by A. S. Hatch
When I came to, I felt intense heat in my left knee like it had been doused in oil and set alight. I heard the distant sounds of motorcycle engines or lawnmowers or chainsaws. Also: a foghorn, birdcall and an aeroplane like a great finger scoring a fold in the sky. I rolled onto my side and I prised open my eyes carefully, allowing the tiniest amount of light to enter. It was daytime. I had been lying here all night. My legs were submerged in water and the tide was coming in. I stood up, hunched and clam-eyed, and surveyed the scene before me. Marshland. I found myself amongst green reeds, luminous like Alfred’s plumage against the grey sky. In front of me the great bay opened up like a pair of arms offering an embrace to the open sea. I planted my feet wide and turned slowly to face the land behind me. My left knee complained with each movement; I didn’t dare inspect it yet. Fields stretched towards the horizon, rising and dipping in curved troughs. The sun shone through a hole in the clouds and caused a golden disc to move across the land like a spotlight. In a distant field away to my left stood a tiny cluster of stone buildings. Two very close together and a third set apart. I did not detect any life. No smoke rose from the chimneys and the windows were not lit. I hoped the buildings were uninhabited; an abandoned old farmstead. I wasn’t in the mood for neighbours.
The knee was problematic. But the greatest source of discomfort was the shivering cold sickness that had seized my body. As I shambled through the pines towards the back door of the cottage – after a long struggle getting back up the rocks – I could feel my body giving in. A deathly sleep was coming. Leaning against the cottage’s walls I inched my way around to the front door, which was wide open. A great oval of grass in the centre of the clearing was waterlogged and reflected the morning sky like a mirror. Hopping along the corridor on my one good leg I somehow made it to my bed.
I awoke and it was night again. I could feel a breeze and remembered that the front door was still open. It had been open now for an entire night and day. But it was too far. I could not move my body. Alfred chirped incessantly. He was hungry too. I fell back asleep.
The next morning my stomach dragged me into the kitchen. I ate oats with water and put a handful of Alfred’s food in the middle of the kitchen table. After this I sat on the floor of the kitchen and wriggled out of my still-damp pyjamas. I looked to my right and could just about make out the faint outline of the mouse’s dead body that I thought I had bleached away.
I was very unwell. Victoria began invading my dreams. She and Ruby conspired in whispers. They each wore prison garb and shielded their mouths with coned hands so I could not read their lips. They giggled and flourished their hair like teenagers. In half-sleep, when I had one hand on the wheel of my own imagination, they came to me more benevolently. Now smiling, now comforting. They both made love to me. Ruby’s body was Victoria’s old body.
Once I had exhausted the oats I knew I had to make a trip to the supermarket for provisions. There was no other food left and I couldn’t have gone foraging with my damaged knee. I drove out slowly along the lane. Each time I squeezed the clutch I emitted a little involuntary wheeze of pain.
Leaning my weight onto my trolley I shambled through the aisles. I could sense people staring at me. I was limping badly on the knee but it was not that which drew their attention. I had not washed in days. My last contact with water had been the tide. My hair was wild, my beard out of control. The waxed jacket was filthy. I saw a woman who looked like Victoria. She was wearing luminously coloured exercise gear and marched with great purpose towards me. I could not run. All I could do was turn away and hope she didn’t notice me. I became acutely conscious then of the smell I was emitting. It wasn’t her but I had been given a fright. I found myself then watching the other people in the store, observing them with fascination. I was drawn to this human behaviour like a jealous ghost. I suddenly longed to be amongst them, to rejoin them.
When I returned to Lanes End I found two letters in the mailbox. The anti-fracking sign had blown over. I did not stand it back up. I was very hungry. I drank three glasses of water from the kitchen tap one after the other, ate three slices of bread straight from the packet and took two anti-inflammatories. I took a bath and watched the dirt float away from my body on the surface of the water. After the bath I stood staring at my reflection in the mirror. My face was buried beneath clumps of wet dark hair. I took a towel to it, which brought out the specks of white and grey that had recently started coming through, and I realised I looked just like Frank. I was missing only a pair of glasses. This was his property. He must have been here, spent time here. I felt I could sense his presence. In the air. In the walls. I shaved the beard off hurriedly, as if exorcising Frank’s spirit. I watched the last of the stubble go down the plughole and then used one of Constance’s ornate brushes to tame my hair. Then I sat at the kitchen table and opened the letters. They had both been forwarded on from Beryl Avenue; I hadn’t given my address out to anybody apart from Royal Mail. One was junk. The other was a handwritten letter, a job offer from the owner of an online furniture company. A Polaroid of a large storage trunk I had made some years before was enclosed. I remembered it well: mango wood, distressed finish, iron trimmings, fitted with an old-fashioned hasp and staple lock. The owner explained how he loved my work, that many people had enquired about the trunk in his home, that he knew he could sell them in decent quantities through his site for eleven or twelve hundred, of which I’d get five. All materials would be provided, all I had to do was drive to the timber merchant to collect them and he would arrange collection of the finished products. Though I owned the cottage outright I still needed an income. This seemed like the perfect job. The trunks were easy to make. I could make at least three or four per month. I decided to accept.
Once I’d put the rest of the shopping away I went into the box room and retrieved the telephone. I plugged it into the wall socket in the corridor and dialled the number on the brochure. ‘Please remember, sir, in some cases it can take up to a week for your account to activate,’ said the voice in the call centre.
But an hour later I was live. I was connected. Annoyingly, the signal from the router (which I had to plug in in the only working phone socket I could find on the property, in the larger of the two outbuildings – evidently a garage – as the socket in the corridor turned out to be ‘internet dead’) only reached to the workshop, the cottage wasn’t close enough. So I set up my old laptop on the bench in my workshop and powered it up. I felt suddenly nervous. Avoiding the news and social media, I opened my emails. There were dozens of junk messages. Offers to enlarge my bank account, my pension, my penis. I deleted them all. When I got down to it there was only one genuine item of mail. It was from Inbox Inmate. My heart leapt violently in my chest as I clicked on the message. This is what she had written:
31 July 2016
Dan
Last night I dreamt you were dead. You were lying on the ground and you had drowned. It felt real. I thought I could smell the sea.
Ruby
I slammed the laptop shut and hobbled quickly back into the cottage and locked the door behind me. The internet was a mistake; I had brought bad magic to Lanes End. I was suddenly freezing cold and I spent the rest of that night on a rocking chair, wrapped in a blanket with my feet tucked beneath me, feeling my weight shift minutely backwards and forwards, and listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock and the snapping of the burning logs.
***
After the summer madness, things have settled down here. The sun has disappeared behind a duvet of clouds. I haven’t seen it in many days. The sun’s departure seems to have drawn the energy from people. I am able now to write a great deal. Gordon seems less preoccupied too. I saw him yesterday. He asked me about the mirror frame. I said it was going well and that he should come look at it himself. He said he might. He asked about Robbie. I said he was doing OK and asked Gordon if he knew what had happened. He told me about a fish he caught over the weekend: a catfish. I said I didn’t think we had catfish in
this country. He laughed and said we’re surrounded by water.
Robbie is more talkative than ever. But now I don’t find it off-putting. Lately, his anecdotes seem to be taking on an autobiographical tone. They seem to have chronology. At present, in his autobiography, he is a young man. He has been telling me the story of how he met his wife Maud. He stole her from another man, I understand. Another miner from Maltby.
***
I thought I had purchased the router with the intention of rejoining society, of jumping back into its bracing current and allowing it to carry me off. But all I used it for was to buy things. I started buying books and having them shipped to the big Tesco where it was possible to collect them. All the books I could remember my father having read. I didn’t read any of them. I was afraid to. I can’t really explain why. Opening the front covers made me cringe, like lifting a rock to see the writhing worms and insects clinging to it. I read the blurbs, imagined my own plots, inserted my own twists. In any case the reading of the books was less important than the owning of them. It felt like another act of defiance against Frank.
I bought food too. More and better food. Tinned peaches and glacé cherries, which I ate by the tub, cheese and bread. Alcohol too. I took to drinking red wine by the fireplace.
I bought things and kept on buying things. The internet made it all so easy. I bought things in larger quantities than any single man would ever need. Forty-eight rolls of toilet paper. Two one-kilo cans of instant coffee. Packs of ten five-litre bottles of water. Fifty bars of soap. A year’s supply of razor blades (I wasn’t prepared to allow Frank’s beard to come back). Huge five-kilo sacks of rice, lentils, oats. Industrial quantities of trail mix, prunes and dates. Giant yellow sponges, which you had to cut to size yourself. Bags of cotton wool. Twenty litres of bleach. A 900-litre compost maker. Various adhesives. Electrical tape. Was I preparing for the end of the world? Perhaps this was just what lonely people did?
My days were now filled with work. When I collected the materials from the timber merchants, where I had not been in months, the conversation was stunted and very awkward. I hated it. When I got back to Lanes End I went immediately down to the rock pools to cool off.
I liked working. I liked the sound my skin made as it brushed along the edges of the mango wood and its sweet smoky scent. I liked the way, if I opened the doors at both ends of the workshop, the air passed through from one door to the other and blew the sawdust onto the ground and the sweat from my forehead. I liked the way the sawdust swirled in mad circles in the corners of the workshop where it sometimes gathered and could not escape.
It was of course irrational to think Ruby had somehow prophesised my accident. The only logical conclusion to draw from Ruby’s email was not that she was psychic, but simply that she hated me and wished me harm.
When this thought occurred to me I was looking at my reflection in the mirror. I felt a very powerful urge to hurt myself. I opened one of the boxes of razor blades I had recently purchased and held my forearm out over the sink. But as I was standing there I realised it wouldn’t go far enough. It would be a cop-out. It would hurt in the moment but then the pain would fade, the wound would heal and I would be compelled to do it all over again. I needed a form of lasting pain, pain for which there was no treatment. So I began by asking myself an innocuous question: I wonder what Victoria is doing right now? I needed, suddenly, to know. It was easy to find out.
I still had a dormant Facebook account that she had created for me years ago. Once I reset the password I was back in, with full access to everyone’s public lives. I typed her name into the search bar and clicked into her profile. I scrolled down her page a little. There was a link to Scott’s YouTube channel. I clicked through and experienced a feeling similar to when I’m dreaming and in the dream I’m dead but no one is talking about it, as though I’ve been erased from history, as though I never existed. Live Well with Scott and Vic. Beneath this: a picture of the two of them back to back in workout gear, the words Live Well printed across their vests. Vic’s head is tilted backwards into the nook of his neck. I watched all of the videos. Every last second of every last clip. It was intoxicating, exhilarating: like poking a finger into a festering wound and seeing how deep I could burrow it, how long I could hold it there without passing out.
There was one video I kept coming back to. It was the only one I could find that featured Victoria by herself. In it she is demonstrating various beginner yoga poses. She wears an orange Live Well branded singlet top and stretches out on a black yoga mat. She smiles serenely and talks in a low soothing voice that I don’t recognise. She reminds me to breathe. She tells me to centre myself, to focus my energy. I watched her movements closely. I sucked air deep down into my body. I played this video over and over. Don’t forget to breathe, she says.
With Victoria’s guidance I began to practice basic yoga on the grass near the garage. I enjoyed closing my eyes and squeezing the grass between my fingers and pushing my chin up to the sky and feeling the skin on my stomach stretch and go taut like a sail and hearing her voice mingle with the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind. The yoga was good for the knee. I could move around much better now but it still throbbed occasionally. This pain, which was only an echo of the original pain, served as a reminder of the precariousness of my isolated situation. What if something bad happened here? I could have an accident in the workshop. Or what if one night the dark figures watching me from the trees came knocking? Who would know? Who would come to help me?
September came. I found the courage to start reading again, beginning with a book I already knew: Nineteen Eighty-Four. The daytime was my domain. Whatever was out there in the woods didn’t threaten me in the day. I took advantage of this whenever I could. I’d take my book and sit with my bare feet dangling over the edge of the cliff and watch the flat-bottomed clouds drift like giant snails across the peaks on the other side of Wilder Bay. There wasn’t a single day of rain that September, and the sun stuck around far longer than it usually does. Usually, I saw squirrels and mice and occasionally skulking foxes and many birds, but that month there was just me and Alfred. Sometimes the silence was so thick it felt like the kind of silence that exists when you hide in a cupboard and hold your breath. The silence of someone wanting not to be found. Once or twice I stood in the centre of the criss-crossing corridors and said Hello? and was relieved not to receive any response. I still slept poorly. I spent a lot of time looking at myself in the mirror, inspecting my skin closely for signs of the beard. I bought a magnifying mirror, which made this far easier to do. Upon any sign of stubble I’d whip out the razor blade and scrape it straight off, dry. My face stung a lot because of this rough treatment, but I regarded the pain, the burn, as penance.
I made sure always to get inside before the sun went down. On the nights that I hadn’t drunk any wine and therefore wasn’t able to sleep, I stood at the window and watched the trees. I was sleeping only three or four hours per night. When I did manage to get some sleep I dreamt a lot. Many of my dreams were simply blank, as though my tired brain hadn’t the energy to produce imagery. But there was also a constant whirring and buzzing, an undulating chorus of some sort of diabolical machinery. Gradually, though, I realised it to be the sound of a motorcycle, two motorcycles, revving and groaning, doughnutting all over the muddied landscape of my mind. I remembered with a start one day that this sound had also come to me when I lay semi-conscious in the reeds. Where had this preoccupation with motorcycles come from? This was a mystery that would go unsolved for some weeks.
***
Robbie’s life story continues. This doesn’t occur every day. Most of the time we’re silent. But his past lingers just beneath the surface and the slightest thing sets him off. Invariably, it is something he sees on the telly. He sits forward on my bed so that his feet touch the ground and he stares off into the past and without introduction or warning he reports his visions to me.
I used to think Robbie was a bit of a sad case. I
used to pity him. What hubris. We’re the same, he and I. Look at us: two lonely, ageing men running the rule over our lives, reliving each painful moment. My motivation for doing so is clear, I hope, at least to you. But Robbie. He seems simply to be flagellating himself to no end. He doesn’t have a Lucy Blu-tacked to his wall. It’s hard to watch. But also compelling in a darkly entertaining way, knowing, as I already do, half of how his story ends. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued to know the details of how his life has turned out this way. Why now? I asked him when he fell silent again. What dya mean? he said. Why are you going through all of this now? Is something the matter with you? Are you dying? This was intended as levity. He just sat back on the bed and resumed watching the telly.
***
It was the night before October.
I drank what would be enough, normally, to induce sleep. But something kept me awake. I was frightened. Silly as this sounds – given I had been there by myself for three and a bit months – I was frightened of being there by myself, of my loneliness growing too big and heavy to cast off. Becoming the sort of loneliness which transforms every room into an inescapable cave, every voice into a snub, and every minute into an hour.
The end of summer felt like a bereavement. I toasted the sun. Tomorrow it would leave me, I sensed. The sun had been my companion, in a way my guide and my clock. I was minded of the way I felt after my mother’s wake. That night I had written to Ruby for the first time. And miraculously she wrote back. And what a mess I’d made of all that.