Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  “Hey,” said Aunty Claire. “What have you been doing to yourself? Not fighting, I hope?” She took one arm from around my shoulders and reached up to touch the bruise on my forehead.

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “Just a stupid accident.” Her fingers felt unnaturally smooth and cool. I stepped backwards as far as I could without making it obvious how uncomfortable I felt, though it took a real effort not to pull away entirely. Now she had me at arm’s length. Our eyes met, and I saw something awful: she knew that I knew, and that she knew I knew she knew.

  Her smile widened. “A drunken accident, I bet,” she said. “I know what you college boys are like.”

  Before I could say anything more, the living room door was flung open and the twins burst in. They made a dive for the Christmas tree.

  “Aunty Sarah says we can have our presents now,” said Emma. She was wearing a pair of green dungarees and a pink My Little Pony T-shirt.

  “Not until we’re all here, princess,” Claire said. “Mind your manners, or you’ll have the tree over.”

  A moment later Dave appeared, followed closely by Mum. She was carrying the silver tray with the five champagne flutes, as well as two glass tumblers, each with a tiny measure of buck’s fizz, for Rhys and Emma. It was the first year they’d been allowed to try some.

  “Here we all are, then,” Mum said. She took a glass from the tray. “Happy Christmas!”

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked faintly.

  “I’m here,” Dad said. He’d got in behind me somehow. He pointed to the cut on my forehead and raised his champagne flute. “To the new Mike Tyson.”

  Everybody laughed, including me. Mostly I was laughing because it was a relief not to have Claire’s arms around me anymore.

  The day passed in a kind of blur. I was given book tokens by the twins, a grey-and-blue windcheater by Dave and Claire. My present from Mum and Dad was a leather book bag. Some of the posher kids at college had them but I’d never imagined owning one myself. As I lifted off the wrapping I found there were tears in my eyes. I looked away quickly, hoping no one had noticed. I was doing my best to seem normal – to seem normal whilst at the same time trying to work out whether anyone apart from me had realised what was wrong. No one seemed to, but I couldn’t believe that, because it was so clear, so obvious. I wondered if they all knew – Mum, Dad, even the twins, only they were doing the same as me and pretending not to.

  I was feeling more and more disorientated, more and more aware of my own empty movements and gestures, my own simulation. It was as if I had become part of an elaborate puppet show.

  The world of the day before – writing to Ronny, going to the pub, even falling down in the car park – seemed lost to me, a million miles away down the wrong end of a telescope.

  “You’re a bit quiet, love,” Mum said to me as we settled down to watch On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Dave and Claire had had their usual argument over whether the twins were old enough for James Bond but this year, and for the first time, Dave had won. I smiled at Mum, rested my head briefly against her shoulder, something I’d stopped doing years before.

  “Just a bit tired,” I said.

  “Missing that girlfriend of yours, more likely,” Mum said quietly. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed.” She smiled back at me. She has a lovely smile, Mum. I grinned sheepishly and looked away.

  “What’s her name, then?” Mum said.

  “Veronica. Ronny.” Mum kissed the side of my head and we both went back to watching the TV. For that moment and for some time afterwards I felt almost relaxed.

  CLAIRE AND DAVE left at around ten o’clock. We’d played several high-octane rounds of Cluedo by then, and the twins were showing signs of becoming overtired. Dad was watching The Morecambe and Wise Show on TV and I offered to help Mum with the final round of washing up. We worked together in silence for a while, her washing, me drying and putting away.

  “I hope Claire enjoyed herself,” Mum said after a while. “I’ve been worried about her. She’s been having those nightmares again.”

  “Really?” I said. I could feel every muscle in my body tensing up, the old fight or flight mechanism. People tend to fly home when they’re scared, as the old rhyme says. Ladybird, ladybird and all that. Only I was home, home already. Home is where the monsters are.

  “Mm, you know. Like before she had the twins.”

  “Has anything happened?” I said.

  “Not that I know of. She hasn’t said anything, just that she’s been having trouble sleeping. There was that time in York, though, wasn’t there? I thought that was strange.”

  She turned to look at me, her hands still covered with soap suds, up to her wrists in the washing up water, and for a moment I could almost imagine there was something in her eyes, that she was pleading with me to reassure her that she wasn’t imagining things, that I had noticed it too, that I knew. Then she was just Mum again, worn out from a busy day, worried about her sister, who she still thought of as fragile, even though she was now an adult woman with children of her own.

  “Nothing actually happened in York though, did it?” I said. “I thought you said it was all in Dave’s mind?”

  “Something happened,” Mum said. “She was barely speaking when they got back here. Not herself at all.” She sighed. “I don’t know. They’d probably just had a row.”

  I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it again. I realised there was nothing I could say without sounding as if I’d gone insane. I had no evidence – not yet. I knew I had to be careful.

  “Christmas does funny things to people,” I said finally. “And the twins can be a right handful, sometimes. She seemed to be having a laugh when we were playing Cluedo, though. I’m sure she’s OK.”

  “You’re probably right,” Mum said. “Thanks for listening, love. God, I’m knackered.”

  We finished tidying the kitchen, then Mum made Ovaltine and we took it through to the living room. Morecambe and Wise had finished and there was a quiz on, something with TV presenters making dicks of themselves. We watched it together, the three of us, drinking our Ovaltine and finishing off the box of After Eights Mum had been given by someone from her work.

  We never had another Christmas like it.

  It took me ages to get to sleep. At some point I realised I’d completely forgotten to telephone Ronny. My heart jumped in my chest, the way it does when you realise you’ve mislaid something important.

  A maggot, I thought again. The words perplexed me, and horrified me, as they’d done before. I turned on my bedside lamp, hoping the light might help me fall asleep, and in the end it did.

  ON BOXING DAY evening, it snowed. The snow made me feel better, the way snow always does – because it makes the world seem new, I think. Spotless. It made me believe in the possibility that I might have been wrong. I called Ronny and she sounded pleased to hear from me. I made no excuses for why I hadn’t phoned sooner and that seemed to be OK, too. We chatted for half an hour, at least. She said it was a shame I couldn’t get to hers for New Year and for a mad moment I considered chucking some stuff in a bag and just going. Then I began to worry about how her parents might react if I turned up out of the blue like that, how that might ruin everything.

  Probably best to wait until we were back on our own ground, for this year at least. The idea that there might be a next year for Ronny and me, that I was even thinking about a next year, brought back that vaguely panicky sensation I’d experienced when I first started to realise how strong my feelings for Ronny were. But at the same time it was incredible, to realise that another human being actually spent a part of their day thinking about me and wondering how I was feeling.

  It was like dancing along a high wire.

  Just before lunchtime on the 27th I heard Mum on the phone to Aunty Claire. Claire had left something behind at our place on Christmas Day – it turned out to be her diary – and Mum was saying she’d drive over with it later, when the roads were less slippery.

&nbs
p; While we were eating lunch, I offered to bike the diary over instead.

  “I could do with the fresh air,” I said.

  Mum looked doubtful. “It’s raw out,” she said.

  “Let him go, Sarah,” Dad said. “The lad’s not been out of the house since Christmas Eve.”

  “You’d better wrap up warm, then,” Mum said. “We don’t want you going down with the flu again.”

  Claire and Dave lived on the other side of Knutsford, right out by Tatton Moor. Their house was one of those new estate boxes and from what Mum said, Claire had never been too keen on it. But Dave was nervous about older properties because of the maintenance and Claire liked being close to the moor at least, she loved walking. There turned out to be a lot of snow on the ground up there, much more than down in the town, but there’d been fewer cars headed out that way and so the snow was still mostly crisp rather than slippery. So long as you were careful it was fine. I tried to block off my mind, to concentrate on cycling, on the knife-edge chill of the air as it struck my cheeks, the snug warmth of the woollen gloves that protected my fingers. They were livery green, those gloves. Aunty Claire knitted them. As my bike sped along the road leading to the Tatton Park estate, I counted in time with my down-pedals and thought about what I was going to feel when Claire opened the door.

  Nothing, probably.

  A maggot, a maggot, a maggot. One, two, three, four, five. My front wheel went into a skid. Made a long, sweeping wheeeep sound. A maggot.

  A maggot was another name for an old kind of dance. I knew because I’d looked it up in Dad’s Britannica. Dance, grub, dance, grub. My knees were aching and no wonder. I’d not been on the bike since late July.

  Soft things, pale things, things hidden where you’d least expect them and where they’d be more nasty. A maggot could also be an insistent preoccupation, like a tune that get stuck in your head that you can’t get rid of. Maggots on the brain, in the brain, in the ear, earworms, earwigs. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Commander Chekhov gets infected with a space-earwig, a monster kind that rots out brains or eats memories or something. I couldn’t remember exactly, but the twins would, Rhys and Emma, because they loved that film.

  In John Fowles’ novel A Maggot, the maggot is a spacecraft, or a time machine. None of the novel’s characters knows for certain what it is, or if it existed, or where it went.

  I could turn the bike around, I thought, and cycle home again. I could say the roads weren’t safe after all, that there was black ice and slush.

  You’re so free on a bike. Every moment, every mile, you do it together. Just you and the machine.

  There was snow on Aunty Claire’s driveway, criss-crossed with the narrow track-marks of what I recognised as Emma and Rhys’s own small bicycles, dotted with the chubby footprints of their red and green wellingtons. I was surprised Claire had let them out on their bikes with the snow this thick, but the tracks seemed to end at the edge of the pavement, so they’d probably been told they had to keep to the garden. Claire and Dave had a big slab of grass out the back – I’d helped the twins set up a shallow flip-ramp there during the summer. Rhys was good on the bike but Emma was better, she was a junior daredevil.

  “If they fall off there, I’ll kill you, Will.” Claire made them both wear helmets of course, even in the garden.

  I wheeled the bike down into the side passage and then rang the doorbell. I heard footsteps, then Aunty Claire’s muffled voice, calling out to me, “Just coming.”

  So matter-of-fact, so innocent, so real. I could feel my hands shaking inside my gloves. That wouldn’t look weird, at least. It was really cold.

  “William, you are a one. Get yourself inside.” Claire leaned forward to grab my shoulder, tugged me towards her. She kissed my cheek and then my forehead. I could hear my breath heaving in and out, making a rasping sound. Hyperventilation, it’s called. You breathe so hard you can’t process the oxygen. If you don’t slow down you can end up losing consciousness through lack of air.

  A maggot. Mag-mag-mag.

  “Come on, look at the state of you. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  I could smell baking – Aunty Claire’s mince pies. I’d never liked the shop-bought kind, which were too sweet and had too much filling in them, but Aunty Claire made hers with almond pastry and they tasted fantastic, especially when they’d just come out of the oven.

  I unzipped my jacket and pulled out Claire’s diary. I’d carried it in my inside pocket, wrapped inside a freezer bag to stop it getting wet.

  “Here it is,” I said. “Mum found it down the side of the sofa.”

  “Thank you, darling. But it really could have waited. It wasn’t urgent.”

  “Where are the twins?” I asked. The house seemed so silent, suddenly. I thought about the criss-crossed bike tracks, the way they ended so precisely at the kerb.

  “They’re over Winnie Harris’s. Dave’s taken them. It’s Caleb’s birthday party. There’s twenty of them going, apparently. I don’t envy Winnie, that’s for sure.” She smiled. “You’ll come and sit down, darling? You’ve still not told me properly about that college of yours. There’s some mince pies just done. I won’t be a second.”

  She made off down the hall – I assumed to fetch the mince pies. She was wearing jeans with purple patches in the shape of handprints on both arse-cheeks. They’d look awful on most people, jeans like that – tacky. On Aunty Claire they looked kind of cute. Cute-funny I mean, not cute-sexy. I went through to the lounge. There were strings of Christmas cards up over the mantelpiece, the tree in the corner the same as always. Claire collected Christmas tree decorations – glass baubles and hand-carved crib figures, stuff like that. I’d stand in front of that tree for hours when I was a kid, trying to spot the decorations that were new. I’d lost count years ago.

  I hadn’t reckoned on the house being empty like this, but as it was I felt glad. Glad and terrified. I’d imagined nothing. She was hiding from me, whatever she was. Hiding like a spider under the eaves.

  Whatever had happened to Aunty Claire, it was too late. Too late to do anything, I mean. She was gone, or changed, or turned. Melted down into something else, the way a caterpillar melts down inside a chrysalis.

  Maggots again. I was beginning to feel sick.

  “Did you see the little birds?” She had come into the room behind me without my hearing. I jerked around to face her, visibly startled. Claire smiled, as if she found my nervousness funny, which she would, wouldn’t she, she absolutely would, then pointed to three glass figurines, blue swallows with snowflakes in silver glitter across their outspread wings. “They’re made in Italy,” Claire said. “I had to send off for them specially.” She was carrying a tray – tea and mince pies, the pink china teapot, Grandma’s white porcelain plates with the gold trelliswork decoration. Claire put the tray down on the coffee table and straightened up again. There was something not quite right about her movements, something too fluid, almost greasy.

  I tried to speak and found I couldn’t say anything. What was the point? None of this was real, anyway. I tried to recall what had happened in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, how they’d managed to get the maggot out of Chekhov’s ear, but I couldn’t remember. “Mum’s worried about you,” I said at last. The words burst out of me like they’d been fired from a gun. “She told me you’ve been having nightmares.”

  For the first time since I understood that Claire wasn’t Claire, she looked on her guard. “Nightmares?” she said. “Not really. Trust Sarah to be a drama queen. She’s always exaggerating, that one.”

  “She said they were the same kind of nightmares you kept having when you were younger. When you tried to kill yourself.”

  It was a test, I suppose, the final failsafe. The real Claire would have been shocked – so far as I was aware, she didn’t even know I knew about the suicide attempt. It was supposed to be a secret. Mum had sworn me never to mention it, especially not to Claire.

  She froze, as if someone had switched h
er off at the mains. Then she slowly licked her lips, as if they were dry. When I looked in her eyes I saw her pupils were dilated. She stared at me glassily, as if she’d been drugged.

  “There’s a place,” she said slowly. “I’ve seen it. Oh God, David, get them away from me.”

  Those last words came out in a whisper. I thought that was it, that she wouldn’t say anything else, but then she spoke again, in a curious rumbling undertone that was almost a growl. “You useless, useless man.”

  She sighed, low, like the wind, and the strange light went out of her eyes. I could feel goose bumps breaking out on my arms, even under my jacket. I’d have taken my jacket off at the door, normally. I stood facing her, not moving. Her outline seemed flattened, like one of those paper dolls Emma liked to cut out. You could cut out clothes for them, too – coloured pieces of paper you fastened on to their bodies with fold-over tabs.

  A shape behind a shape. A maggot inside a chrysalis. An ear worm.

  “Would you like some tea, love?” Claire said, in her normal voice. “I’ll be mother.”

  I nodded. She poured the tea from the teapot and it glistened gold, a living stream of light in the duller light of the fading afternoon. I held hard to the scent of it: tannin and bergamot. I added milk, which clouded the gold, and two teaspoonfuls of sugar instead of my usual one.

  “You’ll be needing that extra energy for biking back,” Claire said, and laughed. She asked me about my course, and I told her some stuff. I didn’t mention A Maggot though – I was worried that if I did, I’d give myself away. She asked if I’d made any friends, and I said yes. I didn’t mention Ronny. Ronny seemed far away from me, at the end of a long tunnel. If I squinted carefully I could still see her, a small dot in the brighter light beyond the windows.

  The mince pie crust was crumbly and flavoured with almonds and still warm. The moist stuffing was half mincemeat and half frangipani. I didn’t know anyone else who made mince pies like that except my Aunty Claire. I ate three, one after the other, just like that.