He then takes a sudden, unexpected step towards me. I resist the urge to step back. He smells of cheese. His breath of onions. It is hard not to recoil from him. But I stay steady and look calmly at his face.
He gazes at me with his dim, staring eyes, but his face is flushed, and his mouth is twisted. It is as if he is aroused. I glance down at his half-open coat. I think he is. The utter horror of it.
“Who is she?” he says conspiratorially, his head inclining towards the living room window. He winks.
I imagine him, whilst I was inside, stepping forward to take another look, touching himself, squeezing, and then standing back as I came back out. Before I could see him.
I really want to tell him to fuck off; he makes me that angry. I want to put my hand on his chest, shoving him so hard that he falls onto the path. I want to take the tea bags and push them into his mouth and down into his throat until he chokes. In that moment, I want to kill him, standing there, spoiling everything.
But I know I cannot do anything like that. I have to be normal, relaxed, indifferent. That this is something and nothing. That his comment is little more than polite conversation. Even though he stands there now with his excitement clearly visible to me through his half-open coat.
“She’s my niece, staying for a few days, until the snow clears,” I answer, turning away and going back indoors.
“Oh …” He is about to say something else, something conversational, as I shut the door on him, hoping this will be the end of it.
Knowing, as he stands there in silence before trudging off, that this is just the beginning.
I must not let it spoil things. But I know it will worry me all evening, as we spend time reading and drawing, and until we go to bed. He will come back.
I hold the body close to me.
The bloated face next to mine.
Cold and clammy against my cheek.
If I can tread water long enough.
Until someone comes.
I think I can save us both.
But no one comes to help us from the water.
And I cannot hold on much longer.
I have to let the body go, or we will both go under.
But I cannot let go.
And I know why.
I wake up.
And I am sobbing.
I am in and out of sleep. As I so often am at night.
Living my nightmares.
Reliving my life. The absolute truth of it.
I loved my daughter. Lucy. But I never told her. Not even once. I wish I had. People said she would have known. I don’t believe she did. If she had, I do not think she would have taken her own life. How could someone so loved do something so terrible? So final. Ruining so many lives.
I love you. Such a simple thing to say.
Three words that will always haunt me.
And the thought of how things might have been if I had said them.
I have some happy memories of Lucy. From when she was born. The midwife holding her up in front of my wife. Our baby’s squashed and bloodied face. My arm around my wife as she held Lucy close to her. I leaned forward to kiss Lucy on her forehead. I should have whispered I love you then. But I did not. I don’t know why. I was an only child and always found it impossible to show emotions. Everything bottled up.
An early birthday party at home. A pink pony theme with bunting, balloons and cake. Lucy’s solemn face as she waited to blow out the candles. Little friends in a circle around her. Her look of delight when the candles magically relit themselves.
Her first day at school. Running ahead to the playground without looking back. Her straw hat blowing away in the breeze. Stopping to get it as we ran to catch up. Her shyness when meeting the teacher. Hiding her pretty face in my wife’s skirt.
Lucy took her own life. The open verdict was no more than a kindness.
She walked into the river late one night. She had stones in her pockets. She could not swim.
Neither my wife nor I were swimmers. We did not teach her. She did not have lessons.
At the age Lucy should have had lessons, the drink already had me. I had discovered alcohol as a pre-teenager, only child of distant parents, sipping from bottles in their drinks cabinet during the long summer holidays when I was left alone whilst they went to work. I did not like the taste then and was sick more than once, but I believe that’s where it started. My alcoholism.
I drank regularly in my late teens, going to pubs with fellows I worked with on a Saturday job in a furniture store. Pints, mostly. Never spirits. I continued to drink heavily – weekend benders, mostly – when I was at university. I got a 2.2, the aptly known drinker’s degree. I never thought my drinking was out of the ordinary. Just what young men did.
I stopped drinking for a while, when I fell in love, got married, went to work, had baby Lucy. But then the stresses and pressures of life – the wrong spouse, the responsibilities of parenthood, a dull and poorly paid job – led me back to alcohol. Birthday, Christmas and New Year drinks became more regular. Weekly. Then daily. And more frequent. Nightly. Early hours drinking, eventually. Trying to unscrew the bottle top without making a noise.
The drink made my life easier to live for a while.
I managed my drinking around my life, my job, my family.
Things turned, inevitably, and I managed everything else around my drinking. For a while.
I don’t remember as much as I should about Lucy’s childhood as she moved towards her teenage years. I have a memory of sitting with my wife in her car in a field as a sports afternoon was about to begin at school. Arguing. I had been drinking. My wife wanted me to stay in the car. I would not. There was some embarrassment. I remember having to return to the car and being sick beside it. And being seen by some of the schoolchildren.
As a teenager in her school holidays, I would sometimes ask Lucy to phone in sick for me at work, leaving a message on an answering machine, sometimes getting a call back, speaking to someone. My wife refused to do it. Lucy did it. I do not think she wanted to. I remember sitting close to her so I could hear what was being asked and telling her what to say in reply. I was already too far gone to realise the woman on the other end of the line could hear everything I said. Shouted, more like.
And I remember how, as days turned into nights and back into days again, I would lie curled up beneath the dining room table for hours on end. I do not know why. I think it made me feel safe, in some way. And I felt hidden from view. One afternoon, Lucy brought two friends back – the last time, I think, so it must have been in her mid-teens. And they came into the dining room for a board game, or some such, and found me there. Later, I was told I had wet my trousers.
By now, my marriage had long since splintered. Little more than a polite pretence in public. Shattered in private.
And Lucy had turned away from me. At least, given up.
But I did not realise any of this, so lost was I in drink with bottles in the cistern and the loft and at the bottom of the old bin at the back of the garage. So many hiding places.
My last clear memory of Lucy was at her school after what must have been her A Levels. I had tried several times to stop drinking over the years. The threat of my wife leaving. Taking Lucy with her. Losing my home. My job, too. I do not think I really wanted to stop. It has to come from inside, not from outside pressures. But I did stop for a while. Short periods of sobriety. Lucy won an award, the person who had done the most for the school, or something like that. As she was announced, I stood and clapped loudly, too soon and too much. I may have whistled. I can still see the look on Lucy’s face in my mind even now. Mortified.
I have no idea how or why Lucy chose to go to the university she did in the north-east. I have no recollection of visiting it. Nor talking about it before she made her choice. These years were a blur, if even that. For much of it, I have no memories at all. Something went wrong in her first year there. She had her first serious boyfriend, and that wasn’t really for her, I don’t th
ink. Boys. Men. She was confused about herself. She didn’t come home during the holidays, as she had a job there in a bar. Somehow, moving into her second year, she began to suffer from depression – and eventually anorexia – and then things started to fall apart.
She had to travel by train for a term’s work placement, and one night, she missed the last one home. She was sexually assaulted and left for dead by the station car park. The man was never caught. She did not tell us any of this at all, nor reach out for help. Not that I would have been any use. I learned all this later, of course. Much later. Far too late.
There was the knock at the door. The police. We learned that Lucy had gone missing. We drove up there in utter silence. By the time we arrived, they had found her body and dragged it from the river. I remember sobering up and walking back and forth, collecting her things, being surprised that she got into such a good university. I did not know how bright and smart and clever and funny she was. This is what friends said to my wife and me at her funeral. I think they were being kind. But truthful, too.
I remember the funeral. Shocked into sobriety, I listened to the vicar, and then one friend after another sobbing through their carefully rehearsed words about Lucy. Halfway, I decided to get up and say something. My wife watched me rise to my feet. By this time, she was far beyond anger. And sorrow and pity, too. She looked at me with the strangest expression. I stood there and said the words I should have said so many years ago. I. Loved. Lucy. But I stammered and choked on her name and struggled for breath until the vicar, assuming I was drunk, took me gently by the arm and guided me back to my seat.
And all I have left now are memories. More gaps than memories in truth. For a while after, as our marriage disintegrated completely, people would occasionally share a story about Lucy. All new to me.
Her left-behind clothes stayed untouched in her bedroom. Her clothes and possessions from university packed away in boxes in the garage.
And I have scrapbooks filled with her cards and drawings from when she was small. There is one there, from a Father’s Day when she was at nursery, with the spindly words “I love you” in her own hand, guided by a nursery assistant. I can hardly breathe when I read it. Yet I have to look at it now and then.
I lie here in my bed. Waiting for the morning.
The cold getting to my fingers and toes.
Yearning for sleep. And a better day tomorrow.
12
Wednesday, 27 November 1.17 Am
I am awake, suddenly, unexpectedly, and turn to my bedside clock to check the time. The illuminated screen shows it is 1.17 a.m.
Something has woken me. I don’t know what. I look down the bed. Fluffy is not there. I cannot remember if he came upstairs with me or not. My fragile, collapsing mind.
I think Rosie may have come through into the cottage. Called Fluffy to her. He has left me for her nice warm bed.
I lie here in the dark, my duvet up round my chin. Just listening. But there is silence in the cottage. Rosie must have shut the connecting door. She now lies back in her bed. Fluffy is by her feet. Maybe under the duvet with her. Snuggled up close.
I turn on my side, curling under my duvet, my arms around me, my legs drawn up into a foetal position. Waiting for warmth and for sleep to embrace me again.
As I descend back into the depths, there is another noise. Hardly anything, a metallic click, not even a clang, but I hear it in the cold night air. It disturbs me. Then there is silence again.
There is someone or something in the front garden. I get up out of bed, slip on my slippers, move to the window. Pull a curtain back slowly with my right hand. As carefully as I can. Just enough to see out through the nets.
In the moonlight, I see the hulking, slightly stooped silhouette of the Lump. He stands inside the front gate and then steps forward into the moonlight. Bobble hat. Overcoat. Boots. The first noise, the one that woke me, must have been the sound of him forcing the gate open against the snow. The second, just now, the click of the metal latch falling back into place behind him.
He stands there, unmoving, as if waiting to see if he has been heard. I am holding my breath, hoping he does not look up at my window and see me there.
He looks up. I stand stock-still. A statue.
His head moves ever so slightly, checking each window in turn. Two or three seconds at each. The same at mine.
And he turns his head towards the nookery. And I count in my head as he stands there. Ten. Twenty. Thirty seconds.
He moves now, one step at a time, slowly and surely, towards the nookery. At his sixth step, he moves out of my sight, too far down and too far to the right for me to see.
I do not know what to do.
Go and confront him, this Frankenstein’s monster of a man.
Or wait and listen, going down if I hear him breaking in.
I put my fingers on the handle at the side of the window, easing it up. Then reach down, lifting the latch that sits on the windowsill. I get ready to push the window open a crack so I can hear more clearly.
I am holding my breath again. Hoping the window does not creak. If it does, the Lump will hear it. I do not know what he will do if he does.
I feel sorry for him in a way. This strange and freakish boy-man. I fear him, too. His strength. His anger in a rage. The violence.
There is no creak. I breathe again, listening. My breath sounds loud inside my head.
I hear his heavy footsteps in the snow, the crunching of his steps into ice as he approaches the nookery.
I imagine him, by the window, peering in. I know why he is there. This grotesque creature who has never had a woman. Rosie. My so-called niece staying in the nookery. He wants her.
He is there now, looking through a crack in the curtains.
Watching as she sleeps.
I imagine what is going on inside his head.
I lean my forehead against the window, struggling with my thoughts. Then gather myself and step back so that he cannot see me. I count the seconds into one minute and towards two. I wonder if her duvet is flung back and she lies there naked. He is by the window, looking through, touching himself as he looks her up and down.
I imagine her rolling over in her sleep onto her back, and he watches her. She moves a little, and he steps forward, his face pressed against the window. His breath on the pane. She then moves again. And he stands, moving towards ecstasy. I shut my eyes and think my terrible thoughts.
Open them again as I hear the click of the gate.
The Lump glances back as he shuts the gate behind him. Then looks up at my window. Stands and stares. I am not sure if he knows I am there. I do not move; I just wait.
Suddenly, he is gone. I return to my bed.
Restless and more troubled than before.
I had my usual early morning walk with Fluffy, studiously ignoring any signs of activity at 1 Bluebell Lane. I enjoy our walks, despite the snow.
We listened to Radio 1 over breakfast (although it might as well be in Swedish for all I understand of the gibberish).
And we cleared the breakfast things together as usual. I washed. Rosie dried and put away. I like our companionable silences.
When we had finished, she stood there unmoving for a moment or two. I could tell by the way she cleared her throat, the way she hesitated, that she was going to ask something of me. I thought it might have been to do with the reading and writing lessons that we’d agreed to do one hour each morning and one hour each afternoon whilst we are shut away in the snow. But it was not.
“Would you teach me to cook?” she asked ever so politely.
I could not help but feel pleased. My Eliza Doolittle.
“Not cakes,” she added. “They’re nice but … meals, like … proper meals.”
I nodded and smiled. “Yes, of course.”
And so here we are now in the kitchen, after the usual morning of cleaning and tidying, ready to “give it a go”. I had said that spaghetti bolognese was an easy meal to cook, and she said she
liked it, so that’s what we are starting with.
Rosie asked if we could look up the recipe online so she could see the ingredients. She sat there all excited by the computer, turning it on and waiting for it to warm up and wheeze into life. She kept turning and looking at me, as if to say Hurry up! Then she looked blankly at the screen, which needed a password to go any further.
I said she could find the password at the top of my notebook – “my little book of passwords” as I call it – in the top drawer of the desk. She did and carefully entered Q1W2E3R4. She took an age searching the keyboard, pressing each key carefully, like a child. But she got there in the end.
I then clicked on Google on my home screen and did a search for “spaghetti bolognese” and went through each entry until I found one that listed and showed the ingredients. As I did this, I leaned in close to Rosie, my head to her left side and my right arm reaching around her to touch the keyboard. She sat very still, but seemed to be at ease with my close proximity.
“Onion,” she says cheerfully, pointing to one picture.
“O-n-i-o-n,” I reply. She nods.
“Carrot,” she says next. Quite jovially.
“C-a-r-r-o-t,” I answer. She nods.
And so we work our way through the ingredients, stopping and stumbling a little over cloves of garlic (where I did a brief impression of Dracula, and she looked back at me without comment) and pancetta cubes (neither of us knew what they were). I said they must be like OXO cubes, but she did not seem to know of them either.
There’s knocking at the front door.
Loud, demanding, insistent.
And I am striding through into the hallway and wrenching the door open. Furious at the interruption.
It is him again. The Lump. And I have no time for any of this nonsense. He wants this. He wants that. And he expects me to get it for him. To give it to him. And all of it just an excuse to come indoors. To have a closer look at Rosie. To smile vacantly at her. To say something inane. To stand there looking like the stupid freak that he is.
The Girl Downstairs Page 14