by Adam Nevill
‘Just some old stones,’ he said.
But they didn’t look like stones. They were very light and black and reminded me of dried salt fish.
Papa stopped looking after that and swept up the soot from the floorboards instead. While he did this, Mama stood on a chair in their bedroom to get the suitcases down from the wardrobe. And I couldn’t find Maho anywhere. She never came out all day. I looked everywhere, in all of our secret places, but I never found her or saw any of the toys either. I whispered her name into all of the tiny holes but she never answered. But when I was checking inside the attic, I heard Mama and Papa talking underneath the loft hatch. ‘A heart,’ Papa whispered to Mama. ‘A tiny heart’ was all I heard before they moved away and went downstairs.
That night, when Maho climbed into bed with me, she held me tighter than ever before and wrapped me up in her silky hair so that I could hardly move. It was so dark inside her hair that I couldn’t see anything and I told her to let me go. I couldn’t breathe, but she was in a strange sulky mood and she just squeezed me with her cold hands until I felt sleepy.
Outside, the rain stopped and the house started to creak like the old ship that we went on one summer. Eventually Maho spoke. She said that she had missed me. In a yawny voice, I asked her about the shoe, the foot and the little bag with the lumps inside that Papa had found in the chimneys.
‘They belong to the toys,’ Maho said. ‘Your papa shouldn’t have taken away things that belong to the toys. It was a mistake. It was wrong.’
‘But they were old and dirty and nasty,’ I told her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They belong to the toys. They put them up there a long time ago, and they shouldn’t be removed by parents. They’re like happy memories to the toys. Now sleep, Yuki. Sleep.’
I couldn’t understand this. While I was thinking about what Maho said, I started to fall asleep. It was so warm inside all of that hair. And she sang a little song into my ear and rubbed her cold nose against my cheek like a puppy dog.
Outside my bedroom in the hallway I heard the toys gathering. More toys than ever before had come out to play. All at the same time, and all in the same place. This had never happened before. It must have been a special occasion, like a parade. They had a parade when Maho’s parents left. ‘Toys. Can you hear the toys?’ I whispered into the black fur around my face, and then I dropped further into the deep hole of sleepiness.
Maho didn’t answer me, so I just listened to the toys moving through the dark. Little feet shuffled; pinkish tails whisked on wood; bells jingled on hats and from the curly toes of thin feet; tap tappity tap went the wooden sticks of the old apes; twik twik twik went the lady with knitting needle legs; clackety clack sounded the hooves of the black horsy with yellow teeth; tisker tisker tisker went the cymbal of the dolly with the sharp fingers; dum dum dum went the drum; and on and on they marched through the house. Down, down and down the hall.
Shouting woke me up. Through my sleep and all the dark softness around my body, I heard a loud voice. I thought it was Papa. But when my eyes opened the house was silent. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t move my arms and my feet. Rolling from side to side, I made some space in Maho’s hair. It was everywhere and all around me. ‘Maho? Maho?’ I said. ‘Wake up, Maho.’
But she just held me tighter with her thin arms. Blowing the hair out of my mouth, I tried to move a hand so that I could take the long strands from out of my eyes. I couldn’t see anything. Maho wouldn’t help me either, and it took me a long time to unwind the silky ropes from around my neck and off my face, and to shake them from my arms and from between my fingers and toes where they tugged and pulled. In the end, I had to flop onto my tummy and then wriggle backwards through the funnel of her black hair. She was fast asleep and very still and wouldn’t wake up when I shook her.
I could only sit up properly when I reached the bottom of the bed. All the sheets and blankets were on the floor again. I climbed off the bed and ran into the unlit hall. I couldn’t see the cold floorboards and could only hear the patter of my bare feet on the wood as I moved down to Mama and Papa’s room. The door to their room was open. Maybe Papa was having a bad dream and was awake, so I stood outside and looked in.
It was very dark inside their room, but something was moving. I screwed up my eyes and stared at where the thin light coming around the curtains had fallen, and then I saw that the whole bed was moving. ‘Mama,’ I said.
It looked like Mama and Papa were trying to sit up but couldn’t. And all the sheets around them were rustling. Someone was making a moaning sound, but it didn’t sound like Mama or Papa. It sounded like someone was trying to speak with their mouth full. And there was another sound coming from the bed too, and getting louder as I stood there. A wet sound. Like lots of busy people eating noodles in a Tokyo diner.
The door closed and I turned around to look behind me. I knew Maho was there before I even saw her.
Maho looked at me through her hair. ‘The toys are only playing,’ she said.
She took my hand and led me back to our bed. I climbed in after her and she wrapped me up in all that hair. And together we listened to the sounds of the toys putting things into the secret places, behind the walls, where they belonged.
The Age of Entitlement
A t dusk, when all about us faded, we walked in silence down the deserted street called Rue du Sous-Lieutenant de Loitière that neither of us knew how to pronounce. Ahead of us, even though we could not see its surging beyond the white stone and slate-coloured buildings on Quai du Canada, we knew the sea was going black. That street was closest to the ocean and appeared more than empty. It was dead.
The streets of Arromanches were not ruined. Not so much as a window was broken. Nor were they all yet derelict; though I was never sure which were and which were still occupied. The flags had been taken down; the tanks and field artillery, preserved since the Second World War, were rusted, the cafés and museums had closed, and the veterans who once visited here were long dead. But more than the desolate and sombre inland reach of the town, huddled into itself and shuffling away from the seafront, the actual buildings facing the ocean were lifeless, spent, somehow, as if they had already been overcome.
We could sense the ocean’s swallowing of the watery light, and we could hear the endless tumult of its cold choppy heaving, the great restless sighs. Insensible, timeless, the water pulled us down to the shore and into a terrifying orbit. To think I once regarded the sea with fondness, its fragrance and bird calls producing a sense of comfort. Now the mere thought of its existence as we are erased, nation by nation, made me shudder. And that morning, right after we arrived at Le Havre, while standing before the great expanse of water, my inner world was crushed to a thing insubstantial. As with my perception of the black infinite depths above the earth, the water’s unbreathable immensity felt closer to the land than it had ever been before. Too near, somehow. In Arromanches this feeling was acute.
My heart beat fast. Panic swelled up my throat. I gulped at the cold air. ‘The sky is closer. The sea is closer. The light is going out.’ When I said this to Toby on the street called Rue du Sous-Lieutenant de Loitière, he smiled with no warmth and too many teeth. I desperately wanted reassurance, but he was delighted by my discomfort.
Our relationship had always been an unbalanced thing. I amused Toby, and took care of the practical matters that he required to make these journeys. I think they were the only reasons that he tolerated my fretting, anxious presence at his side. Like an old relative or servant, deferring to someone younger and more powerful and spoilt and knowing: that’s how he made me feel. I despised him.
‘It’s good shit.’ He was referring to the contents of the little brown glass bottle he often kept inside the breast pocket of his tatty Gore-Tex waterproof. I had barely touched the drug; earlier that day, in our room at the guest house, I had taken a mere sip of the bitter syrup before we began exploring Bayeux at noon. But Toby had filled his mouth with it, until his teeth w
ere filmed with the old bloodstaining of neat iodine. Which is why his eyes were still glassy, and why he had lain down in the wet overgrown grass of the War Cemetery beneath the abandoned Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie and stared at the dismal grey sky, all afternoon, in silence. He was content to lie among the unkempt graves of five thousand dead soldiers whom no one has the energy to honour any more, after all that has happened so quickly in this world.
Toby has no interest in recording the experiences any more either; or of talking about them; or relaying them to me; or making sense of them. He was content merely to endure the episodes, in silence, over and over again. He said nothing to me besides, ‘But are they willing to be forgotten? That is the question, my dear.’ And he had giggled like an infant after he’d tempted the fallen, so brazenly, to appear.
That was the nature of my fear, close to the shore in Arromanches, of things being pulled in at me, on that vacant street, and all at once too. My gaze was drawn to the grey stone walls, bordering the weed-wretched gardens, at the rear of the once grand hotels on our right. Then my vision groped to the windows above, set within bricks seared by salt and lashed by wet winds for centuries. And in the second-storey window of the building that neighboured the derelict church, I saw a figure.
I stopped and inhaled so sharply that I unleashed a tiny scream that turned and fled back down my throat.
The figure’s scrutiny had alerted me to its presence; it had been watching me and then suddenly turned away the very moment I had looked in that direction. Not vanishing, but merely turning its back to me, which I could still see, robed in something long and smooth and pale; the tone in keeping with the chalky light that the Impressionists once adored here, so long ago. The head of the figure was cowled. And both hands were pressed against the hooded face so that I would not see its expression.
‘Jesus,’ I said, and the word trembled on leaving my mouth.
‘What?’ Toby said, looking at me and frowning with a tired indifference.
I swallowed, unable to speak, clenched into the cold paralysis of a short and powerful shock.
Toby turned and followed my eyes. ‘What?’ he said again.
I pointed at the window. ‘There.’ He shrugged, so I stepped up beside him. ‘There!’ I jabbed my finger toward the window in which the figure still stood, exposing itself and yet pleading with us not to stare at it, not to see such grief. This was not mourning, this was desolation; I knew so at once.
‘What am I looking . . . Oh, yeah. But what . . . ?’
‘It moved. Turned away. Covered its face.’
‘Let’s go look,’ Toby said, and he strode across the road to the garden wall.
‘No. No,’ I cried out, and I marvelled at his complete insensitivity. This figure at the window required a respectful distance; was to be looked at briefly and then left alone. I knew this instinctively. But Toby was so brash. With the feelings of others, if I am to be honest, he was a vandal and a trespasser. His incessant seeking of sensation, of the esoteric, of the weird, of visceral experience delivered in full glare, of risk and danger, troubled me at that moment, on that road, more than anything else that I had watched him do, in all of the twenty-three years that I had known him.
But I could not rationally account for why his leering intrusion here shocked me sick. This involved no swallowing of unidentified pills, no deliberate losing of oneself in strange places, no camping in extreme landscapes with unsuitable gear, no going in through dark windows, or provoking the unstable with alcohol and rude cleverness; his intrusion here would carry a heavier penalty. To impose and interfere would be sacrilegious. How I knew this I cannot tell you exactly. Suffice to say, this was a place in which a multitude had died so horribly in a forgotten war. And as Toby and I have seen, in those places where so many ended their days in great swathes through violence, their desire to remain can invest where they fell. Because they reach, I tell you; and they clutch for ever at where they sense the light once was. I have warned Toby of this realm that is only ever sensed or glimpsed in certain places at certain times. But sometimes this region, which I suggest is a kind of parallel non-existence, is thrown wide open. Like here, which accounted for my extraordinary nervousness since we’d alighted from the one ferry that each week still ends its line on this near-abandoned Normandy coastline.
Of course, that is precisely why Toby had wanted to come here, with me as his guide. He had heard things about the place. And I was a Labrador to a blind man. I took him across things. I led him around obstacles. He would have walked directly past the figure in the window had I not been at his side suffering an anxiety attack; the very peak of my seizure had resulted in the drawing out of . . . of what, I do not know.
‘Statue,’ he said, his voice dropping with disappointment, and contempt for me as if I had failed to entertain him enough with the sighting. Then, his tone buoyant, he added, ‘But it’s still pretty amazing.’
I felt some relief that it was only a statue, but not for long. This carving in stone of a woman wretched with grief, turning inwards and away from the world, covering her features and clasping her terror and despair right back upon her own face, made me wither; shrink before all that it symbolised in this dark and dying place. And I bowed my head and closed my eyes at the mere thought of who the sculptor had modelled this figure upon, or of what the weary yet tireless yearning from beneath the waves had invested into stone. I wanted to scream at Toby again that 1,807 bodies eviscerated within the salty shallows and between the neat hedgerows had still not been found. That we had to tread lightly and soundlessly, and keep our eyes and our voices down. What we had stirred up out of the derelict trenches at Vimy Ridge Memorial, during the previous summer, had made him vomit onto his own shoes. And I had fainted.
But Toby had no such concerns here, no such interpretation, as he stood before these cold, wet and mostly abandoned buildings of scoured stone, only yards away from the ghastly sea that slapped down upon the shingle and drowned the light.
The sea. Vast. Senseless. Monotonous. Dreadful. Nullifying, like the expanding, freezing abyss above us that was indifferent to this blue grain of life we stood upon. Specks upon a speck. The sea and the sky were almost touching here; could he not feel it? Here was extinction.
The sudden roaring of my imagination nearly put out its own light with a hiss. I squeezed my nails into the palms of my hands and said the words; the invocation. Said the words over and over again to evoke myself back into myself. Then I relaxed my shoulders, exhausted.
Toby remained at the wall, staring, enthralled by the distant stone figure behind glass. The room around the figure was dark. And then Toby spoke without any emotion, but his words made my bones ache with cold, and the skin around these bones prickled. ‘There are others. Look.’
I joined him at the old wall. And I looked into the neighbouring house. A similar figure stood alone, cowled and robed, with the head turned away from the world, the face clutched. That one stood immobile too; a sentinel at a second-storey window. On the other side of the church, a third stone figure filled a side window in a miserable concrete building, the blue metal roof peeling. It must once have been a garage.
‘Wonder why they are there?’ Toby asked, his query sincere.
To me, the figures seemed to be sealing the empty buildings, or marking them as condemned, or as unstable, as invested. These statues signified places where the dead rose more freely, as the living made room: where the dead invested into things and into spaces. ‘Let’s get back.’
‘This is so cool.’
There have been times in our companionship when I have dearly wished to destroy Toby, physically; this was another one of those times.
As soon as we were back inside our room at the guest house, Toby stretched out on his bed. Still wearing his coat and his muddy boots, he closed his eyes and was snoring within a minute. His muddy footwear soiled the bottom of the bedspread that the withered and yellowing old lady who owned the pension would have to scr
ub.
Hunger, sitting in the cold cemetery watching over Toby all afternoon, and the recent episode in the street, had weakened me. Quietly, I made my way over to the little table upon which we had placed the remainder of our lunch for the car journey from Le Havre. Inside the plastic box, I made the discovery that Toby had eaten, without my knowledge, the last two sandwiches, the bag of crisps and my chocolate bar. I looked at the tray that bore the kettle and hot-drink materials that came with the room. Earlier, I’d seen two packets of complimentary shortbread biscuits. These he had also eaten. The plastic wrappers were discarded beside the broken television.
When I realised that my grinding my teeth risked breaking one of them, I unclenched my jaw and rubbed it. And I looked again at him on the bed, his snoring now vibrating through the walls and filling the chilly air. His thin face was pale, his pinched mouth open. His curly white hair seemed too youthful for his face, like he was an old man in a girl’s wig. I wanted to kick him off the bed and stamp and stamp and stamp on his curly-bitch head.
Instead, I looked away. Beyond the window, the sea and the sky were black, as if existence ended outside the glass. The sudden intense heat in my body abated and left my head aching. There was still some tea and coffee in sachets, but boiling the kettle might wake him.
I cursed myself for such an act of consideration; a human instinct he knew nothing of, because he had never displayed it once in our long friendship. Toby immediately placated any impulsive appetite that he experienced, with no regard for anyone else’s needs. He was a snatcher, a grabber; or he expected everything he needed to be provided everywhere, all of the time. He was entitled. And his contempt for me was reaching unmanageable levels. But now I knew exactly what accounted for his contempt; now it all made sense to me. Now, he made sense. And what was worse than his revelation in the car about his family background was the fact that we cannot change our natures.