by Gary Fry
At reception, I asked the attractive young woman working there whether my companion had taken breakfast or checked herself out. I received a vacant expression in response, which might denote either confusion or embarrassment. In either case, the answer was negative and so I paid in cash—£117—received my change and left.
There was only the tramp outside, who mumbled something as I approached. “…Like a pale giant insect, ” I thought I heard, and then, “…scrabbled up the side to enter and then came back out with its prey…”
He was clearly deluded or drunk on cheap sherry or cider, so I handed him the three pound coins I’d received in change from the hotel and was on my way.
It was now later than nine o’clock and the city centre shops had been open a while. This suggested an explanation that hadn’t occurred to me in the hotel. Maybe Pam had gone out early for a browse around the stores and would soon return to our room. This was so unlike the behaviour of Kate—my one previous lover, the person on whom I’d based my understanding of women—that it had never crossed my mind.
I spent a good half an hour searching the shops, growing impatient in crowded aisles and sweaty under the weight of my luggage. But there was no sign of Pam. After approaching a mobile phone store, I was reminded that although I was carrying my handset, she’d yet to start using one. I hurried on through the high streets, escalating unease making me neglect the many fine old buildings preserved there.
And then I reached that Roman tower base.
I hadn’t been certain that this was where the monument was located, either because I was unfamiliar with the city…or because the crowd of people standing around it now had concealed its appearance. I was astonished that the attraction had drawn so much interest. Kate had often bemoaned the English’s lack of interest in their heritage. But here were harried housewives, suited city gents and even a handful of school-dodging teenagers…as well as several police officers.
It clearly wasn’t history these people were taken by; it was something that had happened in the latter-day, perhaps even overnight.
After reaching the crowd, I shouldered my way through to get a good look at this spectacle.
“You can’t come any closer, sir, ” said one of the officers, a pasty-faced youth with violent pimples. “Please, back off. ”
But I’d already seen what I needed to.
The thick glass sheet that covered the ancient monument had been shattered into a number of sizeable shards.
I wondered what could have caused such damage. The glass was inches thick, and so surely only a heavy object dropped upon it could have managed this trick. Meddlesome youths, perhaps, the kind Kate and I had always described as destructive of a world we’d both hankered after? Maybe we’d sometimes romanticised the past, but what was the alternative? To admit that this tawdry modern cultural landscape was all we had: shops and TV and shallow preoccupations.
Cutting away from the vandalism, I couldn’t be certain I heard another of the police officers—a female this time—say quietly, “It doesn’t make sense. All the broken glass is on the outside, as if…as if something has broken out of there. ”
Fragments of my dream propelled me towards the railway station: a figure stirring in shadows, a face pressed against glass…Then, as I boarded the first train for London, I thought about Pam and how much I felt sorry for her. It wasn’t fair to have to deal with such a messed-up man like me. I pictured her blinking in that vulnerable way she had whenever she felt apprehensive and had to speak awkward words. My heart went out to her, and for once my late wife didn’t intervene in the form of some memory from the past.
All this confusion and panic must have weighed on my mind, because by the time the train exited the mischievous Cotswolds with all their impish memorial prompts, I fell asleep in my chair. I dreamed again, this time of two figures huddled together down a moonlit Gloucester high street. The area was deserted except for this pair, who writhed and struggled as if one was doing unforgiveable things to the other. Then my dream-lens zoomed up close to these people…and I saw they were both women.
It was Pam and Kate.
The first—my new partner—was definitely the victim. Like some terrible arachnid travesty, the second—my late wife—seemed to be absorbing Pam, or perhaps forcing Pam to absorb her. Their bodies combined only with organic resistance, liquid sounds reverberating in all the hollow dream-space around them. Bones ground and muscles merged, but then at last the two were just one: a woman who looked like Pam, though a little more knowing, her eyes sharp and narrowed. Moments later, she walked away, prowling the night, hands flexing with spindly grace.
I awoke as the train was nearing Paddington Station and my change for St Pancras. I felt transformed, and I hurried from platform to platform, fresh resolutions cutting through my frame. From my professional training, I was familiar with a little modern philosophy and understood something about Freudian shifts in paradigms, how a new world of meaning could open up after a single resonant experience.
And had this now happened to me?
All I knew for certain was that I had to visit Pam in her Islington home. Did it matter that she didn’t share Kate’s and my fantasy of an older, finer world than this one? In fact, might that make her less dangerously deluded? What I’d surely get from Pam was stability, because it was abundantly clear that I lacked this in myself. And the thing she’d get from me was…what? Conscious commitment, perhaps, and a real effort to—what our simplistically profound friends had termed—move on.
I reached her terraced house and paced up to the front door. Kate was gone, I reminded myself and pushed this notion deep down inside me, building an even stronger casement around her memory on this occasion. And now, looking determinedly forwards, I had to engage with Pam as the person she truly was.
In response to my knock, footsteps approached from inside the property. I hadn’t been sure anyone would be home, but now realised that my initial assumption about her leaving me in the hotel had been correct. I had much to make up for, and as the door opened with a stealthy creak I had an opportunity to do so.
“Don’t speak, ” I instructed, as the woman emerged from the house, and then I launched into my intuitive defence. “I’m sorry for how I’ve treated you. It’s almost as if I’ve been unfaithful. But I’ve seen my errors now. It’s you I want to be with. So can we possibly make another go of it? Will you forgive me? Can we try again?”
Without blinking in that customary manner she had during such fraught episodes, the woman in the house who looked almost exactly like Pam replied at once.
“You’d better believe it, honey. ”
FRAGMENT OF LIFE
———
Owing to an architectural oversight, the kitchen window of Tim’s house looked directly on to the one next-door. Tim had once heard that no adjacent buildings should have windows facing each other, but this quirk hadn’t put him off trying to buy the property.
He and Deborah had been renting for eight years and had now exercised their right-to-buy option with the housing association. It was a good move, as Tim’s dad had reminded him; with a generous discount and a realistic surveyor’s valuation, Tim and his wife found themselves in a position to own a two-bedroom semi way below market value.
It was just as well, what with the baby due soon. Tim had visited the bank a few months earlier, and on the strength of his modest electrician’s wage, had secured a mortgage offer to cover the asking price. Anxiety about his post with a small company had hardly been alleviated by the global economic downturn, but if they moved quickly, the deal could be completed before any potential job losses. The mortgage would be cheaper than the rent they paid, and although—in the event of unemployment—social services were unable to provide full housing benefit to secure purchased property, it would be possible to muddle through somehow.
At least this was what Tim thought in September of that year. By November, however, everything had changed. And it was about this time that he st
arted seeing the little boy who lived in the empty house next-door.
——
Tim and Deborah’s neighbours had been evicted during the summer because they’d failed to pay their rent for several months. The family of four—two adults, two teenage girls—had been forced to move out, and the property was now boarded up, a For Sale sign sitting like a flag of condemnation in its shabby front garden.
As far as Tim was aware, nobody had come to view the building since the previous tenants’ departure. He was far from surprised: the place was a tip. Although Tim had got on with Keith, the former man of the house, he’d also understood what a work-shy layabout he’d been. His wife had been no better, always neglecting the home in favour of bingo at the pub just outside the council estate. Deborah had disliked her, and when they’d finally shipped out, the farewells had been earnest yet co-mingled with relief to be finally shut of them.
Tim had felt sorry for the two young daughters, however: what chance did they have in life? But there were many more youngsters in the neighbourhood just like them, and besides, he had his own problems to contend with.
One winter morning, Tim was sitting at his kitchen table waiting for the mail to arrive. A job he’d been assigned had been cancelled on account of frost, and when work couldn’t be done, there was no pay. He was feeling frustrated as time slipped by and there was still no sign of the long-expected letter from the housing association.
Deborah was in the lounge, watching daytime television. As she was three months pregnant, Tim had tried keeping the purchasing difficulties to himself, though at present felt as if he could do with someone to share the burden. Everybody—especially the solicitor—seemed to be procrastinating over the deal, which was, as far as Tim was aware, pretty straightforward. Before long, however, the bank’s mortgage offer would expire and they’d have to seek another. It had taken him and his wife nearly half a year to save up the deposit, and now everything was on a knife-edge.
Unable to bear sitting around, Tim got up and crossed to his kitchen window, where he flicked on the kettle with a tense hand. And he was just about to call Deborah and ask if she fancied a cuppa when he saw the figure crossing the kitchen of the vacant house next-door.
That it was a boy Tim had little doubt, even at such a fleeting glance. He was probably about seven years old, and although shadows were legion in the room, Tim noticed his short crop of brownish hair and dark, round face. The boy crossed to what looked like an old fridge left behind by Keith and his family, opened its door, filled a glass he’d presumably brought from elsewhere, shut the door and then retreated with a quantity of what had resembled pale liquid.
Nothing unusual about any of this, of course, except for one thing: nobody lived in the property. It had been deserted for months.
Could the boy be a squatter? Or maybe one of a group of illegal occupants—a penniless family, perhaps? That made sense, but not a great deal. Aside from the fact that Tim or Deborah would surely have noticed anyone living next-door, the house was inviolable. The estate agent tasked with the sale presumably had the only keys, and most of the windows were boarded up.
Except for this one, however—the one Tim shouldn’t even be able to see from his own.
He made two warm drinks, continuingly glancing at the house next-door. The boy didn’t reappear. Then Tim passed through to the lounge where his wife was experiencing discomfort, holding her bloated belly as if in pain.
“Hey, are you okay?” Tim asked, and moments later any enquiry he’d been about to make about the boy in that kitchen was gone for good.
“Yes, just a bit of…wind, I think. ” Deborah promptly demonstrated the veracity of her words with an audible accompaniment, and this had the two of them—despite the tensions they must soon face—laughing so much that the prospect of squatters next-door was of no consequence at all.
——
It was the morning of the bad news that Tim saw the boy again.
The letter arrived after another lay-off at work, and Tim found himself unprepared for the agony such a seemingly innocuous communication could inflict. As a consequence of the global recession, the bank had had to alter its policy on mortgage lending. Although the offer Tim and Deborah had received five months earlier had been upheld, the bank was now asking for more security in the form of a larger deposit: an extra grand, to be exact. An extra grand they didn’t have.
Tim’s mind, now adroit at maths after innumerable enforced calculations, figured out that it would take another six weeks to get together the additional cash…by which time the bank’s original mortgage offer would expire. It got worse, however: what with the patchy nature of work lately, he was no longer earning the same as in the summer and the bank would be aware of this; his salary was transferred directly into his account each month.
He stood from the kitchen table, shaking his fists at an absent devil, the one causing such infrangible duress. And of course that was when he saw the boy again, crossing the kitchen of the vacant property next-door, reaching again for the fridge, filling his receptacle, and then departing with the same carefree manner he’d exhibited on the previous occasion.
Had the shadows in the room made his face darken further? The usual pink of a child had appeared less vibrant than it should, as if the boy possessed charred skin, like the victim of a serious fire…
Tim suppressed any speculation about who was living there illegally (immigrants without official documents? was as much as he allowed himself to wonder) and then hurried through to the lounge, where he had the unenviable task of breaking the latest complication to his pregnant wife. “But there must be some way round it, ” said Deborah, once he’d revealed their woes in as gentle a manner as possible.
“I can’t think how, ” he replied, rubbing his neck. “Unless…unless…”
“…unless what?”
“Well, unless someone can lend us a grand. ”
“What, like a loan company, you mean?”
“I was thinking more about my dad. ”
“That old sod. I thought you always said that his trouser pockets are deeper than his arms can ever reach. ”
Tim smiled, despite the truth she’d revealed. “He does tend to give advice without backing it up with anything concrete, yes. But he has savings—it might be worth a shot. ”
“Well, don’t expect me to ask my parents for money. I’d never hear the end of it. I’d be back in their power. ”
“But if that’s the difference between owning our own place and—”
“Don’t even go there, Tim, ” Deborah replied, and her face was so tense that he didn’t dare finish.
And he certainly wasn’t about to mention whom he now believed was living next-door, even though the boy was on his mind for no sensible reason he could deduce.
——
Talking to his dad had always been a tricky business: the man was frankly full of bullshit. He rarely listened, just functioned as—in his own estimation—a problem-solving consultancy agency. The trouble was that anything he didn’t know, he invented, and that was apt to get listeners into all kinds of difficulties.
That weekend, when Tim dialled his parents’ number, he paced to and fro in the kitchen. He’d had a little work towards the end of the week, but hardly enough to impress the aloofly mocking bank. He must move quickly, making his request with minimum preamble.
Just as the line connected, however, Tim spotted the boy again, crossing the kitchen of the empty property next-door. It was the same routine: that quick skip across the floor, doing his thing in the fridge, and then fleeing with the drink. His flesh this time had been a mask of reddish darkness.
These images put Tim in mind of his own childhood, of how he’d lived in a cocoon of his dad’s self-regard. Nothing had ever been allowed to imply to other people that the family was anything other than respectable, financially stable, and impeccably behaved. Tim believed his youth had been restricted, like a fragment of life. He supposed other children had had wors
e problems to endure, but even so, these issues still bothered him. His lack of proactive intervention in the house-move and his employment situation (something he realised his wife was getting angry about) was a consequence of such a fraught upbringing. Sometimes he just wanted to scream out…but doing so would get him nowhere. And when his dad answered, he simply clenched his teeth and started talking.
After a few pleasantries, Tim got down to business: could he borrow a thousand pounds?
But his dad explained how unwise that would be. “If I lend you this now, ” the older man said, “you’ll only learn to rely on it, and a good father tries to teach his young to earn what they need, to be self-sufficient. You might not appreciate this at the moment, but after a decade or so, once you’re settled with your own pad and family, you’ll thank me for it, oh yes you will. ”
Tim hung up after expressing only a minimum of social graces.
Wanker, he thought. Whenever he engaged with the man, he felt himself being pulled into a boxy world. Tim’s words were adjusted to fit into his dad’s perspective, full of empty platitudes and self-serving nonsense, and then thrown back with useless impact. That was what talking to his dad was like: being trapped in a room in a house in which many possibilities existed elsewhere…But now here was Tim, caught in a sterile fragment of life.
After slamming down the telephone, Tim looked out of the kitchen window, at the ownerless property next-door.
The place now looked tenantless.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before he called the estate agent whose number was marked on the house’s For Sale board.
——
On Monday, Deborah went to attend a routine hospital check-up, just after Tim had been told that, following non-payment of an invoice, work was suspended on a factory he and colleagues had been rewiring. Still, he was now free to meet the agent who’d promised to show him around the house next-door.