He sneezed, dust up his nose. Was it too early to go to the pub? To claim his seat and eek out each pint for as long as he could while reading The Doll’s House? If he drank too much during the day then he would be skint, or drunk, or both, before night, and have to come back to the house earlier… He hadn’t yet spent an evening in his new home, and half consciously he was avoiding doing so. Last night, like the previous one, he had spent twitching awake at every strange noise, every sound that might have been someone in there with him in the dark. The female noises, Layla’s strange cries and groans, had again echoed down into the bathroom, annoying him and exciting him; again when he had gone to check there had been nothing there, despite what his tired eyes had for a second told him.
The house seemed to be shaking with all the noise within – had the guy upstairs turned up the music in response to his turning up of the TV? It was like living on a fault-line, the walls vibrating, a wolf huffing and scratching outside… The flat was already too hot again, yet if he opened the window it would only be to more noise. He slammed his hand on the sofa in frustration, causing dust to jump up – and was it his imagination or something else too? Were there fleas in the furniture? His skin began to itch and crawl between his shoulder blades…
He stood up decisively. He would just have to go over budget for the day, that was all, and economise later on. He needed to get out of his house; he needed a drink.
***
When he returned from the pub hours later he was reeling. Fortunately he could still remember the code for the alarm, although it took him a couple of attempts. Inside, his flat was blessedly quiet: no dreadful rock music, no female voices on the edge of hearing. But he was bored, full of pent up energy, and knew that he couldn’t sleep for hours yet. And so, almost without thinking, he ended up on his knees, pulling open the small door near the bathroom, to see what Dom had stored in those cardboard boxes.
He brushed away the cobwebs that had already accumulated around them, and felt a nostalgic sense of wrongdoing. Not a feeling that he was doing anything amoral or uncivil; but a feeling that what he was doing could get him caught, and punished. But he was trying to brush such child-like things from his life.
The torn cobwebs settled and made him sneeze; things scuttled away from him to make new homes in the dark. Carefully, he pulled at the strips of Sellotape like they were ribbons, and opened up one of the boxes.
He had to drag it into the light to see, and as he did so the insides shifted and settled their weight. He sneezed again at the clouds of dust which he had agitated, like tiny insects. Inside the box were lots of video tapes. They looked homemade – the stickers on their spines showed what looked like initials and dates, in faded handwriting. He took one of the videos out: M.B. 1982…
The feeling of wrongdoing increased – not just looking in Daddy’s wallet but stealing from it too… - but, he told himself, it wasn’t like Dom was an unreasonable man. He was probably expecting him to look in the boxes – weren’t they both ‘men of the world’? (This phrase kept coming back to him when he thought about Dom and the deal he had struck with him.) Still, something about the memory of his landlord, his spidery limbs and underhand smile, made him pause…
But only for a moment.
He went into the lounge and put the video into the VCR. He didn’t turn the light on, and the flickering blue glow of the telly reminded him briefly of horror films: Poltergeist; Ring… The antique video-player whirred and the picture that came onto the screen was blurred; then someone adjusted the focus, over-compensated, and with a less clumsy hand slowly brought the image back. Even in that first split second of clarity his eyes knew what he was seeing: a woman, a girl. She had black hair, long but looking unkempt, and it hung in front of her face and obscured her origins: Eastern European? Oriental? Her home certainly wasn’t England, for assuming that the quiet, gasping noises that she made were words then he didn’t recognise them. She was on her knees, and appeared to have her hands bound behind her back with twine. She was naked.
He carried on watching.
A man came onto the screen, and the poorly focused girl did what she had to do eagerly enough, or at least with a sense of routine. Her foreign words stopped and were replaced by English ones: coarse, barked orders. Watching, he told himself that it was just acting, it wasn’t like it was real. He told himself this even as the man on screen zipped himself up, and slapped the kneeling girl around the face, hard. Even before the echo of the blow had died away a second man had come into shot.
He didn’t know how many men there were in total: ten minutes of the video were all he needed to watch. He cried out as he ejaculated, and immediately worried that he might have been heard by the other people in the house. Quickly, not thinking about the reasons for his rush, for his half-panic, he got rid of all the evidence: tissue into the toilet and flushed away without even turning the bathroom light on; video back in its case, then back into the cardboard box, then back into the dusty cupboard next to the bathroom. He shut the half-sized door then went into his bedroom, and quickly undressed and got into bed, as if wanting to pretend that he was asleep, and had been for hours.
That night he didn’t get up to go to the bathroom, not even when the beer pressure on his bladder became almost intolerable, not even when one of the taps started dripping and he longed to go and turn it off and stop the incessant noise that seemed to be able to cut through two closed doors – as did the amplified little moans of Layla, again echoing down from her room and into his bathroom, along the corridor and into his dreaming bed – her foreign, wordless echoes.
***
He awoke with difficulty three hours later, his dreams like images from half-watched late night TV… He turned over to try to return to sleep, but the burglar alarm went off, sounding like it was right above his head. Even after the sound had ceased he was kept awake by what seemed like the continuous slamming of doors above him, and at least two people going up and down the wooden stairs that connected the three flats – it sounded like someone moving in…
He got up yawning, and feeling vaguely uneasy. He felt as if he had forgotten something and couldn’t remember what. As soon as he stood there was an intense and weighty pain in his bladder, as if he hadn’t pissed all night – he staggered to the bathroom before he wet himself. Afterwards, he had a shower and the water pipes shook and threatened to burst. He cut himself shaving because the mirror was so steamed and unfocused, and the ventilator did little, and he couldn’t get the door to stay open behind him…
Still tired he went into the kitchen, and he wasn’t sure if his blurry eyes really saw the moth flit away from him or if they had made it up – he had always thought moths were nocturnal. For a second he imagined he could smell gas, but he shook his head and this phantom-smell was gone. He opened the window for some fresh air and immediately a draft slammed all the flat doors shut, with a simultaneous bang that made his heart stammer. He filled the scale infected kettle with water, and opened the cupboard to take out the jar of coffee that Dom had so kindly bought him in exchange for… - Decaffeinated? - his thoughts lost themselves as he read this strange new word.
He felt a mounting frustration. He was too tired, he had slept badly and been woken by inconsiderate neighbours, he needed proper coffee and – nothing seemed quite right… He was too young, too arrogant to recognise what he felt at that moment for what it was: homesickness.
He managed to turn his thoughts around as he woke up, and later went to the supermarket to buy some of things he needed – bleach, dusters, a mop, fly spray, curtain hooks, caffeine. He returned to the house and entered the code for the alarm without setting it off. He was just remembering that this was more than whoever had been up this morning had managed, when he heard the door to B upstairs open and release the sound of dated rock music and the heavy steps of the occupant as he came downstairs. He tried to utter a greeting to the big, looming shape, which seemed to stand too close to him for his eyes to focus on it, but the word
s stuck in this throat like it was still dusty.
“Sorry about any noise this morning,” the shape said in the most unapologetic way imaginable, almost aggressively; like a kid being made to apologise, he thought. The man's bouncer-eyes stared at him suspiciously – you can’t come in – and he guessed that Dom had told this collection of hired muscles to be polite, now that he was renting from Dom directly.
“Oh, that’s okay,” he said.
“I was just helping the… the lady upstairs move in. She works for Mister Domwood. Too.”
“Layla.”
The big man blinked, like he was having trouble flipping through the index cards in his memory. “That’s right,” he said eventually.
“Move in? She hasn’t been living here already?”
“No” – a quicker and more certain answer.
“But Dom said…”
“No. She was at… another place. Now she is here. Until… Until she isn’t.”
“So who’s been living in the top flat?” he said, thinking of the faint female sounds that had seemed to come from his bathroom, which itself had seemed for one blink of his eyes to be stained with brownish blood… The bouncer-shape looked at him like he was deaf and underage.
“No one,” he said.
***
He scrubbed and cleaned much of the afternoon, until his hands were chapped from running water, his throat ticklish and sick from too much detergent in an enclosed space – the ventilation did little to suck it out. He bleached the toilet, cleaned the basin and bath, he cleared the black, fungus like mildew from the walls, he wiped the mirror until he could see his face and nothing else within it, he mopped the floor clean of old stains and the occasional dead insect. When he had finished he showered for a second time that day, then went to sit in the lounge with only a brief glance towards the small door just outside the bathroom.
His body ached but felt unsatisfied as he sat down, his thoughts seemed only marginally under his control. Already the scenes from the previous night seemed unreal – but of course that was exactly what they were, despite the cheap quality someone had planned them, even scripted them. They were illegal those videos, but not exactly amoral. The girl had been untied at the end and had wiped away her black-eye makeup. He wondered who had filmed them, and when, and how his landlord had got hold of the tapes. But these were vague thoughts, and in the daytime he wondered how he could have been turned on by such images as the previous night had provided. Such ugly, grunting men, one girl so out of focus that he could remember nothing of her but her long black hair, a couple of slaps and a feigned kick. It was all tawdry and added up to nothing that he should have been excited by… M.B. the initials on the spine had said, along with a date that he couldn’t remember. Sitting in his chair that was leaking foam, he wondered how many videos were in those boxes – how many sets of initials, how many years…
He shook his head, and looked at his watch. The pubs had been open for hours. So it wasn’t too early for a drink, not really.
***
The drink made his journey home blurred, made his thoughts furious. He had spent the evening trying to impress a fellow student he had met – but she had coolly out-drank him, then left. His head was hot and stuffy with indignation, and the sharp night air did little to ease him.
A taxi passed him and stopped outside the house – his house. He had to stand still and blink to bring it into focus. It didn’t sound its horn but waited patiently. A bulky shadow opened the door to the house from the inside and waited, like a doorman. Then another shadow emerged and went towards the taxi, head down. The taxi door was opened and some light was shed onto the scene – he felt some feeling of frustration increase as he saw her short skirt, the shape of her as she got inside. The taxi pulled away; turning around in the street it blinded him when its headlights rushed passed him. He stood stock still for a few seconds. Then he fumbled for his keys and ran clumsily towards the house.
One, Nine, Eight, Six and he was back inside, and his feet made noises like a burglar’s on the bare floorboards. The softer, padded noise he made on the lounge carpet wasn’t much better, and the sound seemed out of synch with his footfalls. Outside, a cat screamed girlishly, and the lounge window shook in its constant draft. He could hear a tap dripping again in the bathroom, although he was sure he had tightened it before he had left. He knew he wouldn’t sleep for hours yet.
Down on his knees, he pulled the cardboard boxes out into the light again, destroying the webs that the spiders had rebuilt during the day. He looked at the spines of the videos, telling himself that it didn’t mean that he was going to watch one again, despite his already rising excitement. The thought came again: assuming the initials were names, assuming the dates were when they had been filmed, then how many girls were here, spread out over how many years? At least two decades worth he saw – longer than he had been alive. He pulled out S.L. 1989 and the moth danced about him as he took it into the lounge.
He didn’t remember as much about this one, maybe because he had drunk more, maybe because it was all so similar to the previous night, maybe because the faked violence was that much more close up and he wanted to forget it… The feelings of guilt afterwards were the same, compounded by the way that the fuzzy-edged girl on screen seemed to look over her shoulder at him as he leant forward to turn off the video, with a look that expressed no desire, no reproach, just a drugged and lack-of-sleep blankness. He scuttled around to put the tape back, put the cardboard box back out of sight, absurdly feeling like Dom was going to barge into the flat at any moment.
Later, when he heard the echoes from the bathroom again he immediately thought, but Layla isn’t in… He remembered again the shape of her silhouette, the way she had left. Suddenly, like she had been summoned. He knew that she hadn’t returned for he hadn’t slept a wink in the two hours he had been lying in his roomy double-bed…
Another female cry – and if it wasn’t Layla, who was it? Fear, like on the first night, overtook him as he got up and walked towards the sounds coming from his bathroom. The door was closed, and the light was off, and the floorboards leading up to it were still dusty despite his cleaning earlier. The noises were quiet, choking, and he wondered how he could ever have thought them cries of pleasure. Wondered too how he could have ever thought they were echoes from two floors above – despite the interposing door the noises now had a clearness to them, and the house seemed to have fallen quiet to allow him to hear them fully: the little gasps, the moans, what sounded like bare heels kicking against the floor… Through all this he could still hear the tap dripping, like a beat behind some terrible, minimalist music. His palms were sweaty, and he paused for awhile with them pressed on the door without opening it, steadying himself.
He was more used to the odd dimensions of the house now, and his blind hand found the light cord first time. The bathroom was filthy, despite his efforts to clean it only hours earlier. There were streaks of vomit on the floor, and streaks of blood, and of what smelt like piss. All leading his eyes up to the small figure curled up beneath the sink, moaning softly, kicking her feet… He realised he could see the background of the house through her.
He didn’t hear himself scream. The almost expected ghostly transparency of the figure was not the frightening thing – the frightening thing was the familiarity: the bedraggled black hair, the bruised and naked back… He couldn’t work out what was happening, he couldn’t see her face for she was turned away…
After a few seconds the whole house clicked into darkness, the noise from the bathroom ventilator cut off. In the darkness he imagined the ghostlike form struggling to all fours, her choked coughs struggling closer... He opened his mouth to scream, and found that he retched instead. Turning around, he stumbled towards the lounge, all the while afraid that a translucent arm was going to reach out along the ground and grasp at his ankle – although he had been able to see the wall through her he had no doubt that her grip on him would be firm.
In the lou
nge he saw that the standby light of the video player was off – it was just a power cut. He wondered where the trip switches were, he hadn’t noticed such unimportant details on his look around the property. He hadn’t got a torch, hadn’t bought any candles like those that his mother would already have been lighting in the same situation… He eventually got the power back on (the trips were in the entrance, near the burglar alarm, and he had to stand on the rickety table to reach them) and he reluctantly went back to the bathroom. But it was quiet now, uninhabited. There was his vomit to clean up from the floor, but everything else was as spotless as it had been. All he could smell were the last traces of bleach. He could see his face clearly in the mirror. It was in fact the cleanest room in the whole dirty house.
So – he had imagined it all then. A combination of drink, insomnia, and the after-effects of those stupid movies which he wouldn’t watch anymore… How else to explain how similar the sight had been to S.L. 1989? Similar, but not identical… No, there had been no ‘ghost’, just his own mind, both over-excited by his new life, and bored by the emptiness of it so far…
He heard a flickering, alive sound behind him. Moving slowly he picked up one of the newspapers he had left near the toilet and rolled it up. He turned, and with one smooth movement, swung at the moth that had alighted on the bathroom door. There was a heavy crunching sound, and it dropped to the floor, one broken wing still trying to fly. He unrolled the newspaper and let it fall, then walked to his bedroom, got into his bed, and slept for ten hours straight.
The Other Room Page 14