Four British Mysteries

by Thomas Brown

  I am sad that we are apart. Yet as soon as I think this, Thom takes hold of me by the hips. Unlike the first time when we wrestled, this time there is an awkward approach. There is a slow draw between us, the clash of breath, and the replacement pressure of his thumb with his lips.

  I pull back after several seconds and gush, “Michael says I should be careful with you”. Thom smiles briefly, glancing to one side for a long moment before he gradually turns back to me. He opens and closes his mouth like a goldfish that never intends to speak. Then another cheeky grin later, he pushes me into his lips and fills his silence.

  42 The Red Slippers Revisited

  Getting into the car outside my bedsit, I avoid looking up at the window where I know Thom is standing. I am certain my lips are flashing or my cheeks are still flushed, yet when Michael nods ’hello’, he shows no signs of suspecting anything. He starts the car and with a glance in the mirrors, pulls away.

  “Is he okay?” Michael asks, although I’m not sure he is actually interested.

  “He’s okay”, I say, staring at the world rolling by outside like a continuous rapid slide-show. Michael fiddles with the radio and after several options, settles on one station. I don’t recognise any of the songs they play. It feels like years since I listened to music, either religiously or just as background music. What kind of music am I actually interested in anyway? I can’t remember.

  “What did you talk about? You were in there a long time”. Michael says after two songs have passed.

  I look over at him, fiddling with my hands in my lap and tell him, “We talked about lots of things. Thom had questions too”. Michael nods at my words and stops at some traffic lights.

  “Did he get angry?” He glances over.

  “Why would he?” I snap.

  “It’s not that unreasonable an assumption”. He narrows his gaze at me, making sure I have to look at his bruises once again. I sigh, knowing he is right.

  “Well, he’s fine”. I shrug. Michael keeps looking at me but I don’t acknowledge him. Finally, he sees the lights have changed and is forced to concentrate on driving again.

  “I thought we could go to the house”, he says quietly. Jumping in my seat, I look at my brother, trying to decide if he’s being serious. Only I would understand which house he means. To anyone else, it could be any house in the whole city. But to me, it’s your house.

  “You didn’t sell it?”

  “No Alice”. He appears he is pouring petroleum onto a fire and is waiting for the backlash. “I thought you might want to see it again”, he mentions it as though he is talking about buying some milk. “I just told you I did, because I thought it would be easier, for the time being...”

  “I don’t know Michael…” I splutter, wringing my hands and leaning forward in my seat. My chest is tightening. I have to focus on dragging the air into my lungs and letting it slide back out easily. I hold onto the dashboard, steadying myself slowly. All I can think about is the staircase, your crooked legs, the unnatural paleness of your skin, those slippers…

  Mum, can I go back? Will it still feel like you’re there?

  “It’s okay Alice, we don’t have to go”, Michael says, taking his hand off the handbrake and patting my leg quickly. His obvious lack of surprise angers me though.

  “No, we’ll go”, I blurt.

  Michael looks over again, almost forgetting he is driving and nods gently, “If you’re sure…”

  We arrive outside the house twenty minutes later. The closer we have travelled to the house, the more my throat has swollen up and my breathing has grown raspier. Michael has said nothing.

  The car stops and is silent but I can’t make my hand rise up and grab the handle. Michael leans across me and swings the door open for me. I throw him a look as though he has just smacked me in the face. He sits back in his seat and stares ahead, waiting for me to move first.

  “I don’t think I can do it Mike”, I confess, pressing my back into the seat so hard that it begins to ache across my shoulder blades. Michael grabs my hand, hearing my wavering tone, and hearing me calling him by the name I barely use when addressing him.

  “You can Alice. You can”. He squeezes my hand.

  “Michael, can you call me Sarah?” I glance at him. His forehead burrows in a sudden avalanche of skin.

  “Your name is Alice”, he tells me, as though I have forgotten.

  “But I really prefer Sarah”.

  “Okay”, he mumbles. “I’ll try Al—Sarah”, he adds, pronouncing Sarah as though in a foreign tongue. He shakes his mistake away.

  “Thanks”, I tell him and swing my legs out of the car. “I should be able to do this”, I inform myself out loud.

  When I am standing outside, my legs seem to dissolve and I grab onto the car. A second later, Michael is propping me up. Even though I want to let him hold me up, I push away and tell my legs to work properly. The least I can do for you is stand up by myself.

  That is all you’d wanted for me especially, Mum, before you died.

  “Do you have the key Michael?” My voice is as shaky as the hand that I extend towards him. I hear him fumbling in his pocket and he places the key in my palm. It feels light and cold. It is a small object but when I use it to open the front door, a waterfall will thrash into me, submerge me with the emotions and memories I have locked away since the day I found you there.

  The walk towards the door is quick and easy, when I feel it should be a harrowing journey through mountains and rough currents. I don’t look back but I know Michael is behind me. Just a few days ago, I wouldn’t have trusted him to be there, but I have a different sense of him now. Even the air around him seems firmer, a commanding building looming over a skyline.

  “Okay”, I say to the door and jam the key into the lock. It feels stiff as I turn it and the door sticks as I try to push it open. After a brief struggle, the hallway opens up to me. I sway slightly, Michael’s hands instantly steadying me.

  “That’s where I found her”, I reveal quietly, stepping across the threshold. I point to a spot on the carpet, unremarkable to others’ eyes, and circle it, hunting the memory. Michael stays in the door-way, watching me in the throes of interest and guilt, gnawing at his bottom lip.

  “She was on her front, her face bent towards the door, her legs bent in weird directions, her slippers…” I move towards the stairs, “One was here. I put it back on her”. I can see you like you are before me now. I can feel the rubber texture of your skin; see the chalky tone of your face. When I had picked you up, it felt like there was an anchor attached, dragging you away from me.

  Don’t worry; I haven’t forgotten you, Mum.

  “Did you know…” Michael holds his sentence hostage again, “she was dead?” He speaks quietly, so quietly I’m not convinced he wants to hear the answer.

  “I don’t think I did. I think I just really ‘lost’ my mind…” I give him a pleading look. “Can you understand, Michael? It was like someone flicked a switch and I just couldn’t figure things out anymore…”

  Michael stares at me. I begin to think he will regress into his old judgemental self and get me locked up again. Yet after a few minutes, he drops his stare to the space on the carpet. “I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like for you”, he says, surprising me. “After what happened to you with Harry, I don’t blame you for taking Mum’s death badly”.

  “I don’t want to talk about him”, I spit.

  “I know, I know”. Michael holds his hands up and moves closer. I study his steps as he walks over your outline. I cringe, imagining your floppy limbs being trodden on. Michael skips a few steps when he realises what he has done. “I should’ve realised at the time”, he continues, taking my hands, “it’s just hard Sarah. I can’t ever completely understand it. It still confuses me how…” Michael shakes his head, “look, it doesn’t matter. I’m just trying to say I’m here for you now, even if I can’t understand it all”.

  “Thanks”, I mumble, taking my
hands back. “Michael, I’m going to look in Mum’s room now and I’d like to go alone”. Michael steps back on himself, grasping at his thinning hair.

  “Must you?” He croaks.

  “Yes”, I answer simply and turn away.

  Leaving Michael behind, I’m instantly lost in the soft padding sound my feet make against the carpet. I remember the sound of you, Mum. Outside my room; your slippers flashing underneath the door, the slice of light as you checked on me whilst you thought I was asleep. The truth is I could never sleep until I heard you check on me. Even now, it’s a struggle to drift off without imagining the flash of light and the click of the door.

  The door to your room is shut. When I touch the handle, it feels as cold as you did when I touched your cheek several days after the fall. I pause, nausea swirling in the pit of my stomach. How had I been so deluded about you?

  I push the door open. The first thing that strikes me is that your bed is missing. I step inside and close the door, taking in the space. Examining the floor, I see the darker square of carpet where the bed used to be. Where has it gone? Why has it been taken? The bed is the last place I saw you and now it’s gone. This absence physically stabs me all over my body like pins and needles.

  I enter the empty space and try to conjure you back into existence. If I concentrate, I even believe I can smell the scent of your soap but then the sense is overrun by the last smell of you, when your body had started to radiate the stench of death. Tempted to vomit, I go over to the window and wrench it up, putting my face next to the gap and sucking in air.

  I sag to the floor. Sitting in the room now, years later, I can’t see it how I did then. I can’t imagine what steered me to take the actions I did. How could I have brought you up here, talked to you, cooked you food, tucked you in and propped you back up? Yet all these things were done when you were quite clearly cold, unresponsive, dead.

  Although I realised the fact long ago, and have since become more familiar with it, this is the moment when I really understand that you are dead. The absence of the bed proves the absence of you. The clear lines on the carpet that are less faded by the sunlight seem to make the realisation sharper inside my mind. It has been lost in there for years and I have finally pinned it down. I feel its cold body, the overwhelming taste of salt, the sound of screaming and sobbing, the smell in my nostrils of stale furnishings.

  Forgive me, Mum. I’ve held on too long…

  I don’t hear the door open or Michael softly crossing the room, avoiding the space where the bed is no longer, and kneeling beside his rupturing sister. The first thing I am aware of is his voice. “You shouldn’t have come in here”, he says, tucking my curls behind my ears and pressing his hands against my sodden cheeks.

  “No Michael, I’m glad”, I say, muffled by the onslaught of tears. “She’s dead. She’s really dead”, I tell him firmly, as if he doesn’t know.

  Michael frowns, bowing his head, his bald spot baring itself to me again. It is only after several seconds that I realise he is crying too. I instantly pull him towards me. I think he might resist, yet he tumbles into my messy hold and allows me to comfort him.

  “You’re so much better”, he says, a sad smile on his lips. I am too busy staring at his wet skin. I haven’t seen him act this way since we were much younger. I almost think he has just come out of the sea and is wearing a skin coloured wet suit and when he takes it off, he will show me he hasn’t been crying at all.

  “Everything’s much clearer now”. I lean back, gazing through the still open window. I think about how I haven’t been able to let you go, thinking that keeping you in the house back then somehow meant I would never lose you. Yet looking out at the sky now, I know that although you are dead, I will always have you in some sense.

  Mum, I’ll look after Michael, I promise. And even though I know you’re dead, I’ll still talk to you sometimes. Yet it’s not the same. I have to talk to real people now – like Michael, and Thom, people at the shops and people in the street.

  Mum, you’re dead and we both have to let go.

  If only I had been able to see that a couple of years ago, perhaps I wouldn’t have pushed that man onto the tracks.

  43 The Secret

  Thom still has the taste of Sarah on his lips when he retraces his route back to Aunty Val’s house in the numb darkness of early evening. He feels like he has been absent for so long; the paint on the door looks more cracked, the weeds droopier and extending their talons closer to the gate.

  Is he ready to go back in there? Is he ready to face Aunty Val and Richard?

  He stands at the front gate as though it is an obstacle to his entry and runs his tongue over his lips, closing his eyes and imagining he is back in the bedsit with Sarah. He doesn’t understand why she left or why he’d been abandoned in the cold damp room immersed in the memory of her warm kiss.

  It is only a few hours later, after Thom decides he needs some fresh boxers, that he makes his way across the city and back to the house he ran away from only days before. After all that has happened, he feels like he is an explorer who has returned after months of rough expeditions that have taken him to the brink of death.

  He finally slinks through the gate, tiptoeing around the cracked paving, wondering how broken his family are inside the house. He reaches the door and somewhere in the depths of his pockets, rediscovers his keys. It takes him several seconds to direct the key into the lock at first; then he turns it in the wrong direction.

  Eventually, Thom pushes the door open. The hallway is a murky crossing. All the lights are off, the darkness huddling in the corners and threatening to smother him. Thom takes a step inside, the soft pad of his feet on the carpet sounding like a stick clashing against a gong. Thom winches and closes himself inside gently, the lock making only a whisper as he guides it into the frame.

  Thom stops and listens to the house, hearing nothing but the central heating humming and the natural creaks of the structure, like bones cracking spontaneously. Thom sighs loudly, adding to these sounds, becoming a human instrument. Thom closes his eyes and enjoys the way his breathing is in harmony with the moaning of the house. Is it sad? Like all three of them?

  Thom still has his eyes closed when he realises that someone else is in the hallway. The music in Thom’s mind is interrupted by the ragged breathing of another person; sounding as though they are catching their breath after inhaling smoke into their lungs. Thom opens his eyes and sees Aunty Val standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She slowly tiptoes her way towards him. She stops in front of him, giving him half a look before staring at the wall. After her tearful pleas the other night, Thom isn’t expecting this.

  “I didn’t know if you were coming back”, she says quietly. Thom has to strain to hear.

  “Of course I would”, he insists. He considers reaching out and taking her hand but decides not to. The only person he wants to touch in any capacity at the moment is Sarah. His hands have hurt too many people lately. His hands have been prying into things blindly with serious consequences.

  “What happened to us?” she asks, locking her fingers together and twisting them. Again, Thom expects her to cry but she seems calmer. Perhaps she has finally accepted that Daniel is dead.

  “We lost someone”, he tells her, “and we found out more than we wanted to”.

  “Do you wish you hadn’t found out that he knew about his death?”

  “Sometimes I do”. Thom shrugs. “But at other times I’m glad I can finally understand Daniel more than I did when he was alive”. Aunty Val gives him a tight smile, not sure how she feels about this comment. Perhaps she has similar thoughts but, as Daniel’s mother, can’t justify vocalising them.

  “Shall we sit down Thom? We can’t talk properly here”.

  He nods and follows her to the kitchen where they both take a seat around the table. The table; where numerous family arguments, dinners, birthday parties, board games and bingo have taken place. What is this occasion? And will it restore the
family that has been deteriorating revelation by revelation?

  “You were right about Daniel’s room”, she starts quietly. Thom simply nods. “Where do you think it all went?” she continues.

  “I have no idea”. Thom answers and he really doesn’t know. Perhaps Daniel burnt everything, or donated it to charity, or it is all stored in another lock up somewhere. They will probably never find out.

  “How did you find out that Daniel knew about his death?” Aunty Val thrusts at him, nearly giving Thom a head rush. Thom thinks about how this all started – the note on the day of Daniel’s funeral. An ending and a beginning in such close proximity. Why hadn’t he just told them all there and then?

  “I found a note in his room”, Thom confesses, relief hissing out of his mouth.

  “A note”, she repeats slowly and continues, “what does it say, Thom?”

  “It has the time and place that he died”. At his words, she slams her hands down on the table, the thud echoing through the groaning house. Thom stiffens in his chair, regressing for a moment, and then tells himself to sit forward again.

  “Nothing else?” Her voice creaks.

  “No Aunty”, Thom insists, his face flushing with heat, despite telling the truth.

  “Why would that be in his room?” She grabs his sleeve and shakes his arm violently a few times. It is as though he is the one who wrote it.

  “I don’t know. I just found it”, Thom pleads, pulling his sleeve out of her hold.

  “Why didn’t you say? Where is it?” She barks, shoving the table towards him so it crunches into his ribs. Thom sags over the table and massages his chest, winded. Aunty Val immediately sprints to his side and pulls his chair back. She rubs his chest in an attempt to apologise but he pushes her off.