by Allan Watson
As we ruefully rubbed our sore heads, our eyes met, and the comical aspect of the incident caused us both to burst out laughing. I’m not sure how it happened, but this outburst of laughter suddenly turned to passion and suddenly we were kissing in a way we hadn’t done in years. The inside of Teri’s mouth held the bitter taste of the wine, but I relished it. My hands were in her hair, twisting and teasing it, forcing her face against mine so hard that our lips would be puffy and bruised later on.
We sat perched on the edge of the couch, our mouths locked together in a communion of lips and tongues for a full ten minutes. It was I who took the next step by sliding my hand onto her breast, feeling the blunt nipple trace against my palm through her bra and T-shirt. I half feared Teri might call a halt at this point, but she only moaned low in her throat and eased herself back on the couch until she was in a semi-reclining position. My hands worked in tandem, one pulling her T-shirt from the front of her jeans and snaking up beneath the cotton, the other frantically attacking the brassiere catch, succeeding more through brute force rather than polished finesse.
As I cupped Teri’s naked breast in my hand I could not help myself from momentarily comparing her soft, full flesh with Rita’s petite breasts. As if she had picked up my stray thought, Teri clashed her teeth against mine, reprimanding me for not worshipping her body alone. We must have spent almost half an hour in that uncomfortable position. I hardly noticed the time, my world solely existed of kisses and breasts. We had become fully regressed lovers, reminiscing an early date. My erection, trapped against Teri’s leg was becoming painful and once more it was I who pushed the boundaries further out by undoing the button and zip of her jeans. I planed my hand over her belly, slipping my fingers under the easy defence of her underwear, briefly encountering the stiff, brush of her pubis before Teri stopped my hand with her own. My disappointment was so great I could have hawked it up and spat it out in a huge, bitter lump.
Teri wriggled her way off the couch and onto her feet while I tried hard not to show the frustration I felt. I had gained more ground than I had hoped and there was no point in acting like a sulking child, an action which might have undone all the good work that had gone before. Then I realised Teri was still holding tightly onto my hand and was pulling me to my feet. She wore a lopsided, almost bashful smile as her eyes indicated we should continue upstairs. I did not need to be coaxed. Trying to make as little noise as possible in case it disturbed the girls, we giggled like teenagers as we climbed the stairs and entered the main bedroom. Only then did Teri let go of my hand in order to cross the room and close the curtains.
I wondered if she would regret this hasty surrender in the morning. Even if she really did intend taking me back, I’m sure her game plan included keeping me waiting until the end of the week before sleeping with me, instead of offering herself like a hurriedly written acceptance speech. Come morning I knew there would be an emotional backlash driven by self reproach. These small concerns evaporated when Teri quickly discarded her clothes and lay on the bed. I too, shed my clothes, dropping them where they fell and joined her. She spread her legs as my hand stroked her, parting her, feeling her slickness enfold my probing fingers. I gasped out loud as her hand finally encircled my erection, making me shudder with desire.
Then Teri was pulling me on top of her, foreplay abandoned in preference of brute friction. In my desperation to penetrate her, I twice clumsily jarred myself on her pubic bone before she reached her hand down and effortlessly performed the carnal trigonometry that guided me inside her. That first stroke felt like the sweetest moment of my entire life. It was a small death - a blood-bruised rapture of pain and love. It was almost unbearable. Teri’s hands were on my buttocks, pulling me in as deeply as possible, making me fight to withdraw for the second stroke. It was never to happen. Even as I drew back, there came a loud crash from the bedroom next door, followed by the sound of Alice’s loud, terrified wailing.
Teri was first to react, pushing me away from her and dragging her T-shirt over her head. As she ran into the hall, I was still struggling to pull my jeans on. It shames me to speak it, but I hated Alice at that moment. I felt as though something had been torn away from me. I caught sight of my face in the dressing table mirror and it was fixed in an ugly grimace. It was this grotesque image that made me remember who I was and sent me scurrying to the narrow bedroom.
I had already guessed the crash was Alice falling out of the top bunk. Teri was kneeling over Alice where she lay crying on the floor. I heard her make soothing noises to Alice, quietening her until only muted sobs remained. I couldn’t tell if all the noise had woken Denise, as the blanket from the top bunk had fallen down, covering the lower bed and making it look like a sleeping berth on an old overnight train. I was reaching to pull it aside when I noticed the safety rail from the top bunk was missing. This shouldn’t have been possible. I had checked it earlier and remembered four heavy brass screws securing it to the bed frame. It was a sturdy slab of wood, and I found it hard to imagine Alice managing to dislodge it. As Teri gently ran her hands over Alice’s limbs making sure nothing was broken, I looked for the safety rail and was shocked to see it standing neatly propped in the corner of the room. The rail had been deliberately removed.
As I puzzled over this mystery, Teri sat Alice up and words were beginning to make themselves clear through the shuddering sobs.
‘A-a-a-skeleton pulled m-me out of b-bed!’
While Teri stroked Alice’s hair and shushed her like a baby, I had a sudden mental picture of a loose jointed bag of bones, cackling to itself while unscrewing the safety rail with screwdriver. It should have been funny, but it frightened me in a way I couldn’t explain. Someone had definitely removed the rail. But who? The rail had been in place when I kissed the girls goodnight, and neither Teri nor I had been in the room since. That only left Denise. Leaning forward I threw the blanket back up onto the top bunk and found the lower bed empty. Denise wasn’t there.
While I stood scratching my head, trying to puzzle things out, Teri hoisted Alice up and hissed at me, ‘For God’s sake, Matt. Don’t just stand there. See where Denise has got to. She’s probably wandered into the other room.’
I crossed the landing and pushed open the door to the room with louver wardrobes. I could see that neither of the twin beds were occupied. I moved into the room proper and it was then I noticed the smell. It was the faint stench of an open sewer, as if a soil pipe had cracked somewhere behind the walls. I ignored the smell for the moment, the priority was to find Denise wherever she was hiding. She had to be somewhere in the house, but deep down inside, I had the horrible feeling that my daughter had been spirited away to a place I would never find her. I lay flat on the floor between the beds and checked beneath finding nothing but dust balls. From next door I could hear Teri singing softly to Alice, an old lullaby about cradles falling from tree tops. An unintentional irony under the circumstances.
I pushed myself back to my feet and moved over to the louvered closets. The ripe sewer smell seemed much stronger here and I had a sudden mental flash of Denise huddling in the corner of a closet covered in shit and blood. The image was so disturbing that I almost tore the louvered door from its hinges. The closet contained nothing except my clothes. Denise wasn’t in the second one either and although I knew the third closet was locked, I still tried the handle, feeling a renewed surge of frustration as it resisted me. Panic was beginning to race like fever through me. The alcohol in my system making it difficult to think clearly. I felt far more drunk than I should have on only four bottles of beer. The whole situation was becoming surreal, like one of those dreams where you run in slow motion and never seem to get anywhere.
Feeling defeated and tired, I rested my head against the wooden slats of the locked closet door and discovered where the source of the stench came from. The smell was so strong here that I almost gagged. I turned to see Teri staring at me from the doorway. Her eyes which had sparkled earlier on in the evening, now looke
d bloodshot and bleary. I could see by the way she wrinkled her nose in disgust that she too had noticed the smell. Teri folded her arms across her chest and shivered.
‘Well?’ she said in a flat tone.
I think we’ve got a broken waste pipe somewhere,’ I replied stupidly.
Teri’s face stretched into an exaggerated mask of disbelief. ‘Never mind about the broken pipe! Where is Denise? Remember her? Your daughter?’
I shook my head like an imbecile. ‘Not here. Maybe she went downstairs. I’ll go look.’
As I passed Teri in the doorway I got the impression she was using every last ounce of her self control not to lash out at me and I could feel her eyes bore into my back all the way down the stairs. There was another surprise when I pushed open the living room door. The room was in total darkness, although I was certain that when Teri had led me up to bed, both the light and the television were still on. In the dim illumination from the hallway, I saw Denise sitting at the dining table in the little niche. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes open. Her gaze was vacant and unfocused as if she had been sleep walking or in a trance.
Before going to Denise, I called up to Teri that all was well, and from the top of the stairs I heard a sharp escape of breath before Teri’s footsteps padded into the main bedroom. Moving slowly and quietly, I took a seat at the small table and as gently as possible I stroked my daughter’s hair and whispered her name. I had been told the trick to deal with sleepwalkers was to get them to first recognise your voice, reassure them, and lead them back to bed without waking them. At first Denise only continued staring at the table top showing no sign that she was aware of my presence.
After a couple of minutes I was beginning to worry about having to bodily lift her, when she said very softly, ‘He touched me, Daddy.’ She raised her head and turned to face me. Her eyes still held that vacant, shuttered look I had seen before in shock victims. Down in her lap her hands were clutching at the hem of her night-dress, rubbing the cotton back and forwards between her fingers as if trying to shred the material. Again she said in that creepy monotone, ‘He touched me, Daddy.’
I felt uneasy and more than a little scared. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. It would have been better if Teri had come down the stairs instead of leaving me to deal with this on my own. I could still have gone up and asked for her help, but I had the distinct impression that I had plummeted back into my wife’s bad books. If I had to tell her I was unable to get a nine year old girl back to bed without her assistance, she was going to be seriously annoyed.
The sense of wrongness was unnerving me, nurturing my uneasiness into distinct fear. It was like things were swimming beneath the surface in my head. Eventually I worked up the courage to ask Denise the question I didn’t really want the answer to.
‘Who touched you Denise?’
Her eyes fluttered closed and she said in a whisper, ‘He said you forgot all about him. He said you locked him away in the dark.’
For some reason a vivid image of Denise’s drawing slipped into my mind. The one with the green, rectangular garden with the strange smudges at the bottom. I felt an old memory stir in its sleep and then it was gone. There was something disturbing about the way Denise was still twisting at the hem of her night-dress. It struck me to ask her where this man from her dream had touched her, but before I could speak, a sharp tapping noise behind me made me whirl around. It was an old, familiar sound that made my skin crawl. Tap, tap, tap.
I tracked the sound across the room to the window. Taking a deep breath, I pulled the curtain aside to find a large, black headed gull sitting on the outside window ledge. Its eyes glittered malevolently as it brought its beak up and rapped on the glass. Tap, tap, tap. I made a fist and knocked on the window with my knuckles, feeling the glass rattle loosely in the frame. The gull opened its beak wide as if grinning insolently and flew off. I closed the curtain with shaking hands and turned to find Denise slumped forward, little snores letting me know she was truly asleep.
I lifted her and held her tenderly in my arms, carrying her up the stairs and placing her into bed beside Teri and Alice. I couldn’t help thinking that it should have been me sleeping there. I wondered if Teri and I would pick up from where we had left off tomorrow but doubted it. Alice falling out of bed had changed things in a way it was difficult to define. Something had re-ignited Teri’s anger. I felt like I had gone two steps forwards and three back. From the bed, Teri gave me a look I couldn’t read before rolling over and draping her arm around Alice.
I entered the room with the louver wardrobes and found the smell had gone completely. Even when I pressed my nose against the locked door there was nothing. I undressed and slipped into the bed nearest the window. When I opened my eyes in the morning I wanted to feel sunlight on my face.
In the darkness of the room, images began tormenting me, stopping me from dropping off. They hung behind my eyes, lingering a few seconds before being whisked away and replaced with another. Teri’s breasts. Denise’s green rectangle of a garden. The safety rail standing propped in the corner. Alice jumping out from behind a gravestone. The squat menace of Blackfriars Chapel. The fountain in Market Street filled with blood. The locked closet door bursting open to reveal......
In the end I threw back the sheets and masturbated grimly, hoping to find sleep in the drowsy after-glow of orgasm. It was a mechanical and unfeeling act. I fantasised about fucking Rita and didn’t even feel guilty about it. As I dropped off, I heard the distant sound of tapping. I thought the gull had returned to annoy me, but at the very last moment, as my finger tips lost their grip on the narrow ledge of wakefulness, I realised the tapping was coming from the locked closet.
CHAPTER 4
When I was six years old, my family went on holiday to Ayr. A happy family of five. Mum and dad, James, Brenda, and me. James would have been two and still in his buggy. It was the last holiday my dad ever spent with us. He was ill the next year with cancer, and by the following summer he was dead. I keep memories of this holiday like frozen snapshots of time in my head.
I remember buying a red and black ladybird that I could make to run up and down my jacket using a tiny magnet. I remember plastic windmills on sticks, sloppy joes, jelly shoes, and beanie hats. I remember measles (Brenda got them two days before we came home), I remember squirming ragworms that dad dug from the sand, and most of all, I remember the rich holiday scent of seaweed and chip fat.
Most of our holiday was spent walking, we did little else but march aimlessly around the town. I felt jealous of James sitting happily in his buggy, while Brenda and I tramped along beside it. This was Robert Burns country, and dad took great pleasure pointing out the taverns Burns had frequented. When we visited the famous bard’s white washed cottage, dad bought me a small book containing the poem Tam O’Shanter. How he expected me to read it, I don’t know. I was then barely capable of reading simple English without having to wrestle with the difficult translation of old Scots brogue.
When we had covered every spare inch of pavement in Ayr, we took the bus to its outlying attractions. I was allowed to sit with dad upstairs when he went up to have a smoke, most likely even then feeding the creeping death in his lungs. We visited Culzean Castle, Electric Brae, Prestwick, and one time as far south as Girvan. At night, when we children were too exhausted to do anything else but fall into our beds and sleep, mum and dad would sit downstairs in the lounge of the boarding house and have a drink together. They knew we were safe enough, and if James woke up and started crying, Brenda would go down and tell them.
Halfway through the week, mum’s parents, Gran and Grandfather Crone came to spend a few days with us. Gran Crone was a lovely old woman with a seamed face and twinkling blue eyes. Grandfather Crone was a different story altogether. He was a thin stick of a man who brought terror into our young lives with his funny ways. Mum said he had been injured in the war fighting for his country. She told us that he was harmless and we shouldn’t be afraid
of him. Dad wouldn’t speak to Grandfather Crone at all, choosing instead to ignore the old man despite mum’s reproachful stares.
Grandfather Crone’s appearance didn’t help matters. His face, like his body, had an emaciated look to it, and his head was disproportionately small for his torso. He grinned constantly as if a funny joke was being repeated over and over again in his head. Quite often he drooled and his eyes sometimes rolled wildly until only the whites showed. He couldn’t talk, but he could make noises - grunts and hoots and whistles like an animal. At meal times Gran Crone would take his food up to him in his room. Apparently his eating habits were not a pretty sight.
The night before Gran and Grandfather Crone left, we all took a stroll down towards the Esplanade where the old pavilion stood. It had been raining and the evening sky was filled with flat, amalgam coloured light. We were walking along Main Street which bridged the wide harbour inlet. Halfway across the metal bridge we stopped, and dad lifted Brenda up onto his shoulders to look over the rivet studded bridge wall. Mum and Gran Crone were busy making James laugh, blowing on the windmills wedged into the sides of his buggy, the red and yellow plastic sails making a whirring, clicking noise like a swarm of locusts as they spun. Grandfather Crone stood facing away from the water, grinning at the passing traffic.
Ten yards from where we stood, something glittered brightly on the pavement. Without thinking, I walked towards it. In my mind it was a shiny coin waiting to be claimed. Finders keepers - Losers weepers. I had been warned never to wander away, but the treasure called to me with a voice of its own, using the horrible, tepid light to draw me in.
