Heirloom by Clio Davidson-Lynch
Heirloom
The wardrobe arrives two weeks after Dot’s mother’s heart gives out. The two burly cousins who move it inside decide that it looks best in the corner of Dot’s loungeroom, where the shadows slope and slouch against it, and it seems to eat up space. It looks old and huge amongst her cute Ikea cabinets. Her mother used to call it an heirloom, as if the word could justify its existence. Said with flair: heirloom. Fucking ancient, Dot corrects her mother now, watching it from the couch. Ancient and swollen and strange.
She turns away, pulling another shirt from the basket. Ellie chatters idly to herself in the next room, interrupted every now and then by a plasticky clack, her dolls slamming together. Dot stares at a blank white wall and hooks her fingers through soft fabric and can’t stop thinking about her mother’s heirloom, slouching somewhere behind her, sucking up air.
Why? She throws it a peripheral glance, unwilling to give it her full attention. Because it’s so big? So abominably ugly? So full of her mother? At least Dot knows she never lost her sense of humour. This is the final jab, one last deftly misplaced punchline, so delicately delivered Dot has to concede her admiration. She’ll never be rid of the wardrobe now. She can’t give it to another relative, can’t justify selling it – after all, it’s an heirloom. And so full of precious memories.
Heirloom, her mother mouths in her mind. You’ll understand when you’re older. Nobody appreciates age, when they’re young.
Well, good riddance, then. It’s fucking ugly. It sits bow-legged on clawfoot toes, too grandiose, too grotesquely big for its own good. The sides of it bulge outward awkwardly, as if it’s packed too full, ready to topple and fall – or worse, burst, spill something unseemly out onto the carpet. The doors sit unevenly, the left just overlapping the right, cradling a lungful of darkness in between. Their scarlet glaze is criss-crossed by a gap-toothed iron lattice that does nothing to hide fault lines and hairline fractures in the glass. Even the handles are horrible in their own way, loose ringlets of iron that hang languid, wide and unblinking.
Dot swats a pair of trousers through the air, folds them sharply at the hem. She tries not to think about the big, hulking mass in her corner, crouched low and drenched in shadows. It doesn’t matter how big she’s grown; the wardrobe still seems bigger. She remembers being terrified that one day it would fall over – she always had an uncannily good sense of how easily it could crush her. It unnerves her that she still feels that way.
When she was small she would sometimes sit still and try to make sense of the strangeness, as if there were some secret harmony at play that she had simply failed to notice. Dot remembers her face reflected in that scarlet mess of glass. She would pull her hand along its front, the pads of her fingers catching on hidden scratches, nails snagging against the metalwork. An odd, brown smear lingered on her palm when she held it to her eyes to investigate. One chubby hand found its way into the gap between the doors, darkness nibbling at her fingers as they slipped in between.
And then a pair of strong hands gripped her underarms, hauled her away.
“Dorothy, what have I told you! That’s an heirloom!”
Ellie screams from the other room and Dot’s heart thumps into her mouth.
“You okay in there?”
She hears how high-pitched and panicked she sounds. Getting worked up. Worked up over nothing, a fucking cupboard.
Heirloom!
Get serious, Dot.
A giggle drifts into the room, dissolving the knot in Dot’s chest.
“Yeah!”
“Be careful, love.”
No response, but the chattering starts up again. Dot thinks queasily of her little girl. Ellie didn’t think much of the cupboard when they brought it up, didn’t pay it any mind, but Dot could feel her chest tightening when she darted underneath it. She’s so small, or the damn thing is too big, too seconds-from-collapse. Unbidden, she pictures Ellie heaving open the doors, clambering into the dark, and a chill slithers down her spine.
It’s that mismatch where the doors don’t fit that really does it, that little lapse of shadow, infuriating, infinite. It used to drive Dot mad when she was small. Her mother warned her a thousand thousand times never to touch the old heirloom, but some desperation drove her to try and close the doors anyway, again and again, pressing as hard as she could with her hands and her back and her shoulder, coming away all tear-streaked and smudged with brown. When her mother caught her there was hell to pay. But Dot couldn’t stand the thought of all the dark in there creeping out.
Her fingers are shaking around a bright yellow dress. She sits down to steady herself and starts folding again, facing the wardrobe now. There’s an odd comfort in the repetition of her task. Her hands move through familiar motions, swish, fold, turn, fold, fold, drop, repeat, and her eyes eat up the latticework, devour every long-detested facet of her mother’s last heirloom.
When she got older, she sometimes caught herself watching the wardrobe still, her eyes pulled up from her book or dragged away from the television to tramp maniac circles around every line and curve and bulge. Even at that age, she was still forbidden to touch it. To open it would be heresy – it was an heirloom, after all. And her mother swore that it was empty anyway.
Sometimes Dot found a strange delight in writing savage little stories, a kind of therapeutic blunt force trauma, brutal but quick. The wardrobe inspired the first of those, she remembers now. Her mother caught her with her hand against the glass, attempting to push those mismatched doors back together again – or ready to prise the heirloom open, shatter its bones, spill its guts. Dot smiles despite herself.
Sitting on the couch, seething after the fight, she imagined that her mother had stuffed a corpse in there when she was young. She could almost see the milky film of an eye shining through the gap, the whole thing bloating crooked in the dark where she wasn’t allowed to look. She could almost smell it.
She started to write. A grin ate up her face as she worked. She savaged the page, delighting in a viscera of syllables. Ink smudged her words, blood spilled across the carpet, soaked into her heroine’s shoes. Her pen slashed line after innocent line, leaving nothing spared or sacred. Her heart raced, sitting there on the couch, her breath surged like she was the one running for her life. The story caught her up in wretched talons, dragged her away, sent her tumbling through the air. She was so caught up she didn’t even notice her mother standing in the doorway, not until the old woman cleared her throat.
Dot jolts.
She finds herself staring at the wardrobe. The wardrobe seems to stare back at her, all innocent. She strains to listen, to hear whatever shook her reverie, but her head is full of her own heartbeat.
“Ellie?”
“What, mum?”
Dot breathes a too-relieved sigh and shakes herself. Somebody in the neighbouring apartment, she’s sure, something outside.
“Nothing, baby girl.”
Ellie doesn’t answer.
Dot stands and walks across the room, a shirt hanging limp in one white fist. Her silhouette ripples scarlet in the wardrobe’s glass panels as she gets closer, looming oddly through the lattice, fracturing as Dot gets close enough to see. She’s nearly as tall as the wardrobe, now. She presses her hand against the left door, the metalwork biting cold into her palm, and gives it a firm push. It doesn’t budge. She tries again, harder now, and the wood gives a protesting groan, but still the doors won’t slide together. A part of her had hoped she misremembered how difficult it was, hoped she was strong enough now to disprove those old fears. She tries one more time, and her hand slips, the lattice tearing rusty at her skin and one finger snicking against a widening crack. Dot pulls her hand away. A drop of blood pearls on her fingertip, bright red against an odd, brownish smear.
Sudden anger drives her fist against the left door. All it does is crack loudly against the right, swing open a little wider in response.
She doesn’t know if anybody emptied it after her mother died.
Once or twice, Dot saw her mother open the doors. She often found her touching the wardrobe, sometimes polishing the scarlet glass, sometimes waxing the oaky outer bulges, but she only ever opened it after Dot was supposed to be in bed. Dot watched from the corner once. The doors gave a terrible croak as they swung wide, hung heavy and awkward off the front as her mother let them go. She reached for something inside, her head and shoulders disappearing in the dark, obscured by the scarlet glimmer on the panelling. Dot couldn’t tell how the wardrobe kept balance propped open like that. It seemed ready to topple at any moment, to swallow her mother whole, close her up inside the dark as those doors finally slammed all the way shut for good.
Standing in front of it now, she can’t account for the fear that still thunders in her chest. It always just seemed full of something, something vile and indescribable, a soft, silken, chittering thing. Something long dead and rotting amongst webs of tulle, leather skin all musty and dusty and smelling like trampled rose petals.
What an imagination, Dot thinks to herself. Her fingers skitter across the opening, find purchase in the overlap, the darkness eating up her fingertips as they slip between the gap.
She sees herself doing this before, when she was younger – sees herself, at Ellie’s age, struggling to shove open the door. She doesn’t remember it well. She doesn’t remember it at all, really. She thinks that she probably made it up, just another one of her stories. That overactive imagination of hers.
The doors croak as Dot pulls them open.
It was cold inside, cloth pressing cool against her cheek as she pulled herself onto the ledge and brought the doors shut behind her as well as she could. From inside the cupboard it was light spilling in, not darkness spilling out. Her mother’s old jackets and dresses and chunky winter coats hung thick and heavy around her, touching every part of her skin. The air was choked with the musty smell of dust and rose perfume.
Ellie’s voice from the other room.
“Mum?”
Her hands drape across piles of cloth, dust swirling in familiar patterns around her fingers. She remembers the soft, fleeting touch of fabric on her face, how the folds of her mother’s clothing touched her body, draped across her back, formed thick, round knots around her as she moved. Her fingers caught on spiderwebs of tulle, found pockets in peculiar spots and marvelled at the treasures they contained. It was big inside, bigger than it looked, and she pushed herself further and further back until she found an empty space behind the curtain of clothes.
Her mother’s voice from the other room.
“Where are you, Dorothy? Dorothy!”
Dot smiles to herself, suddenly pleased with her newfound haven. She likes the dim and the quiet. She likes the way the clothes breathe with her, rustle when she has to shift her arm or readjust her legs. She likes feeling encompassed, surrounded by fabric and still air, the sacred scent of dust and mothballs and old bars of soap.
And something else. Something rancid and rotten lurking underneath, a choking, rancid stink that nearly makes her gag, and when she looks it makes her scream –
“Mum!”
Executive Producers
Daniel Henson
Karolina Ristevski
Elliot Cameron
Sue White
