Keeping in the shadow he stepped swiftly back towards the shop with the shutters and the broken front door. Quickly he stepped inside. For some extraordinary reason, no kid had bothered to break the frosted glass in the door. The doctor thought he could hear the hunters trying the doors farther down the street. He knew he was panicking. He could see himself from above. He thought he’d better lie down on the floor with his back against the door. He did so, dropping down just as a couple more cars swung by. He could hear the men in the cars shouting, ‘We’ll find him. Keep a look out for the footsteps in the snow.’ Then the car was gone.
The doctor crouched and held his breath. He couldn’t hear anybody now. Like anyone who has let fear take its grip he was unable to act consistently any more. He almost wanted to give himself up. How like me, he thought. At the worst possible moment, at the instant of maximum risk, as he heard the men just coming up alongside, he moved and ran across the hall, up the first flight of stairs. There was a bulb burning on the landing above. The walls of the place were painted marine blue. He must have thrown a shadow on the frosted glass.
He heard their voices again. They seemed to have paused. They were talking about the phone kiosk. Another two cars came by and one stopped. It seemed that more men were getting out, though the doctor couldn’t see. He imagined hundreds, with sticks and oily cloths round their hair. And with that he heard dogs. He thought he heard the bark of a dog. That made him stagger up the second flight of stairs. He thought, I’ll hide. I’ll find some cover, then get back to the phone when they’ve gone. In the distance there was the sound of sirens: of police cars and ambulances; of a fire engine, maybe, to wash away the red snow.
At the top of the first flight of stairs, on the mean landing facing him, there was a door which would lead into a room overlooking the street and it seemed to be open. They must have seen that the building is deserted, he thought, they must have guessed that he’d come in here. The snow and the sweat had made his face wet and when he tried to wipe his eyes clear he left blood on his cheeks. Hark, hark, he thought, the dogs do bark; he used to tell Lilian all those rhymes. God, how the mind flits and yet sticks when we finally panic. What a white skin I have, the doctor thought. How irrelevant is the mind, in fear.
The door in front of the doctor must have had some story. Again the doctor’s mind switched in that haphazard, tripping, incredibly swift way: this time, to the imagined story of the door.
The voices were calling outside: and calling back.
There wasn’t a lock on the door; there was, so to speak, a no-lock. The lock that had been there was battered away; amputated. Axed, axed out and replaced by plywood and boxwood all nailed together; and some kind of hook and chain. Chain to the lintel.
Another car had drawn up outside in the snowy street. Men with black voices were asking each other, ‘Left, Right, this way, that?’
So somebody sometime must have broken into this room, maybe yelling to get at a woman or to set free a child or a dog, or to mend some broken pipe.
The doctor moved in, suddenly, and the chain rattled against his hand as he stepped into the dark. Inside, the doctor fumbled with the chain. He could still hear those voices out there.
If he hooked up the chain, then nobody could open the door from outside. Not if he hooked it properly and twisted and knotted it. The doctor did that, frantically; tied it, looped it, pulled it. Fear. There was no kind of padlock, but the hook seemed strong. So tie it again, the doctor told himself, you will be safe for a second or two, even for half a minute, safe from every damn black-power running dog downstairs and outside in the bleak street. Safe maybe for a minute.
As he tried it again, and the chain zipped and rattled in his nervous hands, the doctor kept saying to himself, ‘Safe, safe’, only ‘safe’. The doctor thought, Three club drinks, that stage just before group drunkenness where you see your own complexion reflected in the ruddiness of the others’ faces. He felt ashamed. Tabasco on the old liver wound. He shivered and breathed out his held breath. He thought, The window must be covered up. I must go to the window and watch the street from there: watch the kiosk; wait my time.
He breathed again, feeling his knees sag.
Then, all of a sudden his body reacted. His body reacted before his mind. His spine, his legs, his fingers even stiffened. His mouth went dry. His hair stood up at the back of his neck. Then he froze. Absolutely froze. He closed his eyes shut and hung on to the chain behind his back.
The doctor knew that he was not alone in the room.
The doctor came round again as he hit the floor. He groaned. His sense of fear awoke before his power of reason and before his pain. He suppressed his groan. He did not dare close his eyes. He stared at the darkness which must have been the floor, stared at it as if he was no longer capable of closing his eyes.
The doctor knew that he was behaving like a coward. He thought, Worse than talkative Tom Shaw. Then, at once, he tried to reason with himself. Said, ‘Don’t too easily condemn yourself. That never helps. There’s a difference between unnecessary cowardice and justifiable fear.’
He could hear It breathing. He knew It was awake. The door was chained, tied up in knots. The room was almost totally dark. Almost. Perhaps a dog, he thought, a wild dog.
The voices were dying away. Perhaps snow was falling more heavily. They’d lost the track … Now he was sorry they’d lost the track.
The doctor stayed absolutely still, as rigid as a stone, listening to the faint, faint sound of breathing. He was quite sure he heard the breathing. He was almost certain that he was in the presence of an animal. Then he thought, No, there are many people in here. He strained to listen as he had never listened. The breathing was regular. He must look up.
He did so, and yelped, and lay back.
He had seen absolutely nothing. But the sound of his own emasculated voice brought him a little to his senses. He was now in a different position, his back more or less against the door. He was behaving like a schoolgirl in a haunted house. He could see that. The pain – sudden, hot, wet pain – from his side helped his control. The touch of the blood greatly encouraged him. He dared lift his eyes.
The room was no longer totally dark. He could make out the rectangle of the window, which seemed to be covered with some kind of sacking or cloth. Then below that rectangle, in what seemed to be the corner of the room, there were two holes, two sources of light. For a moment the doctor thought that they must be peepholes into an adjoining room in which there was light. But something about the angles made that hard to accept. The light must therefore be reflected. Perhaps there was something metal or glass on a shelf.
The two sources moved. Again the doctor let out a little yelp of terror, then at once suppressed it. They were eyes. They were eyes and he was on the floor, his back to a door that would take a minute to open. Maybe they were dog’s eyes, after all. They seemed to be yellow, but the colour was hard to tell in the street light.
Because the eyes were at a low level in the room the doctor kept asking himself what kind of animal they might belong to. But the mind, always complex, is more than ever so, in fear. It appears to be frozen but, in truth, it is in ten places at once. Even as he went through the list from police-dog to chimpanzee, the doctor didn’t believe himself. He knew he was locked in the room with another human being; and not a white one. He hardly dared recognise the odds he was really reckoning; the animal choice was only a cover to the important, more frightening calculation.
It was the door that made him think of a lunatic. It was a fugitive’s door. And it had recently been broken down, axed down, maybe more than once. The room was barely heated, and apparently unfurnished. It followed that it was the resting place of some hermit, some untouchable.
Again almost imperceptively, the eyes moved. Now there was no shouting in the street any more. The doctor’s shoes and trousers were soaking wet from the snow. His shirt was wet from the blood and the sweat. He felt both cold and warm at once. He thought, What a
poor kind of soldier I would have made. I have acted to preserve myself. I have run. Have escaped. Have closed the door. But he could not bring himself to try more. He was aware of his self-pity as he closed his eyes again and fell half back to sleep. Faintly aware, too, that this whole mood of surrender, this opiate feeling was in truth a ruse. It was a message to the monster in the corner of the room: pity me.
At last, the eyes turned away. A long arm reached out towards the corner of the cloth by the window and opened up a bright triangular patch of light. A long black arm, with bangles on it. The light shone like an arc on to a bed without sheets. And then this thing, this person shifted across the bed, into the light which now seemed curiously green. She unwrapped the blanket in which she had been lying.
She was very big, she was most certainly ‘she’, wearing diamanté buttons over her nipples, and she was decked up, more or less, like a vaudeville bride. Her hair was dyed not golden but light brown. She wore some kind of tiara in it which held up a strange veil. Perhaps she was a mad, abandoned bride, the doctor thought. She had long finger-nails covered in silver polish, except for the index finger which was a dark brown kind of colour in this light: but which the doctor rightly reckoned to be red. Round her waist she wore a velvet strap decorated, again, with diamanté. She had white, apparently luminous panties on. They were the size of the briefest bikini. After that came her enormous, powerful long thighs and calves. She had the body of an Olympic sportswoman. She wore satin slippers on her feet.
The doctor sat absolutely still. The female said nothing. She lay on the bed looking his way, dangling her slipper on her toe. There was a sound, again, from the street. The doctor knew that in the light his face must look very white. She only had to reach behind her and knock one of her bracelets or big rings against the window pane. The boys would hear it and come up and do the rest.
She reached up her arm. The doctor heard himself say, ‘Please don’t.’
She kept her hand up at the window.
The doctor said, ‘I’m bleeding to death.’
She still kept her hand up at the window. The voices died away again. Then she lowered it. She pulled the veil off her hair. The doctor sighed and closing his eyes, this time only pretended to black out. He could hear another siren approaching. He thought it was a police car, but it could have been an ambulance. It didn’t really matter which. If he could get out and throw himself on to the road, they’d stop and pick him up. By the time he had worked this out the vehicle with the siren was already passing down the street. The female opened a chink in the sacking curtain again. She looked down, but said nothing. She turned back and stared at him, disbelieving his closed eyes.
At last he heard another siren on the uptown side, coming downtown. It might take this avenue or others on each side. He had to hope that this vehicle was routed in the same way as the previous one. If he were going to make it he’d better start now. He began to unravel the doorchain. He worked fast and nervously as if saying, ‘Sorry I called. You don’t want to get into this, I’ll go, I’m sorry,’ and he almost had the chain untied when she moved.
She had observed him well. She kicked him in the side and he let out a terrible cry of pain. She swatted him, then, across the face. She didn’t slap him, but struck him with the flat of her wrist and hand. He was knocked right over. The siren came and went.
He laughed, and that surprised her. Very weakly he laughed because he couldn’t tell the lie that he had only been trying to get up to go to the other end of the room. His hair wasn’t so thick or long, and it was speckled with grey. She suddenly grabbed it and pulled up his head to look either at him or at the phenomenon of white laughter. He had the feeling that she had never left this district, that she would keep him as a curiosity, as a white little freak. The doctor felt thirsty. He had often seen this thirst in terminal cases and thought it came from the drugs, the morphine and heroin. But he’d had no drugs.
‘Water,’ he croaked. Gently, she let go of his hair and his head fell back on to his chest. She took some time to decide. Then he felt the water against his face. She was pushing his brow to lift up his head. She was looking for his cracked mouth.
She didn’t seem to have a cup. So maybe she didn’t usually live here. She too perhaps was on the run. She went to and from the closet, bringing water in the cup of her big hand. She must have done the journey thirty times. Then she put water over his face and head. She kept going over to the closet, then coming back and throwing the cold water at him. She tied up the chain again. Then she moved to the end of the room where the door led into the water closet. It was difficult to see what else, from the doctor’s angle, but she seemed to keep her clothes in there. He could see a white plastic raincoat.
She returned with a padlock and fixed it on the big chain. As she did so the doctor looked up. His head was still on the floorboards. She was aware of his curiosity. She still didn’t say a word. She didn’t give him a blanket, or a cigarette. She wrapped herself up again and lay in bed smoking. After amoment or two the doctor recognised the acrid smell. She wasn’t smoking tobacco; it was pot. The doctor was glad that she smoked, glad that she didn’t smell like a girl.
In the distance he could still hear the sirens. They must have been police cars, maybe making inquiries, searching for weapons, making arrests. Their sounds went farther and farther away; came back, but never too near. The night went by and after a long, long while she closed her eyes. The bed was very low and he moved over towards it as imperceptibly as the grey white light of dawn stole in through the window.
He didn’t know which part of her was so close; it could have been a thigh or a calf or an arm, or maybe part of her amazing trunk. He reckoned that it was hairless, that it was curiously imperfect. In a strange, waking dream the doctor reflected: Black skin isn’t black at all, none of it is black. There are pores, pink pigment, shades of brown. She had a great many flaws and blemishes and creases. She smelt but she was warm.
An age after that – all time was losing its meaning – she snored and the doctor thought irritably – which is to say fearlessly – God damn it, doesn’t she realise I’m dying? I’m dying of thirst.
The boards were very rough. Trying to pull himself across towards the closet he caught some splinters in his bottom and his hand. They seemed very sore. That struck him as odd. He was dying with a knife wound in his liver, and a splinter of wood felt sore. He only wanted to get to the basin. The easy way seemed to be to slide against this shiny painted wall. But he had to get up to do this, so he tried to use the chain on the door.
He tried to pull himself to his feet. The wound felt like a lump, like the swelling after a hornet’s sting; incredibly sensitive and also throbbing. But the bleeding seemed to have stopped. When he pulled his cuff away from his shirt and trousers there was a little crackling noise. The blood had dried up.
He was bent in the shape of a U. He couldn’t straighten up at all, not without the pain becoming intolerable. Standing like this, bent double, he still felt giddy, but he managed to push himself off with the bed, across the room to the wall, and pressing his shoulder against its painted surface he slid and shoved himself along. At the end, he saw the basin. He stepped across to it. He stumbled. He saw the china edge coming up and knew it was going to strike him on the face.
He accepted the pain. He didn’t yelp any more. The water seemed too far away. He felt warmer as he passed out.
The doctor had no idea how long he was unconscious. He thought it might have been for hours, even twenty-four hours. The female was still in bed.
In fact he’d only been out for a moment or two. He’d woken to a sound – to a new and dangerous sound. Somebody had opened the front door downstairs. The doctor pulled his knees up and sheltered, pointlessly, under the basin as he heard the footsteps on the stairs. Whoever it was ran up, with a light young step. He or she might have been wearing sneakers. In a split second the doctor made several wild deductions which brought him to the conclusion that the caller
was this female’s boyfriend; that he was some kind of athlete, probably a boxer.
There was a knock on the door. The doctor’s eyes were very bright. The female didn’t move. There was another knock and a voice, a small voice said, ‘It’s me, Delivery.’ It was a child’s voice. But even a child can raise an alarm. The doctor looked at the female who was awake. Her eyes were open. She did not move.
The door hinges were the doctor’s end of the room. Therefore, when the delivery boy pushed the door open until the chain and lock restrained it he could see the windows and maybe the female, through the crack, but still could not see the doctor. He pushed through a big bottle of Coke and a carton of milk.
The boy said, ‘Why don’t you come out today? There’s been a riot. You heard? They burnt a car with all the men in it. Harry got hurt bad. He’s in the hospital. His back’s bust up. You got to come out tonight. Big cabaret when they come in. You don’t just want to lie there and smoke pot, do you? Big drinking in Charlie’s.’
She did not move. It was hard to tell the relationship between the female and the boy but it seemed the boy liked her. Yet respected her, was a little too much in awe of her to be her brother. The doctor couldn’t see the boy but he thought he must be twelve at most. The arm and hand that poked through the crack delivering the bottle and the carton was thin and small and very black.
Her eyes were on the doctor, not the boy. The doctor thought, She’s enjoying this. She wants to see my fear. It’s a tension she enjoys.’
Household Ghosts Page 42