The lady underneath, Michelle, was a nightmare. In the first month we were there I saw at least five different blokes leaving early in the morning. She must have made a poor cup of coffee as they seemed in a rush to go.
Michelle had a daughter called Kirsty who always appeared at a loose end. She looked seven-years-old, yet seemed to be left to wander the streets after school. There was another lad a bit older than her who played with her and Jonty and I would often hear the three of them giggling together.
For some reason, children laughing didn’t bother Clara so much there. Perhaps it was because they were past the baby and toddler stage. It made me wistful though. There was a roundabout at the back of the flats, and I would find myself staring at them through the lounge window. It must have been nice to have your own son. Someone to show the world to.
Clara had seen enough of the world and only left the house to go with me to the supermarket. I couldn’t remember when she stopped driving. Perhaps about the time I no longer went to the bowling alley. It was almost as if our horizons were narrowing together.
One Sunday springs to mind. As I pulled up outside the flats, Clara and I saw that Jonty kid point at me and run away. I remembered feeling hurt and thinking maybe I could bring him round with comics or sweets. I knew I must ask his mum first or they would suspect I was some kind of pervert.
The car sagged with a week’s shopping when Clara got out as I'd used it to counterbalance her weight.
‘Can you manage that box, love? I’ll carry the bags.’
She picked it up with a grimace. It only had 24 cans of coke in it, yet she carried it in as if it were a seven-stone bowling ball. I followed her up the stairs. She had to stop and rest every few steps. There was no way I could have got past her anyway. She took up the whole width and had to carry the drinks in front of her.
The lad from next door hovered behind us. I heard him say, ‘Typical,’ under his breath. When had she become so big? We finally got inside, and she dropped on the floor like I imagine an Ironman might after a tight finish.
‘You okay?’
She refused to answer, or maybe the way she hauled breath into her lungs meant she couldn’t. I wasn’t to know at the time, but she wouldn’t leave the flat for nine years. Years tick by. Lives are wasted. I suspect if Clara knew what was to happen, she would’ve left that day and never have come back.
Chapter 25
2001 – Age: 35
As time dragged by, the neighbours accepted me. I enjoyed watching the children grow up. The boy next door, Ben, was a bit lively, but he had a good heart. Kirsty, in the flat below, was our favourite.
Michelle, her mother, came up one Saturday night and said an emergency had occurred. Would we look after Kirsty for her later until she got back? She would only be an hour or so. I was surprised that she bothered to ask. Locking her up in her own home alone seemed safer than what she often did, which was to leave her outside and pay no attention. Of course, we said yes.
Kirsty always looked bewildered to me. Like she felt she didn’t belong anywhere. Her mother was a raging pisshead. She would have got on well with Frank. Neglect was probably the wrong word. Kirsty just had an unloved air about her. It must have been a strange thing, not living with your father. It was a terrible shock to us when we lost our dad and we were much older than eight.
The cheeky mare knocked on our door after teatime, ushered her daughter in and said see you in an hour. I hoped she kissed Kirsty goodbye and explained things before she brought her round, as she left in a rush without doing either. I pondered what kind of emergency would call for high heels and that amount of lipstick. Kirsty and I regarded each other in a cloud of perfume. She edged into the lounge when asked.
She sat in the middle of the sofa and stared at Clara with a suspicious air. As though she had come over for dinner and was wondering if she was the starter. I hadn’t thought about what Clara must look like by that point. Our scales went no further than twenty-four stone.
When Clara mounted it a few months back, I saw the pointer hit the maximum and bend as it yearned to go further. I was behind her at the time, a fact she was unaware of until I gasped. Again, neither of us said a word and nothing changed.
She had a two-seater sofa, which she overwhelmed as I would a child’s armchair. Clara offered her a chocolate from the ever-present Quality Street tin she kept on a small table beside her. Kirsty went over, took one, popped it in her mouth, and made a hmmm sound. She looked at Clara, side to side and with a grin said, ‘You must have eaten a lot of these.’
She spoke so factually that we both roared with laughter. All fact and no tact, as May used to say. I turned the channel to Bugs Bunny. She looked over, smiled and came and sat next to me on the three-seater sofa. We watched hours of cartoons that night.
It was lovely to watch Kirsty giggle at the interactions on kids’ telly. After a few episodes, she began to relax and point things out to us.
‘The rabbit’s behind that tree. He doesn’t know.’
Clara and I kept stealing glances and smiles at each other. I think I saw her cry once, but she had been laughing hard a few seconds before so it was difficult to tell. It wasn’t a time for sad thoughts. More a case of being sent a glimpse of happiness and trying to enjoy and store up every moment.
This was the sort of thing she had planned for our lives. Simple pleasures and innocent times. We had pie and chips around eight o’clock. It was gone nine when I first gave a thought to where her mother was.
We didn’t have a contact number or even a hint of where she’d gone. Kirsty didn’t seem to care, and we'd been sent a small piece of sunshine, so I wasn’t too worried. At nine thirty though, I wondered what time was normal for a kid of her age to go to sleep.
‘When does your mum take you to bed?’
She looked at me in a strange way.
‘I usually put myself to bed as Mum’s already asleep on the sofa.’
If sentences can hide long sad tales, then that was one.
‘My friend at school gets a bedtime story when her mum or dad put her to bed.’
Clara and I exchanged another glance. It was heart-breaking but not our business. I didn’t even know if one of the many men who had visited downstairs was her dad. Asking her would be a downer if one of them wasn’t. My indecision was solved by the doorbell buzzing repeatedly.
I opened the door to Michelle. She didn’t explain, or apologise for taking so long. Perhaps the beer was going off at the local pub and they needed volunteers to stop it being wasted. Maybe she was the only one who turned up.
‘Come on, you,’ she slurred at Kirsty.
‘Ah, Mum. Do I have to?’
Michelle seemed to consider it for a second but was beyond any rational thought so just spun around and left. No words of goodbye or thanks. She never told me what the emergency was. I doubt she could remember anyway.
It was about this time that I started to have a recurring dream. I’d wake up in a sweat, shaking with fear. By that point I was sleeping alone. There wasn’t enough room in the marital bed for both of us.
The dream, nightmare really, was always the same. A small boy clung to the top of a slide, wanting to get off. Another kid was half way up and banging the space between them with a small sturdy branch while another watched on. For some reason, the children wore masks - a sheep, a wolf and a shepherd. I could see the sheep crying. The wolf didn’t care, enjoyed it and banged harder. I heard the shepherd shout, ‘Leave him alone, let him down.’
After what seemed like an eternity in my dream, the sheep lost control of his bladder and urine poured down the slide, causing the wolf to slip to the bottom. The wolf sloped off, satisfied, and the shepherd comforted the victim.
Chapter 26
2002 – Age: 36
Clara tried to lose weight. The broken scales might have been a motivator; however, it was when her foot went through the base of the shower that she realised things were out of hand. I bought much healthier foo
d, we cut back on the takeaways, and she lost a few pounds. She complained that the weight wouldn’t come off.
Her mum had been a help the previous time she dieted, but it made me realise I hadn’t seen her parents since we’d moved in. It had been years too. They’d never been for tea at the old house either, although Clara and her mother used to meet up for dinner or shopping in the town centre. Clearly that hadn’t happened with her agoraphobia. Still, I would not judge her familial issues when mine had to be worse.
The problem was her inactivity meant she burned little energy.
‘It won’t come off, Vincent. I need a tummy tuck thing.’
I couldn’t stop myself rolling my eyes. She was somewhat off needing one of those.
‘I think you are supposed to lose the weight first, and then have cosmetic surgery.’
‘What’s that other thing they do to dieters?’
‘A gastric bypass?’
‘Oh yeah. Where you can only eat small meals.’
‘That’s right. We could probably get that for free on the NHS.’
I could see her mind ticking at the thought of going to the doctor and all the rigmarole. I wondered whether she thought if we paid for it, they would come and do it at the flat.
‘We could buy a treadmill?’
‘Really, Vinnie. Could you see me on one of them?’
That tickled both of us and we laughed.
‘How about we get it and I put my mouth one end and you can keep sending cakes down. Does that count as your ten minutes of exercise?’
‘I expect so. If I alternated with grapes and strawberries, perhaps the odd melon, you could get your five-a-day too.’
‘Best I keep my eyes open, or you’ll be slipping a banana on there.’
It seemed a long while since the two of us chatted and flirted like that. We ended up going to bed and having sex. She was so big that it didn’t work in the missionary position, so we did it doggy style. It was unusual to be honest. I felt a bit like one of those small Indian blokes, riding his elephant.
I’m a bloke though, so I still enjoyed it. If I’d known it would be the last moment we would be together in that way, I’d have probably taken more time.
Other than my brother, one of Clara’s friends, and silent Kevin on two occasions, no-one else had been in the flat except us. Frank was the only person who had been round that year. I could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t impressed with our lifestyle. To his credit, he never mentioned it.
I understood the reason behind our actions, or lack of them. We hid from the world. A life wasted is a terrible thing. While others died and suffered, we withered, of our own free will. Clara knew that too, yet seemed powerless to change.
We were trying to gain control by not exposing ourselves to new experiences. We didn’t take any risks, except with our health. No more bowling, nights out or weekends away. Just an endless procession of monotonous takeaways which we spooned into our mouths like unthinking robots. If life scares you, avoid it. I cowered in my books and Clara shrank in front of the television.
Sometimes I found myself thinking of travelling. It was as though I had someone else's memories. I imagined deserted white beaches with a warm Caribbean breeze, or being on a high mountain top with an icy Himalayan blast on my face.
I was always alone. I wondered if those thoughts meant anything. Perhaps I just watched too many travel programmes. Why wasn’t Clara there? Should I reach for those possibilities or accept them as part of a life I would never know? Those things signified freedom to me. Instead, I had an existence in a jail of my own making.
Despite our risk-averse lifestyle I still felt anxious. If I let my mind roam, it would search for dark places. I imagined losing my job, dreadful neighbours moving in, or maybe I would develop an awful illness. Neither of us were criminals, yet we committed a terrible crime. One of ignoring our lives. We were given the gift of life, yet it sat between us unopened.
Chapter 27
Oddly, it was Michelle, the woman living underneath us, getting a permanent boyfriend that was the catalyst for the horror that unfolded. She couldn’t have picked a more unsuitable beau if she’d tried. He had an irritating nickname for one - Titch. You can imagine, he was far from small. He was the type of person who loved to talk about himself, mostly of him winning at various things.
Clara had begun to get out of breath just moving around the flat, so I took my cigarettes downstairs out the front of the flats. Although Michelle smoked like a cooling tower in her lounge, he often came outside. I think he used to wait for me to come out, just so he had someone to impress. I had few pleasures in life, so him ruining one was a constant source of irritation.
Titch was full of shit. We’ve all known people like him. They start off telling you a story which may be true, or at least have an element of truth in it. Then when you aren’t amazed they embellish it. I used to just not listen. However, if you say nothing, they create some enormous fantasy which is so clearly untrue it’s a complete insult to your intelligence.
His dad took him fishing once. Fair enough, probably happened. By the end of the tale he had won a competition he hadn’t even entered, and been asked to represent the county. If I hadn't peppered the conversation with a few 'Wows!' and 'No way!' I bet he would have told me Moby Dick was nestled in his bathtub.
I used to smoke fast, so I didn’t have to listen to his constant moaning about the state of the flat. When I inquired why he didn’t clean it himself, he looked in the distance with a face like someone who had bit down on a soft biscuit. That was his other quality, he had a temper. He scared me, and Michelle I think, but he also frightened her daughter Kirsty. That was unacceptable in my book. Still, it was because of him that we got to spend more time with her.
What triggered it was an incident with Frank. Titch had a habit of talking to you and poking you in the chest with his finger to get his point across. It was bizarre. When he was doing it, I couldn’t believe I would just stand there whilst this total invasion of my personal space was happening. In fact, it was hard enough to be classified as assault. What could I do? He must have been two metres tall. Frank pulled up and misread the situation.
‘Get your hands off him.’
Titch’s chin dropped, and he regarded my brother in the same way a lion might do if a gazelle had come over and browsed his CD collection. I’d never seen Frank look as scared as he did that day. Age mellows most of us and he was a different man, so you had to admire his courage.
He wasn’t daft though, and pushed me through the door and up the stairs. Titch’s face still had the ‘does not compute’ expression on it when we left. It looked like I would smoke out of the kitchen window in future. Clara rarely got off the sofa nowadays and complained the smell blew back in, but I would rather upset her than spend any more time with the meathead below.
‘What was all that about?’ Frank remained flustered when we reached my flat.
‘He’s Michelle’s boyfriend. He wasn’t actually doing anything, he’s just a bit aggressive.’
‘It’s Titch Ryhall, the boxer. You knew that?’
‘No, I don’t follow boxing.’
‘He was in the news for biting someone’s ear off in the Windmill pub on Lincoln Road.’
‘That does ring a bell. He mentions fighting all the time, I assumed he meant in pubs. Didn’t he go to prison for that?’
‘Yes, he’s only been out a few months. He’s barred from most places in town for starting fights, although he left jail with a reputation as someone reasonable.’
That didn’t make any sense.
‘I don’t get it?’
‘He spent eighteen months at Her Majesty’s Pleasure and, with his celebrity boxing status, he got a job at the prison gym. State of the art, I’m told. His drug of choice was ecstasy, preferably with gallons of Stella. A cell is not the sort of place where you would want to combine those two substances, even if you were able to get your hands on them. They were the thin
gs that ruined his career. All of a sudden, he’s clean and training again. When he leaves, he’s fit and toned, but along with many ex-cons, he can’t control himself on the out.’
‘So, when he gets out, the supply chain is re-opened, and he returns to his old leisure pursuits. He’s a fit, hard, professional boxer abusing class A drugs and alcohol.’
‘Yep, and Vinnie, he knocked out our darts captain because he looked at him weird.’
‘Did he?’
‘What?’
‘Look at him funny?’
Frank looked at me funny.
‘I think you’re missing the point, Vinnie. If you must know, he said all he did was raise an eyebrow at him. He woke up in hospital and only remembered buying his first drink.’
‘Fantastic. And you’ve just wound him up downstairs.’
‘I was protecting you, Vinnie.’
‘Haven’t you learnt? All you’re doing is getting me in more trouble. The fight in Cromer, all the shit at school, even my stag do. Don’t bother again.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘Don’t I? Frank, trouble follows you. It always has, ever since you were young. You got chucked out the navy because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut. Then you killed that bloke in your car.’
‘Killed what bloke?’
‘In that accident you had.’
‘I wasn’t driving, he was. It was black ice. An accident.’
‘What about that boy from school who died?’
His face flared with anger, but worry was present too. He went to leave and I grabbed his coat.
‘Tell me you weren’t involved with that.’
He mumbled something that sounded like ‘wusma’.
‘What was that?’
He turned around and bellowed at me.
Fifty Years of Fear Page 10