by Thomas Brown
The woman constantly has a stringy tissue creeping out of her hand and down her wrist, like a bandage she hasn’t been able to remove since it happened. She looks like she has been on a drinking binge. Her hair is a tangled mass of wires; her lips are the colour of pale ham, her body a faltering argument that she used to be winning. She often goes shopping and usually returns with two or three bags from Sainsbury’s. She has twice visited another woman, about the same age, in a house around the corner. She and this woman appear to drink tea together and watch Bargain Hunt. She has several times broken down in the street and had to be collected by one of the men living in the house. She is Daniel’s mother.
The first man is called Richard. He doesn’t look like Daniel. He has darker hair and a slightly chubby face. His eyes seem to be smiling constantly, despite anything else. He usually wears jeans and t-shirts and often has a screwdriver or some other tool on his person. I presume he is an engineer or a mechanic. He often stays in at night and only a few times walks past me, holding hands with a blonde-haired girl who wears short skirts. He sometimes smokes on a bench on the corner of the street and stares up at the sky.
Richard is the one who spoke at the funeral. I watched him from the shadows at the back of the church, watching the sorrow unfold, watching the tissues gathering like flags of surrender. He hadn’t said as much as I expected him to, he hadn’t filled out Daniel’s personality, he hadn’t seemed anything but extremely sad that he couldn’t perform better.
It was nothing like your funeral, Mum.
There were more than three people at this one for starters. At yours, there were no pictures, no eulogies, and no communion in the face of death. Perhaps it had been this way because of the circumstances; perhaps because people didn’t know how to face me when there were two people from the hospital waiting outside to take me back when it finished.
I miss you.
The second man is the one I am interested in. He didn’t speak at the funeral. And from what I have observed, he doesn’t speak much generally. He has walked beside the mother almost every time she has left the house; if only to drop her off and leave, then return to pick her up. He has sat in the living room of the house staring at the wall and I have watched him, wondering if all he sees in the paint is Daniel’s face also. He has stood in the front garden three times, separating his m & m’s into colours and eating them in order: brown, blue, red, green and yellow. I don’t know what this means yet.
He looks uncannily like Daniel. The same dark menace haunts his eyes, although he doesn’t seem to be relishing in it like Daniel, as the photo in the paper seems to portray. They have the same coloured hair and over the last few weeks, the curls threatening Daniel in the photo, have crept up on this look-alike, along with fuzzy lazy stubble. Yet, this man doesn’t have the same presence as Daniel and I think he would hate it if he did. When he walks down the street, he bows his head and avoids eye contact with everybody. He keeps his right hand in his back pocket when he isn’t using it. He makes me want to shake him awake, punch him in the nose until he realises he’s bleeding; tell him Daniel is dead and not him. I feel like I have committed two murders.
It takes almost two weeks of watching for him to finally take action. The key he has been randomly slipping out of his pocket and examining, so intently that I’m sure he could identify it in a line-up, finally springs him into action, a delayed mechanism.
He rushes past me so fast that I have to completely turn my back and pretend I am reading the notes about delivery times on the postbox. This has been my way of hiding whenever one of them passes by. Sometimes I am so transfixed by the postbox that I cannot leave. I stroke the smooth chipped paint, press my finger-prints into these chips, and think about you. I often think about hugging it but somebody always interrupts and pushes their unimportant letter into its mouth and I wish I could get inside there, so easily hide in the darkness and feel the red body encompass me, a new womb for the one that I have lost.
10 Storage Lock Up Number 11
Shit.
The lock up is filled from floor to ceiling with huge bookshelves. The bookshelves are arranged like a labyrinth so when Thom turns around the first corner, he fears he will never find the way out. He begins to wonder if he should have told Aunty Val where he was going. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling are partly blocked by the shelves and the light is scattered awkwardly, as though the light is coming through unevenly spaced floorboards and he is trapped beneath.
The thought of floorboards reminds Thom of the numbers on the door. 11. They are like two exclamation marks with a dash on the top left. When he arrived at the door, he pressed his two fingers against them but felt nothing. Why did he feel drawn to these numbers, these simple shapes?
The woman on the desk told him the lock up had only been acquired three months before. Yet, there is a smell of rotting food, especially the strong stench of banana. Thom wonders if he will stumble upon a disgruntled monkey who has been unable to find the way out, who will promptly kill him. Although would it be the worst thing?
Along with the banana, there is a dusty air that can be seen swirling around him whenever he passes a slot of light. The light also reveals some of the contents of the bookshelves that, apart from the expected books, are clearly full of numerous unrelated items. To name a few of them, there are empty cardboard boxes, cracked ornaments, ripped pieces of paper and notebooks, old car parts, rotting food, pots of ink, perfume bottles and these are just the things Thom can make out initially.
Thom thinks about the moustached man’s words: “I hope he finds his gift as thoughtful as I hoped it would be”. If Daniel’s thoughtfulness created this dark labyrinth which smells foul and looks like a rubbish tip – why? What did he want Thom to get from this? Or is it possible that somebody else had come in here and sabotaged the contents?
Thom reasons that it’s not impossible that somebody broke in here and sabotaged it, but it is unlikely. Although if the note is a clue that Daniel had been in some kind of trouble, it is a justified suspicion. Overall however, Thom thinks perhaps he is reading too much into the note, the key, everything. The only thing he needs to do is find something in this lock up that makes sense, between everything that doesn’t.
He decides to start at the end, that way he is working his way towards the exit and not working his way inside, deeper into the labyrinth. He has no concept of how big the lock up is because he cannot see the walls. Every space is occupied with a shelf, a path is marked out with other shelves jutting out in various places. He is suspicious that the shelves are leading him somewhere he shouldn’t be going.
Each bookshelf has ten large shelves. They are made from quality wood and each detail like this makes Thom feel increasingly uneasy. Why did Daniel pay so much to have all these shelves put in? Was it just for his benefit? Thom lets the question float around in his brain but drowns it with his present task. He kneels on the floor, his jeans instantly browned with dirt, and rifles around on the first shelf.
His hands come back blackened, full of scratches from unexpected items hiding underneath others and smelling of filth. He came in a well-dressed and clean man and he will leave smelling and looking as dirty as a man who has been homeless for several months. He imagines the look on his boss’ face if he’d gone to work in this state, and it brings a smile to his face. Although, his smile quickly sours into a frown. Can he ever really go back there?
There is nothing of interest on the first shelf, or not that he can tell. He moves onto the second and the next and the next, plucking out the objects that he thinks mean something, whilst in his head the mantra repeats: you could be wrong you could be wrong you could be wrong you could be wrong you could be
11 Red Slippers
I am stupid. Whenever I think about how I lost you, guilt punches me in the stomach and I have to tell myself to breathe again, just breathe. It happens every day; sometimes once, sometimes repetitively like a song on constant repeat, niggling at my nerves. At times, I ca
n convince myself it is our neighbour’s fault, for interfering, for believing I am crazy.
Our neighbour is a middle-aged man, who ‘worked’ from home, which actually means he watched his precious street like a child he couldn’t allow to grow up. He knocks on our door to find out why the rubbish bin hasn’t been taken in for five weeks. When I open the door a crack, my eyes are squinting because they aren’t used to the sunlight. I haven’t been out since it happened. I have cooked meals for two, and one is always left uneaten. We are steadily running out of food but I’m not concerned. Every day is an ordeal, a bloodying battle from morning to night; a dam rebuilt and knocked down.
I don’t see his nose twitching. I don’t realise that the smell, from both of us, might be suspicious. Myself, smelling unwashed and neglected. You, smelling cold, removed. I am unaware. My senses have become trapped in little boxes inside and they have been jumbled up. I smell objects. I touch the aromas and emotions around me. Right then, I can touch my neighbour’s confusion. It is blue, a spotted cluster that bangs against the door, trying to see what is hidden.
I tell him I’ve been ill and slam the door.
I hear him shout, “Are you crazy?” It is a question I will hear many times and a question I will ask myself when I am alone in that minimal room without personality, afraid to give me anything, for fear I will somehow use it to injure or kill.
Inside the house, the air is filled with brown flakes that constantly cry from the ceiling and swirl around me. As soon as I wake up, they begin, and gather on the floor until each step is like trudging through mud. The sadness is an algae corrupting our house, the place where you are ingrained on each floorboard, each blemish on the paintwork, each smudge on the window. I go around and touch everything, feeling your presence throbbing, seeing the beat physically making the surfaces and objects rise and fall.
You are in the bedroom. I visit you every hour. You are always cold, never reply to my questions, and don’t even look toward the chair in which I sit. Yet I won’t leave you, I know you’ll be back to your old self soon. I know your skin will redden, wrinkle, contract and slacken with expressions, in time.
If only you would eat again. Each night I call up that dinner is on the table, but you never appear. Sometimes I leave the food on your bedside table but when I return, you haven’t touched it. I get angry and tell you I won’t bother making you food if you’re just going to waste it. Although I know tomorrow, I’ll make it again. And I know soon you will eat it.
It’s been just the two of us for six years now. Michael left for university when he was eighteen and never returned. I went to the local university and stayed at home. You and I always got on so well and I didn’t want you to be lonely. And this is my home. I’m not ready to leave. Screw Michael anyway, he hardly visits and he hasn’t been able to look me in the face for months.
You’ve been brilliant recently. I’ve been depressed. I’ve been afraid to go out, afraid to look in the mirror. Every time I stop for a moment, all I see are those angry muscles pressing me down, Harry’s eyes asking for forgiveness yet determined, violent words thrusting into me, my defences pricked and flooded.
I don’t know how to live without you. You’ve been nursing me for the last three months and now I am nursing you. We don’t need anybody else around. I didn’t even think of taking you to the hospital.
It was five weeks before, when I opened the door and found you lying with one side of your face squashed against the floor, a line of blood neatly dried on your chin. When I moved closer I noticed your neck was bruised, the skin flaccid like a sock that had fallen down, your skin chalky. You were sprawled out like a star, legs pointing towards the door. Your fluffy hair dashed over your eyes. I thought you must have been unconscious and hoped you weren’t concussed. One of your red slippers had somehow travelled several feet away and the other was beneath you. I collected them and put them back on.
I carried you upstairs and put you to bed, pulling the covers right up. I kissed you on the head and told you you’d feel better in the morning. You didn’t say anything.
In the night, I woke up and thought I saw your slippers underneath my door. You often check on me in the night and I always catch you just as the door closes, your red slippers flashing in the crack under the door, before I turn over and go back to sleep. That night, I strained to hear the soft bump of your bedroom door against the door-frame but there was nothing. I crept across the landing and listened outside your door and there was nothing. Only silence. I told myself I must be going crazy and went back to my room.
Two days after the neighbour knocked, I lost you.
12 Objects
Thom sits in the dark with his eyes fastened. He knows he can open them if he tells his brain to send a message to the muscles and nerves surrounding his eyes, yet he doesn’t. He lets his facial muscles lie comatose, like caterpillars inert but full of potential.
He feels an object with his shaky fingers. He has spent two days looking over the objects collectively and hours scrutinising each object’s every feature. With this brush it’s the plastic body with rubber welts that has embedded the pattern into his palm, the stubbly beard that has pressed into his pores until they sting and remind him of his own unkempt face, the curled lip of its head like a sneer. He has devoted hours to using all his senses to analyse this object and now he has spent half an hour holding it in his hands, expecting the lights to suddenly blind him.
It is several minutes later, when he begins to wonder, why the hell is he holding this washing up brush? Why out of all the contents of that lock up, did he deem this specific object important? Was it instinct that drew him to this object or untold desperation?
Questions again. And where have all the answers gone? Thom wonders if he should place a missing ‘answers’ report. They seem to have camouflaged themselves in the scenery, the people, the words all around him, and he can no longer distinguish them. The answers he once recognised so easily in life have grown and their adult forms are so matured, he cannot pick them out in a line up.
He drops the brush onto the floor and it thuds against the collection of other items gathered there. The train grumbles outside the window as though it’s hankering for food. Thom jumps to his feet and yanks the window wide open. He screams.
It’s a loud high-pitched scream. An animal gnawed apart by a metal trap, or a hedgehog disorientated and screeching for rescue.
The train doesn’t respond. The train continues to clunk onwards, on its set path, unaffected by this one man’s pain from a window beside the tracks. The passengers inside the train probably don’t notice his cry and if they do, they probably imagine it’s a rowdy schoolchild playing with another nearby. Or if they’re listening to music, they probably think it’s part of the music that they’ve failed to notice before. If they see him even, they presume he is merely shouting to somebody he knows or he is insane and they turn away, back into the safety of isolation.
Thom wonders if he should talk to somebody. He has barely communicated with anybody since the day he heard the news. The news of Daniel’s death seems like the last thing he heard clearly. The normal sounds of everyday life seem duller like he is sub-merged in water. The world is an art gallery where he walks amongst the pieces yet he is not a part of them.
There is a random series of knocks on the door and Richard pops his head in. Thom is relieved that he is no longer alone with the pile of objects, as though they have been bullying him and he is glad he now has someone to fight with him. Although as Richard settles himself on the bed, Thom kicks the pile beneath the bed as he pretends to rearrange himself.
Richard is a mixture of two extremes and he displays them with-in the first thirty seconds of sitting down beside him. He fidgets with his hands and his lip twitches, a lizard bouncing on legs like mattress springs. Then, he throws his head back and gives a long extended yawn, gulping in air like an addict.
“How you going, Thom?” Richard asks and pulls at his ear lobes. He pulls at
them every few minutes. Thom has never figured out why. Perhaps it is nervousness. Perhaps it is merely an unfounded habit. Perhaps he just likes how the skin of his ear lobe is so soft. Thom has no idea of the reason or the cause, yet he knows Richard will do it, as he knows the sun will rise tomorrow.
“I’m okay. You?” Thom isn’t looking at Richard. In fact, to an outsider, he looks disinterested. Similarly, Richard is tracing the lines of the pattern on the duvet.
“Yeah”, he says slowly, not sure how to answer even a simple question. Perhaps he is merely lying like Thom is. Neither of them probes any further though. They leave it at the words they use to fend off queries, to keep people from digging underneath the pretence worn like clothes every day.
“Rich…” Thom begins, scratching his stubble, “do you think he jumped?” The words claw out of his throat, each letter stabbing him, breeding in size as he tries to arrange them in order and make sense.
“What?” Richard frowns. His head suddenly filled with ditches reminds Thom of Mrs Tray and he remembers he must find out more about her.
“What do you think?” Thom persists. Richard looks down at his lap. Thom loves Richard. He can’t imagine how he would’ve survived his teens without him. Yet, Richard has one major fault, which is his need to believe that life is as it seems.
“I don’t know”. Richard shrugs. Thom feels like he has snatched a treasured toy from a child. Richard tugs his ear lobe a few times in a row.
“So you haven’t thought about it?”
“I guess I haven’t…” Richard mutters, glancing at the door, which is still slightly ajar. “I haven’t thought much about… you know…” He slaps his hands against his knees and a moment later, adds: “trains”. It is a whisper that could be misinterpreted as ‘chains’ or ‘lanes’ or anything else that rhymes with it. Only Thom knows because he has the context. This is the first time he has felt superior with the knowledge he has. Small victories.