It didn’t take too long to get the job done and in just over an hour or so it was complete. I noticed that my stencilling wasn’t quite as neat as your initial effort. Luckily, to the unknowing observer it wouldn’t actually be that obvious. It bothered me though because I could see it. I would always know it was there and I was a little angry that you were bound to see that my attempts weren’t as professional as yours. You would never say so being far too considerate, but you would know. I thought this really unfair, when all I had wanted to do was to save the decoration of the stairwell for myself.
I went downstairs and found you. You were kneeling over the toolbox in the utility room, filing away some of the salvaged tools from the shed. I told you I had finished the stairwell and you looked up towards me with a proud and excited grin. You stood up, brushed your hands against the back of your jeans and said,
‘Well, lead the way.’
You followed me up through the house chatting about how brilliant you were sure it would look. I felt a little guilty, like I was leading a condemned woman to the gallows. I wouldn’t be able to hold it in, my annoyance, even though I knew it would be the more loving thing to do. I knew it didn’t matter really. It was your house too and it was only a daft stencil. But, there you were, all excited and supportive and there I was, fuming.
‘Wow! It’s beautiful,’ you said when you saw it. You thought the colours really worked and that we should have let me go wild with the rest of the house. You gave me a kiss on the cheek and then sat on a step to look around and admire the green and yellow view.
‘How come you started on the stencilling?’ I asked.
You said that you hadn’t and you furrowed your brow looking to me for an explanation. I explained and did well to hide my annoyance. I made myself sound more bemused about the situation.
‘You must have started it yourself darling. Perhaps you forgot?’
As if I would forget. That was a ridiculous comment to make and I told you so. The last time I’d been anywhere near the loft was when I had banged my head. You said that was the last time you’d been there too. It wasn’t exactly an argument but we were clearly both irritated and the atmosphere in the confined space was uncomfortable.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’
I didn’t either. We dispersed into the afternoon and didn’t bring the topic up again.
Your invisible and silent entrance into the house and the mysterious stencilling incident weren’t the only two things to happen there to make me look like I was losing the plot. There were other things such as the strange case of the disappearing, extendable ladder (found in the loft), the mysterious relocation of an entire underwear drawer (found in the loft) and the curious laughter that occasionally echoed throughout the house (emanating from the loft). This you found particularly curious as you said it sounded like my laughter.
It was the laughter that really brought it home to you, purely because we heard it a number of times when we were both in the second lounge. You knew that it could not have been me making the noise. The final incident, the one that made us decide to put the house on the market was the first to relate directly to you. It was a few days after the laughter had died down. You were walking up the driveway having been to the shops for milk and the paper when you looked up to our bedroom window and saw me staring out of it. You said that I looked all dreamy and far away like when I had my head stuck out of the window in the loft. You waved at me and caught my attention. I looked you straight in the eye then moved behind the curtain that was next to me. Wondering what you had done to deserve such a strange response you entered the house calling my name. I shouted that I was in the bathroom and you came to me. I was lying in the bath, relaxing with a book. I had obviously been there for some time. I had certainly been there for about fifteen minutes, in fact I’d read at least ten pages since you had left for the shops. You were alabaster white when you realised. You knelt down and gripped the edge of the bath.
‘Get undressed and join me,’ I said.
You took off your clothes, climbed in and sat in front of me between my legs. I slid my arms around you and hugged you. I rocked you in a delicate and controlled way. I kissed the back of your neck.
‘We’ll go, we’ll leave this place, we’ll go,’ I said.
And we did.
The Alphabet’s Shadow
Alan Bilton
Fergus had died a few weeks earlier, the lump on his tail growing from a pea to a nut to a ball. Four inches in diameter, yet who could measure the death within? I wept like a baby, my wife like a mother, the vet like a Russian. ‘Fergus, Fergus’, we cried, ‘where goest thou now?’ We scattered his ashes by the skip near the playing fields, each telling the other that we’d never go back. Why go? Leaves fell, dogs pissed, yet Fergus would never know. Ho, what could he tell us of the passage of the hours? Branches broke, wood rotted, the jetty fell in to the pond – and all the while Time, that old bastard, hunched nonchalantly by the fire-damaged shelter, slowly winding his watch…
I can’t remember how long it was before I went back: two weeks, three weeks more? It was autumn, gusty, clouds unravelling like old wool, but there I was, sitting on our bench, hat damp, trousers green, the ghosts of old biscuits lining my pockets. What was I thinking about? Nothing, I was thinking about nothing. My lips were dry, my nose gummed, my head a bucket from which all thought had drained. And yet, oddly, it was just when I was thinking of nothing that I saw it, scampering in the half light. What’s that, what was it? Well, I don’t know: both a squirrel and not a squirrel – the remains of a squirrel, perhaps.
‘Hello little fella,’ I said.
The thing looked flattened, mangy, like a hair piece left out in the rain. Its nose was squashed, its eyes all yellow and yolky.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Hello wee man.’
Such a sight, such a thing! But what was it – puppet, road kill, pet? It scampered to and fro amongst the trees, flicking its tail and clicking erratically. Then, just as I started to lose interest it pointed at me with its little black gloves, and gestured for me to come hither. S’ true! Half of me – my legs, feet, my aching knees – started to get up, but the other half – head, shoulders and torso – stayed rigid: I was like two people, one awake and one asleep, a toy where the top and bottom don’t fit. So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself traipsing off into the darkness, my feet two heavy clods of earth, my legs as stiff as fence posts. What did I think I was doing? Why follow this thing? And yet for all that, the squirrel (squirrel?) led the way and I followed, its tail coming and going in the gloom like a hand up a sleeve.
The rag scuttled across boggy ground and then headed for a dense clump of trees. There were muddy patches, deep furrows, upturned roots: and me with my knees! But when I stopped to point at myself it nodded and flicked its brush impatiently. What could I do? At the edge of the trees it was snapped inside like a rat on a string. I breathed in and took the plunge. The copse was bigger than it looked: black leaves, black torsos, black bark. I mean, would it kill the council to put up some lights? Out of breath I rested my palm against a wet and darksome tree, my fingers stinging as they rubbed against the great black shape. Gingerly, I felt whorls, flourishes, a rigid and ageless sea. But what was this: a key, a pattern, a shape? All of a sudden my fingers started to grip harder, burrowing deep into the soft, rotten heart. What was I doing? I felt my nails clawing, my digits grasping, tearing. When I pulled my hand away, my fingers were as earthworms, all pale and long and jointless. The skin at the end was torn. Something black and painful had splintered inside one nail. ‘Oh, what has become of me?’ I thought. The squirrel had departed. Nuts rained down from the sky.
When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom and guiltily scrubbed my nails. The cuticles were green, the tips black, my digits as ten runner beans. The fingers of a gardener or a corpse? A grave-digger, maybe. Anxiously I switched off th
e light and ate lasagne with my wife.
ii
It was pretty dark by the time I finished work, so I parked up on the waste ground near the playing fields and made straight for the bench, making my way through the mud as furtive as a crow. The park was cold, colourless, silent – even the starlings had stopped complaining. Out in the darkness, the trees held each other up like drunks, their roots as tangled as string.
‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello, wee man?’
Ah, no brush, no paw, no little yellow eyes; instead, the gloom went on forever. But why then had it beckoned me here – just to rub my nose in the void? I reached one hand toward the column of trees and then pulled it back: I should listen to a rodent? And yet for all that, I couldn’t seem to help myself. The trunk was rutted, gnarled, lined with deep furrows. Was that an arrow? And inscribed next to it – some kind of cross? Anyway, that’s when I saw it: sad, wrinkled, stooped over as if looking for its glasses, the ruin of a once great thing. Swiftly I produced my papers and peeled back my crayon, rubbing as hard as I could. The paper crumpled and the crayon slipped, but that didn’t stop me – instead I rubbed and rubbed till the whole sheet was filled. But what did the strange frenzied frottage mean? It was too dark to see. In the half-light there were squirrels everywhere.
Only in the light of the dashboard did everything start to become clear. The rubbing had produced a rough kind of map, or at least some kind of rough sketch, the dark, scribbled marks held together by long strings of black. Here the shelter and there the poo-bin; next to it the playing field, the vandalised posts inscribed. And yet somehow, I couldn’t quite read it. No, really! I turned the chart upside down, twisted it this way and that, screwed up my eyes and squinted, but all to no avail; it was both the park and yet not the park – the park’s shadow perhaps. When I looked up an inky shape rolled past my line of vision and disappeared behind the car.
‘Man or squirrel?’ I yelled. ‘Man or squirrel?’
I switched on the headlights but if anything the outside became only darker, shapes and forms turning into one dense block. Disappointed, I slid the paper into the glove compartment and drove the long way home.
iii
‘I thought about going back to the park today,’ she said, stirring the beans thoughtfully.
‘Really?’
‘Mm. You know, to his place.’
‘Ah…’
‘Just to… I don’t know.’
For a long moment I held my breath.
‘Did you go?’
‘Go?’
‘Back, I mean.’
‘No… I… I just wanted to…to…’
‘Shh, come here…’
‘It’s not that, it’s just…’
‘Shhh, it’s okay…’
I held her and felt a painful black splinter pressing in under my nail. Every time I touched it, I felt pain. The whole finger looked strange.
‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Why cry? No, really. Why?’
iv
Stuck in traffic I furtively slid the sheath of papers out of the glove compartment and spread them out on my lap. Yes, lines, shapes, patterns. But what did they mean? ‘Twas a chart without landmarks, a language without a dictionary, a maze with no way in. This a strawberry and that a grave? There a boat and next a breast? Then the lights changed, and these too, were gone.
Just imagine: a world folded, encrypted, a signpost without arms. Over lunch, I photocopied the markings again and again, seeking out arrangements, symbols, pictures. Was that a nose or a fountain? An eye or a hole? If I folded flap A over side B, creased side 1 over page 1.2, would it all start to make sense? O reader! I spent the best part of the day measuring, squinting, moving pieces of paper back and forth across my desk, but alas, ‘twas not to be: this was a door I could not budge. I mean, what if the squirrel lied to me - what if there were no anagrams, no hieroglyphics, no key at all? What if I was wrong about everything? Between my eyes, the dots and the page, something refused to meet. A tome without a title, index, letters of any kind: who could keep one’s page?
That night, after dinner, I snuck off to the kitchen to unfurl the Dead Sea scrolls, the TV talking to itself in the corner. Tracing the lines and rounding the hills, I started to feel more optimistic: wasn’t that the bridal-path and that the latch-gate, that the big hill on the rise above the car-park? But then the typography started to fade and the shapes once more turned to smears, shadows, blurs. Squiggle or road? Mark or tear? I could not tell. These were instructions in another language, signals from a sinking ship. My wife was upstairs crying and I binned the papers in disgust. Where to go, what to do? I cupped my ear to the night, but the night wasn’t talking. When I went upstairs, my wife wasn’t talking too.
That same night, I was awoken by a powerful need to urinate, an urge which dragged me out of bed, across the hall, and off to the bathroom at the end. Even my piss looked green. ‘Diabetes!’ I thought, shaking my head in sorrow. Ah, how terrible I felt! My tongue was dry, my skin bad, nails foul.
Bleary-eyed, I padded down to the kitchen, my hand hurting as if someone had driven a needle deep below the nail. Abruptly the back door rattled and the security light came on. Blinking, I wandered over to the window, peering out at the gloom: first a blur, then a shadow, finally a thing, four legged and shaggy, hobbling past the tool shed and shuffling toward the bins. No, really – s’true! The thing moved awkwardly, limping on two good legs, its back-end sloping as if struggling uphill. But what was it - fox, dog, beast? The thing was closer now, half way between nothingness and the house. My eyes throbbed, my fingers ached. I needed to pass water again, and perhaps the other too. The fox (fox?) knocked over the bags by the garage and started to root inside, pulling one of the bags out into the centre of the lawn and lying there, its jaws methodically clacking. Such a thing! The animal was all wet and matted, two yellow eyes leaking onto its snout. It was only when I saw it cough up a ball of paper that I realised why it had come: as a messenger, a sign, a communiqué from the other side!
The moment I went outside the fox (fox?) vanished, its shadow no more than a smudge or smear. Outside, there was stuff everywhere: wrappers, crisp packets, sanitary towels. The wad of paper lay on the grass, like a ball or a poo. Yes, saliva-spattered, punctured by teeth marks, an enormous stain down one side: my map, my chart, my clue! Looking at it again, it was as if somebody had slipped a pair of glasses miraculously upon my eyes. I mean, just look at it! There the park, here the lake, yonder the bog garden to the east. And there, right at the side of the gardeners’ hut, a cross, an ‘x’, the universal sign for ‘dig here’.
Breathlessly, I dressed and retrieved our spade from the shed. My wife was sleeping, our neighbours likewise. I was still in my slippers, but why worry? I climbed into my car and drove away, the need to pee coming and going in bursts. Fortunately the park had no gate, no security. It was dark, but there were still a few street lights, bushes, stumps, signs. It was cold but not terribly so; if anything I seemed to be running a fever, sharp pains radiating from my groin and advancing on my chest in waves. First I buttoned my coat, then I checked the chart, and finally I started to dig; the ground was soft and inviting and the digging seemed to take no effort at all. No sooner had the spade entered the ground then a great clod of earth lay by my side. Another step down and a second great clod appeared. Ho, why sweat? I dug and dug and pretty soon the thing was done. My trousers were muddied, my fingers black, my slippers ruined, but what did I care? There they lay on the ground before me: a plastic shopping bag, a twisted spoon, a dog lead, string. Yes, it was starting to make sense now, the next step on the bridge!
It was only after I’d cleared up that I noticed a figure watching me, though whether man or woman, young or old, I couldn’t really tell. Why ask, I thought, why worry? Let them watch, take notes, tell! The figure was scribbling in a notebook, his (her?) face obscured by the night’s inky thumb. I got home about th
ree. My wife was asleep. I was covered in mud. Greenish darkness covered my arms right up to my elbows. And my slippers? We will not talk of my slippers. After kissing my wife I climbed under the covers and fell into a deep and bottomless sleep.
v
The next morning I put the sheets in the washing machine, poured myself a drink, and went off to find the bag. No point going to the office today: no time! Instead I opened the plastic carrier and arranged the objects in neat little rows, setting out the objects in terms of size and significance. Each of the items obviously referred to a different section of the park: the spoon, the café, closed down years ago, the bag, the Spa, haunt of glue-sniffers and alcoholics, folk buying lighter fluid late at night. And the dog lead? This seemed less certain. Bag dispensers, benches, trees? The string formed a noose and I hid it beneath my desk.
The next step was to spread the items out on the carpet, cushions for hills, a wash bowl the lake, a line of pens for footpaths. Only the dog lead confused me: stopping points, sniffing posts, playing fields? Or what if it were the shape or the texture which was the clue rather than the thing itself? Ho, what if the answer were engrained in the very texture of things? My skin itched, my nails throbbed, my eyes watered. And then it came to me: the waste-ground, the skip, Fergus – tch, what else should it be? Yes, the dots joined to form a circle, a wheel, a hole. But on the other side, what? Another hole?
Well, the park was a good deal busier than I’d imagined. Middle-aged men carried rucksacks and notebooks, scruffy-looking guys sketched the lake, old women wandered about with pens. But what were they looking for, what did they want? Instantly I felt suspicious: why the crafty look in their eyes, wither their feverish steps? Some skinny guy in a hat eyed up my charts. A bearded gentleman holding his schnauzer nodded in my direction. Two school kids, bunking off class, compared notes. All was a puzzle, a cryptogram, a work-sheet…
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