That night, after Papa finished my bedtime story, he kissed my forehead. He still hadn’t shaved and his lips felt spiky. He pulled the blankets up to my chin. ‘Try and keep these on the bed tonight, Yuki. Every morning they are on the floor and you feel as cold as ice.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘Maybe tomorrow the rain will stop. We can go and look at the river.’
‘I don’t mind the rain, Papa. I like to play inside the house.’
Frowning and looking down at my blankets, Papa thought about what I had said. ‘Sometimes in old houses little girls have bad dreams. Do you have bad dreams, Yuki? Is that why you kick the sheets off?’
‘No.’
He smiled at me. ‘That’s good.’
‘Do you have bad dreams, Papa?’
‘No, no,’ he said, but the look in his eyes said yes. ‘The medicine makes it hard for me to sleep. That’s all.’
‘I’m not scared. The house is very friendly.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it is. It just wants to make friends. It’s so happy we’re here.’
Papa laughed. ‘But the rain. And all the mice here, Yuki. It’s not much of a welcome.’
I smiled. ‘There are no mice here, Papa. The toys don’t like mice. They ate them all up.’
Papa stopped laughing. In his throat I watched a lump move up and down.
‘You don’t have to worry about them, Papa. They’re my friends.’
‘Friends?’ His voice was very quiet. ‘Toys? You’ve seen them?’ His voice was so tiny that I could hardly hear him.
I nodded, and smiled to make him stop worrying. ‘When all the children left, they stayed behind.’
‘Where . . . where do you see them?’
‘Oh, everywhere. But mostly at night. That’s when they come out to play. They usually come out of the fireplace.’ I pointed at the dark place in the corner of my room. Papa stood up quickly and turned around to stare at the fireplace. Outside my window the rain stopped falling on the world that it had made so soft and wet.
The next morning, Papa found something inside the chimney in my room. He started the search in my bedroom with the broom handle and the torch, poking around up there and knocking all the soot down, which clouded across the floor. Mama wasn’t happy, but when she saw the little parcel that dropped down from the chimney, she went quiet.
‘Look,’ Papa said. He held his arm out with the package on the palm of his hand. They took it into the kitchen and I followed.
Papa blew on it and then wiped it clean of ash with the paint brush from under the kitchen sink. On the table Mama put a piece of newspaper under the parcel. I stood on a chair and we all looked at the bundle of dirty cloth. Then Papa told Mama to get her little scissors from her sewing box. When Mama came back with the scissors, Papa carefully cut into the dry wrappings. Then he peeled them away from the tiny hand inside.
Mama spread her fingers over her mouth. Papa just sat back and looked at it, like he didn’t want to touch it. All around us we could hear the rain hitting the windows and rattling on the roof. It sounded louder than ever before. Then I knelt on the table and Mama scolded me for getting too close. ‘It could have germs.’
I thought it was a chicken’s foot, cut from a yellow leg, like the ones you see in the windows of restaurants in the city. But it had five curly fingers with long nails. Before I could touch it, Mama wrapped it up in newspaper and stuffed it deep inside the kitchen bin.
But there were others. In the empty room at the end of the hallway, Papa knocked another parcel out of the chimney and took it down to the kitchen again. At first, my Mama wouldn’t even look at the tiny shoe, even before we found the bone foot inside. She stood by the window and watched the wet garden. Leafy branches moved out there in the heavy rain, like they were waving at the house.
The shoe was made of pinky silk and my Papa untied the little ribbons. It opened with a puff of dust and he emptied the teeny foot on to the table. The rattle sound made Mama look over shoulder. ‘Throw it away, Taichi. I don’t want it in the house,’ she said.
Papa looked at me and raised his eyebrows. We went off looking for more. In the big parlour downstairs while he was poking up inside the chimney, he told me the little parcels belonged to ancestors. ‘This is a very old house. And when it was built, the people put little charms in secret places. Under the floors, in the cellars and up inside the chimneys to protect the house from bad spirits.’
‘But why are they so small?’ I asked Papa. ‘Was it a baby’s foot in the shoe?’
He never answered me and just kept poking around, up inside the chimney with the broom handle. Papa was very clever, but I don’t think he knew the answers to my questions. These things he was finding had something to do with the toys, I was sure, so I decided I would ask Maho when I saw her later. She disappeared while I was eating breakfast and was still hiding because Papa was going into every room and searching about.
The next parcel we found was a tiny white sack, tied up with string, with brownish stains at the bottom. But right after Papa opened it and poured the hard black lumps onto the kitchen table, he quickly wrapped them up in newspaper and put them inside the kitchen bin with the hand and the foot. ‘What are they?’ I asked him.
‘Just some old stones,’ he said.
But they didn’t look like stones. They were very light and black and reminded me of dried salt fish.
Papa stopped looking after that and swept up the soot from the floorboards instead. While he did this, Mama stood on a chair in their bedroom to get the suitcases down from the wardrobe. And I couldn’t find Maho anywhere. She never came out all day. I looked everywhere, in all of our secret places, but I never found her or saw any of the toys either. I whispered her name into all of the tiny holes but she never answered. But when I was checking inside the attic, I heard Mama and Papa talking underneath the loft hatch. ‘A heart,’ Papa whispered to Mama. ‘A tiny heart’ was all I heard before they moved away and went downstairs.
That night, when Maho climbed into bed with me, she held me tighter than ever before and wrapped me up in her silky hair so that I could hardly move. It was so dark inside her hair that I couldn’t see anything and I told her to let me go. I couldn’t breathe, but she was in a strange sulky mood and she just squeezed me with her cold hands until I felt sleepy.
Outside, the rain stopped and the house started to creak like the old ship that we went on one summer. Eventually Maho spoke. She said that she had missed me. In a yawny voice, I asked her about the shoe, the foot and the little bag with the lumps inside that Papa had found in the chimneys.
‘They belong to the toys,’ Maho said. ‘Your papa shouldn’t have taken away things that belong to the toys. It was a mistake. It was wrong.’
‘But they were old and dirty and nasty,’ I told her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They belong to the toys. They put them up there a long time ago, and they shouldn’t be removed by parents. They’re like happy memories to the toys. Now sleep, Yuki. Sleep.’
I couldn’t understand this. While I was thinking about what Maho said, I started to fall asleep. It was so warm inside all of that hair. And she sang a little song into my ear and rubbed her cold nose against my cheek like a puppy dog.
Outside my bedroom in the hallway I heard the toys gathering. More toys than ever before had come out to play. All at the same time, and all in the same place. This had never happened before. It must have been a special occasion, like a parade. They had a parade when Maho’s parents left. ‘Toys. Can you hear the toys?’ I whispered into the black fur around my face, and then I dropped further into the deep hole of sleepiness.
Maho didn’t answer me, so I just listened to the toys moving through the dark. Little feet shuffled; pinkish tails whisked on wood; bells jingled on hats and from the curly toes of thin feet; tap tappity tap went the w
ooden sticks of the old apes; twik twik twik went the lady with knitting needle legs; clackety clack sounded the hooves of the black horsy with yellow teeth; tisker tisker tisker went the cymbal of the dolly with the sharp fingers; dum dum dum went the drum; and on and on they marched through the house. Down, down and down the hall.
Shouting woke me up. Through my sleep and all the dark softness around my body, I heard a loud voice. I thought it was Papa. But when my eyes opened the house was silent. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t move my arms and my feet. Rolling from side to side, I made some space in Maho’s hair. It was everywhere and all around me. ‘Maho? Maho?’ I said. ‘Wake up, Maho.’
But she just held me tighter with her thin arms. Blowing the hair out of my mouth, I tried to move a hand so that I could take the long strands from out of my eyes. I couldn’t see anything. Maho wouldn’t help me either, and it took me a long time to unwind the silky ropes from around my neck and off my face, and to shake them from my arms and from between my fingers and toes where they tugged and pulled. In the end, I had to flop onto my tummy and then wriggle backwards through the funnel of her black hair. She was fast asleep and very still and wouldn’t wake up when I shook her.
I could only sit up properly when I reached the bottom of the bed. All the sheets and blankets were on the floor again. I climbed off the bed and ran into the unlit hall. I couldn’t see the cold floorboards and could only hear the patter of my bare feet on the wood as I moved down to Mama and Papa’s room. The door to their room was open. Maybe Papa was having a bad dream and was awake, so I stood outside and looked in.
It was very dark inside their room, but something was moving. I screwed up my eyes and stared at where the thin light coming around the curtains had fallen, and then I saw that the whole bed was moving. ‘Mama,’ I said.
It looked like Mama and Papa were trying to sit up but couldn’t. And all the sheets around them were rustling. Someone was making a moaning sound, but it didn’t sound like Mama or Papa. It sounded like someone was trying to speak with their mouth full. And there was another sound coming from the bed too, and getting louder as I stood there. A wet sound. Like lots of busy people eating noodles in a Tokyo diner.
The door closed and I turned around to look behind me. I knew Maho was there before I even saw her.
Maho looked at me through her hair. ‘The toys are only playing,’ she said.
She took my hand and led me back to our bed. I climbed in after her and she wrapped me up in all that hair. And together we listened to the sounds of the toys putting things into the secret places, behind the walls, where they belonged.
Florrie
Frank remembered his mother once saying, ‘Houses give off a feeling’, and that she could ‘sense things’ inside them. At the time, he’d been a boy and his family had been drifting around prospective homes with an estate agent. He only remembered the occasion because his mother was distressed by a house that they had viewed and had hurried away from to get back to the car. As an adult, all he could recall of that particular property was a print of a blue-faced Christ, within a gilt frame, hanging on the wall of a scruffy living room; the only picture on any of the walls. And the beds had been unmade, which had also shocked his mother. His father had never contradicted his mother on these occasional matters of a psychic nature, though his father had never encouraged her to hold forth on them either. ‘Something terrible happened there’ was his mother’s final remark once the car doors were shut, and the house was never mentioned again. But Frank had been perplexed by the incongruity of both the blue skin of the Christ and a house belonging to Christians that issued an unpleasant ‘feeling’ to his mother, when she should, surely, have detected the opposite effect.
Frank amused himself trying to second-guess what her intuition would be about the first home that he’d ever owned. He knew what his dad would say about the 120 per cent mortgage that he’d arranged to purchase the two-bedroomed terraced house. But once the house was fixed up, he’d have them down to ‘his place’: his own home after ten years of cohabitation and tenancy agreements.
The narrow frontage of the house’s grubby bricks faced a drab street, cramped with identical houses that leaned over a road so narrow that two cars driving from opposing ends struggled to pass each other. But a final jiggle of the Yale key moved him out of the weak rainy light and into an unlit hallway where the air was thick with trapped warmth. A cloud of stale upholstery, cauliflower thoroughly boiled, and a trace of floral perfume descended about him.
He assured himself that the house would soon exude the scents of his world: the single professional who could cook a bit of Thai, liked entertaining and used Hugo Boss toiletries. Once he’d ripped out the old carpets, stripped the walls and generally ‘torn the shit out of it’, as his best friend Marcus had remarked with a decisive relish, the house would quickly lose the malodour of the wrong decade, age group and gender.
Enshrouded by a thin illumination that wafted through ground-floor windows begrimed with silt and the silvery nets, he quickly realised that there had been a mistake and that the place had not been cleared of the former owner’s furniture. It was as if he’d mixed up the exchange dates and stepped into what remained of the vendor’s home. ‘Pure 70s, Nan,’ Marcus had remarked, with a grin on his face, during the evening when he’d visited to assist Frank’s purchasing decision between this two-up, two-down and an ex-council property in Weoley Castle that had needed an airstrike more than a first-time buyer.
Poking from a Bakelite fitting on the wall of the front room was a chunky light switch, the same colour as the skirting boards, kitchen cupboards and fittings: the plastic of artificial limbs used until the 1950s. But the switch was stiff and, when he’d forced it down, the ceiling fixture only emitted a smoky glow from inside its plastic shade, a shade patterned with all the colours of a tin of fruit cocktail.
He stared at the cluttered room and his distaste and irritation fashioned fantasies of destruction about everything inside it: the rosewood sideboard; the gas fire grille with its plastic coals and concealed light bulbs that would glow in the hearth; the ancient television in a wooden cabinet, the small screen concave like a poorly ground lens in a pair of NHS spectacles; the tufted sofa, exhausted and faded and reduced from an article once plush and dark but now sagging into the suggestion of a shabby velour glove dropped from a giant’s hand. All of it was an affront to his taste. The furniture and appliances also made him morose, though glad that he’d been born in the mid-70s so that he’d not had long to wait for styles to dramatically change and appear modern over the next decade.
Beneath his feet a red carpet swirled with green fronds and made him think of chameleons’ tongues licking fire. He looked down at the weave and his focus was drawn into the pattern. The carpet absorbed most of the dim electric light too, and drained the last of his optimism.
As if he’d just uttered an inappropriate remark in polite company, from the dusty gloom of the sitting room an odd chastening quality descended upon his spirits.
Frank reached out and touched a wall, without really understanding why he felt the need to. The paper was old and fuzzy against his fingertips, the vine pattern no longer lilac on cream but sepia on parchment. About him the warmth and powerful fragrance of the room intensified in tandem with his curious guilt.
Momentarily, his thoughts were weighted with remorse, as if he was being forced to observe the additional distress that his spiteful thoughts about the decor had inflicted upon someone already frightened and . . . bullied. He even felt an urge to apologise to the room out loud.
Only the sound of a delivery truck reversing and beeping outside stirred Frank from his inexplicable shame. The unpleasant feelings passed and he surveyed the room again.
Where to start? Before he could pull up a single carpet tack, the furniture would have to be removed. All of it.
He reached for his phone. This also meant that the terrible Formica
dining table with extendable flaps would still be crowding the second downstairs room, along with the hideous quilted chairs. He checked and confirmed that all of the vendor’s furniture remained in place. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he whispered, and wondered why he’d kept his voice down.
Frank jogged up the narrow stairwell to expel a sense of fatigue, presumably caused by the stifling air or the anticipation of renovating the house.
The master bedroom was still choked by the immense veneered walnut wardrobe that he’d seen during his two viewings of the property. Beside it a teak dresser stood before him in defiance. A bed that had probably survived the Luftwaffe’s bombing of munitions factories on the nearby Grand Union Canal appeared implacable and vast enough to fill what remained of the floor-space.
One quick look around the door of the second bedroom revealed that it was also being used in absentia by the previous owner, as a depository for cardboard suitcases, dated Christmas decorations, candlewick bedspreads, candy-striped linen and knitting paraphernalia.
On the tiny landing, while standing beneath the white hardboard loft hatch, Frank wondered if the old woman had even moved out, or perhaps come back home. ‘She’s in a retirement home, I think. Couldn’t cope. Went a bit funny. Dementia or something,’ the wanker that was the estate agent, Justin, at Watkins, Perch and Manly, had said when Frank had asked about the former occupant’s history. So why hadn’t her relatives collected her things?
Maybe she had no one at the end.
Frank was overwhelmed by an unwelcome notion of age, its indignities, its steady erasure of who you had once been and the recycling of your tiny former position in the world. The same tragic end might befall him one day. Right here too.
He was disoriented by a sudden acute empathy with a loneliness that might have been absolute. It took a conscious effort for him to suppress the awful feeling. Wiping his eyes, he went back downstairs.
Before You Sleep Page 4