Free Island by Jane Rogers Page B

she didn’t know I was here, the fact that I had her in my power – it was a physical pleasure. It swelled me, making me tingle with pleasurable anticipation.
    About an hour aftershe’d gone to bed I crept out into the dark hall in my socks. The floor was tiled it was cold. I stood at the bottom of the stairs listening then went to the TV room. After I’d turned the handle the door swung open on its own. The floor was wooden and warmer as soon as I stepped on to it. There was a little glowing ash in the fireplace. My mother’s sitting room. I closed the door and waited. But my eyes couldn’t make sense of the inky blackness and after a minute I turned on the light. Sod it. If she found me I’d deal with her.
    The room was full of old stuff. Not the sort of room I’ve ever lived in. I’ve seen it – in films, on telly – but I’ve never been in it. The walls were full of books, old hardback books with plain cloth covers, dull blues and reds and dusty black. In the gaps between the bookcases were prints, crummy old maps and pictures of old sailing boats, a big star-map, and drawings of plants and leaves and cross-sections of flowers with spidery writing on them. The furniture was old and none of it matched, there was a faded red velvet covered chair with a very straight back, rounded like a coin. Two tall black wooden tables with twisted carved legs. One of those sofas with one arm missing, in a dingy floral print. The mantelpiece was crammed: candlesticks, a china shepherdess, bits of paper, stones, dried leaves and twigs in a jar, squat brown bottles of liquid with labels in Latin, a mug with pipes and spills in it, photographs in silver frames. Photographs.
    Her about twenty years younger next to a big solid man, staring calmly out of the picture. She was holding a bouquet, it looked like a wedding photo although she was wearing a dark dress. Her with a kid in a garden. Calum. Her with a kid on a bicycle. The man in the middle of a huddle of posed and grinning people on the deck of a boat. The man holding up a big fish.
    Family snaps.
    Fucking cow. I sat on the red velvetchair facing the blank grey telly. The room was full of old junk like an antique shop or one of those rooms they have in a museum,
typical interior from the 1930s
. Where’d she got it? It was like a lifetime’s stuff. Parents’ and grandparents’ stuff. The rectangle of carpet on the polished wood floor was thin, it was worn and frayed under my feet where I sat on the red chair. But it didn’t feel poor it felt classy. There was a glass-fronted cabinet with stuff on display: thin old china painted midnight blue and orange; old pinkish wine glasses and a cut glass decanter, little crystal tumblers, all crammed in together probably worth hundreds.
    Was it hers or the man’s, MacLeod’s? I pulled a book off the shelf. Culpeper’s
Complete Herbal
. Inside the front cover was handwritten ‘Phyllis Lovage’. I looked in another further along – it was in Italian – then one from the opposite bookcase, a book about identifying medicinal plants. Her name was in all of them. It was her stuff. As I closed the plant book I noticed something brown poking out from between its pages; I let it fall open at the centre and there was a squashed brown rose. I picked it up by its flattened stem, it was brittle and dry and impossibly flat. She was keeping a dead rose.
    I pulled open one of the drawers under the display cabinet. It was overflowing with papers. Bills, letters, receipts. I started to read a letter from someone called Anita thanking her for the lotion and saying her skin had cleared up completely now. There were receipts for the sale of lambs; bills for sheep dip, mortgage information. The bottom drawer was full of knitting patterns, absolutely stuffed so it wouldn’t open properly. Mixed in with the patterns were more photos, ofa fat-faced rather odd-looking toddler. Calum.
    I sat on the floor next to the cabinet. All this stuff. All