Paul acted morose around her, he just stood or sat and sulked when he wasn’t making love to her in Uncommon ways, but Pauline acted horribly silly, laughing and playfully slapping him and putting bits of golden syrup on her face with a spoon which she made Paul kiss off.
We needed to make her even with us. If she had a baby too, she couldn’t report ours, Paul decided. Then we could run away and live the type of Life he had had before, lurking and hiding but free of Pauline, who would hopefully throw herself down the stairs or out the window if she didn’t die from birth or shame.
I told him it was impossible, Pauline couldn’t have babies because she was too thin. Paul said we just have to fatten her up like the witches do to children in the fairy tales he used read to me when we had more time together.
Paul started to have sex with her in the common manner, he was able to make her want to do it with him by being less morose and giggling along with her sometimes. He didn’t mind doing it the common way as he did doing Uncommon tricks, because it was to hurt Pauline in the end.
Having sex the common way made Pauline feel sentimental, I think. She started to eat a little more, but it wasn’t enough. One weekend morning, I stood in the bathroom with my dungarees pulled down, examining my breasts in the mirror. They were all swollen with milk, and Paul stood watching me and fondling himself just as Pauline came upstairs. We had planned it out that way.
He convinced her to eat bread soaked in milk, tinned peach juice and golden syrup, boiled eggs and coffee with milk, often bringing it to her while she was naked in bed. She started to grow. The new fat did not look very nice on her. Her hair didn’t get any thicker. I thought she looked like a sweet bun with hairs and pigeon’s eyeballs stuck to it. She started to fill out her lingerie, and Paul tried to act very enthusiastic and In Love, but when he was lying beside me on our couch he would say in a flat voice, “I hate her, I hate her,” until he got so riled up he had to walk in circles around our kitchen, clapping his hands, until it was time for me to go to work.
We both felt better the day she came home from work with a blood stain on the seat of her dungarees that she was unaware of. When she got undressed, she screamed and said Paul was trying to murder her. She ran around with blood dribbling down her thighs and on her hands, Paul had to clean it off her then placate her in bed with sweet songs and kisses.
She told Paul she could no longer do it the common way with him, because she didn’t want to have a You-Know-What. Paul and I decided we would have to make her pregnant whether she liked it or not. One evening, Paul put one of Stuart’s old Tchaikovsky records on, a rather nice waltz, so the neighbours wouldn’t when hear he went up behind her, grabbed her neck and pushed her onto her bedroom floor, forcing himself inside her. After, he held her feet and made her do a headstand so all the stuff he put inside her would trickle deep down inside her like golden syrup.
I told him to do it twice, just in case. He hit her until she was unconscious and did it a third time while I packed up the things we needed. He put a blanket over her head in case she woke up and saw us leaving. We put Waxy in a carpetbag, and floppy hats on our heads, and crept down the stairs of the house like ants carrying crumbs. We walked in no particular direction, avoiding the bright and flashing Exam signs, Men smoking and arguing underneath them, crumpled notepaper between their fists.
As it became colder, we went into an alley, took Waxy out of the carpetbag, and put the little thing under Paul’s coat. We longed to stop for a coffee somewhere, but we were too afraid. Paul and I put socks on our hands to keep them warm, since we didn’t own mittens. They made us look fingerless, like Paul’s homemade dolls. He started to go on again about the cracker tin, which was tied to his back with string since it didn’t fit in his suitcase. My knapsack sagged with home-made nappies, tins of fruit and extra jumpers.
“We just need to find a safe place to put it down so we can live in it,” Paul repeated every few minutes.
“I told you before, Paul, it’s too small.”
“You never know what may happen,” he said in a very grand, serious voice, and I was too tired to contradict him anymore. I could smell Waxy underneath his coat, like a rancid molar in the back of one’s mouth.
We walked and walked, and as the sun came out, the regular time I went to work, I knew I would never paint the word Nightingale again. So I said it out loud again and again until things felt calm, nice and sure.
“Night-in-gale, Night-in-gale, Night-in-gale.”
GARY BUDDEN
Breakdown
My old man was a lorry driver, back in the eighties. He went all over and knows northern Europe like, he says, the back of his hand. I try and tell him it’s all changed since his day, how the terrain morphs as we age. More black tar cutting through the land. More out-of-town supermarkets, retail parks and agribusiness. More EU regulations and migrants dodging the cops in Calais. Dad’s map of the world ossified sometime around 1987, when the trees were closely packed together and strange shadows were cast on the ground.
I like to think his world was just that little bit wilder back then and I’m envious of that, hungry for whatever it was he saw in the woods. I yearn for days with a bit more breathing space, greater anonymity and more personality.
Dad talks about those years fondly, the days on the road before the kids and the divorce and the new family grounded him on the Essex coast. Proudly tells people how he can still roll a cigarette while driving, steering with his knees, how he saw some mighty odd things out on the road that you wouldn’t believe. Straight-laced businessmen blowing each other in lay-bys. A head-on collision with a lorry carrying stationery supplies, staples and reams of paper spilling out like guts over the tarmac. A fox just staring, yellow-eyed and meeting his gaze, nonplussed, before he hit it.
He talks about how it was tough but how he enjoyed the solitude and the anonymity life on the lanes gave him. There, he was just a driver. The mastodon roar of the traffic he found soothing, monotonous and dependable. To this day he’s an excellent navigator, can get around by instinct. I’ve rarely seen him use a map, and sat-navs don’t really register on his radar.
It’s funny how the memories of your family become your memories too. I have an image of swimming under my merchant navy ship, somewhere off the coast of South Africa, tanned men diving down, challenging themselves to curve under the ship and back up the other side. But this is a story dad told me, about his dad. So granddad was the one who, on the point of bursting lungs and desperate to get to the surface, sees a circle of hammerheads and nearly drowns, arms churning the water in fright. Granddad, a man I never knew, transmitting his stories over the decades. Granddad survived the sharks and the deep dives under the trading ships, but he couldn’t survive the Thames and drowned in its murk back in 1981, not yet an old man.
My uncle was a long-hauler too. He shut down the Blackwall Tunnel once when his twelve wheeler’s engine packed in. I think of him sometimes, stuck somewhere under the Thames, neither in Greenwich nor Tower Hamlets, choking off one of south England’s busiest arteries. And here’s me, who can’t even drive.
Granddad’s story is in the blood or something, genetic in a way an ability to drive is clearly not. My own biography involves no sharks, no long hauls across Europe in winter. I have my own stories, of bloody knuckles and shaved heads, a vision in the forests of Colombia, a man tripping out on acid standing messianic in the busy streets of Jerusalem. But those are for another time.
There’s a story of dad’s that niggles at me, one I come back to again and again, embellishing details, making minor edits. In those dead moments, when I’m staring out of a rain streaked bus window on the way to work, crammed into the armpits of commuters on the Northern line, or those days when the simplest of things seems a struggle, I think of dad, a young man, lost in the Black Forest, a broken-down lorry and a fear he’d never get home. Dark descending and the bite of winter. Something out there, a shadow among shadows.
Like many men of his
generation, dad’s cheery when discussing things that should be distressing or disturbing. Trauma is brushed off with a grin and the assertion I could handle it, no bother. Men didn’t complain back then, he believes, nor should they now. He’s old school and small-c conservative. But when he talks about granddad sinking below the Thames and the circling sharks and that night in the Black Forest, there’s perhaps a slight crease around the eyes, the tiniest hint of a grimace or wince that shows below that surface of skin and bravado, some events do leave a lasting impact and sometimes, things just are not OK.
When I lie in bed at night, listening to the traffic outside my window, I can see the circling hammerheads. I think of bubbles escaping an open mouth and the grey waters of the Thames, my uncle stuck in his lorry somewhere far beneath. Imagine I hear a growl in the darkness.
The story of that goat-legged thing and the lonely bird-tower, the arranged branches, the lonely woodcutter. The slow lowing of huddled cattle, the endless trees. It’s a good yarn. I tell it in pubs to friends and acquaintances, my own interpretations and changes stitched into the story’s fabric. I have this compulsion to tell it, something to puncture the humdrum, a little bit of the uncanny to enliven our dreary weekends. When dad goes I’ll be the conduit for both him and granddad.
*
Dad is doing one of his long haul jaunts over to Europe, the destination somewhere in Germany or Austria, requiring cutting through the Black Forest. It’s winter and Christmas is coming. This is the last job before he heads back to Essex, to my mum and us. Some sort of bonus pay packet, overtime in order to stuff our stockings and buy mum something decent for once. He feels bad that she’s stuck at home with the kids, but what can you do? A man’s got to work. He gets the ferry over the water, sets off through France, into Germany in a time before the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War was still something contemporary. Were those times better or worse? I guess, at the very least, you had a sense of your place in the world.
Driving through that forest, he sees the slope of mountains carpeted with trees so dark they appear black, a few locals doing what they do along the roadside, cattle being herded in seeming slow motion to destinations unknown. A solitary woodcutter hefts an axe, fresh out of some Grimm tale and dad thinks he can smell sawdust and pine resin. Dad imagines his own children—me, my sister—lost out in these woods, following breadcrumb trails and shivering with fright, coming to terms with their abandonment. Alone, tired and suffering from twelve hours straight on the road, his mind fills with leering lupine grins and bright menstrual reds, cannibal hags, confectionery dwellings. The forest, he knows, is a place where things happen. He passes some sort of wooden tower, its use opaque. Birdwatching, perhaps. Some German hobby popular in these parts. A home for the lonely woodcutter.
Miles from anywhere, the engine packs in with a stutter and sigh. The lorry grinds to a halt. It’s getting dark already, the evergreens standing stern like angry patricians. It’s cold and getting colder. Dad weighs up his options. The nearest town is at least five miles away. He doesn’t know the terrain and his mind is full of sharp teeth and bleeding fur. The best plan, he decides, is to sleep in the lorry. Walk to the nearest town in the morning, flag down some passing motorist if he’s lucky. Maybe the woodcutter will save him. Dad pulls his coat over himself, rubs his hands to try and stay warm, thinks of Christmas gifts for mum and beds down for the night. His stomach growls but he has no food. He shivers himself to sleep.
About three in the morning he wakes, breath pure white fogging up the windows, the moisture quick to freeze. There’s ice on the inside of the cab. There’s a chill in him that goes bone deep, it’s all encompassing and his limbs are dead wood, unresponsive. He’s ready for the chop, unless he does something. He thinks of granddad thrashing underwater in fright, forces himself awake and out of the lorry. Begins, ridiculously, doing star jumps, running on the spot, laps around the vehicle, anything to get the blood pumping and his temperature up. The woods are still and silent. He’s thankful for his torch, its perfect line of light cutting through a blackness thick and tar-like, ready to consume the unwary.
Nothing but the closed ranks of the evergreens. No, on closer inspection, in a gap among the trees he can see small signs of humanity. A rough path, compressed pine needles and leaf litter. He thinks he hears something, sees what may be the light of a fire ahead. Curiosity overcomes fear. To this day he’ll claim he was half-delirious with cold and hunger and fatigue. He enters the woods. Feels the eyeless glares of the pines regard him from all sides, the prickly rustle of the pine needle carpet he walks on making him think, absurdly, of Christmas back in Essex. The torch beam is a single-yellow line slashed across black tarmac. He thinks about all the impossible chains of events that lead to these moments in our lives.
He sees cut branches, arranged pyramid-like, some jerry-built temple. Like the skeleton of a tipi maybe, but festooned with plants and offerings. Sharp holly and bloody berries, some straw facsimile of a human being, pine boughs bent like the arms of crippled children. In the light of day festive and seasonal, but here, in this black night, in the depths of a fairytale forest, malignant and cancerous. Ahead, a faint orange fire-glow.
That’s when he hears a kind of growling chuckle. His torch beam frantically scans the terrain and maybe there’s a hint of black fur approaching, the shadows thicker and darker in places than they should be. Dad staggers back, sees something goat-legged and red-tongued, some furred forest god grinning and behind it androgynous beings of golden straw stand motionless amongst the evergreens. Hints of a blade, clawed fingers on curled hands. In that moment he sees the thing he know is impossible and utterly of this place, forest devil, Horned God, punisher of the wicked. A warning for the children. The thing sees him, this English man from Essex, and seems to smile and flex its claws and maybe it beckons him. And you know what? He feels the pull. To join this world and never come back. Knows, deep down, he is wicked. But he thinks of mum alone and my sister sitting under a plastic pine tree.
This is when he runs, runs back to the road and leaves the lorry where it is, runs, walks and stumbles until he hits the next village five miles down the road and bangs on German doors for help and the assertion that this is the real world, not that world out there in the woods, where things he doesn’t want to know about happen and are happening and will always happen.
He’s quizzed by local police, is savvy enough to keep it simple and say he simply got lost and frightened. They find the lorry the next morning, ice on the inside. Call a mechanic who gets the job done. As he works, dad scans the lines of evergreens and the path of trampled needles is not there. He hears, somewhere, a man chopping wood.
He quit the lorry driving soon after that, and then found Christianity in a big way, hit it like a drug. Mainlined the stuff. Mum says it was the guilt after he left us but I think it was something else. It’s something I’ve never forgiven him for, and I know that the beginnings of that flight toward what he considers holy began with that thing that may have been a bear, a tree, a magnificent horned stag, but was not. He doesn’t want it, it embarrasses him. The story is mine now.
MALCOLM DEVLIN
The End of Hope Street
NUMBER FIVE
The Potterton house became unliveable at a quarter past three on Saturday afternoon. Lewis Potterton had been sitting in the lounge reading the business section of the Daily Telegraph when he first saw the symptoms, but when he got to the hallway to call his wife and daughter, he saw they were already hurrying downstairs, his wife Lydia fresh from the shower and still wrapped in a towel.
They hesitated, surprised at how, in a moment of bemused concordance, everyone else’s actions had mirrored their own. No one spoke, but then no one needed to. It was true that there had been frictions between them over the past few months; Lewis’ work had demanded too-long hours of him, Lydia appeared helpless under threat of redundancy, and Monica had felt ignored by the both of them. But standing there together in the hallway, there
was an unshakable sense that the connection between them ran deeper and stronger than any of them had previously anticipated. In that one, precious moment, they were still and hyper aware, listening to the sounds of the house settling, sounds that only the previous day had been normal and reassuring.
Then, as one, they made for the front door and let themselves out, hiding their haste from one another until they were safely together on the front lawn where they stopped and looked back at the house that Lydia and Lewis had lived in since they had married fifteen years earlier, the house that Monica had known all of her life.
It was a bright sunny afternoon, and Lewis was struck by all the times he had woken in the night, fretting about what he should rescue in the event of a fire: the laptop, the accounts, the family photographs. He’d had a plan for them once, but he knew now that the most important parts of his life were there with him. His wife, his twelve-year-old daughter, his health so he could take care of them. Everything else was as good as gone now, locked and lost inside the house they would never enter again, and at that moment he really didn’t care anymore.
*
It was the Feltons who took the family in. They lived two doors down at number seven and on that particular afternoon, Una Felton had been putting the recycling out early, which she did every weekend. She saw the Pottertons standing together on their front lawn. She saw how the father (Louis? Larry?) stood with his arms around his wife and daughter, she saw how all three of them stared at the house they had lived in, and she recognised the look of sadness and pride in their expressions.
She’d been unhappy when the couple had first moved to Hope Street. How long had that been now? She remembered them driving up to view the property in that ridiculous red sports car. He had a pony tail then and she tottered on heels across the lawn. Hidden behind the net curtain in the lounge at number seven, Una had listened to their unguarded enthusiasm and assumed the worst. They were young, she’d thought. They were loud and vulgar. Maybe they’d come armed with the means to lower the tone and the price of the neighbourhood.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Page 30