by Killip, Alan
“Elaine is sleeping. As she must.”
Was this a game? I wondered. It didn’t feel like a game. Normally the sleep talk was all endearing nonsense. “Then who are you?”
“I am Eleanor.” Again, the hiss.
Was I really having a conversation with my wife's unconscious mind? I felt a guilty thrill, as though I'd discovered her secret diary in a draw. “Are you Elaine’s friend?”
“I have been with Elaine from before she was born.”
I don't really know what happened next. The words just slipped out. I'm normally so careful about saying the right thing. “Does Elaine love me?”
“Elaine loves everybody”
That threw me. “Do you love me?” This no longer felt like a game.
“I loved you in June, July and August when we were on fire.”
I thought back to the previous summer, moving in to our new flat, the DIY, the takeaways and DVDs, and concluded she must be talking about the summer before that, when we first met. “And now?” I said, unable to stop myself pushing my luck.
“I fear a life of birch veneer and flimsy props, of saggy soft furnishings and your stale beery breath as you stumble home for a feeble fuck.”
“Elaine!” I shook her shoulder.
“Elaine is sleeping. I am Eleanor. Elaine needs to sleep because she is tired from pretending she finds your jokes funny.”
A drop of sweat trickled down my cheek. I brushed it away.
“Elaine does not want you to know when you bore her, because she loves you. As she loves her Mum, and the Queen, and Ruby.” Ruby was our labrador.
“So you find me boring?”
“I don’t find you at all.”
“I mean Elaine finds me boring?”
“Not all the time.”
“So some of the time?”
“Time and time again.”
“So what does Elaine want?”
“Elaine wants you?” She said this in a plaintive voice, rasp-free.
“But she finds me boring?”
The harsh rasp returned. “As she finds her Mum, and the Queen, and Ruby boring.”
“So what should I do?”
“I think you’ve done enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think you’ve done enough”
“I think what?”
“You’ve ticked your boxes, your trophy is on the mantel piece, time to kick back and decay. And you will be the fine upstanding victim when I rip away the cosy rug and send us all spinning.”
“Elaine!” I shook her again. “Are you having a bad dream ?”
“Elaine is sleeping. I am only allowed out on nights like this.”
The curtain fluttered in the breeze and again I saw her face in the moonlight, eyes wide open, nostrils flaring. Then her jaw sprang wide and she inhaled sharply. I panicked. This was too much. She looked frenzied and possessed. I flailed around, feeling for the light switch on the bedside table.
“Choo!” she sneezed as I turned on the light.
I turned back to Elaine and saw her looking around bleary eyed and blinking. She reached over and got a tissue from her bedside table, and then smiled at me.
“Sorry babe, just a big sneeze,” she said, then hugged me and kissed me on the temple before rolling over.
I turned off the light, lay down properly, and told myself it was all just nonsense. Dreams are just shreds of life jumbled up. There's no point in trying to make sense of them, so there's no point in trying to talk to someone who's talking in their sleep. Any one who tries is asking for trouble. I felt myself drifting under, and started to dream that Elaine and I were on a spiral waterslide inside a shell I'd found on the beach in the afternoon.
I was jolted awake by a belch and a hiss from the other side of the bed.
“Stupid fat fuck.”
Lachlan
Henry was very proud of his calm outward demeanour. It seemed to him like a malign force had filled his life with irritants designed to reduce him to a whimpering, twitching mess. He frequently congratulated himself on his ability to resist this malign force and maintain a peaceful facade.
The most irritating agent of this malign force was his business parter, Alex Shuttlecock. Instead of counting sheep at night Henry would sooth himself to sleep by listing the ways in which Alex was irritating, and congratulating himself on not letting them get to him: his defiant emphasis on the last syllable of his surname when he introduced himself with a wink; his harlequin pantaloons; his love of tech jargon and inspirational quotes; his ability to combine the two to nauseating effect; the way he either sat slumped in his chair massaging his testicles through the pockets of his harlequin pantaloons, or contorted himself into weird postures over his keyboard as if tortured by the force of his genius; his habit of swiping his smart phone screen as he talked to Henry, only occasionally looking up to cast him a sour glance; the way he charmed and effervesced in front of other people, which caused them to comment on how lucky Henry was to work with him; his description of himself as a 'Zen Master of the Digital Renaissance,' and the difficulty of pinning down what it was he actually did. The way he scoffed when Henry asked him when the first phase of the product would be finished and when they'd be able to market it properly.
“The word 'finished' does not belong in this domain,” Alex would say. “We iterate.”
Henry knew that these things were sent to test his calm outward demeanour by the force responsible for all the irritating things in the world.
The second source of irritation was his fiancee, Elaine, and it baffled him how someone he loved so much could pose such a threat to his hard won equanimity and poise. His life had improved in so many ways after moving in with her. She'd been coaxing him away from eating meat, and now this was something he only did on Wednesdays when he'd cook himself a massive bolognese while she attended her book club. He'd also benefited from the meditation and mindfulness exercises she bought home with her from the wellness clinic where she worked in the city, and knew that they helped him maintain and strengthen his calm outward demeanour.
However, she did have the power to irritate. Her gentle but persistent questioning was not in the same league as Alex's crassness, but that made it all the more irksome. The conversation would start in a pleasant vein as they prepared their evening meal, a fun process of chopping, grating, juicing and steaming over a few glasses of wine, with Henry being given the opportunity describe how he'd endured another day in the same room as Alex Shuttlecock. But after dinner the questions would start, in different forms each night but always with the same underlying thrust: When would vast profits from the business he'd started with Alex enable them to move from their basement flat in an outer London suburb to a detached home in a home counties village? Did he think that if he'd kept freelancing as an advertising copywriter instead of ploughing their nest egg into the business with Alex that they'd by now be able to afford to move into a semidetached house in a slightly nicer outer London suburb? How come Alex had time to do his own freelance work when Henry did not? How did he think that being cooped up in a basement flat with only a small patch of green at the back was affecting the mental health of Ruby, the Labrador she'd brought from her last relationship with a stockbroker? What state did he think Ruby would be in if her Aunty Sarah wasn't living around the corner and able and willing to look after her during the day and sometimes much of the evening? And worst of all: What was it that Copyware, the business he'd started with Alex Shuttlecock, actually did? What was it that he, Henry Fenton, actually did?
Henry always answered the questions with bloodless precision, but sometimes he'd feel pressure building inside him when the questioning intensified and he'd find his gaze being drawn from Elaine's impish eyes to the stainless steel knife set that hung above the faux vintage digital radio. Unpleasant thoughts would occur unbidden, and he'd excuse himself and retire to the shed that stood at the edge of their tiny patch of garden to smoke a joint and work on the construction of
a matchstick replica of a sixteenth century galleon.
The third great irritant that linked the first two irritants was the difficulty of his job, which was to attract investment and to sell a product that, while groundbreaking, was still under development. The person responsible for the development was Alex Shuttlecock, so it was difficult to get a steer on how close it was to being finished without being overwhelmed by jargon and inspirational quotes. But Henry was supposed to prove to potential investors and clients that the product did what the company literature said it did, and that was not straightforward. Henry had written the literature when he was full of zest and hope, promising that the tech would be able to collate and digest masses of data about habits and aspirations and produce copy that could sell any product or service. This would remove the need for copywriters at advertising agencies, and the algorithms that produced the copy would be based on years of research and would be tweaked by the technology itself which would never stop learning and self-improving as long as it had access to data. Alex Shuttlecock, the self described digital renaissance man, was in daily contact with the people on a distant continent who were actually building the app, and he assured Henry that the current teething problems were only temporary.
But Henry had only seen the Copyware app work once, and he had a sneaking suspicion that Alex had fudged the results because the copy produced was just the sort of schmaltz that Alex thrived upon. All other times the results were garbage.
Once a soft drink firm had agreed to participate in an experiment. They'd shared many years worth of secret market research data and analysis and eagerly awaited the killer strap line that this exciting new tech would create for their brand. After two days of data crunching the result was:
Lubriciousness is the anemone. Feed the challenge.
“That's brilliant!” Alex had said. Henry had remained unruffled, and made something else up in time for the meeting. A disappointed Alex had accused Henry of being old-school.
Sometimes Henry suspected that the other people in his life perceived his calm outward demeanour as something else entirely. When they bought a doormat for the flat Elaine had suggested they call it Henry. He'd put the slightly harsh note in her laughter to stress at the move and worry about how Ruby was going to adjust to lower Tooting after the rippling fields of the Surrey commuter belt. Alex had once introduced him to a potential investor as “My partner Henry – you know, like the hoover. Only less suction.” Henry didn't really know what he meant, but suspected it was a reference to his calm demeanour. Typical of Alex to mistake it for weakness, he'd thought. On the whole he was very proud his calmness. He believed that his hard won equanimity helped improve the world around him, and he hoped this improvement rippled out to the world at large.
But his calm outward demeanour had been achieved at a terrible price. After years of being denied expression, the part of Henry that felt frustration and rage split off from his main personality and took the form of a fierce, dissolute beast who walked upright like a man but had the skin and eyes of a reptile, and whom he decided to call Lachlan.
It took a long time for Lachlan to manifest himself fully. At first he was a physical feeling that Henry experienced from time to time. Sometimes, at night, when he lay awake next to Elaine, thinking about the need to move into a bigger flat to accommodate Ruby and their unborn child, random groups of muscles would clench and become hard as concrete. On the way to work, as he sat on the bus wondering if Copyware was ever going to bear fruit, he would sometimes feel dreadfully claustrophobic. His friend Roger, who was a GP, advised him that he was feeling the symptoms of long term stress, and should seriously think about a holiday. Elaine said much the same thing. No one was able to tell him the truth, that these were the first stirrings of a ravening demon.
Henry first glimpsed Lachlan in the garden shed as he worked on his matchstick galleon and smoked a moderately packed reefer. A small desk lamp lit up his work surface and thew broken curved shadows on the walls. He was absorbed in the intricacies of the poop deck when from behind him there was a rustle and a belch, a hiss and a scraping. He turned to see what was up and saw red flashes in the clutter pile at the back of the shed, and a shifting in the complex shadows, a glimpse of incisors and a gaping maw. He stood abruptly and ran to Elaine who greeted him with the sardonic scepticism she reserved for when she knew he'd been on the puff. She said she hoped one day he'd stick around after dinner for a proper chat instead of disappearing to the shed to get stoned.
“I saw something, though Elaine. Something horrible.”
“Why don't you go to B&Q and get some rodenticide? And clean up the clutter. The shed's a mess.”
The next sighting was about ten days later. Henry was in the pub unburdening himself to Roger about his business and financial worries. He didn’t know when his venture with Alex would start to pay dividends, and in the meantime it had whittled down the nest egg, the sizeable lump bequeathed by his grandparents, that Elaine and he had planned to use to move to a more spacious home. When Roger suggested that Henry confront Alex about his concerns he got up to take a pee. As he was emerging from the gents someone pushed against him from the side, and he breathed a waft of foul, festering air. A fist grasped his collar and a guttural voice rasped in his ear.
“I’m not just a rodent you know.”
He was being menaced by a scruffy middle aged man, his face hidden in a hooded top, whom he'd pushed past on his way to the toilet, but hardly noticed. Two of the bar staff came to his aid, pulling the man away and shouting: they were sick of telling him not to come into the pub. Upset and shaking, he returned to Roger, who looked surprised and faintly amused. It transpired that his assailant was a notorious local vagrant, a middle aged man with a chaotic life called Lachlan. The rodent remark had hit a nerve with Henry though, so he told Roger about the shed, and the noises, the red lights, the shifting shadow and the glimpsed teeth.
“Have you thought about getting a second opinion?”
“What, you mean see a shrink?”
Roger rolled his eyes. “No! You're obviously on edge and making more of things than you should. I think you should try to address the underlying issues. Why don't you get someone to check out Copyware. Assess what's being done. Write a report. Someone not involved with Alex.”
Henry sighed. It was a good idea, but he felt reluctant to take it up because he dreaded the result of such an investigation. “That'd cost a bomb. I don't know who I'd approach.”
“Do you remember Julian from sixth form?”
Henry did. A pale ginger man with multiple piercings and a laugh like a kookaburra. They'd been friends, briefly, when they'd both been into folk music. “Are you still in touch? What happened to him?”
Roger grinned. “Not in touch exactly. I came across his blog the other day. He runs a consulting business, writes a blog about tech. Utterly incomprehensible. What about seeing if he'll give it the once over for you? Worth a try, don't you think?”
“But what about the thing in the shed?”
“Oh that.” Roger swirled his ale around his glass. “Why don't you try to get out more and stop smoking so much dope?”
Later that night, Henry found himself back in the shed, deeply involved in his second attempt to assemble the poop deck. He noticed the darkness outside, and realised he'd no memory of getting home from the pub. He found it hard to focus, and his hands were a mess of glue and matchsticks. Suddenly the light failed and he was enveloped by the smell of rotting meat. Something sharp and scaly probed the back of his neck. He spun round on his stool, flailing. Between him and the door stood a silhouetted shape, a stooped figure with a hooded top. A rasping voice spat the words:
“You can’t get out.”
Henry sat bolt upright in bed and opened his eyes, pulse racing, mouth dry and head throbbing, the symptoms of a hangover well under way. Pale dawn light filled the room and Elaine slept beside him, breathing peacefully.
He decided to follow Roger's advice, and cease
d his hash smoking immediately. It was surprisingly easy. He had a bit of trouble getting to sleep, but in the mornings when he woke his head was clear. He took up jogging with Ruby as a stress relief tactic, and for a few days he felt more energetic and positive. He contacted Julian, and wrote what he hoped was a not too ingratiating email explaining the situation with Copyware. He also resolved to get out more. When Roger organised a paint balling day, he signed up for it.
Still, he continued to experience odd disturbances. When he was shaving one morning he thought he caught a glimpse of a dark hooded figure in the the mirror. It was actually the reflection of a towel hanging from a hook on the back of the door, but a few days later he was travelling to a meeting in Dorset on a train that went momentarily dark as it went into a tunnel and amid the roar and clatter he heard the deep guttural voice that had assailed him in the pub: “Feeble fool, wasting borrowed time.” And in the morning on the Northern line he twice caught a whiff of the the man's odour. Increasingly, he felt burnt out and on edge. He had the feeling of being stalked. It helped to give the malevolent oppressor a name, and ‘Lachlan’ was a natural choice, the manifestations having started around the time of his encounter in the pub with the vagrant. He looked forward to the paint balling afternoon as something that would help him let off steam and relieve the pressures of work with some normal, harmless fun. He even mentioned it to Alex in the office in an attempt to start a light conversation about something other than work.
“Paintballing?” Alex said with an emphasis on the first syllable that made clear what he thought of the sport and people who did it.
“Yeah, an old friend's organised it. I think it will be —”
Alex cast him a pitying look and Henry’s voice weakened.
“— fun…”
Later that evening he told Elaine about the planned day out as they tucked in to a hearty bowl of roasted squash and raw carrot soup. She did not share his enthusiasm.
“Pretending to be a commando? At your age?”