The New Uncanny

by Priest, Christopher

  ‘With a view of the Stadhuis.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘No. In fact, just between you and me,’ I said, lowering my voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘I don’t actually like Duvel.’

  She sat back, eyes wide.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said, hands in the air. ‘The man who didn’t like Duvel. I don’t like tripels either. I like blond beers. I’ve always been partial to blonds.’ I gave her my winning grin.

  ‘Only blondes?’ she asked, sitting forward again.

  ‘As you probably know if you’ve read the books, I like the brown beers best.’ My eyes flicked down momentarily. ‘Westmalle, Ename, Chimay – but only the red or the blue.’

  Around us, hotel staff were discreetly clearing tables.

  ‘So, Eddy De Groot, your Flemish detective, is you?’ she asked, bending the sugar sachet in half.

  ‘It’s easier than making stuff up.’

  ‘Your alter-ego?’

  ‘If you like. All I know is he’s not Poirot and he’s not Maigret, but he’s not Van der Valk either. I saw a gap in the market for a Dutch-speaking Belgian detective. Written by an Englishman.’

  Now it was my turn to sit back in my chair. I took my eyes off her for a moment and looked around the breakfast room. She had described my Eddy De Groot novels as bestsellers. Which of course they weren’t, not in the UK, but they did OK in Dutch translation. In addition, they probably sold as many English copies here in Belgium and in Holland as they did back home, there were that many English speakers in the Low Countries. In any case, the figures obviously added up, or I wouldn’t get this treatment: five-star hotel, a reading slot at the Antwerp festival, a round of interviews with local and national media. The girl with the sexy mouth had come up from Brussels to do a piece for De Standaard. I wasn’t kidding myself it was going to last for ever, but I might as well enjoy it while I could.

  ‘It goes back to when I was a kid,’ I said, leaning forward and taking the sachet of sugar from her hand. ‘My dad used to bring me stamps off the ships. He was a customs officer and he used to rummage ships in the docks and bring me back stamps for my collection. The ones I liked best were the Belgian stamps. The picture of King Baudouin, the different colours. Pink, blue, green. Brown and grey. I liked the way the colours changed but the image remained the same. I wanted to own the whole set. I like having whole sets of things. Belgian stamps. Agatha Christie novels – Fontana paperbacks with the Tom Adams covers. No others.’ I toyed with the sugar sachet and shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’s a man thing.’

  I watched her check the digital voice recorder.

  ‘When’s your deadline?’ I asked. ‘Do you have to go away and write this up this morning?’

  ‘I’ve got till tomorrow lunchtime,’ she said.

  ‘So what do you say we do this over lunch?’

  I held my breath and caught her looking at my wedding ring. I said nothing. She smiled.

  *

  Rain falls without end from a sky made of lead. Your eyes are gritty. Your head lolls momentarily over the wheel.

  Microsleep.

  You exit the motorway. Pull over, rub your face. Get out, walk up and down. Fresh air, pouring rain. Get back in the car. Sit there looking out at the rain. You get your phone out of your pocket and stare at it. You check that you haven’t missed any calls or texts. You haven’t. You remember the time you spent ten minutes going all over the house looking for the phone, while talking on what you thought was the cordless landline. You even told the person you were talking to that you were looking for your mobile.

  This wasn’t so long ago.

  You told your wife about it, hoping she would find it funny. She shook her head and said, ‘It’s a bit early even for you, isn’t it?’ You had had a drink, as it happened, but nothing more than that. You wondered if she had a point and you decided that she may well have done, but that it was disappointing all the same that she didn’t just laugh about it and then perhaps everything would have been all right.

  It’s a long time since everything has been all right.

  You go to the messages on your phone and reread the last text she sent. There’s no real need, there are no fresh insights to be gained. You’re just tormenting yourself.

  You put the phone back into your pocket and turn the key in the ignition.

  More rain, more flat fields. Grey streets with occasional brick houses, shuttered, stark. More traffic cones, roadworks, another flash of fluorescent yellow. But the perspective’s all wrong. It looks like he’s lying down. You lean forward over the wheel, screwing up your eyes. He is lying down. Pull over, stop. Get out. Jacket over your head. Bend down. His hood over his face. Limbs at weird angles, as if he’s been knocked down. Hit and run. You pull the hood back a little.

  Jump.

  The face isn’t real. The rain doesn’t roll off it in quite the right way. But the arms and legs look right; the torso is reassuringly bulky. You touch the leg. It’s a real leg. You’d put money on it being a real leg. You haven’t had a drink yet today. You squeeze harder. Maybe you’re wrong. You look at the face again. Is it a mask? You remember the man on the tube, the blind man with the rubber eye mask. Two unblinking eyes painted on to a rubber mask held in place with elastic behind a pair of useless glasses. When you sat opposite, you stared at him so hard you ended up having to look away, because you became convinced he could see you doing it. Somehow.

  When you took a photograph of him through a crowd on the platform and showed it to your wife, she called you a sick fuck, but only after making sure the children were not in the room.

  You took your camera with you when you went to say goodnight to the children, because you wanted to show that picture to them. You thought they’d get it. But they were both already asleep, their hands clenched into tiny fists, mouths slightly open. The infinitesimal rise and fall of the chest. You bent right down over their beds until you could feel their breath on your cheek. The faintly sour smell. You would never stop loving them, you told yourself, no matter what they did. Yes, you’d lose your temper with them and yell at them, and afterwards you would feel bad because the anger melted away leaving only the love behind.

  You couldn’t imagine life without them.

  Sometimes you’d sit and watch them breathe, sitting with one and then the other. Until your wife would call you. I thought you’d gone to the pub, she would say when you went downstairs. No, you’d say, and you’d look into her eyes and see if it was still there, the glimmer in her eyes that had drawn you to her, what, twelve years ago? Thirteen? It had lost some of its candlepower, perhaps, but it was still there, and so you’d hold her and you’d hug each other tightly and you’d say you loved her and you hoped she’d be patient with you and she’d say nothing, but nor would she let go of you.

  You try to loosen the collar on the shirt, just in case. The neck looks no more realistic than the face close up. You look up, look around. There’s no one. The nearest buildings are some distance away. There’s no traffic. You gather the dummy’s legs and thread your arm under his back, taking care to support the head with your upper arm. He’s lighter than a fully grown man. Heavier than either of your children. You carry him the few yards back to the car and manage to open the passenger door. Your heart is beating fast and the blood vessels in your head are throbbing. You position his legs in the footwell and once you’ve got the seatbelt around him he sits up OK. His head hangs forward just a little.

  You check your mirrors. There’s a car in the wing mirror, far enough away for its driver not to have seen anything. In any case, your car would have acted as a shield. The other car now drives past without slowing down. You wait for the ringing in your head, from the hiss of the tyres on the wet road surface, to die down and then you pull out and drive on.

  *

  I took her to the Entrepôt du Congo for lunch and between us we got through so many Rodenbachs neither of us thought it was a bad idea when I suggested we carry on the interview back at
my hotel. Of course when we got back there, the lobby area was busy and returning to the breakfast room didn’t feel like an attractive option, so although I know I could have asked the concierge for conference facilities, it just seemed easier to head upstairs to my room.

  We did finish the interview, but let’s just say it took a while to get started on the afternoon session. Hilde said it was the first interview she’d conducted in which both parties were completely naked.

  ‘Both parties?’ I said.

  She smiled.

  We could have perhaps left it at that and not gone on and ruined everything. But during the time we spent in my room there were moments of tenderness, interludes when we lay side by side catching our breath gazing into each other’s eyes like lovers. Most of the time, admittedly, it felt like a one-night stand, but there were moments when it didn’t. And there was a mutual reluctance to part once we were dressed and Hilde said the batteries on her digital recorder were exhausted but that it didn’t matter because she’d already got far more material than she could use. Somehow we ended up at a bar not far from the hotel drinking shots. I switched my phone back on to see that my wife had been trying to get hold of me. Instead of calling her back I ordered another round of drinks and heard myself answering Hilde’s question about the origins of my love of Belgium in greater depth.

  ‘It wasn’t just the stamps,’ I said. ‘Well, it was, but it wasn’t just the stamps per se. It was what they symbolised. They were like the equivalent British stamps. Different colours, monarch’s head. We had a queen, you had a king. I couldn’t get my head around how strange it must be to have a king rather than a queen.’ I knocked back another shot and was about to order more, but checked myself and ordered two dark beers instead. ‘We should drink them slowly,’ I said. ‘Here was this country,’ I went on, ‘just across the Channel from us. A small country, a monarchy. In a way it was a mirror image of Britain. As I grew up, I imagined that it was like a parallel world to the one in which I lived.’

  Red light struck one side of her face, blue the other. I felt a compulsion to open up to her completely, to tell her everything about myself. In turn, I wanted to know everything there was to know about her. I took out my wallet and withdrew the battered picture of my kids that went everywhere with me.

  ‘Jack and May,’ I said.

  She grinned and tossed her hair back and asked me how old they were. I told her eight and six, but that the photograph was a year old. She handed it back and as I slipped it into my wallet I fell into a sort of fugue. I couldn’t work out why. Eventually I wondered if it was because she’d been happy to see a picture of my children. If she was happy that I had kids, did that mean she would also be happy when I went home to them, which I both did and didn’t want to do.

  *

  You went home, of course. But it was clear – not to them, but to your wife – that something was up. You can’t dissemble, can’t hide the truth. You said nothing, but within a week you were back in Belgium. Another book to research, you said, next in the series. You stayed with Hilde. She was single even if you weren’t.

  You scrapped a planned De Groot novel and started a new one. He’d fallen in love, with a journalist. His job was on the line, his life falling apart. De Groot’s wife was suspicious; yours too. It wasn’t as if she read your work-in-progress, not normally, but accessing your back-ups remotely on your iDisk was beyond neither her imagination nor her technical know-how. Getting the password right was the easy part, since you had never had any secrets. The drink and drug habits had never been kept from her. How could they be? Their effects were written all over your face and bank statements.

  When you got home, your wife confronted you and you broke down and confessed. You sat at the kitchen table and looked out of the window while she threw crockery – wedding presents – at the wall. In the garden, perched on the handrail that runs around the outside of the deck area, was a small green bird, a greenfinch, seemingly completely oblivious to the mayhem taking place only a few feet away. You watched that bird, its tiny head shifting position in jerky increments, and were filled with a vague longing. If you could have put your feelings into words you would perhaps have said that you wanted to swap places with the bird. That you wanted your spirit or your soul to escape from your own body like smoke and drift under the kitchen door and then enter the greenfinch, which you would henceforth, in some strange incomprehensible way, become.

  Do you even believe in a spirit or a soul? Or is there nothing but a mind? A consciousness? A sense of identity?

  You see a sign for Westvleteren and leave the main road. Some say Westvleteren 12 is the best beer in the world and you would not disagree. None of the three Westvleteren beers can be bought anywhere other than direct from the Westvleteren Abbey brewery. You’ve heard they even require you to have an appointment, but if you turn up and say give me an appointment in five minutes’ time, what are they going to do? Turn you away? Or sell you some of the best beer in the world?

  You see his yellow jacket out of the corner of your eye and it startles you. You’d forgotten he was there, sitting right next to you, steam rising off him. His raised hood conceals his profile. Didn’t you lower his hood? You must have raised it again, either deliberately or accidentally, while getting him into the car.

  You keep driving, although the signs to Westvleteren have disappeared. There was a village, or a hamlet. A settlement. Three or four buildings, all shuttered, no gardens. Brick fronts hard by the road. But no crossroads, no turnings, unless you missed one while sneaking a look at your passenger. Here’s something on the left. You slow down. A walled enclosure. Carefully cut grass. Regular lines of white headstones. Identical black lettering on each.

  You accelerate slowly as if out of respect. There is no let-up in the rain. At the next turning you go left. The windscreen wipers sound like a heartbeat. A Coca-Cola sign shimmers out of the gloom on the right-hand side of the road. You pull over and stop. Some kind of café. Step out of the car and lock it, then look back in and hesitate, the rain drumming on your shoulders and the back of your neck, before unlocking it and turning to walk towards the café.

  *

  I took the Eurostar back to Brussels and jumped in a cab. We spent the afternoon in Hilde’s flat on avenue Emile Max. When I finally looked out of the window I saw a flash of green as a bird the size of a jackdaw, but much more streamlined with pointed wings and a long tail, swooped down into the garden and then climbed back up from its dive just as quickly, like a BMXer on a ramp. I knew instantly what bird it was.

  ‘Look,’ I said to Hilde, ‘a ringed-neck parakeet. They’ve become common in London, apparently, though I’ve never seen one. I had to come to Brussels to see my first one. It’s an omen.’

  She asked me what had happened in London.

  ‘She told me to fuck off,’ I said. And straight away, as a shadow seemed to pass across her face, I knew it was a strategic error. You don’t tell your lover that your wife has kicked you out. It doesn’t matter that you may have talked about the possibility. When it happens, you say nothing, unless what you want to end up with is precisely that, nothing.

  We went out to a bar in Schaerbeek where a friend of Hilde’s was celebrating a birthday. I drank steadily as I watched Hilde drinking and sitting with her arms around a succession of people, male and female, all of them younger than me, as she was herself of course, and I started to feel obscurely sad. Self-pity pricked at my eyes as I turned to look out of the window and thought about Jack and May.

  And Sara. My wife.

  I left the bar and walked in a random direction. Before long I realised I had entered the red light district by the Gare du Nord and I went into the next bar I came to. Pinewood panelling covered the walls. I ordered an Orval because it appeared to be the only beer they had. I detest Orval, so I drank it quickly and ordered another. And then another. It was dark when I left the bar. Red, blue and ultraviolet lights slid past me in a sickening blur. When I somehow found my way ba
ck to avenue Emile Max, I waited outside Hilde’s building until someone came out. The door to her flat gave easily enough without causing too much damage, but really I was past caring. While I was blundering around inside looking for her car keys, I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. A text message.

  *

  You don’t like Jupiler any more than Orval, but when it’s all they’ve got, you’ll swallow it. Three small bottles. Take the edge off. A fat man sits at a till. You give him a handful of coins and go on through into a long narrow room filled with dusty display cases containing scraps of battle dress, a scabbard, a German helmet. Strange wooden boxes squat on tables. You put your eye to the eyepiece and twist the knob to change the photograph being viewed. Some optical trickery inside the box creates a 3D effect. Pictures of terrible wounds and corpses alternate with photographs of advancing columns of soldiers. The atrocity exhibition with slot machines. Somehow, their being in black and white makes it worse, but after a while, the pictures no longer shock. You become inured to the horror. At the far end of the room a doorway leads outside.

  You follow a path into a field dotted with trees and lined, you now see, with passageways dug into the earth.

  Trenches.

  You remember the cemetery filled with war dead. Are these real trenches or some sick replica, a theme park, dug by the fat man? Or that the fat man had dug for him? From what you know of Belgium, it would not surprise you at all to learn that these are the real thing. In another country this would be a monument. Here it’s a disgrace. You’d almost rather it were the fat man’s plaything, that just one man was to blame instead of a federal state for failing to honour the sacrifice of others.

  You half-clamber, half-slip down into one of the trenches and it’s all you can do to remain on your feet in the mud. You feel a damp sensation on the left side of your chest. Something trickling. Sweat from all the exertion. You feel like a ghoul. Time to leave.