by Paul Sussman
‘Frinton, every year,’ she’d cry. ‘Seaview hotel. Room five. Every year. Me, Mother, Father and Aunt Dotty. I know I’ve got the photos here somewhere.’
And that was it. I was trapped. Me on one side of the door, her on the other, and the photo album in between. Trapped in Frinton like a fly in a web.
I started going up to bed later and later, just as in the mornings I would be getting out of bed earlier and earlier. I would sit in the library long after lights out, eventually tiptoeing up to bed in the silence of the very early morning, holding my breath, measuring each step, hoping desperately that she would be asleep, that I might slip safely and deliciously beneath my duvet without a mention of Frinton or Aunt Dotty or Simon and his nocturnal activities with Levantine bodybuilders. But still she’d get me. Burst from her room with a cry of ‘Mr Phoenix, might I just ask you . . .’ and engage me in some tortuous conversation that left me drained and nauseous. She must have had ears like a bloody bat.
And even when I did finally get rid of her, did manage to prod her back into her room, still she would torment me. I would turn out the lights, curl exhausted in my bed clutching The Photo, breathe deep and start to relax. And then the noises would start.
Not big noises. Not bangings or clankings or screamings. Not the sort of noises about which you could put a letter in the house complaints box. No, these were silent noises. Furtive noises, like those made by rodents creeping around in a loft. I’d be drifting gratefully into sleep when I would hear a faint scratching on the other side of the wall. I would listen, it would stop, I would close my eyes again, and then scratch scratch scratch. I would get up, nerves jangling, and lay my ear against the wall. Silence. One minute. Two minutes. I’d go back to bed and then it would start again: scratch scratch scratch. And sometimes it would be a moaning sound, like someone having a bad dream, or a frightful porcine snoring, or an endlessly repeated series of sighs, or, on occasion, an ear-shatteringly loud fart, until I couldn’t stand it any more and would fly from my bed and hammer furiously on the wall:
‘Shut up, you abominable old haddock! Shut up, I say!’
The net result of which would be an interlude of blissful silence, and then a soft knock on the door.
‘Are you in trouble, Mr Phoenix? Do you require medical attention?’
I started sleeping on Archie Bogosian’s floor, or in a chair in the conservatory, or, on one hot night, out in the garden, head pillowed on a divot of turf. I even asked the warden if I could move to another part of the house but, as Sod’s Law would have it, this was one of those rare periods when all the Nannybrook residents were in exceptional health and no one showed the least sign of dying and vacating their room.
For a while I took solace in sex.
‘At least she can’t stop me screwing,’ I chuckled to myself one night, wandering upstairs after a tremulous moonlit assignation amongst the mulchy fallen apples of the Nannybrook orchard. ‘At least there’s one thing she can’t spoil, foul old toad.’
I spoke too soon, however, for two weeks later she discovered me having it off with Nurse Butcher in the back of the latter’s Hillman Hunter.
‘Excuse me!’ she cried, tapping politely on a steamed-up side window. ‘But are you lead-free?’
Thereafter I found myself quite unable to get an erection without suffering concomitant mental images of my appalling prune of a neighbour, and eventually I did myself a favour and stopped having erections altogether. My sex life withered like a flower in a desert.
My one release, it seemed, came in my daily rambles. She had a bad hip and, though on several occasions she tried, could not keep up with me. I would bolt my jam and croissant breakfast and charge down the drive with the old crone in hot pursuit. ‘Mr Phoenix!’ she would cry plaintively. ‘Mr Phoenix! I have something urgent to discuss with you! Please wait a moment.’ But I pretended not to hear and shot through the gates to freedom as she hobbled pathetically far behind. ‘Please, Mr Phoenix. You’re going too fast. My hips hurt!’
I’d hop on a No. 14 up to the centre of town and merge into the jostling crowds, delighting in the vast, noisy anonymity of it all. Delighting in the non-presence of Mrs Bunshop and her ubiquitous fucking bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream.
In time, however, even my expeditions became sullied with thoughts of her. I would be marching round the British Museum when suddenly I would be hit by the thought that at some point I would have to return home. Return to Nannybrook, where she would be waiting – hips, lips and all – like some nasty prowling spider.
‘Bugger Bunshop,’ I would groan, slumping on to a bench beneath the Elgin Marbles, my head in my hands. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’
I ceased rowing on the Serpentine because I kept imagining her lurking in the depths beneath like a malevolent squid, a thought that invariably caused me to drop my oars and nearly capsize in alarm. I stopped going to porno cinemas with Archie because of fears, admittedly irrational, that she might suddenly appear on the screen. I even began avoiding the site of White Lodge, my old home, after an old woman of Mrs Bunshop’s height and build, her face hidden beneath a tartan headscarf, took to feeding the squirrels nearby. The mere thought of her was enough to darken the brightest day.
And yet for all that I never actually set out to kill the old ferret. I hated her, dreaded her, spent a disproportionate amount of time cursing her, yet I never specifically planned to set her alight. It just sort of happened. No one was more surprised than I when she erupted in flames. Except, of course, Mrs Bunshop. She was very surprised.
The day I murdered Mrs Bunshop, in the summer of 1985, was no different from any other day. I rose at 6.30 a.m. after a sleepless night and sneaked out into the corridor where, of course, she was loitering, like a nasty brooding phantom. I cursed her beneath my breath and, rather than wait for breakfast, set off immediately to catch the bus into town.
‘Mr Phoenix!’ she cried, pursuing me down the stairs. ‘Dear Mr Phoenix, might I ask your advice on a matter of some urgency?’
‘No, you can’t,’ I snapped, leaping down the steps two at a time. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘I know your game!’ she trilled, hobbling arthritically in my wake. ‘Playing hard to get, you naughty boy.’
‘Mrs Bunshop,’ I cried, turning at the bottom of the stairs, ‘bugger off.’
Whereupon I hurried across the hallway, heaved open the enormous red front door, and charged off down the drive.
‘You’ll be back!’ she cried as I went. ‘You won’t be able to help yourself!’
The rest of the day I spent sitting miserably on a bench beside the Thames, remaining there until dusk, when I took myself up to Leicester Square to watch a film. This didn’t finish till past 11, and I then wandered around for another hour or so, mingling with the night-time crowds, before eventually catching a bus back to Putney. By the time I reached Nannybrook it was close on 1 a.m.
I let myself in, grabbed some garibaldi biscuits and a glass of milk from the kitchen, and then sneaked warily upstairs, senses at full alert for the inevitable Bunshop onslaught. I reached the first-floor landing without incident, however, and then the second-floor landing, and then my bedroom, and before I knew it I was inside with the door shut and not a sign of my egregious neighbour. For the first time in a year I was home and safe without a single whiff of Harveys Bristol Cream.
‘Perhaps she’s gone to sleep early,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe she’s died. Oh God, let her have died!’
I secreted The Pill and The Photo in the corner cupboard and curled up on the bed, waiting for the nocturnal noises to begin. The sighs and scrapes and snores and burps. Nothing, however. Not a peep. All was silent. Ominously silent.
‘There’s something going on,’ I muttered to myself. ‘She’s planning something. I can feel it. Hideous old yak.’
I lay for perhaps half an hour or so, chain-smoking, waiting nervously for whatever scheme it was that Mrs Bunshop was hatching to make itself known. When, after thirty minutes, h
owever, all was still silent, I got up, put on a dressing gown and eased open my bedroom door.
All was quiet, save for a distant rumble of snoring from old Mrs Hibbert four doors down.
‘Hello?’ I whispered, peering out into the shadows.
No reply.
‘Hello?’
Silence.
I leaned out into the musty corridor and looked to right and left. All was still.
‘Perhaps she has died,’ I thought, hardly daring to believe that something so fortuitous could have occurred with so little warning. ‘Or been moved. Perhaps the nightmare’s over!’
Emboldened, I said quite loudly, ‘Ethel Bunshop, are you there?’
Still there was no reply, however, nor any sound whatsoever aside from Mrs Hibbert’s snoring; and now, quite convinced that something had happened to her, I stepped right out into the corridor and made my way along to her room, the door of which I found, rather to my surprise, was slightly ajar. I pressed myself against the wall, heart thumping, and peered through the crack.
There was only a space of some six inches to look through, so I couldn’t see very much. The room was illuminated by a pale, ghostly luminescence – from a television, I guessed, its sound turned down – by whose flickering light I was able to see the edge of her bed and a pair of furry, zip-up-the-front boots arranged against the further wall. All remained silent.
I stayed where I was for several minutes, and then, hardly daring to breathe, I pushed the door a little further open. I could now see the television screen, on which a black and white film appeared to be showing, and, lying open on the armchair next to it, as if abandoned in a hurry, the dreaded photo album.
‘Mrs Bunshop?’ I whispered. ‘Mrs Bunshop?’
Again, no response, so I pushed the door wide open and stepped inside.
‘Hello hello!’ I said, raising my voice slightly, more confident now that – Glory be to God on high! – I was rid of the old goose.
Silence.
I quickened my pace, half expecting – positively hopeful even – that I would find her collapsed on the far side of the bed. But in my eagerness to confirm her demise, and in the darkened shadows of the room, I stumbled into the arm of the chair and knocked my shins hard against the sharp corner of the open photograph album. The bulky volume wobbled precariously on its perch for a couple of seconds and then crashed to the floor, ripping the leather-bound spine away from the pages of the book and scattering dog-eared black and white photographs all over the carpet.
Despite the many hours that Mrs Bunshop had pursued me with it, I had never given the contents of her album much attention. While she wittered on about seaside holidays and her endless aunts, my mind had shut down. A constant stream of photographs had been relentlessly thrust under my nose but I remained steadfastly oblivious to the minutiae of her family tree. Now, as I bent down and hurriedly started to tidy the photographs back into the broken album I was suddenly struck with a heart-stopping twinge of recognition.
There she was. Staring up at me. In this particular photograph she was standing next to a chubby, five-year-old Ethel, who was grinning manically at the camera, clutching a lacy parasol. Despite only flickering light from the television and the fuzziness of the old photograph, her jutting chin and misshapen bulk were unmistakable. I slowly turned the photograph over. Scrawled in Ethel’s childish writing on the back was confirmation of what I already knew: ‘With Aunt Dotty, Frinton, Easter, 1907’.
A beloved Aunt Dotty she may well have been to Ethel Bunshop, but to me she will always be the abhorrent Miss Dorothy Wasply.
‘I knew you wouldn’t forsake me, Mr Phoenix,’ said a voice suddenly, pitching me back to 1985. ‘I knew you’d come back.’
Ethel Bunshop was, at that point, still very much alive. She was standing just to my left, in front of the open window, wearing a frilly nightgown, which glowed silver in the flickering television light. She smelt strongly of sherry and lavender water and was standing with her back to me, staring up at the stars.
‘You couldn’t help yourself,’ she said seductively. ‘Some urges are irresistible. Quite irresistible.’
I don’t know whether it was the photograph that triggered it, or the suggestion of irresistible urges, but I was suddenly gripped by an overwhelming desire for action. Without quite knowing what I was doing I lurched forward, seized Mrs Bunshop’s withered ankles and, like a gardener emptying a wheelbarrow full of compost, tipped her out of the open window. Just like that. No thought. No fuss. No pre-planning. Just up and out. I had a brief glimpse of her creased thighs, and then she was gone. I didn’t hear her hit the ground, but then it was 30 feet below.
‘Bloody good riddance,’ I huffed to myself. ‘Now maybe I can get a proper night’s sleep.’
I stood still for a moment, just back from the window, breathing deeply, both exhilarated and surprised and a mite concerned about my actions, and then leant out to get a better look at her crumpled corpse. At which point I saw a most amazing sight.
Some three feet below the level of the window, bolted to the outside, was a large floodlight. It was trained upon the flowerbeds below and switched on at nightfall to illuminate the roses and discourage ‘undesirables’ from prowling around the Nannybrook grounds. It was, according to Archie Bogosian, the reason so many people died in the room above. ‘Too much electricity,’ he explained. ‘Pollutes the air. Worse than radiation.’
On this particular night, however, it appeared to have saved a life rather than taken one, for hanging upside down from the rust-fringed lamp-face, her nightgown snagged on one of its sharp corners, was Mrs Bunshop. Moths and other night-time insects fluttered around her face and, in a bizarre imitation of their movement, she flapped her arms as though trying to take off.
‘You threw me out of the window, Mr Phoenix!’ she squealed. ‘I distinctly felt you throw me out of the window.’
I darted back into the room and looked wildly around. In the corner was her rubber-footed wooden walking stick. I rushed across, seized it and, flying back to the window, tried to poke the hideous old monster off her perch. Prod, prod, prod.
‘Ugh!’ she groaned. ‘Ugh!’
For a moment I thought I had her, and she began to slip, but then, with alarming dexterity, like some circus acrobat, she managed to grasp hold of the stick with both hands and pull herself up, towards me.
‘Die, trout!’ I hissed, rattling the stick as hard as I could. But I was unable to shake her loose, and, with strength I didn’t think possible in one her age, she groped her way from an almost upside-down position until she was virtually sitting astride the floodlight. Its rays shone upwards through her nightdress and set her glowing like a shrivelled Halloween pumpkin. A curiously acrid smell, as of burning hay, assaulted my nostrils.
‘Oh Mr Phoenix!’ she cried dramatically, now able to reach out and grab hold of each of my arms, locking them into a vice-like grip, ‘will you murder me?’
‘Too bloody right!’ I replied. But bent double over the windowsill and with her clinging to me with the tenacity of a barnacle, I could actually do very little. Slowly, as she had done with the walking stick, she began to grapple upwards like a monkey until she was clutching me round the shoulders and her face was level with my own, whereupon, to my surprise, she headbutted me on the nose. I straightened, and there was a sound of shattering glass as Mrs Bunshop’s feet smashed into the front of the floodlight. At the same time I noticed thick curlicues of smoke spiralling upwards from the hem of her nightdress where it lay across the floodlight.
‘I always knew you were a bad seed!’ she hissed.
She headbutted me again, harder than before, and I staggered backwards into her bedroom, dragging her inside with me, legs about my waist and arms about my neck. Smoke was now pouring from the bottom of her nightdress and, even as I banged against the wall, the material suddenly burst into flame, illuminating the room with infernal leaping shadows. Mrs Bunshop let out an ear-piercing scream, there was a faintly s
weet smell as of simmering chicken, and then her entire nightgown erupted. Whoosh! Like a Roman candle. Flames were everywhere.
I tried to drop her, but she was having none of it.
‘Like lovers on the Champs Élysées!’ she cried, clutching me harder than ever, arms locked around my neck, legs around the small of my back. I bucked and writhed, but her grip was not to be broken. Flames burst into my face, my hair caught light, my dressing gown ignited, I screamed for all I was worth. The agony was beyond anything I can possibly describe. I whirled round the room, Mrs Bunshop still glued to my chest, smashing into the furniture, banging against the walls, enmeshed in searing flame and acrid sheets of smoke, until eventually I was overwhelmed and crashed to the floor.
Which is, apparently, how we were found. By old Mrs Hibbert, of all people, who smothered us with a duvet. Mrs Bunshop was dead. Charcoaled like an overdone corn on the cob. I was alive, but only just. I awoke briefly in the ambulance, but after that all is forgetfulness.
Whilst I was in hospital I received a visit from Emily.
Since the day, nine years previously, when she had scooped me up from my squalor and deposited me on the Nannybrook doorstep, I had seen neither hide nor hair of her. My residential fees had been paid – six-monthly, by postal order, no questions asked – and I received from somewhere a small allowance which, together with my pension and not insubstantial backgammon winnings, allowed me to live a more than comfortable existence. From Emily, herself, however, I had heard nothing.
And then, suddenly, she was there at my bedside, with a bunch of daffodils and an improbably large bunch of seedless South African grapes, which I couldn’t eat because my face was all bandaged up. Typical Emily.