Illustration © Mhairi Braden
“Keep your head down,” Ella says. “We don’t want it to be all wonky now, do we?”
“No, no,” her father replies, and places his chin on his chest dutifully. His bald patch, speckled with age spots, bursts from the centre of his head. The skin there is as thin as crepe paper. She’d only have to snag it with the comb and it would crease and rip, revealing the mass of tangled connections beneath. She has to be careful. This whole job requires care.
Ella runs the teeth of the comb through the white gauze a couple of times, then clamps a few split ends between her fingers. She makes the first cut. The hair falls and scatters across the dark towel around his shoulders. Can’t afford to waste any. Ella plucks the cuttings off the material and places them in a cup. Traces of the Horlicks he drank at breakfast have dried onto the sides – a reminder that today could turn out like any other day, if she’d only let the sequence of time unfold naturally.
And what would that involve? Putting on DVDs of Steptoe and Son or The Two Ronnies and watching him fall asleep in front of them. Taking him to the toilet every time he drank a cup of tea. Changing the incontinence pads he wore for when the tea went through him too quickly. Cleaning him up with baby wipes. Listening to him press the same key on the piano over and over again. “Can’t you hear?” he’d say. “It’s out of tune.”
No. She couldn’t take another day of that.
“Slower than my hairdresser,” her father grumbles. “Why can’t I have her again?”
She sighs. “I know you liked her, Dad, but Becky doesn’t do home visits.”
“Why can’t I go to her?”
“I told you – because of your mobility issues.”
“Oh.”
It’s true. There’s nowhere to park outside the hairdresser’s. He’d have to walk about five hundred metres from the Short Stay, a journey that involved crossing a busy road and mounting a few kerbs. Ella can just imagine the fuss he’d make about using his frame in public. She hasn’t asked if the hairdresser can do home visits. It’s not relevant.
“You’ll just have to put up with me today, Dad,” she says, patting him on the shoulder.
He grunts in response. She wonders if he fancies Becky, with her tight leggings and high ponytail. She must be about twenty. The thought makes her queasy. She takes a gulp of tea.
Bit by bit, the straggly line of hair at the back of her father’s head falls to the crisp bite of the scissors. Every so often, she brushes the towel down and collects the chopped ends into the cup, where they lie like the discarded skin from the top of a rice pudding. To it, she adds the hairs from the comb. Some of them are tipped with white bulbs. They’ll do nicely.
Her father has fallen asleep. Spittle dribbles from his open mouth onto the towel. Gently, she shakes him awake. “Right, Dad, let me show you what I’ve done.”
“What?”
“Your hair, it’s finished.”
“Am I at the hairdressers?”
“No, you’re at home, with me.”
“Where’s my hairdresser?”
Not this again. “Look,” she says, lifting a mirror from the side. “Who’s this handsome man, eh?”
He searches the mirror for the handsome man.
Her father never goes upstairs these days. It was too expensive to install a stairlift, too much fuss. So he sleeps in the living room now, in a second-hand sofa bed from Gumtree. Ella uses her parents’ old bedroom on the first floor when Rob, the carer from down the road, can’t do nights. Her own childhood room has been filled with junk over the years. It’s fine. She never liked it anyway. In fact, she’s relieved she doesn’t have to go in there. But it’s an odd feeling, sleeping in their bed – she feels like a stranger, like the guest of a guest. Her mother’s Avon perfume bottles still crowd the dressing table. The first night she stayed, Ella was woken by a powdery, violet fragrance. The stool in front of the dressing table was pulled back, as if her mother had just got up. It didn’t scare her – her mother was a comforting presence – but she hasn’t slept well in that bedroom since.
And it’s a good job. A week or so ago, she heard a terrible, strained groaning coming from downstairs and found her father dragging himself along the floor to get to the toilet. She asked him what the hell he thought he was doing as she rubbed Savlon into his carpet burns. He said that he “couldn’t be arsed” to use his frame. Even when there was no-one around to see him, he was too proud to do what was best for him.
It was in that bedroom that the idea first came to her. It must have been her mother’s influence. Mum had always been a magical thinker. When Ella was around seven years old, she’d suffered from a series of ear infections and no amount of antibiotics seemed to work. The doctors probed around for the painful lump she could feel, but their bulky instruments always covered it up rather than revealing it. After she’d been given a detention for falling asleep in class (the painkillers had been so strong), her mother decided to try alternative medicine. She took Ella to a homeopath, but that achieved nothing apart from making her visit the toilet more often.
“What do you expect?” her father muttered. “It’s just bloody water.”
Next came the herbal eardrops; they did nothing but cause the ear to itch and swell up even more painfully.
“Chinese trash,” her father complained.
Then one night, her mother came in with one of those seashells that looked like an open pair of lips underneath and a Mr Whippy on top.
“You know, you can hear the sea inside if you listen carefully,” she said, keeping her voice soft. She put it to her own ear and gasped. “It sounds like the waves. Do you want to hear?”
Ella nodded. Her mother lifted the shell towards her infected ear.
“I can’t hear out of that side,” Ella said, beginning to turn over.
“You can. You’ve just got to listen really hard.”
The cold mouth of the shell closed upon the left side of her head. She held her breath. Yes! She could hear it: the wind ruffling the sea with playful malice. Delighted, astonished, Ella glanced at her mother. She had her eyes closed and was whispering something.
“Mum, Mum! I can hear it. I can hear the sea!”
Her mother finished whatever it was she was saying and opened her smiling eyes.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
Ella woke late the next morning. The pulse of the day beat around her: other children shouting in the street; the mumble of the television in the lounge; the washing machine, chewing over its daily chores. She could hear it all. And there was no pain.
She ran downstairs to the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the table, reading a magazine.
“The earache’s gone!” Ella exclaimed.
“Oh, petal, I knew it would!”
Her mother jumped from the chair and bundled Ella in her arms. Over her shoulder, Ella could see what looked like a smashed plate on the floor. It took her a moment to recognise the swirly top of the shell amongst the fragments.
Years later, her mother had explained how to coax an illness into another body, trap it there, destroy it – or let it consume itself. If only her own death hadn’t been so unexpected. She might have been able to save the family.
Her father never did discover how Ella was able to recover from the ear infections overnight, or overcome numerous other childhood maladies with apparent ease. He didn’t question why his wife never got ill. So even if he was lucid enough to notice that Ella had collected his hair and blood and toenail clippings, he would never have thought it was for this purpose.
The head of the house is, of course, the attic. Ella pulls open the loft hatch with a hooked pole and the ladder clatters down. Hopefully, her father will sleep soundly after the dose of antihistamines she gave him along with his regular medication. She lifts the bucket of plaster and hawk board from the floor and begins her unsteady ascent.
The lightbulb in the middle of the rafters, naked apart from a veil of cobwebs, glares down at the mess. There are suitcases up here that haven’t seen the outside world for decades, games that have never been played. But there are also things that Ella recognises, like the box of papier-mâché Christmas decorations that made an appearance every year when her mother was alive. She lifts one of the baubles up to the light, twirling it round in her fingers. It shows Father Christmas placing presents under a tree, while two children peek out at him from between the bannisters. He knows he’s being watched. He winks conspiratorially at Ella. For a moment, she imagines that this furtive little creature is in on her plan. We both know enough about secrets, don’t we now? he seems to say. She doesn’t like the feeling of intimacy this creates, and buries the bauble under a flourish of tinsel.
Shuffling on her hands and knees, she reaches the bare patch of wall at the far end of the attic and opens the pot of plaster. Her father’s hair is totally submerged in the mixture. She worries that it may have sunk right to the bottom, like currents in a fruitcake, and that all she’ll smear onto the brickwork is ground-up rock and water. Then she notices how one of the longer hairs dangles off the edge of the hawk board, and she smiles. After a couple of deep breaths, she closes her eyes and tries saying the words of the charm.
“Re … reck … recede demens.
It doesn’t feel natural, not like when her mother did it. When she spoke, it sounded like some wind that had skimmed across the centuries was blowing through her. Where had she learnt it, that ancient grace? Certainly not from her own parents, whose proudest achievement was running a chippie in Harrogate.
“Recede demens,” Ella repeats, her voice lifting. “Invoc … invoc …”
The temperature around her begins to drop. Blonde hairs rise on her bare arms.
“Invocatio Hek … ate nomine.”
That scent again – crushed violet and rose.
“Demens!” she cries suddenly. “Leave my father and find a new host in the wood and brick of this house.”
The fragrance – her mother’s fragrance – blows through her now. She smears the mixture of hair and plaster onto the wall.
“May the plaques in his mind crack. May the tangles unwind. Demens, leave his brain and find new lodgings. In nomine Hekate.”
Her arm has a will of its own, sweeping the length of the wall over and over again until she opens her eyes and sees the finished job – a layer of grey matter, patterned with swirls of her father’s clipped hair and microscopic morsels of skin. The tips of her fingers are tingling, like her spirit has just slipped back into her body and is getting used to the feeling of warm flesh again. She’d been outside herself, out of control, but not in that bad way, not like those nights when … It had been a good feeling this time. Her mother’s influence. Not her father’s.
Next, Ella makes her way to the cupboard under the stairs, where she opens the bag containing bloodied bits of tissue. The blood had been the most difficult thing to collect. For ages, she debated with herself whether she should do it. Her instinct cried against it. But she couldn’t think of an alternative. She’d given great thought as to how to collect the blood. He wouldn’t allow her to shave his legs. She thought of cutting him in his sleep, but the idea turned her stomach. In the end, she attached a razor to the edge of a kitchen chair. It sliced into his leg as he sat down. He sprang to his feet, wobbling dangerously.
“What is it, Dad?”
“Something stung me!”
“What? Just now?”
“Aye.”
Trickles of scarlet ran down the back of his thigh. It looked obscene on an old man.
“I’ll get you cleaned up,” she breathed, appalled and excited by what she had done.
Now, she screws up those red-blotched tissues and inserts them into the gaps in the stairs, reciting another charm. This one is to take the weakness from his legs. She’d use the toenails too – drop them into a hole in the floor – just to be safe.
At first, Ella thinks it must have failed. She doesn’t visit him the next day, precisely for fear of seeing no change in him. Rob takes charge of the care, and when she speaks to him that evening, he says in his normal affable manner that the old man is fine, if a little drowsy.
“Anything else?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
She ponders how to make it sound natural. “I mean, how was his mental state?”
“Well, he was too dozy to be very responsive, really.”
“Okay, right,” she says, trying not to let the disappointment colour her voice.
“Ella?”
“Yes?”
She’s convinced that he’s going to mention it then. Why are there blood-stained tissues shoved into the cracks under the stairs? Why did I find toenails under a tile in the kitchen? She’ll blame her father, if he asks. People with dementia do all sorts of unexpected things, even when the disease is at a fairly early stage.
“Would you … would you like to come round mine for dinner tomorrow?”
“What?” she says, taken aback by the innocence of the request.
“You don’t have to! It was just an idea. I’ve picked up some lamb from the farmer’s market and I thought – ”
Ella laughs for what feels like the first time in years. “Oh! Yes. Yes, of course! That sounds lovely, Rob. I’d like that.”
He must be about ten years younger than her, but he’s a salt of the earth type. Responsible. Reliable. Kind. She’d always wondered if there was more than mere neighbourly friendliness to the way he praised her for making such ‘sacrifices’. You’re a good person, he’d told her once, and she’d even believed him for a time.
She tries to keep the cheerful prospect of dinner with Rob at the forefront of her mind as she enters her childhood home a couple of days after the ritual. What had she really expected, anyway? All those cures her mother gave her – they were more a case of mind over matter than anything else. There’s nothing magical about that sick ritual the other night. If anything, it shows how tired, how stressed she’s getting. But as soon as she steps inside, she knows that something is different.
For one thing, she hears the piano. It’s not just that one note being played over and over again. It’s a melody from one of her father’s songbooks of show tunes. He’s playing just the right-hand part, and the notes fall like raindrops from a cloud that’s finally broken.
“Nice to hear you play, Dad,” she says as she walks into the living room. The woollen blanket that usually covers his knees lies crumpled on the sofa bed. He’s framed in the bay window, the curvature of his back silhouetted against the grey November light.
“I’m rusty,” he says.
“It’s been a long time though, hasn’t it?”
She sits down on the sofa and watches as he picks out the left-hand part with his gnarled fingers. “Aye,” he concedes. “It has been a long time. But this piano has sounded so out of tune lately. Did you get it fixed?
She smiles to herself. “Yeah, Dad, I got it fixed.”
The Art Deco clock mounted above the fireplace – the one that’s green as travel sickness and has an obnoxiously loud tick – it’s an hour behind. She checks her watch just to be sure. As she thought, it’s already gone half-five. She’s due at Rob’s in an hour. Tonight, he’s trying his hand at risotto.
“Are you sure you’re okay spending another day with your dad?” he asked her yesterday evening as she was leaving. “You’ve done all the hard work of late. I’ve barely seen the old man.”
She chuckled. “Don’t be daft, it’s fine. You deserve a break after all your help. Besides,” she added, pulling on her shoes, “I’d rather spend some time with him. I don’t think he’s very long for this earth.”
He nodded sombrely. That’s how much he trusted Ella now – he simply took her word for it.
“I’ll do tomorrow and you do the next day, okay? I wouldn’t want my dad to get in the way of the preparations for your feast.”
“Now don’t expect too much of me!” he laughed. “I’m not that good, you know.”
She paused with her hand on the latch. “You’re perfect, Rob.”
He laughed again, more awkwardly that time. A week of going around to his house for dinner, and he hadn’t made a move. But tonight’s the night. Making risotto means opening a bottle of wine, and opening a bottle of wine means … well, everybody knows what opening a bottle of wine means.
Her father is intent on making the time go as slowly as possible, though. There is he is, rubbing a piece of shortbread between his thumb and index finger until it crumbles to sand.
“You alright, Dad?” she asks. “Want another cup of tea?”
Her father looks up. That glassy, vacant expression has gone. There’s something new there. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was frightened. “No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
“You done with those biscuits?”
“Yes,” he replies, pushing the plate to one side.
She wants to check the room, just to make sure it’s ready. It would be awful if she got this far and then ruined it all with bad timing. She gets up.
“Where are you going?”
“Just off to the toilet, Dad.”
She’s halfway through the door when he says it. “What have you done to my house?”
She stops. “What’re you talking about?”
“My house!” he says, slamming his hand on the table. She jumps.
“I haven’t – ”
“Don’t play daft with me. You think I haven’t noticed? You’ve done something to it. It’s all wrong.”
He’s nothing but an old man now. He can’t hurt you anymore.
She faces him, defiant. Despite the strength that’s come back to him over the past week, he’s still frail. It would only take a push and he’d be rolling on the floor like a capsized tortoise.
“What can I possibly have done?” Ella asks.
He doesn’t have an answer. Of course he doesn’t. He can’t explain why the house suddenly feels like it’s haunted.
“The curtains,” he manages at last. “You’re shutting them.”
She shakes her head. “No. I’ve been the one going around opening them. You must close them and then forget about it.”
“I’m not forgetting, I’m not,” he shouts. “I know it’s you. You and your mother, you were always …”
What’s this? Has he figured it out after all these years?
“Go on.”
Again, he can’t explain. He’s had chances – many chances – to be curious. But he always put unusual behaviour down to women’s little quirks. You’re mysterious creatures, he’d said more than once. It gave him an excuse for never trying to understand more about them, for controlling them when he thought they needed reigning in. Maybe it was time for him to finally understand.
“I can show you,” she says.
“Eh?”
“I’ll show you what I’ve done. Come on.”
He sways in his chair, unsure whether to believe her or not.
“You want to see what I’ve done, don’t you? Well, up you get.”
She pulls his chair out and the table moves with him because he’s gripping the edge so hard.
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“I’m not scared.”
He stands without the help of her arm or a frame. He must have noticed the difference in his body but he keeps quiet about that. She gets no thanks for restoring the use of his legs, so that now he can walk unassisted to the foot of the staircase. The blood has done its work. The steps sag in the middle. They look like they’re made not of wood, but of cloth, held up loosely on either side. Ella pinches her father’s sleeve, pulling him towards them.
“Come on. We need to go upstairs.”
He resists. “It’s dangerous.”
“Don’t worry – I won’t let you fall. Just hold on to the bannister rail and you’ll be fine.”
It proves more difficult than she thought. The steps are not where they once were. Some are several centimetres higher than they should be; others have shifted further to the left and Ella has to stretch her arm out to reach the bannister. She’s still holding her father’s jumper with the other hand. He follows compliantly, too frightened and disorientated to turn back.
The first floor landing is dim. All of the doors are shut. All the curtains are closed. It’s cold and damp, like no-one has put the heating on for years. And – no, it’s not just a trick of the light, or lack of light – the colour of the walls has changed. It’s the sky blue of her adolescent years up here now. She remembers choosing the paint: ‘In the clouds’, it was called. She’d thought the peaceful colour would help her cast off the pall of her mother’s death. But those were the years when everything got worse.
Ella walks him across the landing now, up to her bedroom door. It’s covered in stickers from her teenage years: the letters of her name; butterflies dancing in a figure of eight.
“Why are we going here?” he asks with a tremble in his voice. “There’s nothing in here but junk.”
She doesn’t know what she’ll find in there today. Last time she checked the attic, the wall she’d plastered was unrecognisable. It was covered in a fine, sticky film that had congealed in places to form discs, round as startled eyes, and tent-shaped clots. When she placed her fingertips on the surface, she felt it pulsing, like weak electric currents were running through it. The charm was potent, far more potent than she could have hoped.
“Let’s open it and see,” she says.
“I don’t … I don’t want to.”
She unlocks the door. There is no junk in the room anymore. There’s her narrow bed, pushed against the wall. There’s her desk, where she used to do her homework. There’s the mirror, which caught her father’s reflection when he came into the room late one night.
The sticky substance has spread from the attic and now covers the windows and walls like giant cobwebs. She leads her father inside, and the mirror catches his reflection once again.
“I don’t understand,” he sobs. “What is all this? Why – ”
Ella pats his shoulder. “I just want you to remember what you did to me, Dad. That’s all.”
She watches him sink onto the bed and steps backwards out of the room. As she turns the key in the lock, she catches the smell of her mother’s perfume. Maybe she’ll wear some tonight, for dinner with Rob. She picks up a bottle from the dressing table in her parents’ bedroom and walks downstairs for the final time, minutes before the steps collapse in on themselves.
Sophia Adamowicz
Sophia Adamowicz is a medievalist turned tutor. She has been writing seriously since 2018, when she won the Festival of Thought Competition and began the first of two courses with Faber. Sophia is currently working on her first novel, The Frithyard, a near-future dystopia set in a strange sanctuary. Her other writings include an article for Horrified online horror magazine and various academic publications. In her spare time, Sophia wanders the Cambridgeshire Fens, dreaming of dog ownership.
Twitter: @SophiaA_writes