by Alice Feeney
People should be more careful what they wish for.
There is a side of my wife which nobody else sees, because she is so good at hiding it. Just because Amelia works for an animal charity, it doesn’t make her a saint. It doesn’t mean she’s never done anything bad, quite the opposite. There are forests less shady than my wife. She might be able to fool everyone else, but I know who she really is and what she is capable of. That’s why I am emotionally bankrupt these days – any love I had left for her is spent.
I’m not pretending to be blameless in all this.
I never thought I was the kind of man who would cheat on his wife.
But I did. And somehow, she found out.
I suppose that makes me sound like the bad guy, but there’s also a bad girl in this story. Two wrongs sometimes make an ugly. And I wasn’t the only one who slept with someone they shouldn’t have. So did Saint Amelia.
Amelia
‘Adam?’
I stand on the landing, holding a candle, and calling his name. But he doesn’t answer.
Bob stares up at me, annoyed that I have disturbed his sleep, then he looks at the door with the DANGER KEEP OUT sign and sighs. Sometimes I think our dog is cleverer than we know. But then I remember all the times I have seen him running in circles chasing his own tail, and realise he’s just as bemused by life as the rest of us.
I’ve never been great at sticking to rules, so I ignore the sign and open the door. It reveals a narrow wooden staircase, leading to another door at the top. I take a few steps, then almost drop the candle when I walk into a spider’s web. I desperately try to brush it away from my face, but it still feels as though something is crawling across my skin in the dark.
‘Adam? Are you up there?’
‘Yes, the view is amazing. Bring the wine, and a couple of blankets,’ he says, and the rush of relief I feel surprises me.
Five minutes later, we are huddled together in the bell tower of the chapel, and he’s right, the view really is quite magical. There isn’t a lot of room, and I’m cold – even with the blanket wrapped around my shoulders – but the wine is helping, and when Adam sees me shiver, he puts his arms around me.
‘I can’t remember the last time I saw a full moon,’ he whispers.
‘Or so many stars,’ I reply. ‘The sky is so clear.’
‘No light pollution. Can you see that brightest star, just to the left of the moon?’ he asks, pointing up at the sky. I nod, and watch as he moves his finger as though writing the letter W. ‘These five stars form the constellation Cassiopeia.’ Adam is full of random knowledge, sometimes I think it’s the reason why there is no room left inside his head to think about us, or me.
‘Which one is Cassiopeia again?’
‘Cassiopeia was a queen in Greek mythology whose vanity and arrogance led to her downfall.’ My husband knows more than I do about a great many things. He’s well read and a bit of a peacock when it comes to general knowledge. But if there were an IQ test for emotional intelligence, I’d have a higher score every time. There is an edge to his tone as he talks about the stars, and I don’t think I am imagining it.
I was having a bit of a clear-out recently, sorting through some old things, and I found a pretty box of wedding keepsakes. It was like a marriage time capsule. One which I had carefully curated, then hidden away for my future self to find. There were some cards from friends and colleagues at Battersea, little Lego cake toppers of a bride and groom, and a lucky sixpence. Adam’s superstitions insisted I needed that on our big – rather small – day, and we agreed that his mother’s sapphire ring was both my something borrowed and something blue. At the bottom of the box, I found an envelope containing our handwritten vows. All those promise-shaped good intensions made me cry. It reminded me of the us we used to be, and who I thought we’d be forever. But promises lose their value when broken or chipped, like dusty, forgotten antiques. The sad truth about our present always punctuates my happy memories of our past with full stops.
I wonder if all marriages end the same way eventually. Maybe it is only ever a matter of time before life makes the love unravel. But then I think about those old married couples you see on the news every Valentine’s Day, the ones who have been together for sixty years and are still very much in love, grinning false-teeth smiles for the cameras like teenage sweethearts. I wonder what their secret is and why nobody ever shared it with us?
My own teeth start to chatter. ‘Maybe we should head back inside?’
‘Whatever you want, my love.’ Adam only calls me ‘my love’ when he is drunk and I realise that most of the bottle is empty, even though I’ve only had one glass of wine.
I try to turn back towards the door, but he holds on to me. The view shifts from something spectacular into something sinister; if either of us were to fall from the bell tower, we’d be dead. I don’t have a fear of heights, but I do have a fear of dying, so I pull away. As I do, I bump into the bell. Not hard enough to make it ring, just to sway, and as soon as it does, I hear bizarre clicking sounds, followed by a cacophony of high-pitched screeching. It takes my mind a moment to process what it is seeing and hearing.
Bats, lots of them, fly out of the bell and into our faces. Adam staggers backwards, dangerously close to the low wall, flinging his arms in front of his face and trying to swat them away. He stumbles and everything seems to switch to slow motion. His mouth is open and his eyes are wide and wild. He’s falling backwards and reaching for me at the same time, but I seem to be frozen to the spot, paralysed with fear as the bats continue to fly around our heads. It’s as if we are trapped inside our own bespoke horror film. Adam falls hard against the wall, and cries out as part of it crumbles and falls away. I snap out of my trance, grab his arm, and yank him back from the edge. Seconds later there is a loud bang as the ancient bricks crash down onto the ground below. The sound seems to echo around the valley as the bats fly off in the distance.
I saved him, but he doesn’t thank me or display any hint of gratitude. My husband’s expression is one I’ve never seen his face wear before, and it makes me feel afraid.
Adam
She almost let me fall.
I know Amelia was scared too, but she almost let me fall. That isn’t something I can just forget. Or forgive.
We’re leaving. I don’t care how late it is, or that there’s snow on the road. I don’t remember us even discussing it. I’m just glad that we are getting out of this place. Even though I don’t want to admit it – to myself or anyone else – I am trapped. In this car, in this marriage, in this life. Ten years ago, I thought I could do anything, be anyone. The world seemed full of endless possibilities, but now it’s nothing but a series of dead ends. Sometimes I just want to… start again.
The road ahead is dark, there are no streetlights, and I know we don’t have much petrol left. Amelia isn’t talking to me – hasn’t spoken for over an hour – but the silence is a relief. Now that we’ve given up on the weekend away, the only thing I’m still worried about is the weather. The snow has stopped, but there is heavy rain bouncing off the bonnet, performing an unpleasant percussion. We should slow down, but I think better of saying so – nobody likes a passenger-seat driver. It’s eerie how we haven’t seen a single other car or building since we left. I know it’s the middle of the night, but even the roads seem strange. The view rarely changes as though we’re stuck in a loop. The stars have all disappeared and the sky seems a darker shade of black. I notice that I’m colder than before too.
I turn to look at Amelia and she is an unrecognisable blur, the features on her face swirling like an angry sea. It feels like I am sitting next to a stranger, not my wife. The stench of regret diffuses through the car like a cheap air freshener, and it’s impossible not to know how unhappy we both are. When it comes to marriage, you can’t always make do and mend. I try to speak, but the words get stuck in my throat. I’m not even sure what I was going to say.
Then I spot the shape of a woman walking on the road
in the distance.
She’s dressed in red.
I think it’s a coat at first, but as we get nearer, I can see that she is wearing a red kimono.
The rain is falling harder, bouncing off the tarmac, and the woman is soaked to the skin. She shouldn’t be outside. She shouldn’t be in the road. She’s holding something but I can’t see what.
‘Slow down,’ I say, but Amelia doesn’t hear me, if anything she seems to speed up.
‘Slow down!’ I say again, louder this time, but she puts her foot on the accelerator.
I look at the speedometer as it rises from seventy miles an hour, to eighty, then ninety, before the dial spins completely out of control. I hold my hands in front of my face, as though trying to protect myself from the scene ahead, and see that my fingers are covered in blood. The pitter patter of bullet-sized raindrops on the car is deafening, and when I look up, I see that the rain has turned red.
The woman is almost right in front of us now.
She sees our headlights, shields her eyes, but doesn’t move out of the way.
I scream as she hits the bonnet. Then watch in horror as her body bounces off the cracked windscreen and soars into the air. Her red silk kimono billows out behind her like a broken cape.
Amelia
‘Wake up!’
I say it three times, gently shaking him, before Adam opens his eyes.
He stares at me. ‘The woman, she—’
‘What woman?’
‘The woman in the red—’
This again. I should have known.
‘The woman in the red kimono? She isn’t real, Adam. Remember? It was just a dream.’
He looks at me the way a young child looks at a parent when they are scared. All the colour has drained from his face and it’s covered in sweat.
‘You’re OK,’ I say, taking his clammy hand in mine. ‘There is no woman in a red kimono. You’re here with me. You’re safe.’
Lies can heal as well as hurt.
He barely spoke to me when we came down from the bell tower earlier. I don’t know whether it was the shock of almost falling with the crumbling wall, or the bats, or too much red wine, but he got undressed, climbed into the unfamiliar bed – that looks just like our own at home – and went straight to sleep without a word.
It’s been a while since Adam had one of his nightmares, but they happen often enough and are always the same, except that he sees the accident from a different point of view. Sometimes in the dreams he is in the car, others he is walking along the street, or dreams that he is watching the scene from the window of a council flat on the thirteenth floor of a tower block, banging his fists on the glass. He never recognises me straight away afterwards – which is normal for us given his face blindness – but sometimes he thinks I am someone else. It always takes several minutes to calm him down and convince him that I’m not. His dreams have a habit of haunting him, regardless of whether he is asleep or awake. His mind isn’t panning for gold, it’s searching for something much darker. Tiny nuggets of buried regrets sometimes slip through the gaps, but the heaviest of memories tend to sink rather than rise to the surface.
I wish I knew how to make them stop.
I consider stroking the freckles on his shoulder, or running my fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair like I used to. But I don’t. Because I can hear bells.
After playing a creepy tune, the grandfather clock in the corner of the bedroom starts to chime midnight like an apprentice Big Ben. If we weren’t fully awake already, we both are now.
‘I’m sorry I woke you,’ he says, his breathing still faster than it should be.
‘It’s OK. If you hadn’t, the clock almost certainly would have,’ I tell him. Then I do what I always do: take out my pad and a pencil, and write it all down as soon as possible afterwards. Because it isn’t just a dream – or a nightmare – it’s a memory.
He shakes his head. ‘We don’t have to do this tonight—’
I take a silent register of his emotions, ticking off the familiar pattern one by one: fear, regret, sorrow, and guilt. It is the same every time.
‘Yes, we do,’ I say, having already found one of the few blank pages left in the notebook. I always thought I could excavate his unhappy memories and replace them with better ones. Of us. These days I’m not so sure.
Adam sighs, leans back on the bed, and tells me everything that he can remember before the edges of the dream fade too much to see.
The nightmares always begin the same way: with the woman in the red kimono.
Despite the attire, she is not Japanese. Adam finds it hard to describe her face – he struggles with features in dreams the same way he does in real life – but we know that she is a British woman in her early forties, around the same age I am now. She’s attractive. He always remembers her red lipstick, in the exact same shade as her kimono. She has long blonde hair like me too, but hers is shorter, shoulder length.
He doesn’t say her name tonight, but we both know what it is.
The order of what happens in the dream sometimes changes, but the woman in red is always there. So is the car in the rain. It’s the reason why Adam doesn’t own one and doesn’t drive. He never even wanted to learn how.
There is a teenage boy in the nightmares too and he’s terrified.
Adam saw it happen: the woman, the car, the accident.
Not just in a dream, in real life.
It was the night his mother died. He was thirteen.
Adam couldn’t recognise the person in the car twenty-five years ago, when it mounted the pavement and collided with his mum as he watched. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t know who they were. It could have been a friend, a teacher, a neighbour – all faces look the same to him. Imagine not knowing if someone you knew was responsible for killing someone you loved. No wonder he struggles to trust people, even me. If my husband didn’t suffer from prosopagnosia, his whole life might have unfolded differently, but he wasn’t able to describe who he had seen to the police. Not then, not now. And he still blames himself. His mother was walking his dog when it happened, because he was too lazy to do it.
It makes me feel sad how he idolises a ghost.
By all accounts, Adam’s mother was a nice enough woman – she was a nurse and very popular on the estate where they lived – but she wasn’t perfect. And she definitely wasn’t a saint. I find it strange how he compares every other woman in his life to her. Including me. The pedestal he put his dead mother on isn’t just wonky, it’s broken. For example, he seems to have conveniently forgotten why she was wearing the red kimono. It’s what she always wore – along with the matching lipstick – whenever male ‘friends’ came to visit the little council flat that they lived in. The place had thin walls, thin enough for Adam to hear that his mother had a different ‘friend’ stay in her bed almost every week.
Memories are shapeshifters and dreams are not bound by truth, which is why I write everything he chooses to remember down. I want to fix him. And I want him to love me for it. But not everything that gets broken can be repaired.
One day he might remember the face he saw that night, and the unanswered questions that have haunted him for years might finally get answered. I’ve tried so hard to make the nightmares stop: herbal remedies, mindfulness podcasts before bed, special tea… but nothing seems to help. When everything is written down, I turn off the light so that we are in darkness again, and hope he’ll be able to get back to sleep.
It doesn’t take long.
Adam is soon gently snoring, but I can’t seem to switch off.
I swallow a sleeping pill – they’re prescription, and I only take them when nothing else works – but I’ve been popping more than usual lately. I’m too preoccupied with the growing number of cracks in our relationship, the ones that are too big to fill in or skim over. I know exactly why and when our marriage started to unravel. Life is unpredictable at best, unforgivable at worst.
I must have dozed off at some point – the
pill finally kicking in – because I wake up with an unsettling sense of déjà vu. It takes a few seconds for me to remember where I am – the room is pitch black – but as I blink into the darkness and my eyes adjust to the light, I remember that we are in Blackwater Chapel. A sliver of moonlight between the window blind and the wall illuminates a tiny corner of the room, and I strain to see the time on the face of the grandfather clock. Its slender metal hands still suggest it is only half past midnight, which means I haven’t been asleep for very long. My mind feels fuzzy, but then I remember what woke me because I hear it again.
There is a noise downstairs.
Robin
Robin can’t sleep either.
She’s worried about the visitors. They shouldn’t have come here.
When she looks out from behind her curtain and sees that the chapel is in complete darkness, she knows what she needs to do.
It looks farther away than it is. But Robin thinks the distance between places can sometimes be as difficult to perceive as the distance between people. Some couples seem closer than they really are, while others appear further apart. When she watched them eating their frozen dinners on trays on their laps earlier, the visitors didn’t look especially happy together. Or in love. But marriage can do that to the best of people as well as the worst. Or perhaps she was just imagining it.
The walk across the fields from her cottage to the chapel would normally take no more than ten minutes. Even less when running, as she discovered earlier. But now that so much snow has fallen, it takes longer than it should to navigate a path for herself without slipping over. It doesn’t help that her wellington boots are several sizes too big. They’re second-hand: she doesn’t have her own. She would have had to drive all the way to Fort William to buy a pair, there are no shoe shops selling footwear near Blackwater Loch or even in Hollowgrove. She could have bought some online but that would require a credit card instead of cash, which is all she has nowadays. Robin cut up all her cards a long time ago. She didn’t want anyone to have any way of finding her.