Come a Little Closer

by Karen Perry

  When she reaches the connecting door in the hallway, she stops and looks at it. There is a brass doorknob in the shape of a rugby ball, and a cast-iron bolt that looks ancient. A thought comes to her. Tentatively, she reaches for the bolt. It makes a rasping sound as she draws it back. Then, putting her hand to the doorknob, she feels her breath held in her chest. Turning the handle slowly, she feels the lock hold, just as Mark had said. She lets go of the handle but doesn’t move away. Instead she leans in, presses her ear to the wood panel, listens. Her breathing slows. But she hears nothing, only the swish of blood pulsing through her head.

  Just before she moves away, a crazy thought comes over her: the feeling that another person could be standing there, on the other side of the door, and she wouldn’t know. Even as she discounts her own foolishness, the image lingers, that at this very moment, he might have his ear pressed against the other side, listening.

  2

  Anton

  Nineteen years since this house has been occupied and he can still hear Charlotte’s voice. The rhythmic chant of a nursery rhyme for the children at bath-time. The rill of her laughter spilling down the staircase.

  The second day, still disoriented by his return, Anton is standing in the kitchen, trying to get his bearings, when he is sure he hears the clip of a high heel in the hall outside. Quick as a whip, he’s out there, his heart going like the clappers, fully expecting to see her standing in her belted raincoat, shaking out her brolly or applying another coat of lipstick in front of the hall mirror. But there’s nothing. Not even the drop of post on the doormat.

  Still. The fright he gets is enough to fire him out of the house, like a rocket, down the steps, the little gate clanging behind him as he hurries up the street, watchful for neighbours. They’ll find out sooner or later that he’s back, but he’d rather it was later. He keeps his head down, powering his way past the railings of the tennis courts towards the string of shops just off the roundabout. There’s a café he remembers, and he thinks about sitting there with the paper, coffee and a cream bun. But when he arrives, he finds the string of shops has gone. Demolished. In their place stands a giant box of a supermarket – Lidl’s yellow insignia across the blue band perimeter. He stares at it, bewildered.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ a voice asks, and he looks down at a woman of his own age, some shopping bags tucked under her arm.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he snaps, then catches himself, apologizes for his rudeness and begins to cry. Great sobs pour out of him, the hacking of grief and fear in his chest. It’s the unfamiliarity of it all. He hasn’t cried like this in years – not counting the private muffled weeping into his pillow some nights – openly bawling on the street.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ the woman asks, concern making her shrill. And then she reaches out and clutches his arm, and it’s like an electric shock going through him, snapping him back to his senses.

  ‘Nothing. I appreciate your concern. Thank you,’ he mutters, and as he walks away he presses one hand to the place on his arm where she touched him, rubs it like it’s been bruised.

  He buys himself a soft drink and a newspaper in a corner shop, then finds a small, deserted park with a bench and sits down. Litter is strewn in the grass behind him, but he doesn’t care. Fresh air is what he needs. Fresh air and to be left alone. Mark had warned him to stay at home that morning – a man would be coming to install the telephone – but Anton is not ready to go back to the house yet. Mark could arrange for the man to come again. And why isn’t Mark here, anyway? he thinks, with a flare of disappointment. If he cares that much?

  Out by the roundabout, a truck downshifts. Anton sips his fizzy drink, brings himself under control. He’d talked about it from time to time with the others, what he would do once he was back here.

  ‘Go straight to your local boozer. Get yourself a pint,’ Danny had told him.

  Jim, Salim, Fat Eric – they’d all agreed. A pint and a slap-up meal somewhere. Steak and chips. A nice curry. Only Nigel had advised keeping himself to himself for a few days. ‘Run yourself a hot bath,’ he’d advised. ‘Relax yourself back into things.’

  Of all of them, Nigel had understood him most.

  But the house, as well as being his old home, is a receptacle of painful memories. Every room Anton goes into bears some evidence of the life he had once lived there. A picture, a smell, a stain.

  At school, there had been a teacher who drove into them the maxim that you cannot step into the same river twice. Heraclitus. Anton has always had a fondness for the Greeks. All is change. Life is flux. And yet in the house it feels like stasis, as if time stopped the day he’d left. The furniture, the clock in the hall, the teacups in the kitchen cupboards, the linen on the bed: all of it preserved, like the charred mummified remains found in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Perhaps he should sell it. Sell it all. Hand over the keys to an estate agent and take himself off to some B-and-B until it’s done. But what then? Where could he possibly go?

  He finishes his drink, looks at the paper. His eyes pass over the headlines, before he flips to the financial pages. He finds the mutual fund quotation tables, pores over them – an old habit. It had been his one vice, playing the stock markets. A form of gambling, Charlotte had called it, and she had been right. All is flux. The climb and swooping falls of fortunes played out in tiny-print columns. Saturday mornings spent scanning the pages of the FT, making calculations in his head, his losses and gains. It was no fun unless you had skin in the game.

  He recalls then how she would breeze past him in her dressing-gown, casting a bored glance in his direction as she opened the freezer. It was only after she had wrapped ice in a tea-towel and pressed it to her head that she would breathe: ‘Haven’t you anything better to do?’ The smell of last night’s cigarettes clinging to the air.

  The pages of his newspaper flutter, but there’s no breeze. The air is perfectly still.

  It’s his hands that are shaking, sweat moistening his fingertips, making the ink run against his skin.

  The telephone guy is there when he returns, his van pulled up to the kerb. A young lad, mid-twenties perhaps, not much older than Mark, he carries his bag up the steps to Number 14, following Anton, a stream of conversation coming out of him. There’s a sparrow lying dead on the doormat, and the telephone guy peers at it. ‘Poor little thing. Must have flown into the window above, cracked its head against the glass.’

  ‘Yes. They do that sometimes,’ Anton says.

  After he’s removed the bird, using a coal shovel to carry it down to the bin, he comes back into the house and closes the door.

  ‘Just moved in, have you?’ the young man asks. He’s kneeling on the floor in the hallway, running wire along the skirting board.

  ‘Not really. I’ve been away.’

  ‘You must have been gone a while, by the look of it.’ The guy laughs, holding up an old telephone fixture, like some ancient relic. ‘I’ve not seen one of these since my training days!’

  Anton smiles like an indulgent uncle. ‘Yes. A good while.’

  ‘Where’ve you been? Anywhere nice?’

  He’s just being polite, but the blitheness of this young man’s manner is unsettling. His presence in the house is disturbing. Too loud, too chatty. Like someone talking on a phone in church.

  Oh, if only you knew, Anton thinks, where I’ve been. The things I’ve done. ‘Here and there,’ he says, turning away and entering the kitchen.

  He busies himself putting away the shopping he picked up on his way home. Two plastic bags of groceries. He moves from cupboard to fridge automatically, as if at a muscle memory – after nineteen years, he still remembers where things go. But, then, he has always been an orderly man. A man who values systems and process. A place and time for everything.

  ‘Do you want a phone upstairs in the bedroom?’ The guy stands in the door to the kitchen.

  ‘I … I don’t …’

  ‘It’s a big house. People like it. Especially older people.
Saves them the bother of coming downstairs.’

  ‘Good Lord. How old do you think I am?’ he asks, laughing to take the sting out of it.

  The young man grins in the doorway. ‘Dunno. Fifty?’

  ‘Fifty-nine,’ he declares, with a note of triumph.

  Ridiculous to feel so gratified by the error, his vanity coming to the fore. Anton prides himself on his full head of hair, gunmetal-grey. During his long stay at the hotel, he took care to use the gym regularly. His musculature remains firm, no premature hump on his upper back. A woman he once knew told him he had the body of a welterweight boxer. Rose Gleeson it was, he thinks.

  He’s not some doddery old fool whose knees are about to go. There is still life, still vigour in his meat and bones.

  ‘A phone upstairs would be fine. Thank you,’ he says politely, then directs the young man to the bedroom at the front, the one with the bay window overlooking the park.

  He listens to the clatter and banging upstairs, wonders why he gave instructions to install the phone in the front bedroom, when he has absolutely no intention of ever sleeping there again. He will take Mark’s bedroom, or Cassandra’s at the back. But not the front room. He wonders whether Charlotte’s clothes still hang in the wardrobe, whether her brushes and cosmetics sit atop the dresser. Does the room still smell of her perfume? Chanel No 5 – the scent of that Nazi collaborator. On his last trip, he had bought it for her in Duty Free, as he always did. Brought it back here to Number 14, placed it on the kitchen table. A week later, she was dead.

  Upstairs, a drill is going, buzzing through the wall. It reminds him of another time when Charlotte had had the bedroom redecorated. New linen, new carpets, new wallpaper. Tradesmen wandering through his house for a week. ‘We need to spice things up a bit, Anton,’ she’d told him, and he knew she wasn’t just referring to the furnishings. He remembers her leaning over the railings to chat with the tenant downstairs, saying: ‘I’ve got three men in my bedroom right now, would you believe?’ and then the gale of her laughter. She had been fond of innuendo.

  The flat downstairs had been their rental property. ‘A little bit of extra income,’ Charlotte said. ‘Keep the wolf from the door.’ Young couples, newly married. The odd family. People biding their time until they could buy in the area. It had that second-rate look of a rental – bland and inoffensive, lacking any character. There had been the occasional tenant who made a stab at personalizing the place, a few pot plants out the front, some fairy lights strung up over the patio at the back. ‘There’s no point in making the effort,’ he used to say to Charlotte when she’d glide downstairs with a bottle of wine and some welcome roses from the garden, eager to make new friends. No point getting to know people who will move on in a year.

  And now Mark has found new tenants. ‘You need the money, Dad,’ he’d told Anton firmly, overriding any notion that Anton just wanted to be left alone. ‘You won’t even know they’re there.’

  He hasn’t seen anyone come or go yet. Hasn’t heard any noise travelling up through the floor. Not that he’s been listening out for it. If anything, he feels the opposite. Anton wants to forget all about the flat downstairs. If he had his wish, it wouldn’t be there at all.

  He is asleep when the phone rings, stretched out on the bed in Mark’s old room at the back of the house. A few seconds of panicky fluttering in his chest before he realizes where he is. The phone keeps bleating from the other bedroom, and dizzily he crosses the hall.

  It is one of those cordless jobs – grey, sleek. It takes another few seconds for him to figure out how to answer it. Already he is overwhelmed, exhausted. The light in the bedroom has grown dim. He has no idea how long he has been asleep.

  ‘Dad?’ he hears Mark say. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Fine. Fine.’

  ‘You got the phone in, then?’

  ‘Demonstrably.’

  He shuffles back out on to the landing with the phone clamped to his ear, crosses back into what is now his room.

  ‘So, how you doing? Happy to be back in the house?’

  The question startles him. Is that really what Mark expects?

  ‘Oh, yes. Settling in. I’d been looking forward to seeing you, though, more than the house.’

  ‘Yeah. Listen, I’m sorry, I meant to be there when you got home but then this work thing came up.’

  ‘That’s all right. So, when do you think you’ll come over? I thought perhaps we might go out. Maybe play a round of golf. My clubs are still –’

  ‘I don’t know, Dad. Golf? It’s not really my thing. Besides, I’m kind of tied up at the moment with this ad we just shot – they need me in the editing suite.’ There’s something in his son’s voice, a straining. ‘You understand, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I know you need help –’

  ‘I’m not a baby, Mark,’ he responds, with some irritation, immediately regretting it.

  He catches the hesitation at the other end of the line. Mark was always sensitive as a boy.

  ‘Well, I hope you’re finding the house okay,’ Mark says, sounding a little defensive. Then, as if to justify his absence, he continues: ‘I came down last week and cleared out a few things. Got the gas and electricity back. I meant to do the phone, too, but there wasn’t time …’

  On and on it goes, the stream of justifications, of excuses, when, really, what does it matter now? Standing in the back bedroom, listening to Mark, Anton’s eye is caught by movement outside. Down below, stepping up from the patio. The top of a woman’s head – dark hair caught up in a messy knot at the crown. A solitary figure, he watches her progress up into the garden, the rest of her form coming into view as she picks her way through the long grass. White T-shirt, bottle-green skirt, flip-flops on her feet.

  ‘I’ll be a week in the editing room, maybe more,’ Mark goes on. ‘And there’s this thing I’ve got to do at the weekend – helping a mate move house …’

  A basket is held to the flare of her hip and she stoops now to set it down in the grass. White sheets billow and flap in the breeze, and she stretches to unpeg them, half turning so he can see her in profile – slender arms, the swell of her breast, grace in her movements and a sort of containment to her, as if she is utterly lost within her own thoughts.

  ‘Dad?’

  A change in his voice. A dip of seriousness.

  The sun on her head.

  ‘You will watch yourself, won’t you? You won’t do anything … stupid?’

  The delicate stalk of her neck.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Charlotte says, her voice finding him by the window, the low threat of her words curdling inside him.

  But Charlotte is dead, and Anton has done his time. Nineteen years in the hotel. The crime punished. The debt paid. Charlotte’s words can’t touch him now. He is a free man.

  He pulls back from the window but does not move away entirely. Half hidden by the shadows, he watches the young woman come. The movement of her hips, the dreamy grace of her expression. As he follows her with his eyes, the breath catches in Anton’s throat.

  3

  Hilary

  Hilary and Greg are in the car on the way into town when he breaks the news to her.

  She’s peering into the little mirror behind the sun-visor, dabbing at her eyelashes with the mascara wand, when she hears him clear his throat in that particular way of his and say: ‘Look, Hil. There’s something I need to tell you.’

  She feels a little inward sigh at his words and the tone they are said in. After twenty-five years of marriage, she’s used to this. Used to having small disappointments broken to her in this manner: a school commitment that prevents him from going on that weekend away they’d planned, some error in their tax return that has just been discovered, a translation offer for his first book that has failed to materialize. The slow burn of life’s disappointments, always heralded by that sombre warning tone of his.

  He doesn’t take his eyes off the road, and she keeps dabbing at he
r lashes, steeling herself for whatever new negative is about to come at her.

  ‘It’s Anton,’ Greg says. ‘He’s out.’

  She lowers the wand, turns her head and stares at him. ‘What?’

  Greg keeps his eyes on the traffic ahead, even though a bombshell has just gone off in their car. She finds herself staring at the side of his face, the sprinkling of white through the red of his trimmed sideburns, his inflamed cheek, which she notices now he’d nicked while shaving.

  ‘How?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose he’s done his time.’

  ‘No, I mean how do you know this?’

  Her thoughts are coming at her in a rush, messy and confused. It’s like suddenly finding herself at the centre of a swarm of bees – noise and panic in her head. How did Greg find out about this before she did? How could she have missed such a thing?

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘When? Where?’

  All these single-word questions she’s firing at him. What? How? When? Where? Like a child, or someone in shock. And she realizes that she is in shock.

  ‘On the street, down by the crescent. A few days ago –’

  ‘A few days ago?’ There’s a shrillness in her voice and she tries to rein it in. ‘You’ve known this for a few days and you never told me?’

  She stares at him, waiting for his response, but his jaw is set in the fixed, stubborn way that makes her want to scream at him. ‘What if I’d met him? What if I’d turned a corner and bumped into him?’

  ‘That’s why I’m telling you now, in case,’ he explains, some passion of his own leaking into his voice.

  She draws her gaze away from him and stares blankly out of her window. The sun is still beating down even though it’s evening, heat making the streets unrecognizable – little seating areas outside cafés and pubs thronged with people in summer clothes. Grey buildings, smog-stained brickwork, all of it transformed by the brightness of the glare. It’s like a foreign city, she thinks, Athens or Madrid instead of Dublin, everything unfamiliar.