by Greg James
He closed his eyes against what was happening, and his fingers dug into the moulting stuff of the seats. They sank in so deep that when the train next jolted, he tore something out. A soft cry came from somewhere beneath.
Other sounds were occurring beside those made by the train: movement, breath, doing something out there, in here, close to him, coming closer, much closer. The train was slowing to a stop, thank God, as something happened to John’s face.
He felt them crawling across it with the dry, careful dexterity of a spider. Fingers –moving over him, catching in his hair, pulling at his clothes, seeking to unclothe him, to make him naked. A hand grasped and pinched at one of his nipples until it hurt enough to bleed. Numerous fingernails scratched lines into the bare skin of his throat.
The lights went on, off. On. Off again. And John saw, through the staccato haze, where the fingers came from: nudes wearing the remains of strangers’ faces. Their eyes were lambent pits, black as spider-nests. Their fingers were as wet as their eyes, which constantly wept. He flinched and they became still, stuck in place, like a photograph. The train’s brakes shrieked, and they came crowding towards him. This time, their fingers brushed his skin, rather than scratching at it. There was only the pungent smell of them, and the feeling of them being so near, as the sound of the brakes died. The train came to a stop. The lights came on, stayed on, and John saw with clarity the remnants gathered around him. All of them were cracked and worn. They did not move, nor stir. They never should, or could, have done.
They touched me, he thought, they wanted to hurt me. I could feel it.
The train began moving again and then was slowing. They were out of the tunnel, so the rhythm faltered and the carriages came to a halt with a hiss at St John’s Wood. Everything steadied itself. John got up and exited into stillness, into the world as he knew it to be. He bit down on his lip hard, tasting a bead of blood. He watched the train pull away. No sign of them remained in the carriage, only the faces of a few ordinary people who had climbed aboard.
Tears streamed from his eyes, and he remembered how they’d wept from their fingers as well as their faces. The world shook along with him as another train tore out of the darkness and settled itself alongside the platform. People disembarked. Others stayed on board. They all wore strangers’ faces. Some looked at him as he doubled over, feeling sick, and he wished they’d look away.
He clutched something in his hand, something he’d torn out of the seat lining. Opening his fingers slowly, he peered at what was there. A perfectly smooth, bone-white plastic eye, bloodily beaded with residue. The eye of a remnant. John threw it onto the tracks with a yell and watched as a smoke-grey mouse scuttled out to gnaw on it.
A voice inside – bitter, bleak, undefeated – told John Greyerson this was really happening to him, and he should have expected nothing more, and perhaps something a lot less, from life. The voice left him weeping on the platform at St John’s Wood and wishing a number of things upon himself.
John arrived home that night and collapsed into bed, going on to dream of his room as an under-lit stage. Daria was there, gagged and bound to a chair by intricate ropes, and he was the one silently and ruthlessly flensing her throughout the night.
He awoke the moment knife touched bone.
Chapter Seven
The next morning, the doorbell rang, and John found Daria standing on the doorstep, dressed in a long, dirty overcoat. Her shoulders were hunched against the cold wind blowing down the street. Her legs were bare, and she was wearing a pair of scuffed Doc Marten boots. John didn’t know what to say to his much-wanted but uninvited guest. She could be naked under the overcoat, he thought.
“It’s too warm here,” she said. “I need to go somewhere cold.”
“Somewhere cold?”
He noticed her peeling nail varnish as she held out her small hand. “Take me somewhere cold, please.”
“Let me get my coat. I think I know a good place.”
Hampstead cemetery was quiet on Sunday afternoon. They passed a few people walking dogs down the footpath from Horcroft Road to Fortune Green, which bisected the cemetery. One old man nodded hello and smiled, showing teeth as crooked and stained as his dog’s. John nodded back and tried not to look at the old man’s teeth, or the shadows under his eyes.
Daria walked beside him, with a lightness to her skin that made him think of something pale caught on brambles. Only the brambles were malignant, black-boned fingers tearing away at precious threads. Sometimes he wished he smoked, or drank more than he did – that was how other people escaped such thoughts. How could he have lasted this long without finding his own way to escape? There was always the alluring lights, he thought, they’d be waiting in his dreams tonight, wouldn’t they?
John found his eyes wandering over the gravestones and vaults of the cemetery, the inscriptions worn away, the flowers withered into brown stalks, and the photographs rain-spotted and blotchily peeling.
Photographs, they’re important. Something that says I was here, and I am gone now, but while I was here, someone cared enough to take a photograph of me. It was a sign of love – one of the few left that still meant something. No-one takes a photograph of someone they want to forget. But, John thought, people also burn photographs.
That’s what Mum had done during one of her fits, and it was the only time he’d cried in front of her. He’d burned his hands trying to stop her. It felt like death of a sort, seeing his childhood memories reduced to ashes and smoke. She forgot about it soon enough – one of the good things about her illness, perhaps. John never forgot, and he never truly forgave her. You can forgive the ill and the unsound so much for what they do, but there are limits, and you never know where those limits are until they’ve been crossed and there’s no going back. There aren’t any photographs left of me, he thought, so when I’m gone, I will be truly dead.
John and Daria came to a patch of earth with grass growing upon it, which was not as long or as abundant as the rest. The soil looked fresher too, more recently disturbed. Nothing else marked this piece of ground except for the absence of a marker.
“Daria?” Her name was enough of a question.
She looked at the ground, crouched down, reached out her hand and laid it out on the earth. Her fingers dug into it, raking at it until the soil was deeply gouged. She closed her fingers into a fist and tore up a handful of earth and grass.
“It’s me,” she said. “I’m here. Underneath.”
John swallowed and his arms moved at his side, but he still didn’t know what to do, or to say. “How?” was all he could manage.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
“But you asked me to.”
“They’re watching you.”
“Who’s watching me?” he asked, looking around.
“Others like me. The dead.”
“The dead,” he said. “So you’re dead too?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Then why I can see you?”
“Because everyone can.”
“Everyone can see the dead? Really?”
“Not all the time, it comes and goes, but we’re here. We’re like old photographs, waiting to fade away.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re there every morning, afternoon, and night. On the bus, on the tube, the person walking down the street you avert your eyes from. Haven’t you ever seen someone weeping so hard it hurt to watch and listen? Or, heard someone shouting and screaming in the street for no reason at all? What about the sounds that come through the walls when you’re off sick from work? The cars that hiss by your window on a wet night, which’re never there when you look outside? They’re us, always us. That’s the thing about the dead, you see, we’re like we were when we were alive. We keep on going even though we’re lost, and the living just pass us by. You see us, but you don’t notice we’re there.”
Daria stopped talking, and John reached out to touch her. She moved away from h
im, out of reach. “But those things I’ve seen ... the ones without faces?”
“They’re the old ones, like photographs where only the outlines are left. The shape’s still there, just. The memory, a bit, but nothing else. They’re clinging on, and they don’t know how, or why, or to what. It’s like they’re blind, but don’t know what they want to say or do. Poor sods.”
He breathed out. “You’re not making me feel better about this.”
“I’m not here to make you feel better, John.”
He looked down at the ground, at the hole Daria had made with her fingers. Something white showed through the soil; it could have been bone. Somewhere nearby, a dog began barking harshly, and suddenly he was alone in the cemetery. Her words were as lost to him as she was.
John went home alone, sat down in his room, and listened to his flatmates when they came in. The sound of their voices in the walls, moving around the flat, accompanied by doors opening, closing, closing and opening. Coming and going. Going and coming. Like the living. Like the dead. John Greyerson remained still. The world went on without him, and he stayed the same. He knew his place. He’d missed something, somewhere, when he was younger, and so he’d been left behind, waiting for something that never came. He sat there until day turned into night.
For the first time in years, he missed his Mum. She was there in the holes she’d made in his heart. Sometimes, he wept for her. Other times, he wept for himself. Life for him, as for so many, was an ongoing reconciliation of two disparate halves. Mother and son. Love and life. Light and the dark.
When John was a child, Mum used to take him to Richmond Park. The world of the park spoke to him in a language of its own, the small hills, the trees, the grass and its undergrowth. It told him to follow a stream of water for hours until his skin was raw from sunburn. It asked him whether there were fairy-circle toadstools to be found in the copses – and there were, and he found them. There was something about how the trees clung to one another there, their boughs and branches intertwining like dead lovers’ fingers. The shadows in the woods had an intimacy about them that he felt should not be broken. He told Mum some of these things, but she wasn’t very interested. Those afternoons sometimes went on into evening, and they led him to wonder at the stars, and the twilight that came before. So many simple things, and all of them beautiful to his child-eyes. Whatever else happens as we grow, John thought, and find our place in the everyday world, a shadow falls between us and the world we once spoke to alone. It becomes a gentle ghost, a warm memory, a time to which we cannot return. Few could say when that moment occurred, but for John Greyerson. it was as clear to him as the day he was told his Dad had died.
He remembered how Mum’s voice had changed after that day, how it would cut through the park and find him wherever he was. She would appear soon after it, against the dusk, wringing her hands and calling his name over and over and over again. She’d lost Dad, and she couldn’t bear to lose him too, even from her own sight for a minute.
The years of his childhood became his teenage years, and the open spaces of Richmond Park became the walls of their small flat in Burnt Wood. As he grew older, she drew him in closer. He spent his twenties as her carer until she died. He wept for her as he hadn’t wept for Dad, because the tears he shed on his thirtieth birthday were of relief, not loss. Mum was gone. The pain was over, and his life could begin, though he had little idea of how he would live in the world without her.
It took five years of temping to get his full-time job in the post room at the Engineering Institute. It had been such hard work to get that far, to turn his days into repeating patterns of franking, printing, photocopying, answering telephone calls, sorting and dispatching post, and sending e-mails.
Hard work, he thought, was more like life and effort pissed away. There was nothing out there except Life’s hungry, gnawing mouth emptily shrieking about a pain that’s no longer pain and a hole where a hole should not be.
John’s dreams were his only solace. They were not of darkness, but of lights that went on and on forever. They blinded him with their brightness and burned him with their cold. They sang a soft, silent song of pain, and yet were so very beautiful. He did not want to awaken and leave them behind, ever. He did not want to go back to face the morning and a world without alluring lights, but all too soon, they waned, and each night they cast him out to struggle through the mundane darkness of the waking world.
*
John began to take evening walks through Hampstead cemetery, in the hope of seeing Daria again. He didn’t know why, but he was sure he’d never again see her at the flat.
As he passed through the porte-cochère of the chapel and walked among the gravestones, he thought of Mum. She’d wanted to pass on in spring, when it was warmer and things began to grow again. Life didn’t seem to allow sufficient room to come to terms with the passing of a parent. Mum was not a believer in such things, but John might have said that something of her spirit inhabited every room of their old place. He’d had to sell it. He couldn’t bear living there without her.
Now, he’d lost Daria as well, though he wasn’t sure why, or what she’d meant to him. She’d helped him to recapture something of himself, he was sure, but he couldn’t put a name to what it was.
Do I know myself so little?
John began his cemetery walks as the sun was just beginning to set and colour the sky, and he made his way home as the last of its light ebbed away. It was enough time for a good turn or two around the cemetery.
When November passed into December, John began to notice something curious about the cemetery: that the shadows of trees stood as leaning sentries beside the paths ahead, which seemed more disturbed than usual, as if many feet had been passing back and forth, some of which were unshod, judging by the footprints left behind.
One night – he could not remember which one exactly – John saw a shape among the trees. At first, he took it to be a gravestone that had suffered from subsidence, but, as his eyes adjusted, the shadows assumed more natural definitions and he saw it was not a gravestone. It was a form, crouching low against the ground, as if in fear of being seen. For some reason, the sight of it dried out his mouth. John took a step forward, and the toe of his shoe cracked against a stone. The form arose from its crouching position, something loose and black clinging to its white, stick-like limbs. It turned towards him, and the low light of evening caught its face, illuminating something pallid and familiar. John fled the cemetery at a pace that left him sweating and breathless by the time he reached home.
In the morning, after some sleep, John saw things differently. It’d been the wind, some rags caught in the branches of a tree. Nothing to worry about; except for the face he’d seen. There had been no face. Nothing had been there in the first place.
John returned to the cemetery by daylight at the weekend. The wet grass was stiff with a frost of morning dew as he made his way between gravestones and vaults to the trees where the figure had been. He searched for about an hour until he found what he was looking for: a strip of frayed, black rag hanging from a tree branch. He placed the rag in his pocket, wondering whether a religious group had been using the cemetery for something or other, although that didn’t explain the face. Nothing he thought of could explain that.
It could have been a mask.
Chapter Eight
Daria entered the reception of the Old Lock Hotel and immediately wished she could turn around and go back out again, but this was the place she’d been told to come to by the staff at Euston – the only cheap place they could think of for a one-night stay.
The people sitting on worn armchairs around a coffee table did not look like guests. The faces of the men were ruddy, raw, and creased. Their greying hair was cropped short, and they wore matching black bomber jackets, necklaces of plated gold, and army boots. She glimpsed the black-and-white of a swastika emblazoned on one man’s shirt. The woman sitting with them, wrapped in a faded dressing gown, had seen better days and was
missing some teeth. Her ratty hair was dyed an unconvincing, livid shade of orange. Daria could smell stale lager in the air as she walked across carpeting that stuck to her shoes, and she could feel the small eyes of the men on her – “Get yer tits out, love. Come on, give us a show. Show us some gash.”
The woman let out a long sigh and shuffled over to the reception desk, in her threadbare slippers.
“I’d – I’d like a room please,” Daria said.
The woman looked at her with dull eyes. “Would you now?”
She had an accent Daria couldn’t place: heavy, glottal, and serious.
“D’you have a room spare for tonight?”
“Yes, we do,” the woman said. “Fifty pounds, please.”
Daria made a face.
The woman noticed. “Sixty pounds,” she said.
“I don’t have sixty pounds on me.”
“Then why do you think you can pay for a room?”
“Don’t you have anything cheaper?”
The woman sighed, making a show of her hands. "Okay, we have a room for less. You can have it for thirty.”
“I only have twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five is okay.”
She paid, and the woman passed her the room key. “Go up the stairs, turn left, it’s the last door on left.”
“Thanks,” Daria said, trying to sound polite.
She climbed the stairs, noticing the thin paint clinging to the walls in streaks and the air that smelled of the place being closed for too long. The carpet on the stairs looked unwashed. She came to the door of her room and opened it. Sourness wafted out, and the hotel seemed to ease in around her.
Must be the journey, she thought, as she closed the door and kicked her boots off. She turned the light on and sat down on the creaking bed. A skin of dust covered the room. Veins of spider-web clung to the corners.
Daria didn’t care. It was better than sleeping in the station. The people who ran Madame Jo’s had said they’d help her out with kit and whatnot for the performance tomorrow night. They’d pay her in cash as well, so she’d be able to get back home; that was something.
