Dad sighed. “Well, you won’t find anything in here. Out, please.”
I wavered, summoning the courage to ask Dad about the picture, feeling as if a spell had been cast between me and the painted lady. I opened my mouth. “Is she my...”
“Perhaps I can write to your mother,” Dad interrupted, cutting me off before I could finish. “Ask her to send you something. How about that? You’re old enough now to know a bit more about her.”
I nodded, taking one last, long look at the pictures. Was it my imagination, or had the woman’s mouth turned up at the corners? Were her eyes more wrinkled, as if she were smiling, just for me?
Dad cleared his throat and stepped aside, making room in the doorway, and I tiptoed out.
“Please don’t come in here again,” he said, pulling the door closed and locking it. This time he didn’t hang the key on the wall.
* * *
As the summer wore on, I hung around near where I had first seen Stacey, hoping she would turn up again, pretending to catch butterflies in my net and keeping an eye out for her watchful gaze between the buddleia’s branches.
On a hot, sticky night in July I woke up, pulled from a dream where Stacey and I were wading through a shrieking pit, the echo of a hushed voice still whispering in my ears.
“Stacey?” I said, thinking she might have somehow managed to climb in through my bedroom window. I looked around my room. Moonlight filtered through the thin curtain and lay in bluish stripes across the floor. There was nobody there, and yet the whispering continued, words that I couldn’t quite grasp, as if they were in a language I had learned years before but since forgotten. I knew that I should be frightened, but the sound was comforting, like little waves lapping at a shore.
I got up and tiptoed to the window, pushing the curtain aside and unlatching it. Leaning out, I could just make out the dark surface of the moat below me, and in the middle, the gargoyle, crouched low over the water. The voice intensified, whispering urgently, and for a chilling moment I thought I saw the gargoyle twist and look up at me, its mouth whispering. I slammed the window shut and ran to my bed, pulling the covers over my head.
The voice died away, and I lay, holding my breath, listening extra hard, but all I could hear were Monty’s cat snores.
I thought about the shrieking pits that Stacey was so excited to find. Had the voice come from there, drifting across the fields? I wondered if she had found one yet; if she would tell me about it in a spooky voice next time we met. I reached out from under the duvet, my fingers closing over the little brooch she had given me. I pulled it under the duvet and held it tightly in my hand, thinking about Stacey, conjuring her up in my mind.
“Stacey, Stacey, come back to me,” I chanted under my breath, my eyes squeezed shut, clutching the brooch so hard it hurt. When I opened them, I half expected her to be lying next to me under the duvet, giggling at my silliness, but of course she wasn’t, and I felt embarrassed that I had even tried.
I put the brooch on my bedside table and tried to get to sleep. I would just have to wait until I started my new school, when the autumn term began in a few weeks. The thought made my tummy flip with nerves. But Stacey will be there, I told myself sternly. She will take me by the hand and show me around, calming my fears and introducing me to all her friends. And I’ll be able to see her every day.
* * *
The chanting didn’t bring Stacey back to me, but it did bring another kind of magic.
The circus came to town.
It was to be a treat for my ninth birthday. I stood in the shade of the weeping willow waiting for Dad and running my hands over the tiny squares of my best dress, a pink gingham one with an elastic bodice that dug painfully into my armpits. From here, I could just make out the moat, and the gargoyle crouched over it.
Earlier in the day, after a birthday breakfast of crumpets and smoked salmon, Dad had given me a painting. It was a portrait of me, standing in my bedroom, with Monty in my arms. Dad hung it on the wall near my bed and told me to stand beneath it.
“Now, look up at the picture,” he said.
I looked up. The version of me in the picture was standing in exactly the same spot in my bedroom, holding a cat that looked just like Monty, and she was turning and looking up at a picture on her wall, of a girl standing in a bedroom, holding a cat. I screamed with delight, and Monty scrabbled away from me in fright. I reached up and took the picture down, putting my nose to it, examining every detail. The little version of me was looking up at a minute painting, no bigger than a drawing pin above her head. I got lost staring at it, trying to make my eyes go back and back, wondering how many versions of me Dad had painted, how strong the magnifying glass must have been for him to paint so small.
“Watch out, Roe, you’ll go cross-eyed,” Dad had laughed.
“Where are my keys?” His frustrated voice filtered out now from somewhere in the depths of the house. I made myself blend into the willow’s spidery branches. He had lost his keys three times this week and made me search for them every time. This time he could do it on his own.
I had wanted Stacey to come to the circus too, and I had walked to the other end of the village to find her little red brick house and ask her. But when I got to her road, I was confronted by a long line of ugly houses that all looked the same, the front gardens divided up with nasty-looking wire fencing. I thought about asking someone where she lived, but the only person within sight was a man with no hair sitting on a low wall, smoking a cigarette. An empty pop bottle rattled along the road, and I turned and walked home instead.
I told Dad I wanted to take Stacey to the circus, but he said since we didn’t know where she lived, we had no way of asking her. Instead I had asked if Monty could come, worried he would miss us. On the odd occasion that we had gone out before, we had come back to a kitten with no voice from mewing so loudly. But Dad wasn’t sure cats were allowed at the circus, and anyway he said Monty needed to learn to be on his own. He was halfway to being fully grown now, and would no longer fit on my head as a turban, but he curled snugly round my shoulders instead.
Eventually, Dad shouted that he’d found his keys and appeared at the back door, a brown parcel in his hands.
“What’s that?”
“It’s for you. The postman’s just dropped it off.”
I sat under the willow and pulled at the string and sticky tape. Out fell a denim pinafore dress. It had large red plastic buttons like round flying saucers. I stroked one covetously.
“Who’s it from?” Dad said, leaning over and plucking out the card that came with it.
I watched as he read it, his eyebrows growing closer together the further he got.
“Who is it?” My voice was muffled as I pulled off my gingham dress, dropping it onto the ground, and stepped into my new pinafore.