(1990) Sweet Heart

by Peter James

  ‘Unusual? In what way unusual?’

  ‘Something not domestic. Very high powered.’

  ‘The man who came to read the meter said too much power was being used. He thought there was a short circuit somewhere. Didn’t my husband tell you?’

  ‘We haven’t found no short anywhere. We’ve rewired and tested it all.’ He tapped the small screwdriver clipped to his shirt pocket as if to underline what he had said, then tried to work a splinter out of his finger. ‘There’s somethin’ being used here that’s too powerful. Some of the new wiring we’ve put in is starting to melt.’

  ‘Melt?’

  He tugged a bit of the splinter out with his teeth. ‘I’ve checked your appliances. They’re fine. I’m goin’ to have to replace some of the new wirin’ I put in.’ He shook his head. ‘Something’s funny. I’ll give the Electricity Board a bell, make sure there’s no underground cables round here.’

  ‘Is there anything else that could be causing it?’

  ‘Like what, do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Damp, heavy rain.’

  ‘Electricity can be affected by a lot of things. I’ll keep looking.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She went into the kitchen, put the kettle on, sat down at the table and studied the application form for her birth records. She picked up a biro.

  The form blurred; her mind blurred. She began to write, to fill it in, determined, oh yes, determined. She wrote in big letters, huge letters; twice the biro scored the paper, and she had to stop and press it back down around the punctured hole.

  The kettle boiled, clicked itself off and the form came back into focus. She stared wide-eyed at what she had written. Except it was not her handwriting.

  The lettering was bold, large, scrawly.

  ‘LEAVE IT ALONE, BITCH.’

  ‘Hello?’

  Hugh Boxer stood in the kitchen doorway, holding a plant the size of a small tree. She turned the adoption form over, trying not to look obvious.

  The top of the plant was bent, and leaves straggled in all directions; it was as untidy as Hugh’s hair. ‘A little thank you for keeping the car in the barn,’ he said. ‘And a sort of welcome-to-the-neigbourhood present,’ he added.

  LEAVE IT ALONE, BITCH.

  Her insides churned. She stood up unsteadily. ‘It’s lovely. What is it?’

  He looked down at the plant as if trying to remember what he was meant to be doing with it. His face was streaked with grease and he was wearing grimy dungarees over a frayed collar and tie. ‘It’s got a Latin name, and there’s special food in a pack you have to give it. Red meat, or something.’

  She smiled faintly and touched one of the leaves. It was soft and furry. ‘Thank you, it’s lovely. That’s really nice of you.’

  ‘What have you done to your hands?’

  ‘Oh, it was — glass. Just scratches.’ She looked away from his questioning stare. ‘It’s a beautiful plant.’

  ‘I’ll put it down for you somewhere. It’s heavy.’

  ‘The table will be fine.’

  ‘It needs light,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe it’ll like the view,’ she said, trying to muster cheeriness.

  He grinned, ‘Particularly partial to views, I’m told.’ His eyes fell lightly on her and she noticed his almost imperceptible frown.

  ‘I was going to make some coffee.’

  ‘Great, thanks, but don’t let me —’

  ‘It was going to be instant but I’ll do proper in your honour.’

  Company. She did not want him to see her misery, but wanted him to stay, to talk. Something was comforting about him — about his face, his manner, she was not sure what. He seemed even taller in here, barely had any headroom below the ceiling.

  She put the adoption form on the windowsill and weighted it under a perspex picture frame of various snapshots of herself and Tom; Hugh put the plant on the table. There was hammering directly above them.

  He wandered over to the dresser. ‘I like goldfish.’ He leaned over Horace’s bowl and opened and shut his mouth, apeing the fish. Charley smiled, trying to prevent the welling tears. He made her feel sad. Sad because he was nice.

  The blade of his frayed tie swung out of the top of his grimy boiler suit and dipped into the water. He left it there as the fish swam up to it. ‘He likes my tie; this is obviously a sartorially aspirational goldfish.’

  ‘You can take him anywhere,’ she said, then had to turn her face away so he did not see the trickling tears. ‘Do you always wear a tie?’ she asked, her voice cracking as she spooned coffee into the percolator. She dabbed her eyes with a dishcloth.

  ‘Yes.’ He squeezed water from the end of his tie. ‘Old habit. My father was always obsessed with respectability.’ He smoothed the blade out and tucked it back inside his dungarees. ‘He was one of those Brits you’d come across in the middle of the desert. It could be a hundred and forty in the shade and he’d still be wearing a tweed suit and a shirt and tie.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  He rummaged his hand through his hair. ‘He was an archaeologist. A sort of real life Indiana Jones, but not as dashing. Obsessed with the Holy Grail, spent a lot of his life digging up tombs.’

  ‘And always in a tie?’

  ‘He was worried people would think he was a bit potty, so he liked to appear respectable. He believed people would trust a man in a tie. Poor bugger was always trying to raise money for this expedition or that, trying to convince people.’ He touched his tie. ‘That’s probably why I always wear one. Wearing a tie is in my genes.’ He grinned. ‘Prisoners of our past, you see.’

  ‘Did he ever find anything?’

  ‘Oh yes. Not what he was looking for, but he made a few discoveries.’

  Discoveries. Digs. She wondered whether his father had ever dug up a locket. Spots of tiredness danced in her eyes, fluttered in front of her.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You look pale.’

  Genes. Parents. People always took their parents for granted, and the little traits they adopted. She wondered what traits her own parents had had, whether her father had always worn a tie, too. What perfume had her natural mother worn? Details like that had never occurred to her before. ‘I’m a bit tired. It’s hard work decorating.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t leave too much mess moving the car out. The straw was pretty rotten. It must have been there for years.’ The hammering got worse above them. He glanced at Tom’s pewter tankard on the dresser. ‘How’s Man of the Match?’

  ‘Oh, he’s —’ She felt as if a cloud had suddenly slid over her sun. ‘Away, on business.’ The tears threatened again and she poured the coffee into the pot, holding the percolator clumsily, trying not to close her fingers too tightly around it. ‘How is Viola Letters?’ she asked, opening a cupboard and taking out a biscuit tin.

  ‘She’s OK. She rather doted on that dog. I’m not crazy about Yorkies, but it didn’t deserve what happened to it.’ He pulled the cord of the drying rack. The rack raised and lowered a few inches with a squeak, then he went to the sink and looked out of the window. Two swans drifted on the flat water. ‘Fine view.’

  ‘Gideon’s not coming any more,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me why. I think he’s upset about the hens — thinks we blame him.’

  ‘He’s not going to do the lane at all?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He rather took me by surprise.’

  Hugh carried the tray of coffee and biscuits out to the small patio at the rear of the house. They sat on hard benches at the oak table. Ben wolfed down a digestive biscuit, then stretched out on his stomach on the flagstones beside them. Charley scratched an insect bite on her neck.

  ‘Nice to be able to sit outside in October,’ Hugh said, heaping a spoon of sugar into his coffee. ‘Make the most of it. How’s your friend Laura?’

  ‘Oh, she’s well,’ Charley answered, too quickly.

&n
bsp; He stirred his coffee, the spoon clinking. A bird in the woods above squeaked like a plimsole on linoleum.

  ‘Hugh, at our barbecue you said you had evidence of people being reincarnated, but you did not believe in regressive hypnosis. Do you really believe in reincarnation?’

  He pulled his pipe out of a pocket and checked the inside of the bowl. ‘I don’t disbelieve all regressive hypnosis. There have been some convincing cases.’

  There was a tinkle from inside the house that could have been breaking glass or something being dropped on a sheet of metal. They both glanced up, for a second, then she looked back at him. There was an expression of concern on his face that disturbed her. ‘It’s what I said. I don’t believe in playing games with the occult.’ he added.

  ‘You think regression is playing games?’

  ‘It depends how it’s treated. On who’s doing it. Regression itself is valid. And very dangerous. There are a lot of hypnotists around who treat it as a game — and that’s even more dangerous.’ He stared into her eyes.

  LEAVE IT ALONE, BITCH.

  She blinked; her eyes felt raw; she wished he would stop looking at them. She touched her cup and the heat hurt her cuts. ‘What is the danger?’

  ‘Hypnotists are like mediums. They put people into altered states of consciousness, try to reach out to different planes, different dimensions, and contact things that don’t necessarily want to be contacted, or even want to be disturbed. Things they don’t have any business disturbing.’ He clicked his lighter and held his hand over the flame, shielding it from the breeze.

  Coldness seeped through her. ‘What do you need in order to prove you have lived before?’

  ‘Evidence.’

  ‘What sort of evidence?’

  He tapped the burning tobacco down in the bowl with his thumb. ‘Like knowing something happened during a previous life that no one else living knows. Something you could not possibly have known any other way, unless you had lived before.’ He raised his eyes. ‘It doesn’t have to be anything enormous. In a way, small things are more convincing because they are less likely to have been in the history books.’

  Small things.

  Like a locket.

  A locket that no one knew was there?

  ‘Can it help people to resolve traumas? That’s what I was told.’

  ‘You mean someone’s afraid of water in this life because they drowned in a previous one?’

  ‘Yes, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Learning how to swim stops people’s fear of the water, not finding out that they drowned in the Spanish Armada.’ He picked up a biscuit, broke it in half, then quarters. She wondered if he was going to make a diagram; instead he dunked each piece in his coffee and ate it.

  He spoke between bites. ‘I think regressive hypnotism has all kinds of dangers. It tampers with thoughts and emotions that are dormant in the mind, usually dormant for a good reason because the mind has managed to put them away. You risk stirring them up.’

  She put her arms around her chest and hugged herself. A sharp breeze blew and a brown leaf rolled past.

  ‘Anything that involves dabbling in the spirit world is dangerous,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s not just people who have memories. Places have them too.’ His eyes fixed on hers again and she looked away.

  She sipped her coffee and nearly spat it out, a wave of nausea sweeping through her. Puzzled, she lowered her nose and sniffed. It smelled of good coffee, but the taste in her mouth was vile. ‘Places have memories?’ she said.

  ‘I think they do. You know the way you get atmospheres in houses? What happens over a period of time affects how places feel. If there’s been some great tragedy or sadness in a house, quite often it — or a room in it — will feel depressing, maybe even cold as well.’ He shrugged. ‘It may be quite scientific. Perhaps the atomic particles in the walls retain trace memories, like videotape, and some people can accidentally tune in and trigger off replays. That’s one of the theories for ghosts — that they are replays.’

  Hugh looked up at the house, his eyes flicking from window to window, first floor then ground floor, back at her, back at the house.

  He offered to carry the tray into the kitchen, but she insisted she could manage. As he was leaving he said quietly, deliberately quietly, she thought, as if he did not want someone to hear him, ‘Be careful.’ He patted Ben and walked off through the garden and up the drive.

  She took the tray into the dim boiler room and through to the kitchen.

  Something crunched under her feet.

  Horace’s bowl was not on the dresser and for a moment she wondered who had moved it. There was another crunch. She looked down. The floor was covered in water, broken glass, tiny coloured pebbles, strands of weed.

  She was barely conscious of the china pot sliding across the tray, jerking against the latticed edging before it tumbled out of sight and exploded at her feet.

  Horace?

  Her eyes scanned the floor, her heart straining on its mountings, searching the shards of glass and china for the small fleck of gold. Please be all right.

  Be flapping around. Please.

  She put the tray on the kitchen table and was about to drop to her knees to look under the dresser when her eye ran down a black rivulet of coffee that had pushed its way through the debris, carrying Horace with it for a few inches until he jammed between a leg of the table and the severed spout of the pot. His tail waggled in the remains of the coffee and for a fleeting moment she thought the fish was still alive.

  ‘Horace,’ she mouthed, scooping him up in her hand. He was motionless, already stiffening, the eyes sightless, mouth open. Light, so light, he felt like the tinfoil wrapper of a sweet.

  There was another volley of hammering and the dresser shook, the crockery rattling inside. She put the plug into the sink, ran the cold tap and laid Horace in the water, watching as he swirled around on the surface, hoping any moment he might wriggle and dart down to the bottom.

  But he continued swirling on the surface, rising with the water. She picked him out. The water was cold and hurt her fingers. The fish had become stiffer still.

  The hammering continued and the wooden rack rocked on its pulleys, squeaking, and she rocked on her feet, cradling Horace, making a high-pitched creaking noise herself as she tried not to cry over a dead fish.

  She buried him in a plastic bag on the same bank in the woods where she had buried the hens, and placed a small stone over the tiny mound of earth.

  She walked back down the bank and the horses grazing in the paddock reminded her of the smart horsewoman in her last regression who had stared down at her so contemptuously. And the unease she had felt.

  Lies death. Truth. Go back, her mother had said.

  Go back where?

  There must be someone, someone who would know. She racked her brains, thinking back. Her adoptive mother had no relations alive now. Perhaps she had confided in a friend? Irene Willis. She might have confided in Irene Willis. Hope flared and faded. Irene Willis had died of cancer four years ago.

  She went into the kitchen.

  LEAVE IT ALONE, BITCH.

  She stared at the form she had defaced, still tucked beneath the perspex picture frame. Nuts. Talking to myself. Sleepwalking. I dig lockets out of the ground in the middle of the night. I write instructions to myself.

  Rebirthing. Weird rebirthing she had done with Laura, where they had tried to teach her to be positive about herself, where they gave her things she had to say in front of the mirror for half an hour a day.

  ‘It is safe for me, Charley, to feel all my cleverness and all my feelings.’

  ‘I, Charley, am loved and wanted as a woman.’

  Laura. Bitch. Cow.

  She sat at the table and breathed deeply, choking back a sob, stared at the empty space on the dresser where Horace’s bowl had been and at the damp on the floor. She fidgeted, waiting for as long as she could, waiting for the phone to ring.

  For it to be Tom.

&
nbsp; Upstairs, music blared from the builders’ radio. She turned the pages of the morning papers, her eyes sifting listlessly through the columns, a meaningless blur of black print and photographs, IRA bombers, a divorcing billionaire, a starlet on a bike, a wrecked car. Then she stood up and wandered aimlessly around the house.

  In their bedroom she picked up the locket and toyed with the idea of writing a note herself. Dear Rock, I love Tom. Please bring him back. Charley.

  She dropped the locket in the tin, put it at the back of a drawer and closed it. She went into the small room which would have been ideal for the cot for their first child, and looked out of the window, at the barn and the mill and the woods; it was starting to cloud over. It clouded in her mind, too, and she began crying again.

  She went down into the kitchen, composed herself, picked up the phone and dialled Tom’s private line. It was engaged. She waited, just in case he was trying to call her, then rang again. It was still engaged. She rang his switchboard, but hung up as soon as the operator answered.

  It was weak to call him. He wanted time, space, whatever, to think things over. It was what he said in his letter. Fine. Let him think things over. She’d think things over too. She was not going to be weak. No way. Somehow, she determined, she was going to cope, to be strong, calm.

  * * *

  She was not so calm when she saw Laura through the glass front of her boutique holding up a dress for a customer. She walked in, seething.

  ‘The shape is terribly flattering. Try it on. You really —’ Laura’s voice died as she saw Charley.

  Charley stood near the window and flicked through a rail of dresses.

  ‘The cut on these is tremendous. So many dresses like this aren’t good over the hips.’

  Charley moved on to a rail of blouses.

  ‘And, of course, if you accessorise with a scarf, and maybe a pair of gloves —’

  Charley sat down at the till and tapped digits out on the calculator, multiplied them, divided them, square-rooted them. Another customer came in, touched the collar of a jacket, flipped over the price tag and went out again. Laura glanced nervously at Charley, then turned her attention back to her customer. But the conviction had gone from her voice and she was losing her.