by Andy Marlow
Chapter 5
Kathy awoke.
It had been three days since the incident. Afterwards, in a blur of confusion and panic, she had tried to enter the offices of TGN to continue her search- as if nothing had happened and she hadn’t nearly been… violated. As soon as she had left that vile man’s car, she had sprinted off towards the revolving doors without a second’s thought for her rescuer and, once through, had approached the reception desk.
Had she been in a better frame of mind, she could have articulated a forceful question or imagined a clever ruse to sneak into the building- yet in her fragile emotional state, standing before the young receptionist staring back at her with a blank, cold expression, her mind froze and all she could think about was what had just happened.
Instead of mounting a daring undercover investigation of the shady company linked to Thomas’ disappearance, she had simply frozen and broken down in tears.
Her mind had been enveloped by an understanding of what had nearly happened and by an inexplicable sense of shame; she had been lost in her own thoughts, only dimly aware of the reassuring sensation of warm hands on her shoulders. She had turned round to see Geoff, the kindly policeman who had saved her, looking at her with a worried expression. She had allowed him to take her out of that building and to give her a lift home.
Her last image of leaving that foyer had been the expression of shock and surprise on the receptionist’s face. She had been lazily filing her nails and looking at Kathy with an expression of complete disinterest, which was likely how she greeted most people entering the office block. Kathy’s breakdown had shaken her out of her apathy and replaced her static expression of boredom with another, equally frozen, expression of surprise.
Kathy’s memory betrayed little of what else had happened that day- except, of course, for the immoveable scar on her memory of what had happened in that car. Suffice to say she found herself at home later that evening, lying in bed watching a rerun of Friends on channel 4 and spent the next three days in much the same way hiding from reality in convenient and entertaining fiction.
Somehow- she was unsure how- her boss, the ever bullish Harcroft, had found out about the Incident. She had received a phone call at some point during the evening from her. Harcroft’s habitually overbearing and bossy tone had been replaced by a voice so soft and compassionate that Kathy barely recognised the caller’s identity. Harcroft had explained that Kathy was entitled to take as much time off as she needed to recover from the Incident (with full pay, of course) and that she should phone into the office whenever she was ready to return, be that days, weeks or even months.
It would have touched her, except she was too numb to feel touched. She was too numb to feel anything. The initial shame had quickly subsided into an even more unbearable nothingness so that nothing made her happy or sad; angry or calm; passionate or cynical anymore- instead, she existed from day to day in a sort of limbo.
For those three days, she had spent every possible hour in bed. Not asleep, mind, for she could not sleep- and so for seventy two hours straight, she had been staring at the television in front of her, idly changing channels until she had found something passable. She had only got up for necessities like food and toilet breaks, and had then returned straight-away to whatever programme she had been watching at the time.
Eventually, on the third day, sleep had caught up with her. In one minute exhaustion had suddenly overtaken her and she had been overwhelmed by a desire to close her eyes and retreat into a fantasy world of her own making: a safe, friendly world where she could feel safe: for why would her own subconscious subject her to torture?
Perhaps because her subconscious didn’t like her. Whatever the reason, her dreaming life had provided an escape from monotonous numbness back into feeling, but it was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire: for the feelings she felt were far from pleasant. Her many sickly dreams that night had consisted of her being chased by the vile man or being trapped by him while he…
He never did get far enough to do anything. Mercifully, her mind had the grace to wake her up before the unthinkable could happen. Even in a dream, which is quite clearly a fiction made by one’s own mind, the pain and the emotion feel as real as in wakeful life- perhaps even more so. Nevertheless, her psyche’s mercy had given her a terrible night’s sleep so that in the morning she felt more exhausted and rotten than she had the night before.
So she lay there on her bed in a zombie-like fashion. It was three o’clock in the morning and the television was still on, displaying the kind of awful telesales that the main channels put on when they know nobody is watching except insomniacs and students. Too tired to get up, too exhausted to move, she allowed her thoughts to be drowned out by the words coming from the screen. As mind-numbingly banal as they were, they soothed her mind simply by distracting her from any thought that might dare to cross her mind.
The man on the television was grinning madly and incessantly. As she watched, his smile never left his face- even when he was talking. It was probably meant to endear him to viewers, to make them think that he’s such a nice, warm, friendly sort of chap who can be trusted and wouldn’t be trying to flog useless tosh for extortionate prices. In reality, it simply made him look a little creepy. Kathy began to worry for him in case his facial muscles became permanently fixed in that position. ‘Perhaps he has lockjaw,’ she mused.
Aside from his constant grin, his other focal point was his suit. It was neon pink and seemed to blaze out at her from the screen, outshining anything else in her admittedly dingy bedroom. Kathy almost had to avert her eyes to protect her vision.
The man was going on about a new kind of vacuum cleaner. The way he was talking, you’d think it was the most exciting and revolutionary piece of technology since the printing press had brought the written word to Europe. From his advertising spiel, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was something more than just an ordinary vacuum cleaner with air freshener attached as well to make the carpet smell extra nice. The man’s talk was slick, and may just have convinced Kathy that his product was worth her taking out a £300 loan in order to afford it- except for the fact that the product itself was terrible.
The man was standing next to it and his words seemed to be describing a different product. Compared to his glowing recommendations of a “revolution in household tidying”, the vacuum cleaner he was trying to sell looked just like an ordinary vacuum cleaner with a tub of shake-‘n’-vac shoddily cellotaped onto the side. Evidently the viewers weren’t impressed. Kathy watched in numb fascination for ten minutes as the man talked incessantly with his constant grin and his neon suit, desperately trying to sell his product which nobody was buying. After ten minutes, the façade had begun to wear thin and she could see behind his superficial jolliness and charisma that here was a man in despair.
She almost felt like phoning up and buying one of his vacuum cleaners just to cheer him up.
Instead, she picked up the remote control and changed channel.
She found a late night game of poker on another station. It looked interesting, but she had never played poker and didn’t understand the rules, so changed channel again.
The new station was showing an old film. It was black and white and, most importantly, foreign. With her limited grasp of European languages she deduced that it was probably Spanish. It was a strange little film which, after watching for a while, Kathy worked out was about the Spanish civil war. In particular it followed the ‘heroic’ exploits of one of General Franco’s military personnel as he battled the Communist ‘scum’ to create a fascist utopia in Spain.
Yes, fascist. Kathy decided it wasn’t her cup of tea either and for the first time in three days decided to turn the television off.
Without the television to distract her anymore, she was pulled rudely from her numb world of fantasy back into reality. She looked around her room and saw a messy, dark, squalid little room with brown curtains, a beige floor, an unmade bed in the middle
and a dirty mirror on the wall. It struck her as odd that she was alone and that Monica, Rachel, Ross and Chandler didn’t come bursting through the door: she had spent so much time in front of the television that her sense of reality had become a little confused.
But alone she was. She suddenly missed Thomas greatly. If he hadn’t been missing, he would have been there with her, supporting her and comforting her.
She resolved to go back to work as soon as possible and continue her investigative journalism. It was half past three in the morning- she would wash, eat and dress, and then head back into the office at nine o’clock sharp like usual.
Well, not like usual. She couldn’t take her normal route for a start. Too many memories associated with those places.
She tried to get out of bed and had a sudden sensation of weakness. In her three day trance, she had completely neglected to eat and almost couldn’t walk. She more fell out of bed than climbed out and could barely find the energy to crawl into the kitchen and pour some cereal into a bowl.
It was then that she saw it. Nothing major, but- her wall had been painted purple. Now, purple is a nice colour, and one of Kathy’s favourites, but it is a fact that Kathy’s wall was, and had always been, an unpleasant shade of sickly yellow. She had wanted to change it to purple, but her landlord had expressly forbidden her to redecorate what he continued to view as his flat.
Yet there it was: a purple wall. She gazed at it in disbelief. She had not painted it; nor had she hired anyone else to paint it. So how could it have simply changed colour? Had someone broken in on that fateful day and- repainted? No, she reasoned- that would be far too absurd. Who would break into someone else’s flat simply to change the colour of their wall?
Still, somebody must have done it, and it wasn’t her. It… it could have been her landlord. It must have been him. Who else could or would have? Although, she thought crossly, that would be a breach of covenant, because my tenancy agreement states that he cannot enter without my prior written consent. She made an angry note to call him in the morning and complain.
Angry! She had felt angry! Suddenly she felt scared and delighted at the same time at the sudden return of her emotions. It felt good to feel again something other than the numbness which had beset her these past three days, and it felt good to feel about something other than…
Oh. There it was again. The inevitable reminder of what had happened and the equally inevitable return of her oppressing lack of feeling.
She trudged wearily back to bed. She was suddenly quite tired again and, despite her fears over what she may encounter in her dreams, allowed herself to drift away somewhat peacefully into the land of nod.
Kathy found herself in the foyer of what seemed to be a castle. A velvet red carpet adorned the floor and felt soft and smooth under her bare feet. Surrounding her was an ensemble of carefully laid out suits of armour, glimmering in the dull candle light. They stood guard against the walls of the oblong room as if to defend Kathy against any deadly threat that may come along.
Kathy had no idea how she had arrived here. She surveyed her memory and found no trace or hint of an idea to help her. Still, she felt an incomprehensible sense of peace and security in this place and decided to explore her surroundings.
She approached the walls first. One patch of wall was somehow more fascinating that the rest- compared to the ceiling, the floor, the other three walls and even most of this section of wall itself, something called out to Kathy: “touch me, touch me”. It looked exactly the same as every other section of wall, but… smelled different. Did I really think that? thought Kathy. The concept seemed absurd even to her- but yes, she examined the sensations being experienced by her nostrils and found the aromas of chicken and aromatic spices wafting into her head.
The peculiar patch of wall continued to perplex Kathy and she approached it slowly. Now she was closer, she could make out a slight discolouring in the area of interest: while the rest of the walls were old, grey brick, probably hewn by some skilled craftsman many centuries before and with an endearing quality that illustrated how much care had gone into the making of each brick, this circular patch was just a hint darker and bluer than the rest. Apart from this it looked identical- and yet this one difference made the sensation of this patch of wall completely different. By smell, it was far more interesting and attractive; yet by appearance, it looked more modern, less antiquated and somehow more… dangerous.
It seemed bizarre to Kathy that she could ‘experience’ a mere wall. Yet it was also undeniable: as she gazed at the differing types of wall before her, her soul seemed to experience a subtle shift. The normal, grey wall created a comfortable yet bored sensation; yet as soon as her eyes glanced at the bluer section, a strange excitement welled up in her soul and an urge to approach it and back away from it at the same time took hold of her.
She decided to do the former. As she approached, she began to notice a faint sound of drumming which grew louder with each step she took. When she reached the wall it was almost deafening; yet this did not bother her: behind the drums, she could almost make out Propane Nightmares by Pendulum, which had once been one of her favourite songs.
It suddenly occurred to her to touch the wall. Her hand shot out in excitement, then hesitated a millimetre from the surface out of fear. What if… what if it felt wrong? What it that opposing sensation of dread and danger, which had called for her to back away from the wall, had been right? What if some terrible fate lay in store for her if she touched the wall?
This is ridiculous, she thought. Then she laughed: for she presently realised how ridiculous this whole situation was: she was in a castle, with no idea how she had arrived here, getting excited over an odd patch of wall. She therefore chose to rule over her frankly ridiculous emotions and place her hand on the wall.
As she did so, she gasped involuntarily for the wall did not feel as it should. As she looked at the wall, she could see individually grafted bricks stuck together and holding one another up; her vision told her that, apart from being a slightly bluer shade of grey than the other bricks, they should feel exactly the same as them- or rather, the same as they should feel. She had expected a rough, rocky texture with a coarse feeling to the material holding them together.
Instead, the feeling of these bluer bricks made no sense to her. Her mind found itself utterly confused between her vision and her feeling- for despite the messages from her eyes, her hands were telling her that what she was feeling was smooth, with the rare minor peak or trough, and dry. The feeling was more of paint than of brick and as she looked now she could see both a painted wall and an old stone wall occupying the same space. It made as little sense to her as it does to you, dear reader.
The sensation utterly confused her and she pulled her hand from the wall immediately. Yet that did not help: for now she had touched it, she could see it, and along with the painted wall and the brick wall she could also see at least ten other walls occupying the same space: a tiled wall, a wooden fence, a clinical plastic wall, a concrete wall. As she returned her hand to the now confusing surface each finger felt the texture of a completely different object and now each eye was showing her different images: in her left eye, she could now see a purple painted wall; in her right remained the slightly bluer brick wall. And yet in both images, all the other walls were visible in a way incomprehensible to her human mind so that she knew she could see ten walls occupying the same space and yet she knew not how.
“Admiror, O paries, te non cecidisse ruinis qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas”
Kathy forgot the wall for a moment and swung round to see a man standing behind her. It was, like the wall, not one man but many occupying the same space; in the blurry, bewildering mass she could see what looked like a city gentleman in a top hat and suit; a young boy wearing football boots; a weary old man, hungry and weak; and a young man, clean shaven, wearing a tunic- it was he who had uttered those mysterious words.
Though in Latin, she had understood the mean
ing of those words, and not through any Latin training but simply through the disturbing magic of this scene. They had meant:
“I’m astonished, wall, that you haven’t collapsed into ruins, since you’re holding up the weary verse of so many poets”
The whole scene was mangling itself now; every wall in the room was now simultaneously itself and every other wall imaginable- an infinity occupied every space around this room. The quote startled Kathy and she contemplated what it meant. How could she understand it, in the first place? But equally- was Kathy the poet? Was Kathy also a many-woman, occupying the same space as tenfold other women like the man standing before her?
And suddenly, through her confused thoughts, through the world around her which was now blurring into ruin, she made out one face: out of the many-man before her a hand slowly came out, and a face emerged. It was Arnold. His evil eyes gazed as her through the now crumbling reality of this world and his mad, leering smile pierced her like a thousand knives. He was in no hurry, for he knew his quarry couldn’t escape, and that made him ever more dangerous and terrifying.
Kathy screamed and turned around to face the wall…
She opened her eyes.
At least, she deduced that that is what must have happened. For her, the experience in that castle foyer had seemed as real as any waking event. In her mind, she had simply turned around and found herself back in her flat, looking at her wall. Her inexplicably purple wall.
She noticed she was breathing heavily and coated in sweat. A dream, that’s all it was: a dream. She convinced herself of this fact, despite not having had any sensation of waking up. But that’s all it could have been: a dream, and now she wakes to find herself in her front room, staring at her wall.
She must have been sleepwalking. That wall in her dream must have been her own wall. Yes! It made so much sense now- when she had been feeling what she thought was a brick wall in a castle, it had merely been her own wall.
Yet that wall was still purple. More disturbingly, it was dry- which meant it had been purple for a long time. And yet before that morning it had always been yellow. She had been alone in her flat for over three days now. Nobody, as far as she was aware, had entered the flat in that time; she certainly hadn’t invited anyone over. So how could the wall have changed colour by itself?
It was a very strange situation. Only now did the absurdity of the whole thing occur to her. Why would anyone come into her flat to repaint one wall? Looking around, she realised that the other three walls of this room were still that sickly yellow she had hated so much.
With furrowed brow, she resolved to contact her landlord later and find out what was going on.
Her mind was slowly waking up. She also noticed now that, despite no memory of flicking the switch, her light was on. Through the window (she had forgotten to close the curtains) was the London night time skyline. Living on the suburbs, there was not much to see, but in the distance the still bright lights of Canary wharf and the City of London were visible. It was five o’clock in the morning. Many a time she had still been in the office at this time, hastily putting together the finishing touches to an exclusive story that no other paper could have found.
She looked down out of her window at her local area. She lived on the fourth storey of a trendy ‘apartment block’, although she was quite down to earth and preferred to call it a flat. Below her was a sizeable park. During the day she would often gaze out of the window at the children playing in the playground; the lovers walking through the shade; the families enjoying picnics and games. Often she would join them: especially in the summer, there was no better way of relaxing than to sit under the shade of a tree with a good book.
Still, it was not summer now and nor was it daylight. Opening the window, the chill of early morning, when the air has lost all the warmth given to it during the day by the sun, caused her to shiver. Yet she had not been outside in more than three days and had a sudden urge to leave the flat which had now become so perplexing to her.
She rummaged around in her wardrobe to find an old coat. After a few minutes groping, she found it: her hand chanced upon something soft and fluffy and she pulled it out, smiling for the first time in days. Before her was an old coat she had not worn in years and which she had almost forgotten about. Kathy was a bit hesitant to call this an ‘old’ coat, though, for that creates an image of something tatty and worn, unlovable except for the fact that it’s always been there. Yet what Kathy now held in her hand was something else: it was not tatty and worn for she had deliberately kept it protected in mint condition, defended from the outside world by a plastic covering and hidden at the back of her wardrobe. She readily admitted it was not fashionable. It was a garish purple with long fur sticking up all over the place. She doubted anybody she knew had ever seen her wearing it.
Yet she was not ashamed of it, for she loved it. Aside from being a bright, undeniable purple (she had almost screamed with delight when she first saw it), she and this coat had a long, happy history. She would often, in her youth, put it on when she was upset just to cheer her up- and it worked unfailingly. Wearing it felt warm and soft, safe and homely. Had she not looked after it so well, no doubt it would have become tatty and worn in some way- yet this was a labour of love.
Alas, like most love stories, it was not always happy. As she had grown up and pursued an adult career, she had forgotten about this coat. It had not seemed… professional. And so it has languished in the back of her wardrobe for years, practically forgotten. It made her sad to think of it in there all those years, all alone, missing her…
The mature part of her mind told her to stop it, that this was just a coat. It didn’t have feelings. It couldn’t ‘miss’ her. But that was the beauty of the coat: wearing it returned her to a childish state of mind. Here, she could suspend her disbelief and pretend she was young again; that there was no problem in the world that mummy or daddy couldn’t solve by a hug. Simply wearing this coat automatically removed any worries she was having at the time.
And it was so warm! Which is why she smiled with delight at the prospect of going for an early morning walk in it. Despite the chill cold outside, she had confidence in her brilliant, dazzling, bright purple furry fluffy coat to keep her warm.
She was happy for the first time in days. Any thoughts of… that man (she chose to block out his name for fear of remembering him fully) were now cast out to the edge of her consciousness for the time being. She chose to mentally leave them in her flat, and as she stepped out the door into the corridor she felt a crushing weight fall from her shoulders.
She entered the lift and pressed the button to take her to the ground floor. She felt… excited! Excited at the prospect of finally leaving not just her flat, but also the state of mind she had been in for the past few days. To be honest she needed it: three days of little food, little sleep and no exercise had taken its toll. Like all lifts, this one had a mirror and looking at her reflection, she was horrified.
Her hair, usually so well looked after, was a mess. The bags under her eyes were almost bigger than her eyes themselves. Three days of fasting had left her looking emaciated and undernourished: her complexion had suffered. She made a mental note to do something about her appearance sooner rather than later.
Yet right now was early morning: too early for people to be getting up for work, too late for clubbers to be coming home from a night out. In short, the world was empty, and it was hers! She would be the only one outside at this time of night, and that made her happy. The last thing she wanted was to meet anyone out there…
The lift came to a standstill and she stepped out. However, she found her sense of excitement had waned slightly. The idea of solitude and an open space to think appealed to her, but after what had happened to her…
Arnold. The name crept back into her head and the sense of freedom she had enjoyed vanished completely. She had once trusted the world and believed there was good in everyone. All of a sudden his manic eyes and mad sayings re
turned to her mind and she could not step outside into the night.
She tried- oh, how she tried! She stepped up to those doors and willed herself to walk through, to enjoy a fresh, nice walk in the early morning. But each time she stepped her foot outside, a heavy sense of dread overcame her and she had to pull it back in. She almost wept for the freedom that had been taken from her.
Resolving not to let- him- return to her thoughts and torment her further, she once more blocked his name from her mind and decided that, if she could not go outside, then she would jolly well have a good time inside. She may not have physical freedom in the world, but she could have mental freedom in her head- and after all, that is a more precious commodity.
The block of flats- sorry, apartment building- she lived in had a community area on the ground floor. It was always open, but always empty. Ever since Thatcher declared “there’s no such thing as society”, there seemed to Kathy’s mind to have been a general decline in community spirit so that now everybody lived individual and empty lives; everybody sought personal gain while struggling to find any greater meaning or purpose to life than simply the accumulation of personal wealth. That was her abstract analysis of the situation. Whatever the reason, the simple fact was that she could guarantee the room would be empty.
She entered the room. Given that nobody in the block used it, it had not been well taken care of. The furniture still looked modern enough but that was only to be expected given how comparatively modern the building itself was. The room was shaped like two oblongs of different length placed next to each other. There was a pool table in the alcove created by the longer oblong and the rest of the room was filled with haphazardly placed tables and chairs. When the building had first been constructed, this room had been envisaged as somewhere people could eat together, following an egalitarian community ideal resurrected from the sixties. It had obviously not caught on and so the room had been left abandoned.
In one corner was a television. In truth, the room was not always entirely deserted. An eccentric man named Egbert, who lived on the sixth floor, often came down here to watch television- yet he was the sole user of this room. He would always watch the same channel: an obscure channel on the outer reaches of the channel programme which only ever showed programmes about fishing. Kathy had sometimes heard him guffawing loudly as she left for work. She had once gone in to investigate what was so funny: after watching him for several minutes, she had become utterly bamboozled as to what he was laughing at. He would open his mouth to emit a chortle at the strangest times of the programme when absolutely nothing was happening. Kathy often wondered whether he was simply laughing at something in his own head.
He kept strange sleeping habits and could be found in this room at random times of day or night. He laughed so loud that, in the dead of night, he could be heard faintly from her room on the fourth floor. On many a sleepless night, she had heard his chuckle rising through the floorboards at 11 p.m., 2.15 a.m., or 5 a.m. It wasn’t loud enough to annoy anyone or to prevent anyone from sleeping (although she was speaking as a resident of the fourth floor- she couldn’t comment on the experience of those on the first floor), but most people stayed away from him just because he was something strange, different, incomprehensible.
It was for this reason that Kathy breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the room empty. Not that she feared him or disliked him- his nightly laughter was a source of amusement for her on sleepless nights- but right now, she needed solitude. After three days of watching TV and talking to no-one, she wasn’t sure if she could remember how to have a proper conversation.
The lights were already on. They were always on. The designer of this room had evidently fancied himself a bit of an art connoisseur, for the lights were positioned strategically above the many paintings that hung on the walls of the room. Most of them were portraits of various famous persons in many and varied styles: there was an impressionist piece of Mother Theresa in a garden; a cubist picture of George Clooney in a suit; a pop art piece displaying the visage of David Tennant gazing down from the side of a tin can. Most of these were by fairly unknown professionals, but one lady who lived on the top floor, who saw herself as a keen amateur artist, often tried to put up her own work on the wall of this room. Her name was Agnes and such was the volume- if not quality- of her work that the pool table alcove was known as “Agnes’ alcove”.
This was all familiar to Kathy. She and Egbert and Agnes were the only ones who ever used this room, and Kathy did so very rarely. Agnes was a perfectionist- because of her dedication to her art, it often took her several weeks to finish one piece. It had been months since Kathy had entered this room and only three more pieces were up in Agnes’ alcove- one decent piece of a kitten with dreadlocks, another quite awful piece of a young man in a suit which looked barely anything like its subject (Kathy knew the man in the picture to be Agnes’ grandson, whom Kathy had met on several occasions) and a final one which caught Kathy’s eye.
It was a very abstract piece. The whole canvas was painted purple and the ‘art’ was in the words strewn haphazardly across it in varying shades of purple. The more one stared at it, the more one could appreciate its nuances and the more writing one could see - yet all the writing was the same. It was one phrase, repeated over and over again:
“Admiror, O paries, te non cecidisse ruinis qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas”
Kathy gasped. It was the phrase from her dream- if it had been a dream. No, of course it was a dream! What else could it be? She scolded herself. This was just a coincidence- albeit a very bizarre and disturbing coincidence.
Yet as she told herself this, something caught her eye. On a patch of wall across from her, near the door, the normal cream colour of the wallpaper had become tinged blue. The blue patch of wall was circular, like in her dream. She rushed over to it and placed her hand on it. She breathed a sigh of relief when it felt as it should: just like wallpaper. Yet as her hand stayed on the wall covering, its texture began to change; it became rougher and coarser until it felt exactly like a brick wall. She gazed at the wall in horror, but its image remained that of normal cream-coloured wallpaper. She jerked her hand away from the wall and backed away in horror.
But horror at- at what? What danger was she in? She could term what she was experiencing only as an existential crisis. That castle could not have been real, she was sure- but then this could not be real either. Walls don’t do that. Either she was still dreaming, or she was going mad. This could not be real.
“But what is real?” queried a voice behind her. She turned, shocked, to see the mouth of the badly painted man-in-a-suit moving. “What is reality beyond our subjective experience of it? Who is to say that your experience, right now, is not ‘real’?”
She walked up to the painting, eyes wide with fright, and simply gazed down at it. The mouth had stopped moving; yet it had moved, and it had spoken- she was sure of it. She touched it and felt the coarse sensation of dried paint on canvas- it was real. She nevertheless pulled her hand from it in fear that the apparition might bite her.
She sat on one of the chairs and curled up into a ball. Her hands flew over her ears to stop any other strange sounds entering her head; her eyes were scrunched up as tight as possible to avoid seeing anything strange.
Her greatest fear- if this was still a dream world- was that in this world, Arnold was king and all-powerful; if Arnold wanted to, he could come and…
She had thought his name. He had returned to her mind and had an even greater hold over her than before; numbness was no longer her response: rather terror, abject, utter terror filled her heart and she wanted, so desperately, to go somewhere that was real…
But as the painting said, what is real? How can we differentiate between dream and reality except by merely trusting our senses until something bizarre happens that tells us our interpretation is wrong?
It was this realisation that frightened Kathy most. Never again could she trust her senses. If ‘real’ could
only be determined by her senses, but they had just told her that this was real when it surely could not be, then how was she to know what was real ever again? How could she guarantee that her experience of life up until this point had been- ‘real’?
“I can hear it too,” said a voice from the doorway.
Kathy unmuffled her ears and opened her eyes. It was Egbert standing in the doorway, looking on Kathy with a concerned expression on his round, flabby face. His top hat was balancing on his head at an unusual angle, which he would normally have corrected, except that now his attention was wholly on Kathy.
Kathy stared at him in fear. In truth, although she knew him and liked him well enough, in this new world of uncertainty she could not trust him. Not in the conventional sense of trusting someone not to lie to you, or not to betray you; no, she could not trust that he was real. It felt like the whole of reality was collapsing and being replaced by something uncertain and unreal.
Egbert stepped a little closer and continued,
“That painting. I can hear him too. He talks to me every night.”
He was standing about two feet from the doorway now, looking uneasy. It appeared that he was torn between concern for Kathy’s mental health and happiness that finally he had found somebody who shared his special gift of being able to hear what was not there…
…or what may be there, in reality, whatever that may now be.
“They all talk to me. David, there”- at this he pointed to the portrait of David Tennant- “often talks to me about his life. It’s fascinating. He really is a brilliant actor, you know.”
Kathy stared, dumbfounded. She had never seen this side of Egbert before- well, she had never really known him before. She would have ordinarily been prepared to dismiss him as insane, except for the fact that she could hear it too.
“That’s why I laugh. I know people think I’m weird when they see me laughing at the fishing programmes. Truth be told, I don’t like fishing. It’s just that these paintings do, and so they come to life when those programmes are on. Some of them are very funny. Watch.”
At that, Egbert sat down calmly and turned on the television. He found channel 532- a channel very imaginatively called “Channel Fishing”- and turned it on.
There was currently on “Channel Fishing” a programme about the mating habits of trout. It was a very dull show.
And yet, as soon as it was on, the whole room erupted with noise. The paintings started talking loudly and greeting Egbert happily as if meeting an old friend. Mother Theresa started telling the dirtiest jokes imaginable, while David Tennant began talking about his time on stage as Hamlet and George Clooney started trying to flirt with Kathy. It was all very surreal and Kathy felt overwhelmed.
Suddenly the badly-painted man-in-a-suit shouted with a loud voice and made everyone else fall silent. He was, evidently, the leader of the paintings…
…and Kathy could not believe she was thinking these things.
“Silence, everyone,” bellowed man-in-a-suit. “A tragic event is about to occur. In precisely 30 seconds, a man will be killed outside this apartment block. I decree a minute’s silence out of respect for him.”
All the paintings agreed and hushed suddenly. Egbert turned the volume down on the television to silent.
Kathy gazed around in astonishment. At once she had a thought: “If any of this is real, then I may have a chance to save this man’s life now.” She stood up and practically sprinted outside. Putting aside her fear of being outside alone and in the dark, she stood in anticipation for the man whose life she might save.
Presently she saw the man standing on the opposite side of the road which ran between the apartment block and the park. He was obviously going to cross.
“Wait! No! Don’t cross!” yelled Kathy in his direction.
The man turned to look at her. In the dim light, she could make out a face- “no! Surely it can’t be?” she thought to herself, for the face before her was that of Thomas.
“Thomas! Thomas!” she yelled in excitement. “Is it you?”
The man continued looking at her. A serious expression passed across his face, then one of recognition:
“Kathy! Hello! I was coming to see you!”
Kathy allowed her excitement to get the better of her; she rushed across the road, and Thomas did the same.
Neither of them saw the lorry coming.
Thomas was immediately struck down. His body was thrown ten feet through the air before it landed- there was no doubt that he was dead. The lorry continued on its journey as if nothing had happened. Kathy ran over to the body in despair and grief- so close, and now dead! And all her fault!
Yet when she reached the body, and looked into the face of the man who had been hit, she saw not Thomas’ face but that of a stranger: an old man with false teeth, a missing eye and a mole on his left cheek.
Kathy reeled back. Nothing was making sense tonight. None of this was happening, none of it was real- forget what the painting said, she thought, this has to be a dream. This cannot be real.
Emotional, she ran back into the apartment block; past the common room where she could still hear Egbert and the paintings having a lively discussion; into the lift and then into her flat, past the inexplicably purple wall, and finally she crumpled onto her bed, in a heap, hoping that by the time daylight arrived, none of this would have happened.