by Nikki Dudley
Oddly enough, this room is where Thom was transported that night. He vaguely recalls Aunty Val kissing him goodnight whilst Daniel watched from the doorway, having been evicted for the night to the sofa. Thom felt unsettled then by the clatter of the railway that ran behind the house, but over the course of his adolescence it became as natural as birdsong.
In this moment however, the sound of the railway makes him feel nauseous. Although thankfully, he has nothing left to eject. He looks down at his suit and, seeing a vomit stain on his left cuff, rubs at it anxiously. If he turns up at Daniel’s funeral covered in vomit, surely he may as well smear it over the coffin. After all, they were more than just cousins, yet not quite brothers.
Now that Thom thinks properly, he wishes he had known Daniel as well as he did Richard. Although, he and Daniel were the same age and even shared the same birthday, it seems these things merely gave them more reason not to bond. Instead, as soon as Thom arrived after his parents’ deaths, he and Richard, who was two years older, fell into a closer friendship.
Thom tried with Daniel, yet Daniel didn’t seem interested. Whenever Thom pictures their shared birthday parties, Daniel is set back in some way, a step further from the table where everyone was singing ’happy birthday’ or at Christmas, Daniel waited until everyone else had torn at their presents frantically and only then, he carefully chose one to begin with.
And what is the last thing he had said to Daniel? He searches through his memory and can only come up with a brief conversation at Richard’s last birthday party. Daniel was standing by the front door. They exchanged pleasantries about general health and jobs. And what is it that Thom said to him? His last proper words to his cousin; face to face?
“Daniel, do you know where Aunty Val is?”
“In the kitchen”. He nods towards the house. His smile acknowledges what they both feel; a need to find an exit as fast as possible, a sad knowledge that they will never linger with each other.
“Thanks. Speak later”.
Yet Thom didn’t speak to him later. And he never would again.
Thom wishes now he had tried harder. If not to be closer to him in life but for this moment, in order to understand this note, to understand why Daniel had written it so precisely and had left it in the only half-open drawer in the room, as if he knew...
4 Lips Stick
He isn’t wearing the scarf in the photo.
When I first see the photo in the paper, I only glance at it and feel my body collapse inwards. Tears gather at the corners of my eyes at the absence of it. I instantly pull the scarf towards me and hold it up to my face, kiss it; smell his aftershave and his sweat, to pretend I am still following him. I have thought of him at 15:32 each day and probably always will.
After hours of comforting myself with the scarf, I allow myself to examine the photo. Before this, I have enjoyed merely remembering his presence and I think seeing his photograph, probably some false one from his graduation or a family holiday, will spoil the essence of him that I can feel if I close my eyes. Concentrate.
When I finally set the page in front of me, I scrutinize it. Apparently, he was twenty-four years old. Apparently, he had short brown hair that threatened to curl at the sides. Apparently, he had a scar on his left cheek about three inches long. Apparently, they are appealing for witnesses.
I am wrong though; in guessing it would be a cheesy family photo. Part of his face is covered in shadow as though he is a nocturnal animal peeking out at the daylight and there is no smile, only a faint fizzing up of a smile hiding behind his pursed lips. His eyes are dark brown and, for a moment, my heart accelerates, so convinced he is actually looking at me. In the same moment, I see his eyes as he hung in the air. Yet this is all invention because of the photo. The photo has brought him back to life.
Now, I see the only detail that is clear to me: those lips, speaking to me, pronouncing each word. He had been so precise, inserting them into my memory like he’d penetrated me and caused an embryo to grow inside and begin to kick.
Right on time.
I thought perhaps I misunderstood or imagined them but underneath the doubt, I feel certain. He wanted me to know. Perhaps the only thing I misinterpreted is why he seemed aware, not because he stood out, but because he knew who I was, my intentions, and my actions. Even before I knew? Perhaps my crazy notions that he slowed down and waited for me and looked at me in that mirror weren’t so ‘crazy’.
I close the paper and look at the walls. Yet all I see are his lips, curling and sneering. His menacing face is projected onto every surface, daring me. The only place I can’t see him is in the television, which instead reflects my image. So I sit cross-legged on the plastic wooden floor and look into the tiny screen.
There isn’t much choice about where to go here. It is a bedsit with only a small bedroom, and a kitchen along one wall sectioned off by a stained curtain. The toilet and shower are a few doors down, shared with three others. It’s so small in there, every time I get out of the shower, I nearly stand in the toilet.
They tell me this place will be good for me, to get me back on my own feet, to get away from the place where it happened. Nobody asked my opinion and my estranged brother has gone ahead and sold the house, refusing to give me my share of the money until I feel ‘more balanced’ as he puts it.
How can he decide that for us, Mum? How can he take away our home?
So, here I am, in this place that is not only the definition of scum, but also a place where things come to die. I have several potted plants, all of them refusing to live, no matter how much I water them and ask them what else I can do. There is a dead rat in the corner and dead insects that were feasting on the rat’s carcass, before they, too, died. I don’t move any of it. I look at the rat and the insects sometimes, feel the dead leaves between my fingers and remember I am alive and feel superior.
Oh, what would they say if they knew their ploy to put me on ‘the road to normality’ has landed me here, in the house where everything is dying or already dead?
However, the worst thing isn’t the death rate. The worst thing is the landlord. He smells like road-kill and every so often tries to have a ‘chat’. He knocks clumsily on the door and says, “Hi sweet cheeks”, exhaling a bottle of whiskey over me. He always manages to talk his way in, pretending he has some issues about rent or the building to discuss, and as there is nowhere else to sit, we always end up on the bed. He then says things like “I love your soft hair” and runs his hand through it, making my curls moist with sweat and “that’s a very… very… nice top” when he’s really looking at my cleavage. When he tries to grope me, I always throw him out. I’m a tough girl so I don’t mind.
I have to cope with these things because you can’t protect me now, Mum.
Although, if he does it again, I may have to kill him.
5 The Dead, Silence
Thom is surprised during the funeral. No one seems to have known Daniel. Thom himself spends the whole funeral in a daze, thinking about adjectives for Daniel, only realising it’s over when Emma squeezes his hand. She looks great in her black dress. If it weren’t so inappropriate, he would take her to the car and distract himself with a good dose of indecent exposure.
By the time they watch the curtain devour his coffin, Thom has thought of only useless adjectives for Daniel. He was mysterious, elusive, and witty. He always seemed like he knew more than everybody and he probably had. That’s what drove a wedge between Daniel and everybody else. That’s why during the funeral there are few tears. The entire room is suffocated with only one feeling: guilt.
The wake is at Aunty Val’s house. Thom feels the pieces of furniture he grew up with are stabilisers. He can’t help but think he has missed seeing it more than he has missed seeing Daniel over the last few months. The tired grey sofa in the living room is so old and so used that you can see the mould of people’s arses. His is the one in the middle. Aunty Val doesn’t care much for decoration as she always tells him people are mo
re important than houses. Therefore, she doesn’t care (especially today) that the wallpaper in the living room has started to peel at the seams and that a stain has grown on the ceiling, the colour of tea, from when Richard always spills his bathwater. The mourners walk mud into the living room and nobody complains.
During the wake, Thom drifts between everybody, trying to catch snippets of conversation about Daniel. Yet, everybody seems to be discussing the food: “These sausage rolls are tasty”, or the weather: “It’s warmer than I expected it to be”, or where they bought the clothes for the funeral: “It was a bargain, especially as I’m only going to wear it once…” Worst of all are the people who are saying nothing at all. The only bit of shocking information is that Mrs Launder’s dress, which looks like shit, apparently cost her one hundred pounds. She has clearly been robbed.
Thom slumps onto the nearest thing for the second time that day and rests his head in his hands. Emma appears a few minutes later, kissing him on the ear. She sits across from him, pushing a cup of tea in his direction. He gives a faint smile and takes a sip, then pushes it aside.
“How are you?” she asks, reaching across the table to touch his hand. He is conscious of the dried sick on his sleeve but hopes she won’t notice it.
“Fine”, he says automatically.
“No. How are you really?”
“I’m really fine”, Thom pauses and adds, “I’ve just been thinking about how little I knew him”.
“Don’t people always think that when someone isn’t around anymore?” Emma counters, thinking this isn’t serious. He hasn’t told her about the note, which has crackled in his pocket throughout the day, so loud at points that Thom wonders why someone hasn’t heard it.
“This is different”.
“How?” She is leaning forward.
“I’m not sure”. He shrugs, chickening out. Sometimes, he is worried that he finds it hard without a script for every eventuality, a line to satisfy people when they want clarification. Emma lets him get away with it for now. She doesn’t say anything else. She just pulls him closer and kisses him on the lips, deliberately, hard. She holds his face an inch from hers for a moment, saying she is here for him; she will wait, until he understands himself.
6 Red Pen
Nobody notices when I slip upstairs during the wake and go into his room. I tag onto the group again when they arrive back from the funeral and mill amongst the people who knew him. I wonder about the connections in this group. Who loved him? Who has come out of guilt? Who is tagging along like me? What would these people say if they knew his murderer is here?
I check all the rooms on the second floor and decide which one is his. The first one obviously belongs to a woman, judging by the lacy bras. The second has a letter in it addressed to Richard Mansen. The third is a guest room or a storage room, where old furniture that will probably never be used again is waiting, hopefully. The other room is a bathroom so it only leaves the last door, which doesn’t look any different from the others, but the wood is pulsing when I press my hand against it. There is a secret message written along the wood that only I can read.
His room is plain. The walls are white, the carpet a dull brown. There are several sets of drawers, all light MDF wood. One of the drawers is slightly open but not enough to see inside. A large antique looking wardrobe sits behind the door. His bedspread is white with only one black line near the top, showing where the head should be. The spread is creased and one corner is folded back like an eyelid permanently open.
I sit on the bed, clutching the scarf in my fist and try to imagine him sitting beside me. I imagine the speed and heaviness of his breath in the silence, the size and presence of his body, the depth the bed would sink under his weight. Would he say something to me? Would he whisper or speak in a loud deep voice? Would he pronounce the Ts in his words?
The only thing I am certain about him is that he made me kill him.
I had believed it started with me but the chain began somewhere before that, and I have to find out where and when. This is why I am here in this room, listening to the clattering of the train and the murmuring mass of people below. I am a trespasser, the murderer transforming into an investigator. I’m going back to the start of the flow chart to discover the direction and force behind each move.
The open drawer seems the nearest place to begin. It is one of six drawers, all about 5cm by 5cm, in a set beside his bed. I edge towards it, feeling like it’s a landmine waiting for me to add stress and unknowingly kill myself. Yet I still stick my hand in, with my eyes closed.
Nothing. I feel nothing. I think my hand must have gone numb. I peer inside. The drawer is empty. I tug open all the other drawers in the set and find the same. They are all empty. I jump to my feet and begin flinging open all the drawers in the room, the wardrobe, checking under the bed, opening the cupboards above the wardrobe, even pulling back the bedspread in the hope of finding something.
Yet I find everything is empty. There is nothing in this room. He was never here. The only discovery I make in the room is a small red pen mark on his bed sheets and the only object in the room is the angry bedside radio, which is screaming red numbers at me and they happen to be, 15:32…
I wilt onto the floor. The carpet smells new. And I notice, belatedly, the faint smell of paint. He has completely erased himself from this house. He has pressed backspace on the keyboard and removed his life. And this all seems to add to his words as he fell.
He planned it. He chose me. He moulded me.
Mum, how did this happen?
15:32 hadn’t been instinctual. It had been as set as the train tracks onto which I pushed him.
7 Aunty Val
After the wake is over, Thom agrees to stay the night. Emma leaves because she has to go back to work the next day. He says goodbye to her at the door and, as her car pulls away, he has to grasp onto the door handle to stop himself from waving to her.
Inside the house, the lock sounds like a bullet. This is followed by soft crying from upstairs and the clatter of plates that can be heard from the kitchen. He decides Aunty Val is the priority of the two.
He tiptoes upstairs, wincing at the creaks he should have remembered were there. It is instilled in him that death is quiet; something the living shouldn’t flaunt themselves in the face of.
Aunty Val’s door is open. He stands outside for a moment and peers in, instantly smelling the sorrow, hanging in the air like smoke clouds. The walls seem to be quivering in disgust, the paint flaking like dead skin.
“Hello”, he whispers through the crack in the door and slowly moves his head through.
Aunty Val gasps. A fresh tear is rolling down her face, an afterthought, because now she has turned white as paper. She is breathing hollowly, holding herself up with her arms. Then after a few minutes of looking at him, proofreading his features, she gulps in air and starts to cry again.
It’s only now that he springs into action and rushes to her side, taking her in his arms. She is crying words into his body, something like “your voice” and “Daniel”. Thom doesn’t want to think about what she is saying though, feeling his heart begin to shiver behind his rib cage, so he presses her into him until her words are too muffled to hear. It isn’t the first time someone has mistaken his voice for Daniel’s but this is the only time when it scares him.
Yet, almost thankfully, she is too concerned with crying to continue moving her mouth, and her lips forget. She sobs onto his neck and he remembers sobbing onto hers for a week after he’d first moved here. He knows from those times to let her finish, let her run out of water, and let her moans grow muted, disappear.
When these things happen, she looks up at him shyly. Thom tries a smile but even his mouth knows it’s stupid. She leans her head on his shoulder. He thinks her eyes are washed out, as if somebody has diluted them. They used to be a much stronger green. He knows it’s to be expected but when he thinks back to a month ago, when he last came to visit, he’d noticed it then too. S
he has let her hair go grey, when usually she keeps it coloured a medium blond.
Aunty Val always keeps herself well dressed and maintained. He always thinks of her saying, “You’ve got to keep up the hard work if you want to look good”. She is fifty-two and looks good for it, although she is always embarrassed when a man shows interest in her.
So did this neglect start a month ago? Or even longer? He hasn’t visited as much as he should have. And if this neglect had been occurring before Daniel’s death, then why? Had she been worried about Daniel? Perhaps this supported the theory that he committed suicide. But would he have? Thom guesses they are questions he can ask later (and some which he cannot) but now he has no right to bother her.
“He’s really dead”, is how she breaks the silence. It seems obvious but Thom feels like it stabs him in the ribs then. She is right, he can’t argue. He can only nod, trying to breathe.
“Did you like the song we chose?” she asks.
“It was good. Did Daniel like it?” he blushes.
“It was one of his favourites”, she confirms, and he feels himself smile, glad that at least one person feels certain regarding Daniel. She is the kind of person who always takes notes and stores them in a mental filing cabinet, in order to refer to them later. Thom on the other hand keeps forgetting people’s birthdays and buying Emma gold jewellery when she only likes silver.
“I’m sorry”. He throws in a worthless phrase to secretly apologise for not knowing Daniel and now it’s too late.
“I’m too young to be losing kids”, she says, adding, “like you were too young”.
“Let’s not talk about that”, he dismisses, and kisses her forehead.
“But I want to”, she croaks, wiping her nose on her sleeve. He can’t help but find this uncomfortable, especially as she has always been so strong for him, more so than with her own children. She faces him and holds onto his arms at the elbows, pressing down, needing to make her point. “I know it’s different but I thought you would be the best…” Her lips rebel against her, muffle her words. “I thought you would understand this…”