The Woman in the Woods Read online

  This is the part of it all that I can’t seem to make sense of. Naomi is my friend, and until I saw her sitting with Rav in the pub, with her knee pressed against his, I would have trusted her with my life. We’ve been friends for years, since before I met Rav, before I finished my floristry course. We’ve been through so much together. We’ve spent birthdays and Christmases together, been on holiday together, been through break-ups and weddings together. The vision of Naomi looming over me as I half doze, scissors in her hand, appears again and I shake it off. That didn’t happen, there is no way Naomi would entertain the idea of witchcraft, she’s far too sensible. Isn’t she? Maybe she didn’t even realize the significance of the sage, the seated circle. Naomi loves me, Rav, she loves the children. The children even more so, given that she can’t have any of her own.

  My steps slow as I approach the car park to the preschool and I battle tears, blinking hard and taking deep breaths. I don’t know what to think anymore. Maybe Rav and Naomi are right, and there is something the matter with me, I am going crazy. Maybe it’s just nothing, and I am being a drama queen. But then I think of the twined hair, the feeling of foreboding that I had when I first held it, the way the air had changed around me. I think of Rav lying directly to my face about where he had been the night that I saw him and Naomi in the pub, her name on his phone when she told me she hadn’t spoken to him. No, I think, someone is out there, and all of this is connected, somehow. As I reach the steps to the preschool the door swings open and Naomi steps out, holding Mina by the hand.

  ‘Mummy!’ Mina rushes forward, flinging her tiny arms around my waist. ‘You are so late.’

  ‘I know, darling, I’m so sorry.’ I kiss the top of her head and raise my eyes to where Naomi stands awkwardly at the top of the steps. ‘What are you doing here?’ I feel a bubble of irrational anger rising in my throat, ready to pop and spill out fury across the pavement. I think of the blurred picture, trying to match it with Naomi’s face.

  ‘I came to fetch Mina. Rav called me.’

  ‘Rav called you?’ I snatch up Mina’s hand, gripping tightly as she tries to twist away from me. ‘Why the hell did he call you? I was coming to get her, I was just a bit late.’

  ‘You’re nearly an hour late, Al,’ Naomi says quietly, her gaze drifting down to where Mina is pouting, still tugging away from me. ‘The school tried to call you and you didn’t answer your phone. They called Rav, who also couldn’t get hold of you, so he called me and told the school I would be collecting her.’

  ‘And you were just ready to step in,’ I say bitterly.

  ‘What?’ Naomi steps forward and I glare at her, pausing her in her tracks. ‘Allie? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Ready to step in and be a perfect mother, just like the other day when the baby was crying and I was out in the garden.’ Mina tries to pull her hand away again, starting to cry when I hold it tighter.

  ‘Allie, don’t be so ridiculous. I picked Leo up because he was crying, that’s all. I was just trying to help.’

  ‘By taking him out of his cot and away from where I left him, so I didn’t know where he was? What would you have done today? What would have happened if I had arrived to pick up Mina and she was gone because you had already taken her?’ My breath hitches in my chest and I realize Mina is not the only one about to cry. It’s as if everything I know has changed, morphed into something unrecognizable. The sight of Naomi here now, holding Mina by the hand has rattled me even more.

  ‘Allie, please calm down.’ Naomi does step towards me now, reaching out to rest one hand on my arm. ‘Look, if you hadn’t arrived, I would have taken Mina back to the shop and called and texted you to let you know she was there. I didn’t know you were on your way, I didn’t know what had happened. I just did what Rav asked me to do. I only wanted to help.’

  ‘I don’t need any help,’ I say, but the words come out weakly. ‘I was just … I lost track of time.’

  ‘We all do that occasionally,’ Naomi laughs, an effort at normality, before her face turns serious again. ‘Al, what really is the problem? You seem a little … I don’t know. Off. On edge. Have you seen something again?’

  ‘No. Nothing. I had a late night, that’s all.’ I don’t say anything about the witch’s ladder. Not in front of Mina. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to overreact. I wasn’t expecting you to be here, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s fine, I understand.’ Naomi holds her arms out to Mina for a goodbye hug. ‘I’m your friend, Al. I’m here to help you. I told you, you can always ask me, and I’ll do whatever you need.’

  There is a look on her face that I can’t quite read, and I feel prickly and irritable again. ‘It’s fine, honestly. I can manage, time just got away from me today.’

  Naomi nods. ‘I’ll see you later, maybe? We’ll catch up properly soon.’ She chucks Mina under the chin and steps past me, walking away in the direction of The Daisy Chain.

  ‘Naomi,’ I call out, ‘how do you know Tara Newman?’

  ‘Who?’ she calls back, pausing and turning to face me. She shrugs, raising her palms to the sky and pulling a face, before she waves and walks away.

  Mina and I stroll in silence through the village to the outskirts where Avó lives in a house much smaller than ours. No witchcraft attached to hers though, hers is a brand spanking new build, complete with all magnolia walls and a badly laid herringbone paved driveway. Mina is sulky, annoyed that I grabbed her so hard and that I didn’t let her go to the shop with Naomi. I try to push away the shards of guilt I feel at hurting her tiny hand, concentrating instead on the photo on Tara’s Facebook. Maybe it wasn’t Naomi in the photo? She doesn’t seem to know who Tara is. I try to recall the blurred face in the picture, but now I am doubting myself, thinking that perhaps I was seeing things that weren’t really there.

  Avó is waiting for me on the doorstep when we turn into her road. She scoops Mina into her arms, and I follow her into the small, white kitchen. The baby snoozes in the pram, and I reach in and pull the blanket lower down. It’s warm in here, the air rich with the scent of spices as something bubbles away on the stove.

  ‘Thanks for having him, Avó,’ I say, scooping up the empty baby bottles on the draining board and tucking them into the nappy bag that hangs from the handles of the pram.

  ‘It’s no problem,’ Avó says. She peers closely at me, before taking my face in her hands. I can smell the hand lotion she uses, and the floral oil in her hair. She looks up at me, her black eyes intent on my face. She is at least five inches shorter than me and I feel like a giant beside her. ‘You are not happy,’ she says. ‘There is something wrong.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Her fingers are cold on my face and I resist the urge to pull away. ‘Just tired, like Rav said, I had a late night, and he wanted me to sleep.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Her eyes are bright with suspicion. ‘You always say you are just tired. I don’t think so.’

  ‘I am, Avó, I swear. There’s nothing else.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ I squeeze out a laugh and, uncomfortable under her scrutiny, give in to the urge to pull back. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘You seem agitated, like someone has upset you,’ she needles on.

  ‘I said I’m fine,’ I snap, regretting it immediately. ‘Sorry, Avó, I was late for Mina, and I got upset, you were right. Please don’t mention it to Rav? I’m OK now, I promise.’

  Avó follows me to the front door, watching silently as I struggle to get the pram over the threshold. I get the feeling that there is more she wants to say to me, but she says nothing, instead reaching up to kiss me on the cheek as I turn to say goodbye. She has never done that before, and I don’t really know what to make of it.

  I can feel it the moment we step back into the hallway, Mina running upstairs as the baby starts to grizzle in the pram. The air is disturbed, and I know someone is in the house.

  ‘Rav?’ I call out cautiously, even though I know it would be nigh on impossible for him to g
et home before me unless he’d already left when he called. ‘Is that you?’

  My mother appears in the kitchen doorway, watching as I wrestle a now screaming baby from the pram. She looks as chic as ever, this time wearing a white shift dress that I remember from my childhood. She used to wear it through the summer to pick me up from school, with a pair of hot pink wedges and huge sunglasses on her face. I was always mortified when she turned up to collect me in her glamorous outfits, my tiny ears not immune to what the other mothers were saying about her. I thought I remembered her throwing the dress out with a bundle of other things when she moved into her Paris apartment, but clearly not. She looks cool and fresh, while I am sweating, the baby cross and red-faced in my arms, my trainers covered with dust from the walk home along the country lane.

  ‘You left the back door unlocked again,’ Mum says in answer to my unasked question. I brush past her into the kitchen, sitting in the chair closest to the door and latching the baby on. ‘You could be murdered in your beds.’

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ I say, sighing as a cool breeze wafts in from the garden, lifting my hair off my face and winding its way round my bare legs. ‘Rav must have opened it this morning.’

  ‘You need to be more careful.’ My mother’s face is serious. ‘You don’t know who is out there.’

  ‘Did you see someone?’ My shoulders tense, and the scent of lavender and mint wafts in through the open door. I struggle to turn to look out on to the woods, the baby squirming as I move my body.

  ‘No. I’m just saying you need to be careful. What’s the matter? You look pale, something has happened.’

  I should have known that she would know, without me even mentioning it. She has always had a knack of reading me like a book, an open book with fully illustrated pictures. I wait until the baby has finished feeding and I have laid him in his bouncy chair, before I go upstairs to the drawer of trinkets. I pause for a moment, the drawer opened in front of me, not wanting to put my hands inside, not wanting to touch the bones and hair secreted away in there, before I shake myself.

  Ridiculous, I mutter under my breath, it’s just bones. Hair. It can’t hurt you. Even so, I wrap the items in the blue blanket before carrying them down and laying them on the table in front of my mum.

  ‘What is that? This … horrible thing.’ She points at the witch’s ladder, the ‘h’ sliding from ‘horrible’.

  ‘I found it in the chimney. It’s some sort of … witchy ritual. Curse. Witches used to use them to cast spells.’ Looking at it, a familiar chill creeps up my spine, that thick, oily badness seeping from it into the air around us, and I can’t bring myself to use the word death. ‘Mum, I wish we’d never come here. I wish I’d told Rav I wanted to stay in Ebbsfleet.’ Tears make my throat thicken, making it hard for the words to come out. ‘I don’t care about the garden, the village life, the space. I don’t want a garden full of toxic plants and a house with a history of witchcraft. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.’

  ‘But this was what you wanted. You were excited to move here,’ my mother says quietly. ‘I thought you wanted what was best for the children.’

  ‘Yes, of course I do, but honestly, Mum, this doesn’t feel that great.’ I feel sulky, like I did as a teenager when she disagreed with me. ‘At least if we had stayed in Ebbsfleet none of this would ever have happened.’

  ‘And what if Rav had refused to stay? If he had said he would come here alone and leave you? Would that be better?’ She stalks to the open door and lights a cigarette. ‘Remember, Alys, I brought you up alone after your father left. I wouldn’t go with him when he wanted to go back to France, I stayed in England for you. Believe me, it is harder to be alone.’

  And then the minute I showed you I could stand on my own two feet, you hot-footed it right back to Paris anyway, I think, a bitter worm turning in my stomach. It feels odd to hear her defending Rav, when usually she disagrees with everything he says. ‘If I had stayed in the flat, no, things wouldn’t have been ideal, but at least I wouldn’t have been dealing with stuff like this.’ I throw my hand out towards the bones, the twined hair. ‘Witchcraft, Mum. Someone has been watching the house. I hear things, see things and then they vanish, like they were never there. I feel as though something has cursed me.’

  ‘Something?’ Blue smoke hazes around her perfectly bobbed hair. ‘Allie, there is no something. Don’t you think it makes more sense that this is the work of someone?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘of course it’s the work of someone, not something. That’s what I meant.’ I just don’t know if that someone is a woman accused of terrible things four hundred years ago.

  ‘Then you need to figure out who it is.’ My mother gives one of her Gallic shrugs, as if finding out who is responsible will be easy.

  ‘I think I should show this witch’s ladder to Miranda,’ I say carefully, hoping that she’ll give me something to go on this time. ‘She might be able to tell me what it’s for, what I should do with it.’ Quickly, before I can change my mind, I snap a photo of it, laid out on the table, and check the image, suddenly irrationally sure that there will be a blank space in its place.

  A wail comes from upstairs and my mother glances at her watch. ‘Well yes, maybe that’s where you start. Be careful who you trust, Alys.’ Another wail comes and then there is a thud. Mina.

  ‘I have to check on her.’ Hurrying up the stairs into Mina’s bedroom I find it is nothing serious, and I spend ten minutes soothing her, putting a cold flannel on her finger where she has pinched it in the hinge of a plastic box of bricks. When I step back into the kitchen, sweat pooling at the base of my spine in the mid-afternoon heat, my mother is on her feet, bag on her shoulder.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you, to show this thing to the girl, Miranda?’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I say, fingering the edge of my phone, aware of the photo of the items in my camera roll. I don’t want to touch the bones again, to have to carry them with me to show her. ‘You look as if you need to go. I’ll let you know what she says.’ I see her to the door and then sit alone at the kitchen table, the ash rolling around the back door the only sign she was ever here.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Rav eyes me cautiously when he comes home, tiptoeing around me as if I am a bomb about to go off. He bathes Mina and I hear the rumble of his voice overhead as he reads her a story. I find myself hoping he’ll eke it out, knowing that when he comes downstairs and we are alone he’ll want to talk over what happened this morning – why I forgot all about our daughter.

  By the time he comes downstairs I have thought of the perfect avoidance technique, and my bag is already over my shoulder, his car keys in my hand.

  ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’

  ‘Nappies,’ I say, with a bright smile. ‘We need more nappies. When I put the baby to bed, I realized we were down to the last pack.’

  ‘We’ve got enough to last us til the morning,’ Rav says, reaching for the strap of the bag. ‘Come and sit in the kitchen. I’ll make dinner.’

  ‘I’d rather go now.’ I pull away, brushing past him towards the front door, trying not to limp on my bad ankle as I wait to feel his hand on my arm to stop me, but he just follows me to the door.

  ‘Allie, it can wait. Please, we need to talk.’

  ‘Rav, I’ll be ten minutes – twenty tops.’ I look down at the keys in my hand. ‘Please, let me go. I just need a bit of fresh air. I won’t be long.’

  ‘OK,’ he sighs after a long moment. He steps away from the front door, a resigned look on his face. ‘I’ll start cooking. But when you get back, I really think we need to talk about what happened today with Mina. Please, Allie. I’m worried about you.’

  ‘OK, Rav. I said I’ll be back in ten minutes.’

  I don’t look back as I get into the car, fumbling for the ignition before driving the short distance to the local Co-op. As I park up, a gaggle of ghost hunters hurry past the car, clutching their cameras and phones to their c
hests, one of the girls giving a shrill, nervous laugh as they pass. They head along the High Street, past the pub and towards the outskirts of the woods and I wait until they have stepped into the darkness of the trees before I exit the car. Stepping inside the store, the lights are bright and I squint, half wishing I’d stayed home and faced Rav’s questions. I browse the aisles, not in any rush, tucking a packet of newborn nappies into my basket alongside a jar of fancy coffee. Neither Rav nor I drink it, but my mother practically lived on black coffee and her trusty cigarettes while I lived at home. Turning into the dairy aisle, I see Miranda standing in front of the yoghurts, holding a carton in one hand as she stares unblinking into the fridge. She is alone, no sign of the baby, and I quickly turn and move into the sweet aisle, not sure if I should approach her or not. Lurking over bars of Dairy Milk, I dither as she hovers in indecision, before snatching up another carton and heading to the till. Suddenly panicking that she’ll leave, I hurry past the chocolate, towards the bottles of fizzy drinks so I can catch her. As she stuffs her purchases into a compostable carrier bag, Miranda looks up and sees me.

  ‘Hi, Allie,’ she says quietly, and I nod in her direction. She takes her receipt and steps towards me. ‘No baby, eh? It feels odd, doesn’t it. Did you put some comfrey on that ankle?’ Her words tumble over one another as if she is racing to get them all out before I make an escape.

  ‘No, no baby. And no comfrey either. I don’t think I have it in my garden.’ I smile and move past her to the till.