The Resident

by Francis Cottam

  There was a terse quality to the hushed dialogues he heard that told the young Max two things. The first was that their quarrels were too serious simply to allow them to shout at one another. The second was that they did not want their only child knowing what had driven the wedge between them.

  He was in the pantry on the evening of their deaths. He was not hiding or deliberately observing them. He was actually stealing cookies when his mother came into the kitchen to season something she had slow-cooking on the stove and he saw her ivory blouse and black skirt through the slats in the pantry door. He heard her humming something, ‘Lara’s Theme’, from the film Doctor Zhivago, one of her favourites.

  He munched on a chocolate chip cookie, smiling at his mother, thrilled, if he was honest, to be observing her secretly, to have this view of her that she would remain for ever unaware of. He felt his unseen study of his mother gave him an importance greater than that ordinarily accorded a child.

  At the age of six, Max would not have used those words to describe his feelings. He would not have possessed this vocabulary. But he remembered the occasion very accurately and the words reflected his six-year-old feelings with absolute truth.

  His father came in and stood behind his mother and said something very quietly to her. She was bent down from the waist with the oven door open before her and her body stiffened when he said what he said but even with his alert ears, in the cool, slatted quiet of the pantry, even though he had stopped chewing and stood watching with the cookie a congealing mess in his mouth, Max could not make out his father’s words.

  Later in his life, Max saw old newsreels of Nazi death squads. The executions took place in a forest, not in a kitchen. But the mechanics of it, the basic choreography, was the same.

  The victim would kneel before the executioner who would shoot them once in the back of the skull with a bullet from a 9mm pistol. Max did not know then the specifics of the gun his father took from out of his suit pocket. It would take August to inform him of that on that whisky-and grief-soaked night a few years into the future. But that, essentially, was what his father did. He took out the pistol and placed it against the back of his wife’s skull and pressed the trigger and there was a sharp report, and a sharp odour filled the kitchen that Max later learned was called cordite.

  That first bullet skimmed his mother’s head.

  In the Nazi newsreels, the victims always slumped, like puppets with their strings abruptly cut, to the forest floor. In their kitchen, his mother did not slump over the open oven. She stiffened and then rose and turned and faced his father.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Daniel, for the love of God—’

  And he shot her in the forehead, leaving a hole in her head that was the size of a quarter, bright crimson in colour, and there was the smell of more cordite and she did slump to the floor, the life leaving her in a surprised rush. And his father let out a scream higher and more startling in pitch than Max would have thought him capable, with his deep speaking voice.

  Then his father opened his mouth wide, put the barrel of the pistol into his mouth, closed his eyes and pressed the trigger. There was another explosion of sound. The top of his head erupted, blood and bits of bone fragment spattered on the ceiling and Max’s father fell to the floor beside his dead wife.

  It was very still in the kitchen after that. Max swallowed the rest of his cookie. Neighbours were alerted by the noise. By the time they arrived, Max was out of the pantry and lying like spoons with his mother weeping. The tears were genuine. He mourned his mother bitterly for years.

  He tried to re-enact the death. He did it with his puppet theatre. He painted the gory death wounds onto the puppets and created dialogue to add colour to the scene. Sometimes he would contrive a happier outcome, where his mother talked his father out of it. Sometimes his father did not kill his mother at all, just killing himself in front of her as she seasoned her stew at the stove.

  On a couple of occasions, he had his mother wrestle or trick the gun from his father and turn it on him in self-defence. This scenario did not really work, though. His mother had been too gentle a woman to use physical force. His father had a weak character but it was from his father that Max had inherited his formidable physical strength.

  The re-enactments stopped when August caught him. His grandfather beat him with his belt so severely across the buttocks that Max was unable to sit comfortably afterwards for a full week. August burned the theatre and the puppets in an incinerator in the basement of the building. It was after that, when Max was eight, that the nature of his games became of necessity more secretive.

  He had realised eventually that his grandfather would never love him. August looked at him and saw his father. He had been no way culpable in the death of either of his parents. He had nothing to do with his mother’s infidelity or his father’s disastrous reaction to it. But his grandfather looked for the traits in him that had led to his mother’s dissatisfaction with his father. He searched for weakness. And because he wanted to so ardently, of course he found evidence to suggest that it existed, as if present in some crippled, mutant gene that disfigured his personality.

  His parents had loved him, Max was certain of that. And he had loved them, although he had stopped loving his father when he saw him shoot his mother dead. And Max could not love August. He loved his mother’s memory and that was all. He had had a brief, adolescent crush on the child of one of the apartment’s tenant families. August put an end to that too, as painful as it was humiliating. And then Juliet had come into his life.

  He had made up the story about the six-hour operation to try to save his shot mother’s life because he wanted Juliet’s sympathy. He thought he’d succeeded. But Juliet had dashed the hopes he had for them in the cruellest manner imaginable. He couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. The dinner he had cooked had been a triumph, everything had been going exactly as he’d hoped, and then, after kissing him, taking off her clothes, leading him on, she’d rejected him. And it was not his fault. He had performed flawlessly; she had been the one to blame. She’d led him to believe she wanted him, and then she’d said no. Obviously the influence of her ex-husband was still poisoning her mind and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Twenty-two

  THE MORNING AFTER the disastrous dinner and its shameful aftermath, Max felt as if the whole terrible episode had happened years ago. In fact, he wondered whether it had happened at all. Maybe the next time they met, she’d look at him with the same friendliness and he’d wonder what he’d been worrying about.

  Then he saw her. He was walking, a few hundred yards from their building, and he saw her race through the rain, huddled in her coat and head down, across the sidewalk and into the doorway of a deli. And the memory of her deliberately bared breasts and the warmth of her breath and the taste of her lips as she willingly kissed him came back so vividly, he could not hide the truth of it from himself any more.

  Max wondered what to do. Whatever he said, it was going to be embarrassing for both of them. They would be obliged to revisit the awkwardness of the previous night and the prospect of further humiliation and rejection filled him with dread. But what could he do? He had to know one way or another what she thought. So he followed her into the deli.

  She was paying for her sandwich when he went through the door. She turned to leave and saw him and she smiled and the smile was awkward, as he had known it would be.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hey,’ he mirrored back. He moved to kiss her then, on the mouth, starting again where they had left off, except this time determined to get the choreography of romance absolutely right.

  She averted her lips so that the kiss was delivered to her cheek. Did she wince slightly, when she turned her head? No, he decided, he had imagined it. But she had deliberately avoided his lips and he was stung by that.

  He needed to deal with it. The only way to do that was head-on. There was too much at stake for prevarication. Max said, ‘I wanted to talk
to you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I suddenly felt weird. It had nothing to do with you. I just need time.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Max said. ‘That just tells me you take being with someone seriously. I like that.’

  She didn’t say anything. The way she didn’t comment on what he had just said inflicted a slight feeling of panic on him. He thought that he might be able to provoke her into responding how he wanted her to with a bluff. She’d made the first move after all. She had taken off her shirt last night willingly. He had seen the desire burning in her eyes by candlelight. He had seen the dark, delicious contrast of her nipples against her pale skin. He had not been imagining that. She liked and desired him, didn’t she? She had to. ‘But … I was thinking about it,’ he said, ‘and maybe we shouldn’t have done that, living in the same building.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There’s a saying, isn’t there, about mixing business and pleasure? We’re not exactly in business together, but you know what I mean. We have a tenant–landlord relationship.’

  ‘We do,’ Juliet said, nodding. ‘We certainly have that.’

  ‘I suppose there’s two ways of looking at it,’ he said. ‘You can be sensible and cautious and correct. Or you can just act on instinct, doing what your feelings tell you to do, guided by your emotions in the moment.’

  ‘I’m not quite clear on what you’re driving at, Max; at where you’re coming from here.’

  ‘I honestly didn’t mean for anything to happen,’ he said. ‘I’m just so used to having August around. I just wanted company. I wouldn’t want it weird between us.’

  Her posture changed as she relaxed and a slight frown lifted from her brow. She said, ‘I’m so glad you feel the same way.’

  He could hear the relief in her voice as she clearly thought they both felt the same way: that it had been a mistake, a miscalculation they had been able to escape without either of them incurring damage or indignity.

  It was a disaster. Max could feel the fury and frustration building in him: she’d kissed him first. How could she dismiss him from her life as if he was just some stranger? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t how it was meant to be. But he couldn’t show any of this to her; all he could do was stand there with a stupid smile glued to his features, being who she wanted him to be, just a sweet and stolid acquaintance; someone to call upon if a fuse needed fixing or if her central heating failed. He had been bumped in a sickening moment from romantic lead to also-ran, and he had done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

  ‘It’s meant a lot to me,’ Juliet was saying.

  And Max knew that she meant the snug comfort blanket of his unthreatening, asexual presence; the shelter he had provided and his vigilance in keeping his new tenant comfortable and secure. Twelve hours earlier, she had been on the verge of making love to him, abandoning herself to their shared passion. Now he was little more than a fondly thought of employee. His status was nearer the hired help than the man who shared her body and bed.

  He nodded, numbly. Around him, the deli bustled with conversation, wisecracks, complaints about the weather, shouted orders for food, off-menu requests, speculation about the ball game and the next big title fight. He ignored it. It was life, of a sort, but held no appeal for him and he had always ignored it. But he had never in his life felt quite so numb, quite so isolated from things. It feels like a sort of exile, he thought, as Juliet treated him to a cute wave and walked out of the deli, having dismissed him entirely as a significant part of the new life she was embarking upon.

  He left the deli without even completing the pretence of ordering anything to eat or drink. What was the point? She had gone. In her absence he no longer needed a pretext for being there. One of the staff shouted something at his retreating back but Max ignored him.

  He climbed the stairs to his apartment; nine floors, eighteen flights. He was fit and strong and reached his destination barely breathing more heavily than he had at the outset, at the bottom of the first set of steps, but he barely noticed. His mind was otherwise engaged.

  He had tried and failed to orchestrate matters the conventional way. Somewhere he had missed a step in the tricky choreography of the dating ritual or stumbled over a line of dialogue. The mimicry only took him so far. After a while he was dependent upon his own instincts and personality and he had neither the experience nor the confidence to carry things off successfully.

  There was only one avenue left to him. He would have to revert. He stood in his apartment with the closet doors flung wide and looked at the hidden aperture he had so recently nailed shut, believing it to be for the very last time. He’d meant it the night before when he’d decided to try to do the right thing. But it wasn’t as simple as he’d thought. The passages gave him power and it was clear that he would have to use that power if he was going to get what he wanted. Because without Juliet, there was no longer any point to his life.

  He would have to extract the nails. Resolutions were all very well but he needed to study his subject further. He needed to learn everything he could about her if he was to overcome the setback he had endured that morning.

  Faint heart never won a fair maiden, the saying ran. He had heard his grandfather say it. And he was the possessor of a strong heart. He would not give up. He would restrain himself and restrict himself to what was respectable in his behaviour once beyond this wall. He would act with dignity and good taste. But he would have to go back to his hidden domain or he would never learn how to go forward in his life.

  Twenty-three

  MAX DID NOT remember the very first occasion on which he had ventured into the passages. He knew that he must have been very young. He thought he had probably been about four or five years old when his fascination with other people first began to intrude upon and then influence his own behaviour.

  The O’Donnells had lived in Juliet’s apartment back then. Phil O’Donnell was a high-ranking member of the New York Fire Department, having climbed the promotion ladder to a level where he only wore a uniform for ceremonial gatherings. His wife, Patricia, was a part-time teacher of music and drama, and it was the music that first drew Max into the passages. It was the repeated playing of scales and the plangent chords of classical exercises that first attracted him to the honey-comb of secret spaces that haphazard building and conversion work had endowed the building with.

  The O’Donnells had a daughter called Kate. He remembered that she was very beautiful. In fact, she had looked almost uncannily like Juliet Devereau.

  She had not looked like that when he had first seen her; when he had been five and she about eleven and he was restricted to glimpses in the elevator, or on the sidewalk outside the building. She had looked like that when she reached the age of about fourteen and achieved what Max now knew was termed puberty. He had not known that word then. He had sensed the change, though. Even as an eight-year-old, he had been aware of Kate O’Donnell’s budding sexuality; the way in which she was ripely blossoming into womanhood.

  He had bored his first peepholes by then. They gave him intimate views of every room in what was now Juliet Devereau’s apartment. He could watch the O’Donnells go about their family business for hours, fascinated, his attention span belying his years as he watched Phil O’Donnell carelessly caress his wife’s breasts through her blouse after returning from work, removing his suit coat and tie and pouring himself an inch of whisky.

  Everything about the way that people behaved together surprised little Max. He could not predict what people were going to do, how they would act or react to what other people close to them did.

  The notion of closeness was strange. There was physical closeness, of course. That was just proximity, the way a family chose to confine themselves, living together in a single space, apparently preferring one another’s company to solitude.

  Max didn’t understand this. He liked solitude; he revelled in it. He knew that his fascination for others would be considered odd and his spying upon them met with disapp
roval. This made him careful of being caught, almost preternaturally alert. And of course, it isolated him. He could not share his secret and his secret made him unique.

  The other closeness slightly baffled him. This was the closeness that encouraged Kate to sit on her father’s lap when she was close to being a full-grown woman. He would hug her and stroke her head and croon to her in a sweet tenor voice.

  ‘Tell me about the difference between a man and a woman, Daddy.’

  ‘I’d say it’s fairly plain.’

  ‘I mean the real difference. What’s the reason the men on the construction sites whistle at us when Ma and me walk by?’

  ‘It’s because they know no better.’

  ‘We don’t whistle back.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, Katy my love.’

  And later, after Kate had long gone to bed, her parents would lie in theirs and Max would watch through the wall, listening.

  ‘Have you seen the way she’s developing, Phil?’

  ‘I’m not blind.’

  ‘She will need to be told about intercourse. She will need to be told about male urges and the mechanics of it.’

  ‘I’d rather you told her about the mechanics of it.’

  ‘Shy about the theory, Phil? I’ve never known you shirk the practical side of things.’

  Laughter then, shared and deliberately muffled, which Max did not really understand the reason for and hoped was a prelude to their coupling. He liked to watch that. He liked to hear Phil snort like a pig and his wife whimper like someone in pain. He liked the way Patricia O’Donnell’s brassiere straps dug into the soft flesh on her pale shoulders.

  But Kate was the star. Sometimes she would sit between her mother’s knees as her mother sat and brushed her hair. They would murmur things Max could not catch and laugh together and it mystified him. Kate was old enough to brush her own hair. She was not a helpless baby.