by Mark Morris
Jack said he would certainly do that. He walked his aunt to the door and kissed her good-bye.
“Now, are you sure you’re going to be all right here?” she asked.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, “don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
They said good-bye again and she left. When Jack closed the door he couldn’t help thinking he was sealing himself in. Immediately, he began to hum to allay the silence that pressed in around him. He took out his mobile to ring Gail, but there was no signal, not a single bar. “Typical,” he said, and picked up the telephone receiver in the hall. He dialed Gail’s mobile number, but her phone rang several times and then cut the connection with a trio of beeps without diverting him to her voice mail. Irritated, he dialed her home number. He knew she’d be out, but at least he could leave her a message. However, her phone rang fifteen, twenty times without reply. “What is this, a fucking conspiracy?” he muttered before reluctantly replacing the receiver. The fading ching of the phone was gulped by the silence. He glanced up the stairs, where the light through the window seemed to be curling like smoke, trying to find form. “No way, Jose,” he said loudly and stomped back to the sitting room. He whistled as he jabbed at the fire with a poker, but it seemed a thin, somehow lonely sound, and quickly became lost in the stillness of the house.
8
THE SEVEN STARS
He spent the next two hours “settling in.” The first thing he did was to open the front door again as an invitation to the light; the second was to fish his CD player from his suitcase and set it up in the sitting room. He was soon singing along to The Clash’s “London Calling,” aggressively, raucously, to counter the stillness of his surroundings. He fetched his laptop from the car and then parked the car on the grass verge, still singing.
He put off the moment of going upstairs for as long as possible. Despite himself, he kept stealing glances at the afternoon light angling in through the landing window. It did not seem so strong now, for which he felt curiously grateful. It zigzagged partway down the stairs, clarifying the roughness of the grain beneath its layer of polish. Jack took his time setting up his writing space on the dining table. Notepads, reference books, his Filofax, a mug shaped like a skull containing pens and pencils—all these were arranged and rearranged around his keyboard as though their positioning were an intrinsic part of the creative process. When the music finished, he switched on the television and found only children’s programmes—Blue Peter was still on? The format seemed the same as ever, but he didn’t recognise any of the presenters. He looked around; was there anything more he could do down here? Perhaps a cup of tea? He stood up, suddenly decisive. No, it was time to lay a few ghosts. Nevertheless, he felt nervous as he ascended the stairs. His suitcase bumped against the back of his knee like a cumbersome weapon he was dragging in his wake.
He stepped into the shaft of sunlight, squinting, the topmost stairs creaking as he put his weight on them. The view from the landing window was of undulating hills separated by the hard black lines of dry-stone walls. The Butterworths’ farm sat in the midst of this, a chunk of grey stone beside the salmon-coloured thread that was Daisy Lane. On the horizon trees were clumped darkly, as if the boundaries of a dry-stone wall had blurred and seeped into the exquisite blue sky. Jack stared at all this, thinking it should be making him feel restful, not isolated. He sighed and turned back to face the landing. After the brightness outside the window, the shadows in the house seemed darker than ever, as if they had been gathering behind him.
He blinked to rid his eyes of the swarming brightness of the sunlight, and eventually the landing’s muted tones rose up through the murk: the wooden doors, the white wallpaper whose blue pattern had faded almost to grey, the beige landing carpet, the landscapes on the walls like smears of green and khaki. There were four doors on this landing—two to his right, one at the far end, and one to his left just beyond the stairwell. The door nearest to him, on his right, was his old bedroom, with a view of the cobbled backyard and the woods beyond. Next to that was a bathroom, whose most abiding memory for Jack was the brown scummy ring in the bath, his father’s slimy hairs in the plugholes. The door at the far end, which overlooked the front lawn, was his father’s bedroom; Jack wondered whether Aunt Georgina had had to fumigate it after his death. And the fourth door, the one on the left, was simply a storeroom. That was where all his mother’s things had been put after she died. Jack remembered the smell that drifted over him whenever he opened that door as a child; a dry fragrance, like parchment imbued with lavender. It was a smell that never failed to both soothe and sadden him. He used to open that door purely for the smell itself, closing his eyes and breathing deeply like the cartoon kids in the Bisto advert.
His memories were filling him like caffeine, causing his heart to thump, his breath to quicken. He walked to the door of his old room and placed his hand on the handle. The last time he’d seen it his father had been sprawled unconscious on the floor with a broken nose; books had been strewn across the carpet. Some emotion he couldn’t define seemed to be rising to a crescendo inside him. He shoved the door open and strode in with a sense of defiance, though exactly what he was defying he was not sure.
For a heart-quickening instant he saw himself as a skinny, downtrodden eighteen-year-old standing by the bed, then the image faded as he realised the startled eyes he was staring into were set in an older, chubbier face. A mirror, full-length, stood upright against the wall. Jack’s reflection was captured in it perfectly, all jowls and pale skin and casually expensive clothes. He set down his suitcase and ran both hands through his hair. Glancing at himself in the mirror again, he thought how incongruous he looked in these surroundings.
He’d half-expected the room to be as he had left it, full of his possessions, posters on the walls, the bed unmade. The furniture was the same as he remembered it, but it seemed skeletal, somehow forlorn in its denudation, as though the room’s flesh had been stripped from its bones. Though the floor was carpeted his footsteps boomed hollowly as he crossed to the window and drew back the curtains. He pushed the window open, thrusting his face at the wind, taking a deep breath.
His aunt and her helper must have cleaned this room, too, but Jack felt a sneeze building at the back of his nose. He groped for his handkerchief in his pocket and caught the sneeze just in time. It was followed by another, and then another, before the urge subsided. Maybe it wasn’t dust at all but hay fever; maybe living in London had lowered his immunity to grass seeds and pollen and stuff. He blew his nose, mopped his streaming eyes, and looked up in time to see a figure step out of the woods two hundred yards away.
Who was that? One of the Butterworths? A nosy local? Jack screwed up his eyes but myopia reduced the figure to a blur. He could see dark clothes and a pink blob of a head. He took his spectacle case from his pocket, withdrew his glasses, fumbled the bows apart and put them on.
The cobbled yard, the scrub land and the trees sprang into sharp focus. Jack had only looked away for a few seconds, but the figure was now nowhere to be seen. Whoever it was must have stepped back into the trees, realising he or she was being observed. Jack scanned the collage of trunks for any flicker of telltale movement but saw none.
“Nosy bugger,” he muttered and turned back to his room. He would sleep here despite the dust. Perhaps he ought to clean up a bit first, push a vacuum around, but almost as soon as the thought formed he discarded it. No, this wasn’t house dust, it was the stubborn and accumulated dust that came from years of disuse. Jack wondered what his father had done with all his stuff; probably gave it to Oxfam or burned it. The latter option seemed the most likely; it was just the kind of thing—wanton, vindictive, somehow cowardly—that he would have done. Jack felt the back of his throat tightening in anger. How dare he? How dare he destroy all those books? Fucking barbarian.
There appeared to be no bedding, merely a white sheet stretched over the mattress. Jack placed his hand on it, sniffed it; it seemed fresh enough. He swu
ng his now partly depleted suitcase on to the bed and unzipped it. He’d brought four books with him (more than he’d ever get through in three days, but overcompensating when it came to reading material was a weakness of his) and he placed them on the top shelf of his four-shelf bookcase. They looked lonely stuck up in the corner, as if cowering from all that emptiness. Jack fished around in his suitcase and found his Skoob Directory of Secondhand Bookshops, which he carried everywhere with him. If he had time, he intended to tootle around in the car, looking up a few of these places. He added his Skoob to the other four books, and decided that he ought to make it his aim to fill at least one shelf of this bookcase before he left.
He unpacked the rest of his stuff and spread it around the room, hoping it would give the place a lived-in quality, a sense of homeyness. It didn’t. It looked like a bare, underused room with a few bits and pieces scattered about. He sighed. Ah, well, he’d done his best. He shoved his empty suitcase into the wardrobe, glanced once more out of the window but saw nothing, and went in search of bedding.
He found it in the bathroom airing cupboard, freshly laundered. The bathroom itself was as clean as Jack had ever seen it, lots of gleaming porcelain and a strong smell of pine disinfectant. He also opened the storeroom door, but was disappointed to find it empty and smelling only of staleness. The house seemed so uncluttered that Jack wondered whether his aunt had spent much of the weekend stripping it of his dead parents’ personal effects, perhaps in the belief it would lessen the trauma of his homecoming. If so, he was touched by the gesture. It must have been hard for her, overcoming her grief in that way.
“The ogre’s lair,” Jack murmured, looking at the door of his father’s room. It was the only one in the house he had not poked his head into. He felt both attracted and repelled by the thought of entering. The closest he’d previously come to this emotion was when he’d been seven or eight years old and Aunt Georgina had taken him to the nearby seaside town of Starmouth for the day (if he remembered correctly it had been during one of his father’s frequent sojourns in the hospital). That had been the best day of Jack’s young life. They had sat on the beach, walked up and down the promenade, eaten ice cream and fish and chips and more ice cream. And then in the afternoon his aunt had taken him to the fairground.
Jack had loved the fairground—still did, in fact. He had plans to go there with Gail someday soon, maybe this summer. His previous girlfriend, Carol, would never entertain the idea of a day in Starmouth, or any other seaside resort. She had once scornfully described such places as the “naffest on Earth,” and Jack as the naffest person for wanting to go there.
Jack’s favourite place on the fairground was the Ghost Train. He remembered it now only as an impression—the front of it had been painted to look like a huge amorphous green mass, populated with staple horror images: a gigantic leering skeleton, a hooded figure holding a bloodstained axe, a screaming man whose left eye was an empty, seeping socket, a vampire with a stake through his heart.
Standing in front of it for the first time Jack had felt much as he did now. He wanted so desperately to go inside, but at the same time felt reluctant to do so. In the end he had queued up with the rest, sweaty hand clutching his money, heart thumping, mouth dry. The worst (and best) part of the ride was right at the beginning when his car—a little black train painted with shaky silver cobwebs—had suddenly lurched forward along the track, bumped open a pair of black double doors and plunged him into darkness.
He licked his lips, still tasting the candy floss of that day, the thrill of it all. But there was no thrill now. The way he felt standing at the door of his father’s room was similar to the way he’d felt outside the Ghost Train, but not the same. The difference now was that there was no fun, no excitement, no delicious childlike fear. Coupled with his curiosity was a sense of unwillingness, of directionless trepidation. Before he could think about it any more he walked to the door and opened it.
The room beyond was grey, silent, unimpressive. It contained an old double bed with a chipped, scratched headboard, stripped down to a single sheet; off-white curtains partly closed; a bedside table with a lamp on it; grey-blue carpet; a cream rug; a wardrobe; and a wicker chair with a high rounded back like the throne of some South Sea island prince.
Jack took all this in with a single sweep of his head. There was no atmosphere of any kind in the room, no suggestion of any presence. It was empty. With a capital E.
He pulled the door closed. Strangely he felt sad and dissatisfied rather than relieved. On his way back along the landing he glanced up at the dark square set into the white ceiling. This was the entrance to the attic, a place Jack had never seen. His father had always forbidden him from going up there, though in truth Jack had never felt much inclination to do so anyway. He didn’t think there was an attic room as such; more likely just a poky storage space full of spiders and dirt. He considered having a quick shufti now, just to see if there was anything interesting up there, but the idea was only a half-hearted one and quickly discarded. Nah, too much trouble. He’d have to fetch the steps from the walk-in pantry in the kitchen and hump them all the way upstairs. And for what? Probably just a head full of dust and an arse full of splinters.
He went back downstairs and smoked a cigarette while he watched the news. Then he went into the kitchen to make himself something to eat. His aunt had certainly stocked the pantry and fridge, but there was a lot of processed stuff and meat products, the kinds of things he didn’t eat any more. He made himself some scrambled eggs on toast, and washed himself an apple from the bowl on the counter. He carried his plate through to the sitting room and watched TV as he ate.
By the time he finished, it was getting dark. Through the two small windows set side by side, Jack saw the dry-stone walls, the trees and fields merging into a felt-blackness beneath a denim-blue sky. He crossed the room and yanked the curtains closed, averting his gaze from outside. His mind drifted back to the other night in the restaurant, to the memory of his father’s colourless face staring in at him through the window. He’d half-managed to convince himself that Gail’s explanation of that incident was most likely—that the figure had been an old tramp to which Jack’s imagination had affixed the image of his father. Nevertheless, if he saw a figure out there now, a dark silhouette watching the house, he didn’t know what he’d do. There were no bright lights and bustling crowds to escape into here. He had only himself to depend on.
There were two lamps in the room whose frilly shades had most likely been provided by his aunt; Jack turned both of these on. The fire was collapsing into a cluster of glowing coals, like lumps of orange candy. Only the occasional flame still flickered. Jack dragged the fire-guard across and imprisoned the dying embers.
He straightened up, aware that he was listening carefully . . . for what? Smiling at his own misgivings, he crossed the room and switched the television off, then stomped out into the hall. He lifted his brown leather jacket from one of the four hooks behind the front door and shrugged it on. He straightened the collar of his shirt, zipped the jacket, then snatched up the door keys from where his aunt had left them on the telephone table. He decided to go for a drive, find a pub, have a drink and a smoke, maybe do a bit of writing.
Daisy Lane seemed bumpier at night, as if the shadows shifting and looming in the ruts were solid mounds or squatting animals. One invisible and particularly deep pothole jolted Jack a couple of inches out of his seat. “Good-bye suspension,” he muttered, scowling and leaning forward over his wheel. He rooted among his CDs and eventually found what he was looking for. Within seconds James Brown was proclaiming, “I feeeeeel good.” Jack whooped in defiant agreement.
When the trees at the top of Daisy Lane closed around the car like the entrance to a cave, Jack found he was hunching up his shoulders as though bracing himself. The stealthy scratching on the car’s roof were only the tips of branches; the crooked black shapes keeping pace with him were merely tree trunks, the shifting emphasis of their shadows
and perspective.
Less than two minutes later he was out of the trees, and four minutes after that he was turning into the entrance of a pub lot. The pub was called the Seven Stars, which sounded familiar; then he realised why. It was where his “fan,” Tracey, lived, the girl who had helped his aunt clean his father’s house. She was the landlord’s daughter.
“She was only the landlord’s daughter,” he warbled, and wondered whether what he was singing was a real song; if so, he didn’t know any more of the words. His neck and shoulders felt stiff with tension and too much driving. Sometimes, when his back and neck hurt from writing all day, or he was just feeling uptight, he and Gail would climb into a hot foamy bath and she would massage his aching muscles. He groaned longingly at the recollection. What he wouldn’t give for that to be happening right now. Thinking about Gail reminded him that she should definitely be home by now. He took out his mobile and swore. Still no fucking signal! Did these people not live in the twenty-first century? Oh well, if the pub had a phone he could ring her on that.
Eager to hear her voice, he parked quickly and got out. The lot was only a quarter full. Along the wall of the pub Jack noticed a row of motorbikes, six in all, huge powerful machines, black, gleaming, ominous. He approached the door beside them, labeled LOUNGE, pushed it open and went inside. A flow of chatter rose to meet him, buoyed by cigarette smoke and the warmth of an imitation log fire. His eyes were soothed by familiar pub colours—plush red, rusty orange, the harsh yellow gleam of brass, the rich cherry-brown of the bar. The place was fuller than the number of cars outside had suggested, but by no means packed. One or two people glanced at Jack as he entered and then returned to their conversations. He wondered who the motorbikes belonged to; no one here seemed to fit the bill.