t said it yet, but we hadn’t made it to the car either, so there was time for it to come.

  ‘She fucking mental or something?’ Janice with the bruised face was saying to my dad.

  ‘No, she’s not fucking mental,’ he snapped at her, starting to sound stressed. ‘Can you just give us a minute?’

  Mum was standing on her chair, staring at the floor and jabbing her finger at random areas of the stained tiles: ‘There! There! There!’ Shouts. Tears. Shrieking.

  It was in moments like these I used to try to think of my perfect happy place. A nice little desk with lots of sheets of paper; colouring pens all in a rainbow line, which I could use to draw creatures; a tidy bedroom filled with lots of clean, folded things that would be slightly warm to the touch if you were to rest your cheek on them. I think I must have lived in a place like that once, when I was very small. Before Mum became … Mum.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ my dad said. He sounded tired.

  ‘I swear it. I swear it upon … upon my sweet baby daughter’s life.’

  It was as if I wasn’t there. She didn’t look at me. Just kept on with her pointing.

  ‘She thinks she’s seen a spider,’ my dad said.

  I wasn’t properly listening. ‘A what?’

  ‘A spider!’ he snapped.

  ‘Where? Have you seen it?’ My mum shrieked.

  ‘There’s no bloody spider,’ he shouted at her.

  ‘They are the devil’s spies.’

  ‘They are harmless insects that are more afraid of you than you are of them!’

  ‘I’m not sure they are insects,’ I chipped in, but my dad sent me one of his looks and I sat back down at the table.

  ‘They listen and watch and tell their masters all our secrets.’ With this, she clasped her hands together, like she was praying, and began muttering something under her breath. ‘He’s coming. I can hear it. He’s rising. He’s rising. He’s rising.’

  ‘If she don’t come down from that chair and stop with this shouting,’ Janice with the bruised face said, ‘I’m calling the fucking police.’

  ‘Don’t call the police,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving. Marjory, come down, please. I promise you, you’ll be fine.’

  My mother stared at him like he’d suddenly told her it was her birthday. ‘Nathan? Have you come to rescue me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, instantly. ‘Here we go, rescue in progress.’ Before she had time to argue, he’d taken her arm and helped her step down off the chair.

  ‘I was tested, just then, Nathan. And I resisted. He didn’t rise.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said, then turned to Janice. ‘Show’s over. How much do we owe you?’

  She murmured something about how she should bloody charge extra for the stress, then totted up the bill and my dad gave her a banknote.

&nbsp
; We didn’t talk as we left the restaurant, nor when we started driving. Only after we’d been travelling for half an hour did I ask again. ‘Dad. Where are we going?’

  Chapter 4

  Dad ignored me seven times. When he drew in a long, deep breath I thought I’d finally worn him down, but he didn’t say anything.

  After a while, I said: ‘If it’s somewhere horrible – like Epping – I won’t be happy.’ We went on a camping trip to Epping Forest once. It rained. We were forced to either stay in our tent or go to a café near the service station filled with big bald men who drove lorries. I wasn’t able to go searching for little creatures once during the whole weekend.

  ‘It isn’t Epping,’ he said, shortly.

  I was encouraged that he at least reacted to my statement, but then he went back to saying nothing again.

  ‘The Shepherd will soon be tempted to leave his flock and give in to his darkest temptations.’ My mother said this whilst staring out of the window, pressing her forehead to the glass.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Dad muttered. ‘We’ll be there soon, now.’

  Dad didn’t seem to quite understand the meaning of the word ‘soon’. It took hours more, through the afternoon and into the night. We passed woodland, towns, and big signs saying ‘The North’ and ‘Newcastle’ and ‘Northumbria’. We stopped for tea at an old pub with growling dogs. Instead of making a scene at this one, Mum managed to go to the car to have her ‘moment’. After a while, though, she started to use the horn to attract our attention and Dad went out to calm her down. I stayed in my seat, picking at the chicken in a basket he’d bought me, but eventually I got unnerved by all the old men at the bar pointing to me, a child on her own in a pub, so I went out to the car too.

  ‘I need to tell you, Kitty,’ my dad said when we went back in to the pub to finish our food. ‘This holiday may not be like other holidays.’

  I stared back at him, unsure of what he meant. ‘But we don’t really go on holidays. Not any more.’ I was tempted to add that even when we did go away, we didn’t usually take so much stuff or let people stay in our house, but I decided too many words might annoy him.

  He nodded, thinking about what I’d said. ‘That’s true. But if we did, this wouldn’t be like them.’

  I dipped one of my chips into the little pot of mayonnaise the waiter had brought. ‘Why is that?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer, just got up to go and pay at the bar. I looked out of the window and watched Mum talking to the steering wheel.

  We travelled for an hour more. I know this because I watched the clock on the dashboard of the car turn from 20.00 to 21.00, which means nine o’clock, apparently. We journeyed deep into the thick countryside, through dark trees. They bent and twisted around us, as if they were inviting us into their strange world – though once we were admitted, I did wonder if we’d ever be let out. Mum seemed to have the same idea, because she kept up a steady wailing sound, like a radio signal going in and out, and murmured things like, ‘Oh no … not into the darkness … oh no … please.’ But she didn’t fully ‘kick off’, so things couldn’t have been that bad. I tried to ignore her and nestled my head on the pillow I was clutching. I’d been stealing them from other parts of the car along the journey and now I had a little nest of comfort in the back. It had almost caused a bit of an avalanche earlier, with some of the books Dad had allowed us to bring slipping from their bag, but he didn’t notice. He was too busy trying to navigate, glancing at a map in the gloom whilst driving with the other hand.

  Finally, a little bit after nine, Dad announced, ‘We’ve arrived.’ He looked over at Mum. ‘Marjory. We’ve arrived. Remember. Our little holiday?’

  She just nodded and looked at her hands. He sighed and got out of the car. I was sleepy – I’d been dozing on and off since the pub. ‘How far have we travelled?’ I asked.

  ‘Far,’ Dad said. He sounded tired and annoyed. The window to my left was completely dark. I tried to look past all the stuff into the front of the car, but I couldn’t see anything out there either.

  ‘We’ve fallen. And I don’t think we’ll be able to climb back out again.’ I heard Mum speaking in a flat voice, then saw the shape of my father move to the right and open the car door.

  ‘I’ll come round and get you out, Kitty,’ he said before he closed the door.

  He did as he promised, half lifting me out of my little nest in the back, more gently than I expected. ‘I realise this might all be a bit strange. And it might get stranger. But it’s all for the best.’ He nodded as he spoke and didn’t look me right in the eyes. Just off over my shoulder, into the darkness.

  ‘Where are we?’ I said. I looked around, making out the outlines of trees. They surrounded us. I gasped. I couldn’t help it. We were in the woods. In the middle of the woods. I didn’t know what woods, or forest, it was, but we’d been driving for a whole day and a bit, so we could be anywhere. Then I looked directly ahead and saw a building type of thing. A house type of thing. It was like a cottage, only a little bit larger. You could tell it had an upstairs because of the windows.

  ‘Come on,’ Dad said. ‘Let’s go and wake the place up.’

  ‘Waking the place up’ wasn’t as nice as it sounded. The house, which had strange-looking plants crawling up its walls outside, and strange-looking wallpaper crawling up its walls inside, was like something in the old picture books I used to get out of the library. Ones that involved little children getting lost in woods. At least I had my dad with me. And my mum. Although, with each day that passed, she was becoming more of a child than I was.

  ‘There are spiders,’ I said as I looked eagerly around the living room.

  ‘The devil’s creatures!’ my mother shrieked.

  Dad sent me one of his sharp looks and put his arm around Mum. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get rid of them. Won’t we, Kitty?’

  I frowned at him. ‘So long as I can keep them and make a spider colony.’

  He huffed and puffed a bit and settled my mum on the sofa while he and I began to bring some of the boxes and bedding in from the car.

  ‘Prioritise the stuff we’ll need for tonight and the morning,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll bring the rest in tomorrow.’

  I thought about telling him that it was hard to ‘prioritise’ stuff like that when we couldn’t really see what was in the bags unless we unpacked them, but I decided not to. He’d given me too many sharp looks already today. One more could be the final straw for the both of us. I did as I was told, even though I didn’t want to, and tried my best to bring in just the things I needed. Sometimes I got it wrong (‘Kitty, why the hell would we need our wellington boots for either bed or breakfast?’) but it all had to come in eventually, I said, so I didn’t know why he bothered complaining. While I did this, he took the majority of the bedding upstairs. I heard him rifling around up there, then a loud creaking noise. He must be moving the furniture, I thought. In the end, bored with bringing things in, I went up to have a look. The stairway groaned as I trod on it and I imagined how many wonderful animals must be living underneath it. Rats and mice with razor-sharp teeth and spiders the size of dogs.