by Tin Larrick
She watched him read. It wasn’t even seven in the evening. Long, empty winter evenings of wine and wood burners were the stuff couples fantasised about – but only, Charlotte mused, if one’s attention was fully focused on the other. She herself couldn’t help but feel that these evening moments were crying out for a routine borne of love and affection – bathtime, stories, play.
She grew bored very quickly, and set down her wine to reach for the pack of fleur-de-lis cards. She had blotted the Jacob’s Creek from those that had been caught in the earlier crossfire, and, after careful individual arrangement on the radiator, they were more or less usable again.
Out in the hallway, the phone rang. It made her jump. It sounded strange in the new house, but then she realised she couldn’t remember when it last rang in the old house either. It so seldom rang that she wondered at first what it was. Everything these days was apps, barcodes and online chat. Everything was bloody virtual.
In fact, she thought as she crossed the room, an evening telephone call to the house seemed like a rather pleasant and old-fashioned interruption.
She went to the mahogany half-moon telephone table with the fern draped over the side – she didn’t normally do dark woods, but it suited their new cosy house – and picked up the receiver.
If she had been hoping for a half-hour chat with an old friend, she was disappointed. It was a prerecorded message from some bank or other, telling her about her entitlement to reclaim payment insurance.
She let the voice drone on for a moment, and absent-mindedly pushed back the curtain covering the glass porthole in the front door. She looked out onto the dark form of the cherry blossom tree standing resolute in the garden, and beyond it, the street lamp on the pavement.
She froze.
There was someone standing under it.
Someone watching the house. She let go of the curtain abruptly, and the curtain fell across the porthole again. A chill passed from her throat down to her sternum, and it took her a moment to realise that the robotic message about payment insurance had been replaced by another robotic message: PLEASE HANG UP PLEASE HANG UP PLEASE HANG UP PLEASE HANG UP
“Sean?" she called.
"Yeah?" was the disinterested reply from the drawing room. Fucking drawing room. It was a lounge.
"Could you come here please?" This was, again, part of some practical process of elimination; were this a movie narrative, the figure under the street lamp would have vanished by the time her husband came to corroborate her sighting.
Silence.
"Sean!"
"Okay, okay. I'm coming." A sigh, the sound of paper rustling and the creak of the sofa.
He appeared next to her in the hallway a moment later.
"What is it?"
She kept his eyes on his, and pushed the curtain aside again, willing the figure to be gone.
"Shit," Sean said. "There's someone out there."
Charlotte didn't look, but shut her eyes.
"What's he doing?" she said.
"Nothing. Just standing there. He's looking right at the house."
She forced herself to turn and look. She had to press herself against Sean so they could both look out of the porthole, and drew some comfort from his warmth.
He was still there. A stranger. The sodium wash of the street light did not lend itself to detailed identification, especially at a distance of thirty yards, but she could see he was somewhere in his late thirties. His hair was short and dark and relatively neat. He wore a denim jacket with an upturned collar, and a huge pale duffle bag was strapped across his body. He was staring intently at the house, but with his hands in his pockets, his pose was not threatening. In fact, it was almost casual – the unnerving fact of someone watching your house in plain sight notwithstanding, especially in the dark.
"Are you going to do something?" Charlotte asked.
"Like what?" Sean said. He was a pragmatic man, given to thinking of consequences; both his physical form and proclivity to confrontation were decidedly middle-of-the-road. "Think I should call the police?"
"Or you could just go tell him to fuck off," Charlotte said.
Sean stared at her, unused to the sound of curse words from his wife’s mouth, and she knew she had betrayed the fact that she was rattled.
To his eternal credit, however, he did not argue, but instead opened the front door.
A rush of cold air swooped in and circled their ankles. The man immediately turned and started to walk off down Parkway; not rushing, but not exactly hanging about either.
Sean took a step or two out into the garden, but the man had already disappeared into the murk. The diagonal stripe of his enormous duffle bag, pale against the gloom, was the last thing to disappear.
Sean checked all the doors and windows were locked, and then they both went upstairs to bed. Charlotte made Sean shut the curtains, following which he succumbed to the usual soporific effect that wine had on him.
Charlotte, however, sat up in bed, half a glass of wine still on the bedside table. She was filled with a terrible urge to pull back the curtain, but forced herself not to. There was nothing out there, she told herself, besides the street lamp and the naked cherry blossom silhouetted in its amber glow.
She returned to bed, and picked up the deck of cards. She sat on the bed, one bare knee folded under her, and turned the cards over, one after the other, until her lap was covered in the fleur-de-lis.
*
Despite the evenings of romantic fantasy having already given way to idle self-amusement (like the newspaper) after only two years of marriage – two concurrent and equidistant lines already starting to run parallel – Sean and Charlotte nevertheless ate breakfast together daily. Not standing up at the counter, either; this was around the table with orange juice and coffee. Charlotte was desperate to set a third and fourth place, and loved to imagine an array of high-sugar, brightly-packaged cereals lining the table in a mouth-watering array.
“I thought I might see what work there is at the hospital,” Charlotte said, suddenly.
Sean looked up from his toast. Charlotte noticed a small smear of butter on his club tie.
“Really? You want to go to work? You’ve not mentioned that before.”
“I have, actually,” she said, leaning across the table to scrape off the offending smudge with a knife.
“Thanks. What sort of thing were you thinking of?”
“Nothing onerous. Just a few hours a week. A bit of extra money. Might meet some new people. Just until…”
“Until what?” Sean was smiling.
Charlotte was still leaning over him, the butter knife in her fingers. He raised his hand, touched the back of her head, and pulled her mouth onto his.
They did not discuss the strange episode of the previous night. Not only that, but Sean was late for work.
*
By mid-morning, Charlotte’s mind had flatlined into a kind of sludgy content. There was obviously a risk that, alone with her own company in an empty house for any period of time, she might revisit the unease she felt towards the forest at the bottom of the garden, and the strange man outside the house. However, the unexpected events of the morning occupied her brain sufficiently for her not to allow the irrational to play any kind of part.
Buoyed by this, she attacked the housework, ignoring the fact that, once she had stuck the washing machine on, there wasn’t a whole amount that desperately needed doing.
Except the garden.
The heavy sound of knocking at the front door jolted her, and made her realise just how quiet the house actually was; up until this point, her thoughts had been so constant as to take on actual sound in her mind.
The knocking was slow and heavy. Just three knocks. The sound caused a drumming in her chest, which she banished as utterly ridiculous and a clear need for more social interaction in her life as she went to answer it.
On her doorstep was the man with the duffle bag.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
t to startle you.”
For Charlotte clearly was startled – her mouth and eyes were wide in a frozen tableau as she tried to engage her brain.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “My name is Brazill. Jamie Brazill.”
He extended a hand. Charlotte looked at it stupidly.
“What… do you want?” she said, clutching the edge of the open door.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said.
Three apologies, Charlotte thought, finding her brain. One for the noise, one for the late introduction, one for the intrusion. That’s all the bases covered, I think.
Up close and in the daylight, he was slightly younger than she had thought the previous night. Thirty-two, maybe thirty-three. The streetlight, illuminating him from above, had obviously highlighted the more drawn aspects of his face. His dark hair was cut very short and had some form of product – gel or something – lightly applied to it. The edges of his ears were red with cold, and Charlotte found herself thinking he should grow the hair a bit. His jaw was heavy with a perpetually-unbanishable shadow across it – always five o’clock in his world – and the brow was equally dark and heavy.
The denim jacket had put in another appearance, as had the duffle bag. In fact it looked like he had slept in a car. The bag looked heavy, and was packed so tightly with something that there were no folds or creases; the material was stretched tight and looked somehow obscene, like a giant pale green gastropod.
He laughed awkwardly.
“This is going to sound really strange,” he said, “and you must think I’m a right weirdo for watching the house last night, but the thing is… well, I grew up in this house. It used to belong to my parents. I haven’t seen it in twenty years, and, well, I guess I got a little caught up by nostalgia.”
Charlotte felt her defensiveness ease a little. Like acids and alkalis countering one another, explanations and suspicions made strange bedfellows.
“Oh, I see. I must admit it did unnerve me a little.”
She stopped speaking. The man called Jamie Brazill didn't speak either, but he smiled. It was a wide smile, plenty of reasonably good teeth, and no self-consciousness at all.
"How far have you come?" Charlotte asked.
"Well, a fair way," he said, still smiling. "Wakefield, actually."
“You don’t sound like you’re from Wakefield.”
“No. I was born here.”
"What made you decide to come back and see the house?" She was still holding the door, but her grip had relaxed, and now she seemed to be almost caressing it.
"I've been meaning to for a while. One of those things you never get round to, you know. Then a friend of mine passed..."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"...thank you. Yeah, it was a shame. He went before his time. He never left Eastbourne, and the funeral was yesterday, at Hide Hollow. The wake got a bit lively, and I wandered up here after a couple too many. Thought I'd swing by the old place." He stepped back and looked up at the upper windows. "It's quite a strange feeling, I must say."
"Would... would you like to come in?" she said, on the spin of a coin.
He looked at her. She pushed herself off the door, causing it to open a little wider.
"You've come such a long way," she said.
He smiled again.
"Thank you," he said, and stepped inside. She took two or three steps back into the hallway to allow him in. "I'll leave this bloody thing on the doorstep," he said, dropping the duffle bag outside. "You don't want it in the house."
She smiled, but said nothing. He was right. The duffle bag unnerved her, somehow.
He stepped inside, and pushed the front door shut with his foot.
One reads stories about people – young and old alike – being visited by complete strangers and somehow taken in by complicated confidence tricks. Most people read them and believe they could never be taken in by such a thing, that only the foolish or vulnerable could be duped in such a way.
Charlotte became acutely aware of this as the door closed. Such awareness might prevent her from becoming the victim of a con trick; equally, however, she would be more or less powerless to stop this man from doing anything he wanted to her – this man she had just invited into her home.
He did not look poised for some form of violent attack, however. His face was wide and full of wonder at the memories that were doubtless enveloping him.
"That smell," he said, almost in a whisper.
Charlotte had almost got used to the smell of woodsmoke. Now he was in the house, she could, however, smell Jamie Brazill. He smelled of gum and aftershave and faintly of sweat.
Still facing him, Charlotte retreated the six or so feet to the foot of the stairs. As if attached to her by an invisible gossamer thread, Jamie took a few steps into the hallway, rotating his neck as if staring at the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.
He passed the open door to the small dining room at the front of the house. Jamie turned to it.
“That cherry blossom’s still here, then,” he said with a grin. “Bloody thing used to tap against the roof tiles something rotten. Gave me nightmares.”
Charlotte stepped up on to the bottom step and gave him an indulgent smile, noticing as she did so that he wore a gold sovereign ring on the index finger of his left hand, and a matching watch, but no other jewellery.
That she could see, anyway.
“Which one was your room?” she said, the boyish astonishment on his face causing her automatic unease to dissipate somewhat.
“Upstairs,” he said. “And to the left.”
She grimaced.
“I’m afraid it’s not much more than a storeroom at the moment.”
His roving eyes landed on hers.
“Could I?...” He pointed up the stairs towards the landing.
“Of course.”
She turned and walked up the stairs, wishing immediately that she had stepped off the bottom step and allowed him to go first. She could feel him behind her, but it was now too late to do anything about it.
At the top of the stairs she turned left, towards the rear of the house. Turning right would have taken them to the front, where the bathroom and the bedroom she shared with her husband were situated.
She stopped in the doorway of the room she hoped to decorate with racing cars and fairies, but which was still more or less empty but for the assortment of packing boxes still lined along two of the walls.
“Oh, man,” he said, passing Charlotte and going straight for the centre of the room. “This is too weird. It’s like I’ve stepped back in time.”
Despite herself, Charlotte could not help but be infected by the nostalgia he was experiencing. She hovered in the doorway and smiled.
“It all seems so much smaller than when I was here,” he said. “But then, I suppose it would do.”
“How old were you when you left?”
“Fifteen. End of an era, I tell you. You have kids?”
Charlotte folded her arms across her body and gripped her elbows.
“No… not yet.”
“You should. You’ll be a good mum,” he said with a smile. “You’ll put him in here, eh?”
“How do you know it will be a boy?”
He dug his hands in his pockets and grinned.
“I don’t. Just a guess.”
“Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
His face seemed to change with the question.
“I’m sorry,” she blustered. “It’s none of my business.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “No. No brothers or sisters. Wish I had, though. Bit lonely being an only child.”
He met her gaze, and the conversation faltered. To dispel the sudden awkwardness, she entered the room and stood with him in the centre.
“He’s a good man, eh? Your husband?”
It was a potentially loaded question, but she took it in good faith.
“Yes. Yes he is. He’s training to be a solicitor,” she said, smiling with a sudden a
nd unusual pride. “He works in town.”
Jamie clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
“Solicitor,” he said, neutrally. “Good solid profession. Lot of money. Good on him.”
He didn’t sound entirely sincere. Charlotte opted to share her interior decorating plans instead.
“If we do have a boy, I think it will be racing cars,” she said. “And I want a big cabin bed under the sky window here. You know, one of those things with a built-in sofa and TV unit and a ladder for the bed. Made of pine, maybe.”
“Sounds good,” Jamie said. “I’m pretty good with my hands. Carpenter by trade, as it happens. Maybe I could make it for you.”
She smiled politely.
“I thought I would do each wall in a different shade of blue. Some glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, perhaps, and big racing car stickers he can peel off the wall and move around. Over here…” here she went to the window and started painting her intentions with her hands, “… I think matching curtains – of course – and maybe some multi-coloured shelving. Some of those storage boxes you can get these days are very clever. They almost fold away to nothing. Don’t you think?”
There was no answer.
Charlotte turned around.
He was gone.
*
An infinite number of conceivable scenarios had already spiralled through Charlotte’s mind before she’d even reached the top of the stairs. Panic and fear – and, indeed, her own stupidity – caused her pulse to double. There was a sudden urge to shout, but it held in her throat. She paused in the bathroom and master bedroom just long enough to establish that her guest was in neither, and then she flew down the stairs.
She did not find him in the kitchen, hallway or dining room. Only when she entered the drawing room did she see him.
He was outside on the patio, his back to the window. He was standing quite still, staring out at the infernal green/black hole in the forest at the bottom of the garden. Small clouds of smoke were rising from in front of his face. The upturned collar of his denim jacket had folded slightly at the back, and she could just see a small black tattoo on the back of his neck, peeking over the blue.
Suddenly glad she had not shouted, she took a deep breath to compose herself, and went to join him on the patio.