by David Mathew
‘Honey…’
She had not settled on a term of endearment for Claire.
‘Honey, let Mummy’s neck go a bit…’
She stopped striding, her breathing lumpy and harsh in her throat. Claire loosened her hold and they turned to see what was behind them.
The climbing frame was following, but not at any great pace. Its every step sending shocks through the earth, it lumbered awkwardly, no doubt keeping mother and daughter in its sights (if it had sight); but beyond the macabre nature of its pursuit, there seemed little danger. If it really was after the humans, it was taking its sweet time about it.
Phyllie held the child out away from her body and said, ‘Sweety? Sweety, listen.’ The child thrashed. ‘Claire, listen, please, to Mummy.’ She waited until she had the girl’s attention. ‘What happens at the Overlap? It’s very important you tell Mummy.’
Claire had swapped looking terrified for looking confused, and Phyllie was not sure which she preferred. While she waited for her daughter to respond (the ground shook - another heavy step), she tried to remember what Benny had told her and Vig. Something about everyone living in a place of their own creation. They constructed their own islands, their own worlds… but they talked in their sleep, some of them, in the place where they were held captive. They influenced one another; they formed groups, they melded…
They overlapped.
Could that be it? Claire’s silence had suggested something close to unthinkable, but perhaps her vocabulary was simply not the concept’s equal. And if so, whose fault was that? It was she, Phyllie, who had given the child such characteristics as she owned; it was hardly fair to blame her for freezing now. She needed help, not harsh judgement.
‘Is it where all the people meet?’ Phyllie asked. ‘All the people from all the different places?’
‘Not all.’
‘But some.’
Claire nodded. ‘Mummy, I’m scared,’ she said – but her voice had changed: it had deepened. It was Phyllie’s own voice. She was talking to herself and probably would be from this moment on.
It came as no surprise when Claire began to lose colour and fade, there in her arms. However, she needed the girl for a few more minutes. All the fantasies that she’d used over the years of someone rescuing her from danger, they had all been a crock. The only person who would get her out of this jam was herself.
‘Is that where Vig is?’ Phyllie asked Claire, ‘at the Overlap?’
But the child declined to answer. Her colours seeped into the air and rose like will o’ the wisps, a multitude of them; the lines that defined the girl’s face blurred and smudged, lost distinction.
‘Where is it? Where’s the Overlap?’ Phyllie demanded, furious at the girl’s silence. She shook Claire hard. ‘Tell me where.’
‘It’s near the sea,’ the girl answered in Phyllie’s voice… and now, as well as the colours fading, the skin was ageing, tightening…
‘Which way?’ She rattled the wraith once again. ‘Which way, you little bitch?’
Claire threw her right arm out in the direction in which they’d been heading: towards the boundary of the cricket pitch. Where the ditch waited, Phyllie knew from memory- the ditch where some of the girls had hidden during after-school games, in their P.E. kits, skiving sports and smoking cigarettes stolen from their parents. A gang to which Phyllie had briefly belonged. The Bitch Ditch.
And then Claire vanished. She was gone. Her work was complete.
Breathing deeply and trying not to over-examine what the girl’s early demise might imply, philosophically speaking, Phyllie faced the lumbering climbing frame as it moved towards her.
‘And you,’ she said loud and clear to the monstrosity; ‘you can fuck right off as well!’
At which it stopped walking. Shamed and humbled, it gave the impression of a naughty dog, bested by an owner.
Phyllie showed it her back and strode on, as fast as she could.
6.
Vig regarded Don with astonishment.
‘What did you just say to me?’
‘I think you heard me, sir.’
‘I meant an explanation about Charlie Eastlight, about your suicide.’
Don nodded. ‘I was aware of that, sir. I apologise if my letter was not the full ticket. But sir, you have to understand, I’m already off your payroll… I’m a bit on the dead side, you see, sir.’
He had a point. Not that Vig was delirious to concede.
‘Where’s Benny?’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir. It’s a lot of trees.’
‘Don’t patronise me, Don.’ Vig lifted his voice. ‘I repeat,’ he shouted, ‘this is my construction… on my owned land… not Benny’s… and I want to see the following people.’
On branches above him, Don’s owls, kites and falcons fussed and flapped. A fox had appeared at the door to the chicken-house.
‘Charlie Eastlight! Where are you?’
‘I’m here… Viggy-Loo, Viggy-Lay!’
The voice came from behind Vig, who swivelled expecting to see Eastlight plump and suave in an expensive suit. There was no suit. There was virtually no skin either: evidently the fox that had gnawed at Eastlight’s skin when Vig had found the man had not finished its meal in this afterlife. Eastlight’s body was all-but a skeletal frame. The fox (or a collection of foxes) had eaten most of the skin from Eastlight’s bones. Most of the internal organs too. What remained was not worthy of the word body.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Eastlight. ‘I’ve spilt some soup down my tie again. You look like I’m not welcome in your dinner club.’
‘You’re not. You owe me for my hospitality…’ Vig indicated to the oldest man present. ‘So does Don.’
Eastlight chuckled. ‘Your hospitality?’
Vig appeared stoic. ‘How much commission did you make on the house you sold me?’
‘A good chunk of change – and thank you very much. So?’
‘So I didn’t give you permission to sleep on my land, Charlie.’
‘Viggy-Loo…’
‘I didn’t, Charlie. How many nights did you stay as Don’s guest? I’m not running a hotel.’
Eastlight’s laugh sounded less certain. ‘It wasn’t exactly my intention, Viggy-Loo,’ he began.
‘Nevertheless. You did stay. So you owe me. You owe me for rent.’
‘…You’ve got to be kidding.’ Eastlight’s smile was fading. ‘…You’re serious.’
‘You owe me for rent and you owe the people you hurt.’
‘…What’s the price?’ Eastlight asked.
‘You and Don.’
‘Yes?’ Eastlight and Don asked in unison.
‘A team. You’re working as a team. We’re going to close down Benny’s operation, do you hear me? You both left before discharging your debts.’
7.
In control, calm and sane, Vig exited the woods, expecting to see the large house that he knew he would sell when he was given the opportunity (he’d take a loss for a quick sale: he didn’t need the money) – the house and maybe Dorota. After all, why shouldn’t his partner be in this fantasy, even if she was about to be an ex-partner? (Things were going to change when he got home.) But neither the house nor Dorota was present.
Phyllie was.
She stood on the other side of a chainlink fence that stretched in either direction for as far as the eye could see.
‘Fancy meeting you here,’ said Vig.
‘Small world.’
‘Literally… So what happens next?’
‘I’m trying to get out of school,’ Phyllie replied. ‘I’ve walked all the way round – there’s no door and no gate.’
The fence was also (Vig estimated) ten metres or so high.
‘And you don’t fancy a climb, I suppose,’ Vig suggested.
‘I
n these shoes?’
Vig tested the strength of the chainlink with one hand; he squeezed to see if it would break – perhaps it was rustier than it appeared… No, it wasn’t.
‘What’s in there?’ he asked.
‘I told you. A school. My school.’
‘I thought you were joking. I met Don and Charlie. I told them they had to work together. I sent them off to do my bidding.’
Phyllie smiled. ‘Bet they loved that. Doing what?’
‘Spreading the word. That all of this is an experiment; it’s not real.’ Vig shrugged. ‘If we can sow a few doubts, that can hardly be a bad thing.’
‘And what if no one believes them?’
Vig shrugged again. ‘Negative news spreads as fast as positive. Faster, probably.’
Phyllie leaned against the fence and gripped a couple of links. ‘Come on, this is like A Letter to Brezhnev. Get me out of here, Vig.’ And she sang the first bar of ‘Rescue Me’.
‘Benny said this was all ours to control, right? So why don’t we abuse the responsibility we’ve been handed?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Listen to me, fence,’ he said in his best English accent (he sounded like the actor Trevor Eve). ‘You do not exist. I unmake you. Go…’
Vig even flexed a karate chop at the fence – hey presto! – for extra panache and shazam.
Nothing happened.
Bursting out laughing, Phyllie managed to say, ‘Oh your face, Vig. Bless.’
‘Why didn’t that work?’
‘You look crestfallen…’ Phyllie was still chuckling. ‘You didn’t think I might’ve tried that then? Thanks for the vote of support.’ But she wasn’t offended, in fact she found the whole situation very close to hysterically funny. ‘You look like you’ve knocked your tennis ball into the neighbour’s garden. And there’s a nasty little yapping dog playing with it.’
Somewhat sulkily Vig replied, ‘The situations are not a million miles apart, in case you haven’t noticed, Phyl.’
‘Am I the dog or the tennis ball?’ Phyllie started laughing afresh.
‘I could always walk away, you know.’
‘Oh don’t whinge.’
‘Seriously. I don’t know why that didn’t work.’
‘You didn’t make it,’ Phyllie guessed. ‘Maybe it’s mine to dispose of… only that didn’t work either.’
‘If I wanted to conjure up a shovel, would I be able to?’
‘A shovel? Are you planning to dig me out?’
‘Or a pair of shears then! What am I, some sort of expert!’
‘Well what am I, Vig? You’re treating me like an old hand.’
‘…Sorry.’
‘Where are they, by the way? Charlie and Don: where did they go?’
‘The road not taken,’ Vig answered. ‘We hit a crossroads a mile or so back. I told them to go left and I turned right… They’re to find me at a place I want them to find me: that’s the challenge I set them… I don’t know if that’s metaphysical or just vague and woolly.’
‘It’s the Overlap,’ said Phyllie. ‘My daughter told me about it. Sort of.’
‘Your daughter…’
‘Yes, I have a daughter. It’s complicated. Another time, Vig. I think I need to get out of here.’
‘Or I have to get in.’
‘To my school?’
‘No you’re right. Start climbing, Phyl. And that’s an order.’
‘Ooh. I love it when you talk dirty.’
8.
They walked over hill and dale, where the winds had colours but the animals and plant life did not. Rabbit-shaped absences of colour hopped in front of their footfalls; bird-shaped absences of colour swooped over their aching heads.
But were they getting anywhere? It was hard to tell if they had made any progress, the sky remained cloud-covered for a mile after mile, the cumulonimbus a gorgeous aquamarine hue against the dirty cream sky. Besides which, neither of them wanted to question the assumption of progress being made (by placing one foot in front of the other, surely they were moving towards an end-up point somewhere); for both of them, a walk was anyway a welcome break, a way of spending the poison-induced hangovers that they surely must be nursing, back in the real world. A walk was a way to discuss their home lives.
Vig admitted that he and Dorota were at a standstill, developmentally and emotionally speaking. ‘And Don didn’t help much, I must say.’
‘No. No I don’t suppose he did.’
‘…How’s it going with you?’
Never in living memory had Phyllie stepped so close to blurting out the truth: that she was frightened of her time at home. A host of conflicting fears troubled her, here, sufficiently far away from that existence that she could view it, stripped of any inevitable proximate passion, with objectivity. Contemplating Vig’s question, Phyllie sighed and wondered where to begin. Not only was she frightened of Roger’s escalations of libido, and the new and outré acts that they would share together to quench it, she was frightened that one day (soon) he would stop wanting to achieve these sexual complicities. That one day he would cease fancying her, either for the duration of her pregnancy or longer. That he would move on to person new (not necessarily women either). That the baby inside her had brought their love life to an end, and not with a bang but with a whimper.
‘Roger has a theory,’ said Phyllie, ‘all women eventually marry their fathers.’
‘With respect, I think Freud might’ve come up with something along those lines first.’
‘Well he was right, whoever it was. I married my father when I married Roger. They’ve even got the same name! That should’ve been a clue, don’t you think? I’ve been punishing myself for something ever since.’
Vig spent a few seconds tiptoeing through his thoughts.
‘Was your dad a psychologist too?’
‘No. He sold used office furniture and dreamed of winning the Pools… He was in The Sun the other year.’
‘I didn’t realise the Pools were still going.’
‘Not for that… I have no idea. He was a regional slimmer of the year for East Sussex. Lost fourteen stone in eight months… He’d ballooned up to twenty-nine stone after Mum died. Lived on four pizzas and a bottle of brandy a day. Eighty-a-day on the snouts.’
‘Wow.’
‘…I think it’d be fair to say it was more than a cry for help. He wanted it over and done with.’
‘So what changed?’ asked Vig.
‘I will never know – he won’t tell me. I’ve stopped asking, to be honest: it gets embarrassing after a while.’
Vig made the mental adjustments that needed to be made. Up until this point he had assumed Phyllie’s father to be deceased. Fortunately he had not asked Phyllie if she missed him terribly.
‘Saul Bellow wrote that it’s a rare man indeed who isn’t affected evermore by the sexual advice of his father… or words to that effect.’
Phyllie sniggered. ‘And where does that leave girls?’
‘I have no idea… I can’t help questioning whether I think it would be better or worse to meet some other people, on the trail as it were – the trail of the lonesome pine.’
‘Worse, would be my vote. I’m actually enjoying myself – I’m sure that’s not supposed to be how it works.’
Vig smiled as a butterfly-shaped absence of colour floated past. It was almost too cartoonish to be true.
‘Only one thing would make it perfect,’ Phyllie suggested. ‘Do you think we can turn the world’s lights off?’
Vig said nothing.
‘It’s been a while since I had you alone, after all. And technically… it’s not cheating if we’re actually not here. We’re in a room somewhere, not even touching.’
‘As far as you know.’
Phyllie laughed. ‘As far as we know.’
She stop
ped walking. The wind blew through her hair in streaks of orange and gold. She felt pained – she felt threatened – by the chance of rejection. Uxoriousness was one of Vig’s more regrettable traits. She waited.’
‘Al fresco?’
‘As if there’s a choice.’ Phyllie started to unbutton her blouse.
‘No, let me,’ said Vig. ‘We’ve waited long enough. I don’t want to rush it now.’
‘We won’t rush… Let’s try to make some stars,’ said Phyllie.
‘You mean real ones? In the sky?’
‘We’ll decide as we go along.’
Group Activity
1.
Barely sentences into an excavation, a dig for a particular lode of memories, senses and impressions, Connors stopped in the middle of a word (the word was reservoir) and let the dash that bisected its syllable stand for the whole, unwilling and impotent to strike deeper, and not possessing the correct tools to do so anyway.
It was Bernadette who provided him with an implement. She did so by completing the thought that Connors couldn’t manage.
‘Your brother died in the reservoir,’ she said softly. ‘That’s what you’re telling us, isn’t it.’
Connors nodded his head.
Bernadette, Massimo and Tommy watched him closely, each individually wondering what emotion the man would be led to explore. For the moment, no emotion was obvious: Connors was still alternating his shovel and his pick, dig-dig-digging in the mine.
‘We think so,’ Connors continued. ‘The problem was, he was never found. They never found his body.’
‘In a reservoir?’ asked Bernadette.
‘They searched for a week, I found out later. Me, my mum and my mum’s fella – we all watched him fucking about at the rail and fall in. But he didn’t even bob up, struggling-like. Spitting and coughing. Nothing. A big splash… and it was like he was never there. Goodnight, Vienna. We never saw the cunt again. He left this world, like… or that world I should say. A whole seven days to declare the poor cunt dead.’