Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey Page B

table up again, chuckling to himself. She looked at me when he was gone.
    “Oh, Mopps,” she said. “But just look on the mantelpiece. See what Frank’s keeping for himself from the house clearance. Ghoulish, I call it.”
    Sukey often complained about the “junk” that Frank brought home. Paintings of boats all done in brownish paint, and ugly plates teeming with insects. This time it was a glass dome the size of a coal bucket full of stuffed birds. I got up, pressing a hand to the fiery side of my face, and peered in. The birds were brightly coloured, green and yellow and blue. Some had their wings spread out; some had beaks poking into flowers; others, as I moved round, pointed straight at me. Their glassy eyes seemed not to fit quite in their sockets, and their feathers had a dullness to them which made me think they’d been dyed. I couldn’t look away.
    “Horrid, aren’t they? For some reason, Frank’s taken a liking to them and so we’re to have them here from now on. And, Mopps, no matter how many times I say to myself, ‘They’re stuffed and dead, Sukey, get a hold of yourself,’ I still can’t shake the idea that they’re going to fly out at me.” She pulled her row of stitches straight. “Silly, isn’t it?”
    I looked at her and nodded, and that made her laugh.
    “But I can just hear it, Mopps. The glass breaking and the blighters fluttering out, flapping their wings, coming to peck my eyes out.”
    “Blimey, your missus has a mind on her,” one of the men said, coming into the room with Frank. They carried an old sofa between them. “You want to watch she doesn’t come up with too many ideas about you.”
    “That’s just where I’m lucky, Alf,” Frank said. “She’s managed to get the idea into her head that I’m a catch. And I’m not complaining.”
    They took the sofa into the cellar and Sukey watched them disappear down the steps before turning to me. “Get my shawl to cover those birds, will you?” she said. “I can joke all I like, but I really can’t bear to see them any longer.”
    She looked quite desperate, and I went off to find the shawl which she thought she’d left on a chair in the kitchen, or on the coat stand in the hall, or possibly in the bedroom wardrobe, and if not there, then definitely on the towel rack in the bathroom. I walked through the kitchen, trying my hardest not to trip over or scrape my skin or knock my elbows, and had to hold the door open for two men carrying a large piece of furniture in from the yard. It was covered by a cloth, but I guessed it was a dressing table from the shape, with a mirror fixed to the top. The edges of the cloth rippled with the movement and made it seem as if the dressing table was floating between the men’s hands. One of them, a man with a face full of vertical lines, asked me to open the next door for them. I ran over to do it, but forgetting it opened outwards pulled instead of pushed, banging the door in its frame and making the plates on the nearest dresser clink together alarmingly. The men laughed.
    “You ’aven’t quite got your sister’s delicate touch, ’ave you?” the line-faced one said.
    They floated the furniture into the sitting room and I started up the stairs, stopping halfway and breathing quietly, listening to the house. There were creaks, deep and almost human, as if the house was straining under the weight of other people’s possessions. These were covered by the dissonant chiming of two clocks somewhere downstairs, and once I heard the cursing of a removal man as he walked into or fell over some piece of furniture. I hoped it was the line-faced one and looked out of the window.
    There was no one in the yard now, and yet I could hear a faint rustling from outside, the sort of sound a blackbird makes when it’s foraging for worms under a hedge. A short, angry fizz of foliage followed by another. I couldn’t see anything, but the thicket near the lane bristled, and for some reason the