***
The moth was lying stiff on its back the next morning, its hardened form like plastic rather than a regular corpse. He swept it into the dustpan with barely a glance, along with the other rubbish and dirt. He cleaned all of his new home again, scarcely paying the bathroom any more attention than the other four rooms. He bought air fresheners for the lounge, a reading lamp for the bedroom to study by, and for the kitchen pasta, eggs, rice, pepper, even flour. As he worked he turned his music up loud – Lalya and the bouncer-guy must have been out, for the whole house was dead. Fiddling with a few dials on the boiler he managed to tame the oppressive and rattling heat of the radiators, and using a piece of cardboard allowed him to stop the window from rattling. Instead of going to the pub that afternoon he went for a walk, then joined the local library, and toured the local junk shops looking for a second hand bike with which to ride to university, although he didn’t find one.
It never occurred to him to ask just why he wasn’t thinking about the events of the night before. The entire evening after his third drink was hazy, as it should have been. The ghost he had seen had undoubtedly been bottle-born, popped from that last beer like a genie from a lamp… - and what was wrong with that? So his eyes had been drunk as well as his libido. His adolescent fumbling before those videos of Dom’s seemed to him the more shameful, more disquieting…
Still, he didn’t have a shower that evening even after all that work, all that walking. He didn’t drink anything either, for he didn’t want his bladder to be attention-seeking and unreasonable all night. He didn’t want to have to go into that bathroom after the hours of darkness; he didn’t want to have to pass that small, unsecured door on the way there either.
He went to bed early and read with his headphones on. The next play in his Ibsen ‘best of’ after The Doll’s House was Ghosts, but he didn’t really want to read more than one Ibsen on the trot… He started Pride & Prejudice instead. Because his flat was on the ground floor he heard the taxi pull up even through his headphones; he ignored it. He sensed the vibrations as someone came out of one of the higher-floor flats and headed towards the front door; his internal layout of the house didn’t seem quite right because he had the stairs placed near the far wall, and yet the sound of Layla’s footfalls seemed right above his head. He irritably turned the volume up on The Cocteau Twins. The front door to the building slammed, and again the sound seemed to come from the wrong place. The taxi turned in the street and its headlights peered through his thin curtains, and shadows climbed and shrank on the walls of his bedroom.
Eventually, he fell asleep, Stars & Topsoil still pouring into his ears.
In his dream, he was a prisoner held to ransom by a group whose demands he didn’t understand. The room he was being held in was cramped and filthy and it seemed as though the walls weren’t quite straight, the ceiling not quite level, like they had subtlety altered the angles of his cell to mess with his perceptions. He occasionally heard the sound of his captors from other floors. He was chained to a radiator that was always on, although he didn’t know why because he was imprisoned in such a hot country. He had to keep his back constantly arched away from it. But his head, his ear – that he had to keep pressed against its blisteringly hot surface. Why? Because someone else was trapped in this building too, and he could hear them purposefully tapping against the radiator that they were chained to, and the sounds echoed through the house’s system of pipes to his ear. The sounds were a warning; escape plans that he couldn’t understand. They were irregular but had purpose – even if they did occasionally just sound like a tap dripping somewhere…
He woke up, kicking away the covers that had been the chains around his ankles, pulling away his headphones that had been clamped on so long they’d made his ears burn… The tap was dripping in the bathroom again – all that cleaning and fixing he had done during the day, why hadn’t he got round to tightening that tap? He turned onto his other side and tried to take no notice of the sound. But something about its rhythm refused to let him ignore it, every so often he got used to it but then there was an off-beat that drew his attention back, a pause and then a fortissimo sequence of drips that seemed to indicate some hidden melody, some meaning… It was too aggressive a sound for him to sleep.
But still, he didn’t get up to tighten it straight away.
The tap wasn’t loud, but the silence of his flat, and the promise of meaning that the rhythm seemed to hold out, added volume. The whole house seemed quiet except for the noise of that tap dripping. If there had been other sounds then that drip-dripping would have hidden them; it could have easily smothered the pad of any footsteps or gutturals in the back of a human throat…
Eventually, the irritability of insomnia grew stronger than the fear of any ghost (not that sober he believed such things existed). He arose gaunt-eyed from his bed, his head feeling stuffed with the light and inconsequential stuff of sleeplessness. The tap dripped; paused; then drip-dripped as he opened his bedroom door and padded across the wooden floorboard towards the bathroom. He realised he could see clearly – it was getting light. How much sleep had he actually managed? About thirty minutes? The tap dripped. He shook his head, as if to rid himself of the sound, as if he was listening for something else of importance, and he couldn’t quite hear it. The tap dripped its Morse Code; paused…
…and stopped.
It was like the splicing of two pieces of audio tape together, for there was no silence, no gap, but a continuation of the noise in another register; a continuation of the message in another medium…
He opened the door into a black bathroom where the nascent sunlight couldn’t penetrate, a blackness which contained sounds that didn’t seem to echo properly, as if the darkness around them was vast and cavernous. Cries and moans and the rising and falling of a damaged body that couldn’t drag itself upright. What sounded like something metallic falling onto the tiles. He felt a rush of cold air like there was a drop right ahead of him. He reached for the light cord, fearing that he wouldn’t find it.
The ventilator turned on, and immediately replaced the cool, cavernous air that he had felt with the stuffy and cast-off air of an enclosed space. In the electric light the bathroom seemed too small, smaller than how it had looked when he had first been shown around. Barely big enough, it seemed, to contain the two people within it.
His brain felt like it was slowed and sleepwalking, but he still registered the similarities to what he had seen the previous night: the thrashing and translucent form of a bare-backed and bloodied girl, naked and facing away from him, one moment curled up tightly around the core of her pain as if to smoother it, the next arching away from it so it looked like her back must break. Her long black hair was tangled and stuck together with dried blood, with vomit. Her mouth was shaped like a scream but only a dulled choking sound emerged from it; her dirty feet cramped and convulsed. Could she sense him standing there, was that why she faced away, to avoid the shame of her shabby and animal death? He stared at her sleepily. She was bloodied from a wound that he couldn’t see.
There was no question that she might be real: he could see the wall through her. The rest of this ghostly vision was transparent too: the trails of black and globular blood; the vomit; the odd items that seemed to have appeared with her and which he couldn’t understand, couldn’t place into the story: a bottle of foreign liquor, blood-stained towels, an open bottle of pills that had spilled out across the bathroom… How could pills have caused this bleeding? He didn’t understand. These objects too glowed with a phantom transparency, pulsed with it, first more solid and then less so, in a rhythm like the turning on and off of a light…
The girl turned and looked at him over her shoulder.
He took a step back horrified, and a late rush of adrenaline kicked the sleepiness from his body. Could she actually see him, with those eyes? See him through the film of pain, hatred, and transparent death that covered them? All the dark and echoing space which he had seemed to sense earlier
was contained within her eyes.
She made a sound. It wasn’t a gasp or a cry or a death-rattle. It was a word, he was sure of it. Thank God he couldn’t understand it! Quickly, desperate to stop her saying something more, he took another step backwards, and swung the bathroom door shut.
The sounds behind the door immediately ceased, and he knew that if he reopened it the vision of the girl would be gone. He stood outside for a few seconds, bent over with his hands on his knees. His thoughts had fully woken up, and it didn’t take him long to calm down. Really, the vision hadn’t meant anything. It was horrible, but no more real than a horror film. Maybe the events he’d seen had taken place, but a long time ago – that was the point of ghosts. When she had turned her head and seemed to speak it hadn’t been directed at him, but at some lost figure who had stood in the same place ten, twenty, thirty years ago. And no doubt rushed for help.
Really, he was supposed to be acting grown up and practical – no doubt if he just ignored it this ghost would fade and he would stop seeing it. And really, what was a harmless and obsolete spectre compared to noisy neighbours, to rattling windows and dripping taps? Those were practical problems of his house that he needed to sort out and alleviate. He took another couple of steps into the daylight, and what he had seen seemed to drift, to become little more than a coda to his captive dream. His thoughts had shifted into another gear: he still needed to find that bike…
He turned around and hurried off into his busy day.
***
The next evening, he felt he deserved a glass of wine or two. He sat and watched TV (he had bought a licence that day, too), reading his book whenever a boring programme was on, and hazily daydreaming about the girls that he might meet at university the next week, and shyly take their hand.
This time there was no knocking at the door. He heard an odd snuffling sound, the jingling of keys outside – but his mind was dulled and half-asleep from the wine and he thought it was merely Layla returning... It wasn’t until he heard the door to his flat open and footsteps approach that he realised an intruder had broken in. He sat up with some alarm – shouldn’t Dom have waited to see if he was invited? But he had already been invited in once.
Dom smiled in greeting, his faint, executive smile that wouldn’t let anyone else in on the joke. He didn’t sit down, but stood poised on his attenuated spider-like legs that didn’t seem like they should be able to support him.
“Good evening,” he said. “I have come, hmmm, to collect my things.”
“Sure Dom, sure…” – he was glad to get them out of his house, that filth that had made him imagine – what? Ghosts in the bathroom? Ghosts in this stupid place – weren’t ghosts supposed to haunt crumbling garrets, stately homes? But, he told himself, this place isn’t stupid, isn’t squalid – it was his.
Dom smiled, and slowly blinked. His eye colour was indistinct, an unreadable blue grey nothing. Nevertheless, his gaze was piercing. Without a word Dom went to the small cupboard near the bathroom. He didn’t know whether to follow, but somewhat listlessly he did. He suddenly felt unsure of himself, bloodless. He felt vaguely guilty, but not nervous, like he had waited all day for a parental punishment, one that he had imagined so many times that the reality lacked verisimilitude. But why did he feel that way? After all, wasn’t he on his own territory? He stood and watched Dom drag out the two dusty boxes into the light, and as he watched images fogged his brain – girls on their knees, on their backs, eyes acting dead as they were fucked or slapped.
Dom stood up smoothly, brushing without distaste at the cobwebs on himself. He smiled yet again.
“So,” he said. “You had a good wank over them then?”
The waneness, the fog in his brain, left him, and he felt his face flash a tell-tale red. His eyes bulged, his throat felt speechless with the dust that had been thrown up when Dom had shifted the videos.
“Most people,” Dom said, “pay for that privilege.” His tone of voice aped hurt and betrayal, while he smiled.
“Dom, I just looked, I didn’t…”
“Enough. I am not as stupid as maybe you students think I am. I am sorry that you broke my trust. If you hadn’t I might have, hmm, stored other things here. Asked other favours. And recompensed you. Let you into my clubs. Let you meet my girls. Although I doubt a boy like you would have known what to do with them.”
He was speechless, but not in anger – he was invaded with the obscure feeling that he deserved this. His punishment, his karma, his spank on the backside. But what exactly did he think he’d done that was so bad?
“I have reconsidered our previous arrangement,” Dom said, striding back into his lounge, and causing him to tonguelessly follow. “I will allow the Housing Agency to keep an eye on you, to suck slightly on the both of us. But remember, not only do I own the house, I own them too. Of course, if you had been, hmm, man enough to shake on our deal then I would have honoured it. But you weren’t.”
He gaped – then just hung his head. The wine had hit his bladder and he needed to pee desperately. He felt like he was going to piss himself with Dom standing there watching him.
“I am going to call on my employee upstairs to help move these boxes,” Dom said. “I think it would be better if you, hmm, were elsewhere. He has a low enough opinion of you as it is. Noisy, he says. I suggest you leave for fifteen minutes.”
Numbly, he did so.
***
He hadn’t allowed himself to become angry until he had slunk back to the house, an hour and a half later. He had paranoid fantasies that the code for the alarm had been changed, and his fingers made mistakes on the keypad, causing a short howl of intrusion. Safely back inside his flat, in the bathroom, he looked at himself in the mirror. As far as he could see, the second figure present had no reflection.
He was so angry that he trembled, ground down on his teeth. His anger stripped his memories of any of Dom’s natural, Alpha-male superiority – he had allowed himself to be bullied like that because of the economic relationship between them, that was all; because Dom was his landlord, the owner of the house… But he had no one to take his side against the bullies now, he would have to find his revenge how he could.
From below him, curling around his ankles like a cat’s meows, came crying noises – the words she tried to utter were foreign, and he couldn’t have placed continent, never mind country. The ghost’s sounds angered him further – each one seemed to jar his thoughts from completion, seemed to collude in the house’s plans to deny him revenge. For wasn’t the house filled with his enemies, with spies? The ghost’s cries were yet another trick, like the rattling window, the odd, footstep-sounds that prowled as the house settled, the sag in the middle of the mocking and empty double-bed… And so he refused to look down, to listen to this further trickery. He focussed inwards. His eyes were looking at his own in the mirror, and trying to fill them with a blood-red mist, to delineate his soul, to fortify it.
He didn’t ask himself why he felt so angry, so slighted – he knew somewhere in the back of his head that if he analysed his feelings their rationale would seem small and child-like. He had to keep his mind furious and clear, and only thoughts nourishing to his anger could be allowed in.
(Below him, the see-through stain around his feet was her blood – black, curdled, patterned with the grasp of her handprints, the kick of her heelprints, decorated with the delicate print of her hair as she’d arched her back. It stank, like something gone bad.)
He smelt the phantom smell of a gas leak again – another trick of the house. He remembered the black gas carbon monoxide detector in the kitchen. But that had been fixed long ago.
Upstairs the serf-like bouncer was playing his heavy metal again. It shook the whole house. How did Layla stand it, he wondered? Didn’t it stop her sleeping?
“She sleeps most of the day” – it was just seven o’clock.
Those films – they had been taken from him but he could still remember them. His libido slunk back to him, l
ike a cowardly animal after the threat had passed. Yes, he could remember those videos. And now he remembered that behind those girls, and the huffing and puffing men, the backdrop had been an all beige flat, with Seventies furniture, and a window that rattled… He could remember all the background details, or at least fill them in.
(She reached up a hand, as if to pluck at his trouser leg – a request for aid, a warning – but her gesture was insubstantial and passed through. Maybe he felt something, for he glanced down – her form looked as solid as a movie projection, and about as real. Dust motes danced within her light. He looked away, having barely registered the sight. Her hands clasped around her stomach, her feet kicked a rhythm against the floor.)
He felt so neutered and angry.
No more tricks. He moved away through the unheeded, miraculous muck of the bathroom, the blood and the spilt liquor and the bare heel prints. He was breathing in through his nose; some part of him heard the cry that followed him, but dismissed it. He headed towards the flat door, looking upwards. Something flickered eye-shapes at him on the wall, but he dismissed that, too.
***
He sneaked passed the door marked B on the middle floor, and started to climb up towards C. Like everything else in the building the stairs were ill-made and noisy and designed to unnerve him – but the heavy rock music was loud enough to drown out any noise that he made; it was like sneaking through a gale.
He reached the top, and knocked on the door C. Nostalgic fancies of rescue passed briefly through his mind - leading the captive princes, past the ogre’s doorway, to safety and freedom – but such things were behind him. He was after all one man fighting another.
The Other Room Page 15