The dead come back and watch the living | Charlotte Turnbull

My mother still wears tailored skirts and round-necks beneath that tartan oil-cloth apron. When I was a child, she only heated the chill, vaulted drawing room on the rare evenings that my father made it home from the office early. Usually we stuck to the kitchen, where the range was warm and the furniture wasn’t covered in dust sheets. So it must have been the Christmas holidays and she was building the fire perhaps, or needed the space to iron my father’s white shirts, because otherwise she never had the television on during the day. 

 – she was absolutely never caught still in the afternoon, one hand snared mid-run through her crop of feathered hair, the other poised three inches above the saucer on her lap as a cup of Lady Grey cooled into dark, pearly water.

She can’t have noticed me slip into the room. I thought she was watching a fairy tale; the overgrown drive, the castle subdued. Everything sleeping in black and white. She didn’t move when I crossed my legs and leaned back against her knees, sucking my fingers for comfort.

– to begin with. 

We watched the second Mrs De Winter splayed as wide as my mouth, pressed up against the screen. 

When the household staff gathered on Manderley’s lawn to watch the house burn like the sunrise, my mother collapsed in shuddering relief. Her shoulders sagged, jellied and spent, like a tide had gone out. 

The fireplace was cold and white with ashes. The afternoon outside was black where the curtains had not been drawn.

There were boxes of matches everywhere in that house. 

Upstairs, in my room, I tightened a Sylvanian pinafore and placed the white rabbit on the rooftop of Sindy’s Super Home. 

That night my father must have been home early. 

My mother took a damp sponge to her apron, to wipe away the residue. She snapped her arms behind her back to undo the knot, pulled it over her head and hung it behind the kitchen door. She sat with us at the table, spine always as stiff as Judith Anderson’s. 

When he asked, ‘How was your day?’, she flicked a flake of ash from her sweater, and answered with her usual joke. 

‘Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.’ 

He laughed and she laughed and our cutlery spat against the plates, but I knew exactly what she was thinking of. 

Charlotte's fiction has appeared in Ellipsis, Splonk, Litro and Barren Magazine among others. She is Pushcart-nominated for ‘no home for a kraken’ at Wild Hunt magazine.