Until next time.
This is Six Stories.
This has been our fourth.
SCOTT KING AUDIO LOG 5
00:00:00
Man
You tell yourself that it’s logical that the tapping has started. Of course you hear it, too. You hear it when you’re editing the podcast, sat in the studio for those endless nights, waveforms undulating like strange jellyfish. The series without an end. You sit and stare sometimes, just listen to the interviews over and over. Just behind the words, the descriptions of tapping, you hear it. Always from another room; under the floor, the attic. It’s as if it’s playing with you.
Once you’ve see Anne, you know the tapping will go. You don’t know how, but it will.
Because if it doesn’t, if after this series is done and the dreams and the darkness and the tapping are still there…
You don’t even want to think about it.
29th August 2018, 10:02 a.m.
OK, I’m here, at Anne’s house. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to be somewhere in my life.
I’m driving as I record this. I need to get back. There’s so much I want to get down. I couldn’t write anything, it was too much. So I need to get this out here and now.
Anne was as glad to see me as I was to see her. We embraced. We stood on her doorstep and held each other. Like old friends, like long-lost relatives. I’ve never felt such a strong connection with anyone before.
I made the tea. Anne asked about the dreams. She stroked my hand, told me she understood. I wanted to cry. I felt like I could cry without being judged. But I held back.
Anne wanted to talk about herself today. She said she had a couple more things that would help with the case. I wanted to ask her to tell me those first, but I had to wait.
Anne said that she wanted to talk to me about men. It was a curveball, and she told me to prepare for a hard listen.
So she began by telling me about a man she met when she was in her mid-twenties. She said he was around her age, maybe a little older. They met at work, she said. He was charming, polite, a real gentleman. He courted her, gave her flowers. She’d never been given flowers before. She wasn’t anything special, she said. She was run-of-the-mill. She said this man breathed light and life into her. This man built up her confidence, one brick at a time. He made her feel like she was worth something.
I listened, waiting for the punch.
It came in slow motion, more vicious than I could possibly have anticipated.
Anne said that she would have done anything for this man, walked over hot coals for him. She said she felt like she owed him something. She said that this notion made her put up with a lot from him.
It started small, as these things do. He began to make comments – little suggestions about her clothes, how he liked to see her in certain things. This moved on to telling her what would make him happy and insisting she wore it. ‘Have you got anything new?’ he would ask. That was code: it meant that Anne should wear something low cut, revealing. That’s what he liked. It made him happy. This was the man that had made her believe she was pretty when no one else had given her a second glance, so she did it for him. She never felt truly comfortable, but because he told her she was beautiful, bragging about her, showing her off, he made her somebody.
Anne’s degenerative eye disease meant she had to wear glasses with thick lenses. The man always moaned about them, telling her she was much prettier without them. This soon became insistence, so Anne began to struggle on in a blurry world. It was easier to spend more time at home then. ‘It made him happy,’ she said.
He then wanted to know where she was when she wasn’t at home or work. When they had days off together, he liked her to stay where he could see her. It wasn’t her, he said. He just didn’t trust other people.
He became more and more insistent that she tell him who she had spoken to, even if it was customers. He began to isolate her; he told her that her friends were bad people, that he didn’t like her hanging around with them. And Anne said she agreed – they were bad. Drug dealers and ne’er-do-wells. But there were also good people, she says, good friends. He hated them, too. He told Anne that they were talking about him behind his back. Whatever he said, however much she tried to assure him this wasn’t the case, he didn’t believe her.
And he was always right.
He hated the drugs, she said. He told her they would make her lose her mind, become a lunatic shuffling round the streets, talking to herself. Every time Anne dropped something, bumped into something, couldn’t see something, he blamed it, not on her eyesight, but the drugs.
He told her that she talked to herself, that she didn’t know she was doing it. Anne became paranoid. She began shunning other people, worried that she would make a fool of herself. He told her they were probably all talking about her too. She began second-guessing her every move, her every thought. She said their colleagues began to look at her strangely, as if she was insane.
Finally Anne gave up everyone. She kept to herself – worked and then went home to this man. So Anne broke up with the man. She told him it was over. I almost didn’t want to know his reaction. ‘He refused!’ Anne said. ‘He told me no! As if he had the choice.’
Then she found out she was pregnant.
Anne said that this was the best and worst thing that had ever happened to her. She was elated and terrified – all the emotions that came with such a discovery. She couldn’t wait to tell the man. She wasn’t a disappointment now, was she?
But he told her that she was utterly incapable of bringing up a child and she had to get rid of it.
When Anne suggested she might want to keep the baby, he told her she couldn’t. He told her that if she had the baby, he would make sure she never saw it, that he would take it from her. He said he would win custody easily. And Anne knew that, with her track record – the drugs, the drink and the isolation – this was true.
So Anne got rid of the baby.
The bottom fell out of her world. She still had to work in the same place as the man; she had to see him on a daily basis. But she had no friends left and no family to help her.
Then something inside Anne changed. She said she had no idea where that last iota of strength came from, whether it was something in her upbringing in the home, or just something in her personality. Whatever it was, she realised it when the baby was gone. She understood something about that man. She recognised him for what he was.
A controlling, remorseless monster.
He wore a gilded cloak. He’d perfected the image he presented to the world, but inside he was empty and dead. To him other people were objects to manipulate, to bend to his will. Once he broke them, he discarded them.
Anne said she still has waking nightmares, sometimes – intrusive thoughts about the child that never was. A little boy, a little girl growing up with that monster as a father. It still scares her to think of what that child might have become.
She said to herself that day that she would never let that happen. She would die first.
So this time Anne left him. She told him it was over. Again, he told her no. He would not allow it. But that child, the one who never was, gave her the strength to get away, to end things.
Of course, he acted like she thought he would. Like a spoiled child. Like someone used to getting their own way. He ruined Anne’s already brittle reputation at work. He made everyone believe she was crazy, that he was the one who was hard done by. And of course, it worked. Everyone believed him. And she became a figure of pity, of ridicule.
Then the man left. Got a job somewhere else.
Anne followed him. She knew what she had been to this man: training. Experience. Practice. The next woman he ensnared would have no chance. So Anne promised if she saw this pattern repeating itself, she would help. In whatever way she could.
I begged Anne to tell me who this man was, but she told me I already knew. She said, instead of his name, she would give me hers, as it was worth m
ore.
‘My real name’s Maryanne,’ she said. ‘Maryanne Manon. Or, as they used to call me … Mad Mary.’
I couldn’t believe it. I stood there, like a goldfish, opening and closing my mouth. A thousand questions racing through my mind. Mad Mary. Sorrel’s girlfriend – the one before Sonia.
I remember what Darren Morgan said about her; how he said she told Sorrel she was pregnant, but Sorrel told him she’d stuffed a pillow up her top and lied.
It’s all falling into place now; it makes sense. This is flowering into something more horrific than I could have imagined. I didn’t know what to ask. Why on earth hadn’t she come forward at the time? Why had she given a bizarre psychic reading about Alfie that wasn’t true?
Anne … Maryanne, infuriatingly told me that it would make sense … next time. She told me I knew already why she hadn’t come forward. And I do know. Who was going to believe her over Sorrel? The press would turn on her faster than they did on Sonia. But the question remains: why on earth did Anne get in touch with me? Does she really know what happened to Alfie that night?
She gave me another phone number. She said to mention a different name this time.
Another name, another number. I feel she’s been controlling me this whole time – moving me like a piece on a chess board. I go where she sends me, trusting only in her word.
She told me we’d meet one more time.
Then she wished me goodbye.
Episode 5: How Beautiful You Are
—I made casserole. Casserole was easy. I remember how long it took me to cut up the vegetables, though – my prep was always the weakest part of my cooking. I started with the carrots – orange witches’ fingers, all wrinkly. Leeks and onions that made my eyes water. I almost stopped and gave up because it was pathetic, crying over a vegetable. I kept on, though. I diced up the lamb and dipped it in seasoned flour. Neck. That’s the best cut for casserole. Cheap, easy to braise. I can still smell it. Brown it in the pan, the thick-bottomed one. I nearly stopped again when a few pieces stuck. I thought I was going to be sick. I thought it was all over. But it was OK. I held it together. It’s OK if it sticks to the pan. I was a good pupil; I’d learned a lot.
There was a fat bottle of red wine waiting for me to take a break. The cork lying on the worktop. It was breathing. I could almost hear it.
The first glug would be harsh, raw-tasting; it would linger around my gums – bitter fruit, purple like innards. Then beautiful. Plums and grapes and chocolate. And it would do the job.
I looked at the clock. The timing would be perfect; I was a pro. I learned how to pull that casserole dish from the oven and let it stand, all that steam rising and curling like little fists. I learned how to fill the house with that smell. That wasn’t all – the food was only a part of a whole. I wanted to be perfect, too – smiles and an apron; a spot of flour on my nose; a home that smelled of wine and meat. All I wanted to do was make him happy. If I was perfect he would be happy. I used to be able to do this with my face, by simply being. That was a long time ago.
After the veg was prepped and the meat sealed, I’d allow myself a glass, less than a mouthful, just to give myself a little buzz. That’s what they did in the films when they cooked – wine and laughter, orange oven light while the weather wailed outside.
The knife I was using was sharp, one of the good ones. I remember those shitty serrated ones that my mam had got me from the catalogue. He’d laughed them out the back door and down behind the dustbin. When I finished using his knives they had to be washed and sharpened on the whetstone. Just so.
I drank more wine, the same colour as the blood that was running down my finger, soaked up with a plaster as pink as my cheeks. The first mistake; the pain thrumming through my finger. Time was beginning to run out and I could feel the wine flooding my system, thudding round my heart. The cogs were loosening.
I’m getting a dry mouth just thinking of it.
So another glug of wine and I was looking for the tinfoil. Where was the fucking tinfoil? It had been there. I had taken it out of the drawer and it had been there, right next to me, and when I went to the bathroom to get a plaster it had gone. Just like that!
Then the laughter came, just like it always used to when I messed something up. Trickling out of the cracks of my life; laughter, like the voices of ghost children. I turned up the music to drown it out. Sang along with Robert Smith. I let his voice, his words, his poetry of loss drown out everything. I sang and I sang, wailing and crying along.
The time! Where had it gone? There’d been hours to go and suddenly there wasn’t. It was as if the time had been eaten. I tried to stand, swayed, looked around me.
Veg peel was in piles of smiles all over the chopping boards, and little chunks of leek had fallen into the cracks between the floor tiles. I went to my knees to pick up the mess. But when I was down there, the roll of foil came back, threw itself off the worktop and hit me on the back of the head. I jumped. Because it hadn’t been there. It hadn’t! And when I jumped I hit my head against the oven. When I got up I was hot and my head was spinning. Knives and foil and spoons and even a whisk were all over the worktop, arranged in pretty little circles. There were saucers on every work surface, filled with crumbs and melted butter. Plates with slices of cake, bite marks and raisins everywhere. I wanted to scream. That hadn’t been how it had started. All this wasn’t here when I began. Simple casserole didn’t end like this. One chopping board, one knife, one pan, everything swept up into the bin and tied tight. Nothing on the floor. That’s how he’d taught me to do it. It wasn’t that hard. My finger throbbed like a second heart worn at the end of my hand.
Why did I always make everything such a chore?
Why was I such a disappointment?
The music kept me going. I was dancing. Another glass of wine. But it didn’t help. The knife was gone now and the noise had started up. More wine to squash it, to silence it. Red grapes in my ears. Old songs, old memories.
Tap … tap … tap … tap-tap…
A faulty metronome. The tapping and the laughing struggling together against Robert Smith.
Tap … tap … tap … tap-tap…
Where was the knife? Why was it in the corner? Why did it have icing and crumbs all over it? I felt sick. There was a blur and tap-tap-tap behind it all.
Tap … tap … tap … tap-tap…
Driving me mad, like something was in my head and wanted to get out; tap-tap against the inside of my skull. Dry mouth, water. Water and wine. A blur of water and wine.
Then they came home. The boys, the men. I turned off the music like a flash, leaving only the echoes of laughter and the tapping. Keys in the door, voices in the hall.
The clock swallowed up all the time. It sat there, swollen on the wall, grinning down at me, full of spite.
They went straight upstairs. Of course, he couldn’t bring our boy in here. In a kitchen full of knives and hot things. Take him to his room instead, somewhere safe, full of toys and games and books and all the lovely things. If our boy was in here with me, something would have gone wrong. Something always did.
The wrongness of me resonated with every fall of his foot on the stairs. As I stumbled and bounced against the sides, all the lost things – the tinfoil, the wooden spoon, the Tupperware – came back at once in a clutter of peel and blades and spilled wine. The empty bottle shimmered, a fat green beacon of my failure.
He just stood in the doorway and looked at everything – at the sides, the floor, the wine, the cake, the CD player and finally at me. He had the face on, and for good reason, I thought. He had every reason to have the face on.
I tried to explain, I tried to tell him about the things going missing, the tapping and the laughing, but my tongue was all wrong. Swollen with wine. I tried to tell him how it all went wrong and the words teetered on the edge before falling back in my throat.
‘A whole bottle, eh?’
He picked it up and studied it while I tried to stay still. I wa
s being pushed and shoved from every angle, back and forth. The tapping came again, louder. Then the laughing, and suddenly it was in my head. He didn’t react to it in any way. I tried to stay upright. I tried but I was shoved and toppled sideways. I held on to the back of the chair.
‘A simple thing,’ he said. ‘One job I left you to do. I’ve been busting a gut all day. All I asked was for some food for us when we get home.’
There was a dribble left in the bottom of the wine. He lifted it up where the afternoon light was pouring in through the window. He waggled it, sniffed it and placed it back.
He looked at me and shook his head. He sighed, a sound that pulled the air from my chest.
‘Why do you have to make our lives so hard?’ he said.
And my fat, useless tongue just lay there between my lips.
The next morning he got the boy ready for school. There was no shouting, no tears, no tantrums. That was always what it was like with him. His short, sharp instructions; little feet thudding across the floor to do his bidding as fast as he could. I wanted to get up to help, to bring a softness to this hard day. His hard ways. That’s always how we balanced, hard and soft, yin and yang, me and him.
My heart wanted to get up, to get out of bed and make you boys your breakfasts, to be happy families again.
Just like we always said we would.
But I couldn’t. I just lay there, my mouth dry, and a black crack of pain across my vision. Another spider-web of cracks across my heart as I listened to our boy trying to please his father.
I wondered where it had all gone, all those happy days. It was me who had thrown them all away.
When those two had gone, I went downstairs. The kitchen sparkled as it always did after he’d been in there. Egg cups dripped on the draining board.
Casserole in the bin.
Red.
An abortion.
Changeling Page 14
