3. Coronary Street

The next bit of 'The Abandoned Line'.  Very much a work in progress.

There were times when Iza envied her imaginary sister. Ria, for instance, didn’t have webs and spiders in her hair. Gritty dust wasn’t falling into her eyes. She didn’t have to scrape the skin off her arms and elbows and hands. Her fingernails did not need to splinter as they dug into the brickwork. She didn’t have to strain her muscles climbing, and hold on for dear life. She wasn’t alive, for a start. Iza felt guilty thinking this… but enjoyed thinking it all the same.

“This is amazing,” said Ria, sounding uncynical for once.

There was no room for Ria in the dark space behind the walls. But she was there anyway, somehow. Iza could hear her voice. It was as if Ria was behind her… which she couldn’t possibly be. Behind Iza there was just dirty, cold brick wall, bare but for the cobwebs. Iza had her back pressed against it, to keep herself wedged in place. Even so, Ria sounded as if she was behind Iza. This was an old trick of Ria’s that Iza had forgotten until now. Ria could be present even in situations where she couldn’t possibly physically fit. In situations like that, Iza just felt her presence, and heard her voice, as if she was always just out of sight, even if there was nowhere for her to be just out of sight in.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” asked Ria.

She asked the question in her usual clear, loud voice. There was, of course, no need for her to keep her voice down.

“I only found out about it after the last time you… left,” whispered Iza. She felt Ria scrutinising her and deciding she was telling the truth. So nice to be trusted, she thought.

“I didn’t leave,” said Ria, “You sent me away, remember?”

“If I did that, I didn’t know I was doing it,” hissed Iza. She almost told Ria how many times she’d wished for her to come back. She wanted to ask her why she never had. But she had a sense of the right time and place to go into things like that, even if Ria didn’t.

The cavity ran down the entire height of the house on the right side. It was only just big enough for Iza to squeeze into. Every time she did it, it was a tighter fit. She supposed that was good. She didn’t want to be small forever. But it had occurred to her that one day she’d be too big to make any more secret visits to the top floor of the house, to look at Mum.

They - if that was the right word - stared into their mother’s top floor apartment. The suite she’d chosen to make her sanctuary, her cave, her comfortable oubliette. The fortified place that Mary Park, the woman who wrote books about queens and princesses, and who had once presented television programmes about queens and princesses, had chosen to make into her castle. A turret for a self-imprisoned Rapunzel. London-greyed stucco for stone walls and ramparts. Barred and shuttered windows for arrowslits and embrasures. A lake of silence for a moat. A locked door for a drawbridge. An electronic keypad for a sentry.

Not even Mary’s Personal Assistant - a young woman called, much to her own apparent embarrassment, Jane Austin - knew the code to gain entry. She had to wait to be let in. She’d been astonished and horrified to learn that Iza didn’t know the code either, which Iza found rather idiotic of her. Surely, Iza would be the last person who’d know it, given that she was the first person Mary wanted to keep out. Jane - a perpetually flustered and self-conscious young woman who had worked for Mary since before her seclusion - came and went regularly, ferrying in and out of the apartment anything that needed ferrying. She did all Mary’s shopping… which meant, in practice, that she told the housekeeper Mrs Chatterjee what to buy and then took it up to Mary. In addition, she was supposed to ‘look after’ Iza, as she’d once sheepishly confessed in the course of a conversation over the kitchen table.  It’d been the same awkward conversation in which she’d revealed that she rarely actually saw Mary Park even when in the apartment. She told Iza, with the air of someone divulging a mildly shameful secret, that she and Mary tended to conduct conversations from opposite sides of an internal door, left slightly ajar. Jane had apparently soon realised that Iza needed no help or supervision, probably because Iza was openly resentful of her diffident attempts to provide such things. Iza didn’t think Jane was suited to the role of a mother-proxy, and made this clear. She also thought the whole idea had probably just been a vague handwave of Mary’s towards taking the proper care, one that was quite unfair on both her and Jane. Iza didn’t dislike Jane… though she suspected she only had her job because her name had appealed to Mary. She felt more or less the same way about Jane as she felt about Mrs Chatterjee. She was glad both of them turned up regularly, but didn’t like the pitying way both of them looked at her. Both, at one time or another, had said something about it being a shame that she didn’t see more of her mother. Neither of them knew that she actually saw her mother quite a bit. Not even her mother, who always made sure to keep her laptop camera switched off on the rare occasions that she would Skype with Iza, knew how often Iza saw her.

“How many times have you watched her from in here?” asked Ria, almost as if she’d been listening in on Iza’s train of thought.

“I don’t know,” whispered Iza.

Even whispering, her voice sent little echoes up and down the cavity, as did her every scratch and scuff and grunt. Ria’s voice did not echo.

The truth was, Iza had lost count of how many times she’d done this.

*

On their way home from seeing Dad, Iza had realised that she hadn’t read a single word of the book, aside from the title and the author’s name. This puzzled her. And she wanted to make up for it right away. But she realised, with an odd feeling, that she couldn’t. She and Ria needed privacy. If she did what she wanted to do, and opened the book in the lift, and read it as she walked the streets, and found a taxi, and let the taxi carry her home while she carried on reading it, then she’d be reading it in public… which normally wouldn’t bother her, but in this case it would mean she and Ria wouldn’t be able to chat about the book, which wasn’t fair. They’d always done it that way in the old days. When there was a book or magazine or website they both wanted to look at, or a film or TV show they both wanted to watch, Iza had found some opportunity to go off and be by herself - at least as far as everyone else was concerned - so that she could chat openly with Ria without people hearing her conduct an apparently one-sided conversation, and deciding she was mad. The sisters had discovered early on that Iza couldn’t communicate with Ria by just thinking at her, or vice versa. They had to speak to each other, just like everyone else.  Well… maybe not exactly like everyone else.

In the taxi, Iza put the book down and checked her phone. No reply from Mum. Plenty of Notifications from those friends who were close enough to be all over her social media during the holidays but not to actually spend time with. But still no sign of Mum on Skype, or anywhere else. There rarely was these days. Now that she came to think of it, her last Skype conversation with Mum had been almost a year ago. But then actually talking to Mary was a thankless experience, and didn’t relieve much of her longing for contact. 

She held the phone so that Ria could see, but so it wouldn’t look to the taxi driver that she was showing it to an invisible person, just in case he looked back. Things like that had happened before.

Despite their precautions, mistakes had been made. One weekend afternoon a few years ago, Iza had conducted a long conversation with Ria in one of the school squash courts, without realising there were sixth-formers observing from the viewing gallery. Her echoey side of the conversation had drifted up through the glass. Iza had been asked to see the school counsellor, and had fobbed her off with a story about rehearsing her lines for the forthcoming play. Luckily, the woman had accepted this - with some relief at finding that she didn’t have a difficult case looming - and neglected to check with the drama teacher, who had probably didn’t even know Iza’s name.

Even so, word got around. Iza Park talked to herself. Iza Park was weird. Iza Park was mad. But she could live with that. If her parents were ‘sane’ and lived in ‘the real world’, as they so often told her, back when they told her anything, then she could live with being crazy. It wasn’t as if the consequences had been dire. On the contrary, people had just extended her more kindness the stranger they thought she was. She was not the type to be bullied or taunted. She’d come to realise that she was not at risk of this. Being a bullying victim, she came to see, was far more about who you were than what you did. Some people - her, for instance - could be as strange as they liked and never be at risk. Others would get it no matter how quiet and conformist they were. It wasn’t that they asked for it. They just inadvertently telegraphed their helplessness to the people who were always on the lookout for it. The same sorts of people at school saw Iza Park’s strangeness and interpreted it favourably. Iza Park talked to herself. Iza Park was interesting. Iza Park was unusual. Iza Park was artistic and spiritual. Probably. They imagined. Iza Park, of course, had a very rich mother who was on TV and a very rich father who built massive buildings. Iza Park’s mother was a baronet’s daughter, and her father would be a life peer one day. Meanwhile, amongst adults, her parents were a get-out clause in a different way. Both were almost always absent, rushing around somewhere else; him from project to skyscraper to developing neighbourhood to gated community to gentrified street; her from TV studio to location shoot to newspaper office to academic conference to book launch. Other adults blamed them for anything they thought was wrong with their daughter. And Iza had not worked hard to oppose this interpretation. After all, that was how any kid liked it: all the sympathy and none of the blame. She felt she might as well let her parents take the heat. It was a way for them to care for her that would surely appeal to them: from a distance, and with no actual effort involved. Iza had also found that the less she herself criticised her parents, the more other people were willing to do it for her. The only people who expressed any serious dissatisfaction with her had been her parents themselves. It had soon became clear to Iza that she was not their idea of an ideal, or even satisfactory daughter. She hadn’t turned out to be the girl they wanted. That girl was outgoing, ambitious, a social butterfly in pupal stage, preparing eagerly for debutantery and ball-attendance, already networking her future career contacts in her house common room. Iza in her early teens, by contrast, was confident but in a quiet and vague and introverted way, an unconcerned and oblivious style of confidence - quite unlike the little child they had adored, who had been as gregarious as a particularly sociable dolphin, the kind of dolphin whose name is always at the top of the list whenever the other dolphins decide who to invite to the next fishing-and-splashing-around party. As she got older, Iza withdrew, and came to prefer her own company… at least, that was all they knew.

On some level, Iza understood that her relationship with a non-existent sister, who tended to criticise her and analyse her, was probably not what people would call ‘healthy’ if they found out about it. But they persistently didn’t. Adults really weren’t much different to those kids who kept an eye out for the weakness or strangeness of their peers; they saw it in some places, and missed it in others where it simply seemed inappropriate. And in any case, she thought health, like normality, was probably overrated. Healthy people dropped dead from heart attacks while jogging. It happened directly outside their house at least three times a year.

The ambulance and the fallen jogger were long gone by the time the taxi dropped them back outside the house in Maude Square. To distract herself, Iza had tried again to initiate a conversation with Ria about that topic, but had been interrupted by the taxi driver calling her back to tell her she’d left her book on the back seat.

By the time Iza walked inside the house and closed the door, Ria was already in the hall, back on her step at the bottom of the stairs, looking out through the pillars again.

“Get the photo,” said Ria, unsmiling, her gaze steady.

“I don’t know where it is,” said Iza.

“Rubbish,” said Ria, “it’s on your bed. You put it down and left it there before we went out.”

“I wonder why I didn’t take it with me,” said Iza.

“Us,” said Ria.

“Huh?”

“You didn’t take it with us. We both went, remember?”

“Oh. Yes. Right. Sorry.”

Ria pushed the issue aside with a jerk of her head and a noise somewhere between a bray and a huff.

“You kept on putting it down and leaving it somewhere and walking off when we were here before,” she said.

“Did I?” asked Iza.

“You put it down in the taxi,” said Ria.

“Yeah but that was just…”

“Photo,”said Ria.

“But don’t you want to…?” began Iza, holding up the book.

“Don’t I want to… what?” asked Ria, something inexplicably sarcastic in her tone. Iza followed her meaningful gaze until she saw that the hand she was holding up didn’t actually have the book in it at all.

She must’ve put it down on the hall table the moment she’d walked in. She went to get it.

“I thought you’d want to read…”

“I do,” said Ria, “but you obviously don’t. I think we should just move on to the photo before you finally succeed in losing the book.”

Iza blinked at her, ashamed and puzzled by herself.

This was another old feature of their relationship. The compromise negotiated and accepted tacitly, with one of them conscious of it and one of them not, until Ria - the conscious one - broke it. Iza had often raged at her reflection for being better understood by a phantom than she was by herself.

“Photo,” said Ria again.

They set off upstairs, Ria in front.

Iza glared at the back of Ria’s head.

“Iza,” said Ria, without turning around.

Iza stopped. She wondered if Ria had somehow seen the face she’d pulled.

“Don’t you think you should take the book with you?”

Iza went back to the hall table. The book was still there.

The book finally retrieved, they found the photo where Ria had said Iza had left it: on her bed.

Iza put it in the book.

Iza didn’t open the book.

She felt an almost overwhelming urge to put it down somewhere and walk off.

Only Ria’s gaze stopped her.

“I’m scared,” said Iza.

Ria softened.

“It’s okay,” she said, “I’m here.”

“I know. I just feel like…”

She faltered. She couldn’t find the words.

“Like we’re about to blunder into something best left alone?” asked Ria. “Like we’re about to find stuff out that maybe we don’t really want to know?”

“Yes that,” said Iza.

“I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,” said Ria, holding up her hands to indicate her powerlessness.

“But you want to know, don’t you?” asked Iza.

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. And I don’t. I’m scared to know.”

“You’ve got more to lose than I have.”

It wasn’t said nastily. It was just a statement of fact. Ria was never nasty about the really serious stuff.

“Maybe we could wait and talk to Mum,” said Iza, “She might get back to us.”

“To you.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” said Ria, “if you think so. You know her better than I do.”

“Do you miss her, when you’re… wherever you go?”

“I don’t go anywhere,” said Ria. “Sometimes I feel like there is somewhere I could go when I’m not here. But I… I can’t find it.”

Iza was startled. This was the first time Ria had said anything like that. But she wanted her question answered.

“But do you miss her?”

Ria scowled.

“Yes,” she snapped savagely, looking down. And then, quietly: “I miss both of them.”

“So do I,” said Iza.

Ria looked up, as if to challenge. Then she saw Iza’s face and looked down again.

“Let’s go and have a look at her,” said Iza.

Ria looked up.

“I knew it,” she said.

And that was how Iza managed to make Ria let her put the book down unopened.

*

She had discovered the way into the cavity in her bedroom one day during Half-Term the year before last, when rearranging the furniture for no reason other than that doing so didn’t constitute coursework.  Or serious thinking about her life.  Or dwelling on the fact that, while she had lots of friends at school, none of them were really close friends, close enough to spend time with outside of term time, and she was feeling very lonely. Moving a wardrobe that had been stood in the same place for as long as she could remember, she’d accidentally torn the wallpaper with a rusty nail sticking out of the backing boards. Examining the tear, she’d discovered that there was nothing behind it, just space. She’d torn right through a section of wall that was little more than paper and cardboard. She tore out the rest of the flimsy patch, only to discover an old recessed cupboard. 

It was very small, only just big enough for her to stand in. There were ruined wooden boards and old nails on the floor, and the back was lined with narrow shelves. There was nothing on any of them except for an old teddy bear. It was tattered and threadbare. It was grey and filmy with dust. It had obviously been handled many times by many childish hands. There was a long cut down its front that had been roughly stitched closed. Even so, it looked like a finely-made thing from long ago, Victorian maybe, not some bit of mass-produced rubbish from recent years. It wasn’t just a pretty, plush bag of foam. It had articulated legs and arms and hands, and a head that turned from side to side. Stylised and anthropomorphised, it nevertheless looked somewhat like an actual bear. It had something of the shape and carriage of a bear, as if, were it to start walking, it would walk on all fours.

Enchanted, Iza had picked it up… and had felt the strangest sensation in her fingertips, just for a moment, as if something inside the bear was making a rhythmic tapping, almost like a heartbeat. She wondered if there were clockwork mechanisms inside it, but checked its back and saw no key to wind it up. And, in any case, how could any mechanism within still be wound-up and running? The sensation seemed to vanish, and she decided she’d imagined it. She’d looked at the thing and concluded she didn’t like its face. One of its eyes was noticeably higher than the other. Looking closely, she saw that the lower eye had fallen out and been re-darned into the wrong position. Unlike the cut down its chest, this mend had been accomplished with some skill, but for the positioning of the eye. Somehow, it made the thing look angry, sad, resentful… even cruel. Just for a moment, she felt waves of malevolent bitterness flowing from it like heat from a radiator. She wondered if maybe it’d been walled-up like that because the former owner had decided they didn’t like the look on its face either. She put it down again, somehow feeling it important to put it down exactly where she’d found it, using the dustless patch on the shelf as her guide. 

And then she felt a breeze ruffle her hair. It seemed to come from above. She looked up, ignoring the silly feeling that the cock-eyed bear was watching her with a helpless sneer. Above her there was only blackness. The blackness receded away from her, up and up and up. That explained the ruined boards and nails on the floor. The roughly-made ceiling of the cupboard had some down. She fetched a torch and shone it up into what looked like the inside of a never-used chimney. Old bricks receded upwards for what could’ve been infinity. It looked like it ran all the way up the side of the building. And that was when the idea had struck her. It might run all the way up to the top floor. To Mum.

She’d crawled up the cavity, finding her fear of falling lessened by the tightness of the fit, and the trainers with good grips she was wearing, and the mattress she’d hauled off her bed and wedged into the bottom of the secret cupboard, and the determination to see if she could somehow see her Mum again. Just to see her, to really see her, not a recording of her on an old TV show… it made the risk seem worthwhile. There would only be one floor’s worth of upward passage to scale, Mum’s apartment being right above the floor where Iza had her bedroom. The ceilings of the house were not high. (Sometimes Iza had lain in bed watching her bedroom ceiling, and imagining she could hear her mother’s footsteps above.) And besides, Iza reflected, she did gymnastics at school. She wasn’t any bloody good at it of course… but then, she reflected, she’d never had a proper incentive before.

She had an ominous feeling as she shimmied slowly and painfully up the vertical tunnel the first time. It was something besides the fear she still felt, and the loathing of the dirt and stringy webs and insect debris that slowly covered her. She felt as if she had broken through some kind of barrier she’d never known was there, some disguised boundary wall around the world she knew, and into a hidden second world that had always been there, just next to her, but lurking out of view, waiting to be found, and perhaps not harbouring wholly positive intentions. It made her think of Ria, and to wonder where she was, and wish for her. But of course, she hadn’t come. Not then. She’d come that morning… this morning. The book and the photo had summoned her.

At the top, Iza had been pleased to find that she could see into her mother’s apartment through a ventilation grille. She was looking through that same grille now, into the same room. The room was empty. But the scratching of a pencil came from nearby, from inside another room.

The room she was looking into was the same as last time she’d looked into it. The room never changed. It was as tidy as ever. Mary presumably cleaned it herself, something about which Mrs Chatterjee had once seemed to feel aggrieved. Except that there was something different about it this time. Someone was in there Iza had never seen in there before.

Ria, silhouetted against the unshuttered window, turned and waved and grinned at the grille. Iza blinked in astonishment. And outrage. She’d not expected this.

Ria walked up to the grille. They faced each other, noses close, on either side.

“What are you doing?” hissed Iza.

“It’s cramped in there. I thought you might appreciate the room.”

“I’m not joking. You know this won’t work.”

They’d experimented with this in the old days too. Iza stays put. Ria ventures around a corner, or into another room. Ria cannot report what is happening there when she comes back. She tries to, apparently convinced she can do it, but can’t. Ria had wanted to try this often, always convinced that she’d be able to do it next time. Iza had eventually declared a moratorium on it, and refused to play along every time Ria tried it, until Ria gave up. Iza had grown heartily sick of the moods it put Ria into every time it failed, which had been every single time.

Ria didn’t reply to Iza’s remark. They stared at each other in silence, listening to the scratching of the pencil. Iza dropped her eyes. The pencil seemed to stop as soon as Iza started concentrating on it.

“So what do we do now?” asked Ria, “Just sit and wait until she comes out? And then just watch her without saying anything?”

Iza didn’t reply. She didn’t want to say That’s what I normally do.

That was when Iza’s phone rang.