by Ray Cluley
“Later, dear. When you’re asleep,” she said and she kissed him goodnight. Her lips were like the special rubber that can rub out pen.
“Did you like the film?” she asked as she was leaving, and then, “Do you want the lamp left on?” which was good because yes he did, please, and he didn’t have to answer about the film which he didn’t really like.
“Goodnight Joseph.”
When she closed the door, J-J realized the lamp only really showed how dark the rest of the room was, but he tried to sleep anyway because that’s when Mum would come to collect him.
He could hear the new people next door. Mrs. Davies said nobody had moved in yet but she must have been wrong. Someone was in the room that used to be his and he could hear them moving around, bumping into things. Knocking on the wall.
“Mrs. Davies . . .” J-J said, but he didn’t say it loud enough. It sounded wrong asking for her when he wanted Mum but she—
Knock-knock.
J-J rolled away from the wall, coiling himself in a cocoon of bed sheets. At the foot of the bed he stared at where the noise had come from.
There was a darkness on the wall, like an upright puddle. It moved, and another knocking came from where it stopped.
It moved.
It stopped.
It knocked.
It moved again.
Right above the bed.
“Go away,” J-J said. “Please go away.”
The lamp died with a soft “tink,” the bulb gone (away), and the room was dark as black and J-J tried to yell but only breathed out.
The knocking came again, muffled by the bricks of the wall at first, but getting louder as whatever was making the noise pushed through from next door, pushed through from somewhere else.
Knock. Knock. Knock-knock-knock. KnocknocknocknocKNOCKNOCKN—
Interrupting cow, talking rhino, doctor, toodle, boo, lettuce—
Lettuce in, it’s cold over here.
Dad stood in the wall near the bed, dark with something like oil that didn’t smell the same and spread around him as a stain of shadows. His eyes were really really white in the dark and one looked at J-J properly but the other one stared off at a different angle. His hand was up where he’d been knocking and J-J could see Dad’s fingers were curled in a knocking fist but two of them dangled loose in a weird way. Something that wasn’t oil dripped from them and outside a car went past and its lights moved across the room so Dad seemed to move too and the drips from his hand made little red circles on the sheet because he was so close to the bed and that was how J-J knew the dark stuff on Dad was blood because he’d seen blood on his bed before. A puddle of it grew at Dad’s feet and stretched darker than the dark. Dad stepped from the wall into the room and when he opened his mouth blood came out instead of sound. J-J heard him anyway.
Hello Joey, you little Mummy’s boy. I was gone away somewhere else but now I’m back.
J-J tried to call out again and this time when he did it was loud like a scream—
You sound like a little girl.
—and Mum came running from her bedroom except it wasn’t Mum it was Mrs. Davies and she wasn’t quite running like Mum did. Dad stood with blood spilling down his chin and he pointed his bloody fist at J-J, at Joey, trying to point with the dangling finger.
The door opened fast and J-J screwed his eyes up closed so he wouldn’t see what was there.
“Joseph?”
He opened his eyes to see Mrs. Davies.
Nothing else. No one else.
“Joseph, what’s wrong?”
Knock-knock-knock.
Even though he was a big boy, J-J wet the bed. Mrs. Davies saw the spreading wet and said, “Oh,” then looked down the hall behind her.
Knock-knock.
“Don’t open it,” J-J tried to say but he couldn’t breathe properly and each word came out with a gulp of air between them.
“I’ll be right back to clean you up,” Mrs. Davies said. And she went away.
“No!”
J-J chased after her because he didn’t want to be left on his own, but in the hall the knocking came again. It came loud from the front door.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNO—
“Okay!” Mrs. Davies cried.
The knocking stopped. She really was magic. But it didn’t stop J-J from cringing when she reached out to open the door and in came—
Mum.
She pushed in quickly past Mrs. Davies. “Why didn’t you answer the door?” She was wearing her long coat done all the way up, even though it wasn’t raining and it was really hot in the house.
“Mummy!” J-J said, even though she was Mum now.
“Jesus, what’s going on?” She picked him up and hugged him even though he was wet with wee. She took him through to the bathroom. “He wets himself and you don’t bother cleaning him?”
Mum was angry at Mrs. Davies even though it wasn’t her fault and Mrs. Davies looked scared even though she could make the knocking stop but J-J didn’t care because Mum was here.
“He’s only just done it,” Mrs. Davies said, following Mum to the bathroom. “He had a nightmare, poor thing.”
Mum set him down in the bath tub.
The bath had a shower hose attached to the taps and Mum turned it on without taking off his pyjamas and sprayed his bottoms with it. It was a bit cold and J-J backed away from it but she pulled him back in.
“The knocking noise again?”
He nodded. She pulled his bottoms down and helped him step out of them, but she did it quickly, like she was angry with him. She gave him the soap and he washed himself.
“I told you to stop worrying about that,” she said, “Dad’s gone, okay? You’re safe now, forever and ever.”
She was angry.
“I know,” J-J said, “but he might come back.”
Mum looked at Mrs. Davies. “Can you tell the taxi I’ll just be a few minutes? It’s waiting outside.”
Mrs. Davies nodded and went.
“He won’t come back,” Mum said. She thrust a towel into his hands. “Not now. Not ever.”
S
When they were home Mum started running a bath even though it was night and even though J-J was clean.
“You, bed,” she said.
J-J went to his room and left the light on and waited under the covers for the final tuck. When he heard Mum crying he got up again to tell her it was okay, it was alright, even though she was trying to cry quietly so he wouldn’t know.
She was leaning over the bath. Her long coat was on the floor and she didn’t have her other clothes on either. They were in the bath, making the water pink as she rubbed a bar of soap over them.
“I bought you some paint,” she said. She tried to wipe her eyes and pretend she wasn’t crying. “I spilled them on myself so now I’m washing it out of my clothes, okay honey?” She sniffed. She was all snotty like she had a cold. “I got the yellow out, and the blue and the green, and now it’s just the red left.”
“It’s okay, Mum. I don’t need paint. I got my pens.”
Most of the ones Mrs. Davies gave him had run out, but some hadn’t. And anyway, he had coloured pencils.
“I want you to be happy,” Mum said, twisting her clothes around and around. “You deserve all the bright colours in the world.”
S
The knocking came one last time that night. J-J was in bed and tucked in safe but he wasn’t sleeping. He heard the knocking far away down the hall. It was the front door. He looked at his clock but all it said was oh-oh, oh-oh, which must have meant it was a special time that wasn’t late and wasn’t early but it sounded like trouble if you said it out loud.
He heard the knock again and then Mum’s voice, “Hello?”
She sounded like J-J did when he heard the knocking in his room and so he knew this was very bad, this was adult scary.
There was a voice from the other side of the door. J-J heard the shape of it but not the words. It must have been okay because Mum opened the door and they came inside. J-J knew it was they because the first voice he couldn’t really hear was a man’s and the next one was a lady’s.
“We just have a few questions,” she said. “It won’t take long.”
“Good,” said Mum, “my little boy’s asleep.”
He wasn’t, though.
They went into another room, the front room probably, and J-J could only hear the murmur of them talking. He heard Mum sometimes, though.
“No,” he heard her say. It was loud but it was wet sounding too, like she was crying with her voice.
The other voices were a murmur again and J-J tossed back the quilt and got up. He put his Transformers slippers on so he was quiet and he went down the hall. He didn’t sneak. He didn’t tip-toe. But he held his breath so he could hear better and not be heard.
“. . . not consistent with the accident,” the man said, “and no fault could be found with the pit-lift. Looked like it had been lowered deliberately, and after he had sustained his injuries. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
J-J only heard his Mum cry.
“Should we be talking about this somewhere else?” the lady asked.
Mum must have said something because the man said, “What was that?”
“He was a monster,” Mum said, and J-J started to cry because of how Mum was crying and because he thought she meant him and even when she said, “He was a bad man,” and J-J wasn’t a man, he still cried.
“Hello there.”
The woman had come out from the front room and into the hall. She was smart like a man. She wore a jacket and trousers. She had long dark hair that was a bit silver and she smiled at him with her mouth but not her eyes.
“J-J?”
Mum came out too and she knelt down and hugged him, kissing his neck and his ear and his face.
“Mummy’s got to go with these people for a while,” she said.
“Can I come?”
“No honey, you can’t come. I’ll take you to . . . Jenny’s. I’ll take you to Jenny’s, okay?”
J-J nodded because she wanted him to but nothing was okay at all, even going to Jenny’s. He wanted the whole world to cry without really knowing why.
“I’ll only be a little while,” she said.
The man was in the hall as well now and he looked at the woman and she looked at him and J-J didn’t like what he saw there at all because it was like they were saying Mum was wrong.
S
J-J looked very smart, everybody said so, but he didn’t care about that. A nice man who Mum said was on her side gave him a pad and some pens but they were writing pens and not very good for drawing and J-J couldn’t really concentrate anyway. He tried to listen to what was happening but there were lots of big words and some of it was very fast and no one really looked at each other when they spoke which made it hard to understand. Other people watched too, like it was a cinema.
J-J knew when it was finished because of Mum’s face.
“Mum’s going away,” she said, just like he knew she would, “and—”
But J-J knew what going away really meant so he screamed “No!” at her and at everybody else in the room and he did it so loud that people started to get very upset, even the mean man with stupid white hair that wasn’t even real.
“No honey, not there, not forever, just gone away for a little while. Somewhere else.”
“Like Dad?”
“No, not like your dad.”
“Can I come?”
Mum nodded, but what she said was, “You can visit.”
S
Jenny looked after him and she took him to see Mum sometimes but he knew the woman they showed him wasn’t really her. She was different, even though she looked like her. But she’d come back one day, he knew she would, everybody said so. It wouldn’t be fair if Dad could come back but Mum never could.
J-J waited for her and he drew pictures. Sometimes he drew a talking bee, other times a rhino or a monkey, but most of all he drew her. He drew his Mum. And while he waited for her to come back he drew a frame around her like an open door. He waited for her every night, hoping to hear her knock-knock, and if it was her he wouldn’t bother with “Who’s there?” because he’d just say, “Come in!”
The Death Drive of
Rita, nee Carina
Rita searched for roadkill on the nights she couldn’t sleep. She would drive until she found a dead animal or became drowsy, whichever happened first. One-fifth of all road traffic accidents were caused by people falling asleep at the wheel, but Rita had never nodded off while driving. She didn’t sleep much at all these days. Counting sheep only helped if they were broken shapes of bloody wool, and so far she’d never found such a thing. Instead she’d find an explosion of feathers that was once a bird, or a hedgehog spewing its own insides out, or a badger with its head twisted around on a bone-splintered neck. Once she’d found a fox that had been flattened by something so big that its body had separated into two pieces, one either side of a dirty orange-furred tire print smeared across the road.
There.
At first she thought it was a cat, but on a second pass she saw its ears had been torn from its skull by somebody’s skidding wheels, and its once-fluffy tail was buried beneath a spaghetti pile of entrails. A rabbit. It must have been hit at least twice already, the second vehicle crushing the animal’s midsection to flat skin and forcing out everything that had once been stored inside.
She parked her VW Golf, put on the hazards and clambered out using the passenger door because it was furthest from any traffic that might pass, even at such an early hour. She put on a high-vis vest and took a safety flare from the glove compartment, setting it one hundred paces from the car. She quickly spread an already split bin liner inside the boot, taking out the only other item stored there. It was a shovel.
She walked to where the rabbit lay and put the blade of the shovel between its body and the organs it had been forced to shit from itself. With a series of sideways scrapes she separated the insides from the outside then scooped them up and flung them to the roots of a nearby hedge, an offering to savage nature. The glow of her rear lights lent a hellish red glow to each of her actions, and every orange flash of the hazards added the suggestion of flames, casting Rita’s face into regular repeated shadows. She didn’t notice. Carefully, she slid the shovel under the furred body and peeled it from the road. The earless head lolled. Its hind limbs hung limp over the edge of the shovel. Flopsy rabbit, all right. But it was intact.
She walked quick mincing steps to the open boot, a grotesque egg-and-spoon race in which she was the only contender, and dropped the body inside. She wrapped it in the plastic and tied it. She wiped the shovel on roadside vegetation to remove the worst of the wet smears and wrapped the business end in another bin bag before laying it on the backseat.
She retrieved the flare, returned to her car, and drove home.
S
The garage had a workbench at one end. She reversed into the space, blipped the door closed, and got out as it lowered. Then she went to the boot and transferred the rabbit to the bench. Before anything else, though, she’d make a cup of cocoa. It was chilly, and there was no heating in the garage. The drink would warm her while she worked.
Rita lived alone. She hadn’t always. But the kids’ room was now a shrine and her husband’s side of the bed had been cold for almost two years. It meant she didn’t tidy up much. The kitchen was a clutter of cups and teaspoons—she only washed them when all had been used—but there was still the World’s Best Mum mug which she always saved for last.
She made her cocoa and took it back to the garage, stopping only to pull on some latex gloves.
The rabbit looked like a deflated toy, or a cuddly one with its stuffing torn out. Rita would fix that. She’d plump it back to life.
She selected something she thought was suitable from her shelves. It was too big, stretching the skin, so she created something smaller and forced it inside. When she had finished, scraping some of it out, forcing new contents in, the rabbit looked almost healthy. Almost. It was as close as she could get it, considering the missing ears.
Next, she stitched up the torn open end of the animal. Some of the tearing had been her, but not all of it. It was important that it looked as natural as possible. Not that anybody else would look as closely, or care as much, as she did.
Finally, she said her prayers.
When she was done, her cocoa was cold. It didn’t matter; she was ready for bed now.
S
She hadn’t done enough: she dreamed. She woke from its crowded fire to the emptiness of her cold room and knew what she had to do if she wanted proper rest.
She got up, and grabbed her keys.
S
Crouched behind an old dry stone wall, Rita tried not to think about where she was. She was cold, even with her coat and hood. Her knees were up to her chest, arms wrapped around the shins for warmth. She hoped it didn’t rain. She was sheltered from the wind, but occasionally a gust was channelled down through the gravestones of the churchyard she sat in. Her car was parked some distance away, in a parallel country lane.
It was dark. The sky was cloudy and no stars shone. The moon was missing from the sky, an eye closed on what would happen. It was so dark that Rita didn’t notice when her own eyes closed until she dreamed again.
She woke from the nightmare’s whoomph! and its sudden heat to find herself cold and unrested in the churchyard once more. Names she hadn’t spoken for a long time remained unvoiced in her throat but she saw them before her, chiselled in stone. Todd, Sian, Charlotte. She reached as if to trace the “forever sleep” of the inscription when the sweep of headlights threw her shadow long and far from the words.