Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  Amidst global financial hardship, Turkey’s £1 billion Mardan Palace opened its doors with the biggest Beluga and Bollinger party in history. Sharon Stone, attending with other fading stars like Richard Gere, Mariah Carey and, with grim inevitability, Paris Hilton, said it was a ‘moment of potential profundity. We have come together to make the world a better place.’ That’s the beauty of celebrities; they’ll say or do absolutely anything. The Russians found a way to punish their most rebellious oligarch hotel owner for spending his cash overseas: they closed down his revenue source, a vast Moscow market full of smuggled Chinese goods.

  The line between PR and reality vanished with a staged tiff between Sacha Baron Cohen and Eminem at the MTV Awards (Cohen was dropped into Eminem’s face dressed as a half-nude gay angel and the rapper called him a faggot before storming out). Both were selling new products, and later confirmed the ‘accident’ as a publicity stunt. ‘This is very exciting television,’ said the show’s presenter.

  AEG, the promoters of the O2 concerts which were to feature Michael Jackson’s record-breaking forty-plus appearances, came up with a great way to save on refunds. Punters were offered replacement memorial souvenir tickets somehow ‘inspired and designed’ by the dead singer. Meanwhile, Jackson’s death sparked a massive internet campaign of hoax celebrity death reports that included Jeff Goldblum falling off a cliff and George Clooney crashing a plane.

  Oh, and Prince Charles gave the planet just ninety-six months left to survive.

  But if the world ends, that’s okay too, because it turns out there’s an afterlife. The August 3 issue of The Sun ran a front-page headline announcing that Jade Goody, once so used to speaking through the medium of television, was now speaking through a television medium—from beyond the grave.

  The title Red Gloves suggests, on one level, that like the woman who put the cat in the bin, we are all to some extent guilty. But don’t think you can flee the city and live a life of pastoral tranquility, because the world has a way of catching up with you. As I hope these two volumes will show, whether you choose to stay behind or go abroad—you’re fucked.

  The Rulebook

  Every house has a rulebook. It’s not an actual book, but it has rules you’re not supposed to break. In our house the rulebook appeared after my dad went away. Here are some of the rules:

  Put the lid down on the toilet seat when you’ve finished.

  If you want to get something down from the top shelf don’t stack the furniture to reach it. Your cousin Freddie died like that.

  Don’t touch the boiler in the kitchen, you’ll burn yourself.

  Reading under the bedsheets with a torch will hurt your eyes.

  The internet does not replace real friends.

  Don’t say Bollocks even though your grandad says it all the time.

  Just because everyone else has got one doesn’t mean that you should have one too.

  When you ask for seconds and can’t finish them, remember there are people starving in Africa.

  Television doesn’t go on until you’ve finished your homework.

  Pressing 6 on the speed-dial will call Auntie Pauline in Australia, she has verbal diarrhoea and it will come out of your pocket money.

  Every time you blaspheme, an angel gets a nosebleed.

  Don’t touch the cat’s tray without washing your hands afterwards.

  Don’t ever put a lightbulb in the microwave again.

  When we went on holiday, there was another set of rules:

  Don’t go in the sea until an hour after you’ve eaten.

  Always keep an eye on the tide.

  Only go into an amusement arcade if you’re prepared to lose money.

  A stick of rock can pull your fillings out.

  If you feel carsick tell Mum at once, don’t leave it too late and do it down the window.

  There’s no need to drop a brick on a jellyfish. It can still feel pain even though it hasn’t got a face.

  —

  Soon I made up my own rulebook. These were rules I just seemed to know by instinct, or felt were probably true. Here are some of them:

  If you don’t reach the bottom of the stairs before the toilet finishes flushing, the Thing That Lives in the Landing Cupboard will come after you.

  You can ruin next door’s telly reception by throwing balls of silver foil at their satellite dish.

  Every time you squash an insect, God makes a mark in his book against you.

  If you die at home while your mum is away there will be nobody to feed the cat, and it will eat your eyes.

  There is a horror film that can make you go mad if you watch it.

  And:

  Dad is still checking up on you, even though he isn’t here.

  Then, in the winter of my twelfth birthday, I learned a new rule.

  Don’t tell the neighbours that Mr Hill murdered his wife.

  It was a game, really. I don’t think I believed that Mr Hill had really murdered his wife, but I hated him because he had a dead grey eye like the guy in Pirates of the Caribbean and had painted all his flowerpots in Arsenal stripes and he kept my football whenever it went over his fence. He probably had footballs enough to open a branch of JD Sports.

  On Bonfire Night Mr Hill had a huge row with his wife. I heard her in the hall, yelling, ‘Do you know how painful this is, or what it’s doing to me? I’m not going to stay in this house another minute.’ Then she left. She dragged a huge suitcase out to the front step and climbed into a waiting taxi, and he slammed the door behind her. Two months before this I had heard a lot of banging and crashing in their house one night, so I figured they had been fighting for a long time.

  I was the only one who saw her leave. When I told my best friend Andy about the row, I exaggerated the story a little bit. I told him that I had seen Mr Hill hit his wife with a shovel before burying her in the back garden while everyone else was watching the fireworks.

  I told Andy not to tell anyone else, so by nightfall everyone in the street had heard the story, and as the days went on it became even more exaggerated to include all kinds of gross stuff. He’d cut off his wife’s hands and buried them in his Arsenal pots, he’d used her spleen to decorate his Christmas tree, he kept her head on a stick in his shed and cast a spell on it to make it predict the football results.

  I saw Mr Hill staring through his kitchen window with laser-vision that could have melted a hole in the glass, and I knew the story had reached him, so I stayed out of his way after that. I thought he might kill me as well, because by now I believed my own story.

  ‘You mustn’t go around telling people lies about Mr Hill,’ said my mum one day. ‘His wife left him and he’s very upset about that, without you making things worse by telling everyone he’s a murderer.’

  There had always been a damp patch on my bedroom wall near the ceiling. It was dark grey and furry, and shaped like the Isle of Wight. One day there was an amazing storm. The rain fell sideways. Water came in through the back door and all our gutters overflowed, soaking my ceiling. The grey furry patch grew to the size of France and then part of the ceiling fell down, so my mum called a company called AA-1 Roofs. They were called AA-1 so they would be the first people listed in the alphabetical telephone directory under Roof Repairs, but now that everyone used Google they weren’t at the top of the list anymore, so they were really cheap.

  They came in to do the work, but told me and Mum to move out for Christmas because the air was unhealthy and the house needed to dry out for a bit.

  ‘The good news,’ said my mum, ‘is that Mr Hill has to go into hospital, and says we can stay there.’

  ‘Why is he going to hospital?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s having something done to his bladder.’

  ‘Gross. Can’t we stay in a hotel?’ I asked.

  ‘No, too expensive.’

  ‘Bugger.’

  ‘Mind your language.’ My mum collected the keys, and on Friday evening we went next door.

  How can I
describe Mr Hill’s house?

  The hall was as dark as a tunnel to the centre of the earth. There was a framed photo on the wall of a really old man that turned out to be a picture of Mr Hill’s grandmother. The living room smelled of wet dogs. It was full of little china ornaments of poodles, Dalmatians, bulldogs, every kind of dog. There were piles of magazines about dogs and dog shows, and there were long brown dog hairs everywhere, but get this, he didn’t own a dog. I could see why Mrs Hill had run away from him.

  Every room was painted in a different shade of brown paint. Either he was colour-blind or couldn’t be bothered to match up the tins. There was a clock in the hall that ticked very slowly, like someone hobbling painfully towards the grave. In the hall cupboard I found my footballs. He had let the air out of them and folded them on a shelf like pairs of pants. Weird.

  Mr Hill had a son who had grown up and left home, and now that he lived alone he didn’t bother cleaning up anymore. My mum saw this as a challenge, and decided to give the place a spring-clean. I think she actually looked forward to our weekend of living next door, charging around with a mop and bucket.

  ‘Think of this as a Christmas treat,’ she told me, but Christmas is getting a RoboWarrior, not getting covered in dog hairs in someone else’s smelly, creepy house.

  ‘You can play wherever you like,’ she said, ‘except in the room at the end of the upstairs hall. Mr Hill says you’re not allowed to go in there under any circumstances. It’s one of his rules.’ So Mr Hill had a rulebook too.

  I went out into the garden and stayed there, but there was nothing to do. Weirdly the garden was the opposite of the house, so perfectly kept that there weren’t even any insects in it. Eventually it was time to go to bed. There were three rooms upstairs. The smallest was Mr Hill’s son’s room, which was now mine. Then came Mr Hill’s room, which was where my mum would sleep. Finally there was the big double room at the front of the house which nobody ever used and I wasn’t allowed to go into Under Any Circumstances.

  I stood outside this door and sniffed the keyhole. The dog-smell was coming from inside. I put my ear against the door and listened. I could hear faint breathing—in, gurgle, out, in, gurgle, out—like someone with a very bad cold and no tissues. I called Mum up and made her listen but she couldn’t hear anything.

  ‘Nothing at all?’ I said, shocked. ‘You really can’t hear anything?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘You wait till you want me to hear something.’ Disgusted, I went to my room.

  Mr Hill’s son must have been about five when he left home to get a job, because his bedroom was full of stupid fluffy rabbits and realistic-looking puppies. I washed and got into my PJs and listened to the house. It creaked and clicked and rattled in the wind, so I couldn’t get to sleep. My duffel coat on the door looked like a hunchbacked monster in the dark, and even though I knew it was just my coat, it bothered me. I must have drifted off for a few minutes, because I remember running through a jungle. Some kind of animal was after me. I heard claws scratching at the door.

  At 11:45 p.m. my mum looked in and said, ‘Why are you still awake?’ I don’t know how she knew; she’s sort of psychic like that.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ I told her. ‘Listen to all the noise.’

  She cocked an ear. ‘That’s just the rain falling on the dustbins.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like that on our dustbins.’

  She gave me a funny look. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I think I had a bad dream,’ I told her. ‘I was being chased.’

  She came and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘It’s because you’re in a strange house. Was my little soldier afraid?’

  ‘No, I was fine.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll let you get some rest.’

  ‘Can we put up Christmas decorations?’

  ‘Mr Hill doesn’t want pinholes.’

  ‘I hate it here.’

  ‘Give me a break, Paul. It’s just for two nights. Go to sleep.’

  The rest of the night I lay wide awake, watching the bedroom door. Finally I buried myself deep in bed with the pillows pulled up around my ears.

  At seven o’clock it was supposed to get light, but it didn’t. The rain had turned to thick wet fog. You could usually hear traffic outside but today there was complete silence. The fog had blinded and deafened the house, like someone had thrown a blanket over it. The street looked like it was made of mud, and someone on the radio was singing ‘White Christmas’.

  I checked the door for scratch-marks. Nothing. I got dressed when I smelled Mum burning the toast. Mr Hill’s kitchen was bright yellow because it was the room where he smoked, and all the nicotine had stained the ceiling. I wondered what it made his food taste like.

  Mum had tried to poach eggs in Mr Hill’s microwave and they had exploded. She said, ‘You know I’ve never been good at breakfast. It’s a horrible day. You’ll be better off staying indoors.’

  There was no way I was going to do that. I spent almost the whole day outside on my bike, but by the evening it was bucketing down with rain again, and thunder rolled in the distance. We ate beans on toast and watched some rubbish dancing show my mum liked. The storm was getting closer because I counted the gaps between the flash and the bang, and they were shorter each time.

  My mum’s mobile rang. It was Mr Hill. He needed some bathroom stuff to be brought to the hospital, so my mum agreed to take it to him on her scooter. ‘I don’t want you coming with me,’ she said, ‘it’s raining too hard. Do you want to stay up until I’m back? You’ve got your computer games.’

  This was very good news, as it was already late. ‘Drive slowly. Don’t rush back,’ I told her. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Don’t open the door to anyone, okay? And stay out of the end room. I know what you’re like.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ I tried to look innocent.

  ‘Yeah, right. Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.’

  After an hour by myself, I got tired of blasting monsters on my game—actually I was stuck at the first boss and was fed up with repeating the same level over and over. So I went upstairs and had a nose in a few drawers. Mr Hill had a dressing table full of really good stuff, including a red penknife with about a million attachments, a huge ring of keys, some really weird comics called ‘Out of This World’ in plastic bags, several watches and a tobacco tin full of old metal puzzles.

  I wanted to look in the room at the end of the hall, because I knew it would take an act of bravery to do so. My dad used to say, ‘Are you a man or a mouse? Squeak up.’ We’d laugh a lot about that one. When he told me not to do something, I didn’t do it. With Mum it was different. Sometimes I deliberately did the opposite of what she asked.

  Tonight was one of those occasions.

  I wasn’t scared, even though I was sure I could hear something breathing behind the door. Even though it smelled like something had died in the room. I stood outside the brown-painted door for a long time, listening to the falling rain, listening for the in-gurgle-out breathing. I made a list in my head of all the terrible things that could be inside, so that I’d be prepared for the worst when I opened the door. I decided it could be any one of the following:

  Mrs Hill had come back to the house to beg his forgiveness for leaving, and her husband had pretended to forgive her before locking her up in a cage and feeding her dog food.

  Mr Hill kept a pack of starving dogs in the room, and if I opened the door they would spring out and tear me to pieces.

  Mr Hill had created a human being out of bits of dog, sewing all the parts together and bringing his creature to life with electricity. He had to keep it locked up because it was really angry all the time.

  None of these situations were very likely, but they were all I could come up with. What else breathed and smelled like dead animals?

  Finally I decided there was only one way to find out. Wrapping my fingers around the handle, I pushed down on it.

  The door didn’t budge. It wa
s locked.

  Then I remembered the keys in Mr Hill’s desk. I went to the drawer and took out the great ring. Returning to the door, I tried each one in turn.

  I tried the coolest-looking keys first, but none fit. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. The tenth key was the smallest, and worked. The lock wasn’t very big. Maybe there wasn’t something trying to get out of the room after all. As I pushed open the door and tried to find the light switch, the animal smell overpowered me and I heard the breathing more loudly.

  Then I saw it, a huge hair-covered outline against the rainy window. It had a bristly snout and pointed ears like an Alsatian. In the light from the streetlamp outside I could see the raised arms, the long curved claws, the great tongue that hung out from between yellow teeth. I knew the truth then:

  Mr Hill was a werewolf.

  He hadn’t gone to hospital, he had tricked my mum and lured her away, leaving me alone with him. He knew I would come to the room. He was going to catch me and suck the meat from my bones.

  Then I found the light switch. The lampshade in the middle of the ceiling glowed orange, removing the dark from the room.

  Mr Hill wasn’t a werewolf after all.

  The room was full of dead animals, and there was a huge book on his desk called Taxidermy for Beginners.

  Mr Hill had a secret hobby. He stuffed dead animals. Lots of people used to do it. The noise I had mistaken for breathing was the hiss of a cooling unit which was breathing cold air over his creations.

  I opened the book and began to read.

  ‘Taxidermy Specimens—Preservation and Mounting. The taxidermist must remove the skin of the dead animal, then tan it and treat it. The animal’s bones and muscles are posed in place with wires. The body is molded in plaster to make a cast, then re-covered with skin. Artificial eyes are then added as real ones would rot.’

  I put down the book and looked around the room. A dozen dogs, a badger, four cats, some bats and foxes stared back at me with shining marble eyes. There was also an owl with no eyes and a duck without a beak. The big creature I saw by the window was a moulting brown bear, mounted on its back legs and frozen in mid-roar. There was another flash of lightning.