Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  I went along to this walk, but only, I think, to return the watch to the sender. It was a themed walk on a wet Sunday: something to do with three gruesome paintings in a tiny church. The triptych of paintings featured an ugly antique wooden cabinet as their subject. There was some kind of connection between the cabinet and a local poet who had gone mad. I think. There were drinks after the tedious walk too, I am sure, in a community centre. I’d asked around the group on the walk, trying to establish to whom the watch belonged. Everyone I asked had said, ‘Ask Lois. That looks like one of hers.’ Or, ‘Speak to Lois. That’s a Lois.’ Maybe even, ‘Lois, she’s looking. She’s due.’

  I’d eventually identified and approached this Lois, spoken to her, and complemented her on her fabulous eye makeup. She’d looked wary, but appreciated the remark with a nod and tight smile that never extended to her eyes. She said, ‘You’re from that building where the down-and-outs live? I was hoping you were going to be that other chap that I’ve seen going inside.’ And she’d taken the watch from me, and sighed resignedly. ‘But all right then,’ as if accepting an invitation from me. ‘At least you returned it. But it’s not going to be what you think, I’m afraid.’ I remember being confused.

  That afternoon I’d not been able to stop staring at her beautiful hands either, or the idea of her wearing nothing but the tight leather boots she’d worn on the walk. So I was glad that the watch had a connection to this woman called Lois. I think my attentions made her feel special but also irritable, as if I were a pest. I wasn’t sure how old she was, but she had clearly tried to look older with the grey coat and headscarf and A-line tweed skirts.

  From a first sighting she had made me feel uncomfortable, but intrigued and aroused also, and at the time I had been lonely and unable to get the cold, unfriendly woman out of my mind, so I had gone to the community centre again knowing that is where the strange group of people, The Movement, met monthly. This dowdy, plain and depressing building was the centre of their organisation, and had pictures painted by children covering the walls. On my second visit plastic chairs had been set out in rows. They were red. There was a silver urn with tea and biscuits on a paper plate too: Garibaldis, Lemon Puffs and stale Iced Gems. I was nervous and didn’t really know anyone well, and those that I thought might recognise me from the walk seemed unwilling to converse.

  When something was about to occur on the stage, I sat in the row behind Lois. She was wearing a grey coat that she didn’t take off indoors. Her head was covered by a scarf again, but her eyes were concealed by red-tinted glasses. She’d worn those boots again too, but had seemed indifferent to me, even after I’d returned the watch and she’d suggested some kind of enigmatic agreement had been made between us the first time we met. I did suspect that she was unstable, but I was lonely and desperate. I found it all very bewildering too, but my bafflement was only destined to increase.

  To replicate the image in one of the hideous paintings that I had seen on the literary walk, a picture responsible for sending a local poet mad, a motionless elderly woman had sat in a chair on the low stage. She was draped in black and wore a veil. One of her legs was contained inside a large wooden boot. Beside her chair was a curtained cabinet, the size of a wardrobe but deeper, the sort of thing budget magicians used. On the other side of her was a piece of navigational equipment; naval, I had assumed, and all made from brass with what looked like a clock face on the front. A loud ticking had issued from the brass device.

  Another woman with curly black hair, who was overweight and dressed like a little girl, came onto the stage too… I think she wore very high heels that were red. When the woman in the red shoes read poems from a book, I felt uneasy and thought that I should go; just get up and leave the hall quickly. But I lingered for fear of drawing attention to myself by scraping a chair leg across the floor, while everyone else at the meeting was so enraptured by the performance on the stage.

  After the reading, the woman dressed like a little girl withdrew from the stage and the hall darkened until the building was solely lit by two red stage lights.

  Something inside the cupboard on the stage began to croak and the sound made me think of a bullfrog. It must have been a recording, or so I had thought at the time. The ticking from the brass clock grew louder and louder too. Some people stood up and shouted things at the box. I felt horrified, embarrassed for the shouters, uncomfortable, and eventually I panicked and made to leave.

  Lois had turned round then and said, ‘Sit back down!’ It was the first time she’d even acknowledged me that evening and I returned to my seat, though I wasn’t sure why I obeyed her. And the others near me in the hall had looked at me too, expectantly. I had shrugged and cleared my throat and asked, ‘What?’

  Lois had said, ‘It’s not what, it’s who and when?’

  I didn’t understand.

  On the stage, the elderly woman with the false leg spoke for the first time. ‘One can go,’ she’d said, her frail voice amplified through some old plastic speakers above the stage.

  Chairs were knocked aside or even upturned in the undignified scrabble toward the stage that was made by at least four female members of the group. They’d all held pocket watches in the air too, as they stumbled to the stage. Lois got there first, her posture tense with a childlike excitement, and had looked up at the elderly woman expectantly.

  The old veiled head above her had nodded and Lois had risen up the stairs to the stage. On her hands and knees, with her head bowed, she then crawled inside the curtained cabinet. As she moved inside, kind of giggling, or maybe it was whimpering, the elderly woman in the chair had beaten Lois on the back, buttocks and legs, quite mercilessly, with a walking stick.

  The stage lights went out, or failed, and the congregation fell silent in the darkness. All I could hear was the clock ticking loudly until a sound like a melon being split apart came wetly from the direction of the stage.

  ‘That time is over,’ the amplified voice of the elderly woman announced.

  The lights came on and the people in the hall started to talk to each other in quiet voices. I couldn’t see Lois and wondered if she was still inside the cabinet. But I’d seen enough of a nonsensical and unpleasant tradition, or ritual, connected to those paintings, and some kind of deeper belief system that I cannot remember much about, and couldn’t even grasp back then, and so I left hurriedly. No one tried to stop me.

  I think… that’s what might have happened. It might have been a dream, though, or a remembered dream. I never really know if I can trust what appears in my head like memories. But I’ve recalled that scene before, I am sure, on another evening like this one as Lois bemoaned our coming together. Maybe this was as recent as last month? I don’t know, but all of this feels so familiar.

  Lois began calling me after the night she entered the cabinet on the stage of the community hall. On the telephone she would be abusive. I remember standing by the communal phone, to receive the calls in the hallway of the building in which I had rented a bedsit. Her voice had sounded as if it were many miles away and struggling to be heard in a high wind. I then told the other residents of the lodging to tell all callers that I was not home and the phone calls soon stopped.

  I met someone else not long after my brush with Lois and The Movement… Yes, a very sweet woman with red hair. But I didn’t know her for long because she was murdered; she was found strangled and her remains had been put inside a rubbish skip.

  Not long after that Lois came for me in person.

  I think…

  Yes, and there was a brief ceremony soon after, in the back of a charity shop. I remember wearing a suit that was too small for me. It had smelled of someone else’s sweat. And I was on my knees beside a pile of old clothes that needed sorting, while Lois stood beside me in a smart suit and her lovely boots, with her fabulous eye makeup, and her silver hair freshly permed.

  We had been positioned before the wooden cabinet that I had seen at the community centre, and in the odd paintings i
nside the chapel on the literary walk. And someone had been struggling to breathe inside the box, like they were asthmatic. We could all hear them on the other side of the purple curtain.

  A man, and I think he was the postman in that town, held a pair of dressmaker’s scissors under my chin, to make sure I said the words that were asked of me. But there had been no need of the scissors because even though our courtship was short, by that time I was so involved with Lois that I was actually beside myself with excitement whenever I saw her, or heard her voice on the phone. At the charity shop wedding service, as we all recited a poem from the poet that went mad, Lois held up the ladies wristwatch with the very loud tick that had once been sent to my address, though intended for someone else.

  We were married.

  She was given a garish bouquet of artificial flowers, and I had a long wooden rule broken over my shoulders. The pain had been withering.

  There was a wedding breakfast too, with Babycham and cheese footballs, salmon sandwiches, round lettuces, sausage rolls. And there was a lot of sex on the wedding night too; the kind of thing I had never imagined possible. At least I think it was sex, but I can only remember a lot of screaming in the darkness around a bed, while someone kind of coughed and hiccupped in between lowing like a bullock. I know I was beaten severely with a belt by the witnesses, who were also in the bedroom at a Travelodge that had been rented for the occasion.

  Or was that Christmas?

  I’m not sure she’s ever allowed me to touch her since, though she takes her pleasures upstairs with what I can only assume was inside that box in the community centre and at our wedding. I may be her spouse, but I believe she is wedded to another who barks with a throat full of catarrh, and she cries out with pleasure, or grunts, and finally she weeps.

  The betrayals used to upset me and I would cry in the dog basket downstairs, but in time you can get used to anything.

  * * *

  On Thursday Lois killed another young woman, this time with a house brick, and I knew we’d have to move on again.

  The disagreement culminated in a lot of hair pulling and kicking behind some beach huts because I had said hello to the attractive woman who’d been walking her dogs past our picnic blanket. Lois went after the dogs too and I had to look away and out to sea when she caught up with the spaniel.

  I got Lois home, up through the trees when it was dark, wrapped in our picnic blanket. Shivering, all stained down the front, she talked to herself the whole way home, and she had to lie down the following day with a mask over her face. The episode had been building for days and Lois detested younger women.

  While she convalesced I watched Ceefax alone – I had no idea that channel was still on the telly – and I thought about where we should go next.

  When Lois came downstairs two days later, she wore lots of eye makeup and her tight, shiny boots and was nice to me, but I remained subdued. I was unable to get the sound of the frightened dog on the beach out of my mind; the yelp and the coconut sound and then the splashing.

  ‘We’ll have to move again. That’s two in one place,’ I’d said wearily.

  ‘I never liked this house,’ was her only response.

  She relieved me into a thick bath towel, using both of her hands, kissed me and then spat in my face.

  I didn’t see her again for three weeks. By then I had found a terraced house two hundred miles away from where she’d done the killing of two fine girls. And in the new place I’d begun to hope that she’d never return to me. Vain and futile to wish for such a thing, I know, because before Lois vanished at the seaside, she’d slowly and provocatively wound up her golden wristwatch while staring into my eyes, so that my hopes for a separation would be wishful thinking and nothing else. The only possible severance between me and Lois would involve my throat being placed over an ordinary washbasin in a terraced house and her getting busy with the dressmaker’s scissors as I masturbated. That’s how she rid herself of the last two: some painter in Soho in the sixties and a surgeon she’d been with for years. Either a quick divorce with the scissors over vintage porcelain, or I could be slaughtered communally in a charity shop on a Sunday afternoon. Neither option particularly appealed to me.

  In the new town there is evidence of The Movement. They’ve set themselves up in two rival organisations: a migratory bird society that meets above a legal high shop only open on a Wednesday, and an M. L. Hazzard study group that meets in an old Methodist church. No one in their right mind would want an involvement in either group, and I suspected each would convulse with schisms until they faded away. There are a few weddings, though, and far too many young people are already missing in the town. But I hoped the proximity of the others of Lois’s faith would calm her down or distract her.

  Lois eventually came up in the spare bedroom of the new house, naked save for the gold watch, bald and pinching her thin arms. It took me hours with the help of a hot bath and lots of watery tea to bring her round and to make the ticking in the house slow down and quieten, and for the leathery snakes with dog faces to melt into shitty stains on the carpet. She’d been through torments while away from me, I could see that, and she just wanted to hurt herself on arrival. But across several days I brought Lois back to a semblance of what we could recall of her, and she began to use a bit of lippy and do her hair and wear underwear beneath her housecoat.

  Eventually we went out, just to the end of the road, then to the local shops to treat her to new clothes, then down and along the seafront, where we’d eat child-size vanilla ice creams and sit on the benches to watch the misty grey horizon. We’d not been down to the sea much before a drunken, unkempt man asked her to do something rude and frightened her, and then another dirty youth in a grimy tracksuit on a bike followed us for half a mile and tried to tug her hair from behind.

  That second time, while I pumped two-pence pieces into an arcade machine to win some Swan Vesta matches and Super King cigarettes tied up in a five-pound note, Lois got away from me. I ran the length of the pier and shore looking for her and only found her after following the sound of what I thought was someone stamping in a puddle in the public toilets. And then I saw the bicycle outside.

  She’d lured the lad who’d yanked her hair on the promenade inside the ladies toilets and been thorough with him in the end cubicle. When I finally dragged her out of there, little was left of his face, that I could see, and the top of his head had come off like pie crust. When I got her home I had to put her best boots in a dustbin and her tights were ruined.

  Two people from The Movement came and saw us at home after the incident and told me not to worry because hardly anything like that was investigated anymore, and besides the police had already charged two men. Apparently, the smashed-up lad was always knocking about with them and they had form for stamping on people in the grimy streets. The visitors from The Movement also invited us to be witnesses at a wedding, which I instantly dreaded despite hungering to see Lois all dressed up again.

  The wedding was held in the storeroom of a Sea Scout hut that smelled of bilge and in there, within minutes, Lois met someone else: a fat, bald man who did little but leer at her and sneer at me. She also did her best to lose me in the crowd, and there were a lot of people there to whip the bridegroom with leather belts, but I kept my eyes on her. At the wedding breakfast I saw the fat man feeding her the crisps that come with a sachet of salt inside the bag. He wasn’t married and wasn’t in The Movement either, so I was appalled by the fact that they let single men attend an event like that. At one point, as I hid below Lois’s eyeline, I even caught her slipping the fat man our telephone number. All of the other women felt sorry for me.

  I barely recognised Lois after the wedding in the Sea Scout hut. For days she was euphoric and acted as if I wasn’t even there, and then she was enraged because I was there and clearly preventing her from pursuing another opportunity.

  The fat man even approached me in the street when I was out shopping and spoke down to me and said that I may
as well give up on Lois, as our relationship was dead, and that he intended to marry her within weeks.

  ‘Is that what you think?’ I said, and he slapped my face.

  I writhed beneath the kitchen table for three days after the incident with the fat man, before getting up and dressing in Lois’s clothes, which made me giddy. When I got the eye-shadow just right, my knees nearly gave way. But I still managed to leave the house in the early hours to pay a visit to the fat man. Lois ran into the street after me, shouting, ‘Don’t you touch him! Don’t you touch my Richey!’ When some of the neighbours started looking out of windows, she retreated indoors, sobbing.

  Well aware that Lois was absolutely forbidden from making such an overture to a new partner, without my voluntary participation in a divorce, Richey hadn’t been able to restrain himself from making a move on her. Through the spyhole in the door of his flat he saw me with my face all made up and he thought that I was Lois. He couldn’t get the door open fast enough. Then he stood in the doorway smiling, with his gut pushing out his dressing gown like a big shiny pouch, and I went into that bulb of guts with a pair of sharp scissors, my arm going really fast. He didn’t even have a chance to get his hairy hands up, and into his tubes and tripes I cut deep.

  We cannot have oafs in The Movement. Everyone knows that. I found out later that he’d only been let in because the woman in the bird migrating group, the one who always wore her raincoat hood up indoors, had her eye on ‘Richey’ and had believed that she was in with a chance. She was only one week from crossing over too, but I think I saved her a few decades of grief. Later, for sorting out Richey, she even sent me a packet of Viscount biscuits and a card meant for a nine-year-old boy with a racing car on the front.

  Anyway, right along the length of the hall of his flat, I went through Richey like a sewing machine and I made him bleat. I’d worn rubber washing-up gloves because I knew my hands would get all slippery on the plastic handles of the scissors. In and out, in and out, in and out! And as he slowed and half collapsed down the wall of the hall, before falling into his modest living room, I put the scissors deep into his neck from the side, and then closed the door of the lounge until he stopped coughing and wheezing.