by David Haynes
He put his hand on her shoulder and this time she got a bad feeling… a really bad feeling.
“Can you hear the scratching?” she said to him. “They don’t like me being in here with them. I think this is their home. They don’t like it one bit.”
He removed his hand before she could see anything other than a rat in the pictures from his mind. The picture shivered and then was gone.
“Have you seen them?” She could hear the same thing in his voice that she had heard in Daddy’s voice after she’d done the bad thing.
“I haven’t seen any yet but they’re in here and they’re cross.”
“Why do you think they’re cross with you, Melody?”
“They’re not cross with me. They’re cross with you.”
The man laughed again and shrank away from her. His laugh wasn’t friendly though, it was nervous.
“Can I come out now?” she asked.
The man had gone completely again. “Not yet.”
Then a ray of light shone down from above him and he disappeared upward. Had he gone to heaven? Or was she in the other place and he had just come for a visit? The scratching started up again.
“Here, ratty,” she called out. If the rats were upset with the man who had given her a bad feeling then they were probably okay to be friends with.
“Ratty?” she called again and held out her hand.
“There’s a good boy.” She felt the rat’s whiskers tickle her fingers. It scurried off again.
Why had they sent her to the dark? The man had said that Mummy and Daddy knew she was here and that they were worried about her. They ought to come and fetch her if they were that worried.
The crying was fainter now but it had definitely sounded like Mummy. Mummy had cried a lot after she’d said and done the bad things. Daddy hadn’t cried but his voice trembled a bit when he spoke. He must have been tired; they both must have been after all the talking they did late at night when they thought she was asleep.
But she was awake and she’d heard every single word.
“Here, ratty.”
If the rats were cross about it, then she should be too. Very cross.
*
That man had been back lots of times now and each time the bad feeling was worse. He always stayed in the darkness so she couldn’t see his face properly and she could tell he was trying really hard to be friendly. It was just that he didn’t actually sound very friendly anymore. Most of the time he sounded scared. He always wanted to talk about the bad things she’d said, too. And when she told him she couldn’t remember, he got impatient with her. Once he’d told her she could go and see Mummy and Daddy if she told him why she’d said those things.
She wanted to make something up then but making things up was a lie and telling lies was a bad thing to do. The truth was, she couldn’t remember saying anything bad. Not once. She could only remember afterwards when Mummy or Daddy were crying or really mad with her.
The time she bumped into those boys and saw what one of them was thinking was bad but that was when she was really little. Was she just two? She might have been and she didn’t understand what she’d seen but she knew it was bad. It was evil.
There were others. Boys, girls and grown-ups too. They all had pictures floating about in their brains but only some of them knew they were there and they were the ones who made her feel sick. The worst one was the doctor, though. She’d seen him lots of times and his head was full of the sort of things she imagined nasty men did.
“I need to speak with your daughter alone. Can you wait outside for a moment, I shan’t be long.”
Mummy and Daddy had asked if it was necessary but the doctor said it was.
“Now, Melody, I want you to tell me why you keep shouting out terrible words. Where have you heard them? Is it from television or perhaps you’ve heard Mummy or Daddy saying them?”
“I don’t know any bad words, only ‘bugger’ and that’s not too bad. Daddy said it when he dropped his cup of tea.”
“Any others?”
She’d sat quietly and searched inside her brain for something to say. “I know the word ‘fuck’ but I don’t know what it means.” She looked at the doctor for reassurance. He nodded his head.
“That’s a very bad word.” He leaned a little closer and she could smell minty sweets on his breath.
She felt the beginning of the bad feeling coming along. It was like a train coming down a dark tunnel, like the London Underground.
The doctor with his niece on his lap. She looks just like me but with brown hair. His hand on her knee and a funny feeling in his tummy. Like an excited feeling only slightly different. Like worse and dirty.
“And I know the word ‘paedophile’.” Then the train carrying the word arrived at the platform and everything went dark.
Had that been a bad word?
The doctor told Mummy and Daddy there wasn’t anything else he could do and they would have to go somewhere else to get help. She’d woken up on the floor with Daddy lifting her up. He looked sad and frightened but he hugged her close and took her out to the car while Mummy stayed and talked to the doctor for a while.
“I don’t like him,” she’d said to Daddy in the car.
“No, neither do I.”
Then Mummy had come back and they’d gone to have an ice cream in the park. But none of them spoke at all for a long time.
*
The rats came more often now. They came to smell the bucket she went to the toilet in and they came after the man had brought her something to eat. They moved quickly but she could see them easily because her eyes were used to the darkness.
She cried less too. Not because she missed her parents any the less but because she knew it wouldn’t do her any good.
The man came less, though; the man with the kind face and the frightened voice. He came to bring her food and empty the bucket and when he did he talked about God. She remembered people talking about God before and she remembered being in a church.
A church. People screaming and pointing at her. A feeling of cold terror creeping up her legs as her parents wept.
When was that? Was that something to do with the bad things? Was that why she was here?
There was a man at the front of the church dressed all in black except for his white collar. He was talking slowly and people, including both of her parents, were nodding slowly. Mummy had looked down at her and smiled but it wasn’t the warm smile she used to have. The train with the words came rumbling down the track and tried to stop at the platform but she pushed it away, she didn’t want to see it.
The man seemed to be looking straight at her. He had dark clouds in his mind. He couldn’t understand why everyone was listening to him, not when he was an adulterer. That didn’t sound like a good thing to be.
And then lots and lots of pictures and words started hurtling toward her from everywhere. There were so many different types of trains and too many tracks and there was no way she could stop them all.
“Mummy? Can we go?” she’d whispered. “I feel sick.”
She’d looked down at her again and this time the smile vanished in an instant. She slid away from her, skidding across the wooden pew.
“What’s wrong Daddy? Have I said something bad?”
Someone, it might have been Mummy, stifled a scream.
Images of people fucking. Men fucking women, men fucking men, women fucking women. Pictures of people hitting each other with hammers until their faces were nothing but bloody pulps. Tongues being pulled from mouths with teeth. Knives being pulled across throats. The bad stuff, the really, really bad stuff.
“Mummy, I feel sick.” Then she had been sick and as she looked at her cereals for the second time that day, they became something else. The cornflakes became the faces of the people in the church. Each and every one of them snarling and biting at her skin. Each and every one of them was trying to devour her with their tiny snappy teeth.
She’d screamed as loudly as she
could and closed her eyes but the trains had arrived and the words were tumbling out onto the platforms. They just kept coming. Brighter, more colourful and vivid and now she could hear other people screaming.
Why were they screaming?
And then she’d opened her eyes and looked for Mummy, she wanted to go home right now but everyone had turned around and they were looking at her. The words came then, words she didn’t understand but she had to say them, she had to, or they would burn her guts until they spilled onto the floor like a thousand crawling insects.
She raised her hand and pointed to the man in front. “Wife beater!”
The woman beside him reddened and touched her cheek.
“Sodomite!” She pointed to a man two rows in front.
She marched out of her pew and walked toward the altar. At each row she stopped and looked at the open-mouthed faces staring back at her. Images and words flashed through her brain, forcing themselves out through her mouth. She pulled at her hair, they were bad words, words which she shouldn’t know. Words she didn’t understand and had never heard before.
“Kiddy-fiddler!” She spat the words at a pale-looking man who tried not to catch her eye.
She gasped as a picture came before her. It was of a woman hacking at a man’s neck with a small silver knife. On and on she hacked until his head hung limply from the side. The man was her husband but it was not the man whose hand she held now, in this church.
“Murderer,” she said calmly and walked on.
Another woman, a sad woman, plunged a knife into another man’s chest while someone laughed in the background. It was too faint to see properly, not like the others.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she chanted as her purple glittery shoes tip-tapped across the flagstones, past the font and to the foot of the pulpit stairs. And down he came until he stood before her, the man whose letters spelled A-D-U-L-T-E-R-E-R in bright red across his face.
“Faithless!” she screamed as loudly as she could and the words burned on the way out of her mouth.
The vicar looked away. He couldn’t stand to look at her, he couldn’t bear to see what was in her eyes.
“Adulterer,” she whispered.
He looked directly at her and then away again. He looked directly at her Mummy.
She followed his stare and looked at her Mummy too. The same words were written across her head, and in red felt-tip pen. “Adulterer?”
Then a burning sensation had crept up the back of her neck and plucked at the skin behind her ear. Her skin started to pull tighter and tighter across her face until she thought it might actually rip away from her skull.
“Daddy?” She was aware of falling and of screaming. There was screaming everywhere and the loudest voice was her own. It came from somewhere deep inside the dark and terrifying cave her mind had become.
9
Children. Stokes had always wanted children. So why hadn’t he had any? Twice Jo had conceived and twice things had gone bad, really bad.
The first time, he’d lifted her sobbing from the bed and put her in a warm bath. He’d washed her hair and wiped the blood from her thighs. He’d stripped the sheets and turned the mattress but neither of them had slept a wink. How could they? How was anyone supposed to sleep after that? How was anyone supposed to sleep when they were sharing a bed with their dead child? Even if it was only a collection of cells.
The next day he’d taken the mattress, the sheets and the duvet outside and burned them. He’d stared into the flames and watched silently as they stripped any signs of the baby’s existence from the world.
Jo had wept for days; of course she had. But he hadn’t, he’d just held onto her. Then eventually the crying stopped and he’d wanted to try again, they both had. And that was a mistake, especially so soon afterwards.
At first he thought he’d pissed the bed. A lovely warm feeling had spread up his legs and along his thighs until his half-sleep delirium came crashing to earth with a terrible and decisive thud.
“Jo?” he’d whispered. Half of her face had been illuminated by the street light coming in through a crack in the curtains.
“Jo?” He’d gently shaken her cold and naked shoulder. “Jo, I think something bad has happened.”
She’d stirred and rolled over to face him. “What is it, Jim? Why are you waking me up?” Her eyes had been closed but he couldn’t say a word more. Words didn’t seem to be adequate. Then her sleep-stunned body had woken up as the warmth spread along her thighs too.
“Jim?” Her voice had pleaded with him. “Jim?”
All he could do was shake his head and throw back the covers. The police officer had a job to do. He needed to sort the situation. He needed to switch on and be the man he was at work. Jo had reached for the lamp but he stopped her.
“No,” he’d said simply. He slipped his arms under her and lifted her out of the bed. She let out a little whimper that nearly broke his heart there and then.
“I’ll run a nice hot bath.” He carried her to the bathroom. “Just keep your eyes on me, sweetheart. Don’t look down.” In truth he needed to keep his eyes on her too. He didn’t want to look at the dark shadow that covered the lower half of her body. And they sat there on the edge of the bath just staring at each other while the steam rose around them. They sat in silence. And then he’d lifted her in and washed her again. The water had turned darker and darker until it was as black as tar.
There had been so much blood, so much, and it just wouldn’t stop coming.
“Don’t leave me, Jim. I’m frightened.”
“I’m going to fetch your robe and then we’ll go to the hospital.” The policeman needed to get the casualty to the hospital.
Jo had kept her eyes on him all the way to the hospital and hadn’t looked down, not once. But he’d been driving and then he’d been speaking to the nurse and then to the doctor. Not once had he looked at her, not once had he taken her hand and said, “It’ll be all right, Jo. Everything will be all right.”
Why?
Because he was a shit?
No, not because he was a shit but because the tiny fissures which were now great crevasses had already started opening up inside his mind. If he’d looked at her, if he’d looked deep into Jo’s eyes, he would’ve seen them reflected back at him and he didn’t care to see them.
He’d burned the mattress again. He would’ve burned the whole damned house down if he could find enough petrol to do the job. He would’ve taken a knife to Jesus Christ and sliced him up good and fine if he could’ve found him. Instead he stood in silence and watched as the flames licked at the blood-soaked mattress and devoured his unborn child for the second time.
When at last the flames died down leaving only a collection of warped springs, he turned his head to the early morning sky.
“Fuck you.” His voice was barely audible. It was less than a whisper, almost a breath and the only ones who heard it were the angels and God himself and they chose not to reply.
How would it have been if things had been different? If Jo had managed to hold onto the babies, would they still be together? There was no way of answering that. But he’d pondered it nevertheless. And what would their children be like? He’d imagined a boy and a girl with about a year between them. They never got as far as talking about names but secretly he’d always loved the name Daisy. Daisy Stokes had a nice ring to it. She’d be pretty too, just like her mum and full of beans. And the boy? What would he be called? Perhaps he’d just have a good look at him when he was born to decide that. He’d be cheeky though, not in a rude or spoilt way, just charming and disarming. He’d met enough characters like that in his lifetime to know they were the ones who got away with anything and everything and yet you couldn’t help loving them for it. One day all four of them would take a tent down to Cornwall and catch crabs in the rock-pools. One day...
“Fuck you.” Stokes looked out over the lake and watched the lights on the far side of the lake twinkle in the dusk. How long had he been there,
caught up in some sick daydream? His head was pounding. He hadn’t drunk or eaten anything all day and his head was complaining about it.
He levered himself out of the recliner and shuffled into the kitchen. A box of paracetamol lay open on the worktop. He switched the light on in the extractor hood and pushed four out of the blister pack. Even getting a glass out of the cupboard felt like too much effort so he stretched his head under the tap. He swallowed the tablets and allowed the water to wash over his face. It wasn’t safe to move until the need to vomit had passed but the water felt good on his skin, and if it wasn’t for the cramp building in his neck he might have stayed longer.