by Jo Mazelis
‘Children!’ the teacher is saying. ‘Calm down at once!’
The dead girl pushes back her chair. She wears a beatific smile as she stands and begins to take the few steps which will bring her to the window. She seems to glide forward, focusing her gaze on the distant hills. She does not see the teacher bearing down on her. She hears the tirade of words coming from the teacher’s mouth, but they are as generalised as the thunder.
‘I will not have this! I will not tolerate such insubordination in my classroom. Sit down! Sit down at once! YOU!’
The teacher catches her arm, wrenching it sideways, forcing her to turn. The older woman’s face up close is terrifying, her expression almost insane with fury.
‘How dare you!’ she roars, then slaps the dead girl’s left cheek. ‘Stop grinning, child!’ she adds, but the girl’s smile has already gone and her face is blank once more.
She closes her eyes.
‘She is dead,’ the girl standing at her head says, and the voices travel around her prone body, echoes of what has been, of what is to come. Then they are lifting her, higher and higher, to waist level, then shoulder level, then above their heads, to the furthest reach of their upstretched arms and fingers. Then higher still and higher again until she is floating far overhead. Then finally, although the other girls shade their eyes and search the sky they can no longer see her. She’s free.
CARETAKERS
‘Human beings are 70 per cent water. The brain is roughly 85 per cent water…’
She is gazing at the lecturer trying to fight back a yawn. She is so tired her eyes are tearing up. She searches her bag, but no pen. Just a dried-up, electric-lime highlighter. She looks around at the students near her, mouths the word ‘pen’, makes a squiggle in the air to signify her want. Cold eyes study her, frown, then dismiss her as if she is merely a clown, a puppeteer whose hand is suddenly naked and meaningless.
She leans forward in her chair and stretches out to tap Lolly’s shoulder. As he turns, she catches, from beneath her armpit, the strong scent of sweat. Lowers her arm quickly.
‘Pen,’ she whispers urgently.
Lolly raises his eyebrows, turns back, riffles in his bag then produces a biro. She has to lean over to take it. Her sweat is greasy smelling, like pork and onions.
When the lecture finishes just before lunch, she does not follow the other students to the refectory, but goes home to shower.
Last night she couldn’t sleep. All because of the wet footprints she saw; running in a line from the bathroom to the fireplace in her bedroom. The footprints were far smaller than her own. Child-sized naked heel and toe marks, damp on the floorboards and carpet, quickly evaporating to nothing.
The other houses on her street are a mixture of 1930s mock Tudor semis, new apartment blocks and terraced cottages. Hers is the oldest, a Georgian landowner’s pile, double-fronted, whitewashed, tall sash windows and six bedrooms. She lives here alone, half ashamed of her good luck in possessing such a house, half afraid that it will somehow be taken from her, invaded, despoiled. She has lived there for over four months. Since September, when she moved in, disbelieving, everything she owned in an old suitcase and a black bin bag. Everything she owned – not forgetting the house and all its contents: the antique furniture, the mahogany and horsehair, the ivory and silks and ormolu, the oil paintings and watercolours, the butler’s pantry with its silverware, its cut glass and Clarice Cliff tea sets.
The house was left to her by her great uncle. It was a slap in the face to his children and five grandsons, her own parents and his housekeeper (who may or may not have been his mistress for the preceding fifty years).
‘Don’t go and live in that awful house,’ her mother said. ‘Just sell it.’ But it was near the college and she felt compelled somehow, duty-bound.
She puts her bag on the rosewood table in the hall and hangs her jacket on the coat-stand with its carved menagerie of real and mythical creatures, a stag, a unicorn, frogs and lizards with inlaid eyes of ebony, amber and jet. Kicks off her shoes at the base of the stairs and goes up, two steps at a time.
On the landing she stops and searches the floor for signs of footprints. Nothing. She draws closer and kneels to inspect the area for the barest trace of a dark or water-beaded mark.
She glances into her bedroom. Nothing there. Then goes into the bathroom and locks it before disrobing. Turns on the ancient shower and steps under its spluttering, thundering water. Washes herself, then stands, turning this way and that, luxuriating in the liquid heat. She feels at peace. Cleansed and transcendent. Not reborn, but returned to the womb, to the state of being where there are no edges or boundaries. She lingers, eyes closed, hair plastered flat against her skull, down her back.
She does not go back to college that day. Or the day after that, a Friday. Spends hours curled up on the sofa, the TV on. Thinks that she could go on like this. Forever and forever. If she wasn’t so lonely.
On Monday she goes back to college. No one has noticed her absence. They ignore her as before.
After the seminar, she goes to the refectory and does not, as she has in the past, attempt to sit at a table with her fellow students. But they, as bad luck would have it, occupy the table behind her. She can hear every tedious word of their conversation. None of which she wants to hear. Until…
‘Did you hear about Lolly?’
‘No. What?’
‘He’s just like, totally broke.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. His father’s supposed to pay his rent. But he hasn’t, so Lolly’s being chucked out.’
‘Oh my God!’
‘So he owes like nearly a thousand, but his father won’t help him and he can’t go home.’
‘What’s he going to do?’
There is no audible answer to this, perhaps the speaker merely shrugged.
They change the subject. She stops listening. Finishes her food, gets up and walks away, very deliberately not looking at them. Someone laughs, perhaps at her.
She sees Lolly crossing the big hall, weaving between tables packed with students. He has a plate of chips and a white plastic cup of water. Nothing else. Lolly is a big guy, tall, broad-shouldered, but also overweight. His lumberjack shirt is crumpled and he looks like he needs a shave. Tucked away, near the fire exit is a narrow corridor with three small tables, he heads there and she follows. At one of the tables, sitting on a chair as if waiting for a companion is a large nylon rucksack, on the floor beside it are two carrier bags, and a sleeping bag. Lolly slumps into the seat opposite.
She pulls over a chair and sits.
‘Lolly,’ she says.
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘But everyone…’
‘My name is Lawrence.’
He averts his gaze and begins eating.
‘So … someone said you were looking for a place…’
‘Oh yeah? Well someone is talking out of their ass. OK?’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. I heard that … and then here you are with your rucksack and this bag and…’
He looks her in the eye; his expression is flat, guarded. She waits. He says nothing.
‘I was going to say. You know, if you’re stuck. Between places? Then you could stay at mine. For a while. If you want…’
‘For real? Are you for real?’ A grin is starting to break out all over his face. He’s handsome when he smiles.
‘Yeah, for real.’
When their last lecture finished at three she and Lolly lingered until the rest of the class drifted away, before setting off together – him almost a giant, made even larger by his huge rucksack. She, at least a head and a half shorter, had to run every few paces to keep up with him.
They didn’t talk. There was no conversational opening which wouldn’t have been painful for either; he didn’t want to talk about his father, she was ashamed of owning a big Georgian house set in an acre of land, he did consistently well at college, she was scraping along most of the time. Everybody at col
lege liked him, though he seemed to make no effort to be liked, while she tried desperately to charm and ingratiate herself, but got nowhere.
The Lolly/Lawrence thing was interesting, she thought as they turned into her street, he hated being called Lolly but said nothing. The man they all liked, Lolly, Big Loll, Lolls who was tall and a tad overweight, but handsome and affable, was their own invention. The jolly giant, he was safe, good at walking home girls too drunk to look after themselves.
In a similar fashion they must have created a version of her that bore little resemblance to reality. This person was spiky and mean, jealous of the other girls.
Maybe as she and Lawrence got to know one another better they would have a conversation about this, and then understanding everything about her, he would become her envoy, making others see her in a whole new light.
As they began down the drive to the house, he gave no sign of surprise at its majesty. But then he had no idea of her relationship to the house, she might have been a live-in skivvy for all he knew and lived in a caravan around the back.
‘Here it is.’
He stepped in and looked around.
She had almost stopped seeing how grand the hall was, but now she could see its magnificence reflected in his gaze.
‘How many people live here?’
‘Just me.’
‘Just … you?’
‘I’m the caretaker.’
He seemed relieved to hear that. She smiled. How easily the lie had come to her.
‘Well…’ she began, but then she sensed a presence near her, very close by, and a fleeting touch of something cool and very slightly moist on the back of her hand. A quick glimpse and there they were, fading and drying already, two bare footprints that seemed to be waiting, hungry for attention.
‘You okay?’ he said.
‘Yes, just tired. Let’s find you a room, eh?’
When they were halfway up the stairs, he said, ‘You won’t get in trouble will you?’
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘As long as nothing is damaged or whatever… We’re not going to have wild parties are we?’
‘God, no.’
‘Okay, that’s my room,’ she indicated the closed door opposite the bathroom. ‘How about you have this room, next to it?’ She led him into the master bedroom. It was a big room, high-ceilinged, twenty-two feet by eighteen, with three tall sash windows, each with the original wooden shutters. There were long yellow brocade curtains that pooled on the floor and were faded in places. The bed with its walnut headboard stood in the centre of the room, the bare mattress was indecently pink and shiny.
Lawrence put his bags on the floor, then unrolled the sleeping bag and laid it out along one half of the bed. It was one of those high-altitude sleeping bags, a black cocoon that was narrower at the feet than the upper body, like a sarcophagus.
‘There’s plenty of bedding; pillows, blankets, sheets, eiderdowns,’ she said.
‘This will be fine’ he said.
‘But…’
It looked so temporary and so out of place, that sleeping bag on the luxurious satin of the mattress. He does not mean to stay, she thought, he can’t wait to escape.
He busied himself with his stuff, going through the bags, not unpacking but searching for something. Eventually he came to a limp-looking roll of faded purple towel and a striped nylon wash bag.
‘Would it be OK if I had a wash? Need to shave,’ he said, rubbing a hand over his bristly chin, so that a faint rasping sound could be heard.
‘Yes. Yes, of course. The bathroom’s just here. Have a shower.’
He went in and she hovered at the open door.
‘We’ll have to sort out some money for bills,’ he said, as if in answer to her watching him.
‘Plenty of time,’ she said.
He turned on the shower and held a hand under, testing it, then steam began to gather and rise and he withdrew his hand. Smiling awkwardly, he crossed the room and closed the door in her face.
At college, as the days went by, he behaved towards her exactly as he had always done. He did not sit beside her in lectures, nor share a table in the refectory. They did not walk to college together and after the last lecture of the day he always seemed to be caught up in a laughing conversation with one group of students or another.
To punish him she had not yet given him his own set of keys.
Yet each evening they ate together. She had an allowance, she explained, for expenses, and this covered all the bills, even food. She bought ready meals from Marks and Spencer and heated them in the oven, decanting them onto the best plates and adding flourishes like side salads and steam-in-the-bag vegetables. There was always wine too, though he professed at first not to like it. She put fresh flowers on the table and lit the candles in the silver candelabra.
They started, from desultory beginnings, to have real conversations, though the focus was always weighted towards him, she, having much to hide, used a subtle sleight of hand to keep herself in the shadows.
Only two years before he had been an outstanding athlete; excelling at cricket, rugby, long-distance running, swimming and basketball. Then he’d had his accident while rock climbing.
‘But I was lucky,’ he said, and she thought it would be luckier not to fall at all, though did not say this. ‘I could have been paralysed. I could have been dead. Instead, a year and a half in hospital and I’m as right as rain. Just out of shape. Look!’ He pulled his wallet from his back pocket, took out a newspaper clipping. There he was, a god of a man in Speedo swimming trunks, every muscle toned and lean; pecs, biceps, abs, quads. His face, stripped of the plump cheeks and double chin, was that of a Hollywood film star, a young dimpleless Robert Mitchum crossed with Jake Gyllenhaal.
She passed it back to him quickly, afraid to linger over this image.
He’d also revealed more about the quarrel with his father. Lawrence said his dad had left the family when he was too young to remember. Deserted us, was how he put it. The father who had promised to pay his rent, but hadn’t and wouldn’t answer his calls.
Term broke up for Easter and without saying anything to her, he disappeared for three weeks. She had already bought enough food for the two of them for the coming week and a turkey crown for Easter Sunday, and a chocolate egg each.
In his room the sleeping bag still lay on the bare mattress and there were a few of his things scattered about, but his rucksack was gone. In the weeks before this she had barely noticed the little naked footprints. Perhaps with him there she had been too distracted to notice them. Perhaps he scared them away? Whatever it was, throughout Easter they were back with a vengeance. She saw them in the bathroom, the hall and landing, in the kitchen, bedroom and living room. Very often they were side-by-side next to her own feet and sometimes seemed to disperse her loneliness, at others to distil it, making it far more potent.
The doorbell rang on the last Friday of the holidays at eight o’clock.
She opened the door to find Lawrence on the threshold. He was tanned and seemed to have lost the last of the excess fat. He wore flip-flops, khaki shorts and a white t-shirt.
‘Hi,’ he said, hefting the rucksack from his back and onto the floor. Not wanting to look at his face, she found herself concentrating on his feet. There were grains of sand still visible between his toes. She hated him for that, for making her remember long ago summer days when she had come home from the beach, sand everywhere and the sea pulsing in her head, the waves still visible when she shut her eyes to sleep.
‘Hello,’ she said as coldly as she could, but he seemed oblivious.
‘Think I’ll have a shower,’ he said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’
She turned sharply on her heel, went to the kitchen and crashed about with pots and pans, browning meat, chopping onions, garlic, mushrooms, chillies.
She heard the creak of the floorboards overhead and the rattle of the pipes as the shower was turned on.
She boiled rice and poured half a bottle of
Claret into the sauce. Drank the other half, then opened a second bottle.
The little feet beside her seemed to wobble unsteadily. Her little ghost was drunk, she thought, as she sloshed more wine into a tumbler and drank deeply.
‘Smells great!’ He was standing in the doorway, his hair still wet, his face gleaming, a pair of loose white linen trousers covering his lower half, while his chest was bare. She turned away quickly, again afraid to let her gaze linger over that taut, muscled skin, the black hair that gathered in the centre of his chest and ran in a line over his flat stomach.
‘Can I have a glass?’ he asked and when she looked up, she saw that he had put a t-shirt on.
He began to potter about, arranging cutlery on the table in the adjoining room, lighting the candles. Then he put music on; soft swirling pipes and insistent drums, the sound of a night far away in Morocco or Tunisia. Hand claps and a woman’s voice, a rhythmic ululating lament.
She slopped the food onto plates, splashes of tomato everywhere, rice spilled on the stove top, the floor, the counter.
‘Can I help?’ he asked.
She shook her head, unable to speak. A plate in each hand and the wine bottle tucked under her arm.
‘Oops,’ he said, coming closer, reaching behind her so that she thought for one moment he was going to put his arms around her. ‘You left the gas on.’ The pan that had held the rice was blackening and fizzing.
She lurched unsteadily forward and made it through to the dining room without a mishap, tipping the bottle so a little wine sloshed out on to the tablecloth. He filled their glasses and she drained hers immediately. Being this drunk, she thought, is like being in deep water. At the bottom of the ocean with all that weight above you.
‘Wow!’ he said. ‘I’ve really missed this.’
She half closed one eye in order to focus on him across the table.
‘The food?’ she said, slurring horribly.
‘The food, the house, you and me chilling. Everything.’
By candlelight, even through her drunken haze, he seemed to shine like a Greek god, Apollo or Eros or Dionysus. She tried to shrug, wishing to show him that she couldn’t care less if he was there or not. She should just let herself drown she thought, pour more wine down her open throat, let the waves consume her.