by Frank Baker
But why did he have to become my neighbour? I never liked him from the start, when he came here a year ago. Nobody knew anything about him; and his grim-looking sister spoke to nobody, only made me mad with her hideous little yapping dog she keeps locked up all day and only lets out at fixed times to do his jobs. And I know the times; I’m keyed up for them. I can hear that yap in advance, time it exactly.
But all this has nothing to do with what I’m trying to write about. And K. Knowles, for all I know, is a perfectly decent kind of chap. About my age, or a little younger. I don’t suppose he really meant me any harm. Other neighbours, people I’ve known well for years, wondered who he was and what kind of life he’d lived before he bought the house next door. Only I found out.
As I write, it’s late at night. I had to stop. I’m hot. The electric heater’s on, two bars, in this little breakfast-room where Dorothy and I had all our meals. I’ve just unbuttoned the collar of my shirt and ripped my tie off. There’s a fire laid in the grate, I laid it this morning, then I thought – I don’t really need a fire, not in early October. Then it came to evening, and I thought – no, I’ll use the electric, it’ll save me going to the outhouse, where the sack –
Why didn’t anybody teach me, when I was young, to write properly? To put down in clear sentences of good English just what you want to put down? I just can’t seem to assemble my thoughts coherently enough to get my story – is it a story? – in order.
So – what? The sack. Yes. I’m writing about a sack – about The Sack. The one my neighbour gave me. Now I’ve got that down, I may be able to stick to facts.
Yesterday, Mr Knowles said to me – no. I don’t want to put that down now. I must try to get things in proper order. And it starts with dead leaves.
Dead leaves – the leaves of last autumn, which I’d crammed into a plastic sack and was dragging down to the bottom of the garden, intending to burn them. Dorothy said – keep them for compost. But I just couldn’t be bothered with that sort of thing, after she’d gone. So I decided to burn them. And when I think of burning them, I think of ash, and that puts me in mind of ashes and sack-cloth. Funny, how things come together.
He said to me, over the box hedge: ‘Mr Patch,’ he said, ‘Mr Patch, that plastic sack – it’s got a hole in it. Try this one.’
And he slung a proper sack over the hedge. It fell at my feet. Proper sack? What do I mean by that? I mean, an old-fashioned sack – made of ‘coarse material’, to use a dictionary definition. The kind of sack I’ve known so well for so many years. The sack the postman uses.
It seemed to me presumptuous of him, if that’s the right word. For I didn’t really need his sack. But the way he’d slung it at me – there was a kind of contempt in the gesture. He’s a tall, very well-built man; and it was only me who found out (one gets to ways of finding out things when one’s worked in the Post Office for years) that he’d been in the CID. Once I’d got that established, a lot about him that had seemed mysterious, fell together. Those wide shoulders, huge hands, sturdy legs, and cunning eyes . . . Yes. He’d lived a dangerous life, no doubt about it. And now, retired, with that grim sister, it could be boring for him. In a way, I admire him. I felt – this is the kind of anonymous man who protects people like me. And never gets much of a reward – except, I suppose, a feeling of satisfaction when he’s run somebody to earth. There’s a pride about him I understand. For even I have my pride – after years of doing out ‘special issues’ and going slower when you see there’s a queue building up the other side of the counter. You develop pride, that way. And you learn to be patient.
As for K. Knowles – I suppose he needed patience too, a different kind of patience, a predatory kind of patience, eager for the pounce, then swooping down, like a hawk. Oh yes, I do admire him, even if I hate him for dropping that sack in my path, and knowing quite well what he was doing.
I know he knew what he was doing.
But what did the sack do? that is what I’m trying to put down. And – what is it doing now?
All my life I’ve felt that what they call ‘inanimate’ objects have a life of their own. ‘Of their own?’ Do I mean that? Not exactly. I mean – a life in relation to what are called ‘animate’ objects. A much slower life; but stealthy. As a child, I remember watching a chunk of coal burn, and then suddenly sizzle or sparkle in the grate, and then fuse into flame, only to die, and become a clinker by morning. I used to say to myself – that was an ‘inanimate’ object only an hour ago, before it went into the grate and the match was struck. So, all my life I’ve questioned ‘inanimate’ objects. A leaf, for example. A dead leaf. Or a candle, before flame touches the wick, and the wax curls. A chair. A spoon. Inanimates? And – a sack?
I am right. Take stone, even the most ancient stone. Those at Stonehenge, say. Does one call them ‘inanimate?’ Of course, it could be proved that the stones on Salisbury Plain have been there for thousands of years. But are they exactly the same now as the stones which were dragged there, inch by inch, from Pembrokeshire? Only a dolt who believed that the stars didn’t revolve, could believe that. Lucretius says a lot about this kind of thing, somewhere.
Anyway, this sack. I just said, ‘Oh, thank you, Mr Knowles.’ And picking it up, as he went back to his house, I threw it in the garage – empty now, except for garden tools, logs and a lawnmower and odds and ends; for I had to give up the car.
It was then, when I first picked it up, that I began to itch.
It’s odd, and I suppose irrelevant. But I ask myself, what would the sack have done if I’d still got the car and used it on a cold night to cover the engine with? Perhaps that is what they call a ‘rhetorical’ question. No answer needed. And yet – what would it have done to the engine of the old Riley?
I can’t go on writing. I have to go to the outhouse, and see what the sack is doing. But no. In writing that down, I begin to see how crazy I’ve become. I’m a ‘case’. Because, of course, the thing will be there, where I left it. Or, did I leave it there, in the outhouse, by the coal and sticks? Did I? I cannot remember.
I think it’s wiser not to move from here. Yes. I won’t go away from this table until I’ve written down what I know is true. I will not go to the outhouse.
I’m getting my thoughts in order. This is what I have to put down. First: a day after I’d thrown the sack in the garage (and locked the doors as I always do, even though I’ve no car), I opened the back door, next morning, to take in the usual pinta, and – there was the sack.
Put down plain like that, it reads so simple it seems to mean nothing; and maybe it does mean nothing. Maybe I didn’t leave the sack in the garage. Maybe I left it outside, and the wind lifted it to the back door, to huddle up over the one milk bottle. Like a lurker.
It’s odd, now I come to think of it, how I used that word ‘huddle’ – for that is exactly what it did. It had arranged itself over the milk bottle, as though it needed sustenance. Yes, sustenance. The sack was starved. It needed milk. It came to the milk.
That is how it seemed to me, ten days ago. But still, I said to myself (before the later events came to pass) I must have imagined that I locked it up in the garage.
And so, I took the milk bottle in, picked up the sack, and as I did so there was a little whip and snarl of wind, suddenly veered to the north – biting cold. A wind with teeth in it. I dropped the sack, came in quickly, and locked the door. Early morning; but one likes to be on the safe side. The milkman had told me that there was a lurker around. And living alone, you get used to locking up, even in the morning.
Later that same day, I went out. Sack not there. At first, that signified nothing. For why should it be there, with a howling wind striding from the north?
I thought no more of it, but walked to the bakery, to get bread. It was only on the way back, happening to look up to the one chimney on the bungalow, that I began to ask myself
– had I left the sack in the garage the night before?
Because now, it was curled round the chimney and the TV aerial. Draping itself over the tiles, in a kind of graceful manner, almost protective, as though it had settled there for the winter.
Yet I still told myself – the wind did it. Until the wind dropped and in a dead quietness when even the withering roses – the white roses Dorothy loved so much – till even the white rose petals didn’t quiver, I saw the sack hunched up, or should I say ‘bunched’ up, against the front door, the door I now never use, not even for the Vicar should he happen to call, as he once did, not long after Dorothy went. There it was; and when I write ‘hunched’ or ‘bunched’ – I mean – in a kind of pyramid, or a tent, as though three sticks had been stood up inside, wigwam-fashion, holding it tent-wise. Like a little tabernacle.
I wish I hadn’t used that word, ‘tabernacle’. For even as I wrote it I half knew what it meant. And now I’ve looked it up in Chambers. ‘A tent, or movable hut . . . or, the human body as the temporary abode of the soul . . .’
It was not until then – not until I saw the sack slooped against my front door, as though it was saying, ‘Let me in, please . . .’ – it was not until then that I was certain: I had left it, in the locked garage, the night before.
From that moment, I knew I was not just imagining things. From that moment, my life has become a torment.
But I must not overstate. In a kind of way, I’ve learnt to live with it, learnt to live with this torment, this bit of ‘coarse material’, dun grey with a slither of rustiness in it, and a prickly roughness that seems to tinge the fingers. Learnt to live with it – yes. But I cannot easily touch it. For one thing, I’m now convinced that this itching I get, all over my body, was caused by contact with the sack. There’s a kind of tic in it. Yes, a tic.
But I am not really writing of physical matters, although one cannot discountenance them. So – what happened next?
I think it was this way. After I’d seen the sack before the front door, I decided it might be a good thing to open the door and let the sun into the hall. And when I did – well, I opened the door to nothing. Or, rather, only to the rose bushes in the bed near the door. The sack had been blown away.
Why did I write ‘blown away’? I suppose I am still trying to rationalize. In fact, there was, as I’ve said, no wind at all. The sack could not have been blown away. And, certainly, it could not have been ‘blown’ into the house, where I found it, late that night, lying in a slither, along the bottom of the door to a cupboard where I keep all the odds and ends everybody keeps. The things you want to lose, and can’t lose.
I didn’t sleep well that night. This is unusual for me – and I never take sleeping pills. But I tossed about a lot; and when I write that – I mean it in the old sense. I mean, I was sexually alert. And I awoke about three – bad hour, I’ve heard people say. And so it is. I awoke to feel myself stiffening, and hot; and the bed-clothes all in a tumble about me. There had been a bad dream; but, what was it? I couldn’t remember. And there was a foul yet sweet smell, which I couldn’t place. Was it sweat? Was it my own smell? I didn’t know. Somehow, with bones that ached and creaked, I jerked my body up from the bed.
I stood for a moment, trembling all over. I was looking at what lay, crinkled and frozen, over the candlewick spread.
It was then I fully realized – the sack was an enemy. It was the enemy.
I am determined to go on writing, not to go to the outhouse. I am determined to put down what I know is true.
But I wish I wasn’t alone here.
What happened next that night? I stood by the bed, and I must have picked up the sack, I must have – or did I? Did I pick it up? This is what I can’t remember. What I do remember is that I went to the toilet, and was sick, violently sick, and then went to the medicine cupboard and found a bottle of sleeping tablets, which the doctor had prescribed for my wife, in her last months. I had always meant to throw them into the dustbin; but now I took one, and never having taken sleeping pills before, I was soon in a dead sleep.
I think I dreamt of Dorothy. I don’t know. But it seemed another age when I woke up, although it was really only another day. I didn’t let myself think of the sack – not until about four in the afternoon, when I went into the front room, a room I hardly ever use now.
Why did I go there, anyway? What sent me? I think it was a message from my wife. I think she said to me, ‘Ted, go and dust my picture.’ Her picture – a fine pencil drawing of her head, as a young girl, one of our treasures, hangs above the fireplace in the front room. And when I went in there . . .
It seems unnecessary to write it down.
Again, I cannot remember removing the sack. I don’t think I touched it. I do remember smut on the glass of the picture. Then I closed the door, and came to where I am now, and sat down, and tried to think of it all calmly.
It is so difficult to write calmly of the movements of the sack in these last days. I can’t get them in proper order. In the bath, one night; but which night? Never again on the bed. And that was kind of it. Then for two whole days I saw no sign of it. And I said to myself, pathetic really, the wind has snaffled it away.
I wish I had been right. I wish I hadn’t come in the next day, after I had been down to the PO to draw my pension – I wish I hadn’t come in to see it laid flat upon the table where now I write all this.
Flat, yes, flat. Except for two little mounds, that reminded me of breasts. But otherwise, quite flat, as though it had been pressed, almost ironed out.
For the first time, without touching it, I looked very closely at the coarse woven material. I cannot have imagined it. I could see the shapes of bones in the material. ‘Rag and bones’ – the call came from my childhood. I remember no more – except that I ran out of the room, out of the house, only longing to feel the autumn air upon me.
And was that the last I saw of it? No, it cannot have been. Since I know now that it is, or should be, in the outhouse. And when I write ‘should be’ I mean only that it was there this morning, over the coal. It looked as though it had crawled there.
I must not go out to check on this. I must first tell how I went to my neighbour, and talked about it.
‘Mr Knowles,’ I said, ‘Mr Knowles – ’ And then I stopped. I could see that something in my expression, or my tone of voice, had got him. ‘Come in,’ was all he said. And in his sitting-room, where his sister sat silent and aware, doing a jig-saw puzzle on a little antique table, he said to me, ‘What’s the trouble?’
I knew he knew what the ‘trouble’ was. And so it was easy simply to say, ‘The sack’.
There was not the smallest change of expression in his face.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I realize.’ And then a long pause, and the sister went on doggedly searching out another piece for her jig-saw.
‘You realize?’ I said. He merely nodded.
There was a long silence, till at last he asked me to sit down. I didn’t. I felt aggrieved. I felt, for sure, that he had done me wrong; and that he knew it.
I started to speak. I wanted to protest. I wanted to say, ‘That sack you gave me – ’
But he got in first. ‘I’m sorry.’ That is how he began. And I could see he was sorry.
Suddenly, his sister got up. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ She left the room before I could answer; and I never saw the coffee. Because the brother so quickly spoke, and I so quickly left the house, when I heard what he had to tell me.
‘I shouldn’t have given it to you,’ he said. And then, in a blank kind of voice, as though it really meant nothing to him: ‘It has a history. I shouldn’t have kept it. I always knew that. It should have been destroyed. If you remember, the Cassenden case – six years ago. I was in charge of that. A sex-killer – and we have our own names for them just as, I daresay, Mr Pat
ch, you had your own names in the Post Office business?’
I could only nod. And let him go on.
‘We got him, perhaps you remember, on one murder only. Please believe me, I never talk about such matters. But now I have to. The girl – she was only nineteen – was dismembered. The dismembered body was found in Wyre Forest. The sack – ’ And I remember that here he hesitated, and at that moment I could hear his sister, the other side of the door. But she did not come in, and I guessed she was listening. ‘The sack contained the remains.’
‘Why did you throw it to me?’ I almost shouted at him. And Mr Knowles looked at me gravely.
‘I don’t know.’ That was all he said. Then a pause, and that sister still shuffling, the other side of the door. And Mr Knowles went on: ‘I had to get rid of it somehow. It – ’ And here there was a long silence. ‘ – Gave me a bit of trouble.’
‘But surely – ’ I protested, ‘surely – such gruesome relics – you didn’t usually keep such things?’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘No. We don’t. But in this case – and I was a long time on it, if you remember – in this case, I asked finally if I could keep the sack. It was a symbol of a sort of victory for me.’ Then again, a silence, until he added, ‘I always regret I did keep it.’
‘So the sack contained – ?’ I began a question I could not finish. But Mr Knowles finished it for me.
‘It contained – the legs, the arms, the abdomen, part of the neck. But it did not contain – ’