by Adam Nevill
Slipping the gauzy scarf around her head, she indicated that she wanted to leave. As she rose her spectacles caught the light from the fluorescent strip, a shimmer of fire above sharp ice.
There was no one outside the café, or on the pier, or the grassy area behind the esplanade, so she hit me full in the face with a closed fist and left me dazed and leaning against a closed ice-cream concession. Blood came into my mouth.
I followed her for ten minutes, sulking, then pulled up alongside her and we trudged up and down the near-empty grey streets of the town and looked in shop windows. We bought some Christmas cards, a pound of potatoes we’d boil fluffy and eat later with tasteless fish and carrots from a tin. From the pound shop we picked up a small box of Scottish shortbread. In a charity shop she bought a pencil skirt without trying it on, and two satin blouses. ‘I have no idea when I’ll be able to wear anything nice again.’
As we passed Bay Electrics I saw a girl’s face on two big television screens. Local news too, showing a pretty girl with black-framed glasses who never made it to work one morning just over a week ago. It was the girl inside the kennel.
‘Is that what you like?’ Lois whispered in a breathless voice beside me. ‘Is that what you fancy?’
Increasing her pace, she walked in front of me, head down, all the way back to the car, and she never spoke during the drive home. At our place, she sat and watched a television quiz show that I hadn’t seen since the seventies. It could not have been scheduled, possibly never even recorded by ITV either, but it was what she wanted and so the show appeared and she watched it.
She couldn’t bear the sight of me, I could tell, and she didn’t want me watching her quiz show either, so I removed my clothes and went and lay in the basket under the kitchen table. I tried to remember if we’d ever had a dog, or if it was my teeth that had made those marks on the rubber bone.
An hour after I lay down and curled up, Lois began screaming in the lounge. I think she was on the telephone and had called a number she’d recalled from years, or even decades, long gone. ‘Is Mr Price there? What do you mean, I have the wrong number? Put him on immediately!’ God knows what they made of the call at the other end of the line. I just stayed very still and kept my eyes clenched shut until she hung up and began to sob.
Inside the kitchen the ticking lulled me to sleep among vague odours of lemon disinfectant, the dog blanket and cooker gas.
Lois was doing a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, the one with the painting of a mill beside a pond. The puzzle was spread across a card table and her legs passed beneath the table. I sat before her, naked, and stayed quiet. Her toes were no more than a few inches from my knees and I dared not shuffle any closer. She was wearing her black brassiere, a nylon slip, and very fine tights. She had painted her toenails red and her legs whisked when she rubbed them together. She had taken her rollers out and her silver hair shimmered beside the fairy lights. Her eye make-up was pink and gloriously alluring around her cold, iron-coloured eyes. When she wore make-up she looked younger. A thin gold bracelet circled her slender wrist and the watch attached to the metal strap ticked quietly. The watch-face was so tiny I could not see what the time was. Gone midnight, I guessed.
Until she’d finished the puzzle she only spoke to me once, in a quiet, hard voice. ‘If you touch it, I’ll have it straight off.’
I let my limp hands fall back to the floor. My whole body was aching from sitting still for so long.
She mostly remained calm and uninterested for the remainder of the time it took her to finish her puzzle, so I didn’t have many memories. I only recall things when she is agitated and I forget them when she calms down. When she is enraged I am flooded.
Lois began to drink sherry from a long glass and to share unflattering reminiscences and observations about our courtship. Things like: ‘I don’t know what I was thinking back then. And now I’m stuck. Ha! Look at me now, ha! Hardly the Ritz. Promises, promises. I’d have been much better off with that American chappie. That one you were friendly with . . .’
Increasingly roused, she padded back and forth through the living room, so long, thin and silky with her thighs rasping together. I could smell her lipstick, perfume and hairspray, which usually excited me, particularly when her mood changed to something ugly and volatile. And as I sensed the vinegar of spite rising through her I began to remember . . . I think . . . a package that arrived in a small room where I had lived, years before. Yes, I’ve remembered this before, and many times, I think.
The padded envelope had once been addressed to a doctor, but someone had written NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS on the front, and then written my address as the correct postal address. Only it wasn’t addressed to me, or anyone specifically, but instead to ‘You’, and then ‘A Man’, and ‘Him’, all on the same line above my postal address. There were no details of the sender, so I’d opened the parcel. And it had contained an old watch, a ladies’ wristwatch, with a thin, scuffed bracelet that smelled of perfume, so strongly that when I held the watch I received an impression of slim white wrists. Within the cotton wool was a mass-produced paper flyer advertising a ‘literary walk’, organised by something called ‘The Movement’.
I went along to this walk, but only, I think, to return the watch to the sender. It was a themed walk on a wet Sunday: something to do with three gruesome paintings in a tiny church. The triptych of paintings featured an ugly antique wooden cabinet as their subject. There was some kind of connection between the cabinet and a local poet who had gone mad. I think. There were drinks after the tedious walk too, I am sure, in a community centre. I’d asked around the group on the walk, trying to establish to whom the watch belonged. Everyone I asked had said, ‘Ask Lois. That looks like one of hers.’ Or, ‘Speak to Lois. That’s a Lois.’ Maybe even, ‘Lois, she’s looking. She’s due.’
I’d eventually identified and approached this Lois, spoken to her and complimented her on her fabulous eye make-up. She’d looked wary, but acknowledged the remark with a nod and tight smile that never extended to her eyes. She’d said, ‘You’re from that building where the down-and-outs live? I was hoping you were going to be that other chap that I’ve seen going inside.’ And she’d taken the watch from me, and sighed resignedly, ‘But all right then,’ as if accepting an invitation. ‘At least you returned it. But it’s not going to be what you think, I’m afraid.’ I remember being confused.
That afternoon I’d not been able to stop staring at her beautiful hands, or thinking of her wearing nothing but the tight leather boots she’d worn on the walk. So I was glad that the watch had a connection to this woman called Lois. I think my attentions made her feel special but also irritable, as if I were a pest. I wasn’t sure how old she was, but she had clearly tried to look older with the grey coat and headscarf and A-line tweed skirts.
From that first sighting she had made me feel uncomfortable, but intrigued and aroused also, and at the time I had been lonely and unable to get the cold, unfriendly woman out of my mind. So I had gone to the community centre again, knowing that it was where the strange group of people, The Movement, met monthly.
This dowdy, plain and depressing building was the centre of their organisation, and had pictures painted by children covering the walls. On my second visit, red plastic chairs had been set out in rows. There was a silver urn with tea and biscuits on a paper plate: Garibaldis, lemon puffs and stale iced gems. I was nervous and didn’t really know anyone, and those that I thought might recognise me from the walk seemed unwilling to converse.
When something was about to occur on the stage, I sat in the row behind Lois. She was wearing a grey coat that she didn’t take off indoors. Her head was covered by a scarf again and her eyes were concealed by red-tinted glasses. She’d put on those boots again too, but had seemed indifferent to me, even after I’d returned the watch and she’d suggested some kind of enigmatic agreement had been made between us that first time we met. I did suspect that she was unstable, but I was lonely and desperat
e. I found it all very bewildering, but my bafflement was only destined to increase.
To replicate the image in one of the hideous paintings that I had seen on the literary walk, the picture responsible for sending a local poet mad, a motionless elderly woman had sat in a chair on the low stage. She was draped in black and wore a veil. On one leg she wore a large wooden boot. Beside her chair was a curtained cabinet, the size of a wardrobe but deeper, the sort of item that budget magicians used. On the other side of her was a piece of navigational equipment; naval, I had assumed, made from brass, with what looked like a clock face on the front. A loud ticking had issued from it.
Another woman with curly black hair, who was overweight and dressed like a little girl, came onto the stage. I think she wore very high heels that were red. When the woman in the red shoes read poems from a book, I felt uneasy and thought that I should go, just get up and leave the hall quickly. But I lingered for fear of drawing attention to myself by scraping a chair leg across the floor, while everyone else at the meeting was enraptured by the performance on the stage.
After the reading, the woman dressed like a little girl withdrew from the stage and the hall darkened until the building was solely lit by two red stage lights.
Something inside the cupboard on the stage began to croak. The sound made me think of a bullfrog. It must have been a recording, or so I thought at the time. The ticking from the brass clock grew louder and louder. Some people stood up and shouted things at the box. I felt horrified, embarrassed for the shouters, uncomfortable, and eventually I panicked and made to leave.
Lois had turned round then and said, ‘Sit back down!’ It was the first time she’d even acknowledged me that evening and I returned to my seat, though I wasn’t sure why I obeyed her. And the others near me in the hall had looked at me, expectantly. I had shrugged and cleared my throat and asked, ‘What?’
Lois had said, ‘It’s not what, it’s who and when.’
I didn’t understand.
On the stage, the elderly woman with the false leg spoke for the first time. ‘One can go,’ she’d said, her frail voice amplified through some old plastic speakers above the stage.
Chairs were knocked aside or even upturned in the undignified scrabble towards the stage of at least four female members of the group. They’d all held pocket watches in the air as they stumbled to the stage. Lois had got there first, her posture tense with a childlike excitement, and had looked up at the elderly woman expectantly.
The old veiled head above her had nodded and Lois had climbed the stairs to the stage. On her hands and knees, with her head bowed, she crawled inside the curtained cabinet. As she moved inside, kind of giggling, or maybe she had been whimpering, the elderly woman in the chair had beaten Lois on the back, buttocks and legs, quite mercilessly, with a walking stick.
The stage lights went out, or failed, and the congregation fell silent in the darkness. All I could hear was the clock ticking loudly until a sound like a melon being split apart issued wetly from the direction of the stage.
‘That time is over,’ the amplified voice of the elderly woman announced.
The lights came on and the people in the hall started to talk to each other in quiet voices. I couldn’t see Lois and wondered if she was still inside the cabinet. But I’d seen enough of a nonsensical and unpleasant tradition, or ritual, connected to those paintings, and some kind of deeper belief system that I cannot remember much about, and couldn’t even grasp back then, and so I left hurriedly. No one tried to stop me.
I think . . . that’s what might have happened. It might have been a dream. I never really know if I can trust what appear inside my head like memories. But I’ve visualised that scene before, I am sure, on another evening like this one as Lois bemoaned our coming together. Maybe my last recall was as recent as last month? I don’t know, but the vision felt so familiar.
Lois began calling me after the night she entered the cabinet on the stage of the community hall. On the telephone she would be abusive. I remember standing by the communal phone to receive the calls in the hallway of the building in which I had rented a bedsit. Her voice sounded as if it were many miles away and struggling to be heard in a high wind. After that I told the other residents to tell all callers that I was not at home and the phone calls soon stopped.
I met someone else not long after my brush with Lois and The Movement . . . yes, a very sweet woman with red hair. But I didn’t know her for long because she was murdered; she was found strangled and her remains were inside a rubbish skip.
Not long after that Lois came for me in person.
I think . . .
Yes, and there was a brief ceremony soon after, in the back of a charity shop. I remember wearing a suit that was too small for me. It had smelled of someone else’s sweat. And I was on my knees beside a pile of old clothes that needed sorting, while Lois stood beside me in a smart suit and her lovely boots, with her fabulous eye make-up, and her silver hair freshly permed.
We had been positioned before the wooden cabinet that I had seen at the community centre, and in the odd paintings inside the chapel on the literary walk. And someone had been struggling to breathe inside the box, like they were asthmatic. We could all hear them on the other side of the purple curtain.
A man, I think he was the postman in that town, held a pair of dressmaker’s scissors under my chin, to make sure that I said the words that were asked of me. But there had been no need of the scissors because even though our courtship was short, by that time I was so involved with Lois that I was actually beside myself with excitement whenever I saw her. At the charity-shop wedding service, as we all recited a poem by the poet that went mad, Lois held up the ladies’ wristwatch with the very loud tick that had once been sent to my address, though intended for someone else.
We were married.
She was given a garish bouquet of artificial flowers, and I had a long wooden rule broken over my shoulders. The pain had been withering.
There was a wedding breakfast too, with Babycham and cheese footballs, salmon sandwiches, round lettuces, sausage rolls. And there was a lot of sex on the wedding night too, the kind of thing I had never imagined possible. At least I think it was sex, but I can only remember a lot of screaming in the darkness around a bed, while someone kind of coughed and hiccupped in between lowing like a bullock. I know I was beaten severely with a belt by the witnesses, who were also in the room. A Travelodge had been rented for the occasion.
Or was that Christmas?
I’m not sure she’s ever allowed me to touch her since, though Lois takes her pleasures upstairs with what I can only assume was inside that box in the community centre and at our wedding. I may be her spouse, but I believe she is wedded to another who barks with a throat full of catarrh, and she cries out with pleasure, or grunts, and finally she weeps.
The betrayals used to upset me and I would cry in the dog basket downstairs, but in time you can get used to anything.
On a Thursday Lois killed another young woman, this time with a house brick, and I knew we’d have to move on again.
The disagreement culminated in a lot of hair pulling and kicking behind some beach huts because I had said hello to the attractive woman who’d been walking her dogs past our picnic blanket. Lois went after the dogs too and I had to look away and out to sea when she caught up with the spaniel.
I got Lois home, up through the trees when it was dark, wrapped in our picnic blanket. Shivering, stained down the front, she talked to herself the whole way home, and she had to lie down the following day with a mask over her face. The episode had been building for days and Lois detested younger women.
While she convalesced I watched Ceefax alone – I had no idea that channel was still on the telly – and I thought about where we should go next.
When Lois came downstairs two days later, she wore lots of eye make-up and her tight, shiny boots and was nice to me, but I remained subdued. I was unable to get the sound of the frightened dog on th
e beach out of my mind, the yelp and the coconut sound and then the splashing.
‘We’ll have to move again. That’s two in one place,’ I said wearily.
‘I never liked this house’ was her only response.
She relieved me into a thick bath towel, using both hands, kissed me and then spat in my face.
I didn’t see her again for three weeks. By then I had found a terraced house two hundred miles away from where she’d done the killing of two fine girls. And in the new place I’d begun to hope that she’d never return to me. Vain and futile to wish for such a thing, I know, because before Lois vanished at the seaside, she’d slowly and provocatively wound up her golden wristwatch while staring into my eyes, so that my hopes for a separation would be wishful thinking and nothing else. The only possible severance between me and Lois would involve my throat being placed over an ordinary washbasin in a terraced house and her getting busy with the dressmaker’s scissors as I masturbated. That’s how she rid herself of the last two: some painter in Soho in the sixties and a surgeon she’d been with for years. Either a quick divorce with the scissors over vintage porcelain, or I could be slaughtered communally in a charity shop on a Sunday afternoon. Neither option particularly appealed to me.
In the new town there is evidence of The Movement. They’ve set themselves up in two rival organisations: a migratory bird society that meets above a legal high shop only open on a Wednesday, and an M. L. Hazzard study group that meets in an old Methodist church. No one in their right mind would want an involvement in either group, and I suspected each would convulse with schisms until they faded away. There are a few weddings, though, and far too many young people are already missing in the town. But I hoped the proximity of others of Lois’s faith would calm her down or distract her.
Lois eventually came up in the spare bedroom of the new house, naked save for the gold watch, bald and pinching her thin arms. It took me hours with the help of a hot bath and lots of watery tea to bring her round and to make the ticking in the house slow down and quieten, and for the leathery snakes with dog faces to melt into shitty stains on the carpet. She’d been through torments while away from me, I could see that, and she just wanted to hurt herself on arrival. But across several days I brought Lois back to a semblance of what we could recall of her, and she began to use a bit of lippy and do her hair and wear underwear beneath her housecoat.