by R. H. Dixon
Reaching for the bathroom cord he clicked the light off and stood in darkness, deliberating as to whether a shot of Southern Comfort might help to slow the barrage of thoughts running through his head. He often imagined his skull was an opaque glass jar filled with poltergeists that wanted to rest but didn’t know how. Some days he expected the glass would break, thus releasing all of the trapped negativity, along with his sanity, into the aether. It was bound to happen.
Making his decision, but not without guilt, he crept downstairs to the kitchen and poured a generous measure of whiskey liqueur into a glass tumbler. He swished it round a couple of times then swigged it down in one go. As the sweet amber liquid coated his throat with a warmth that would soon fill his belly with acidic fire, he rested against the counter and berated himself. Then when he went back to bed he lay with his eyes open and listened to the rain. He wondered if his life might return to some semblance of normality. Sometime. Ever. And he was still awake when the angry buzzing of his alarm clock signified yet another day for him to take on the chin.
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3
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Sissy Dawson’s paper-thin skin was covered in raw bed sores and it felt like it was filled with nothing but stiff joints and brittle bones. The mattress she was lying on provided no sense of cushioned comfort whatsoever and felt unduly harsh against her fragile frame. Despite the disrepair of her body Sissy still had all of her sensory faculties intact (although some would beg to differ), which seemed a cruel jape to add to her endless excruciating purgatory.
It was now, during night time hours, when life became most unbearable. Unable to shut down, Sissy could sense most things that went on within Eden Vale as though the building was an extension of her being. Each sound, smell and vibration tormented her. Cars came and went, their drivers slamming doors, revving engines and tuning radios. Other residents moaned and called out during agitated sleep, sometimes bidding good riddance to mortal existence. Members of staff snuck into the communal gardens for cigarette breaks and banter, making for a long-running soap opera that Sissy couldn’t switch off. As a result she knew that Lesley, head of the kitchen, was worried her son might have got a girl who was barely out of school pregnant, and that Charlotte, one of the trainee care assistants, was having doubts about marrying her fiancé because she suspected he was sleeping with her so-called mate, who happened to be a man. Then there was Donna and Julia, both laundry staff, who were concurrently fooling around with Eden Vale’s manager, Rob Fairhart. Neither woman knew about the other’s involvement with him, and nor did Rob’s wife Lisa.
Donna, a plump divorcee from out of town, whose whites never looked white when they came out of the wash, was a malicious troublemaker. Her rabble-rousing, mostly incited by boredom and a keenness to screw people over, meant that every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon she’d blow Rob behind the juniper bushes with a hope that Gerard the caretaker would catch them together. Gerard was an ill-tempered man with wiry grey hair, big hands and green corduroys. He tended the gardens (plants being just about the only thing he seemed to care about), did odd jobs around the nursing home and occasionally fucked Donna in the store cupboard. Their trysts were always hard and fast. He’d take her from behind and not utter a word before, during or after. She’d given him her private number three times, but he’d never called. She often wondered what he’d do if he found her trampling his begonias with the boss’s cock in her mouth. It was something she was keen to find out.
Julia, on the other hand, was a pernickety single-mother who wore Marks & Spencer twinsets and went to water aerobics classes in her spare time. She looked the prissy type who would most likely make love like they did in the cosy romance novels she was so fond of reading, yet in the privacy of Rob’s office she’d do all kinds of crazy shit to him that would warrant her having to stuff her knickers in his mouth to stop him from bellowing like a stag when he’d eventually come. It was during these times that Sissy could feel the heat of their lust and taste the zingy sweat of their bodies from all the way up in her first floor room.
Unsurprisingly, these frequent episodes of debauchery sickened Sissy to her stomach and made her wizened flesh burn. She could do nothing but lie there and hum to try to block it out. But no matter how loudly she did this, or how stridently she sung hymns in her head, she was still right there – bent over the office desk or squatting behind bushes – hanging thick in the air along with a profound level of deceit and yearning and the smell of sex.
Tonight there had been no goings-on of that nature, so she’d been spared the feelings of shame and blasphemy. Sissy, a deeply religious woman who’d attended church regularly in the days she’d been deemed able-bodied and sound of mind, held onto the hope that God might be as forgiving as Jesus said He was. She tried to have faith that He was merely keeping her here while she paid her dues. Because He alone knew she had a lot to pay.
On the wall above her bed the slow scrape of the clock’s second hand kept a nauseating synchrony with her heart. She wished it would stop. Dawn was slowly approaching with tendrils of grey and the shrill rage of a blackbird and the only positive she could take from this was that she must be one day closer to death.
From elsewhere in the building canned laughter carried on fusty air, travelling down corridors straight to her door. Someone else was having trouble sleeping, she supposed, and the sound of laughter itself, she thought, was very sinister. Nauseating like vertebrae grinding together, bone on bone. Demented like the hysterical noise Rob’s wife Lisa would make when she eventually found out about her husband’s infidelity. And disingenuous like most people, she found.
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4
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It was mid-afternoon when the landline started to ring, dragging John’s concentration from the spreadsheet he was working on and irritating him to the point of cursing. He expected it would be a cold caller because time-worthy calls seldom came through direct to the house, but when he picked up the cordless receiver he saw his mother’s number displayed in the caller ID window. His immediate thought was that something must be wrong.
‘Mam?’
‘Hi love, how’re things?’ Judith Gimmerick’s voice was calm and casual, not what he’d expected.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yeah fine, love. Sorry to disturb you while you’re working.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ John wafted his hand, a dismissive pardon as though she might see. ‘I needed to start wrapping up anyway. Got to pick Seren up from school.’ He checked his wristwatch, alarmed to see it was later than he’d thought.
‘I’ll not keep you long in that case. How is my gorgeous granddaughter anyway?’ There was a certain amount of concern attached to his mother’s voice that ruined the intended upbeat spontaneity of her query. It was a thinly veiled question that suggested she wanted to provoke conversation about what Seren had been up to and other such trivialities, but John knew it was a ruse to detect whether or not he was taking care of his daughter properly. It was all in the tone. Over the past three years he’d become well accustomed to that tone, and unfortunately such doubting concern, however well-intended, wasn’t exclusive to his mother.
Staring at his laptop screen, John directed the cursor to the white cross in the top corner of the spreadsheet and jabbed at the left mouse button a little too hard. ‘She’s okay, Mam. We’re both okay. Now what was it you wanted?’
‘That’s good to hear then,’ his mother said, her voice slightly strained. ‘That you’re both doing well. And yes, of course, I’ll get to the point. See, the thing is, I’m in a bit of a quandary. You know, I wouldn’t usually ask such a big thing of you but I need a massive favour…’ Her voice trailed off and an uneasy silence ensued. John imagined she was cringing on the other end of the line, waiting for some sort of positive reaction from him, some gesture of encouragement that would give her the go-ahead to ask whatever it was she wanted, whatever it was that was making her feel so uncomfortable. He took
the bait and prompted her. ‘Go on.’
‘You know how it’s mine and Norman’s tenth anniversary of being together next week?’
John hadn’t, but didn’t say as much. ‘Er, okay…?’
‘Well, the soppy bugger went to the travel agents’ yesterday afternoon without me knowing and booked us onto a last-minute cruise.’
‘Great.’
‘I know! Four weeks sailing round the Med, can you imagine? Even got a drinks package chucked in. Oh and an upgrade into a cabin with a view as well. I thought he was winding me up at first, you know how he is, but…’
‘Right, okay, I’m with you so far, Mam,’ John said, flipping his laptop screen down now he was aware of the time. ‘It sounds great but what’s it all got to do with me? I’m a bit far away to be doing an airport run surely?’
‘Oh no, love, we don’t need a lift to the airport,’ she said, a nervous laugh denoting it must be a comparably big favour that she needed to ask. ‘It’s the dogs. We’ve got nobody to watch Otis and Mindy.’
John’s brow furrowed. ‘I still don’t see…’
‘It’s just, I thought maybe you could bring Seren and stay here during the school holidays. Change of scenery for you both…’
‘You want me to stay at your house for a month to watch the dogs while you’re away?’ John was beyond incredulous. He picked up a blue stress-ball from his desk and squeezed it in his fist, watching as bits of rubber expanded between his fingers. ‘I do work you know…’
‘Yes, but you’d be able to work from my house just as well. Norman’s had that super-duper broadband malarkey put in and you can use my phone as much as you need to.’ Her voice had risen in pitch, marking her desperation. ‘Listen, love, like I said, I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t in such a fix…’
‘What about kennels?’
‘Oh come on,’ she scoffed, ‘Otis and Mindy wouldn’t like that at all, they’re too used to their creature comforts. They enjoy lying on the couch and having peanut butter on toast suppers. Besides, Pamela Tanner left her little Jack Russell in kennels last year while she went to Ibiza and the poor thing came back with fleas and gastroenteritis. He was never the same again after that. And neither were Pam’s carpets.’
‘Who the hell’s Pamela Tanner?’ John scrunched the stress-ball again, watching the veins in his wrist bulge.
‘Lady five doors up.’
John rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘What about Chris or Nick, can’t you ask either of them to do it?’
‘Chris and Laura are taking the kids to Florida in three weeks’ time, so the cruise clashes with their plans. And Nick’s expecting to have to travel to Dubai for work, so he can’t commit.’
‘What about Norman’s daughter? Can’t she have them?’
‘No. She’s got one of those little Shih Tzu things and he’s not keen on other dogs. Besides, I was hoping to get the house watched too, there’s been a spate of break-ins round here lately.’
‘Couldn’t she just open and close your curtains every day, make it look like someone’s home?’
‘Her car isn’t on the road at the moment, the radiator’s bust, and they won’t have the money to fix it till next month.’
‘So why can’t she just walk?’
‘Oh John, I can’t exactly ask her to walk all the way down Yoden Way with the three little 'uns twice a day, can I? It’s a good two miles there and back at least.’
‘Yet you can ask me to travel eighty miles?’ His response was snappier than he’d intended, but he wasn’t about to back down. ‘Look, Mam, you’re just going to have to get Amanda to sort it.’
‘Who’s Amanda?’
‘Norman’s daughter.’
‘Miranda.’
‘Whatever. There’s your neighbour as well, can’t Miranda and Pamela Tanner work something out between them?’
‘God no, Pam’s alright for a bit of a chinwag now and then, but she’s not the type I want mooching about in my house…’
‘It’ll have to be Miranda then,’ John said, slamming the stress-ball against the wall opposite. ‘Listen, Mam, I’m gonna be late, I have to go for Seren. I’ll call you later, okay?’
‘Oh. Alright then.’ Judith Gimmerick’s voice sounded small and dejected, all of the pre-holiday excitement she’d conveyed moments before now gone.
As soon as he hung up John cursed himself for being such an uncaring and uncooperative, lousy shithouse of a son. Then he cursed his mother for asking and expecting too much of him in the first place, thereby making him feel the way he did. And then he cursed himself some more. His mother seldom asked anything of him.
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5
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John scowled behind mirror-tinted aviator sunglasses, still trying to make sense of why his mother thought it would be such a great idea for him and Seren to move into her house for a large chunk of the summer. Surely there was a better solution. He’d left Horden almost eighteen years ago when his parents were going through the proceedings of a nasty divorce and he hadn’t been back since.
His father, Billy Gimmerick, had torn the family apart, triggering matrimonial warfare by having an affair with one of the young barmaids, a girl not much older than John himself, from the local Working Men’s Club. Billy might have got away with the brief fling too, had the barmaid not fallen pregnant. The bitter-sweet irony was that when Judith Gimmerick kicked him out of the family home the barmaid had decided she didn’t want him either. The younger woman had resolved to keep the baby, but concluded that Billy Gimmerick was much too old for her after all.
It was John’s older brothers Chris and Nick who had supported their mother throughout the whole ordeal. John had upped and scarpered. He’d had his own issues to deal with, stuff he still didn’t like to think or talk about, stuff he wasn’t proud of to this day. So, on top of that, he hadn’t had the emotional capacity with which to cope with his parents’ marital crisis.
He’d left Horden in the summer of ’97, moving to Manchester to find work and create a new life for himself. He spent nine years there in total. Long weekdays being an IT consultant were offset by short weekends living it up. The social aspect was an energised blur of liver-crippling benders, decadent sex and Class B drug dabbling – incidentally, none of which had made him feel remotely better about himself. All had been temporary fixes that made him descend into a different kind of low. Eventually work had seen him relocate to Leeds and that’s where he’d changed his recreational pursuits and met Amy Howard, a vivacious blonde who was originally from York. They’d shacked up together within months, got married a year later and set to creating their own family unit straight away – a small taster of true happiness that had lasted John a mere five years.
Now he was back to being a lone adult, but without the free-falling energy of his youth. His six-year-old daughter was enough to curb any antics that might have led him back to a debauched way of life, but these days he wasn’t much interested anyway. He didn’t take drugs, apart from prescribed ones. He was extremely lucky if he got laid once every quarter. And alcohol…well, two out of three wasn’t bad going, all things considered.
As he drove, air blew through the dash vents, brushing John’s knuckles with a constant air-conditioned chill. Despite having his sunglasses on, he reached up and flipped the car’s sun visor down. The sun’s glare was fierce and there was an energised hotness to the day that he couldn’t recall from summers past. The temperature gauge on the dashboard display indicated it was a massive thirty-two degrees Celsius outside. West Yorkshire was onto its fifth consecutive day of sunshine. It was hardly surprising the housing estates he drove past were epitomising British summertime. Ballgames were being played in the hot tarmacked streets: footballs bounced off kerbs and basketballs were pitched through hoops on driveways. Most players wore vests and shorts, a good percentage of them revealing post-winter skin. Front doors were flung wide, England’s answer to residential air-con, and deckchairs and sun-loungers in gardens were positione
d sun-facing. Paddling pools on lawns were filled with hosepipe water, squealing children and dead midges. Bassy beats thudded from car sound systems and the continuous loop of an ice-cream van’s jingle confirmed that summer was in full flow. The media would declare a national crisis of some sort sooner or later, John thought, most likely a hosepipe ban, because according to the forecasts it was set to hot up to the mid-thirties in time for the first few days of the school summer break.
In order to make the most of the favourable weather front, before the jet stream got its mad up and pummelled the country with an onslaught of cold, wet misery, John planned to get some barbecue supplies after picking Seren up. If he left it any later he imagined the supermarkets would run out of charcoal and crates of lager.
It would be a nice treat for Seren, he thought, for the pair of them to have dinner alfresco on Friday evening to mark the start of the summer holidays. They could enjoy burgers and sausages in the garden, then light the chiminea when it got chilly, because no doubt Seren would want to stay up late. He’d been secretly collecting money-off coupons from the back of Frosties boxes so that he could take her to Alton Towers, because she’d been harping on for ages about wanting to go. He was going to wait till Friday evening and then tell her they’d be riding Nemesis and all the other rollercoaster rides whenever he could schedule some time off work. Perhaps even as soon as two weeks into the holidays, if he could finish preparing the auditing documentation he’d been working on for the past month.
By the time he arrived at St Philip’s Primary School there was already a long queue of cars waiting to get out of the car park, road works further up the street seeing to it that they were filtering from the junction at a painfully slow rate. Knowing he’d be going nowhere fast once he pulled off the main road, John grumbled a few choice expletives, indicated right and turned in through the school gates.