The Best British Fantasy 2013

by Steve Haynes

  Becker nodded, as though Pollard had confirmed something for him, and said, ‘Please read what’s on the paper on the table.’ Pollard picked it up, unfolded it and saw, printed neatly in black, THE ATTACKS WORSENED DURING THE WEEK. ‘I’m not showing off,’ said Becker. ‘What you’re experiencing is awful but it’s also understandable and to some degree predictable. I wonder, why did you have to pause before you could tell me the nice things about Mary but not before you told me about how the attacks feel?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I do. It’s because the attacks are the most important thing for you now, more important than your wife because they’re more real, more immediate. All the good memories of Mary are tangled up with the unpleasant memories of her death; thinking of her pulls up not memories of the good times, but of the bad time, the awful time when she died. Those memories are like scabs covering the things you should be able to remember about her without pausing, the things that should be your primary memories of her, the good times and the happiness and the love. In a funny way, the attacks are healthy because they represent the positive memories trying to reassert themselves, trying to regain their rightful place of importance in your brain. In your life.’

  ‘Why are they so frightening?’ Pollard said. ‘Mary wasn’t frightening, I loved her. I still love her, I’m not frightened of her.’

  ‘No,’ said Becker, ‘but you are frightened of remembering her fully, because doing that means facing fully how much you’ve lost and how that makes you feel. It means facing the rest of your life without her. You’re frightened because the way to stop these phobic attacks is to take control back, to face the panic and pain and fear and the terrible memories of Mary’s death, peel them away and allow Mary, the memories of Mary and how she made you feel, to regain their rightful place in your mind and your imagination. Those are the steps you have to take to stop this happening. That’s where we have to go, together. Next week, Mr Pollard, we talk about how Mary died.’

  ‘If the paper says ‘had an even worse week’,’ said Pollard, nodding at the new folded sheet lying on the table, ‘then it’s right.’ He felt greasy with tiredness; the attacks had been coming almost daily since his last session with Becker, at all times of the day and night. The previous night’s had been repellent, leaving him ragged and queasy with terror and tiredness.

  Pollard had been half gone, in that state between sleeping and wakefulness, when his whole body spasmed violently. That, in itself, wasn’t unusual; it was a lifelong, though occasional, thing, as though he was walking and had tripped. Mary used to laugh about it and say the startled look on his face as he popped awake was one of the funniest things she had seen. This was harder though, almost painful, a savage jerk that yanked him awake. He rolled, tangling himself in the duvet as he went and then thing sitting on the bed next to him shifted, leaned in towards him.

  Pollard remembered screaming. He threw himself from the bed, the duvet clinging to him, and fell to the floor. He was cold, terrified, the muscles in his legs jittering spasmodically as he tried to kick away the heavy, tangling duvet, struggling out from under it as behind him something moved across the bed. It was huge, blocking the night’s half-light coming in around the edges of the curtains as it came and then Pollard was free of his bedclothes and he ran without looking back.

  He had ended up in his back garden, standing at its far end in the shadows of the apple tree that he and Mary had planted when they first moved to the house over thirty years ago. His panic receded in shuddering waves, the world seeming to swim back into reality around him. He was still cold, although not as cold as he had been in the bedroom, and his legs ached from the running but had stopped twitching. Embarrassed, Pollard covered his genitals with his hands and went quickly back down the garden path and into the kitchen. Smells lingered, the residue of his food that evening, a microwave meal from the local supermarket. Suddenly, bitterly, he missed Mary, missed the smells of her cooking and the times they cooked together, peeling and cutting, chattering, drinking wine. The feeling was almost anger, rage even, hot in his chest.

  ‘And the house? The bedroom?’ asked Becker.

  ‘It was fine,’ said Pollard. ‘I could feel even from down in the kitchen, the frightening thing was gone. I went back to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Although it was gone, every time I closed my eyes I saw it move again, the way it leaned over as though it wanted to get closer to me, to catch me.’

  ‘Let me ask you something,’ said Becker. ‘Why did you run to the garden?’

  ‘Because I wanted to get out of the house,’ said Pollard.

  ‘Did you pass your front door to get to the back door?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pollard. He hadn’t thought of that before, had just run.

  ‘So why not go out of the front door?’

  ‘I was naked,’ he replied after a moment. ‘I didn’t want to be naked in the street, people might have seen.’

  ‘So,’ said Becker, ‘even though you were terrified, the fear of being naked was greater?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pollard. ‘No. I don’t know.’

  ‘You do,’ said Becker. ‘It might not feel like it, but you’re making progress. The phobic reaction, the attacks, are getting worse, yes, but your inherent rationality is beginning to break through. All of the things you experience can be explained physiologically: you feel cold because your body, having entered an extreme ‘fight or flight’ reaction, is drawing the blood away from your extremities in order to protect and feed your muscles. The thing you saw moving was your eyes adjusting to opening and the pupils widening very quickly, the movement and change in light being taken in by your eyes being interpreted by your brain, an interpretation fed by fear and adrenaline. We make patterns where none exist; it’s why we see shapes in the clouds. The pattern you made was fearful, terrifying, because that’s how you were feeling at the moment of interpretation. Consider this, though, Mr Pollard: you went past one potential exit from your home to a further one not because it was a better exit, but because you’re starting to take control, to set the attacks within the context of your wider life. You didn’t want to be seen naked, so even without realising it you were assessing with the situation, considering your options, acting on them, reducing the possibility of that happening. You may have felt out of control, but you weren’t, not really.’

  ‘But it was so real,’ said Pollard, remembering the weight on the bed, the shift of the mattress, the cold, the sight of it surging forwards at him as he struggled in his duvet.

  ‘Of course it was,’ said Becker. ‘The feelings that are causing it, all the pain and fear, all the grief you feel about Mary’s death, they’re real. You don’t want to experience them again, to even remember them; who would? So, unconsciously, you’ve trapped them down and converted them into this other fear, something powerful but ultimately irrational, an externalised point, a thing to flee from, to allow you a literal running away. The feelings fade when you’re run because you’ve vented them, released some of the pressure, but it builds up again. The attacks are a sign that, whether you realise it or not, you are ready to deal with those feelings now, to get rid of them, to uncover Mary and let her back into your memories. Not as a painful thing but as something good, something positive.

  ‘Tell me how she died.’

  The question surprised him, caught him off guard, and Pollard couldn’t speak. That day, that miserable, dreadful, awful day, was the most terrible memory he had, and it was scraped and raw when he probed it. Fragments of the day jumbled together inside him, fighting to free themselves, each one bad, worse, the worst; the phone call from the police, the trip to the hospital, the doctor in her white coat with the voice as sympathetic and absolute as cold mercy, being left alone with Mary but not for goodbye, no, for identification, to know that she was dead and to be able to confirm for the world that he knew she was dead. Mary, who joked she’d kill him if he went first, Mary
who wouldn’t eat olives but who loved anchovies, Mary, whose mouth and eyes were open as she lay on the morgue’s viewing room table as though she had been caught by surprise, frozen staring into the distance, mid-speech. Mary, who was already going cold when he kissed her for the last time. Mary, who was dead. ‘She had a heart attack in the office behind the gallery, unpacking crates,’ he said eventually.

  ‘This was an art gallery, yes? She worked there?’

  ‘She owned it. She set it up six years ago, after years of working in a job she hated. She mostly showed contemporary artists, and imported and sold ethnic art. Most of our holidays these last years have been business trips.’ He smiled at the memories, Mary excitedly telling him about the new pieces she had found somewhere off the beaten track, of the deals she managed to do. ‘She was good at finding things that were unusual, that people liked enough to buy. She was successful, was getting a good name for herself.’

  ‘She had a heart attack?’ asked Becker, gently steering Pollard back to the subject he was trying to skirt around.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But it didn’t kill her, not straight away. She fell. She was unpacking some Inuit pieces at the time, little stone carvings, and they fell with her. Most of them broke on the floor, all except one she was holding. Mary, she . . . she rolled in them, and the pieces cut her. She had scratches and punctures all over her arms and face, so many that the police thought at first that she’d been attacked and stabbed. There was an autopsy and an inquest before they decided she’d died of natural causes.’

  Pollard took a deep breath, painful and sharp, and said, ‘They think she was alive for at least a few minutes after the heart attack. There was a lot of blood and marks like she’d tried to crawl towards her desk, towards the phone. That’s the worst of it, I think, the thought of her being alone and scared and in pain for those few minutes. I wish I’d been with her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Becker, ‘I’m sure. Have you told anyone that before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then well done. This isn’t easy, I know; you’re peeling back these layers, all of those miseries, but it’s for a good reason. Mary’s there at the centre of it all, Mr Pollard, the positive Mary, the good memories. I know I keep saying it, keep repeating it, but I have to know you understand, that you trust me. We’re getting there, getting closer.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pollard said. He was suddenly exhausted, sick with tiredness.

  ‘Tell me, the object that you wife was holding, do you know what it was?’

  ‘No. The police gave it me back once the inquest was over, but I’ve never looked at it.’

  ‘Then homework for the week, Mr Pollard, is to look at the object and find out what it is, and tell me about it next week.’

  The day before his next session with Becker, Pollard ate his lunch outside. The square in front of his office was busy with businessmen and –women, scurrying, eating, talking, smoking. He liked it here, liked its busyness, the bustle of it. The concrete benches that ringing it faced in, which he and Mary had laughed about that lunchtime all those years ago. ‘Business only wants its people to look inwards, at other business sorts,’ she had said, ‘God forbid they look at the world outside even for a moment!’ Pollard, who had worked in finance since he was sixteen and was used to her teasing, had laughed with her and kissed her and poured her another glass of champagne. Sitting here now, he remembered her leaning into him, whispering about the future, the smile on her face evident in her voice. Ah, but he missed her, more every day it felt like.

  It had gone cold.

  On the other side of the square, something black moved. It was large, stalking behind the curtain of people so that Pollard couldn’t get more than a glimpse of it. He had an impression of flanks, of fur sleek with wetness, of a head that swayed from side to side as though sniffing at the floor.

  Of eyes as black as obsidian and of teeth the yellow of ivory left in dark places.

  It’s an animal, he thought, although what, he couldn’t tell. It was high at the shoulder, almost as tall as the people around it, none of whom reacted to it. Couldn’t they see it? Feel it?

  It was even colder now, and steam was rising from the thing as it moved around the edge of the square, coming to towards Pollard. A gap opened briefly between two of the hurrying people, allowing him to glimpse a head whose flesh was crenelated and raw-looking. Pollard dropped his half-eaten sandwich and rose, knowing that he had to go, to go now, to escape the thing, to not let it any nearer. He heard it, a noise like the snuffle of some giant carnivore scenting its prey, heard a sound like freezing rain hitting glass, and he ran.

  ‘I don’t remember much after that until I was in the office,’ said Pollard. ‘I must have run up the stairs, though, four floors. My legs still ache now.’ In fact, Pollard did remember one thing; as he knocked open the door from the stairway onto the fourth floor, startling some of his colleagues, the thing had been at the bottom of the stairwell. It was long and lithe, slipping around the corners with a sinuous grace, peering up at him. In the bright electric light, its black eyes glinted with flashes the colour of burning grass. The sight of it, of those glittering and depthless eyes, made his bladder clench and he had felt a hot splash of urine escape him.

  ‘Did you do your homework?’ asked Becker.

  Pollard, momentarily startled by the conversation’s change of direction but beginning to recognise Becker’s tactics, didn’t answer. Becker looked at him expectantly, forcing him to speak. ‘Yes,’ Pollard said. ‘I did my homework.’ Homework, he thought. Some homework, to investigate the last thing my wife held on this earth. He had opened the bag the police had given him several nights before, tipping out Mary’s purse and phone and the other thing, letting them tumble onto the table in front of him.

  The thing was in his pocket and he took it out now, putting it on the table between himself and Becker. It was a small dog, carved out of dark rock. ‘It’s an Inuit carving of a qiqirn,’ he told Becker. ‘I remember Mary telling me about it when she originally ordered them. Most Inuit art is stories, they were originally nomadic and didn’t have much use for carvings and statues, I don’t suppose, so she was excited to find them. Qiqirn are supposed to be malicious spirits, unpleasant, taking advantage of the lonely.’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the thing you saw, could you say it was a dog?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Pollard admitted. ‘A big one. It’s hard to say for sure.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Becker. ‘You saw a version of the thing Mary was holding when she died, this Inuit qiqirn, not because it’s real and not because Mary was cursed by it, but because it’s a representation of her death. Those bad layers, Mr Pollard, they’re fighting as hard as they can to stay in place but you’re winning.’ He gestured to this week’s piece of folded paper. Pollard picked it up and read A BAD WEEK IN WHICH YOU HAVE SEEN SOMETHING.

  ‘We’re getting closer, Mr Pollard, closer to the heart of it. Closer to Mary, moving through the layers of bitterness and mourning and anger and hurt that surround your memories of her. Those layers have helped protect you these last months, kept you safe until you have the strength to move forwards, but they’ve done their job now. These attacks are evidence of that, of that fact that the rational, loving part of you is beginning to assert itself, to free Mary from their shackles. Let me take a guess at something: the square in which you saw the qiqirn, it was somewhere that had significance to you and Mary?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was where he and Mary had gone after she had signed the lease on the art gallery, where they had had the conversation a year earlier about her quitting her hated job and setting up the gallery. Where they drank champagne at lunchtime and smiled at other and looked forward to the future.

  ‘The kitchen, the bedroom, other places of importance where this thing happens, the qiqirn makes its presence felt in those places because it’s a thing
of negativity and it can have its greatest affect in places that are most positive for you.’

  ‘It felt real,’ said Pollard, not sure which was worse, the idea that the qiqirn was real or that he wanted to it to be real because the alternative was that was holding onto his negativity so tightly that it had made him see things.

  ‘Of course it was, because it is real,’ said Becker. ‘Where our brains are concerned, our perceptions, there are no metaphors or similes, there’s simply real and not real. Did it physically exist? No. Was it real? Yes, yes it was, a manifestation of all your unhappiness and loss and sadness and fear.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Pollard, remembering steam rising off grey flanks.

  ‘You’re doing well, Mr Pollard, so well. Time for the next stage, I think. All the steps you’ve taken so far have been around the edges of the attacks. Important, yes, vital even because it’s been about helping you to understand what’s happening, but now we have to deal with the things themselves. Small steps, Mr Pollard, or in your case, no steps. When the attacks come, try to stand still for a second before you run, for five or ten or thirty seconds, as long as you can manage. Try to stand for longer and longer each time. Take control of them, rather than letting them control you. Will you try, Mr Pollard?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and thought again of flanks and teeth and eyes that flashed through the darkness of four floors, black and cold and glistening.

  ‘You look tired. I’m assuming this hasn’t been a good week?’

  ‘No,’ said Pollard, thinking that these sessions were making him monosyllabic. It had been a terrible week, with at least one attack each day and sometimes more. He had tried to stand in the face of them, he had, but they were simply too strong. The fear, the thought of seeing that thing again, the qiqirn, was simply overpowering and he had found himself running within seconds of the attacks starting. He had cowered in his garden, come to a halt in the street, even locked himself in the bathroom once, pushing towels into the gap between the floor and door and knowing as he did so that it was a ridiculous thing to do.