There was a long period of quiet. Doughnut groaned in his sleep. Bubbling sounds from the kitchen, a creak from the fire. Maybe a smell of something burning. I tried to think of what to say but then he started off again.
‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘How’s research going? Lighthouses, was it? Or fashion? Sarah said Mr Dickens said it was fashion. That’s why you had his album, with the pictures of his wife. Or was it your nan?’
‘So?’ I said.
What difference does it make anyway? Lighthouses or fashion or nothing at all?
‘Quit saying so to everything.’
‘Why?’
His eyes rolled up to the ceiling and the scars on his fists stretched tight. ‘And she said you’d made out we’d been living together for years.’ A burning smell was coming from the kitchen. I got up. ‘Is anything you’ve told me true?’ he said. ‘And did you shag another guy last night? Was it another lie – that you’re frigid? Funnily enough I believed that one. I felt right sorry for you. Joanna Vinier.’
I wish he hadn’t said that. I was all right up to that point. But Joanna Vinier is someone else entirely. I went into the kitchen and found that the potatoes which were meant to be par-boiling had gone into a mush and welded themselves to the bottom of the pan. I chucked the pan in the bin. When I looked back Doggo was putting Gordon’s lead on. The diamanté collar glinted in the plastic flame-light.
‘I’m off,’ Doggo said.
‘Don’t go out,’ I said, ‘you might get caught.’
‘What if I do. Makes more fucking sense inside than you do.’
‘What about the Christmas dinner?’
He didn’t bother to answer. ‘Please,’ I said but he just shrugged on his old jacket not the new one.
‘Come on, lads,’ he said. Doughnut hauled himself up.
‘K. Be like that,’ I said.
I went back in the kitchen and turned the oven off. All that stupid fucking turkey smell filling up the house. Who cares anyway? He slammed the door so hard I thought the house would fall down but it didn’t it just stood there all around me and I was very small. The vegetable knife was on the side, the steel glinting like a friend. I picked it up. The new scar on my arm was ridged and red. It would be so easy. Just to let the pressure off, just to ease it up a bit. But what if he came straight back in? Anyway the knife was blunt. I banged it down and picked the new gloves off the floor, lovely gloves, black fleece. What’s up with him anyway slamming the door like that and not wearing the new gloves even though it’s freezing cold?
I stood in the room for a long time. There are so many sounds in a house. The sounds of it holding itself up, wall by wall, the thin sounds of hidden wires, the plumbing sounds. The pyjamas were ruined by the wine and my head was throbbing. I picked up a new cracker and tried to pull it but I couldn’t pull it by myself, I couldn’t rip my arms far enough apart. I could have gone out too. I looked at the new coat and thought about putting it on and going out. I could be like a spy and follow Doggo wherever he went. But what would be the point? I took off my paper hat and tore it to shreds.
I went into the hall and stood looking at the barred-up room. It really got to me that the room was barred up and empty. I do think it a weird and sinister thing to do, bar up a room like that.
Sometimes you do things without thinking, don’t you? As if you are watching yourself but quite detached from the decision. I stood outside the room where Zita burnt to death. I got hold of the plank of wood and pulled. There was no struggle. It came off straightaway as if it wanted to. So simple after all that time. I stood there with it in my arms and then I put it down. I put my hand on the door-handle and turned it. The door opened and I stepped inside.
And there was nothing. There was no carpet or hole in the floor or stink of old fire. No lampshades or bookshelves, no vases. Nothing, not even a light bulb to switch on. Just nothing. The day was dark with sleet falling. You could hear it tutting like a million tongues. The room was dark with the curtains pulled. I walked across the bare floor and opened the curtains. The window was licked by wet grey tongues. The light that came through was a dirty wavery light and the room was empty. I got a feeling in my chest like a door opening and then pain.
I thought there would be something. Some sort of leftover something even if it was only smell. But it was clean and blank. Rain shadows wobbled and slid on the walls and the floor. I started to sweat. My heart went like a rat in a cage, trying to scrabble out of my ribs.
The grate was a black and empty throat.
I hurt so much. My back and my belly with a body memory of hurt. Like a dream of being awake and remembering and my body did remember. I went on my knees.
The memory came and my mouth dribbled blood when I bit my tongue. The sleet was stinging in the chimney-throat. The door was miles away and there was no way I could move. Wind blew out of the grate like black breath. I shut my mind but it rushed over me and the rat fled right out of my chest and disappeared across the floor and down a hole.
Thirty-five
The place I was was bed and it was dark. Ice branched in my veins. My head was empty as a room and my chest was, till my heart came back. Wind rattled the glass all night, it crept through cracks and chinks, whistled between my ribs, flapped my lungs like curtains while my sad heart throbbed.
Then what?
I don’t know. I think Doggo said OK now OK now or something and there were arms around me and my face against a beating chest. When I did come back I was thin as sticks and shaking. Doggo dripped some brandy in my mouth. It tasted of electric light.
Is that real? From now on is as real as it gets. As real as you are, anyway.
One day I sat up and drank tea. Doggo was sitting on the bed looking comical in Sarah’s dressing gown. I was so light and thin I didn’t want to spoil the light thin cleanness with food but he made me eat a bit. I started to speak and this is what I said:
A girl had a baby. She was sixteen. She didn’t even know she was pregnant. There were the signs but she didn’t read them. Part of her knew but part of her didn’t. She was sick sometimes and she felt thumps inside her when she was trying to sleep. She never got that big.
She was working hard at school. She wanted to be a doctor. She had hung on to that even when her mum had died. Her mum’s friends had taken her in until she finished school. The date of the birth was the 1st of June, the same day as her GCSE science.
She woke up and the bed was wet. Then she got an outrageous pain. It started in her spine and spread round both ways till she was in a vice. She tried to shout but her voice wouldn’t come. Then it stopped hurting and she was OK.
It was five o’clock in the morning. Pink light was coming through the curtains. A bird was singing. She got up. The pain again. She went on her knees and shoved her face in the pillow. When the pain stopped there was a hard wriggle inside her and she knew. She had a flashback to a broken greenhouse window and the moon. A boy saying it would be OK.
The pains went on and on. The time went past like it had nothing to do with real time any more, hands skidding on the clock face and the ticking speeding up and down. Wet came out of her mouth and sweat from everywhere but she was shivering.
Then it changed, like she was sharpening. On her hands and knees on the fluffy white rug. She screamed silent mouth shapes into the bed. Everything felt as if it was pushing back, the whole room gathering back around her haunches as she pushed and pushed against the bulge and split of the whole world cramming down.
And then it changed again. She put her hand between her legs and felt a hot wet thing like heavy fruit. Then more pain and the whole thing came slithering out. Floppy like something rubber. Tiny and covered in blood. She knew biology. She knew about the umbilical cord and how you have to cut it. She tried to cut it with her nail scissors but they slipped on the blood. The afterbirth came like a horrible butcher thing and she couldn’t look. The white rug was bright red.
She got through the cord with the scissors and
tied the belly stump with some silver gift tape left over from a birthday gift. The baby was a boy and he was moving a bit but not crying. She wrapped him in a T-shirt and put him in a drawer.
You’d think she’d rehearsed all this a million times. She had a shower and poppies bloomed around her feet. She nicked a sanitary towel and put her school uniform on. The skirt was loose. She got a black bin bag and put all the bloody stuff in. She put the sheets and towels in the washing machine. She put the baby in a carrier bag. She put the bin bag in the dustbin and took the bag down the road to the medical centre. There was no one about. Inside the bag there was movement and maybe the faintest mew of sound. She put the bag on the step beside a bottle of milk. The bottle had beads of wet outside and she realised how dry she was.
She walked back and it was already getting hot.
After her exam she walked back and the bag was still there. It had dropped off the step. She stood and looked and looked at it, just a creamy bag, perfectly still in the shadow with a beer can and some fag-ends. Someone had put a washed-up milk bottle on the step but the bag had fallen off the step like rubbish.
Please believe this. She didn’t mean for that to happen. Someone was meant to find the bag and take it in. She stood and stared and willed herself to pick the bag up but she couldn’t. She was too scared to look. The heat beat right through her. The whole street was throbbing. She was not brave enough to pick up the bag and look inside. She turned away and left it.
After that, well after that her life was ended. Who could live with themselves after that? That was Joanna Vinier. That life was over with. That was her. Just stopped.
You see, you cannot even bear to dream if you’ve done something like that. You cannot bear to believe in a life that would let a bag fall off a step like that and not get carried in and saved. How anyone could even joke about a God in a life like that.
I didn’t look at Doggo’s face, I just looked at the blue quilt with the little feathers poking their sharp ends through and sometimes I pulled one right out. Weird how the details come back – pink light, poppies, an empty bottle.
When I had finished we were silent. Then Doggo said, ‘What happened to baby?’ There were tears in his eyes. I could not believe that. Actual tears. I couldn’t answer because I don’t know. I could never bear to know. I couldn’t watch the news or listen to it or read it because I didn’t want to know the worst and I still don’t.
‘Maybe someone did find him and he lived,’ he said. Then he got up and went out. I listened to him going down the stairs and the front door banging shut. You can’t blame him for walking out like that.
It might not seem possible that I forgot that. But I did. That is the truth. Maybe not forget, exactly. More like detach. More like lock up behind a door. I lay and ached and ached so much I thought I’d bleed to death but there was no blood at all. I thought it couldn’t hurt so much to die.
At the moment of getting dark, Doggo came in. I never thought he would. I thought he’d gone. I turned my face towards him. The pillow was cold from tears and drool. The sky was purple with full dark clouds. Doggo poked the fire and I heard the hiss of flames on damp new coals. I had this stupid thought. You could paint the ceiling purple and stick on moons and stars.
He sat on the edge of the bed and I felt myself tilt towards him. He cleared his throat a few times and finally said, ‘Fuck, Lamb.’ He reached out and took my hand. His was like ice. ‘I’m right sorry,’ he said. I lay still, feeling his hand warm up in mine, waiting for him to go on, to say Sorry but … something or other, Sorry but that’s it I’m off or something. At that moment I almost didn’t care.
Then looking not at me, but at the fire, he said, ‘I’ve been walking about thinking about what you said. And thinking it must have broke your fucking heart.’ His voice choked up. ‘You poor, poor frightened kid.’
Everything stopped for a second. What? The sky froze, the world did but then he moved and it started off again. He lay beside me and held me tight. Held so tight it was not just comfort for me but like he was clinging on to something too. The words kept going on and on in my head, echoes and echoes of words I could hardly believe had been said. Me a poor kid. The rough wet wool of his jumper rubbed my face raw. Me a poor kid. Me. I never thought of it like that.
Thirty-six
In the middle of the real Christmas Day Doggo cooked the pudding. It wouldn’t catch fire even with brandy poured on. We were in bed in the lighthouse room with the fire in the grate and the world going on outside the windows. Doggo splashed more and more brandy on the pudding and struck match after match but it wouldn’t burn. The smell of the matches caught in my throat. I stared at the pretend window with the ship tossing on the stormy waves and wished we were in a real lighthouse with nothing but sea outside. Nothing but waves for miles.
When I took a spoonful of pudding I saw that it was flickering blue. A spoonful of dark pudding and flames so pale we hadn’t seen them. Maybe it had been burning all along. I stopped before the flames got in my mouth and waited for them to go out. Then I stuffed my mouth with the scorchy pudding. It made me remember the thin bite of a silver threepence between my teeth. Get the threepence get a wish. To be in a real lighthouse with Doggo, just me and Doggo and nothing around us but sea. And nobody able to get us ever. But you don’t get silver threepences in shop puddings. Wishes aren’t for sale.
We went downstairs and watched telly, drinking bottle after bottle of wine. Doggo was smoking but I only had one puff. I couldn’t stand the telly for long, all the raucous noise and falseness, so I went back to the lighthouse room and watched the soft flap of the flames instead. I was trying to concentrate. Trying to keep myself together, to keep us together. And I think it would have worked.
But then a letter came for Doggo. He never looked at the post but I sometimes picked it up. There was no surname just Doggo and the address. I opened it.
23rd Dec
Dear Doggo,
I keep trying to phone, is the phone out of order? Obviously we need to speak about what happened. I hope you don’t regret it, I don’t. I know it’s awkward with Lamb. She really is disturbed, isn’t she? I don’t want to do anything to upset her. We don’t want her to harm herself again. Is it really true you’re just platonic because if it is … well I’d like to see you. As in seeing you. I’m coming to Sheffield on the 29th. I won’t come round – I feel too awkward with Lamb being there. Daft isn’t it when it’s actually my house now! But I won’t come round till we’ve sorted this thing out. Meet me by the statue in the Botanics at one o’clock.
Please be there, love Sarah.
I took the letter straight upstairs and fed it to the flames. Her house. How could someone like her own a house? It was hard to remember that Mr Dickens was really dead, even though the funeral was over and the will had obviously been read. I kept his watch strapped to my wrist and sometimes put it up to my ear to hear its tick.
We settled back into nearly our old routine. The grey days rolled past. Doggo went back to making wild plans for the garden though I don’t know why. I think it was a kind of game. We slept in the same bed and he held me every night but he never tried anything. I wouldn’t have minded if he had but now he knew the truth about me why would he? It was almost a relief he knew. No more pretending.
Another letter came. This time short.
29th Dec
Dear Doggo,
I waited for an hour. What happened? I need to speak to you. If you don’t ring me I’ll call round, awkward or not.
Love Sarah.
She gave a number, not a Sheffield one thank God.
But days went past and she didn’t come. I watched television with Doggo in the evenings and sometimes during the day while he was in the garden. Not really watched, just let it go on in front of me while my mind was somewhere else. But sometimes hooked me back. One night there was a programme about spontaneous combustion.
It was late and Doggo was asleep in his armchair with a glass of win
e tilting perilously in his hand. I nearly got up and switched the telly off but then I didn’t. The programme was trying to explain the phenomenon. Some scientists were doing an experiment to try and duplicate the effect of spontaneous combustion. They didn’t use a person but a pig. They wrapped it in cloth and set fire to the cloth. The flames melted the pig’s flesh which soaked into the cloth and it burnt like a candle. The cloth was the wick and the fat was the wax. It burnt for hours at an amazingly high temperature, higher even than cremation fires, and the blaze didn’t spread away from the pig. When in the end the fire died down the pig was burnt up, even the bones were gone. Except for the ends of the legs where there is less fat. The bottoms of the legs don’t burn because they are not fat enough and it is the same with humans.
From this they deduce that there is no such phenomenon as spontaneous combustion. In all reported cases it could have happened like this: the person sets themselves alight somehow, maybe they fall asleep with a lit cigarette, or maybe a spark jumps from the fireplace where they’re drunk or dozing and they don’t wake up till too late.
Which means there is no such thing as spontaneous combustion. The impossible idea of catching fire from the inside out. It just can’t happen. I am so glad. I wish I could tell Mr Dickens that.
Doggo woke up just as it finished. He blinked at me then swigged his wine. He reminded me of Mr Dickens at that moment, jerking back to consciousness and carrying on.
Sarah still didn’t come and the days went past in a muffled way as if we were living under a grey blanket. Some days it hardly got light and those days I came down and waited for the post, made sure the phone remained unplugged then went back to bed. Doggo brought me plates of honey sandwiches with the crusts cut off. It was all I would eat. No crusts, nothing hard, just sticky fraying bread and endless cups of tea. He threw the crusts out for the birds and every day he told me which ones he’d seen, robins, blue tits, blackbirds, even a jay.
I thought about my mum a lot but never without crying. I do know she didn’t mean to die. I thought about the baby. He must have been found eventually. And I’d gone missing. Someone must have put two and two together and known that it was me. That he was mine. That I had dumped him. If I rang the friends they’d tell me. Tell me if he had lived or died but that I couldn’t bear to know.
Now You See Me Page 22