The Temple House Vanishing Read online

  ‘No make-up, no painted nails, no jewellery, socks to just below the knee, skirt to just under the knee, hair to be tied back if long, hair to be behind ears if short, no fringes, whether long or short. And no hair dye. No looking at watches in class, no yawning, stand up when the teacher comes into the classroom, stand again when they leave the classroom. Only walk on the right side of the corridors, do not make eye contact with teachers outside of class, wait to be spoken to. Bring your lab coat to science and if you forget it go to the office and see Sister Frances who will give you a menial task to complete, like cleaning the blinds of the office with a toothbrush.’

  We were laughing loudly then. A classroom door further down the corridor opened and Helen stuck her head out. She was wearing her black cloak and frowning. She gestured that we stand up. We didn’t move. I expected her to march towards us but she didn’t, she just stayed staring at us and put her finger to her lips.

  Victoria jumped up then and gave her a mock Nazi salute.

  And I thought, thank God you are here, with me.

  By October we were inseparable. Twin flames.

  Time moved too quickly when we were together and too slowly when apart. I didn’t have many classes with her, except for art in the summer house, and those others we did share were a relief, an oasis of bounty in the otherwise long, withered day. I had them highlighted in red on my timetable, then outlined again in gold. I stuck it on the wall beside my bed. And we would pass the time in these classes whispering, or if sitting apart, passing notes with amusing comments about someone’s hair or another’s misreading of an important theme in the book we were studying. We were never caught. The universe conspired on our behalf.

  I remember it felt as if we had a secret, something unique between us that we kept concealed but that lit us from within. At other times I thought it was an armour, a shield, and I wore it so that, even when without her, it protected me from the rest of the world. It was something to cherish, that set me apart from them. We took to calling the others in our class ‘the atoms’. I could stand silent and ignored in the line outside a classroom and not care. I could face the cold dislike of Helen in the corridor and be unmoved. Victoria helped me withstand the side glances. I felt my shame fade, for a while anyway.

  Victoria was popular with most of the teachers, which surprised me a little at first as she was not a conventionally exceptional student and spoke out of turn. Her family lived in a large house in a smart part of town and a ridiculous amount of people she was related to had become someone important. Public figures who were referenced in obscure law books and had footnotes dedicated to them in the story of the State. She wore it lightly, the deferential respect. She would talk little in class and only ever offered something of insight just as were packing up our books. Only I knew she had barely been listening and had spent most of the time doodling quotes from the Smiths on her jotter. Or asking me whether Jim Morrison would have been better off sticking to life as a poet and avoiding rock and roll. Or why it was that the muses of artists nearly always seemed so lame. She would be different, she said, if she ever became a muse.

  I envied her a bit, the ease with which she could unleash her mind and how she only did it when it suited her. She did not feel any need to prove anything, unlike me. My intellect was my badge of honour, the sword I prodded the world with so that people could see, understand that I had power, value. Her decision to upend our entire class discussion on the rules of tragedy by quoting directly from Aristotle, or to suggest that Heathcliff represented a god of fertility, was part amusement and part actual belief. She was comedy; I was tragedy. She was irony brought to life, if irony was a girl.

  I had seen that first afternoon in the summer house that she wasn’t liked by many of the other girls. They looked at her with a sort of unease. Like she might say something that would embarrass them or damage their sense of self. She told me she had had a best friend last year, but that girl had been forced to leave the school. Victoria had tried to see her over the summer holidays, but for some reason, never explained, it was not allowed. She would look sad and faraway when she spoke about her.

  ‘How is it possible to once feel love for someone, for that’s what true friendship is,’ she said, looking at me as we sat on the front steps of the school, ‘and for it then to disappear?’ She clicked her fingers.

  I felt uncomfortable when she talked of her, this nameless friend from before. A shadow crossing us.

  ‘I don’t understand how people change. I see it as a moral failure,’ she said in conclusion, her head bowed.

  I thought of my parents and their wedding picture on the mantelpiece. Things end, I felt like saying, and there is no reason, except a change of heart. But I didn’t. I had a need to agree with her.

  Sometimes I wondered why she had chosen me. For I did feel like I had been chosen. But I didn’t dwell on it. It appealed to my ego. She and Mr Lavelle had seen me. My essence. I stared at myself in the mirror a lot. I wondered if my eyes were too far apart or whether my lips should have been fuller. Then sometimes I would see only mystery or melancholy in my face. Like it was a portrait from long ago, dark and stern. And not me at all.

  Victoria told me we needed a philosophy to live by. Like the Bloomsbury set. And so irony became all that we were about that autumn. A form of quiet rebellion that allowed us to obey but gave us breathing space. It seemed the most appropriate response to the rigid and farcical rules of the school where at times it felt as if the walls were closing in and your mind was being requested to shut down rather than open up. Irony became a reflex, accompanied by rolling eyes and sighs. Irony infected our thoughts. It was a way of being that we didn’t give up, until the very end.

  The rules we applied our ironic response to included –

  – Stand in straight lines.

  – Pray. Often.

  – The soul is transcendent. The body is not of the same value.

  – Examine your conscience.

  – Recognize you are inherently sinful.

  – Think about Eve and what she did to Utopia.

  – Everything pleasurable is followed by a fall into darkness.

  – Hell is a place of fire.

  – Purgatory a place of mist.

  – Heaven is glorious.

  – God sees everything.

  – He knows your thoughts before you express them.

  – Though you do have free will, hence God is blameless for all that goes wrong in the world.

  – Never express an original thought.

  – Unless your family is particularly rich and influential whereby we will listen respectfully, for a time.

  – Upon this foundation we have built the education of many a young woman, just like you.

  – You are not unique.

  – Go bury your gifts in the ground.

  So irony became our companion, our weapon. It felt like an action. I left behind bits and pieces of myself as a result. But I thought it a form of sophistication, so didn’t ever question it.

  Or wonder if it might be worth the sacrifice of other things, other parts of me.

  Chapter Nine

  My mother had moved out. The house was quiet most weekends. My father had taken up fishing.

  It should have been the defining feature of those months, my mother leaving us, but somehow it wasn’t. I would sleep in late, read for a bit and watch old black-and-white films on the TV in the afternoon, sometimes while ironing a school blouse. My father would bring a takeaway home in the evening and we would watch a quiz show. I would usually get the answers right and he would say I should apply to go on. We’d laugh then. No one rang, not even Victoria, though I had given her my number. She kept forgetting to write it down and would be filled with heartfelt, dramatic apologies every Sunday evening. And I always forgave her.

  I lived instead for the summer house. This became my new home, my refuge. The lamps lit as the afternoons faded earlier and earlier, the stove hot, the vine growing like a thick co
ver of protection over our heads, keeping the school out. Here the stray and orphaned bits of myself were connecting. I felt safe and accepted.

  Mr Lavelle would be smoking, drawing sometimes, but often just looking at the flames in the stove, describing worlds for us to explore.

  ‘I need you to free your minds,’ he said, looking at me.

  ‘The route to happiness is not with striving to be the same as others. Whose life are you living? The real purpose is to find your quest, your path to truth. If there is a God, if he does exist, he will not ask if you have sinned. He will ask, did you love?’

  His voice loud now in the room. Some of the girls looked uncomfortable. Notebooks closed tightly on their knees. Nothing he said was on the curriculum.

  ‘Don’t you want to be remembered, to fight the drive to conform?’ he asked. ‘It’s the lovers who are remembered, the ones who gave themselves to their passions, whether it be art, literature, nature, life.’

  His blue eyes darker now, pleading.

  Listen.

  And I did.

  Victoria would be languid, lying on the couch, much to the annoyance of the others in the class.

  ‘I was here first’ was her only explanation when there were complaints from people looking to sit down. They had to make do with the beanbags.

  Mr Lavelle loved her wildness. The way she didn’t care if they hated her. It was true freedom. He and I both recognized it, for we were not as brave.

  She had taken to trying to complete a Rubik’s cube and would fiddle with it as Mr Lavelle spoke, never managing to get the colours together on one side.

  Mr Lavelle would laugh at her failure.

  ‘I know what to do with it,’ she said suddenly one day, holding the cube up to the light. ‘I will peel the stickers off and rearrange them according to colour. Then it will be completed, but just in a different way.’ There was delight in her voice.

  ‘My outlier,’ Mr Lavelle said, shaking his head. He knelt down beside her and took the cube, holding it with reverence in both of his hands. ‘When you do complete it, I will put it in the cabinet,’ he said, bowing his head to her.

  They were glorious together.

  Mr Lavelle spoke with irony too. He also could throw words up into the air, turn them inside out. He could set them on fire, then blow out the flames, hide them in hats, then pull out roses. They disappeared and reappeared.

  And Victoria and I were not alone in our admiration. He was the favoured among the other girls. They liked his hair, they liked his smile, they liked the way he smelled of the outside. Grass and woods. They liked the way he made them feel like they had something inside of them, undiscovered. They liked his car, the Citroën Dyane and its folding window, and the way he would speed away in it in the evenings out the black gates, gravel flying.

  Or the way sometimes he would hold your arm for a second when he spoke to you. As if the words were spilling out into the physical world, could not be contained in something as narrow and constricting as a sentence. You, and only you, had jolted them out of him which meant there was something special about you.

  Victoria liked the way he would stand on the steps of the house in the morning before classes began and just stare out to the sea. A mug of coffee in his hand, sometimes a cigarette, and always giving the impression that much was on his mind. As if something or someone was calling him. Sirens, perhaps, Victoria said.

  Helen said his family were very wealthy and had a yacht and a castle and a house in France. The blonde prefects claimed that he was in love with Miss Clement, the French teacher, or she was in love with him. They were seen together going for walks.

  Some thought he was ancient, at least thirty.

  Victoria said he was not that old, only twenty-five. And that he swam naked at night off the cliff rocks.

  I imagined him backpacking across Europe and reciting poetry on the sun-drenched terraces of cafes in return for food and a bed for the night. He was surely going to do something great, become a painter, or a sculptor of note. Maybe write a book. One that would change the way everyone thinks. An instant classic.

  Victoria said he was guardian of the cabinet of curiosities and he would show you things, pick an item especially for you and tell you its story. And this story would be about you, it would become the emblem for who you are. The hidden depths uncovered. The thing that marked you out. My skull and her heart.

  He understood you. He could see you. And he might draw you. In charcoal.

  And everyone knew Victoria and I were special to him.

  It was there in the sideways look, the exclusion zone that sprang up around us. It was there in the language we spoke. Our words weaving together in a complex and intricate pattern, taking the thoughts we expressed in class higher, and further away from reality. The way we brought our best game to the table, the wits sharpened, the gun of our intellect loaded and ready to fire. Follow us, if you can.

  In being the beneficiaries of his gaze.

  In being the ones he asked to stay late after class.

  The woods dark outside.

  The Journalist

  Chapter Ten

  Monday. Everyone was tired, hugging their coffee cup, phones on their laps.

  The room was glass. Windows on one side out to the street and glass partitions on the other, overlooking the open-plan office. It was cold outside, February weather, but in here it was already warm, the early-morning sun striking the whiteboard making the words on it illegible. You had to squint to read it which made you feel slightly angry, even though the day had barely begun.

  The intern, always covered in layers of clothes, removed her cardigan while stirring what looked to be a homemade green smoothie. I could feel a headache starting over my left eye.

  ‘It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary this year. It’s one of those stories people remember – the boarding school, the student and the teacher who vanished,’ my editor said.

  Mr Edward Lavelle and Louisa.

  A truck was reversing on the street down below, a loud beeping sound coming through the open window. Every now and then others in the room would turn to look at where the sound was coming from but chose not to do anything about it. I got up to close the window, taking a last, deep breath of the cold outside air. In the building opposite a man in a suit was standing at a desk staring back at me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said as I turned back to the room.

  We had already spoken about it. I had an interest in this story.

  ‘Women and true crime. . .’ my colleague said behind me.

  He was rolling a water bottle over one eye as he spoke. A headache too, I imagined.

  ‘The fear of imminent death haunts us more,’ said the intern.

  A few people laughed but in a depressed way.

  ‘You knew her, didn’t you?’ my editor asked.

  ‘I didn’t know her know her. I just lived on the same road. We knew the family,’ I said, sitting back down again.

  People looked at me.

  Louisa: she was the reason I never got to go anywhere on my own as a child.

  I was too young to remember when it happened. But the story was very familiar. Louisa, the missing student, had lived in the house opposite mine. I had no real memories of her, just a few scraps of images. A bike thrown against the front wall, music coming from a bedroom window of a summer’s night.

  She and I had gone to the same primary school. There they offered a spelling-bee prize in her honour. A cup on which my name had been engraved one year, exactly ten names after hers. Louisa’s mother had even come to the school once to present it. She was painfully thin and grey-haired. She had moved away from the road by then so was not a familiar face. I remember feeling not so much sorry for her, as embarrassed. She sat on the stage with her head down. When she did speak, it was to warn us of strangers in cars, people who pretend there are puppies in the back seat. Everyone was awkward around her, even the teachers.

  The conversation about missing women continued.
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  ‘Well, you can take it in two ways: either it’s a retaking of this dark space by women and an overcoming of the fear, or really it is a fetishizing of victimhood,’ someone commented.

  ‘What?’ the intern said, putting down the smoothie.

  ‘It started with Twin Peaks. . .’ he said.

  ‘Let’s leave it,’ said my editor.

  ‘Wrapped in plastic,’ I said.

  Everyone turned.

  ‘Laura Palmer,’ I answered quickly.

  ‘Via Marilyn Manson,’ said water-bottle man.

  ‘Quite,’ said my editor.

  ‘It’s the opposite of romance; that’s why women read it, listen to the podcasts,’ I said. ‘It teaches us not to trust anyone.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. It all seemed obvious to me.

  The intern smiled.

  ‘There is a man missing too,’ my editor said, eyebrows raised.

  No one reacted.

  The meeting moved on.

  Someone was going to do a quiz on the world’s favourite fictional dogs.

  I returned to my desk. It was my third month in the office. I needed things to go well.

  The story of Louisa and the art teacher, Edward Lavelle, was already very familiar to readers. It appeared, in a bid for new leads, in the paper and on some websites every two years or so, around the anniversary of the disappearance. It was like a mark in the calendar.

  Louisa’s father stayed living across from us until his death a few years ago. He rarely left the house, and I remembered that as a child my mother had explained to me he was a recluse and an alcoholic. I hadn’t known what that meant but she said it was a sickness, brought on by sadness. She warned me not to throw things over his front wall or ring the doorbell as some of the others kids did. I had a phase of being afraid of him; he looked messy, unkempt. And the house with its curtains drawn was so uninviting. I would never walk past it, always crossed to the other side of the street.

  At my computer I opened an article about Louisa and Lavelle from two years earlier and studied their photos. They were beautiful and young. You treated people like that differently, even when they were no longer there. Like a dead celebrity. Louisa was dark, and in the photo most often reprinted she was thin, boyish almost, and wearing a Depeche Mode T-shirt. It said: ‘Enjoy the Silence’. Lavelle was fair and foppish. He looked both entitled and lost at the same time, his round, china-blue eyes almost childlike in their open gaze. Together they were emblems of youth, from a time and a place that was recognizable but also vanished.