Sugar Hall E-Book

Tiffany Murray

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 336

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

It's Easter 1955, as Lilia scrapes the ice from the inside of the windows, and the rust from the locks she knows there are pasts that lurk with the moths in the folds of the drapes at Sugar Hall that she cannot reach. Mouldering in the English border countryside the red gardens of Sugar Hall hold a secret, and as Britain waits for its last hanging, Lilia and her children must confront a history that has been buried but not forgotten. Based on the stories of the Black Boy that surround Littledean Hall in the Forest of Dean, this is a superbly chilling ghost story from Tiffany Murray.

Leseprobe

Contents

Also by Tiffany Murray

Title Page

Dedication

Quotes

1. Sunday, Easter Holidays, 1955, in Grandfather Sugar's House

2. Lilia Sugar Stops to Think

3. Dieter Writes Two Letters

4. Mr John Phelps Helps

5. The Shirt

6. Lilia Digs

7. A Murder

8. John Phelps’ Secret

9. Dachkammer

10. Maybug

11. The Hunt

12. A Hammer, a Fruitcake, a Cake Knife, Tin Snips and a Metal File

13. Awakenings

14. Saskia’s Party

15. A Trial

16. The Snoopers

17. A Visitor

18. Strong Black Coffee

19. Thunder

20. The Lepidopterist

21. Doctor Portman’s Orders

22. A Midnight Feast

23. Fire Lantern

24. Set Them Free

25. Saskia Says Goodbye

26. A Gift

27. The River

28. Against the Clock

29. The Cow

30. July 13th, 1955, 7:00 BST

31. July 13th, 8:50 BST

32. Up, Up, in Our Air Balloon!

33. A Late Autumn Auction

34. Epilogue, September 12th, 1965

Acknowledgements

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Copyright

Also by Tiffany Murray

Diamond Star Halo

Happy Accidents

Sugar Hall

Tiffany Murray

for Kamau Brathwaite

And limbo stick is the silence in front of me

limbo

limbo

limbo like me

limbo

limbo like me

long dark night is the silence in front of me

limbo

limbo like me

From ‘Limbo’, by Kamau Brathwaite

…All children – whether good or bad – eventually find their way home…

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz

For the last ninety years the drive had been growing narrower as the rhododendrons grew larger.

In Youth is Pleasure, Denton Welch

Sunday, Easter Holidays, 1955, in Grandfather Sugar’s House

1

When Dieter Sugar backed out of the long shed that edged the Hall’s red gardens, when he ran through the graveyard with its tiny headstones to make a stumbling shortcut across the grass meadow where frilled daffodils bobbed like sprung Jack-in-the-boxes, when he sprinted past the black water of the ancient swimming pool onto the yellow gravel that made a sound like crunched sugar between teeth (and ‘Sugar’ was his name after all), when Dieter bounded up those grey steps, into the ancient house that he could never think of as his, when he shot through that cathedral-sized hall that smelled of marzipan (on account of the rat poison and not the cake his mother had told him), when he sprinted past the carved oak staircase and into the long room someone had named ‘the reception’, gliding to a stop on the polished floor, Dieter Sugar knew he was afraid.

He was petrified.

‘What is it, Dee?’ his mother asked as she unwrapped white tissue paper from small objects he had forgotten were theirs.

Dieter’s words came out a jumble as he tried to tell his mother and sister what he’d seen. It was hard to put into words. There was a boy; there was a small boy and the boy appeared out of thin air, and he, Dieter Sugar, was sure this boy was something different, he was almost certain this boy wasn’t like any other boy he’d seen before.

To begin with, the boy wore something bright round his neck: a silver collar. It had writing on it, but it had glinted in the sun and Dieter couldn’t read it.

It was his older sister, Saskia, who interrupted. ‘Don’t you have anything better to do than make things up?’ The sharp snap of Saskia’s voice echoed in the long room and she shook those things she called her ‘heavenly hips’. (Dieter had once heard Saskia say her hips were more heavenly than a Knickerbocker Glory.)

‘I’m not making it up. He just popped into the air, from nothing, and he stared at me and didn’t say a word, and he looked so ill, and I felt dreadfully funny all over. Thereisa strange boy out there.’

Dieter pointed to the bay window and the wild red gardens. He squinted; it was all too bright in the countryside and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like this house: he hated the fact it was home now. London was his place to be. By the river: Churchill Gardens.

‘He just appeared, and he wore a silver collar…’ Dieter’s voice tailed off.

Saskia latched onto these last words and snorted. ‘Don’t be silly, Dee. Boys don’t wear collars. Vicars do and dogs do.’She glared at him and Dieter felt his fear settle, a burrowing toad. The points of the toad’s wet, sharp feet, its warty sides, all dug deep into Dieter’s belly; his breath went and he collapsed into his grandfather’s lime-green armchair.

Dust puffed.

This reception room was green. Green silk wallpaper, patterned with gigantic open-winged butterflies and hairy moths, peeled just below the line of the ceiling; at times Dieter was sure he heard these insects flutter. Green velvet curtains held greener mould in their swags, and there, by the great gape of a fireplace – like a black mouth and such a long way away – was an even greener something Saskia called achaise longue. It sat directly beneath the dead bulbs of a light Saskia had told him was achandelier(Dieter was learning so many new words in this strange house, it was exhausting). As for the armchair he sat in, it was as lime green as the Mekon’s face, and how Dieter hated the Mekon: Dan Dare’s deadly adversary from outer space; evil, alien and so very,verygreen.

‘Dee, you must listen to your sister.’

Dieter’s head tilted at the sound of his mother’s voice. Its tone had altered so much since they’d come to Sugar Hall. Of course it had the same part-English, mostly-German sound but now it was full of something both sticky and stuck, and Dieter didn’t like it. Ma sounded like she was talking through a mouthful of condensed milk.

‘You have to believe me,’ he pleaded, kicking his legs out. ‘A boywasout there, and hedidwear a collar. It was silver and it shone in the sunlight—’

‘So you do mean like a dog?’ Saskia snorted again as she hopscotched on the parquet floor; the countryside had brought out the child in fifteen-year-old Saskia Sugar.

‘I don’t know, Sas, I’ve never seen a dog in asilvercollar.’That got her, Dieter thought. ‘And it was real silver, Ma, because it shone like your special necklace…’ Dieter stopped. That silver necklace was sitting in the window of Kinsey’s Pawn Shop, on Lupus Street, SW1. That was such a long thought away. It made Dieter think of walking with their suitcases from Number 52C, Shelley House, Churchill Gardens to the bus stop in the pink morning light because Ma couldn’t afford a taxicab. It made him think of bouncing on the creaking springs of his carriage seat at Paddington Station as the train mushroomed smoke into the thicker smog,shuuuu-tu-shuuuu-tu, and the pistons pumped and the whistle shrieked like a woman falling from a bridge. It made him think of Ma’s egg sandwiches that smelled like farts, and Ma turning and turning her wedding ring on her finger as the carriage rattled all the way to this horrid place.

Then he remembered something else about the strange boy: the boy hadn’t worn clothes. When he appeared the boy was naked. Dieter didn’t know why but he couldn’t quite tell his mother this, so he said, ‘Ma, listen to this, when I saw him he didn’t have a shirt on, can you believe it?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s cold out there,’ Saskia sneered.

‘It’s true…!’

‘Please, Dee,’ his mother interrupted, ‘be good, a good boy. Please don’t make up these stories.’

Frills of wood shavings patterned the floor around Dieter’s mother: and such a young mother she was.

At last her children were quiet.

Dieter watched her reach up and unwrap more forgotten things from the tea crate. Dieter didn’t know why it was taking his ma so long to unpack; perhaps it was because things disappeared, things moved, in this house.

Like their shoes: like the figures in the paintings on the walls, like the ornaments on the mantelpieces; like the billiard table, Dieter thought.

And Ma’s laugh: that had disappeared too.

His ma, his beautiful ma, she was so scruffy now. This awful house had done that to her. She wore a pair of Pa’s old trousers with a belt and a dreadful green overcoat that swallowed her up. Dieter was used to her wearing pretty dresses patterned with bluebirds that seemed to fly up the short sleeves and flock at the little belt at the waist – and that dress made him want to sing,There’ll be bluebirds ovah, the white cliffs of Dov-ah!

Not long ago Ma had been so glamorous.

Glamour was a word Dieter loved because he had read it in a thick-as-a-brick magazine calledVoguethat Ma kept between her mattress and bedsprings at 52C Shelley House, Churchill Gardens, SW1. ‘Glamour’ was a word Dieter loved because when you said it the words made your face smile at the first ‘gla’ and then they made you blow a kiss on the ‘mour’.

‘Gla-mour.’

Dieter liked that. He liked it so much he once practised the word in the bathroom mirror, wearing Ma’s Siren Red lipstick.

‘Gla-mour.’

It was London that had made Ma glamorous. In London, Dieter ran home from school longing to hug her. He wanted to smell the diesel fumes, the newspaper-scent that the city, his city had given her. Dieter wanted to smell this as the thud-thud-thud of her quick little heart beat through the satin and frill layers of her slips and dresses. Even Ma’s name was glamorous; she was ‘Lilia’, she wasn’t ‘Vera’ or ‘Daphne’.

Now her heart had slowed to a dull thud and she smelled like the black damp that lurked behind the green silk wallpaper in this room: she smelled of the spores and the dust that danced busy as the flies in this ancient house; like the foxed pages of the ugly books that lined the bookshelves in the red library, like the silverfish, the earwigs; the living ones and the husky-dead.

Dieter looked across the long room at his newly drab mother and his puppy-fat sister and the toad of fear burped inside him. Saskia had begun to sing, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, and Dieter closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about sadness today, about How It Was Before They Came to Sugar Hall, because How It Was Before made his muscles tense and his lungs shrink, and the thing that hung between his legs move back to where it had come from (and Dieter wasn’t exactly sure where that was, he had tried to see in a mirror once, but for now he just knew it was inside).

He let his head drop back against lime-green upholstery and he thought of the Wee-Hoo Gang. That last afternoon in London, Dieter had stood on his dirt mound in the place they called the Wasteland and – as the smog came in from the Thames, and the cranes that were building, building, building chugged in the distance – he shook the dry hands of every member of his Wee-Hoo Gang, just like a grown-up leader would. His best friend, Cynthia Nurse, had cried.

‘See you, Dee,’ Tommy Perrot said as he wiped snot candles from his nose, and when none of them could see a thing because the smog was so bad, they held hands and walked in a crocodile all the way back to Churchill Gardens.

In the long, cold reception room of Sugar Hall, Dieter tried to picture his friends; he thought of the twins, Deuteronomy and Comfort Jones, running through the Wasteland crying ‘weeeeeee-hoooooooo!’ at the roofless buildings with their brick steps that led to doors that led to rooms that weren’t there anymore – all because of the war, a war he didn’t know or remember. (It was Mr Hutchins, his old Form Teacher, who had told the class they had a different war now, and this war was about bombs called atom and hydrogen; Mr Hutchins said that if this new war happened there’d be no bombsites because there’d just be nothing left).

How awful to have nowhere to play, Dieter thought. How awful it is to have no one to play with.

If he concentrated, Dieter could hear Billy Foley and Tommy Perrot make spacemen ray-gun noises; he could hear Cynthia Nurse and Precious Palmer flicking their skipping rope, singing,‘The wicked fairy cast a spell, cast a spell, cast a spell. The wicked fairy cast a spell, long, long ago!’

If Dieter was with them, he’d be kicking about in the dust by the river until the sun set over Battersea Power Station and their different mothers’ different cries and the smells of their different cooking were carried out on the dry wind, all the way from their beloved council flats, the brand-spanking-new Churchill Gardens.

A furry bluebottle hit against one of the tall windows in the long, green reception room and Dieter opened his eyes. If he crushed the fly he knew its guts would be yellow, just as he knew that being back home, in London, would make everything right.

‘A boywasout there,’ he whispered, ‘he did wear a silver collarandyou’ll see, I’m going to make him my friend.’

Lilia Sugar Stops to Think

2

Lilia Sugar loved to hear her children. Unfortunately Saskia had yet to grasp the fact that her gift did not lie in singing, and Lilia had retreated to the window seat of the library to escape her daughter’s mauling of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’.

If Lilia hadn’t been so out of practice, she would have laughed.

She glanced up at the leatherbound volumes sitting behind dust-caked grilles. Lilia saw hard work up there. Still, in this house she knew that if she could clean it, she could sell it.

She thought about books.

The first book she read in English wasJane Eyre. At the time she was fifteen, she was Lilia Fisch just come to England, andJane Eyresuited her very well. Of course she had already read the book in German: as a child in Demmin, and again during that last black year in Berlin, but Lilia would always remember the first time she mouthed those words in English and in England, sitting on the hard wooden bench of the tall and almost round Quaker Meeting House in Nailsworth. She remembered she had been quite alone, quite cold, but content; and her fingers on the white page seemed very red.

Nails-worth. At first it had seemed such a frightening word for a town.

Drizzle spat against the library windows and Lilia shuddered.

It had been a shock to discover that Nailsworth wasn’t far; it lay out there – she tapped the window – over those fields and past the wide mud of the Severn River. She didn’t care for that river; it was tidal, she couldn’t swim it and so it was useless to her. She’d heard dreadful stories, too, of ponies stranded and sinking to their deaths in the slick mud of the estuary, of a girl who jumped in at high tide and was never seen again. No, Lilia didn’t care for that brown churning river at all. She knew there was another behind them – the River Wye – she hadn’t ventured out there but she did hope it was proper, calm water, for Lilia loved to swim. It made her want to laugh, though she didn’t, the fact that rivers surrounded them.

Sugar Hall is an island, she thought, and we are marooned in this new home.

‘Nearer my God to Thee!’ Saskia cried from the staircase. ‘Nearer to Theeeeeee!’

Home. It wasn’t that. Sugar Hall was a dirty-grey square, spiked with fancy but useless chimneys. Two silly towers shot up from a porch decorated with stone roses and stone creatures that Dieter had insisted were lions, dragons and bears, but to Lilia they were rain-washed lumps that made her head hurt. Sugar Hall was the past, and Lilia did not care for the past. This was her husband’s past; it was Peter’s, and Lilia couldn’t think of Peter, not today.

She dug her hands into the pockets of the army coat she’d found all those months ago in the boot room (the coat had got her through this winter so well she’d forgotten that it made her itch). Lilia lit a cigarette, breathing in as deep as a poacher on a cold night.

‘Juniper, please come,’ she whispered at the windowpane: smoke clouded the view.

In the rat-infested and freezing winter Lilia had been too busy surviving to consider loneliness; now she craved company, or the company of one person at least.

Juniper Bledsoe had arrived one day in February when the drive was still banked with snow. Lilia was standing at these library windows when she saw a figure on a white horse pushing through the drifts. Lilia thought it was out of a book. Still, she’d hidden behind the red curtains.

Lilia had always thought the English strange; either they were fawningly polite or they barged in like bulldogs. Juniper had marched into the hall and cried ‘Haalllooo! Haaalllooo!’ for so long that Lilia had to scurry out of her hiding place and open the library door. Juniper wore a long wax coat and trousers that flared above the knee, and for a moment Lilia thought it was another century.

‘Ah! There you are!’ Juniper said. ‘Christ, it’s an ice-cellar in this place. Howdoyou survive, dear?’ She barked all this as she slammed her riding crop down on the hall table and tugged off her leather gloves. ‘I can only apologise that I haven’t visited until now. Ill, you see. Damned pneumonia. This winter is enough to kill us all. But I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to meet you at last.’ She shook Lilia’s hand with a grip that could crush bones and Lilia worried about her own hard, dry skin. ‘Now where do you bunk up? Where’s your warm retreat in this arctic place?’

‘I…’

‘I remember the old range in the servants’ kitchen, kept me toasty after many a ride. Old Sugar didn’t have the foggiest I was here.’

‘Yes, the kitchen,’ Lilia said and immediately she worried about how German she might sound, but Juniper hadn’t flinched; she simply took Lilia by the shoulders and marched her along the passage towards the worn stone steps that led down to the kitchen. Juniper knew the house.

‘By the way, it’s Mrs Bledsoe to most, Juniper to you.’ Her long wax coat creaked as she walked.

‘Lilia.’

‘Pretty name. Pretty altogether.’ Juniper laughed. Lilia blushed.

Juniper; it was such a strange name. Lilia tried it in her head as they walked down the cold stone steps to the kitchen: Joo-nipper.

This first encounter had been so brisk, so English, that Lilia had been dazzled, and when Juniper slammed her holdall on the kitchen table and pulled out a large brown package that dripped blood, Lilia gasped.

‘Beef,’ Juniper said, and she waved the package in the air; blood sprayed. ‘You’ll embarrass me if you don’t have it, dear. Larder the best?’ Without waiting for an answer she walked into the back scullery. ‘Ah, I see the old meat safe is still going. Good. Good. So, have you had a line of them? Visitors?’ Juniper marched back into the kitchen, wiping bloody hands on her wax coat. Lilia took a cloth from the sink: there was a trail of dark spots into the scullery.

‘Well? Visitors? Had many? While I was languishing in my sick bed?’

Lilia couldn’t imagine this woman being ill at all: she was so thick and strong.

‘I was hellishly ticked off, you know. Once I heard you were here, I wanted to be the first. Well?’

Lilia had to think while she crouched and dabbed at the blood. ‘The vicar and his wife. They came…’

‘What did they bring?’

‘Margarine.’

‘Frightful! Ghastly people.’

Lilia hid her smile and swilled the bloody cloth. She checked her face in the dirty basement window.

Juniper pulled out a chair, the legs squealed on the flagstones and she sat. ‘Now, tell me, what on God’s green earth are you doing here all alone, Lovely Lilia?’

Lilia opened her mouth; she didn’t think she liked the nickname but she couldn’t think of what to say so she blushed again.

‘How about a little drop?’ Juniper took a flask of whisky from her greatcoat pocket, she reached for two glasses from the draining board and as she poured she gave Lilia sound advice about the rats and the bats and the moles that were ruining a perfectly good lawn.

After a little whisky, Lilia took to Juniper more than she had taken to anyone for such a long time. Juniper had a strong nose with freckles and the tip of it seemed permanently red. Lilia thought this woman smelled of kindness, and it was a buttery, soapy smell.

‘You’ll die here, my dear, without help,’ Juniper told her.

Lilia gulped her whisky, elbows off the table.

‘Really. We must rally round. I know things have been terrible for you. Otherwise why would you come to this damned place?’ Lilia swallowed. ‘I could not stay at the flat, I could not remain in London.’ She swallowed again. ‘This house is for Dieter. It is his.’ ‘Yes, I see,’ Juniper glanced about the kitchen. ‘Where’s the boy by the way? The heir.’

‘School. They have opened the schools at last.’

‘Heck! Thevillageschool?’

‘My girl, Saskia, she is…’

‘Didn’t know about a girl.’

‘She…’

‘Is she Peter’s?’ Juniper was so direct Lilia had to swallow more whisky.

‘No. She – she was before. Before Peter.’ Lilia baulked at her husband’s name; she hated to say it out loud. ‘She, she is … she was born in the war.’

‘You must have been pretty young.’

‘Yes…’

‘Do you have family, dear? Back home?’

Lilia drank.

Juniper was silent: for a small moment.

‘Yes well, the war. There we are. The war. Still, we mustn’t dwell, must we? Tell me, what are your plans? For this old place? You can’t just rattle around in it.’

Lilia was numb with whisky, though for the first time in weeks – sitting at that kitchen table – she felt warm.

‘You must have plans, Lovely Lilia. You can’t take your eye off the quarry. You must plot and scheme with a responsibility like this.’

‘I hate it,’ Lilia said and she felt the burn of whisky in her throat.

Juniper didn’t blink. ‘I don’t blame you. I’d hate it, too, but the point is, you came here, so you must have a plan to make it work. Do you see?’

Lilia was a little too cloudy to see, so Juniper spoke again about the rat problem and the cold winter. The two were connected. ‘They come into the warm, evil blighters.’ She also spoke of her time as a nurse in London during the war and Lilia nodded, trying to dodge any words that might take her back there. It seemed like Juniper Bledsoe was a countrywoman who had done it all, a woman who was bored at home now that her husband – who she admitted had loved her a little too much – was dead.

‘Heartattack, five years ago. Dreadful. Mighty older. Almost a good innings.’ Juniper sighed, ‘Death duties,’ she said. ‘Will they swallow this place up?’

‘I do not know,’ Lilia shrugged, because even at this first meeting Lilia found she could only be open and truthful with Juniper Bledsoe.

‘Have a solicitor?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Do you have a good solicitor, dear, looking into it?’

‘I…’

Lilia found she had to be quick to finish her sentences with Juniper.

‘Well you can use mine, good man. I’ll arrange it. If you don’t mind.’ Juniper paused. ‘And are things hard, Lovely Lilia? I mean, did Peter leave you anything, apart from this horrid place? What I’m trying to ask, my dear is, is there money? Ghastly thing to talk about, but in these times, needs must. Can’t stand pussy-footing.’

‘No,’ Lilia said. ‘No, there is … there is really nothing.’

‘You can’t go back to London?’

Lilia bristled. ‘No, I cannot. For today we cannot live anywhere else but here.’

‘Yes, well, that is understandable.’ Juniper drained her glass and slammed it on the table. ‘I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it, Lilia, but I am dreadfully sorry you know. It was awful what Peter did.’

Lilia nodded.

‘He always was so put upon by that ghastly father of his. It really is quite sad. But, we’re here and there we are. That’s the way it is. I hope you don’t mind me talking like this. Tell me about your children, dear.’

And so Juniper carried on, and on, and Lilia was soothed by the sound of a stranger’s voice and by a stranger’s whisky.

Juniper liked to visit at least three times a week now, and whenever she did Lilia would wave a tipsy farewell from the big stone steps of Sugar Hall, and for a very small moment all was fine.

Her cigarette was done; she spat on the tip, crushed it, and buried it in her pocket. Lilia looked up at the library bookshelves: she was onto ‘D’ and ‘Dickens’, and now she knew she was as bored as Lady Deadlock. She sorely needed Juniper and her whisky today.

Lilia tugged off her headscarf and walked to the huge spotted mirror on the library wall. She laughed: her Dieter was right, it was her hair that was the worst; two thick wedges of dark growth were bold at her crown while the rest of the blonde felt and looked like straw. Her eyebrows were thick, she hadn’t a stitch of make-up on and her fingernails were black with dirt. Lilia unbuttoned the army coat and hung it from the bookshelf’s ladder. She went up on tiptoes in her gumboots – a difficult manoeuvre – and examined herself.

She certainly wasn’t Lovely Lilia any more: she looked a sight in Peter’s old tweed trousers, rolled up at the ankle. Her body had changed too; she’d become wiry, stretched. There was no pleasing plumpness to her cheeks or her breasts. Lilia gripped her hands in tight at her waist, and turned, a profile pose: she had lost her bottom, too.

She was thirty-one. Surely it couldn’t be over yet?

Lilia barred her teeth at her reflection, a warning dog. She wanted to howl, but instead she stuck out her tongue and blew a raspberry.

‘Sugar Hall,’ she said to her reflection, and suddenly her breath was white in the cold: she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

Lilia spun around to look behind her.

There was no one there; of course there was no one.

She reached out to touch the wallpaper, black silhouettes of oversized butterflies stood proud on the blood red paper. Fleshy, she thought. Lilia felt movement beneath her fingers.

She jumped back and grabbed her coat from the ladder; she plunged her hands into the itchy arms and marched across the room, singing. It was an old song in an old language she had hoped to forget.

‘Bak, bak, Kuchn! Der Bekker hot gerufn,’ the words came quick and easy, and she knew why her daughter sang alone for hours in this house.

Saskia was scared.

‘Bak, bak, Kuchn! Der Bekker hot gerufn,’ Lilia cried, ‘Wer s’wil gutn Kuchn machn…’ She cut off and hurried across the worn red rug as fast as she could, but the rubber of her gumboots kept catching on the bunched thread, pulling her back.

Dieter Writes Two Letters

3

Sugar Hall, Sunday, about a quarter to three, April 17th1955

Dear Cynthia,

How are you? I am very well…

Dieter chewed the end of his pencil. He liked to feel the wood splinter in his mouth.

I am very well and so are Ma and Sas (even if Sas is a silly old moo because she’s singing on the stairs right now, it’s awful) I hope your Ma and you are jolly good.

He was sitting at a desk in the yellow room on the second floor. Here, canary-yellow moths with intricate patterns on their wings danced on the lemon-yellow wallpaper. Dieter was used to the eccentricities of the wallpaper in this house, he hardly noticed now.

I still wish you were here with me, Cynthia, and now more than ever because guess what? This morning I found a strange boy in the sheds. He frightened me, Cyn, but I want to see him again. You’d tell me not to, you’d tell me he wasn’t right, I know you would, but there’s no one else to play with. He didn’t speak but I know he’ll be my friend. Sas and Ma don’t believe in him, but you would. I am making it my mission to find out about him. I’m going to be as sharp as Sherlock Holmes…

Dieter glanced up at the letter he’d already written: it was a thin thing with ‘To The Boy In The Shed’ on the envelope. He picked it up and sniffed it. Dieter knew that letters held secrets so he hated to read them. He also knew that letters kept people alive; at least they kept theideaof people alive – Ma had taught him that – so he had to write them and he had to read them.

Cynthia,he wrote,I wish—

Dieter dropped his pencil. He picked at the fluff of green baize on the desk top and he thought about Cynthia: Cynthia Nurse the best Wee-Hoo in the world; Cynthia who lived above him at Churchill Gardens, Cynthia who could use a slingshot, Cynthia who could run faster than Tommy Perrot; Cynthia who could recite her Bible off-by-heart, Cynthia who could hex you, too. Today was a Sunday so she’d be back from church with her ma, Mrs Nurse. Mrs Nurse dressed Cynthia in so much white on Sundays that the ribbons in her dark hair looked like snowflakes.

Dieter looked up at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room.Bong-bong-bongit said as the grandmother clock on the landing replied,bing-bing-bing.

Three o’clock.

Cynthia would have sneaked out by now, her white puffball dress and her ribbons hidden under her bed. She would have crept down the concrete steps of Shelley House, Churchill Gardens wearing her play dress and an old brown cardigan that was too big for her. The cardigan had leather patches on the elbows, and it was her pa’s. Cynthia brought it over to England in the bottom of her trunk and she said it smelled of cherry tobacco and fried fish, and it was all she had left of her pa because Cynthia had come to England on a boat just like Ma had (and Dieter often wondered if Mrs Nurse and his mother had just sailed up the Thames, right by the Wasteland, and jumped off). Cynthia said she came from an island made of coral where fish could fly and a schoolteacher called Mrs Briscoe hit her with a cane. Cynthia called itBar-ba-dos.

There were magic words on her island, Cynthia said, and she whispered them in Dieter’s ear as they lay on the tar roof of Churchill Gardens.

‘Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux,’ she whispered.

Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux.

It rhymed if you let it.

Cynthia said it was a dangerous spell. She said it meant ghosts and bogeymen and werewolves. She said a duppy was the worst because it could make time stop still; she said a duppy wanted to steal your soul or your skin, sometimes both. In the heat of a summer city night, as they lay on their backs on the roof of the flats and giggled at the stars, Cynthia Nurse told Dieter Sugar everything she knew about duppies.

‘They’re mean. My mum said when she married my dad they left Jamaica because of the duppies, but the duppies followed them anyway.’

‘My ma says ghosts are sad.’

Cynthia smacked her lips and kicked her legs free of her sticky nightie. ‘Mean-sad. Duppies are mean-sad because they’re ancient and if you’re sad too long, you get mean.’

‘How do you know?’

But Dieter knew Cynthia was right: there was sad and there was mean-sad like those duppies she left behind in the coral-island home that was no longer hers –Bar-ba-dos.

‘I think you get mean if you can’t go to where you’re supposed to,’ Cynthia said and she squinted at the half-moon as Dieter stretched out in a starfish shape, his fingers and toes touching her on one side.

‘Like where?’

‘Like heaven or hell or just that place you’re supposed to be,’ she said, because although Cynthia was a church-girl, sometimes she had other ideas. ‘Mum says duppies play tricks on us, she says they can steal our souls, trick us into swapping our soul for theirs, so all of a sudden we’re them and they’re us and they get to live again.’

‘That’s dreadful.’

‘A dog howls in the night, that’s a duppy.’

‘Like Mrs Anderson’s dog?’

Cynthia punched him. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she cleared her throat. ‘Just be careful, Dee. My mum says don’t go out when the moon’s full and stay away from the crossroads. That’s where the duppies are.’

Dieter felt warm in that somewhere beneath his belly button as Cynthia whispered in his ear. ‘Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux. Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux…’ Dieter’s nose twitched along with the night-sounds of London: the growl of cabs, the push of the Thames, the roar of red night buses, but Cynthia wouldn’t stop. ‘Duppy. Baccoo. Loup-garoux,’ she whispered. ‘And there’s the heartman, too. He steals children’s hearts and gives them to the devil. You wake up in the morning with your ribs open and an empty chest and you’re dead.’

Dieter shivered.

‘Duppy, Baccoo, Loup-garoux.’

‘And these ghosts, they never go away, Cyn?’

‘Mmm-uh. Never.’

‘So even when you’re dead you can live and live and live?’

‘I suppose, if you’re sad and mean enough. Though it’s not really living, is it?’

Dieter felt Cynthia’s hand in his and he wished with all his heart that she would live and live and live. Though even if she died, even if she was stuck neither here-nor-there forever, he knew Cynthia Nurse would never get mean. That night, Dieter made a promise to himself, and it was to watch out for ghosts, particularly the mean-sad ghosts.

‘Duppy, Baccoo, Loup-garoux,’ he whispered at the green baize desk in the writing room of Sugar Hall. He listened for the Hall’s clocks: but they hadn’t stopped; time wasn’t standing still. Cynthia didn’t need to worry; there was no duppy here. The boy in the shed was just different, that’s all.

He looked up at the face of the grandfather clock: it was ten past three.

‘Nearer my God to Theeee!’ Saskia cried from the landing. ‘Nearer to Thee! E’en though it be a cross that raiseth mee!’

Dieter picked up his pencil and thought of the letter-writing tips he’d read in Saskia’sBumper Guide for Young Ladies.

‘If you are writing a letter, tell your correspondent where you are. Consider the scene to describe the scene…’ it had said.

‘Cyn, I told you there are strange noises here, didn’t I? Ma says it’s the forest behind us, but it isn’t because trees don’t scream…’

He stopped.

DieterconsideredSugar Hall.

This place was a sort of big that forced you to make up words that had you stammering, because it was gi-gi-normous, it was gar-ga-ga-gantuan. His grandfather’s house was a million times bigger than their flat but not as big as Buckingham Palace. Maybe on the tops of his letters he should write ‘Sugar Kingdom, Sugar World, Sugar Skies, Sugar Universe’. He thought of the first night here when Ma had to lay their coats on top of the bedclothes and they all slept in the same bed, huddled, because there was nothing but the scuttle of rats and the howl of something terrible outside that tickled the white-blond hairs on his head. That first night he had decided Sugar Hall was a Black Forest Gateau (the one Ma made when he was younger once she’d saved up enough ration tickets). Yes, this place was a Black Forest Gateau because it was made up of layers – of floors upon floors of rooms – and as Sas said, God knows what lurked in the shadows. Dieter wondered if Goddidknow, though he suspected it was more likely to be the Devil, and that was why Ma had dragged a commode into their bedroom and locked them in every night.

Dieter decided to make a list of facts. It was going to be very long.

Cyn – since I last wrote these are the things I have found out…

In this house 21 doors are locked and 19 are open.

I have found a room stuffed with frightening things. Masks made of wood and animal heads are nailed to the wall. I saw three zebras, a lion, a tiger and a big black cow with horns. They have glass eyes and their skins are on the floor. The masks frighten me more than the animal heads.

In the same room are glass cases filled with butterflies and moths. The butterflies and moths are pinned down so they can’t move. Some of them are GIANT and bright but I don’t like them.

Ma has locked this room up.

There is a front staircase and a back staircase. There are 62 steps to the back staircase because it goes all the way down to the cellar and all the way up to the attic. Ma said this was for servants.

There are 7 leaks in the attic rooms. Last month I counted 12 dead rats, 3 crows, a something I think was a cat, and piles of flies in the corners. I can’t count the flies, there are too many.

Last week we had a bonfire for the dead rats. Ma wore a hanky over her face.

Saskia found a thing called a Priest Hole and she said that is for Catholics so they have somewhere to hide. Are you a Catholic, Cyn?

In the olden days people called Roundheads killed people called Cavaliers in our dining room (or is it the other way round?)

There are paintings of olden-day Sugars here. Ma says they are my ancestors. They are ugly.

We have been here for 77 days.

I can fit in the thing called the Dumb Waiter.

I have grown 2 inches.

There’s a river over the fields in front of us that sometimes looks like the Thames, but I know it’s not. Ma told me ponies get stuck there because the water goes away, but it always comes back.

I have found a boy in the sheds and he wears a silver collar round his neck. He’s not a duppy, Cyn, honestly, he’s a boy. He won’t hurt me or stop the clocks.

I am lonely.

I wish…