The Box Room

"Does it bother you, overlooking the cemetery, Gran?"

"What can those poor buggers do to harm me? It's the live ones you have to worry about." 

Anna turned from the window towards her Gran.  The old woman’s breathing grew more wheezy as she tucked the sheets under the mattress and threw a thick brown blanket over the top.  The final layer was a candlewick bedspread, like a wedding cake piped with swirls and icing flowers. Anna lent over to stroke the soft surface, but Gran tossed a pillow at her with a huff.

"Make yourself useful," she said, handing the girl a flannelette pillowcase.

Anna was sleeping there more often now her mum was on nights at the maternity hospital, but there was nothing personal to her in the room. It had once belonged to her aunts, before they had married and moved away. She couldn't remember ever being allowed upstairs then. Though the piles of clogs and wedge sandals contested to young fashionable women having lived there, along with piles of magazines, discarded cosmetics and perfume bottles containing the last stale dregs of eau de cologne. Anna tried to imagine them getting ready for a night out, applying Moonwind from the blue glass phial, brushing their long hair and checking their reflections in the mirror above the mantelshelf.

She imagined them coming downstairs transformed, in their floor-length dresses, their faces shining, their eyebrows plucked to perfect arches and lashes spidery with layers of black mascara.  They would often wear the same dress in different colours, Anna recalled, so that one was like a negative image of the other: Cynthia in a pale ghostly shade and Jacqueline in dark red or brown.  There was still a bottle of Jacqueline’s nail polish on the shelf, like a crimson heart against the white painted surface. Anna tried to twist off the lid, but it was stuck fast with dried up varnish.  Yet its sweet solvent smell filled the room, as she remembered being allowed to watch them paint their long scarlet talons, then how they would flutter their fingers like birds’ wings.

The bedroom smelled of damp now and although her Gran would plug in an electric heater to take the chill off before bedtime, Anna knew that she would spend the night shivering under the covers. She hoped to sleep right through, for it was if she woke in the night, that the strange thoughts would begin. What was behind the door, barred by the headboard of the double bed? She knew: she’d seen that it was a cupboard filled with old games and puzzles and boxes of junk. It was only in the dark that the doorway haunted her and she imagined it actually led somewhere. And it was only in the dead of night that she would dream she heard people singing, or voices murmuring, or the sound of crying, and she would tell herself that it was only Gran, unable to sleep too, listening to the wireless.

“Let’s watch some telly before bed,” her Gran said, plugging in the fan heater.

Anna led the way out of the bedroom and stopped at the door of the box room next to it.

“Why is there a lock on the outside of it, Gran?”

“Oh, the lady down the road had someone break in through an upstairs window, so I’ve put bolts on all the bedrooms.” 

Anna suppressed a shudder and the old woman mimed hugging herself against the chill air and tried to bustle her along the landing towards the stairs.

 “Come on, let’s get that kettle on.” she said, but Anna slipped past her. 

“I just want to get one of those magazines to look at. I’ll be down in a second.”

***
Anna wasn’t quite sure why her hand trembled as she slid the bolt across.  She had been in the box room before and it was even emptier than the one she slept in, as though all traces of its previous occupant had been erased. She stepped down into it and winced as the floorboards groaned and shifted under her weight. The carpet was faded and threadbare, and though the walls were papered with a cheerful floral pattern, it felt like a dusty tomb. A child’s tomb. Why had she thought that she wondered. But then the smell became more noticeable.  The box room was infused with the faded bathtime scent of baby lotion.

***

For the rest of the evening, Anna's mind lingered on the small neat pile of folded baby cardigans.  A white matinee jacket with silky ribbons. A lemon layette. She knew those words from her Gran’s knitting patterns. She worried about them upstairs in a flimsy carrier bag. Alone in the cold, dark box of a room; the door bolted from the outside.

She watched as Gran slurped Horlicks from a mug, sharp eyes behind thick bifocal glasses, intent on the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News, and she couldn’t think how to ask the right questions. Anna knew that her Gran would be ready, as she always was, with a soothing and plausible answer.