Free The Crooked House by Christobel Kent Page B

that was now, she’d seen in passing, net-curtained and silent. The girls had just started going, the two of them on Saturday morning begging to be allowed. Dad was always bad news on a Saturday morning by then, cursing as he filled the kettle and swallowed painkillers, so Mum had let them go reluctantly, frowning as they raced each other along the top of the sea wall. The twins, skipping silhouetted against the endless sky, bright and wicked and loving – and strange.
    They’d turned more so, towards the end, hiding in cupboards together, writing in secret notebooks; there’d been a reason. Alison faltered, almost stopped. She remembered Mum pale and depleted, unloading the two of them from the car after a hospital visit, when had that been? When had that started? Mum distant. There had been other trips to the doctor’s, blood tests, the girls tired and scrappy and bickering afterwards. How could Alison have forgotten? Mum had made light of it, routine, she said, but Joe had said one evening,
She’s worried.
And whispering back to him Alison remembered observing then that Mum still thought of her and Joe as extensions of herself, she didn’t understand that they saw things. Understood things. Such as, not everything grown-ups said was true.
    Another hundred yards downhill, fifty, with the stones loose and treacherous under her feet, and then the hedges parted and there it was. The horizon: the power station, the church, the grey tufted marsh and the sparkling distance where the flat water met the sky. At an angle to her path the wide bumpy track led out from the back of the village and where they intersected it still stood. The crooked house, its brick dark and its angles wrong, a blotch on the pale lovely morning. She had to make herself breathe.
    As she ran that last stretch, its tilted shape jumped and shifted until she was dizzy so Alison just stared at the path and then she was in its long, cool shadow. The tide was low but not fully out yet. She looked up.
    Thehouse was boarded and derelict, weathered plywood splintered and graffitied at each window and the purple spikes of some plant sprouting above the lintel over the front door. The little enclosed yard behind where they had hidden and whispered and left secret messages. Thirteen years.
    Approaching in the lee of the seawall, hidden from the village view, she skirted the house. She put a hand to its brick flank and found it already warm from the sun. The brick was crumbling and pitted with neglect and salt erosion; looking up she saw that the roofline sagged, a piece of guttering fallen away.
    Her heart would not slow down, in fact she felt as if it would rise and swell into her throat and choke her. What had she expected? That the house had been sold, renovated, extended, a family living there? The truth was she had expected nothing: in her brain she had forced the house into the setting of a horrible story, of a bad, bad dream, branching into cellars and cluttered attics and corridors that had never existed except in her imagination and she would come here to find nothing at all. A windswept marsh, a bumpy track that led to nowhere but another empty berth. That hope blew away on the wind. Because here it stood.
    The graffiti on the boarded bay window to what had been the sitting room was layered and faded, scratched messages and crude diagrams. One word isolated itself,
Joe
, written in pale marker almost gone and if there’d been anything else attached to his name it had been written over or obliterated.
Joe
. Other names, some she recognised, some were strangers.
    And then her brother was there in her head after everything she’d done to hold him at bay all this time. Watchful, quiet Joe, helping unload the car right here the day they arrived. And later, years later, fierce tongue-tied Joe, out on the beach below the power station, smoking dope with the other boys, getting angry about something. Those boys. Joe surly andrefusing to come home. One night