‘You’ll look after each other, won’t you? I really ought to catch the next train. I’ll be back to see you again soon, I promise, and next time it’ll be longer.’
‘It will.’
His parents said that not quite in chorus, apparently competing at slowness. ‘Till next time, then,’ he said and shook his father’s hand before hugging his mother. Both felt disconcertingly cold and unyielding, as if the appearance of each had hardened into a carapace. He gripped the handle of his briefcase while he strove to twist the rusty key in the back door. ‘I’ll go my old way, shall I? It’s quicker.’
When nobody answered he hauled open the door, which felt unhinged. Cobwebbed weeds sprawled over the doorstep into the kitchen at once. Weedy mounds of earth or rubble had overwhelmed the yard and the path. He picked his way to the gate and with an effort turned his head, but nobody was following to close the gate: his mother was still at her post by the stove, his father was deep in the armchair. He had to use both hands to wrench the bolt out of its socket, and almost forgot to retrieve his briefcase as he stumbled into the alley. The passage was unwelcomingly dark, not least because the light from the house failed to reach it - no, because the kitchen was unlit. He dragged the gate shut and took time to engage the latch before heading for the rear of the museum.
Damp must be stiffening his limbs. He hoped it was in the air, not in his parents’ house. Was it affecting his vision as well? When he slogged to the end of the alley the street appeared to be composed of little but darkness, except for the museum. The doors to the old auditorium were further ajar, and as he crossed the road Trent saw figures miming in the dimness. He hadn’t time to identify their faces before panting down the alley where brick was ousted by concrete.
Figures sat in the stark restaurants and modelled clothes in windows. Otherwise the street was deserted except for a man who dashed into the station too fast for Trent to see his face. The man let fly a wordless plea and waved his briefcase as he sprinted through the booking hall. Trent had just begun to precipitate himself across the road when he heard the slam of a carriage door. He staggered ahead of his breath onto the platform in time to see the last light of a train vanish into the trees, which looked more like a tunnel than ever.
His skull felt frail with rage again. Once he regained the ability to move he stumped to glower at the timetable next to the boarded-up office. His fiercest glare was unable to change the wait into less than an hour. He marched up and down a few times, but each end of the platform met him with increasing darkness. He had to keep moving to ward off a chill stiffness. He trudged into the street and frowned about him.
The fast-food outlets didn’t appeal to him, neither their impersonal refreshments nor the way all the diners faced the street as though to watch him. not that doing so lent them any animation. He couldn’t even see anyone eating. Ignoring the raw red childishly sketched men, he lurched across the road into the alley.
He oughtn’t to go to his parents. So instant a return might well confuse them, and just now his own mind felt more than sufficiently unfocused. The only light, however tentative, in the next street came from the museum. He crossed the roadway, which was as lightless as the low sky, and climbed the faint steps.
Was the ticket booth lit? A patch of the blackened glass had been rubbed relatively clear from within. He was fumbling for money to plant on the sill under the gap at the foot of the window when he managed to discern that the figure in the booth was made of wax. While it resembled the middle-aged woman who had occupied the booth when the building was a cinema, it ought to look years - no, decades - older. Its left grey-cardiganed arm was raised to indicate the auditorium. He was unable to judge its expression for the gloom inside the booth. Tramping to the doors, he pushed them wide.
That seemed only to darken the auditorium, but he felt the need to keep on the move before his eyes had quite adjusted. The apparently sourceless twilight put him in mind of the glow doled out by the candle that used to stand in an encrusted saucer on the table by his childhood bed. As he advanced under the enormous unseen roof, he thought he was walking on the same carpet that had led into the cinema and indeed the theatre. He was abreast of the first of the figures on either side of the aisle before he recognised them.
He’d forgotten they were sisters, the two women who had run the bakery and the adjacent bridal shop. Had they really been twins? They were playing bridesmaids in identical white ankle-length dresses - whitish, rather, and trimmed with dust. Presumably it was muslin as well as dust that gloved their hands, which were pointing with all their digits along the aisle. The dull glints of their grimy eyes appeared to spy sidelong on him. He’d taken only a few steps when he stumbled to a halt and peered about him.
The next exhibits were disconcerting enough. No doubt the toyshop owner was meant to be introducing his model railway, but he looked as if he was crouching sideways to grab whatever sought refuge in the miniature tunnel. Opposite him the sweetshop man was enticing children to his counter, which was heaped with sweets powdered grey, by performing on a sugar whistle not entirely distinguishable from his glimmering teeth. Trent hadn’t time to ascertain what was odd about the children’s wide round eyes, because he was growing aware of the extent of the museum.
Surely it must be a trick of the unreliable illumination, but the more he gazed around him, the further the dimness populated with unmoving figures seemed to stretch. If it actually extended so far ahead and to both sides, it would encompass at least the whole of the street that contained his parents’ house. He wavered forward a couple of paces, which only encouraged figures to solidify out of that part of the murk. He swivelled as quickly as he was able and stalked out of the museum.
The echoes of his footsteps pursued him across the lobby like mocking applause. He could hear no other sound, and couldn’t tell whether he was being watched from the ticket booth. He found his way down the marble steps and along the front of the museum. In a few seconds he was sidling crabwise along it in order to differentiate the alley from the unlit facade. He wandered further than he should have, and made his way back more slowly. Before long he was groping with his free hand at the wall as he ranged back and forth, but it was no use. There was no alley, just unbroken brick.
He was floundering in search of a crossroads, from which there surely had to be a route to his old house, when he realised he might as well be blind. He glanced back, praying wordlessly for any relief from the dark. There was only the glow from the museum lobby. It seemed as feeble as the candle flame had grown in the moment before it guttered into smoke, and so remote he thought his stiff limbs might be past carrying him to it. When he retreated towards it, at first he seemed not to be moving at all.
More time passed than he could grasp before he felt sure the light was closer. Later still he managed to distinguish the outstretched fingertips of his free hand. He clung to his briefcase as though it might be snatched from him. He was abreast of the lobby, and preparing to abandon its glow for the alley that led to the station, when he thought he heard a whisper from inside the museum. ‘Are you looking for us?’
It was either a whisper, or so distant that it might as well be one. ‘We’re in here, son,’ it said, and its companion added ‘You’ll have to come to us.’
‘Mother?’ It was unquestionably her voice, however faint. He almost tripped over the steps as he sent himself into the lobby. For a moment, entangled in the clapping of his footsteps on the marble, he thought he heard a large but muted sound, as of the surreptitious arrangement of a crowd. He blundered to the doors and peered into the auditorium.
Under the roof, which might well have been an extension of the low ponderous black sky, the aisle and its guardians were at least as dim as ever. Had things changed, or had he failed to notice details earlier? The bridal sisters were licking their lips, and he wasn’t sure if they were dressed as bridesmaids or baked into giant tiered cakes from which they were trying to struggle free. Both of the toyshop owner’s hands lo
oked eager to seize the arrested train if it should try to reach the safety of the tunnel, and the bulging eyes of the children crowded around the man with the sugar whistle - were those sweets? Trent might have retreated if his mother’s voice hadn’t spoken to him. ‘That’s it, son. Don’t leave us this time.’
‘Have a thought for us. Don’t start us wondering where you are again. We’re past coming to find you.’
‘Where are you? I can’t see.’
‘Just carry on straight,’ his parents’ voices took it in turns to murmur.
He faltered before lurching between the first exhibits. Beyond them matters could hardly be said to improve. He did his best not to see too much of the milkman holding the reins of a horse while a cow followed the cart, but the man’s left eye seemed large enough for the horse, the right for the cow. Opposite him stood a rag and bone collector whose trade was apparent from the companion that hung onto his arm, and Trent was almost glad of the flickering dimness. ‘How much further?’ he cried in a voice that the place shrank almost to nothing.
‘No more than you can walk at your age.’
Trent hung onto the impression that his father sounded closer than before and hugged his briefcase while he made his legs carry him past a policeman who’d removed his helmet to reveal a bald-ridged head as pointed as a chrysalis, a priest whose smooth face was balanced on a collar of the same paleness as and no thicker than a child’s wrist, a window cleaner with scrawny legs folded like a grasshopper’s, a bus conductor choked by his tie that was caught in his ticket machine while at the front of the otherwise deserted vehicle the driver displayed exactly the same would-be comical strangled face and askew swollen tongue . . . They were nightmares, Trent told himself: some he remembered having suffered as a child, and the rest he was afraid to remember in case they grew clearer. ‘I still can’t see you,’ he all but wailed.
‘Down here, son.’
Did they mean ahead? He hoped he wasn’t being told to use any of the side aisles, not least because they seemed capable of demonstrating that the place was even vaster than he feared. The sights they contained were more elaborate too. Off to the right was a brass band, not marching but frozen in the act of tiptoeing towards him: though all the players had lowered their instruments, their mouths were perfectly round. In the dimness to his left, and scarcely more luminous, was a reddish bonfire surrounded by figures that wore charred masks, unless those were their faces, and beyond that was a street party where children sat at trestle tables strewn with food and grimaced in imitation of the distorted versions of their faces borne by deflating balloons they held on strings . . . Trent twisted his stiff body around in case some form of reassurance was to be found behind him, but the exit to the lobby was so distant he could have mistaken it for the last of a flame. He half closed his eyes to blot out the sights he had to pass, only to find that made the shadows of the exhibits and the darkness into which the shadows trailed loom closer, as if the dimness was on the point of being finally extinguished. He was suddenly aware that if the building had still been a theatre, the aisle would have brought him to the stage by now. ‘Where are you?’ he called but was afraid to raise his voice. ‘Can’t you speak?’
‘Right here.’
His eyes sprang so wide they felt fitted into their sockets. His parents weren’t just close, they were behind him. He turned with difficulty and saw why he’d strayed past them. His mother was wearing a top hat and tails and had finished twirling a cane that resembled a lengthening of one knobbly finger; his father was bulging out of a shabby flowered dress that failed to conceal several sections of a pinkish bra. They’d dressed up to cure Trent of his nightmare about the theatre performance, he remembered, but they had only brought it into his waking hours. He backed away from it - from their waxen faces greyish with down, their smiles as fixed as their eyes. His legs collided with an object that folded them up, and he tottered sideways to sit helplessly on it. ‘That’s it, son,’ his mother succeeded in murmuring.
‘That’s your place,’ his father said with a last shifting of his lips.
Trent glared downwards and saw he was trapped by a school desk barely large enough to accommodate him. On either side of him sat motionless children as furred with grey as their desks, even their eyes. Between him and his parents a teacher in a gown and mortarboard was standing not quite still and sneering at him. ‘Mr Bunnie,’ Trent gasped, remembering how the teacher had always responded to being addressed by his name as though it was an insult. Then, in a moment of clarity that felt like a beacon in the dark, he realised he had some defence. ‘This isn’t me,’ he tried to say calmly but firmly. ‘This is.’
His fingers were almost too unmanageable to deal with the briefcase. He levered at the rusty metal buttons with his thumbs until at last the catches flew open and the contents spilled across the desk. For a breath, if he had any, Trent couldn’t see them in the dimness, and then he made out that they were half a dozen infantile crayon drawings of houses. ‘I’ve done more than that,’ he struggled to protest, ‘I am more,’ but his mouth had finished working. He managed only to raise his head, and never knew which was worse: his paralysis, or his parents’ doting smiles, or the sneer that the teacher’s face seemed to have widened to encompass - the sneer that had always meant that once a child was inside the school gates, his parents could no longer protect him. It might have been an eternity before the failure of the dimness or of Trent’s eyes ...
Fear The Dead (2003)
Someone else he didn’t think he’d ever seen before leaned down as if to let him count all her wrinkles. “I wish I’d had the chance to say goodbye to my grandmama, Jonathan.”
Another lady dressed in at least as much black and holding her wineglass askew parted her pale lips, which looked as though they had once been stitched together. “Now you know she’s at peace.”
As he remembered how his grandmother’s cheek had felt like a cold crumpled wad of paper he had to kiss, the winner of the wrinkle competition said “What a brave little soul. He’s a credit to his mother.”
“And his father.”
“Careful or you’ll drip.”
The stitched lady straightened up her glass. “We don’t want stains on your lovely carpet, do we, Jonathan? They don’t make them like that any more.”
He thought the elaborate carpet felt like the rest of the house -furtively chill and damp. “I can just hear her saying that, old Ire,” his father joined him to remark.
“Her friends never called Iris that,” the stitched mouth objected. “Oh, whatever’s wrong, you poor little fellow?”
While Jonathan struggled to think of a reply that wouldn’t be the truth, his mother hurried over to confront his father. “Are you upsetting him, Lawrence?”
“Only saying I could hear your mother pricing the contents of the house. Half of it Jonno wasn’t supposed to touch,” he confided to the wrinkled ladies. “You must have felt like you were living in a museum, did you, Jonno?”
Jonathan was yet more afraid to speak. The wineglass slouched again as its lady crooked her other thin arm around his shoulders and murmured “Don’t worry, your daddy wasn’t really hearing her. She’s gone to Jesus and she’ll be talking to him.”
The mention of Jesus appeared to draw the priest, who smelled rather like an unlit candle wrapped in linen. He hoisted his tumbler of orange juice to acknowledge Jonathan’s. “That’s the right road. That’s what real men drink.”
“Is my grandma really talking to Jesus now?”
“I shouldn’t be at all surprised, but it won’t do any harm to pray she is.”
“How long do you think she’ll be?” Jonathan pleaded.
“That’s one of the things God’s keeping as a surprise for us. We won’t know till we see her again.”
“The father means till we’re with Jesus too,” Jonathan’s mother made haste to say.
“Isn’t she supposed to be there for ever?”
“If you keep your faith up,” the pries
t said with a smile that was less than wholly aimed at Jonathan, “I’m sure she will be. You know Jesus has time for everyone.”
How could Jesus deal with all the dead? God was meant to be able to see everyone at once, and perhaps his son had inherited the trick, but that wasn’t the same as talking to them. If Jonathan’s grandmother thought she didn’t have Jesus’s full attention, Jonathan could imagine her stalking off in search of someone who would have to notice her. He might have put some of this into words if the priest hadn’t moved away, leaving Jonathan’s parents to argue. “What are you trying to make Jonathan think of my mother?”
“Whatever’s the truth, Essie.”
“You didn’t stay around to see it.”
“Jonno knows why, don’t you, Jonno? It’s nobody’s fault Ire and I didn’t get on. I expect there are people you don’t with.”
“Maybe it was up to you to make the effort, Lawrence, considering it was her house.”
“Well, now it’s yours, and I don’t feel any more welcome.”
“I don’t know how you’d expect me to change that.”
“It’s sounding like time I absented myself.”
Jonathan thought he might leave it at that, having loaded his voice with dignity, but then his father swayed at him as though its weight had unbalanced him. “I’m sorry this had to be our day this week, Jonno. I’ll take you somewhere better next weekend.”
Jonathan watched his father’s untypically sombre back view merge with the blackness of the crowd, and then he had to undergo a succession of pats on the head and kisses that felt like dried fruit brushing his cheek as mourners took their leave of his mother. Before long there was only Trudy, who also taught at the college. She ran her small hand several times up and down his mother’s hefty arm. “You need to talk, I can tell.”
“I could bear to,” his mother admitted, and gave him a smile beneath a frown. “Don’t bother helping clear up, Jonathan. You’ve had a long day and made us proud of you. I should go to bed.”
The Collected Short Fiction Page 141