by Amy Lloyd
When they were inside Dennis placed her back on her feet and kissed her gently. ‘It’s only for a couple weeks, I promise.’
He went back to the car to get the last of their things while Sam looked around, still feeling as though she was doing something she shouldn’t.
In the living room, dust floated in the beams of light streaming through the gaps in the shutters. The air inside was stale. Sam walked from the living room to the master bedroom: shelves cluttered with junk blanketed in dust; the bed with a flat, yellowed pillow at the head; a dresser covered with bottles of medication. The walls were all wood panelled, making the house seem dark even during daylight. When she looked up she saw the silhouettes of dead insects inside the lampshades. There was Dennis’s old room at the end of the hall, the door closed. She walked past the bathroom, glancing through the crack in the door.
In the kitchen, the sink was full with stagnant water and a cockroach skittered over a dirty plate. The lino beneath her feet was bubbling up, peeling away from the cabinets. A broken window had been taped up. Sam covered her nose and mouth with one hand and tried to open the back door, but it stuck in its frame. There was nothing beyond it. Just the wilds behind the house.
‘It’s not great, I know,’ Dennis said behind her as he put down a couple of boxes filled with cleaning products. He pushed against the back door. He leaned back and kicked. It swung open and snapped back, clattering against the frame. ‘Would you mind getting started in here? I’m going to clear out the sitting room, make some space for us to set up our bed.’ He pulled her in, arms looped around her lower back, and pushed his mouth against hers. ‘I love you,’ he said breathily into her lips.
When she was alone Sam closed her eyes, leaned against the counter and smiled. Maybe staying here wouldn’t be completely terrible, she thought. Dennis had seemed different since they arrived, like something inside him had loosened. Perhaps it was that they were, finally, alone. Sam thought of the miles of trees around them and all the space and the time that they had just for themselves, finally.
It was pointless to clean the crockery that littered the kitchen, so Sam put on her rubber gloves and threw everything into heavy-duty trash bags, enjoying the satisfying crash as each thing smashed against the last. She pulled the plug in the sink and watched as the rancid water was sucked down, leaving the remnants of rotting food in a slushy pile at the bottom. Her whole body felt dirty. She needed to pee but was afraid to see what the bathroom was like up close. After sweeping the crumbs and God knew what else from cupboards and surfaces, she squirted neat bleach over everything until her eyes burned and flooded with tears. She had to step out into the back yard for air.
Outside, she wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and blinked the tears away. The world was a blur but she thought she saw something move at the side of the house. She squinted. Suddenly it seemed to take a step towards her. She felt fear hit her like cold water and shouted for Dennis, stumbling back into the kitchen, still half-blind from the chemical fumes.
‘What is it? Oh, it’s looking way better in here, nice one.’
‘There was someone out there just now, at the side of the house,’ Sam said.
‘Really?’ Dennis frowned, his voice steady but concerned. He went out and looked around. ‘Did they say anything?’
‘No. I think they were hiding, I couldn’t see properly because my eyes are watering.’
‘Are you sure?’
She could tell he was starting to doubt her. She was certain. ‘Yeah, it was creepy.’
‘It’s probably those kids who spray-painted the house. It’s nothing. Call me if you need me. You’re doing a good job here.’ He winked.
She returned to work, scouring at the sticky patches and spraying every surface with a last layer of disinfectant. When she was done she looked around, proud of the transformation. She had never once tried this hard in her own house. Mark always used to complain about the huge pile of laundry which she left in a heap in the spare room. She thought about how her sink was always full of dishes stained with pasta sauce and how the bin was constantly overflowing. When she’d left it long enough Mark would inevitably roll up his sleeves, sighing, and start cleaning, as if she was someone who needed to be saved. Now she enjoyed the cramp in her arms that she had earned from scrubbing and the knowledge she was saving someone else. It felt right, like growth.
By the time Sam had finished it was dark. She went to look for Dennis. On the floor of the sitting room a double mattress was inflating itself, the plug trailing across the room and into the wall. The old furniture was almost all gone, leaving just the sofa and a lamp against the back wall, a fraying armchair and the TV on a unit in the corner. Everything else was piled outside in the yard. Sam couldn’t see or hear any sign of Dennis. She called to him a few times but there was no answer. So much for being alone together, she thought.
Sam entered the bathroom apprehensively, peeking around the door and revealing the room an inch at a time. It was as filthy as she had predicted. She gathered all the things from the kitchen and made a start there.
Twenty-three
After dark, the air became thick with the noise of cicadas, and moths bounced off the screens at the windows. Sam wandered the house, noticing how the boards bent beneath her feet. In the hallway, on top of a table piled with unopened letters and beneath a nicotine-stained telephone that hung on the wall, she found a modem and router. The relief was instant. While typing the Wi-Fi password into her phone she heard the back door screech against the floor. She froze. From the corner of her eye she saw a man in the kitchen and heard the pounding of heavy boots on the floorboards. ‘Dennis?’ she shouted. ‘Dennis? Is that you?’
‘Yeah,’ Dennis shouted. Sam held a hand over her chest to feel her heart slow down.
‘Where were you?’ she called, but he didn’t answer. As he walked past her on his way to the bathroom he stopped and kissed her on the head. He closed the door behind him and she heard the shower running.
When Dennis emerged, he was wearing just his boxers, and clutching a towel at his side. Sam asked if he was ready to eat and then, on her way to the kitchen, asked again, ‘Where’ve you been? I cleaned the bathroom too.’
‘I noticed, thanks,’ Dennis said. ‘I went to look for whoever was hanging around. I knew it was bothering you so I checked it out. I couldn’t find anyone, so try not to worry about it.’
‘Thanks, that’s sweet.’ Sam smiled to herself, taking the brand-new pans from the cupboard. The oven was broken so she had to do everything on the stovetop and some things went cold while she overcooked other things. It was Dennis food: chicken, brown rice and broccoli. Boring, dry food. Utilitarian. ‘Eat to live, don’t live to eat,’ as Dennis was fond of saying. Sam chewed and swallowed, telling herself how good this was for her.
Dennis ate everything in minutes, thanked her and sat back on the sofa to read the Men’s Health that he’d picked up at Walmart. Sam sat with her legs across his lap. Every now and then she heard a scratching noise, which seemed to be coming from all around her. Rats, she thought, until what sounded like the wail of a baby made her jump and bury her face in Dennis’s armpit.
‘Shh,’ he said. ‘I think it’s in the crawl space. It’s just an animal! Don’t worry, let go, get off, I’ll go check.’
She followed him outside into the yard. She watched him crawl on his belly under the house, her eyes scanning the surrounding trees for anyone who might be watching her. Something scurried past her, brushing her leg. She screamed.
‘Jesus CHRIST, it’s a raccoon, for fuck’s sake, a raccoon! Hang on …’
Sam climbed back on to the porch, shaken and embarrassed. The wailing had stopped and Sam wondered what Dennis was still doing under there. Beneath her she could hear him talking quietly, cooing.
‘There’s a cat under here. She’s got kittens … Hey, hey there! Hello! She must have been fighting that raccoon. She doesn’t seem hurt … Sam, get a can of tuna from the house.’
Sam returned with a bowl of tuna and a bowl of milk.
‘Leave it here; we need to make her trust us. She can’t stay out here. No milk! They can’t have milk.’ Dennis poured the milk into the long grass and handed her back the bowl.
Dennis went inside and got some old towels, which he placed under the porch and shaped into a makeshift cat bed.
‘I used to have such a great cat. He showed up like this one, all stray and with this sick infected eye. I fed him and let him come and go and eventually he just stuck around. I had to fix his eye because we couldn’t afford a vet. I had to disinfect it and he hated it – he scratched the shit out of me. It was worth it though, when the pus all dried and the swelling was gone. I think he went blind in it; his eye was all milky. I called him Ted. He was always fighting, with cats, with possums, whatever was around.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Seven? I had him until I was about fourteen. He got hit by a car on the road out there. Whoever hit him just left him. I went looking and I saw his tail sticking out from the grass. He was stretched out and stiff, all the fur was scraped away on one side of his face and one of his ears was missing. There were just holes where his eyes were. I think that the birds ate them. If I knew who hit him, I’d have killed them. How could they just leave him there? Sick, people are sick.’
Sam thought about her old cat, Tiger, and how many times he’d disappeared. She remembered how worried she used to be until he’d show up a day later as though nothing had happened. She hated worrying about him, and she resented it. It was too hard loving something that much, something which had its own life and its own mind, and could come and go as it pleased. It was almost a relief when he died. Now she barely thought of him at all. Already she worried about the cat and her kittens under the crawl space: were they cold? What if it rained? Would the raccoon come back? Did racoons eat kittens?
They slept poorly that night, lightly, wondering if the cat would be there when they woke up. In the morning, they checked the crawl space again and saw the cat was still curled around her kittens. They drove out of town back to the superstores and bought boxes of cat food, kitten food (though they were so young they wouldn’t need the food for weeks yet). Proper cat beds and toys that jingled. They went home and put out the cat’s lunch and a bowl of fresh water. Dennis did the same in the afternoon and he and Sam waited on the porch, talking gently so they didn’t scare the mother off.
‘I hate to think of her under there all night,’ Dennis said.
‘Me too.’ Sam swung a leg over his lap and felt a rush of affection at seeing this new side of her husband.
‘Sometimes my dad would kick me out of the house and tell me not to come back in. I’d have to sleep under the porch. There were snakes and spiders. Sometimes I’d find bones from the things that crawled under there to die.’ Sam didn’t know what to say. ‘I can’t leave that cat under there.’
‘What will we do when we leave here? Will we take them with us?’
‘I think so. We’ll have to see where we go.’
They were quiet for a while.
‘I really need to get a start on some of this.’ Dennis gestured to the yard. ‘The dumpsters I rented will be here tomorrow and I’ll need to run some errands in town soon, too.’
‘Town?’ Sam said anxiously, remembering the incident in the general store.
‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to come. I can always get a cab. Besides, I won’t cause any problems. It’s just funeral stuff.’
After dinner, Dennis threw on some sweats and told Sam he was going for a run. Sam tried to busy herself by rearranging the clothes in her suitcase, taking them out and folding them back in again. Occasionally, she’d go out to check on the cat. She still wouldn’t come out, so Sam crawled under the porch, sliding on her belly and clicking her tongue to get the cat’s attention without startling her. The cat tentatively stepped towards her, stretching her neck to Sam’s outstretched fingers and sniffing delicately, the air from her nostrils tickling Sam’s hand. Sam tried to stroke her but she backed away to protect her squeaking kittens. Sam was excited to tell Dennis that she had made some progress while he was out.
Two hours passed and Dennis still wasn’t home. It grew dark and every noise was suspicious and loaded with potential danger. In the bathroom, she kept the door slightly open so that she could see down the hall and listen for Dennis’s return. As she wiped herself she saw, through the small frosted window behind the bath, a moving shadow. Sam turned to look at it full on and saw clearly the shape of a head ducking, followed by the thump of feet on the discarded plywood that littered the side of the house. Clutching her knickers around her thighs she was frozen, unsure what to do first. She kicked the bathroom door shut, yanked her underwear up with one hand and slid the bolt shut with the other. Sam looked for her phone to call the police but she saw it, in her mind’s eye, resting on the arm of the couch. She turned the light off and on again and stuffed a towel under the door; then she realised that was for a fire and that she had never learned what to do if there was an intruder.
Sam didn’t know exactly how long she was in the bathroom, with her back pressed against the wall, her eyes darting between the window and the crack under the door, waiting for the shadows of approaching feet. It was long enough for her legs to go numb beneath her and her back to start seizing. She thought of a knife pressed to her throat, or the click of a trigger, or a fist colliding with her cheek, the feeling of snapping bone.
She heard the noise of the back door, its rusted scream. She held her breath at the sound of approaching feet. Then someone was rattling the handle, pushing against the locked door. Sam crawled into the gap between the bath and the sink and squeezed her eyes shut.
‘Sam?’ Dennis’s voice. ‘You in here?’ She slid the bolt open and threw herself at him. He smelled like grass and something else, something metallic that made her teeth ache a little. She pulled back and told him about the shape at the window, that there was definitely someone there this time.
‘This is ridiculous. Get out, I need to shower,’ Dennis said.
‘No, I’m serious, there was someone looking in,’ Sam insisted, knowing how she must sound to him.
‘There wasn’t. Come on, I want to shower.’
‘I don’t want to be alone.’
‘So stay here. I don’t care.’ Dennis peeled off his damp shirt, his trousers and a pair of Nikes he got from the magazine shoot.
‘Weren’t you wearing your old trainers when you left?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Your old … sneakers, when you left, those white ones.’
‘No.’ He pulled his boxer shorts down and stepped out of them, sliding the glass screen of the shower and turning on the water. Sam watched him, how his body moved and the soap ran down his back. He turned to grab the shampoo and she leaned to get a better look at him.
‘Don’t look,’ he said.
‘I’m not.’
‘Liar.’
Sam smiled.
‘Hand me the towel,’ he said, reaching for it around the side of the glass. She handed it to him, almost forgetting the fear she’d felt a moment ago and instead thinking of sex, of grabbing him and pushing herself against him, of making him want her.
‘It’s like prison all over again, some creep watching me shower,’ he said, pulling on his fresh clothes.
‘I’m serious, I promise you, there was someone definitely outside.’
‘Fine, I believe you.’
‘It doesn’t scare you?’
‘No. It’s probably just some kids coming to see the old Danson place. They probably think it’s haunted.’
‘What if it’s someone who still thinks you’re guilty? What if they want to hurt us?’
‘You’re being so dramatic.’ With this, he strode from room to room to show her they were empty and then patrolled the yard with a torch. Sam followed, looking nervously over her shoulder as they went. Dennis stamped on the wood
beneath the bathroom window and asked Sam if it was the same sound she had heard earlier. She said no, then maybe, then that it might have just sounded different from inside.
‘Mm-hmm,’ he said, shining the light up to the guttering and tutting at the amount of debris crammed in there, the plastic pipe sagging under the weight of the leaves. ‘You know what you need?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You need to see that there’s nothing to be afraid of around here. It’s not spooky, or haunted, or full of bad energy.’ He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her on the nose. ‘Come on.’ He pulled her legs out from under her and flung her over his shoulder. She was laughing, playfully beating her hands against his back. ‘Let’s go to the garage,’ he said.
Sam stopped laughing. His shoulder was pushing into her sternum and making it harder to breathe. ‘No, no, please – I don’t want to go in there,’ she said.
‘You’ve got to beat the fear. It’s irrational.’
‘No, I really don’t want to. You’re scaring me now, it isn’t funny, please.’ She tried to push and wriggle away from him but Dennis had hold of her hamstrings and lower back and she could only move in convulsions. ‘Please, please!’ Sam started to cry. Dennis opened the garage door and carried her over the threshold. He set her down and gave her a push that made her stumble a few steps before she lost her footing and hit the floor with a thump. Dennis was already back outside and the last she saw of him was his silhouette as he swung the metal door shut and plunged her into darkness. ‘Please! Dennis!’ She was sobbing and banging her palms against the door.