Naked Angels

‘He doesn’t mind people laughing,’ Evangeline told her, in case she thought it was rude or something.

The old woman raised a finger and touched it to the part of the photo that had Lincoln’s face on it. The crow swooped so close its wing touched the window. Evangeline cried out and when she looked back the photo was back on her lap and her grandmother was gazing out at the sea again. Only this time the hankie was stuffed harder against her mouth.

Evangeline was asleep by the time they reached the house and she only woke up as the chauffeur tried to lift her out of the car seat. She wriggled a lot. She didn’t want to be lifted. She wasn’t a baby. Then she took one look at the house and she knew more than anything that she wanted to go home.

They were absolutely in the middle of nowhere. There was the house and the car and there was them and then – nothing, just the sand and the sea and a handful of gulls overhead who screamed as though they were being gutted alive. Evangeline hated the sea. She turned to look up at her grandmother. This couldn’t be true. This couldn’t be her home.

‘You live here?’ she asked. She didn’t mean to be rude, she just wanted to check the facts.

Grandma Klippel nodded. ‘Will you come inside? It’ll get chilly out here soon.’

Evangeline swallowed. ‘I think I ought to be getting back.’ No wonder they’d never had the grandmother to visit – she’d have melted away in all the noise and doggy racket of the house in Boston.

The old lady looked down at her then, looked her right in the eye for the very first time: ‘This is your home now, dear,’ she said. ‘You must live here, with me.’

Evangeline looked back at the house. The place was huge. There must have been over a hundred windows staring back at her. She could see the sky reflected in those windows – flat and grey, like curtains that needed a rinse. Saul Peterson would have needed a whole month off tending the cranberries to paint a place that size.

It was made of clapboard that was painted a dirty blue colour, like the sea should have been, with white around the windows and the doorway. Someone had made an ugly garland around the porch by pressing clamshells into cement. In front of the house were sand dunes and behind the house was the sea. It looked as though the house had turned its back on the ocean altogether because there were no windows on the lower floors on that side. The view from everywhere but upstairs would be of the grass-spiked dunes out front.

‘Patrick won’t like it here,’ Evangeline said. The sand would blow into his eyes and between his paws. They’d taken him onto the beach last year and he’d come back whining with sores between his pads. There were no trees to climb, either. She’d promised Lincoln they’d be climbing trees before the fall. What were her parents thinking of, moving out here?

Her grandmother was going into the house anyway. Evangeline picked up her school bag and ran after her.

4

By the fifth day the joke was wearing thin. Evangeline’s family was not hiding in the house; the place was huge but she’d checked it all over and anyway she would have heard Lincoln yelling at night, the rooms were so quiet. Which meant they were on their way, coming for her.

Maybe the clue was in the bit about being so good and truthful. Her grandma had said she had to be good and tell the truth, always. Good children always got their reward; she’d been told that at school often enough. Maybe they were seeing just how good she could be before they came back and surprised her. Being good would be hard, then, because she didn’t feel good, she felt mad that they’d gone at all.

Grandma Klippel lived mainly on her own, apart from a handful of staff. As well as the chauffeur, who lived in, there was Mrs O’Reilly, an elderly Irish woman bent up with arthritis who nevertheless hobbled the length of the beach each day with a bag full of half-dead flowers for the house, to cook and serve the meals. The flowers were always anemones. Grandma Klippel liked vases full of them all around the place. By the first day their heads would start to droop and by the next they were powdering tables and mantelpieces with their pollen. Mrs O’Reilly was a good person, even though she’d once been bad. Mrs O’Reilly had been good for many many years now, according to Grandma Klippel, and she didn’t seem to have that much to show for it.

Then there was the woman’s son, Evan. Evan was simple, like a child, but he could polish like a demon and came up for an hour each morning, just to clean the place. When he cleaned he made a racket with his breathing, like an old man. Evangeline wondered whether he was allergic to all the pollen he dusted.

Evangeline waited for her parents, watching at the window of her room, where she could see for miles. Few cars came by, though, and none ever stopped, apart from the vans with deliveries.

Twice a day a small plane flew by and either buzzed over the house or trawled along the shoreline like a lazy fly. Mrs O’Reilly swore it was Evan’s father flying the plane and Evan himself waved at it sometimes and did a mad frenzied sort of hopping dance along the beach after it. But Grandma Klippel told Evangeline it had nothing to do with Mrs O’Reilly or her son. She said Evan had no father, which was why he was simple.

The waiting made Evangeline cry a lot. She wasn’t scared, exactly, but she was tired and impatient and her head ached because it was full of so many questions.

The house was mainly hollow inside and a lot of the rooms stood empty. The ones that didn’t were filled with old things – dangerous things that broke if you only looked at them. Darius had brought home a few antiques once but these rooms were crammed with them. They were mostly too fancy for Evangeline’s taste; she liked new things you could play with. Grandma Klippel’s belongings made her feel jumpy and nervous. She wondered how Evan, who was fat and hopped about almost as much as Patrick, ever got by without breaking much as he polished. Then she discovered that Grandma Klippel stuck the ornaments down with tape each morning before he came.

The sea made her twitchy, too. Sometimes she would wake up frightened that it had come right up to the house. It might seep in through the doors and flood the cellar. She could hear it in the dark like a whispering, and often she thought she could make out whole words.

‘They’re not coming back,’ the sea whispered one night.

‘What?’ It woke her. She stood shivering at the window and watched it heaving. Her eyes were popping and her ears almost fell off her head, they were straining so hard.

‘They’re not coming back.’ Did she hear right or was she dreaming? What did it know? She listened till her ears actually ached with the effort. When you listened so hard to silence you thought you could hear anything. She even thought she heard her grandmother crying away in her bedroom.

‘They’re not coming back.’ The idea was ridiculous. Parents didn’t just leave their kids – not responsible parents, like hers. Besides, she’d been good for weeks and she’d even picked a spot on the bed for Patrick to sleep on. Sleeping on the bed at night might make up for all the sand.

Grandma Klippel was difficult company. Despite living alone she still carried on as though she had a house full of people, minding all her manners and dressing properly for dinner. Maybe she did it for Mrs O’Reilly and Evan. Evangeline had never dressed up for dinner before, except at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Now she did, though, because Grandma Klippel insisted on it. She also insisted Evangeline sit up straight all the time and she corrected her grammar when she said something wrong.

They said prayers before they ate and more prayers at night. Mrs O’Reilly told Evangeline her grandmother had been a regular at the church along the coast for many many years. That was how they met, Mrs O’Reilly said; she tended the flowers there and Grandma Klippel played the organ on Sundays and did good works during the week. She’d stopped going since Evangeline came to live with them, though. The day before she’d left for Boston was the last day they’d seen her there for prayers. The priest came to the house several times for visits, but Grandma Klippel had never once set foot in that church again.

Evangeline began to wonder how Darius ever grew up so normal.

‘Did Darius live here when he was a child?’ she asked her grandmother over breakfast.

The old lady always looked surprised when she spoke, as though she’d forgotten she was there, and she always paused a long while before answering, too.

‘He most certainly did,’ she told Evangeline.

‘Did he mind the sea?’

‘Mind it? He loved it. It was his passion – sailing, swimming, fishing for crabs down by the old rocks.’

She touched Evangeline on the arm. ‘Darius was a very special child, dear. Very talented. Very beautiful. So was your mother. You have a lot to live up to, you know. You have to be special too, Evangeline. Better than all the other children. It would please me so much. Do you understand?’

Evangeline looked thoughtful.

‘Is that why Darius wants us to move back out here again?’ she asked. ‘Because he misses the sea?’

The old lady sniffed. She had blue veins and brown spots on the backs of her hands and sometimes you could see her wrinkles through her make-up.

‘Darius is not coming back here, Evangeline,’ she said slowly. ‘They have gone, dear, all of them. My son, your mother. The baby. Even the dog. I’m sorry.’

‘Gone where?’ Evangeline looked at her boiled egg and the toast that Mrs O’Reilly had cut into strips. The egg was hard in the middle and dented when she poked the bread into it. Also there was no salt, there never was. For some reason Grandma Klippel would not have the stuff in the house. If you wanted salt you got it outside all right: salt on your face that the sea-spray spat up, salt on your mouth if you forgot to keep it closed, and salt caked onto just about everything that lay in the sea’s path.

There was a long silence before Evangeline looked up.

‘Gone where?’ she repeated.

Her grandmother dyed her hair, she was sure of it. When you dyed white hair chestnut what you got was orange. False teeth and dyed hair. The old lady’s hair was the colour of pine pollen.

‘Gone … away,’ Grandma Klippel replied. Her mouth was tugging at the corners again. Evangeline just stared, even though she wasn’t allowed to. The tickle of fear had started in the back of her throat. She wanted to go on eating egg but the tickle wouldn’t let her.

‘How long for?’

Grandma Klippel sighed. ‘For ever. I’m sorry.’ Evangeline nodded. A sliver of yolk managed its way down the back of her throat after all.

‘Are they on holiday?’ she asked.

The old lady shook her head.

‘They just went, dear. You must understand that they are not coming back. Ever. They just had to go away, that was all.’

‘Without me?’ It had to be asked. The yolk was slipping back up again, like snot. ‘Without you.’ ‘I won’t see them again?’ ‘No.’

‘But I was good!’ It came out choked, like a wail.

Grandma Klippel closed her eyes. ‘Then you’ll just have to be better,’ she whispered.

Then all the egg and all the tears and all the snot seemed to well up and ooze in Evangeline’s throat at once, so that she didn’t know if she wanted to cry or be sick, and she choked and hiccuped but she could suddenly neither breathe nor see.

Her grandmother stood up.

‘No tears at the table,’ was what Evangeline thought she heard her say. Maybe she was scared she’d make a mess on the white linen tablecloth.

The fog came down the following night and it stayed for a week or more, rolling mournfully around the house and making the sunsets look as though the whole sky was on fire.

When Evangeline stood on the back porch in the evening the sea’s voice was muffled, though its smell was sharper than ever. It smelt of decay, despite all the salt. She imagined it heaving with dead fish, wood from sunken boats, empty quahog shells and a gull’s corpse that floated on the tide with one filmy eye turned towards the sky that it could no longer soar about in.

The fog was so heavy her hair got wet just standing there and she had to dry it by the fire when she got inside again.

She was going to look for her parents once the fog lifted. There was no doubt about it, Grandma Klippel was wrong and the sea was wrong. Nobody went away like that. Nobody left little girls alone, it just didn’t happen. Someone had made a terrible mistake and it was up to her to sort things out. Maybe her teachers could help if she could just get back to her school. Or a policeman. Darius had always taught her to go to the police if she ever got lost while she was out.

She didn’t go to her own school any more. Grandma Klippel said it was too far away and sent her to a small private place a mile up the coast instead. She missed her friends – even Ewan Raw-meat Goodman. The new kids acted almost as though they’d been told not to speak to her. Her grandmother had her booked in under a different name, too. Evangeline Cooper – it had been her grandmother’s surname before she’d married Mr Klippel, the owner of the local bank. Walter Klippel had died so long ago there were no pictures of him in the house, just a chair Evangeline’s grandmother never used because he’d sat in it a lot.

Then one night, when the fog was at its thickest, Evangeline heard a noise like a dog howling and she knew it had to be Patrick. The waiting was over; they’d come back at last. She felt mad with her parents as well as pleased they were back. She opened her window full out and the howling grew louder, and even though it sounded as though it came from miles away – from another country, almost – she just knew he was telling her they were on their way and she would not have to wait much longer.

Excited to the point where she was leaping on the spot, she decided to go down and meet them. Pulling a big warm jumper on over her nightgown and an old pair of boots onto her feet Evangeline ran out of her room and down the landing, yelling to her grandma as she went.

‘They’re here! Grandma Klippel, they’re here, they’re outside somewhere, I heard them, I heard Patrick howling, they’re here!’

Everything was right all of a sudden. The world stopped tipping crooked and straightened out at last. She didn’t care who she woke with her shouting, she was just relieved that the waiting was over. Her legs worked like pistons and she took off down the stairs without once needing to grip on to the banister.

‘They’re here, I heard them!’ Opening the front door was a problem but it was her time at last and she knew she was on a roll, so the catches slipped back without too much fumbling and then the cold wet air hit her face and made her laugh with relief.

‘Patrick! Mommy! Daddy! Lincoln!’ She knew they’d never left her really and she was too pleased to be mad with them for disappearing like that.

‘Evangeline!’ So she’d woken her grandmother after all. ‘Evangeline!’ The old girl could holler louder than she’d thought. Her voice had a high, rasping quality that made it more like a scream than just a yell.

Evangeline took off down the sand flats, towards the sound of Patrick’s howls, her brown frizzed hair streaming out behind her like a banner.

‘Evangeline!’ She wished her grandmother would be quiet so she could hear the dog instead. She’d forgotten where the sound was coming from and she couldn’t see further than a few feet in the fog.

The sand was wet and sucked at her feet. She ran until her legs were tired and then she ran some more with them aching. Her feet got heavy with the sand and then suddenly they were heavy with water. She stopped. ‘Patrick!’

There was water on her legs. It hit the top of her boots and then – colder even than ice – it fell inside the boots with a rush.

‘Oh my.’ It was all she could think of to say and it came out in one word, like a sigh. She looked back, but there was no back any more, it had all gone in the fog. The smell of the sea overwhelmed her and the hiss of the surf was all around. Her bones began to ache from the cold but she wasn’t scared yet.

Yoo-hoo!’ she hollered, so Darius would know it was her, and at that moment there was a sharp tugging at her legs as the cross-current came to take her away.

It was the chauffeur who snatched her back, as naked as nature intended, because Grandma Klippel had not given him the option of dressing after she tipped him out of his bed. The man had plunged into the surf like an athlete and wrenched Evangeline up just as the boots were being pulled off her legs by the current.

She popped straight up like a cork from a bottle, unable to differentiate between dark and light and the sea and the shore. He carried her off roughly, hurting her arms.

Her grandmother was waiting on the dunes, her hair as wild as the marsh grass. Her teeth were missing. She carried a storm-torch in her hands and she shone it full into Evangeline’s face.

‘What in God’s name were you up to, child?’ Her voice sounded spitty and stretched out and thin with anger and concern.

‘I heard them, Grandma, they’re coming back. I went to look for them in case they missed me.’ ‘You heard them?’

Evangeline was suddenly short of air. ‘I heard Patrick, Grandma, he’s barking out there somewhere in the dark. I think he smelt me, you know. He used to be a hunting hound and he can smell…’

Her grandmother dropped the torch suddenly and seized Evangeline’s face in her white hands. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Listen to what you heard.’

There was a noise, a noise somewhere out at sea. A lonely noise. The noise Evangeline had taken for Patrick’s howls.

‘It was a foghorn,’ Grandma Klippel said angrily, ‘just a foghorn. They’re not coming back. Now why won’t you believe me?’ Her voice sounded like the sea’s voice; whispery and tired and dull. ‘Evangeline, I told you you had to be good,’ she said, sadly. ‘I thought you understood.’

The chauffeur shook water off himself like a dog and droplets flew out from his body.

On the slow walk back to the house Evangeline looked out across the beach. ‘I know you’re out there somewhere, waiting for me,’ she whispered to her parents under her breath, ‘I know you’re just lost, that’s all. I’ll be good and I know I’ll find you, don’t worry. I promise.’

5

Budapest 1981

The first metro train of the morning rattled slowly out of the terminal at Vorosmarty ter, waking the boy up. His nose was running and his bones felt as though they had been cemented in the night. Andreas was dead. It was the first thought of the day every day. It came followed closely by self-pity and then, as he woke properly, by unbearable, crushing guilt. The guilt was like a large balloon in his chest that got inflated every morning. What had he done? Why was he alive? He had no right, no right at all, now that his brother was dead.

He saw Andreas every day. His brother was haunting him. The thought made him shake, but he knew it to be true. His brother never came close – he was always hiding in crowds and dodging round corners – but he’d confront him one day, Mikhail was sure of it.

He had no one else. His mother was gone. Once he had thought about her a lot, but now he no longer knew what it was he should be thinking. Andreas had been his only parent and he had loved him all the more for that. Then he had done the terrible thing, and now he was scared of him.

Someone was watching. Maybe it was the police at last. He knew they would come for him. He wanted to pee but instead he stood up slowly, shoving his hands deep inside his trouser pockets, and mooched off casually. His black hair looked wet with grease and his face was so pale you could see veins through the skin. He walked quickly but he didn’t run. If you ran you looked as though you were up to no good. Walking with your hands in your pockets looked like you were just on your way to somewhere else.

He could hear music playing – a violin or a cello. The sound came from the railwaymen’s huts nearby. There was a smell of fresh coffee, too. Mikhail felt his stomach begin to contract with hunger. The men in there would be shaving. He thought he could smell the soap – lavender, maybe. It was as though the balloon in his chest had burst. Beads of angry sweat appeared on his forehead, even though it was winter and well below zero outside. He sobbed out loud and kicked at the wall as he passed it, and a lump of china tile fell off onto the ground.

The metro was old. The place was crumbling. The smell of the coffee wouldn’t go away, even though he had passed the last of the huts now.

The station was not a deep one and there were only a few steps to the pavement. The air that hit him was so cold he almost urinated where he stood. He set off for the old fruit market to steal some food.

They had made him go to a hostel at first, after Andreas’s death. The place was warm and the food first-rate, but he had found he couldn’t stand the fear of waiting all the time to be arrested. They would have come for him before long, he was sure of that. The two policemen at the mortuary had looked at him as though they’d known something was up. He couldn’t just wait for them; he’d had to run away.

He’d gone back to the room he’d shared with his brother, but the locks had been changed, which didn’t surprise him. He’d tried with his penknife, just in case, but the padlock held firm. Maybe it was just as well – they would have come for him there too, sooner or later. He’d wanted to get inside for a little while, though, just to check; to make sure things had really happened as they had.

So now he was living on the street. Andreas would have been mad with him – it was the one thing they’d always avoided. He pushed off down Vaci utca and past all the old pastry shops. The wind was cold but he wore his brother’s coat and it was a good one; it kept him almost warm.

He had always envied Andreas’s heavy coat and now it belonged to him. It had been lying around at the mortuary and he’d taken it, just like that. It was too big but that was all the better because it kept his legs warm, too. That was the other thing about the hostel: they had made all the boys wear short pants and he had felt stupid in them, like a child. He was twelve years old, nearly thirteen. No one of his age should be made to wear short pants, it was ridiculous.

He pulled one of Andreas’s cigarettes out of the breast pocket of Andreas’s coat and lit it with a match from Andreas’s box. The smoke kept his mouth warm. He cupped his hands over his face and inhaled as deeply as he could.

6

Cape Cod 1966

The Bentley was a pretty good drive – maybe even better than the Oldsmobile. Evangeline had made quite fair friends with the chauffeur on the school run and she knew the car had power steering and a sixteen horse-power engine – which meant that even if you had sixteen real horses harnessed to the front of the chassis the car wouldn’t have gone any faster than it did.

Grandma Klippel had paid good money to get her into that school. She could tell from the other grand cars in the drive and from the way the kids spoke without moving their lips much, but despite all that money they still had sneers and secrets leaking out of those mean little mouths.

Evangeline knew something else, too – a secret not even the know-all-miss-snotty kids knew. A secret even her grandmother wasn’t aware of. A terrible thing. She knew that her parents were dead.

They were all dead: Thea, Darius, baby Lincoln – maybe even Patrick, too, though she wasn’t sure about that. The chauffeur had told her by sheer mean mistake. He hadn’t meant to, she knew that. It had sort of slipped out while they were talking one day. It wasn’t his fault and she never found out how he knew, because Grandma Klippel had no idea – she knew that for sure.