by Adam Nevill
Be humble, stay quiet, lower the eyes; in the mother’s presence it is best not to stare. Her shape is vaster than the first son Saul, but the pallor of the flesh is the same. With my eyes on the floor I can see the bottom of the floral dress that sticks to her bulk in places. In the pinky light and rushing shadows I see sparrow legs under the hem, as if her pudding body has been smashed down on two bone pins to stop it rolling around on the floor. But she’s fast on those legs. Usually, I barely have time to run upstairs and hide in my room when I hear her feet skittering around from next door.
She speaks to me in a deep voice. With booming words she says I have done wrong. Moving my eyes I look at the tiny ‘Dainty Maid’ sign on the enamel cooker that is next to the rickety kitchen table. Reading the letters to take my mind off her voice, I see they are made from chrome, like the names on the metal grilles of old cars.
Look at me, little bastard, she says.
I shake my head. I don’t want to look. She makes me sick; even more than my own bulbous shape looking out of a mirror. Perhaps this is why there are no mirrors in our house, but in the bus window I can always see what the milk has done to my face.
Shadows flick around her stick-legs, made by the quick movements of her short arms. Her gruff voice rises. Slowly, I turn my hot face from the ‘Dainty Maid’ and look at her naked arms. There is no elbow. Dimpled stumps end in baby hands. Puppet fingers move like anemones in a rock pool.
Look at me, little bastard.
This time I obey.
White eyes with a purple iris are pressed like studs into the cushion of her face. On top of her head is a messy thatch of fine white hair. Around the wet mouth there is more hair.
I have done wrong, she says. Never bring milk and bread home from the outside. How many times have you been told? She thought I was ready. Ready for what? Doesn’t she realise that I will always hold onto the last bit of myself, what is left of me; those fuzzy images I have in my memory before the milk cravings start fires inside my body?
This scolding means that she has been in my little room and gone through my things. All alone in the unlit house, cleaning and sweeping while I’m at work, she searches about. I imagine her face when she found the loaf and the carton of normal milk that I brought home yesterday. I bet she screamed.
The telling off is soon over. She has a good mind not to give me milk tonight. On my face there must be a look of horror. I feel it tighten my podgy cheeks and crease my forehead. But then she smiles. I will be allowed my share after all. Now where is the dirty washing? she asks. I want all of it.
Ethan appears from around the hem of her yellow and brown circus-tent dress. Glad to see me and pleased the telling off is over, he frolics like a puppy. He jabbers at me in his strange buzzing voice that I can hardly make sense of, even after all this time. To please the watching mother, for it is my job to amuse Ethan, I hold a stupid grin on my face until it aches. His small body speeds around the kitchen like a fleshy barrel on tiny legs, covered in old man’s hair. Jabber, jabber, jabber. Will he ever shut up? Sometimes I want to smack his little pig face. But he’ll only run next door and tell the mother.
After the mother collects the washing in white pillow cases, she leaves the kitchen and returns to her house next door. Saul, Ethan and I sit around the wooden table in the flickering pink kitchen and wait. Our elbows make the table rock where the oil lanterns sit. Light ripples against the brown cupboards, shining on all the glass windows and off the china dishes we are forbidden to touch.
Groaning and yawning sounds start inside us all when we hear her coming back. Outside, she waddles across the lawn to make us wait, like a big plucked goose with no beak and chin feathers.
Milk! Here is the milk, frothing and slopping in big, ivory-coloured jugs. It’s brought around on a broad tin tray, painted with green, blue and red stripes. Her foetal paws hold the tray under her chin and it always looks so heavy for her. There’s one flagon each. Little squalls and squirts of excitement start in Saul, Ethan and me. Warm cream smells fill my nose and I can almost see the little bubbles in the soupy fluid. It’s like starving and dying of thirst when you’re near the fresh stuff. You have to have it quickly. Slug it down with big gulps and let it thicken inside you, all the way down until your belly is full. There is bread too. Oily bread soaked in cream. Steady, boys, she says, but all we can hear is the rushing sound when we close our eyes and feed.
After the meal I run upstairs to make sure that the mother hasn’t been stealing again. I know she has been in my room to take my normal bread and milk, which is so bland and thin and makes me sick now. Straight out it comes like a fountain after it touches my stomach. But maybe, I tell myself, outside milk will help water down the strength of her produce.
In the bedroom I go rummaging through the bottom of the cupboard with the mothball smell, to check my little stash. There should be a comb, a wallet and a broken watch in a shoebox. Everything else has gone. There used to be letters held together by a rubber band but the mother took them. This house doesn’t have a number and no one writes to the family anyway, but people used to mail letters to the store where I work with Saul. A girl used to send letters and cards for a while too, and I liked the one with ‘happy birthday’ written on it. Big pink letters on the front and a blue number thirty inside.
Although nothing more has been taken from the shoebox, I see the contents are disturbed. The mother’s little hands have been in here then. Fortunately I keep the photo of the girl safe under my mattress. I want to remember the girl. Like I do in the store before the hunger grows and I circle the little white table with the metal flask on top. But when I look for the photo of the girl with the charcoal eyes, thin body and long brown hair, the rage comes out. The mother has taken the photo along with the bread and milk.
Anger boils inside me and sweats across my skin. I decide to escape again. These are the same feelings as before, when I ran down through the trees and managed to get over the gate. Back then I wasn’t so fat or sleepy and the cold snow kept me awake. I hate myself for taking the milk. If I had left it alone back in the beginning of the tenancy, I would be with the girl I can’t remember properly, and not with the mother. My hate adds to the rage.
I run downstairs and smash the milk jug on the kitchen floor. Upstairs, Saul closes his heavy book with a thump that I hear through the ceiling. Ethan appears from under the table to buzz and jabber and run around the kitchen as if the house is on fire. Shouting and slamming, I run from the house, through the back door and into the garden. Heading for the gate and the woods beyond, I cross the lawn. Anger drives my podgy legs and I don’t even care about the pain between my rubbing thighs. My heart gurgles and my little lungs feel raw but I keep running.
Shouldn’t have turned around by the gate. I only look to see if Saul or Ethan are following me. They aren’t, but I see movement in the mother’s house. At the kitchen window is a face, pressed against the glass. What looks like a huge white hare with buck teeth stares at me with pink eyes. It is the father.
My slippery hand goes still on the ring-shaped gate handle. I don’t like those eyes one bit. He’s the one the mother keeps locked away next door; the one with the hiccupping voice that used to come through the wall at night when I first moved here. He was angry back then and he’s angry now, watching me trying to escape. Out come his hiccupping shrieks making the glass tremble, and up go his goaty legs with the hard bone at the end to rattle, scratch, rattle on the glass like he wants to get to me. Now the mother’s face appears in the gloom behind the father, all red and howling because she’s heard the jug smash. From the mother’s kitchen, there is a sound of a door being unlocked and I watch the father’s grimace turn into a grin. She’s letting him out to catch me.
I run from the gate, back across the milky green grass to our house, and don’t turn my head. But he’s so fast. When I reach the kitchen, I can already hear his bone feet on the tiles behind me, getting louder as he gets closer. Soon, I can smell his goaty brea
th as he snorts over my shoulder and all I can think of are his yellow teeth and how they must bite with a wooden clacking sound. I want my heart to stop; then it will be over quickly.
Jabbering, Ethan runs into his legs and stops him from catching me. There is a crash behind my back. One of the pinky lamps smashes on the floor and the table skids across the tiles and hits the ‘Dainty Maid’ enamel cooker. Ethan is hurt and I hear him squeal as the father stamps on his hairy back with those clip-cloppity feet.
Up the stairs I run and hear the mother start to bellow at the father for crushing Ethan. There is more smashing and howling in the kitchen as I slip into my room. The truckle bed goes against the door.
Now I am ill, laid up with a fever, and the dreams are worse. For two days I’ve been off the milk and it has made me sick. Ethan is outside my bedroom door, buzzing. His words are madness. He is saying the milk will make me better and the mother is angry. When she is angry we all suffer. He tells me the mother has said that I am never to go to work again. I have done wrong, she says. I’m a little bastard who can’t be trusted.
And I’m hurting inside now; dry and gritty and sawn in my throat and lungs. It’s like there’s broken glass inside my stomach too, cutting my softness, and a little voice tells me to drink milk because it will fill in the slashes and take away the pain. And all I can think of is the creaminess inside the ivory jugs. Cravings make me weep salty tears and I hate myself even more. All I want to do is go back to the time of the debts and say no to the warehouse job where I first met Saul. Then I could also say no to the little room and the sweet, sweet milk.
Back in the days of my early tenancy, I wanted to be sick whenever I saw the milk. Laden with tins and packages of normal food I would struggle up the hill through the black forest, resisting her. There was no way I wanted to drink that brew with the offal taint and soupy thickness. But every night, it would be brought across in huge jugs, slightly steaming, and left upon the kitchen table for the sons to feed from. The sounds they made when feasting made me think of new accommodation. I would have moved out too if I hadn’t touched the milk.
As if it were poison, whenever I left a carton or bottle in the otherwise empty ‘Dainty Maid’ fridge, she would pour my normal supermarket milk away. With no other choice, I got into the habit of storing a little emergency container under my truckle bed. But once, when it ran dry with a last rattle and I had a desire for hot tea to stave off the night cold, I was trapped into tasting her produce. To whiten my tea, I used a teaspoon of her milk from the jug that had been left on the kitchen table. And it was delicious; the best tea I ever tasted. Thick and sweet and warming me up like a shot of whisky, while filling my belly like a big roast dinner. Then, a few days later, I tried it on some cereal. Just a few warm dollops with my nose turned away from the smell. As I ate, loving spoonfuls wrapped my body in warm feather pillows and filled my head with sleepiness and the promise of good dreams. In secret, I went to that jug again and again, like a drowsy bear who found a honeycomb in a log. Eventually, Ethan saw me and sped next door. When he returned with the mother, she was smiling and her cheeks were ruddy. That was the start of my troubles.
If only I’d trusted my instincts. Maybe the last tenant did and escaped. There was another, you see, before me in the little room upstairs with the cupboard, greasy wallpaper and child’s truckle bed that my feet hang over. I have seen his markings and know he had the dreams. Maybe he hid under the bed after dreaming of the dances down on the milky green grass and scratched the last of himself away on the wooden slats beneath the tiny springs. Milk, milk, milk, he scratched over and over again with a nail or belt buckle. He knew the craving, when a thousand fish-hooks snag in your belly, and a shrill inside voice screams until it’s smashed all of the windows in your head. But where is the last tenant now? If he escaped then so can I. Soon.
Locked in my room without the milk, I’m struggling to fight off the rolling waves of yellowy fever. Sometimes my head gets a little clearer, but not in the cool way it used to at work before I supped with relish. When I’m not so sick and can move a bit, I write tiny notes under the bed for the next person who takes this room, drinks the milk and has their clothes washed by the mother.
The father is outside the door now. Up he comes every day and chitter-chatters like an ape, but I won’t let him in. Before I smashed the milk jug the mother used to threaten me with the father. My husband will bite you, she’d say, if you don’t go in with Ethan at night. Ethan gets lonely in his little box, but the straw smells like the meaty chairs downstairs and I always hated going in with him. I’ll have to wait until Ethan and the father have gone from outside the door of my room before the next escape is attempted.
There are noises too at night. The worst sounds come out of Saul’s room.
Since I’ve been here, Saul follows the same routine. After work and the feeding he always goes to his room, which is next door to mine, to read his heavy books and he never comes out until the following morning. In the early evening when the mother’s curfew is announced by her banging on the walls, the rest of us go to bed and dream. But now I’m awake for most of the night, rolling and turning, I hear her moving up the stairs. I know it’s her because their feet make different sounds like their voices: Ethan scrabbles, Saul shambles, the father clip-clops and the mother skitters like a chicken in straw. Most nights, she scratches up the stairs on her bird legs and goes into Saul’s room. It is then I cover my ears, unable to listen to the bumping sounds.
But dreaming is the most frightening part of being a prisoner. I’m never sure whether I’m awake or asleep now and all the good dreams have gone. Stuck in my tiny room, passing in and out of sleep, sometimes disturbed by the shifting sounds the father makes outside – I think he sleeps by the door now – I dream of the dances. The whole garden is lit up by a yellow moon, the colour of the fever inside me, with thin clouds drifting across its brightness. It’s as if the stars are closer to the earth too when the family forms the circle. Croaking and bellowing, Ethan and the father hop and skip round and round the mother, who moves slowly on her hands and knees with her face in the grass, while Saul chants things from the side in his singing bark. He has a book open and sits beneath my window like a white whale glowing on a strange beach. They are calling out to something in the sky with words I have never heard and don’t understand. But these names and words pull me from sleep, sometimes with a scream.
When I wake up, I am always standing by the window looking down at the milky green grass, with my body all moist. The garden is empty, but there is a faint ring still left on the lawn as if it has been trampled by skipping feet. Then the soft blades of grass straighten themselves, and in the centre of the slowly vanishing circle the lawn is silvery with midnight dew.
I could break the window to lick that moisture down. To stop the yellow fever and parched throat that has stolen my voice. Nothing has passed my lips for three days and nights and much of my strength has gone. Maybe a final slurp of the milk will allow me to escape, but you can never trust yourself after swallowing that creamy sweetness.
Fourth day, maybe the fifth, and my room is starting to smell. If I don’t drink soon I’ll dry out and die. Feeling my face with slow-moving fingers, I touch the loose flesh. All over my body the skin has gone yellow. Even the little white hairs are dying on my tummy. Cramps have taken over from the fever and sickness, but they’re half-hidden by weakness.
No matter how stained and sharp the father’s teeth are, or how fast he can run, or how big the forest birds are, I must escape tonight. You see, they’ve all been up today and talked through the door. It’s no good, staying in there. Come and drink the milk, Saul said. Tonight is very important, he said. Everything is ready and you don’t want to miss out. We’ve all worked very hard to welcome you into the family. Ethan just buzzed and squealed, but the mother made threats. This is your last chance, she said. If you come out right now I won’t let my husband bite and we’ll forget about how bad you’ve been. But
if you don’t come out, I’ll put you to sleep for good. I’ll put your big head in a bowl of water and drown you, like the last one. You’d grown so well, she said. Almost ready. All you had to do was grow some more for the joining.
Rage keeps me awake and I hold the bed against the door with my body on top. Joining will be the end of me. There was glee in her voice when she mentioned it. Let them dance beneath the vapours and the yellow moon. When they gather on the grass, I won’t be here.
Now it’s quiet outside, thoughts of escape give me a shiver and start a dripping in my gut. I make my move and ease the truckle bed away from the door, bit by bit, while listening out for the father. Silence fills the house. Maybe they’re next door. All I have to do, I tell myself, is go out of the house, leave the garden, run through the woods and then climb over the gate by the bus stop. And this time I won’t come back when the children start screaming.
Peering through a tiny gap between the door and the frame, I can see no one outside between the grubby walls on the landing. So out I go, breathing softly with little shudders in my lungs, into the dark house.
Creamy smells surround me on the unlit stairs, like soft hands reaching out from the stains on the walls. Even the bricks beneath the dirty wallpaper must have milk inside them and I hold my sagging face to stop the spinning inside my skull.
I’m getting nearer the kitchen, with the pinky glow and the flicker of shadow against the table and the cabinets, which I can see from the bottom of the staircase. I continue past the old parlour with the horsehair chairs that smell of bad meat. I think of sitting in there for a while to catch my breath and to stop the dizzies, but then the idea of sitting on those fleshy things, surrounded by the silk wallpaper gone brown with damp and smelling of sulphur, makes me go all seasicky.