Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  “Willy.” Like she’d been expecting me. Why didn’t you call sooner, you eejit? Six years. I swear it was as if we’d spoken the day before.

  THAT MATCHBOX. YOU’RE thinking I should have got rid of it, flattened it under my shoe then dumped the crushed remains straight into the nearest litter bin.

  I wanted to know, though. I remembered what Marian Rose had said – that she’d opened Lionel’s matchbox and nothing had happened. I’d mostly talked myself into believing the box was empty anyway, so of course I had to open it, just to prove that it wasn’t.

  There was a woodlouse inside – not a silvery, glowing nymph, just an ordinary woodlouse. When I slid the drawer open it ran about in circles for a minute then took refuge in one corner and stayed put. It was a dusty brown colour. I placed the matchbox under my desk lamp, to see if the bright light might make it start shimmering, but nothing happened, nor when I turned off the lights completely either. I think I had the idea the creature might glow in the dark, or something.

  I felt pretty stupid, I must say. And like Marian Rose, I also felt sorry for the woodlouse, trapped in its cardboard box with nothing to do.

  Keep it contained, Mccabe had said. Well, sod him. I took it out to the back garden and let it go in the rockery. It was gone in an instant. I suspected I’d have more bad dreams that night, but I didn’t. I slept just fine.

  MUM’S PHONE CALL came at five the next morning. I jerked awake, panicking because I thought I must have overslept, that someone was calling from work to find out where I was. Then I realised it was still dark outside.

  A strange feeling crept over me, that the caller was Mccabe, that he was telephoning me to... I don’t know, have a go at me for releasing the damned woodlouse or something.

  Don’t answer it, I told myself, but I did. Not knowing is always worse than knowing, after all.

  “Willy? I’m sorry to wake you, love, but it’s your Aunty Claire. She’s... she tried to kill herself last night. She’s in the hospital.”

  “Is she –?”

  “She’s stable and she seems quite lucid. Only she’s been asking for you, love. Could you come?”

  I realised I couldn’t remember Mum ever having asked me for anything before, apart from normal kid things: tidy your room, Willy, now, or would you mind laying the table, love, your dad’s gone to the shop. Stuff like that.

  Could you come? “There’s a train at 6.30,” I said. “I’ll be on that.”

  CLAIRE WAS STILL drowsy from sedatives and painkillers but she knew it was me.

  “Willy, darling,” she said. Her voice croaked through dry lips. She looked pale against the hospital sheets, diminished. Seeing her felt natural, normal, as if we’d both been on pause until this moment, waiting to begin.

  It was like my reunion with Ronny, in a way. History righting itself.

  I sat beside her bed for a long time, just holding her hands. Both her wrists were bandaged, but aside from that and some bruising around her eyes – a nurse told us this was caused by shock and would soon start to fade – she seemed unharmed.

  My fear lay quiet, sighing contentedly between us like a sleeping dog, one of the feral kind that patrol closed-down shopping centres in the dead of night but that are still just dogs. Instinctively lazy. Sun-lovers.

  I knew there was no way back for Claire – not in the long run – but I could help, perhaps, simply by being there for her, by understanding the truth of what she had done.

  DAD LEFT AS I arrived, mainly to drive Dave home – the man was exhausted, white as a ghost – but also to pick up some stuff from home, for Claire. The hospital told us they’d probably be keeping her in until the weekend.

  I lost all sense of time. When Mum told me she was taking me to the canteen to get us both some lunch my first thought was that it was too early, but then when I looked at my watch it was two o’clock.

  Mum looked shattered. There was a moment when, catching sight of her in the bald fluorescent lighting of the hospital corridor, I barely recognised her.

  “What happened?” I asked her, once we were sitting down. The main lunch rush was over. We grabbed a table by the window, overlooking the car park.

  “She’s been down for a while,” Mum said. “Not dreadful, though, not as bad as she has been. I had no idea.” She let out a shuddering breath. How long had it been since I’d been home? Eighteen months? Two years?

  What an arsehole I’d been. I opened my mouth to say I was sorry, then closed it again. Mum knew already, she knew everything about me. What mattered most was how I went on from here.

  “I know you’ve had your worries, pet,” she said. She sighed again. “How are things between you and Veronica? Your dad and I were so happy to hear you’d patched things up.”

  “Ronny’s fine, Mum, we’re great. Please tell me about Aunty Claire.” I knew Dad would return before long. If we were going to talk it would have to be now.

  “Well,” she said. A shadow floated across her face. “She made such a mess of her arm, Will. I don’t just mean –” She touched the inside of her wrist. “I mean what she did before that. Carved words into herself with a penknife. There’s a place, they said. Like the start of a poem. The doctors say it’s not too deep and the scars should fade but it’s still horrible. Horrible to think she was that desperate.”

  I shovelled pasta into my mouth. Dull oaf that I am.

  “Listen, Willy, there’s something I need to tell you. I should have told you years ago probably, but there’s never a right time for these things, is there?” She paused. I could hear an extractor fan whirring round somewhere. The pasta turned to a wad of gluey cardboard inside my mouth. “I’m not your real mum, Will – Claire is. She was pregnant when Doug was hit. They were supposed to be getting married. Doug had bought the ring and everything – it was one of the things they sent back to her, after the bomb. She was so ill, right through the pregnancy, and then afterwards, that was when she first tried to kill herself. We were all so scared, Claire most of all. She said she couldn’t trust herself – not to try again, I mean. Your dad and I, we were happy to take you. It seemed like the best solution at the time, for everyone, and then later when we found out we couldn’t have kids it seemed like a godsend. Like it was meant to be, almost. I know how selfish that sounds.” She grabbed for her napkin and blew her nose, hard. “The thing is, I made Claire promise. Promise she’d never tell you. I realise now that was an awful thing to do. Inhuman, really. But I was scared too. Scared you’d want to leave us and live with her. And everything seemed to settle down once Claire had the twins.” She tried to smile. “These past couple of years, you know, with you not coming home so much and everything? Claire was convinced you’d found out somehow, that you hated us for lying to you and her most of all. I told her that couldn’t be right, that you were just busy with your life in London and anyway, you’d never hate her, you’d never hate anyone. But she couldn’t get the idea out of her mind.”

  I shook my head. The sounds of the hospital canteen – the clattering of plates, the subdued chatter of relatives killing time, the mournful keening of a child – seemed to lap around our table in a ceaseless wave. “You always said there wasn’t a bomb,” I said in the end. It’s strange, isn’t it, the things you’ll come out with? It was the one detail that didn’t fit. Mccabe kept going on about a bomb, I remembered. The word seemed stuck in my mind, like a splinter of glass.

  “There was a bomb, only Doug wasn’t killed. He was – well, he could never have had kids after. Claire was desperate to go to him but he wouldn’t see her, wouldn’t even read her letters. He thought it was kinder that way, I suppose, kinder for Claire. Later on we heard he’d married the nurse who’d been taking care of him. It was all such a mess. You think you’ll never come to the end of something like that – as a family, I mean – but eventually you do, because you have to. That’s how the world works.”

  She started to cry.

  “Mum,” I said. It was all I could say. I sat there patt
ing her shoulder and gradually she seemed better. When we went back down to the ward, Dad was there, sitting on a plastic chair and looking worried.

  “There you are,” he said.

  “I’m going outside to phone Ronny,” I said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  When I returned they were sitting close together, holding hands. They raised their heads and looked at me, questioningly, a double-headed worry beast.

  “Hey,” I said. “Shall I get us some coffees?”

  “It’s good to see you, son,” Dad said.

  “You too, Dad. It’ll be OK.”

  We’ll be OK, was what I meant, what I wanted to say: him and Mum, Dave and Claire, Rhys and Emma, me and Ronny, us. But I could tell from his expression that Dad understood, that there was no need for me to explain anything.

  You’re very alike, Mccabe had said.

  He’d known who I was, all along.

  “YOU KNOW, I think on some level you must have known,” Ronny said to me one evening. We were sitting together on the sofa, drinking wine. “About Claire being your real mum, I mean. I reckon that’s what made you ill that time – one part of your mind was trying to tell you something, and another part kept trying to repress it. It makes sense.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” I said. It felt good, that we could talk about it. ‘That time’ – the time I banged my head and started believing my aunt was a monster. I loved the way Ronny said it: carefully and tenderly and protectively all at once, like it could happen to anyone and that was OK but it was all in the past now.

  YOU OLD FAMILIES, Mccabe had said. Always making up and breaking up and going to war.

  SOME NIGHTS, I can feel the world turn, like something vast rolling over in its sleep. A feeling comes upon me then, that the time I am living in is not wholly real, that I am living in a narrow crack between one age and another, and that soon I will return to the course I am destined to follow. Tears start from my eyes then. Given the right conditions, they will multiply, I think. The way is open. They will set a fire in the firmament. It will burn for aeons.

  I KNOW THESE are Claire’s nightmares, too. The knowledge is not comforting exactly, but it makes me feel less alone.

  NOTES ON IRONGROVE LODGE

  I DON’T KNOW why London should feature so heavily as a location for Irongrove Lodge. If we were to talk about the true location of the house, we would have to admit to ourselves that it is nowhere. Yet the history of London – thousands of years of the sacred and profane – seems to draw the house, just as the house draws those it has chosen.

  London is relatively close; a couple of hours by train – engineering works and strikes permitting – but I have never found Irongrove Lodge there. I have walked the streets mentioned in the histories, I’m even in possession of a photograph that shows the house residing in a London borough, but I have never, on visiting the city, found myself standing at the door of the property.

  It is infuriating. Evidently Irongrove Lodge is close, reachable, but it hasn’t yet revealed itself to me in the flesh.

  To dedicate my life to the discovery of one house would seem to most nonsensical. I no longer have any friends. I’m estranged from my family, although this has little to do with my studies and more to do with what I did, a long time ago. As a result of my actions, I spent many years indoors. There, even the sky was bounded by walls. I never found my redemption within. They talked often of rehabilitation, and in the end they were satisfied that is what had been achieved; the forms said so, and in that place paperwork and structured assessment were sacred.

  When I left, I found that the world was too big. I stood on the threshold and experienced a moment of terrifying vertigo, as if with the first step I would fall and carry on falling forever.

  You can’t find the sort of redemption I seek in church, or within the community. Most doors are closed to me. The Crown and the government may be satisfied that I have paid my dues, but people have long memories, and even if they hadn’t, the papers were more than ready to remind them of what I had done. The media were hungry for my story, and perhaps if I had agreed to talk to them I wouldn’t find myself in the dire financial straits that presently plague me. But they would have taken my words and changed them. They would have looked for a satisfying ending or resolution where none is to be found. This tale is mine to tell, and I will seek my own end.

  It is true that when I finally find Irongrove Lodge I will once more be bounded by walls. It is true that, like my former residence, it will be a place of many doors; but unlike that place – that formalised hell that took so much of my life – in Irongrove Lodge some of the doors will open to me.

  PRIEST’S HOLE

  K. J. PARKER

  I HATE THIS house. It’s freezing cold, it eats people and it stinks of petrol.

  The Zulu king Shaka, they tell me, once disposed of the mother of his hated foe by shutting the old lady up in a hut with a hyena. Observe the subtlety. The hyena is a notorious coward, for all that his jaw can crush a man’s skull like a biscuit. Only when he’s starving hungry and entirely desperate will he attack living prey of any kind, let alone that monster surpassing all monsters, a human. So, to begin with, while the old lady and the hyena were reasonably comfortable, she could repel him with a shout or an unkind word. He’d slink away into the shadows and cower. But, as time passed and hunger took its toll, she got weaker and he got more frantically desperate, terror (trapped in a confined space with a horrible monster) and the overriding necessity of food tearing his poor pea brain apart; the moment came when fear crumbled and gave way, and the terrified animal broke the terrified old woman up into something useful that he could consume and digest. History doesn’t record whether they let the hyena go after it had done the business; I hope they did, for reasons that will become apparent in due course.

  I have no idea which terrified creature I am in this analogy. In theory – keep an eye on that word, it’s dangerous – it’s all over now. But I’m getting weaker, and the house is very hungry.

  THE JOB WAS a piece of cake, no bother at all. I was being paid to be a middle-aged businessman, and all I had to do was walk into a bank and pay in a cheque. It was something to do with avoiding tax. You’d be surprised and depressed how often it turns out to be about tax. This amazing talent, and what’s it good for? Screwing the Revenue. Ah, glory.

  I propped up his photograph against the cornflake packet while I ate breakfast. Let the record show that I no longer eat cornflakes; breakfast is a serious matter and should consist of eggs and pork derivatives, and I keep the cereal packet purely and simply as a useful stop to rest things against – photographs mostly, but also briefings, dossiers, files, the very occasional non-fiction paperback.

  He had an interesting face, the man in the picture. He had a nose like the beak of a Roman galley. You could be defeated and oppressed by having a nose like that, or you could regard it as your spearhead, crash through life with it like an icebreaker. I guess my man chose the latter approach; clearly he’d made a lot of money, or he wouldn’t be needing to diddle his taxes. He had plenty of thick white hair, wavy, I’m guessing he went white quite early, because he didn’t look a day over sixty, possibly younger than that. Vigorous, bursting with vitality. In the photo he was smiling, and I don’t think it was just because someone had told him to say ‘cheese’. I got the impression he smiled a lot. But a very strong jaw (crunch up your skull like a biscuit? Probably best not to put yourself in a position where you’d find out.) You could like this man quite easily, right up to the very last minute, when it’d be too late.

  Well; I don’t have to think myself into their heads, but I find it helps. I don’t mean it leads to a better outcome, in practical business terms. It helps me, to cope with the procedure. Not that I’m complaining, or anything like that. Easy way to make a living. It’s just – well, identity issues. Who am I and what am I doing here? Like it matters.

  To perform the transformation; ask me how I do it, I can’t tell you.
Once I did it in front of the mirror (I bought a mirror specially, and hung it on the wall in the room), watched closely in the vain hope of perceiving the split second of change, when I stopped being just boring old me (who am I? Don’t know, don’t care) and became the target/victim/subject/object. Pointless. I stared and stared at the reverse-image me for what seemed like a very long time – I think it was about ten seconds – and then, without any sense of anything having happened, I was the other guy, the man in the photograph-du-jour propped up against the cornflake box. I could have burst into tears from sheer frustration, except that he (the man in the photo) wasn’t a big girl’s blouse like me and didn’t start blubbing the moment things didn’t go precisely the way he wanted them to.

  One thing I’ve learned, doing this job. Nearly everybody’s better than me, in some, most or all respects.

  Forgive me, I’m drivelling. Easily sidetracked, mind like a teabag. I turned into the white-haired bloke with the champion snout, put on a suit and a tie and went to the bank.

  You don’t have to do anything, my agent told me (more about her later); just walk up to the counter, hand over the paying-in slip and the cheque, even you know the score; God knows, you’ve had practice paying in cheques. The bank CCTV will record the fact that you’ve been there, and that’s all that needs to be established. Easy peasy.

  “Hello, Mr Morgan,” the woman behind the glass screen said. That threw me. I smiled at her, hoping that would do. Of course, I later rationalised, they’re trained to do that these days. They read your name off the cheque or the card or the paying-in slip, and they greet you with it as though they know you, as though you’re known and have an identity in their mind. It’s to make you feel loved and wanted, old-fashioned personal service, we really care when actually we don’t. Still, it gave me a bit of a shock, all the same. She knew me better than I knew myself.