“Um…” says Lampie. “Are they big ones?”
They are very big ones. When Lampie walks into the kitchen, they run toward her, stumbling and drooling, and barking their warm dog breath into her face. She screws her eyes shut and lets them sniff her hands. The dogs could easily bite her fingers right off, but they don’t. The big, burly boy, the one she saw in the garden yesterday, pulls them back by their collars and slaps them on their big, hard heads. They do not bite him either—they just lick at his hands, Lampie is relieved to see. They let him push them away, and then they walk over to the fireplace, paws tapping, and drop down sluggishly onto the rug. Was that what she heard last night? Just dogs, just animals? Not monsters?
“This is my son, Lenny.” Martha pushes the boy toward her. “Shake hands, Lenny.” She says it again, louder, when Lenny blushes and keeps his hands at his side. “Well, go on!”
The boy towers over his mother, but he looks like a child. His cheeks already have stubble, but he is painfully shy and does not even dare to look at the girl. So Lampie takes the big hand herself and gives it a bit of a shake. “Hello, Lenny.”
Behind her, someone else comes into the kitchen.
“Oh,” says Martha crossly. “You’ve decided to show your face, have you?”
Without replying, the man in the big coat sits down at the kitchen table, picks up a bowl, and pours himself a cup of coffee.
“This is Nick.” Martha lifts a pan from the stove and brings it over to the table. “Apparently he is capable of speaking, but sometimes you wouldn’t think it. Don’t go running off when you’ve finished your breakfast, Nick. There’s something I want to ask you.”
Nick stirs his coffee and shows no sign of having heard her.
“This is Ama…no…Emi…What was it again?”
“Emilia,” says Lampie. “Or, um…Lampie, that’s what they call me…”
She wants to say, “at home,” but her throat squeezes tightly shut.
“And porridge.” Martha puts the pan on the table with a bang and starts serving.
Spoons tap against bowls and rattle in cups. Coffee is slurped down. Chew, chomp, clink—and no one says a word. The dogs by the fireplace whimper in their sleep.
Lampie does not quite know where to look: at the strange faces, the chewing mouths, or at the big, blue eyes of the boy in the corner, who keeps glancing up at her and then back at his bowl? Martha feeds him as if he is a baby, and she gives Lampie a grumpy look when she sees that she is watching. Lampie stares back down at her bowl. At the stains on the tablecloth. At her spoon full of porridge.
Yuck. She does not say it out loud, but that is what she thinks.
It’s porridge! says her mother inside her head. You used to love porridge.
Lampie does not believe a word of it. She lets the porridge drip off her spoon. Slimy.
I always used to feed you porridge when you were a baby. Don’t you remember? Give it a try. Mmm!
On the other side of the table, the thin man is shoving great big mouthfuls of the stuff into his face, and it is dripping down his chin. She puts her spoon back in her bowl. Not today, thank you. Her stomach is closed.
You have to eat something. Her mother does not give up. Go on. A bit of strength for the day ahead.
Day one, thinks Lampie. Day one of seven years. With breakfast here every day. With these silent people. With these scary dogs. With that disgusting porridge.
Come on, says her mother. Whatever happened to my brave little girl?
Lampie grits her teeth and tries to hold back her tears, but one escapes and falls into the bowl. Plop.
Because it is so quiet, everyone looks up.
Lenny gapes. His lips begin to tremble. “Oh!” he says, pointing, and he starts whimpering along with Lampie, who is so startled that her own tears immediately dry up.
“Oh dear…” Martha puts down her coffee and sighs. “Oh dearie me…” She unties Lenny’s napkin and wipes away his tears. Then she looks at Lampie. “Just make a start, child, eh? What else can we do?” Lenny sniffs and gives a few more sobs. “You wanted to do the washing-up, didn’t you?”
Lampie shrugs and then nods shakily. Not really, but she has to begin somewhere.
“Then I’ll give you a bucket in a minute.” Martha gestures to her son to blow his nose. “And eat something, child,” she says to Lampie. “A bit of strength for the day ahead.”
Lampie looks at her, and Martha looks back for a moment. Not unkindly. Then she turns to Lenny, who has forgotten that he was crying and has started banging his spoon into his porridge. Splashes fly up in every direction, and Martha has to wrestle the spoon from his hand. That is no easy task, because the boy is strong and splashing porridge is fun. Nick watches the struggle from the other side of the table. He scrapes his bowl, swallows the last mouthful, and stands up. Giving Lampie a little wink, he turns around and silently leaves the kitchen.
“Wait a moment,” Martha calls after him. “Nick, I wanted to…You need to…” But he’s already gone.
Martha begins angrily wiping the porridge and tears from Lenny’s face. And from the table, because it is everywhere.
It looks really unpleasant, but Lampie still takes a mouthful of her own porridge. And another one. It’s not good, but it does warm her up a bit. And maybe it does taste just a little bit like home once used to taste.
buckets and mops
And that is how Lampie’s days at the Black House begin. Two, three, four days crawl by, more slow and dull than nasty and terrifying.
In the morning, after Lampie has washed up, Martha gives her a bucket, a brush, and a mop and shows her where to start. Lampie brushes and mops the tiles in the long, drafty corridors.
The house is big and dirty, the wind blows through all the gaps, it is moldy and smelly, and her cleaning does little to help. She can only mop a small area at a time before the dogs go traipsing over the clean tiles again with their grubby paws. She is still a bit scared of them, and so she quickly gets to her feet until they have lumbered past into the garden, where they hunt rats. Later, with even dirtier paws, they walk back to the kitchen, to chew on bits of rat and to fall asleep.
Sometimes Lenny lurches out of the kitchen to watch Lampie and get in her way. At first he stood still in the corner, but he is no longer as shy, and so he comes to sit beside her, with his bottom on the wet tiles, watching everything she does. She does not understand him when he speaks, but that does not matter. He splashes in the water and sometimes knocks the bucket over, but that does not really matter either. After a while, Martha comes to fetch him and takes him back to the kitchen table. He spends the whole day there, cutting up old newspapers. He snips them into pieces, going neatly around the columns, making a pile of letters and black-and-white photographs, and, when he has finished, he puts them all back together again, like a jigsaw puzzle, to make a newspaper. Whenever a piece blows away or gets lost, he cries. Lampie helps him to look. She is good at looking and finding even the tiniest pieces in the dusty cracks between the floorboards.