Still every birthday he waits to see if a magic door will appear in the wall and take him away, but it never does.
The boy thinks, sometimes you have to make your own magic doors. And one night he packs a few clothes into his rucksack and leaves home.
He gets on a train, and the train rattles him backwards and forwards, and when he shakes his head his eyes rattle, and that’s a comforting sound.
The boy tries to find the house where he once lived. He doesn’t want to break inside it, not necessarily, he just wants to look at it, to stare up at his old bedroom window from the base of the streetlamp. But he can’t find the house, and maybe they knocked it down, or maybe it never really existed in the first place, or maybe he’s just got the directions wrong – whichever option seems the most likely.
THE BOY MEETS his wife to be at a party. He doesn’t know whose party – it’s the friend’s of a friend of a friend, and the only thing peculiar about that is he doesn’t have any friends. She’s the one who speaks first, she sees him in the kitchen where he’s on his own chugging cans of beer. “Want to dance?” she says, and he doesn’t.
She takes him back to her place, and it’s quite a nice place, really, and in the light he can see that she’s almost pretty. She could do better than him. They have sex, and it’s not the first time he’s had sex, but perhaps the first where he’s actually felt involved in the action, where he hasn’t thought it was all taking place down the wrong end of a telescope.
Afterwards she dozes next to him, and he lies awake next to her, and the sheets are so soft, and he thinks, I’ll never ever leave this bed, I’ll stay here forever. I’ll stay until my body withers away.
She loves him, or says she does, and he says he loves her too. He tries to love her, he puts a lot of effort into it. And perhaps that’s what love is, anyway – simply, the inclination to try.
He thinks, maybe she’ll be the one who’ll patch him back together. They marry, and at the registry office she whispers hot into his ear that she is the happiest girl in the world, and he tells her he’s glad for her, and he is.
He doesn’t know what to say when she falls pregnant. He asks if it’s kicking, and she laughs, and says yes, the baby’s kicking away! Would he like to touch it? He prods her stomach. “Oh yes, there it is,” he says. But he feels nothing, nothing whatsoever.
And nine months in, or thereabouts, it’s time to take her to the hospital. “Let’s get this bun out of the oven!” the boy cries, and he laughs a lot, and his wife looks at him a bit strangely.
It’s a perfect little baby – not just the head, it’s the whole package. “Let’s name him Trevor,” he says, and his wife doesn’t like that, so gives him some other bloody name altogether.
The boy loves his son, just as he’s supposed to, just as he’s constantly asked to by his wife: “Don’t you just love him? Isn’t he adorable? Doesn’t he just take your breath away?” He loves him, but he can’t talk, or walk, or do pretty much anything yet, his son seems very stupid.
On his son’s first birthday he spends the whole night in his bedroom, standing over his cot. “Come to bed, darling,” says the wife, “he’ll be all right.” “Leave me alone,” he replies.
He does the same on the second birthday, and the third.
And when he lies in his own bed he shakes his head and sometimes it’s only the rattle of his eye that sends him to sleep.
As he’s drifting off, of late he’s been hearing a voice in his ear, whispering to him a single letter or number. “Stop doing that,” he says to his wife. She pretends she has no idea what he is talking about.
On his son’s seventh birthday he sits him down and speaks to him sternly. He tells him that a door may appear that night on his bedroom wall. It’s an impossible door. He must not go through it. No matter how it tempts him, he must stay strong. If he goes through the door, the father says, there will be consequences. His parents won’t love him anymore, and his life will be desolate and without purpose. His young son begins to cry – “Good,” he says. “Good, you should cry! I’d cry every day, but I don’t think there’s enough water left in me.” His wife snatches his arm, all but drags him out of the room. “Telling him such stories, don’t you feel ashamed of yourself!” No, he doesn’t, can’t she see, that’s the entire problem?
That voice in his ear, it’s every night now. At last he can stand it no more. He gets up, finds a piece of paper, writes the letter down so he can forget it.
He starts to keep a notepad by the side of his bed.
He writes down all the letters, and at last the message is finished, he can read it back.
R O V E L O D G E I R O N G R O V E L O D G E I R O N G
At the weekend, when his wife takes their son out shopping, the boy gets down a street atlas, finds Irongrove Lodge on the map, and goes there.
THE HOUSE LOOKS pleasant and respectable. But still it takes him a full half hour to summon up his nerve to get out of the car, walk up to the front door, and ring the bell.
She opens the door, and of course it’s her, and of course it was always going to be her.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “I’m so sorry,” and he’s never felt such shame in all his life, and he keeps on apologising, and he isn’t even sure what he is apologising for.
She says nothing, but then the woman was never much one for small talk. She takes his hand, and leads him upstairs to the bedroom.
He recognises it at once. “Poor Trevor,” the boy says, and he reaches up to the wizened old paint demon, and tickles the top of its head. The demon chirrups just barely, coughs. Trevor is dying.
She gestures towards the bed, and he clambers back inside it gratefully. She joins him.
They have sex, and the sex is good, it is as if she has got to the very heart of him, and every sensation all these long years has been cocooned in cotton wool and she knows how to strip the cotton wool away.
And after it is all over, and there’s no more sex to be had, then she turns to him on the pillow and whispers close in his ear.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” she says.
There were once three women, and they had a strapping son, and they all lived together in a big house in the void.
The three women loved their son, so hard sometimes they thought their hearts would break. It hurt them sometimes. It hurt them bad. The women were very happy. Their son would ask them, “Are you happy? You’re happy, aren’t you? Tell me you’re happy!” And the mothers would answer promptly, because although their son liked to use a lot of words, he never wasted a single one.
The boy had a head, and a chest, and a stomach, and two legs, and one good strong arm, oh, he was really very nearly complete. And if some of those body parts were of different colours, what of that, they all shared the same birthday together.
And every birthday the three mothers would work hard to make a great cake of marzipan and icing and chopped nuts and mixed fruit, and they didn’t quite know why, their son was always far too busy to eat, but he seemed to expect it and it was the thought that counted.
And every birthday the son would start to shriek, and the shriek would only stop when the summons was answered, and there was a knock at the front door.
The first time, the mothers might have expected another pregnant woman on the doorstep, ready to join their happy posse. But instead there was a little boy, wild-eyed and frightened.
The mothers loved the child at once, they wanted to protect it.
“Come in!” said one.
“Safe from the dark,” said another.
“And the rain,” said the third.
Then their son appeared behind them, looking so delighted. “My playmate has arrived!” he said. “For my special birthday party!” And he extended his single arm, and crooked a single finger, and the boy followed.
Year after year, it would be the same thing. The birthday shriek, a knock at the door – and always now a little child alone and shivering and needing shelter. “Come along, come along,”
the son would say, “no point delaying!” Extend the arm, crook the finger. The child will follow.
The mothers loved all these stray children, they wanted to protect them.
“Stay away!” said one.
“Safe in the dark.”
“And the rain.”
But the children never seemed to hear, they would follow the son dutifully to the bedroom, and the stories would be told, and they’d never be seen again.
Their son was getting greedy. He was taking birthdays every day. And the mothers one day tried to count how many children he had consumed by now, and the number was far too large for their little woman brains.
“We must stop him,” the limb mother said one day. “Stab him as he sleeps,” the torso mother agreed. And the head mother nodded, but she betrayed them, and told her son what they were plotting. And that was the right thing she did, because she was a good mother, and what’s a mother supposed to do different, you just tell me that!
All three mothers went to bed that night, but in the morning only one mother was left. “Where are my sisters?” she asked her son, and the son smiled, and told her not to worry, he hadn’t laid a finger on them, he hadn’t even touched them. “They’ve just got lost within the bed sheets,” he said.
And now the mother had her son all to herself, and she was everything he needed, and she could help him, she could lead the children to his bedroom, she could be kind and caring, she’d be both mother and lover to them all.
One day she dared ask her son a question. Because she still couldn’t understand. Why, after so many children, still her son hadn’t found that arm he was looking for?
“You silly goose,” he said, and laughed. “I don’t need a second arm. Who needs a second arm, when I’ve got my head, and my torso, and two strong legs, and a loving faithful mother? Who needs an arm when I have all my stories?
“It’s not an arm I’m missing,” he told her. “Do you want to know what I’m missing?” He extended his arm, he crooked his finger, she bent her head close, and he poured his secret into her ear. “What I’m missing. What I need. Is a soul.”
THEY DOZE TOGETHER in bed for a while, the boy and the woman, and sometimes he has to hold her so they won’t get separated within the wastelands of the sheets, and others so neither will fall off the precipice into the void.
And she stirs, and says, “Would you like to see our son?”
“Our son is here?”
“Our son is always here. He’s so big and grown.”
And there’s a little door underneath the windowsill, and only now does he see it, and only now hears it, something is behind, something that is strong and angry, kicking against the wood, trying to get free.
“No,” he says. “No. Please.”
The woman tilts her head to one side, and considers. Then she shrugs.
She pulls off the blanket. “Get up,” she says. He does. He puts on his pants, his shirt. She watches him the whole time. He feels awkward.
“I love you,” he says. “I have only ever loved you. I shall only ever love you.”
She says nothing, shows nothing, but she has heard.
He goes down the stairs, and out of the house, and back to his car. He drives home.
Upon the way home he realises there is nothing there for him any longer, and there never really was. He drives past his house, and doesn’t even bother to look at it – it was never his house, not the one that mattered. And the further he puts it behind him how much lighter he feels, how much more free, and there’s a numbness in his fingers, and his mouth is very dry.
VII.
The Rage
THE BOY IS no longer a boy, not in any way you would recognise. He is fat now, decidedly fat. His arms are thick. His beard is grey. His eyes are rheumy, and the top of his nose is a maze of purpled blood vessels. He has jowls.
And whenever he moves about – walking, or getting out of bed, or just shifting in his chair from buttock to buttock – he feels he is dragging such a lot of weight with him, and he doesn’t quite know what it is or how it got there, it’s been accumulated from long years of indolence and compromise, it clings to him like an alien parasite and he knows now he’ll never lose it. It’s with him right to the end.
He’s tried living with people, and now he lives on his own. Except for the cat – he tries to love the cat, and maybe the cat tries to love him, but for the most part they keep a wary distance from each other.
The boy works in an office, and does his job competently and without much effort, and if sometimes he stops to question what his job actually is, he realises he doesn’t know.
He has his name on the door, and a large desk, and a window view of the car park. He has a personal assistant he doesn’t like, but that’s all right, he likes not liking her. He’s pretty sure she doesn’t much like him either, and not since that incident at the Christmas party two years ago in which he groped her and she groped him and neither said a word about it afterwards. Of a morning she’ll bring him in his post and a black coffee, and she’ll close the door and leave him alone.
One day, as the boy’s working on the Davison account, amongst the usual brown envelopes she brings in one that’s a gaudy bright red. Inside is a birthday card.
“Is it your birthday?” she asks.
“It must be,” he says.
On the cover is a bunny rabbit, raising a glass of champagne. “Happy 50th!” the card says. Inside, “You Don’t Look A Day Over 49!!”
The card isn’t signed, but at the bottom the sender has written three large ‘X’s as kisses.
“Happy birthday,” says the assistant.
“Thank you.” He throws the card into the bin. She leaves.
He tries to concentrate on the Davison account, but minutes later he fishes the card and its envelope out from the rubbish, and looks at them. He stares at the celebratory bunny. The bunny stares back, wild-eyed with insolent happiness. There’s no stamp on the envelope, it must have come in the internal mail. Someone in personnel with access to his records must have seen he’d reached fifty. He looks once more at the kisses. He strokes them with his fingers.
He stands the card up on his desk, and tries to like it, but it irritates him, and he puts it back in the bin, and this time he tears it in two first.
He can’t focus, and at half past three he decides to cut his losses and leave work early. His assistant asks, “You off out to have birthday fun?” And he doesn’t deign to give that a response, but on the way home he decides he will have fun, he might as well, why not? – and stops off at the supermarket to pick up a frozen lasagne.
That night the boy sleeps well, and comes into work the next day refreshed.
On the desk the Davison papers seem to have been filed away; he has to call in his assistant to ask what she’s done with them. She looks confused. “You mean, the Davenport account?” And the Davenport papers are there and waiting, and of course that’s right, the Davison job is long finished and forgotten; he shakes his head to clear the muddle. “Your post for you, sir,” his assistant says, and there, on top of all the brown envelopes, a brilliant red card. “And an extra surprise,” she goes on, and twinkles, and has he ever seen her twinkle before? “Happy birthday,” – and then, wrapped in a little serviette, she hands him a slice of cake.
The cake looks good. It has marzipan and icing. And guess what, there’s nuts. And guess what, fruit.
“It’s not my birthday,” he says, but he supposes it is.
“A fork, sir? For the cake?”
“I don’t want a fork.”
“Sir?”
“I don’t want cake either. You have it.”
“I’m on a diet.”
“You have it! Take it! Take it!” She does take it, she closes the door.
He picks up the envelope. No stamp. Once again, it’s been sent from within the office. He opens it. Inside there’s a card. It’s the same design, the bunny rabbit is still at it with the sparkling wine, partying hard. Above
the picture is printed, “Happy 51st!” He’s surprised, he didn’t think anyone made fifty-first birthday cards.
And inside, printed: ‘The Years Keep On Coming, But You’re Still Going Strong!’ It’s an odd sort of message. And three kisses handwritten underneath.
He’ll solve this little mystery. He’ll go to the mailroom. He’s never needed to visit the mailroom before, he has to ask where it is, it’s in the basement. When he gets out of the lift the basement is hot and clammy, how can anyone stand it? Inside the mailroom there’s a little old man whistling cheerfully as he sifts through hundreds of envelopes and sorts them into sacks.
He turns, and smiles. “How can I help you, guv’nor?”
The boy asks about the birthday card. Who could have sent it? “I wish I could help, but all these envelopes look the same to me.” What about the cake, that’s out of the ordinary. “Sorry, guv, I wish I could help, as I say.” And he looks sorry too, properly regretful.
“But let me just say,” the old man says, “many happy returns.” And he offers the boy his hand. Without thinking, the boy shakes it. It feels strange and cold, and only then does he realise the whole arm is prosthetic.
The next day it’s his birthday, and the next day, and the next.
He begins to believe he understands – how he escaped from the bedroom on his fiftieth birthday, how now it’s caught up with him. That he’ll speed through his remaining birthdays now until he’s dead. How many more birthdays has he got left in him?
His assistant brings in his post with a waddle. “You’re pregnant,” he says. “Yes, sir,” she replies. He wonders if the child is his, but there’s no way to ask without it being awkward. “Lots for you today, sir,” she says, and all the envelopes are large and red, there must be a hundred of them, she spills them out all over his desk. “And a cake!”, yes, a full cake too, none of those silly little slices any more. “Well,” she says. “Someone must love you!” Someone, but not me, I don’t love you, I’ve never even liked you. And don’t you want to prod my stomach, sir, see if the baby inside gives you a kick? Let’s see if it bites.
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