by Allan Watson
Mum went down to meet him and I saw her kiss the old man on the cheek and take hold of one of his hands. Across the road, a small crowd of children and not a few adults, stared unashamedly at the monster who was moving into their street. I didn’t blame them for staring. If I had been in their shoes I might have even booed or hissed or thrown rotten fruit. A minute later I heard voices in the hallway and the sound of the front door closing with an almost apocalyptic click. The devil himself had come to stay with us.
The first three days of his stay were a complete anti-climax. Grandfather Crone stayed in his bed, with mum taking his dinners through and feeding him. She also tended to his toilet needs which must have been very embarrassing for her. Brenda spent a lot of time at her friend’s house on the pretext of needing peace and quiet to study for her exams and mum seemed to approve of this tactic. When I however wanted to go out with my friends, I was made to feel guilty for leaving mum to cope on her own. James quickly lost his fear of our Grandfather and began helping carry food through to the bedroom. I never once put a foot in the devil’s lair. I wasn’t fooled by his senile invalid act. He was lulling us into a false sense of security, waiting his moment before showing his true colours.
By the end of the week he was joining us for meals which was a sight to behold. Quite often he would spit food back onto his plate and prod at it with his finger as if looking for something. What stayed in his mouth was ground to pulp as efficiently as any garbage disposal unit, and sometimes I caught myself wondering what would happen if I put my hand into that grinding orifice.
Mum would pretend not to notice these breaches of dinner table etiquette, and if I so much as wrinkled my nose in disgust at Grandfather Crone’s eating habits I would be harshly reprimanded later. After dinner was usually spent watching television with the sound turned louder than usual to mask the sound of the old man’s whistling and clicking noises. I couldn’t help but notice that at the merest hint of exposed female flesh on the screen, mum would spring from her chair and change the channel. Life was becoming a living hell.
After a week Grandfather Crone began to wander in the night. I could hear him out in the darkness of the hallway, his cane tap, tap, tapping on the linoleum. Sometimes he would halt right outside my bedroom and I would lie motionless with fear listening to the soft wet clicking sounds coming from the other side of the door. This would go on for half an hour or so before mum woke up and shepherded him back to his room. I began to wonder if she had put the bolt on the wrong door. It might have been me that Grandfather Crone wanted, not Brenda. He never actually entered my bedroom, but I was certain it was only a matter of time.
When I mentioned my fears to mum, she looked flustered and told me she had special medicine to stop Grandfather Crone from getting up in the night. When I asked what it was, she told me sharply to mind my own business, her sudden anger seeming out of place for such an innocent question. It made me curious. The thought of the old man being drugged to the eyeballs reassured me, but I knew I would still sleep uneasily while he was living in the house. Whatever mum gave him at bedtime seemed to work. The sound of his cane tapping along the linoleum could no longer be heard in the dead of night. I remained curious to know what she was administering to him, but she always waited until the old man was in bed before giving him his medicine. In my head I had a vision of a long hypodermic syringe and yards of thick rubber tubing snaking from glass demi-johns filled with bubbling liquids. If only it had been so simple.
Eventually the two weeks were up, but I did not celebrate. Grandfather Crone’s return to the hospital would only be a temporary thing. Once the doctors had made an official report on his behaviour he would be sent straight back to us. For good this time.
On his last night before returning to hospital, mum changed the routine by switching off the television and bringing Brenda’s record player into the living room. There was a flushed look to her face as she cheerfully set up the turntable and rooted around in a cupboard for a stack of old 78 rpm discs that had belonged to Gran Crone. For the next hour I had to endure the crackly performance of Jimmy Shand and his Band while Grandfather Crone excitedly tapped his cane in time to the music and made mewing kitten noises. The sound of the fiddles and accordions seemed to infuse new life into him, juicing him up as it were. James entered into the swing of things by doing a comical Highland Fling, and I cringed as mum and the old man laughed uproariously at my younger brother’s antics. At regular intervals Mum would vanish into the kitchen and I guessed she was drinking from a vodka bottle I knew was hidden beneath the sink.
Then came the worst bit. Lurching from her chair, mum drunkenly pulled Grandfather Crone to his feet and began dancing with him in the middle of the living room floor. It was a grotesque sight as they half jigged, half staggered around the room, narrowly missing knocking over the television. When the record ended I was commanded to keep the music going and reluctantly complied through fear that if I didn’t, I might be expected to dance with the old man. This went on for half an hour or so and only ended when Grandfather Crone’s foot hit the record player in the middle of the Gay Gordons, sending the stylus screeching across the shellac and ruining it in the process. There was no more music that night. Not for many years to come.
A few hours after I had gone to bed, I awoke to hear a familiar tapping outside my bedroom door. With dismay I realised mum had been drunker than I’d thought and forgotten to dope up Grandfather Crone with his special medicine. Across the room James snored peacefully, unaware there was a monster on the loose. I heard the old man’s hand slither across the wood of the door and I knew he was searching blindly for the door knob. The music had fortified him like an elixir of life and reawakened old appetites inside him. He may already have found Brenda’s bed empty (she was staying overnight again with a friend) and decided I would make do for his terrible needs. I was on the verge of screaming when mum’s footsteps padded unsteadily from the direction of her room, and I heard her say something to Grandfather Crone. Her voice was slurred with sleep and vodka. Grandfather Crone’s reply was an aggrieved sequence of whoops and whistles.
I felt sheer relief as the tapping receded back down the hallway with mum’s sleepy voice still murmuring the way you would talk to a small child. I heard them go into Grandfather Crone’s bedroom and the muffled creak of his bed as the old man settled back into it. Then mum came back out and I heard her pull a towel off the hand rail before returning to his room and closing the door. For some reason the towel bothered me. For five minutes I lay listening for mum to return to her own room, but I heard nothing. I wondered what sort of medicine it was that took such a long time to administer. Maybe she had to change his blood with some sort of paralysing fluid and then replace it all again in the morning. Perhaps the towel was to mop up the spilled blood.
My curiosity overrode my fear and I decided on impulse to get out of bed and open my bedroom door, hoping to hear better. Distantly I could make out mum still talking in that sleepy baby voice. Not thinking what I was doing, I crept forward step by step, aware that if she chose that moment to leave Grandfather Crone’s room I would be caught. But the door remained closed, and her voice continued in that same hypnotic tone as I reached the room and put my ear against its rough grain of the door. What I heard confused me.
‘Oh dear old daddy likes his medicine doesn’t he? Gets grouchy if he misses it. Thinks of nothing but his medicine...........’
She went on and on in this manner, saying the eerily lilting words like a spoken lullaby. In reply, Grandfather Crone’s grunts sounded almost tender and pitiful as if he were in pain. A kitten with a thorn in its paw. But there was something else too, another noise, something familiar. It was a sound I had only recently come to know well, and the fact it emanated from behind Grandfather Crone’s bedroom door made it almost too terrible to comprehend at first. It was the light snick of lubricated skin being manipulated back and forth over harder, more rigid flesh. I finally knew how mum was pacifying Grandfathe
r Crone at night.
CHAPTER 16
My mother’s face was just as it had been the last time I’d seen her – the flesh puffy and bruised black, her blood filled eyes bulging from their sockets as if being forced out from within. Around her neck she still bore the raw, livid mark of the rope she’d hung herself with. She sat on a wooden fold-away chair, the kind they used at school for assembly. She was wearing her best dress, black crushed velvet with an ornate silver brooch on her breast.
Memories flooded back for the first time in all those years. This was the terrible face I had gazed upon from the doorway of my home. I remembered standing there and seeing mum hanging from the top of the banister, her body slowly turning on the clothes line she had used as a noose. This was the image that had broken my mind like a fragile piece of porcelain and left me helpless and alone in the hinterlands of a mental breakdown.
I tasted salt on my lips and realised I was crying. Horror and self reproach overwhelmed me and I sank to my knees in front of that grim figure sitting in the chair. The old man’s cane fell from my hand and rolled across the bare floorboards. The smell of shit was so strong that I began to feel faint. I had a vague memory of someone saying her bowels had given way when she’d hung herself. The final indignity of death. Nevertheless, I reached out with my hand to stroke her face. I knew in whichever purgatory her damned soul resided, she could not see or feel me, but I still had to touch her, to show I cared.
My fingers came to rest on her cheek and the flesh felt like cold putty. I was sobbing unashamedly, great heaves of grief and sorrow. I tried to remember how it had all come about, but the memories were still too fragile to wrest and pull at. Mum had done something terrible and I had told someone. But what, who, and why? A hazy picture floated into my head of myself standing in a large room surrounded by stern faces. Mum’s face had been amongst them. What had I told them? Another image of mum running from the room with her hands covering her face. Then the picture broke up into a meaningless melange of buzzing lines like a distorted television signal.
I gazed into the swollen, blood-bruised visage before me, feeling the tallow-like skin beneath my fingers yield easily as if I were touching wet paper. The obscene, bulging orbs staring blankly back at me saw nothing. She had been dead too long. This I knew wasn’t the final answer to riddle of the old man. His part in things were still to be revealed. There was still the Garden of Remembrance to discover. No matter how much I feared the old man, I still had to find him and end this dreadful pantomime going on around me. I raised my hand and ran it through my mother’s hair before returning it to her cheek for one last gentle stroke. Abruptly, like a striking weasel, the corpse turned its head and bit my fingers, her teeth locking in a death spasm
With a scream of both pain and terror, I jerked my hand back, feeling the thin flesh of my knuckles being stripped to the bone as I ripped them from her mouth. The sudden violent movement unbalanced me and I sprawled backwards on to the floor, feeling shards of splintered shellac dig into my scalp and neck. This new pain was nothing to the scouring agony of my ruined fingers. I watched, unable to do anything else but moan and whimper, as my mother leaned forward to pick up the old man’s cane and slowly rise to her feet. She was smiling now, her lips painted with fresh red lipstick. Her eyes had gone milky white, and colourless fluid leaked from the corners of her stretched eyelids. Something dark ran down her bare leg and I knew it was shit.
I could only watch helplessly as she raised the cane and brought it crashing down onto my unprotected head. Before I sank into the infinite blackness, I heard the old man whistling with glee.
I opened my eyes from one darkness to another. Far away in this new darkness there was a flaring orange sun. I was viewing it from a far away planet; a barren, cold rock that knew only perpetual night. Gradually, lines began to flow from the darkness, creating shape and form, showing the outline of an empty room, the bright sun resolving into an orange street lamp glowing through the veiled window. Memory came flooding back and I remembered fragments of my days events. Alison McCulloch with her jeans at her ankles, the police station, Teri’s brother with his bad news, me going back to the flat for my car keys. Then I remembered my mother.
With a hiss of fear I turned towards the recess and saw only the silhouette of an empty chair. Almost gagging with terror, I crawled along the floor until I was sitting with my back pressed into the wall. For what seemed endless hours I sat in that spot hardly daring to breathe for fear she would come lurching from a dark corner of the room and renew her assault upon me. Little by little the terror ebbed away and my thinking process’s un-kinked themselves. I checked my fingers and found them to be whole and undamaged. Likewise my head seemed to have suffered no discernible injury, although the blow she had inflicted upon me with the cane should have burst my skull apart. I could only conclude that I had been dreaming or suffering an hallucination. The memory however seemed as real as anything I had ever experienced. The fact I was still in this derelict room suggested something had happened. I no longer knew what was real and what was not.
I rummaged in the cluttered space of my mind and found the memory of my mother’s suicide. At least I had that to cling onto. A fragment of my past unearthed. I wished I had more than just the event itself. I needed to know the circumstances surrounding the tragedy.
I turned my head towards the nimbus of the orange street lamp shining through the curtains. The light was important in some way, but at first I could not think why. Then it came to me with a rush of absolute panic. It was night time. It had been early afternoon when I came down here and now it was dark outside. How long had I been in this room? I pushed myself to my feet and pulled the curtain aside to see the time on my watch. It read a quarter to twelve. Sick dread rushed through me. I was to have gone to the hospital. I was to have told Teri her father was dead. I had done neither. The brittle hopes I had harboured earlier of still saving our marriage burst apart like rotten, cancerous bones.
I decided I would go to the hospital anyway to see Denise. I didn’t care if Teri berated me for not showing up earlier. I could deal with that. I just wanted to see my daughter, to be reassured she was still stable. I had no doubts she would come out of the coma eventually. Once the old man had finished with me he would release Denise from whatever mysterious condition ailed her. Everything came back to the old man. Teri wouldn’t understand that, her experience of the supernatural was limited to her stupid friend with her ridiculous Tarot cards and tea leaves. I hoped she would have already left the hospital and taken Alice to a hotel for the night. I wanted to see Denise alone without the inevitable hysterical confrontation.
I delved into my jacket pocket and pulled out my cigarettes. The nicotine calmed me and helped me to think better. The feeling that I had been responsible for mum’s suicide still resonated strongly within me. If only I could remember what I had done, I would be halfway to the Garden of Remembrance. I smoked the remainder of my cigarette before crushing it out on the bare floorboards with my shoe. I made sure I had the car keys and left the flat.
Standing at the foot of the stairs I checked my reflection in the mirror and saw a pale, gaunt man I hardly recognised. The day had taken its toll. There were streaks of grime on my cheeks and my hair was stiff and matted with dust. Even my clothes were dirty with crawling about on the floor. I was about to go upstairs and get washed and changed when outside in the street I heard a car pull up, followed by the muted hiss of a short wave radio. I swore under my breath, thinking it could only be Teri arriving in a taxi. She must have decided to confront me tonight instead of leaving it until the morning. I hesitated, unsure of whether to stand there and face her, or duck back into the derelict flat, where I could hide until she went upstairs. I had only seconds before her key slotted into the lock. Desperately I looked into the mirror again hoping my reflection would be of some help, but the grey man staring back looked as confused as I was.
I waited tensely for the front door to open. I could alread
y see the fury and anger on Teri’s face as she demanded an explanation as to why I had failed to turn up at the hospital. No doubt she would have phoned home and found out that Derek had entrusted me to pass on the bad news of her father’s death. This was going to be very difficult. To my surprise there came the sound of a heavy fist banging on the door, followed by an aggressive voice shouting, ‘Open up! Police!’
I was so taken aback I immediately did as the voice commanded me. Facing me was a bulldog of a man who looked like he was in the mood to bite. He wore a brown leather bomber jacket and a black sweater. The standard uniform for a television detective. Although probably only in his late thirties, his hair had gone completely at the front and top, and he had compensated for this with a bushy moustache and sideburns. Behind him stood a sullen man who looked more suited to standing under bridges at three in the morning and asking stray passers-by if they had a light. Uninvited, Bushy Moustache took a step over the doorway forcing me to take a step back. A warrant card was quickly flashed in my face and just as quickly vanished again inside his pocket.
‘Detective Inspector Thomas Moore. Dundee CID,’ he growled. ‘Are you Matthew McVey?’
‘That’s me,’ I replied, frantically trying to think why two CID men might be wanting to talk to me. Guiltily I glanced at the shattered lock on the downstairs flat door. It briefly crossed my mind that someone might have seen me pull the curtain aside, someone who knew the flat should be empty. The man’s intense stare didn’t budge from my face.
‘Matthew McVey, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder. Get in the car. If you resist arrest or try to run away, both myself and my colleague will consider it our sworn duty to kick you to within an inch of your miserable fucking life. Now move it.’
