by Will Maclean
‘I – think she’s very nice. I mean, I like talking to her. I mean, yes, she’s very pretty but that’s not why I like talking to her. In fact, I’d barely even noticed that.’ Was I still talking? It felt like I had been talking for a long time. Polly smiled into her cup, holding it with both hands.
‘I think you’ve just answered my question.’
I snorted indignantly. ‘Even if I did like her, what’s wrong with that?’
‘Do you think she likes you?’
My hands quivered. ‘What – what’s that got to do with you?’ My voice sounded wounded and whiny. ‘Why would you ask?’
‘Well,’ said Polly, looking directly at me. She clearly couldn’t see in my expression the thing she was looking for; she smiled ruefully and sipped her tea again. ‘So, what great theory does Sally have about what’s going on here?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘It’s likely to remain that way if you don’t tell me.’
I squirmed in my chair. I didn’t want to share anything that Sally had told me. Polly smiled at my obvious distress.
‘Oh, don’t bother if it’s that painful. I’m sure you and Sally had a lovely time today.’
‘You don’t like Sally, do you?’
Polly pursed her lips. ‘What I feel about Sally is beside the point.’
‘Ah!’ I was relieved, for the first time in the conversation, not to be on the back foot. ‘So you don’t like her?’
‘It’s not that,’ said Polly, looking away.
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s … it’s nothing. Just forget it.’
And then I saw, just for a second. My ignorance and lack of experience with people, and the prism of my own anger, cleared, or coalesced into a solid, comprehensible perspective, and I understood.
‘You’re … jealous!’ I said, before I could stop myself.
Polly stared at her cup.
‘Do you … like … me? Is that what this is?’
Polly nodded, very slightly. ‘Is that so strange?’
‘No, it’s just …’
‘You don’t like me?’
‘I don’t really know you.’ I was going to say ‘I’ve barely noticed you’, but even at seventeen years of age I suspected that might not be a prudent thing to say.
‘But you don’t know Sally!’ said Polly.
‘I know her better than I know you.’
Polly smiled and shook her head. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. She shook her head again. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘No,’ I said. I was flattered and embarrassed all at once. No girl had ever ‘liked’ me before, and I had never given the matter much thought. And yet, in the space of one day, all of this had happened. My head was flooded with unfamiliar feelings, large, complex, commingled emotions I could not see the entire shape of all at once. I floundered. ‘No, it’s … you seem a nice girl.’
Polly scowled. ‘Bloody hell, Tim! Nice girl is what you say about someone when you don’t care about them.’
There was a long pause. I didn’t know how to continue. All the words I had to address this situation were clumsy, bumbling, second-hand, of my dad’s generation.
‘Is Sally a nice girl, Tim? Was she nice to you today?’
‘Nothing happened today!’
‘Well, if nothing happened,’ said Polly slyly, ‘this should be OK’.
Putting her hands on my knees, she craned her neck up, and her lips were on mine. I felt the world turn in a strange way. It was a very careful, precise kiss, as if Polly were keeping something hungry dammed up behind it. It was also long and delicious. My mouth hung open as she stood up.
‘I’m going to bed now,’ said Polly. She got up and walked to the door, and I heard her footsteps pause at the threshold as if she were about to say something else. But then I heard the stairs creak, and the house was silent.
I was exhausted. The day had given me everything, and I was worn out to the ends of my nerves with new and strange things to think about, to feel and consider. It was all too much, and not enough.
The stairs were like an escalator I couldn’t stop ascending until I was on the upper landing, where the shadows gathered to blackness, but when I reached for the light switch my hand stroked the fuzz of the ancient wallpaper and I couldn’t find it, because it had never been there. I knew I had to make it to my room but I knew that I would not. As I turned the corner I saw, in the corridor – a brazen black shape, like a column of dense black smoke, not really there but there all the same, as if in two places at once, caught in the act of deciding to be. It was the height of a man but not a man, and the more I looked at it, the deeper and blacker it seemed, and the taller and more menacing it appeared to grow. And I knew then that this was him. He was becoming, thirstily sipping at our attention, our imagination, our focus, his long-dead fingers probing, seeking a way in, and it was already too late to stop him because he was already here and always had been, now.
One rotten, charred hand with age-blackened flesh reaches out, almost idly, to touch the wallpaper, to delight in real contact with real things, and it rots under his terrible attention, ages to dust in seconds and drops from the wall.
I woke in my room to the sound of my own rapid breathing, as if I were being pursued. The darkness was no-colour, but seethed with tiny, unseen things, the charged soup of existence itself, quarks and leptons and gluons and electrons; simple, momentous events we are too crude to notice, or even see. A feverish chattering, a roaring chanting that built and fell away in great waves, coming apart and coming together, and I could only hear it and wonder, and its meaning would only ever be opaque to me.
34
The room was blurred, the morning light turning everything to blue chalk. Last night’s conversation with Polly and the kiss she had planted on my lips returned to me before the nightmare, the one that had expelled me from sleep into the frantic darkness in the early hours. I wondered if breakfast would be uncomfortable. Not only did Polly like me, she also knew that I liked Sally, and I felt for the first time in my life that I was completely vulnerable to things I had no understanding of. And then I remembered the dream.
We were, of course, supposed to write down our dreams, and although I had dreamed nothing of note since I had been at Yarlings, I still felt guilty that I hadn’t written anything down. Everyone else had: Juliet in particular seemed to dream a lot, and told us that she had almost filled her dream journal. And so, more to avoid heading downstairs than anything else, I wrote up my dream, of the thing that was more a column of black smoke than a man, a vortex of malign intent, breaking through into the house, the fixtures crumbling underneath its awful fingers. When I had finished, I changed into my clothes and, having no more reason to delay, headed out of my room.
I saw that everyone else was gathered on the upper landing, with their backs to me, murmuring.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked. Everybody fell silent as I joined them.
‘Hello, Tim,’ said Graham. Normally, he was irritatingly chirpy in the mornings, but today he seemed just as subdued as everyone else. There were strained smiles from Sally and Juliet, and unreadable looks from Neil and Seb, and, especially, Polly.
‘What’s going on?’
‘We’ve, er …’ Graham scratched the back of his neck. ‘We’ve had some contact, I think.’
‘Contact? How?’
‘Just show him,’ said Seb.
‘Show me what?’
Neil pointed at the wall. The dark green wallpaper had been torn away, and some kind of ancient yellow paper under that, revealing the bare plaster beneath.
Written on the plaster in sloping loops of pencil were the words
NICE GIRL
And, underneath that,
BITCH WHORE
‘Oh my God.’ I suddenly felt a sensation of falling, as if from a great height. I stumbled away from the edge of the stairs and sat down on the carpet. That exact spot—
; Graham squatted next to me.
‘I know, Tim. We’ve all seen it. But – and I hate to do this – I have to ask you the same question I’ve asked everyone el—’
‘Did you write this?’ said Polly. Her arms were folded.
‘What? No! Why on earth would I write something like that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Polly stood over me now, her gaze unwavering. ‘You tell me.’
‘I didn’t write it!’
‘You seem very upset by it.’
I got to my feet. ‘Wait there.’ On rubbery legs I ran to my room, and returned with the dream journal.
I virtually threw it at Polly, who read the account of my dream with a tight-lipped expression.
‘And this is from this morning?’
‘It is.’ I must have looked more spooked than I thought, as I saw Polly’s anger give way to puzzlement. ‘That’s why I was so long getting up this morning. I was writing that.’
‘What does it say?’ said Neil. ‘What did you dream?’
I read out my account.
‘The figure in your dream …’ Graham said. ‘He touched the wall, yes? Does that correlate to where the wallpaper’s damaged here?’
‘I can’t be sure,’ I said. ‘I think so.’
‘A portent,’ said Graham, bending over to peer at the wall. I noticed for the first time he had his camera around his neck; presumably he’d already taken plenty of shots of the writing. ‘A dream-omen. This is exactly what I was hoping to see.’
‘Oh, great,’ said Polly. ‘Bully for you! You’re not the one being singled out for abuse.’ She looked at me for a long moment. I looked at the floor. Graham sniffed and wound his camera on.
‘Well, I wouldn’t take this personally, any of you ladies. Mr Salt wasn’t exactly a fan of the fair sex during his lifetime. However, even despite the content of the message, I think we can all see how significant this is.’
‘Yeah,’ Seb grunted blearily, lighting up a cigarette. ‘We made a ghost swear.’
Graham ignored him. ‘Tobias Salt has made contact with us. He’s spoken to us via planchette, but now he’s reached out from our minds, into the physical world. He’s not just knocking chairs over or letting us write things for him. He wrote something himself, on a wall.’
‘Like at Borley,’ I said.
‘Yes!’ said Graham, his eyes sparkling. ‘Like the poltergeist at Borley. The link between us and him is growing in strength.’
‘Did you find the pencil?’ I asked.
Sally smiled. ‘That was the first thing I thought of. No. And we haven’t found the torn wallpaper either.’
‘We may not ever find it,’ said Graham. He looked round him, and his smile faded as he saw the frightened faces of his volunteers, his troops.
‘Come on, everyone!’ he said. ‘This is a success!’
‘What is it an omen for?’ said Neil.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said it was an omen. What for?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Graham. ‘Something that hasn’t happened yet, obviously. Traditionally, some piece of bad luck or misfortune.’
‘Great,’ said Polly.
‘Affecting all of us?’ said Juliet.
Graham shrugged.
Downstairs, the telephone rang.
We exchanged glances, no one daring to say anything.
Eventually, Sally turned and descended the staircase, with an almost stately slowness, as the sharp ring of the telephone drilled through the hollow rooms and heavy frame of the house.
‘This is stupid,’ said Neil. ‘About the omen. It’s not rational.’
‘I agree,’ said Graham.
‘Something bad, for one of us. Something bad for all of us. Who knows?’ said Polly. There was a note of unease in her voice.
Sally returned, climbing the stairs with the same solemn, almost ceremonial pace with which she had descended.
‘Tim,’ she said hoarsely. ‘It’s for you.’
I picked up the mustard-coloured phone receiver from the hall table as carefully as if it were booby-trapped.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Tim.’
‘Dad?’ He sounded exhausted, washed out. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘You need to come home. As soon as you can.’
‘What is it, Dad? What’s wrong?’
‘Just get here as soon as you can, OK?’
‘Tell me what’s wrong!’
Down the line, I heard a deep sigh. I knew my dad, and I knew what he was doing. He was gathering the strength to admit something to himself, to speak it out loud, to make it real.
‘It’s your mum, Tim. She’s had a stroke. She’s in St John’s Infirmary, she’s unconscious. I’m with her right now.’
I said nothing. I did not move. I just stared, at a patch of the black wooden floor, where it met the skirting board. There was a knot in the plank, which projected a little way out of the wood. I stared at it for a long time. Consciousness is a funny thing, I thought. The knot had been there for as long as the house had stood, unnoticed by everyone who walked down that hallway. And now it was all I could see, linked irrevocably and for ever in my mind with this moment of fear and disaster.
My dad’s voice burbled from the receiver as I put the phone back in its cradle. The coolness of the wall against my back, and the tense silence of the house, was broken, eventually, by the sound of many feet clumping heavily down the stairs.
Twenty-five minutes later, I was in the passenger seat of Seb’s red Triumph Stag as the car ate up the winding country road. As I had imagined, Seb was a terrible driver, and under normal circumstances, I would have been terrified. As it was, I felt nothing. Seb steered with one hand, throwing the car round each bend with an insouciance that was as forced as it was barely controlled. Occasionally he would look sideways at me – perhaps to see whether I was all right, perhaps to determine whether I was scared, or maybe just to see if I was impressed. I stared ahead.
It dawned on me long before we pulled into the station that Seb lacked the emotional reach to speak to me about what was happening, that he was probably dreading the moment of packing me off onto the train. As is so often the case with emotional trauma and the English, I found myself more worried with how Seb felt about this minor discomfort than I did about the fact my mother was gravely ill.
At the station, Seb took my rucksack out of the Stag’s boot and handed it to me with awkward solemnity, as if I had disgraced the family name and was off to join the Foreign Legion.
‘You like the car?’ he asked, clearly unable to help himself.
‘It’s amazing,’ I said indifferently, looking at it properly for the first time. It was new and shiny, but a series of thin, ugly scratches ran along the bodywork, filled with brown rust like clotted blood.
‘Oh, that,’ said Seb. ‘Some bastard keyed it a while back when I parked at school. Jealous, I expect.’
I nodded, and wondered if it was Neil.
‘Good luck,’ Seb said, smiling weakly. ‘And hey.’ He suddenly looked very serious. ‘Look after your old man, hmm?’
‘He’s not the one who’s sick.’
‘No,’ said Seb. The tone of his voice changed. ‘But he has to live with somebody who is. Trust me, it can wear someone down. Much more than they let on.’
‘You haven’t met my dad,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’s fine.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure he looks fine, from the outside. I thought my dad was fine, too, when Mum had her … thing. I really did think he was doing OK.’ His voice trailed off; he was looking through me now. I saw that his eyes were momentarily dark with some unasked-for recollection. And then, realising how serious he was being, he snorted a half-laugh.
‘Anyway, look, go easy on the old bugger.’ He punched me on the shoulder. Even through my donkey jacket, it hurt.
We smiled at each other for an awkward second. I half expected Seb to salute. A couple of minutes later, as I sat down on a bench on the empty platform, I heard
the roar of the Stag’s engine receding into the sparkling summer countryside. I imagined the car’s incredible noise was tinged with something close to relief.
Twenty minutes’ wait for the train. An adult would have spent their time collecting their thoughts, steeling themselves for what lay ahead, but I was seventeen. I was concerned for my mum – of course I was, I loved Mum very much – but alongside this was an impatience, a wonderment at what all the fuss was about. She wasn’t dead, part of me thought, so what was the problem? And this was perfectly normal. What child or young person with two healthy parents – parents who’ve always been there – can possibly imagine the world without them? She wasn’t dead. She was unconscious, yes, but she would recover, wouldn’t she? Mum would be all right, surely?
And in the meantime, my resentment at being plucked away from the first thing since Abi’s disappearance that had any meaning to me grew, until the gathering summer heat and the wait for the train grew intolerable. I took my jacket off, stuffed it angrily into my rucksack.
The train came. I sat by the window, staring out at the Suffolk countryside, watching the flat fields blur by like a dream. I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts, I barely noticed London creep up at the windows, street by street. The train pulled in at Liverpool Street Station.
By degrees – a tube, another train, and another bus later – I found myself back in the world I knew – the infinite suburb, stretching out forever, thwarting escape in all directions, the place where I had grown up. I had only been away five days, but I felt as if I had travelled, inwardly, had been both encouraged and forced to consider new perspectives. It felt frustrating to be back home again, surrounded by the things one knew to the point of mania.
There was the newspaper kiosk by the bus station, which always smelled of tobacco and peppermints. There was the tree by the short cut, on the trunk of which someone had painted the letters I.R.A., complete with careful full stops. Everything from street signs to house names was overfamiliar, worn out, tired. I crossed a road and ducked into the short cut, plimsolls crunching on the gravel path. I thought of Abi again, and then, intensely sweet and painful, the full glory of our joint efforts to transform this crushing everyday into something magical, to find goblins in the park and clay pipes in the garden, ghosts in the attic and witchery behind the lace curtains of withdrawn neighbours. The alchemy of our imaginations. I had been so adrift without it. The privets were choked with litter; the only incantations written on the concrete walls were the names of football teams and bands and doomed couples. I could not hold back the banality of this world on my own.