by Neil Cross
She said, ‘Hello again.’
‘Hello.’
‘I was wondering if I’d see you.’
There was a long mirror at the edge of his vision. He wanted to glance at himself: to see what kind of state he was in. But he daren’t. He stood there with the Henry vacuum cleaner in his hand. It had a smiley face printed on the front of the red canister—the hose was its nose.
He said, ‘Here I am.’
She half-lifted her little bag in strange salute, and the corners of her mouth flexed.
‘Me, too.’
He had sweaty hair and he was wearing overalls.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d better leave you to it.’
She didn’t appear to have blinked. It must have been an optical illusion—perhaps their blinks were synchronizing, the way the moon spun on its axis in perfect time with the Earth, always to show the same face.
But at dinner she was quiet, and prodded her food.
He tried to eat. It felt wrong.
She put down her cutlery and dabbed with a napkin at the corners of her mouth. It wasn’t required; she’d eaten almost nothing. She said, ‘I don’t do this.’
‘Do what?’
‘This.’
‘Eat dinner?’
She got the bill and he sat there, helpless.
They went to her car. She didn’t offer her arm. He walked beside her.
He thought of the drive that lay ahead; all the way back to Innsmouth. Him staring at the passenger window, at the reflection of his own face. Chris at the wheel, following the radiant string of cat’s eyes.
He touched her arm; her pointy elbow.
At his touch, she stopped. She faced him.
He said, ‘Are you, like, married or something?’
She laughed. At first, he was glad; it was good to hear her laughing again. But then he heard that it was a bad laugh, a desolate laugh. It was like the Anchorage; it had been corrupted by bad magic.
‘Yes and no. Not any more. It’s complicated.’
She rooted in her handbag and produced her cigarettes.
‘I’m twice your age. Jesus Christ.’
She booked them into another hotel; a better hotel. She showed Charlie her corporate credit card and made a face and winked.
Charlie blushed under the neutral gaze of the desk clerk, because often he had been in the desk clerk’s position.
He followed Chris to the elevator and up to the fifth floor. And he stood while she opened the door and hung out the PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign and turned on the lights.
After he had come, a long and violent animal spasm, she stroked his face. She was crying. And he let her, because it made him feel strong. He buried his face in her neck and smelled her—different, even better now.
And he was still awake when the sunrise brightened the curtains and the Sunday traffic started outside, and he pulled the blankets over them and lay thinking.
He curled around her, thrilled by the astonishing intimacy of her kittenish snoring, the nape of her neck; her mouth slightly open.
He thought, Don’t sleep, and soon he was asleep.
They woke just in time to check out. There was a rush of clothes-gathering, jumping into trouser and knickers: she hurried, topless to the bathroom and cleaned her teeth with an index finger, combed her hair with wet hands: produced make-up from her bag, scribbled some on.
The sunlight came clean and cold through the curtains. There was no wind.
He waited on the steps while she paid the bill. And in the car on the way home, he sat transformed. The cold air slipstreamed through the open window.
She pulled up opposite the house. And in the shadow of it, he felt the transformation begin to reverse.
He glanced at her knees, her ankles, her wrists. Thought of her, curled up asleep; her little snores. The way her naked breasts jiggled as she finger-cleaned her teeth.
He nodded and opened the door. He got out. She leaned over. Patted his hand.
He saw that, at the nearest convenient spot, she would pull over and lower the sun visor and she would correct her make-up. And then she would drive back to Manchester.
At his approach, the house loomed over him.
He opened the door—the peeling paint, the rusted lock, the disorder in the kitchen, the ancient pots and pans, blackened and never fully clean, and he smelled them for the first time—the family smell of them, penned up together.
He grunted hello, and stomped upstairs to his room and lay on his bed—his single bed, his kid’s bed—and stared at the warped and damp-patched ceiling.
He stayed locked in his room all day, then lay awake in the darkness and into the dawn.
He masturbated four times, onto his stomach, but it didn’t go away.
In the early daylight, Jo sneaked into his room and sat on the edge of the bed. Her presence edged Chris McNeil into another universe.
He pretended to be asleep.
Jo waited.
She shook his knee. He opened one eye.
‘What?’
‘Shhh!’
‘What?!’
‘I have to tell you something.’
‘Tell me later.’
‘I have to tell you now.’
‘Is it about space?’
‘No. Duh.’
He sat up, careful to cover with a blanket the dried, rice-paper flakes of semen on his belly. He saw she was wearing a sweater over her flannelette nightgown. She was sexless and thin.
‘What is it?’
‘Dad saw a panther.’
‘A what?’
‘A black panther.’
‘Where?’
‘In the garden.’
And Chris McNeil shrank to a point and was gone.
‘When?’
‘A while back.’
‘What was it doing?’
‘How am I supposed to know?’
‘Wait, wait. Did Dad tell you this?’
‘Duh, no.’
‘Then how do you know?’
‘I heard him talking about it.’
‘Who to?’
‘That weirdy vet.’
‘The one with the teeth?’
‘Yes. Mr Caraway.’
‘What were they saying?’
‘I don’t know. Panther stuff. It’s why Dad got the sheep.’
‘He got the sheep to mow the grass because he’s a lazy bastard.’
‘That’s just what he told us. He’s using it as bait.’
‘Dad actually thinks he saw a black panther?’
‘Yes!’
‘In the garden?’
‘Yes!’
Charlie lay back on the bed and crossed his forearms over his eyes.
‘Penis envy,’ he said.
‘It can’t be penis envy, dork. He’s got a penis.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Mum’s left him, to look for some stupid monkey. He wants to prove her wrong by finding something better on the doorstep. Show her she should never have gone. Big white hunter. It’s pathetic’
‘How would that prove her wrong? That wouldn’t prove her wrong.’
‘He’s gone mad. Living here’s driven him round the bend.’
He could hear that he was scaring her, so he uncrossed his arms from over his eyes and sat up again. She was wringing her narrow hands in her lap.
‘Jo-Jo, he’s wrong. He’s seeing things.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Good. Stupid thing.’
‘But don’t go out on the path alone.’
‘Charlie!’
‘Just don’t, all right?’
She slapped his knee, and he slapped at her hand and tickled her in the ribs, and then they stopped.
‘Do you think he’s all right?’
‘Who, Dad? No, I think he’s gone mental. I think he’s lost it.’
‘But he’s all right, though? Really.’
‘Of course he is.’
Early December.
Patrick dropped Jo at Nately’s gate, waved, drove away.
It was dark and wet and cold. Jo huddled in her red anorak, hood pulled up against the drizzle. She was a slash of colour against the mulchy browns and greys of the garden, the limewash of the cottage. Over one shoulder, she carried a rucksack; inside it was her packed lunch—some ham sandwiches and parsnip soup in a flask.
She opened the gate and walked down the path of dead winter roses and tangled wet grass. And on the brass doorknob, beads of rain had gathered.
Jo banged on the door three times, rat-tat-tat, and she clasped her rucksack in two hands as she waited.
After a few seconds, she turned and watched the rain, the travelling grey washes of it across the garden, the farmland, the hills, the distant woods.
She waited for a while, until she needed to pee. She was wet and cold, and her nose was running. She wiped it on the wet nylon of her sleeve—just about the worst fabric to wipe your nose on—and she knocked on the door, again, a bit louder.
Rat-tat-a-tat-tat.
Tat tat.
She needed to pee pretty badly by now.
She stepped back from the doorway—and when she moved, there was a wet throb behind her pubis: she really needed to go. It was beginning to hurt.
It was supposed to be full daylight, but the cloud cover was low, drifting like petticoats over the distant hills, and the morning sun was a faint opalescence behind it. The rain came at her in curly whipcracks that found the edges and seams of her kagoul; chilly water trickled down her spine and into the crack of her arse.
The house was dark.
She backed up to the gate, until the bony fingertips of the hedgerow prickled her spine; the screechy noises it made on her kagoul were amplified by the hood.
An empty house was not like an empty box. An empty house filled with something else—a primitive mind, maybe: or just primitive emotions. The cottage’s windows were blank and reptilian.
The wind whipped at her kagoul, blowing long bubbles in it.
And she really, really needed to pee.
She didn’t want to do it where the house could see her, so she walked round to the back garden, past the allotment, and found a corner between the shed and the border where the old orchard began; not far from where a blue tarpaulin flapped like a broken wing over a pile of old planks and damp bricks.
Hoiking up her kagoul, she lowered her jeans and squatted.
It took her a long time to pee because she felt watched, and the wind in the trees unnerved her. When she could finally let it go, the wind snatched at the piss and whipped it away from her. It spread and thinned in the rain, and she supposed some of it got to the apple trees; it would be sucked into their root system and then, minutely, into its apples. And Mr Nately would make apple pie and she would smile a secret smile—and he’d want to know why, but she would not tell him.
She zipped up. Her arse was cold, and under the hood it was becoming humid. But her hands were cold and wrinkling. And her feet were wet.
She was wearing Doc Martens, but only with thin socks—purple and pink striped ankle socks, actually, which she’d owned since she was nine and which were technically far too small to stretch over her long, knotty feet. But she liked them, because Jane had bought them for her on some inexplicable fancy—these girly, whimsical socks—and wearing them made her feel close to her faraway mother.
She walked once more to the front of the house. The house shifted like a head on a neck, to follow her. The wind whistled in the crooked chimney.
No smoke.
No lights.
She crouched and opened the letter-box—to call out a hopeful, ‘Hello?! It’s me!’
But, peering through that spring-loaded slot, the house extruded a vile rush of emptiness. It made her want to pee again.
So she put on her backpack—it had luminous yellow patches that would help drivers see her in the semi-darkness—and she began to walk to Innsmouth.
It was six miles. And she had walked two of them when suddenly she stopped worrying about the empty house, the long walk, the rain, and even Mr Nately …
… and remembered the panther.
She stopped, in the middle of the country road.
It was bordered by high hedges. It wound up and down the hill. There was no sound but the rain beating down on nylon. And Jo’s heart began to trip with a bad rhythm.
She was fit enough. She could probably run all the way to Innsmouth, if she wanted. But to do that, to break into a run, would be to admit she was scared: really very badly scared now, out here all by herself.
She began to walk a bit quicker, and she thought about it logically. Would a big cat, adapted to the African savannahs, or whatever (she didn’t know much about panthers)—would it come hunting humans on a filthy-cold morning like this?
Surely it would be holed up somewhere, out of the rain. Cats hated water.
Was that true of big cats, too?
What about big cats that lived in rainforests?
She adjusted her backpack, thumbs hoiked under the straps, and resolved not to think about it. She wiped her nose on her sleeve again, and walked on.
She tried to think of herself as the first human on a strange planet; the first observer of hills and billowing clouds. Because she wore the nylon hood, it sounded a bit like she was wearing a space helmet.
Normally, this was her relaxation exercise. In order to sleep when she was restless, she imagined violet skies and blood-red sands stretching to unguessed-at horizons. But here, now, wandering between thousand-year-old hedges, the thought just made her lonely. And the wet trudge of DMs in wet earth was depressing and earthbound.
A number of cars approached over the narrow, undulating roads, and one or two roared up, unexpectedly, behind her.
She could have stuck out her thumb, but she knew that kids her age (even really tall, and really clever kids), shouldn’t be walking down lonely country roads by themselves, let alone getting into strange cars. So she kept her head down and pretended not to see, or to hear, and she hoped that, because of her height, the drivers would not think her a child.
She passed several farmhouses. Inside the gates were desolate collections of rusting carcasses of old vehicles, churned mud and corrugated sheds. And she ignored these too, because thirteen-year-old girls did not go knocking on the door of strange houses, not by themselves.
So she walked the whole entire way.
Not far from the edge of Innsmouth, one car did slow down and hiss to a stop. It was a black Golf, with a rain-jewelled sunroof. The passenger window hummed down. A woman was at the wheel, and she was frowning.
She leaned over and said, ‘Are you okay?’ and Jo said, ‘Yes, thank you,’ very politely, except she was too cold to speak properly and her voice came out shivery and she wiped her snotty nose on the back of her hand and walked on.
She could feel the car behind her, the woman at the wheel, watching her. The woman was pretty and seemed kind enough, but perhaps kind women—like grannies in a fairy tale—were wolves in disguise. Perhaps if Jo had climbed into that warm Golf, she’d have been abducted, taken to some faraway cottage and been given fudge cake and Coca-Cola and allowed to watch TV, and then when the sun went down and the moon came up, the woman would sprout hairs and teeth and claws and would bay at the sky and rip Jo to shreds and eat her—gobble her all up—and burn her clothes so that no trace of her was ever found—nothing but the faint relic of her urine, in Mr Nately’s apples.
The silly thought called up a panicking child inside her, and Jo began to walk much faster, even though her legs were hurting and her feet were wet and sore.
Jo walked until she found a small cluster of shops—a greengrocer, a butcher, a video-rental store and a Post Office. She went into the Post Office, because she had no money.
She queued with the hunched old ladies until she reached the front, and she asked the narrow-faced woman there to please, if she didn’t mind, to please call her dad on this number and ask him to come and fetch her.
Patrick got the call shortly after giving Harriet a promotion that meant she could deal with the morning staff meetings he kept finding excuses not to hold.
He promised to get a new job description typed up by the end of the working day, but had no intention of getting round to it. Nobody at Monkeyland had job descriptions, least of all him. Or, they all had the same job description, which amounted to the same thing: look after the monkeys.
He made a quiet, triumphantly managerial cup of tea, and his phone rang.
The call had been put straight through by Mrs de Frietas, so he knew without asking that he had to take it. His first thought was of his wife, raped and dead in a burned-out Land Cruiser.
But instead, it was a woman called Esther Hivon who was, she explained, calling from the Post Office near the corner of Dagon Place and the main road. She had his daughter.
Patrick didn’t think to ask any questions. He thanked Esther Hivon (she had the voice of a well-coiffed woman who wore spectacles on a chain) and hung up and hunted for his keys.
He drove into town at an unsafe speed, wipers beating at the rain, and he didn’t so much park as abandon the Land-Rover on the corner of Dagon Place. He jogged to the Post Office.
He’d been wrong about Esther Hivon; she was an elderly and thin woman in a very tight polo-neck that made her look even thinner. She also wore an A-line, tweed skirt that didn’t match. But she was waiting at the door for him, in the rain, and she greeted him and led him through the humid Post Office, back to the little staff room. It was hardly more than a big cupboard with a little window that overlooked a square of car park. And Jo was sitting there, hunched almost double, sipping from a cup of hot Ribena.