It was during that sticky, unforgiving summer of 1976 that the voices began. The summer people still remember, decades later. The summer it didn’t rain for three months, not one drop. When days stretched languidly into rose-tinted twilights and dogs lay panting on dusty doorsteps. Petals fell silently. Grasses dried to brittle rasping husks. The air was thick, opaque, motionless. Time stood still that summer, listless and apathetic. That was the summer the summer the voices began.
Going to bed in the daylight was a blessing. It meant she wouldn’t have to climb the stairs in darkness. In colder months, leaving the amber hued, lamp-lit sitting room for the narrowing staircase made her sick with dread. Esther was the youngest. She went to bed first. Those days, she went to bed alone. No one would think to offer to hold her hand as she climbed to the looming, unlit rooms above.
Teeth cleaned. Hands and face washed. Nightie on. There was comfort in the routine, the familiar. No one noticed the quiet diligence with which the routine was followed: the cap twisted carefully back on the toothpaste, the towel hung squarely over the radiator, the day’s clothes folded neatly on the dressing table stool. The impressions of her mother’s bedtime routines were imprinted into Esther like a footsteps in deep snow. All she needed to do, to stay safe, to stay alive, was to meticulously follow each step: her tiny feet sinking into the icy void her mother had left behind.
She would climb up onto the heavy wooden bed piled with blankets. If she wanted a bedtime story, she would read it to herself or read it out loud to her dolls. There was no time for bedtime stories any more. Her father, hunched with tiredness and grief, might be washing dishes or folding clothes in the kitchen. Her brothers, seeped in wounded anger like a sponges soaked in blood, might be arguing or sitting in sullen silence in front of the television.
At one time, before bed, Esther’s hair would be brushed 100 times. Then, her mother would climb under the blankets with her daughter, all plumpness and warmth, smelling of sugar, vanilla, beeswax polish and ivory soap. There would be a story. Always a story. Her mother was a teacher and she would borrow books from school to read at night. The books were often old, their pages yellow and crisp. Animal stories were favourites: witch’s cats and wooden horses. The dusty orange paperbacks were suffused with adventure and magic. They were heart-stopping, terrifying, thrilling. They made Esther cry sometimes and her mother would cry with her. The barbed cruelty of the world was unfathomable to the little girl. The knowledge that she would soon leave her daughter behind was unbearable to the woman.
That summer though, Esther went to bed alone. The heavy floral curtains were still open; she left them that way. She liked to watch the day melt into night. Darkness would creep over the house and garden, as if they themselves were being tenderly tucked into bed. She would day dream for a while. She imagined the bed was a magic carpet and she was flying across deserts, forests and oceans. She would imagine travelling, always travelling. Then, with the light paling gently, the birds quietening in their trees and the somnolent whisper of a radio playing in her brother’s room, she would finally sleep.
But then the voices started. They always waited till the room was velvet with darkness and the house was silent, sleeping. They came every night that long, dry summer. Children’s voices. Girls’ voices. Chattering and laughing softly. They came from outside, from the gardens. The voices didn’t scare Esther, they merely puzzled her. There were no other children living in Esther’s street. And why would children be out so late anyway? Esther would rise from her bed, pad over to the window, open it wide and listen intently again. She would lean out as far as she could, breathing in the cool green scents of the summer night. She would peer into the blue-black gardens below, but there was never anything to be seen. Esther would return to bed and the voices would fall silent again, until the next night.
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