All the same, I felt my way out to the hallway, where a pale bone-colored light was falling through the skylight above the door. Without switching on the lights, I walked on squeaking trainers to the very far end, beside the cellar-door, and that was where the photograph hung—Fortyfoot House, in 1888. The man was still there, his face blurred, staring back at me across more than a hundred years. On the day that he had stood in the garden to have that picture taken, Queen Victoria had been staying only a few miles away at Osborne, Oscar Wilde had just published The Happy Prince, and the first flight had been made in Germany of an engine-powered balloon.
I suppose it was completely irrational of me to check that he was still there. But I had been unable to shake off the suspicion that he had somehow managed to escape from the photograph, and was now hiding somewhere in or around Fortyfoot House. Black-suited, white-faced, vexed, and two-dimensional.
I turned away from the photograph at last, but as I did so I was sure that I saw the man’s image shift slightly. I looked back at it. He seemed to be standing in the same position as before, his expression hadn’t changed, but hadn’t his foot been further away from the edge of the rose-bed?
Too many glasses of Piat D’Or, I told myself. Too much stress, too much worrying. I was beginning to fall apart. There was no way in the world that a hundred-year-old photograph could move or change. There was no way in the world that Young Mr Billings could be walking around the corridors or gardens of Fortyfoot House.
I climbed the stairs, with the bone-colored light at my back. I reached the landing, and paused for a moment by the attic door. Its catch was securely fastened, and I could hear no scuffling or scratching. Brown Johnson (or whatever the good people of Bonchurch called it) was either absent or asleep. I rapped on the attic door softly with my knuckles, just to reassure myself that I wasn’t afraid.
Who’s afraid of the big brown rat?
I looked in on Danny. He was fast asleep. Hot, his hair stuck in waves to his forehead. How had Louis Macneice described his sleeping child? “Like something baking.” I kissed him and he stirred and said, “Mummy.”
Mummy, you poor little chap. Mummy’s over the hills and far away, with Raymond the Bearded Fart. Mummy doesn’t want you any more.
Liz’s door was closed. I was tempted for a split-second to open it and wish her goodnight, but then I changed my mind. She might take it all the wrong way. I thought she was pretty and sexy and I loved her bare toes and the nineteen-year-old smell of her, but I didn’t want to turn her off. I enjoyed her company too much, not to mention her chili. The thought of having to spend the summer without her suddenly seemed bleak.
I undressed, washed, brushed my teeth, and climbed wearily into bed. I wished at once that I’d taken more trouble over making it. The sheet was uncomfortably wrinkled like a beach when the tide’s gone out, and there were toast crumbs in every conceivable crevice. I tried to settle down, but after a while I had to get up, and straighten it out.
I was still tucking in the sheet when there was a quick knock at my door.
“David? It’s Liz.”
“Hold on,” I told her. I vaulted into bed and pulled up the sheet to hide my nakedness. “Okay… you can come in now.”
She came into the room and quickly closed the door behind her, as if she were afraid that something was following her. Her hair was still tied in that red silk headscarf, but all she was wearing apart from that was a short white T-shirt and a tiny pair of white lacy panties. She sat down on the edge of the bed but her face was anxious rather than lascivious.
“There’s something running around in the attic. I can hear it. It must be that rat.”
“I haven’t heard it, not tonight,” I lied.
“I’m sure it’s a rat,” she insisted. “It keeps rushing from one side of the attic to the other, right over my room.”
“I can’t do anything about it, not tonight. The chap from Rentokil will be here tomorrow.”
“All right,” she said. “I’m sorry I disturbed you. It’s just that I can’t stand rats. They really make me shudder.”
“Sure, me too. Tell me if you hear it again. Perhaps I could go upstairs and hit it with a poker.”
Some hopes, I thought. Especially after this morning’s fiasco. As far as I’m concerned, the more distance I keep between Brown Johnson and me, the better I’ll like it.
Liz hesitated with the door still ajar. Then she said, “Listen… I know this must sound like a come-on, but rats really do frighten me. Do you think I could stay with you tonight? I’ll keep a pillow wedged between us.”
“Yes, sure.” I didn’t mind at all. In fact, I very much liked the idea. I hadn’t lain side by side in bed with a girl for months, and it wasn’t so much the car maintenance I missed, it was the conversation. It’s surprising how quickly you can get tired of laughing on your own, reading on your own, playing music on your own, eating on your own. But sleeping on your own is worst of all. You might just as well be lying in your coffin, with nothing to do but grin into the darkness and play with your cock and wait for God.
“All right,” I said. “If it frightens you that much.”
“I promise I’ll leave you in the morning, before Danny wakes up.”
She closed the door again, lifted up the sheets, and climbed into bed beside me. I shifted myself away from her, so that there were a good six inches between us, and kept both arms stiffly by my sides, but all the same the closeness of her, the warmth and the perfume and the wriggly presence of a pretty young girl, were all very hard to ignore.
“When did you hear it?” I asked her.
“When you were coming up the stairs. It ran sort of diagonally across the attic floor. It sounded incredibly big and heavy, but then things always sound louder at night, don’t they?”
I looked up at the ceiling. “I think it is big and heavy.”
“Don’t. You’re scaring me.”
We lay side by side listening. We heard the clock in the hallway downstairs strike twelve-thirty, and a night breeze beginning to pick up outside—a breeze that blew through the house and made the locked doors rumble on their hinges.
“I suppose we’d better switch off the light and try to get some sleep,” I suggested.
Now we lay in the dark. There were no streetlights in Bonchurch, no lights in the garden and no moon tonight, so that the blackness was almost complete. It was like having a black velvet bag tied over your head. I was disturbingly conscious of Liz’s breast, pressing against my right shoulder. Even though she was wearing a T-shirt, I could feel the softness and the heaviness of it. Now that she wasn’t wearing one of her loose cotton dresses, which more or less concealed her figure, it was obvious that she had startlingly large breasts for her size and build. Alluring though her face had been, Janie’s breasts by comparison had been gnat-bites, so you can understand why I tended to notice them.
“I think fate always gives us a second chance,” said Liz. “Sometimes we’re blind or too busy to notice it, that’s all. Don’t you think it’s a tragedy, if two people who could be really happy together passed each other in the street, an inch away, and never knew? Or if two people were being brought closer and closer, from thousands of miles apart, and then suddenly one of them missed a train connection because they dropped a newspaper and went back to pick it up... and so they never got to meet at all.”
“That kind of thing must happen all the time. It’s the law of probabilities.”
“How did you and I manage to meet, for example?” asked Liz. “You might have found a summer job somewhere else. You might have carried on your shop. You might have stayed with Janie. And it was only by fluke that somebody gave me the name of this house to squat in.”
“Fate,” I smiled, although she couldn’t see me. “And the one thing that keeps us all going… the occasional rare and glorious moment when life turns out to be not-half-bad.”
She reached out and her fingertips found my cheek in the darkness. She felt my eyes an
d nose and lips as if she were a blind person. “I love feeling people in the dark. They feel quite different, their proportions change, according to how you touch them. Perhaps they really do change, there’s no way of telling. You could be turning into some strange disproportionate monster, for all I know. You have to switch the light on really quickly to catch people with their dark faces on—as opposed to their light faces, the faces they wear to reassure you that they’re ordinary and normal.”
“You think I’m going to change into a monster?” I asked her.
“You might do. On the other hand, I might change into a monster, and then where would you be?”
“About three valleys away, leaving a high-speed trail of hot diarrhea.”
She kissed me. “Don’t be disgusting.”
I kissed her back. “I’ll agree not to be disgusting if you agree not to turn into a monster. And that means a monster of any kind.”
She kissed me again, but this time I said, “We’d better get some sleep, yes? You promised to be Saint Elizabeth the Untouched; and I promised to be Saint David the Divine.”
“It depends what you’re divine at.”
All the same, we managed to wrestle and struggle ourselves into a reasonably comfortable position, close our eyes and pretend to sleep for nearly three quarters of an hour. I listened to the house creaking, the wind blowing through the oaks, the shush, shush, shush of the sea. I listened to the draft foraging around the house, knocking at the windows, tapping at the locks. I listened to Liz’s neat, steady breathing, which was the breathing of somebody who has been trying to get to sleep but can’t, and is almost about to give up and go downstairs and make themselves a cup of tea.
“Liz?” I asked her, eventually. “Are you awake?”
She pushed the sheet down, away from her face. “My mind keeps spinning over.”
“What are you thinking about? Anything in particular?”
“Oh… nothing much. Work, and college. I was wondering if I would be able to save up enough money to buy myself a car. I get fed up asking people for lifts all the time.”
There was a lengthy silence. Then I said, “I can’t sleep, either.”
“Perhaps you’re not used to having anybody in bed with you.”
“Yes. Perhaps you’re right.”
I heard her lips moistly clicking in the darkness. Then she said, “You can kiss me, you know. We won’t be struck dead by a wrathful God.”
“I don’t know. I don’t like to start anything I can’t finish.”
“Who’s talking about starting anything? Who’s talking about finishing?”
I cupped her shoulder in my hand. “Do you know what Danny asked me the other day? ‘Did God make Himself?”’
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him not to be so silly. Then I realized I didn’t know whether God made Himself or not. I spent a whole night thinking about it.”
“God was there before anything. God has always been there.”
“What kind of an answer is that? That’s a complete cop-out.”
Liz raised herself on one elbow and kissed my cheek, then my mouth. Her tongue searched between my teeth like a warm porpoise. I tried not to kiss her back but she tasted like a girl ought to taste, slightly sweet and slightly salty, saliva and perfume and wine, and her heavy warm T-shirted breast pressed against my bare arm. Our mouths tussled. I squeezed her breasts through her T-shirt, and her breasts were huge, compared with Janie’s; they were like a Penthouse fantasy come true. My cock rose hard and uncompromising, there was nothing I could do about it, and Janie grasped it in her right hand, quite forcefully, like a girl who’s quite experienced at grasping cocks. She rubbed it slowly up and down, up and down, until it was swollen almost beyond endurance, and slippery with juice.
At the same time, I slid my hands underneath her T-shirt and felt the bare weight of her breasts, and rolled her nipples between finger and thumb, until they crinkled and stiffened.
All the time she was kissing and rubbing me, she was singing lightly under her breath, a strange high crooning song. I couldn’t hear all of it, but it sounded like one of those spooky ribald country songs; the songs they sing in Norfolk pubs with a wink at your wife that sends shivers of anxiety and protectiveness down your back.
“The collier, the dirty old collier, he keeps all his coal in a sack...”
She twisted around, and tugged off her panties.
“Condom,” I said, in a muffled voice.
“I’m on the pill.”
“All the same… we ought to.”
“I haven’t got AIDS, you know.”
Before I could say any more, she had climbed on top of me. Still grasping my cock tightly, she guided it up between her thighs, teasing me for a moment by sliding it up and down the lips of her vulva, not letting me in—then suddenly sitting down, so that I penetrated her as deeply as I could. I closed my eyes. After months of abstinence, after months of telling myself that I didn’t miss it, it was bliss. I don’t know whether I groaned out loud, but Liz leaned forward and kissed me, and said, “Ssh, it’s beautiful.”
She moved herself up and down with a slow fluidity that gradually aroused me more and more, but not too much, so that it seemed to be hours before I felt that irresistible tightening between my legs which told me that I was just about to go over the top. Liz herself was beginning to pant, and her T-shirt clung sweatily to her breasts. I clutched the cheeks of her bare bottom in both hands, and urged her down on to me even more forcefully.
At that instant, however, we heard a heavy tumbling sound in the attic directly above our heads, as if somebody had knocked an armchair over.
Liz sat up straight, listening, my cock still deep inside her. “What was that?” she whispered. “That couldn’t have been a rat.”
“I told you, it’s really big.”
“Big?” Her voice was bleached with fear. “It must be enormous.”
We waited and listened, and we were just about to continue making love when there was another noise: a dreadful scurrying sound, followed by a sharp clatter, as if a collection of walking-sticks or curtain-poles had fallen over.
Liz climbed off me. I felt the cold draft on the wetness between my thighs. “That’s no rat,” she said. “There’s somebody up there.”
“Oh, come on,” I protested. “Why the hell should anybody want to bang around in the attic? It’s a rat. It just sounds worse than it is because we’re underneath it.”
“Perhaps there’s somebody living up there, without you knowing. I saw a film about that once. He used to come down at night when the family were asleep, and walk around the house. It was really frightening.”
“What would anybody want to live in a pitch-black attic for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they were squatting here before you came, and now they’re hiding up in the attic and waiting for you to go.”
I switched on the bedside light. “People who are trying to hide don’t usually make so much noise.”
“Maybe he’s trying to scare you,” Liz suggested.
“I’ve been up there,” I told her. “I saw something like a rat, but it definitely wasn’t a person.”
“Well, it sounds like a person to me.”
We waited a few moments longer. I was frustrated as well as alarmed. I felt like taking a poker or a cricket bat and beating this stupid Brown Johnson to death. I just wondered if I’d have the nerve, once I was face-to-face with it. And supposing it wasn’t a rat? Supposing it was a squatter, or a vagrant, or a psychopath hiding from the light, or from the law? Supposing it wasn’t any of those things, but some different kind of creature altogether—something so horrible that nobody could describe it?
Whatever it was, it had to go; but I wasn’t at all sure that I was capable of getting rid of it. If the people of Bonchurch had known about it for so many years, why hadn’t somebody tried to get rid of it before? Why hadn’t the Tarrants tried to get rid of it?
We heard no more
noises for over five minutes. Eventually I took hold of Liz’s hand and said, “Come on, back into bed. We should try to get some sleep.”
“I’d better go back to my own room,” she said. “We don’t want Danny finding me here, do we?”
“I don’t think Danny would mind at all.”
“Yes, but I would. I’m not his mummy and I’m not your lover. We just had an interrupted fuck, that’s all.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had been hoping that we might continue where we had broken off, or a few thrusts earlier; but obviously Liz wasn’t in the mood any more. I thought of at least five sharp answers, but I bit my lip instead. Least said, soonest mended, and all that kind of thing. Perhaps, tomorrow night, she’d be back in the mood again, who knew?
She climbed out of bed, tugging her T-shirt down, but not before I had glimpsed the glistening rose-pink lips of her sex. It was the kind of vivid, split-second image that you could see again and again in the magic-lantern of your mind, for the rest of your life.
“Knickers,” I said, and held them up.
“Thanks,” she smiled. “Sleep well.”
She blew me a kiss, then eased open the bedroom door, went out, and closed it quietly behind her. I stayed where I was, propped up on one elbow, feeling as if I would never understand girls. My friend Chris Pert once said that girls were the only insoluble problem that you could get sexually excited about.
I was about to turn off the light when the door opened again, and Liz came back in.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her. She looked odd, unsettled, wide-eyed.
“There’s a light coming from the attic. A really bright light.”
“There aren’t any lights up there. The wiring’s all rotten.”
“Come and have a look.”
I swung myself out of bed and found my toothpaste-striped boxer shorts. Liz said, “I was just closing my door when I saw it flickering. It looks like something’s wrong with the electricity.”
I stepped out into the corridor and Liz followed me close behind. It was totally dark. The moon wasn’t up yet; the curtains were tightly drawn. “I don’t see anything,” I told her. “It was probably a reflection. You know, when you opened your bedroom door. There’s a mirror on the landing.”
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