by Nikki Dudley
“Okay”, he interrupts.
“No Thom, please”, she begs, “I know you hate talking about it”.
“It’s not the same”, he tells her, wriggling in her hold.
“But it was wrong too”. She is staring at him, searching. “Your parents shouldn’t have died then and Daniel…” she falters again, “shouldn’t have...”
“What do you want me to say?” He cuts over her, unable to go back, even for her. He has never been able to discuss it properly. The week he cried himself to sleep is the closest she ever got to it. The closest anybody has got in fact. Even he struggles to get near to his feelings about it all. Perhaps back then, he asked somebody why or what happened or some question that didn’t matter like what happened to the car but he hadn’t opened a showroom to let everyone examine his feelings. Perhaps, this is his problem. Perhaps that is why he has a job where he always knows what to say because there is a handbook.
“I don’t know what I want you to say”, Aunty Val eventually admits. He moves and puts his arm around her, pressing her shoulder against his.
He thinks about work, about the people who phone about a loved one’s life insurance, how they’ve lost that person and to really rub it in, they have to argue with him about the clauses in the contract. And so he says what he says to them (because he isn’t a bastard), “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll do all I can”.
8 The Reading
Thom is only beginning to recover from the funeral when the reading of the will pops up like an uninvited relative. He doesn’t even remember he has to attend until Aunty Val shakes him awake in his old bed, three days after the funeral, where he has been having nightmares for most of the night. She says they’re leaving in an hour.
He turns on his side and stares at the wall. He sees the faint remains of the treasure map he and Richard drew on the wall the first summer he’d been here. Daniel insisted it was too simplistic and went to draw his own, more complicated and realistic map. Two hours after they finished their hunt, Daniel appeared with a five-page map, complete with cryptic clues. He and Richard could make no sense of it and resorted to mocking him instead.
This is how Thom feels now. Like he is standing in a map, an infinite number of pages long, trying to find somewhere familiar, somewhere he can start from. He can’t help thinking he has lost the solution page to the puzzle that had been Daniel. But as soon as he returns from the solicitors, he is determined to find at least an impression in the wet sand, however small, that will lead him somewhere.
The solicitor is a well-spoken man and all Thom can remember about him is his twitching moustache that nods along to his every word. A desire to laugh jabs at the back of his mouth throughout the reading. Yet Thom is sure that laughing will be inappropriate and it is so quiet in the office that the clock could be arrested for excessive noise. Its only competition is the shuffling of papers on the solicitor’s monster of a desk for five minutes, and the formalities of death, voiced softly by moustache man.
The solicitor, Thom, Richard, Aunty Val and a shrunken prune of a woman, who has yet to identify herself, occupy the room. Aunty Val’s husband left when Richard was two and Daniel not even born, and no one cared to find him. In this room were the people that Daniel wanted to share himself with, or share his possessions with, which were probably just as estranged from him as most of them felt.
After reading the obligatory paragraph, the moustache moves on to awarding prizes, for knowing Daniel, for loving Daniel, for caring he is dead. Yet Thom misses most of the information. He drifts away until he realises the moustache is addressing him.
“And to Mr Thomas Mansen, I leave this key”. The moustache slides a key across the desk, as though he is passing him a bribe. “I hope he finds his gift as thoughtful as I hoped it would be”.
Thom takes the key, weightless in his hand, contradicting his heavy frown lines. Why did the comment about his gift seem loaded? After all, what twenty-four-year-old has a will anyway?
Aunty Val and Richard have passed by, without event. Then focus turns to the prune woman. Her face is a fruit gone bad, folding and collapsing into itself. Her skin is a landscape of rough ground filled with ditches. She stares at the moustache throughout, squinting, holding a handkerchief. Thom doesn’t remember seeing her at the funeral.
“I leave Mrs Mary Tray, the sum of two-hundred pounds, to spend as she pleases”. The moustache has concluded, abruptly. The woman, Mrs Tray, doesn’t flinch or express any emotion. She continues to sit for a further ten seconds, Thom counts, then excuses herself with a graceful wave and hobbles out of the room. The rest of them watch, on the edge of words, silenced by the resolve of the door.
“Thank you for attending the reading”, the moustache says, dismissing them. The three of them, a small fabricated family, help each other up.
The reading of the will means more questions. Thom has a desire to put his hand up, like a schoolchild, and wait for somebody to ask him what he wants. Perhaps that way, someone will have to answer him and he won’t need to think anymore.
9 Postbox
I have been watching them for twelve days. After the emptiness I encountered in Daniel’s room, I have latched onto them, not knowing where to go or what to do anymore. They fill up the emptiness with their sorrow, their quiet desperation, and their connection with the dead.
I stand outside their door every day from about 8am to 9pm, following each of them separately or together when they leave the house, learning about their habits and lives. I hate when I have to go home and try to sleep, when all I can think about is where they might go and what I might miss. Sometimes I do follow them until the early hours of the morning and survive on only a few hours sleep before running through the streets, excited and breathless, to see them again.
The woman constantly has a stringy tissue creeping out of her hand and down her wrist, like a bandage she hasn’t been able to remove since it happened. She looks like she has been on a drinking binge. Her hair is a tangled mass of wires; her lips are the colour of pale ham, her body a faltering argument that she used to be winning. She often goes shopping and usually returns with two or three bags from Sainsbury’s. She has twice visited another woman, about the same age, in a house around the corner. She and this woman appear to drink tea together and watch Bargain Hunt. She has several times broken down in the street and had to be collected by one of the men living in the house. She is Daniel’s mother.
The first man is called Richard. He doesn’t look like Daniel. He has darker hair and a slightly chubby face. His eyes seem to be smiling constantly, despite anything else. He usually wears jeans and t-shirts and often has a screwdriver or some other tool on his person. I presume he is an engineer or a mechanic. He often stays in at night and only a few times walks past me, holding hands with a blonde-haired girl who wears short skirts. He sometimes smokes on a bench on the corner of the street and stares up at the sky.
Richard is the one who spoke at the funeral. I watched him from the shadows at the back of the church, watching the sorrow unfold, watching the tissues gathering like flags of surrender. He hadn’t said as much as I expected him to, he hadn’t filled out Daniel’s personality, he hadn’t seemed anything but extremely sad that he couldn’t perform better.
It was nothing like your funeral, Mum.
There were more than three people at this one for starters. At yours, there were no pictures, no eulogies, and no communion in the face of death. Perhaps it had been this way because of the circumstances; perhaps because people didn’t know how to face me when there were two people from the hospital waiting outside to take me back when it finished.
I miss you.
The second man is the one I am interested in. He didn’t speak at the funeral. And from what I have observed, he doesn’t speak much generally. He has walked beside the mother almost every time she has left the house; if only to drop her off and leave, then return to pick her up. He has sat in the living room of the house staring at the wall and
I have watched him, wondering if all he sees in the paint is Daniel’s face also. He has stood in the front garden three times, separating his m & m’s into colours and eating them in order: brown, blue, red, green and yellow. I don’t know what this means yet.
He looks uncannily like Daniel. The same dark menace haunts his eyes, although he doesn’t seem to be relishing in it like Daniel, as the photo in the paper seems to portray. They have the same coloured hair and over the last few weeks, the curls threatening Daniel in the photo, have crept up on this look-alike, along with fuzzy lazy stubble. Yet, this man doesn’t have the same presence as Daniel and I think he would hate it if he did. When he walks down the street, he bows his head and avoids eye contact with everybody. He keeps his right hand in his back pocket when he isn’t using it. He makes me want to shake him awake, punch him in the nose until he realises he’s bleeding; tell him Daniel is dead and not him. I feel like I have committed two murders.
It takes almost two weeks of watching for him to finally take action. The key he has been randomly slipping out of his pocket and examining, so intently that I’m sure he could identify it in a line-up, finally springs him into action, a delayed mechanism.
He rushes past me so fast that I have to completely turn my back and pretend I am reading the notes about delivery times on the postbox. This has been my way of hiding whenever one of them passes by. Sometimes I am so transfixed by the postbox that I cannot leave. I stroke the smooth chipped paint, press my fingerprints into these chips, and think about you. I often think about hugging it but somebody always interrupts and pushes their unimportant letter into its mouth and I wish I could get inside there, so easily hide in the darkness and feel the red body encompass me, a new womb for the one that I have lost.
10 Storage Lock Up Number 11
Shit.
The lock up is filled from floor to ceiling with huge bookshelves. The bookshelves are arranged like a labyrinth so when Thom turns around the first corner, he fears he will never find the way out. He begins to wonder if he should have told Aunty Val where he was going. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling are partly blocked by the shelves and the light is scattered awkwardly, as though the light is coming through unevenly spaced floorboards and he is trapped beneath.
The thought of floorboards reminds Thom of the numbers on the door. 11. They are like two exclamation marks with a dash on the top left. When he arrived at the door, he pressed his two fingers against them but felt nothing. Why did he feel drawn to these numbers, these simple shapes?
The woman on the desk told him the lock up had only been acquired three months before. Yet, there is a smell of rotting food, especially the strong stench of banana. Thom wonders if he will stumble upon a disgruntled monkey who has been unable to find the way out, who will promptly kill him. Although would it be the worst thing?
Along with the banana, there is a dusty air that can be seen swirling around him whenever he passes a slot of light. The light also reveals some of the contents of the bookshelves that, apart from the expected books, are clearly full of numerous unrelated items. To name a few of them, there are empty cardboard boxes, cracked ornaments, ripped pieces of paper and notebooks, old car parts, rotting food, pots of ink, perfume bottles and these are just the things Thom can make out initially.
Thom thinks about the moustached man’s words: “I hope he finds his gift as thoughtful as I hoped it would be”. If Daniel’s thoughtfulness created this dark labyrinth which smells foul and looks like a rubbish tip – why? What did he want Thom to get from this? Or is it possible that somebody else had come in here and sabotaged the contents?
Thom reasons that it’s not impossible that somebody broke in here and sabotaged it, but it is unlikely. Although if the note is a clue that Daniel had been in some kind of trouble, it is a justified suspicion. Overall however, Thom thinks perhaps he is reading too much into the note, the key, everything. The only thing he needs to do is find something in this lock up that makes sense, between everything that doesn’t.
He decides to start at the end, that way he is working his way towards the exit and not working his way inside, deeper into the labyrinth. He has no concept of how big the lock up is because he cannot see the walls. Every space is occupied with a shelf, a path is marked out with other shelves jutting out in various places. He is suspicious that the shelves are leading him somewhere he shouldn’t be going.
Each bookshelf has ten large shelves. They are made from quality wood and each detail like this makes Thom feel increasingly uneasy. Why did Daniel pay so much to have all these shelves put in? Was it just for his benefit? Thom lets the question float around in his brain but drowns it with his present task. He kneels on the floor, his jeans instantly browned with dirt, and rifles around on the first shelf.
His hands come back blackened, full of scratches from unexpected items hiding underneath others and smelling of filth. He came in a well-dressed and clean man and he will leave smelling and looking as dirty as a man who has been homeless for several months. He imagines the look on his boss’ face if he’d gone to work in this state, and it brings a smile to his face. Although, his smile quickly sours into a frown. Can he ever really go back there?
There is nothing of interest on the first shelf, or not that he can tell. He moves onto the second and the next and the next, plucking out the objects that he thinks mean something, whilst in his head the mantra repeats: you could be wrong you could be wrong you could be wrong you could be wrong you could be
11 Red Slippers
I am stupid. Whenever I think about how I lost you, guilt punches me in the stomach and I have to tell myself to breathe again, just breathe. It happens every day; sometimes once, sometimes repetitively like a song on constant repeat, niggling at my nerves. At times, I can convince myself it is our neighbour’s fault, for interfering, for believing I am crazy.
Our neighbour is a middle-aged man, who ‘worked’ from home, which actually means he watched his precious street like a child he couldn’t allow to grow up. He knocks on our door to find out why the rubbish bin hasn’t been taken in for five weeks. When I open the door a crack, my eyes are squinting because they aren’t used to the sunlight. I haven’t been out since it happened. I have cooked meals for two, and one is always left uneaten. We are steadily running out of food but I’m not concerned. Every day is an ordeal, a bloodying battle from morning to night; a dam rebuilt and knocked down.
I don’t see his nose twitching. I don’t realise that the smell, from both of us, might be suspicious. Myself, smelling unwashed and neglected. You, smelling cold, removed. I am unaware. My senses have become trapped in little boxes inside and they have been jumbled up. I smell objects. I touch the aromas and emotions around me. Right then, I can touch my neighbour’s confusion. It is blue, a spotted cluster that bangs against the door, trying to see what is hidden.
I tell him I’ve been ill and slam the door.
I hear him shout, “Are you crazy?” It is a question I will hear many times and a question I will ask myself when I am alone in that minimal room without personality, afraid to give me anything, for fear I will somehow use it to injure or kill.
Inside the house, the air is filled with brown flakes that constantly cry from the ceiling and swirl around me. As soon as I wake up, they begin, and gather on the floor until each step is like trudging through mud. The sadness is an algae corrupting our house, the place where you are ingrained on each floorboard, each blemish on the paintwork, each smudge on the window. I go around and touch everything, feeling your presence throbbing, seeing the beat physically making the surfaces and objects rise and fall.
You are in the bedroom. I visit you every hour. You are always cold, never reply to my questions, and don’t even look toward the chair in which I sit. Yet I won’t leave you, I know you’ll be back to your old self soon. I know your skin will redden, wrinkle, contract and slacken with expressions, in time.
If only you would eat again. Each night I call up that dinner is
on the table, but you never appear. Sometimes I leave the food on your bedside table but when I return, you haven’t touched it. I get angry and tell you I won’t bother making you food if you’re just going to waste it. Although I know tomorrow, I’ll make it again. And I know soon you will eat it.
It’s been just the two of us for six years now. Michael left for university when he was eighteen and never returned. I went to the local university and stayed at home. You and I always got on so well and I didn’t want you to be lonely. And this is my home. I’m not ready to leave. Screw Michael anyway, he hardly visits and he hasn’t been able to look me in the face for months.
You’ve been brilliant recently. I’ve been depressed. I’ve been afraid to go out, afraid to look in the mirror. Every time I stop for a moment, all I see are those angry muscles pressing me down, Harry’s eyes asking for forgiveness yet determined, violent words thrusting into me, my defences pricked and flooded.
I don’t know how to live without you. You’ve been nursing me for the last three months and now I am nursing you. We don’t need anybody else around. I didn’t even think of taking you to the hospital.
It was five weeks before, when I opened the door and found you lying with one side of your face squashed against the floor, a line of blood neatly dried on your chin. When I moved closer I noticed your neck was bruised, the skin flaccid like a sock that had fallen down, your skin chalky. You were sprawled out like a star, legs pointing towards the door. Your fluffy hair dashed over your eyes. I thought you must have been unconscious and hoped you weren’t concussed. One of your red slippers had somehow travelled several feet away and the other was beneath you. I collected them and put them back on.