Keats: Not you. Permanent staff only.
I’m engulfed by this retched sense of isolation. It’s never a great feeling being left behind. Brings back memories of Mum passing over. As they file out, leaving me alone, I try to cheer up by insisting I’m not entirely sorry that I won’t be joining these zombies, or Keats in particular, for lunch. I’d love to be a fly on the pizzeria wall to see the stunned expression on the waiter’s face when Keats orders his Hawaiian in his full combat desperado rig. Pineapple and ham? No, Keats will be a pepperoni and Cajun sauce guy. Hot ‘n’ fiery.
The steel door clangs shut. I sigh lightly and then decide I might as well go for lunch too. I push the door handle down. The door doesn’t budge. I tug harder. It refuses to detach from its frame. The metal handle slips from my hands when the penny drops. I’m locked in the basement.
Alone.
All the earlier patient work I’ve put in to keep composed goes out of the window. Correction: window. There’s no window down here. No natural light. I fumble in my bag for my mobile and call Michael. No connection. The basement must be beyond the reach of my service provider’s reception. And stupid me forgot to ask for the password for the office wifi, so I can’t even send an e-mail. I turn. My edgy gaze bounces and bounces about. My chest squeezes, my eyes water as if they’ve been stung by a film of dust.
The walls are closing in on me, I know they are, the ceiling inching lower. The lights come alive, stabbing me with their hostile glare. I’m caught in a coffin, the bang bang of nails cementing its lid over me forever. It rushes back to me, the girls who died in this very trap room over a hundred years ago. The words on the website come back to haunt me.
As the flames drew closer, their faces wreathed in choking smoke, prayers for divine intervention were feverishly howled by the doomed girls. The heroic dog that had led the way, keened in helpless anguish. All twenty-two perished.
I panic. Thump my fist on the door and cry out. No-one comes. I flatten my back helplessly against the door, my palms spread against unresponsive cold steel. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Didn’t a character say that in the classic comedy, Dad’s Army, as they did the opposite, panicking enough for England?
They’ll be back soon, won’t they? How long does a pizza take?
I hurry to the back of the basement, hoping to find a way out of this prison. The wall is shadow and whitewash over ancient wood panelling. Something catches my eye. A semi-circular wooden handle. I study the panel more closely and note the straight lines defining it. I think it’s a door. I look back at the handle. Damn. It’s been painted over and is stuck to the panel. Screwing up my face with determination, I dig in my nails and pull. Let out an ouch of surprised pain as I spring backwards and stumble. The handle hasn’t budged an inch.
Think. Think. Think.
I rush back and rummage around in drawer after drawer until I find a metal ruler. It takes all my will and strength but I manage to jemmy the handle free. Then I tug desperately. No joy. I use the ruler to scrape away the old paint from where I think the door frame is and put my foot against the wall and pull with all my might. A thick solid oak door creaks on its hinges, gives off the groan of a dying person, opening enough for me to inch through.
I sense it’s another room. Blanketed in dark, coated in a musty smell. I use my hand to feel along the wall. Touch something that’s the shape of half a tennis ball jutting from the wall. A dated light switch. My fingers roam over it until I locate the on/off switch. Flick. A pasty dirty brown-yellow light throws its gloom over what appears to be an empty storeroom. The aged bulb inside is hanging by a wing and a prayer, its wiring frayed and torn. There’s another door at the back. It’s fastened shut with what must be decades-old rusty bolts. I won’t be defeated. I bite and fight the pain that attacks my hands as I pull the bolts free. Open up.
Fresh air. Streams of natural light. I tip my head back like a convert reborn. Tilt my mouth open. Bliss. I stay like that, don’t move for a while, breathing in the invigorating oxygen that I’ve always taken for granted. I look about me and am surprised to see I’m not fully outside. It’s a kind of narrow courtyard, functional, not pretty, save for its cobbled ground. In the middle is an old-fashioned drain to catch rainwater through the large iron grill above that links the courtyard to the world outside. Two black things suddenly clatter over the grill. I jump back, grossed out it’s a pair of rats swishing their tails taking a lunchtime stroll. Then it happens again and I understand – it’s the shoes of pedestrians walking over.
I breathe with relief now I can holler for help at passers-by if I need to. Thank God my mobile works here because of the reception coming through the grill to outside. Now I know I can come here, it feels okay to go back inside.
I close the door to the narrow passage, fasten the bolts again but their age and rust mean they’re nearly hanging off. I push the internal door to the basement back into place and try to cover where I’ve scraped off the whitewash.
Now I’m here on my own, naughty thoughts come to me. While the cat’s away… I slip into Keats’s seat and spin round. I can’t resist grinning. I shake the mouse on his computer to get rid of his screen saver and look at what he’s been doing all morning. He’s a busy boy, no doubt about it. The guy’s a whirlwind. On his recently opened files option, there’s a dozen he’s opened today alone. One is a policy document for a corporation that explains how to create a happy and integrated workforce. I can’t hold back the nasty laugh that bursts out. Laughter dies, curiosity grows when I see a graphics file called ‘P Funeral Service’. Strange thing for a management consultant to be doing. Or perhaps ‘P Funeral Service’ is a cover name for something else. I open it.
It is indeed the first page of an order of service programme for a funeral. The photo of the deceased, a young man, stuns me. My breathing changes, along with the beat of my heart, both high kicking to a dangerous level of acceleration. My earlier wish that Keats’s chair turns into lethal electric must have come true because I swear I’m being electrocuted. You see, I knew this handsome young man in the photo. But I’m not paralysed with shock because he’s dead. I knew he was dead. How can Keats be working on his funeral service programme now? He can’t have passed away. Not recently.
Philip died that summer ten years ago.
Philip can’t have died twice over.
My head, my brain, my everything is shaking in numb denial. This can’t be Philip. Not my Philip. No! I’ve got this wrong. Being alone down here, in this stagnant vault, has mushed my mind. My head moves closer to the screen to check…I hear the zombies coming back in the corridor outside. A tribe of footsteps playing musical echoes. Keats.
Panic is beside me again. A fine sheen of sweat blooms below my hairline as I hurry, with shaking hands, to close the file. The footsteps beat louder. Hell, I can’t get Keats’s screen saver back. Come on. Come on. The footsteps are the intense beat of a drum as they near the reinforced door. The screen saver won’t be found. Awful silence from outside. My heart lurches. I jump into my chair, head down, tapping nonsense on the keyboard as the door opens.
I run my hand over the damp sweat on my brow. Look up at Keats. Smile innocently enough, although I suspect he deliberately locked me in this room. The zombies file back on his tail. Keats takes his seat and studies his screen for a moment. He moves and clicks his mouse. He turns his head towards me slightly and pauses. What’s going on behind that bandana and sunglasses of his? A patchwork of confusion? A vision of menace? Lips parted because he’s going to let rip at me?
He turns slowly from me and carries on working as if nothing has happened.
I’m completely shot. The only sounds are digital hums, the walls’ peculiar breathing and my own aching heartbeat.
Nothing in my life could prepare me for this moment. My eyes have just told me one thing but my searing and inerasable memory tells me something else. Philip died, was buried. Ten years ago. That’s not something I’m ever going to forget. It made me the person I
am, more than anything else. Now a file – a funeral programme – on Keats’s computer tells me Philip’s just died and is about to be laid to rest in the near future.
Both can’t be true. Deep down inside my soul, someone, something is screaming at me to somehow, someway, print off a copy of the funeral programme. I can hear the screaming. But my limbs and hands are stiff, stuck still by a bitter cold as my fractured mind hurtles back into an unwilling past.
Twelve
That summer
‘I’ve found you a summer job, Rachel. I know you don’t need the money but you know how I feel about teenagers learning to stand on their own two feet. When I was your age I was labouring on building sites from dawn to dusk. It’ll give you something to do before you go to university. And anyway,’ her father’s voice faltered, ‘it’ll be better than staying in the house, moping and thinking about your mother.’
In the three months since Rachel’s mother had died, her father, Frank, had never uttered the words ‘mum’, ‘mother’ or ‘wife’. Rachel hadn’t either. She didn’t want to upset her father by reminding him about his wife’s death. She knew he didn’t want to remind her that her mother was dead either. They were like two conspirators covering up a crime called grief. Instead of the sound of tears in their rambling country house, there was only silence. The silence of the grave.
Rachel pasted on her best make-believe smile. ‘Great.’
‘I met an old friend of mine yesterday at my club,’ her father informed her as they sat at their special spot at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t think you’ve met my friend, Danny. He’s got a big house on an estate about five miles from here. He owns a business in my line of work too, building, construction. Anyway, I had a word with him and he thought he could find you something to do around his house, filing or collating or something. You can travel there on your bike. I said you’d go over tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. Don’t be late, start as you mean to go on.’
That was all her father said before silence descended on their home again.
There was no sign of Danny the following morning when Rachel wheeled her bike up the drive of a property that certainly put the ‘country’ into ‘house’. She rang the doorbell and hammered on the brass knocker but no-one came. The house was silent. But in the luxuriant gardens that surrounded the property, there was a sound. Someone singing along to a guitar, accompanied by the yap-yap barking of a small dog. She left the front door and followed the music. Behind a gazebo, she found a young man who her girlfriends would call ‘a looker’ sitting back against the structure singing Alice Cooper’s Eighteen. A puppy gleefully scampered around, joining in with a howling harmony.
The man looked up with a warm smile. ‘Hi there. Come to burgle the place? The safe’s behind a landscape painting in the master bedroom.’
Cheeky guy! Though she did like the twinkle in his eyes.
‘I’m Rachel. I’m supposed to be starting work today with Danny but I don’t know where he is.’
The young man nodded. ‘He’s probably out and about putting up overpriced jerry-built flats that don’t need to wait for Jericho for the walls to come tumbling down. That’s where he usually is. I’m Philip, by the way. Why don’t you park your backside and join me for a ciggy while you wait for the old crook to turn up?’
‘I don’t smoke, it’s bad for you.’
Philip was laughing at her. ‘Right. I suppose that means you don’t want to shoot up any of the heroin I’ve got in my bag?’
Rachel looked outraged. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s a joke. You know what one of them is, don’t you? If you’re going to be working around here, best to have a sense of humour.’
‘Right.’ More in embarrassment than anything, Rachel sat down next to Philip and enjoyed the puppy making a fuss of her. ‘Hello, what’s your name?’
Philip explained. ‘He hasn’t got a name yet. I found him in a river on the way to work a few weeks back; I think someone was trying to drown him.’ He tapped a finger to the side of his nose. ‘By the way, don’t tell Danny I’m looking after our little friend here. He doesn’t like dogs. He told me to get rid of him.’
At the sound of footsteps approaching, Rachel leapt to her feet and stood awkwardly to attention, Philip meanwhile lounged further back. A large thickset man with a stony face came round the corner, eyed Rachel, then Philip, then Rachel again.
He spoke to her first. ‘Hello, you must be Frank’s girl. Come into the house and I’ll find you something to do.’ He turned to Philip. ‘And as for you, what do you think you’re doing?’
The cheeky young man shrugged. ‘I’m on a tea break. I’m entitled, it’s the law.’
‘And what’s that mutt still doing here? I thought I told you to make it disappear. I’m paying you to be a gardener and handyman – not a dog warden. Why don’t you go and prune the roses or something?’
Slowly, with the insolence of youth, Philip climbed to his feet, guitar in hand. ‘Yeah, I’ll do that. They could do with a bit of nip and tuck. I’ll see you around, Rach.’
As Danny and his new employee walked towards the front door of the house, Philip called out across the garden. ‘Hey, Rach. I’ve got a name for the dog. I’m going to call him Ray – then you’ll be Ray and Rachel – you can go on the stage together as a double act!’
For the first time since her mum died, Rachel’s face lifted into a real smile.
Rachel was an only child. In the weeks that followed, Philip became the brother she’d never had. They were both eighteen. When Danny wasn’t around, and sometimes when he was, her new friend seemed to be on a perpetual tea break. During those extended breaks, he taught her how to juggle apples from Danny’s orchard, how to play the chords to Alice Cooper’s Eighteen on his guitar and how to do wheelies on her bike across the gravel drive. He taught her all the names of the plants and trees and the birds that sat in them. He asked her questions that she’d never been asked before. When she said she was going to a really good university in the autumn, he looked puzzled. ‘Why?’
No-one asked that question at her school or among her friends because it was the natural order of things that everyone went to university. ‘To get a good job.’
He scoffed, appearing highly unconvinced. ‘Right. Good plan.’
When she mentioned she’d lost her mother in the spring and the doctors couldn’t explain why, he didn’t react like most people. He didn’t say:
‘At least she’s at peace now.’
‘Time’s a great healer.’
‘At least you’ve still got your dad.’
Philip said nothing, just offered her his hand. When she took it, he held it softly for as long as she wanted it held. He always said and did the right thing. He always made her laugh. He always looked out for her.
Only once in those first few summer weeks did Philip turn serious. When he asked her what Danny was actually making her do, she told him she was cleaning his classic car collection in their specially built annex.
Philip’s initial reaction was to sneer, ‘Oh yes, his cars; they’re the only things he really cares about. That and his multiple ex-wives of course.’
But when she told him, ‘From tomorrow though, he’s asked me to go down in his wine cellar and catalogue the vino in a notebook for him,’ the muscle in Philip’s cheek twitched.
‘His wine cellar?’
‘Yes – that’s all right, isn’t it?’
It was a long time before Philip answered. ‘I suppose.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
It was an even longer time before he whispered, ‘No reason.’
Thirteen
‘When are you packing your bags and moving out?’
Those are the fiery coals heaped on my disorientated head after I close the front door of the houseshare. It’s the vulture from the kitchen. Hands on hips, standing there blocking my path like a newly constructed partition wall. She’s one of those perpetually angry people. You know, lips drooling with dis
pleasure, eyes hard that refuse to rest, a body held a hair’s breath away from pouncing on some unsuspecting victim. Well, I don’t need her BS. Not now. Not after seeing Philip… If it was his face that I saw. Will the shaking ever stop? The hurt go away? My hidden past leave me the damn alone? But you know it’s never gone away. It’s always taunted, playing a cruel version of peek-a-boo around every corner you turn.
The walk from work back here was a path strewn with broken-glassed turmoil. My existence spinning on a sixpence ready to capsize, upending me. I’d been frozen, transfixed in the street by a toddler crying and its mother trying to scold and tug her into a pushchair. That’s what happens when I see the distress and pain of a stranger, no matter how young or old, I catch a wisp of Philip’s tortured features in their face. As if he’s there, amongst the suffering and heartache.
Did I see what I thought I saw in those moments at Keats’s computer? Or have things reached such a pass that my imagination has replaced my reality?
‘I asked you a question.’ What is without doubt a reality is this woman rearing in my face. Her obnoxious tone rather than the question itself is what mercifully drags me back to the present.
‘Whatever’s the problem will have to wait. I’m busy.’
I try to bustle by but that bristling body of hers shuffles and shifts, won’t let me pass. Who the son of a monkey does this woman think she is? My guardian demon angel? No, that’s Philip. His beautiful open face swims in my mind. Then it shutters and snaps, a camera lens replacing one picture after another of him. Talking. Head tilted back, filling the world with his husky start-stop beat of laughter. Humming Alice Cooper’s… No! No! No! I won’t go back there.
She needs to let me pass. Can’t this self-important woman see I’m on the edge? Ready to combust apart? It makes me rage, so angry, I bite back, ‘Can you get out of my way.’ Do I mean her or mine and Philip’s past?
The only tune she’s listening to is her own. ‘You should’ve been gone a month ago. My friend’s been waiting to rent the room.’
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