Grave Misgivings

by Caroline Wood

  I hadn’t started to think about it that way back then, though. All I knew was that the purple-faced Savage Twins living above me led a fairly regimented life. They kept themselves to themselves, and apart from their occasional unfriendly glares, they were no bother. It was the woman across the road that put another slant on things. Small, she was, and getting on a bit. She always had a dressing gown hugged round her when she stepped out to get her milk or take her rubbish to the dustbin. One morning, she beckoned me over, asked how I was settling in. She coughed all the time, and wrapped her quilted dressing gown tighter and tighter against her chest.

  ‘They’ll try and get you out,’ she said. ‘They’ve never wanted anyone living in the flat under theirs. Unhygienic, they reckon.’

  I wanted to ask her what she meant, if there was something about the flat that I should know – some old leakage or problems with the drains. But she saw the Savage Twins setting off to fill their string bag with shopping, and she went back inside. They came and stood where the woman had been, their chins jutting towards me.

  ‘You want to be careful. Might catch something if you get too close to her. That cough … full of germs.’

  Rose was nodding as Keeley gave this sour speech, and I stood where I was. I didn’t know what to say. Embarrassment flushed through me. The comment had been loud enough for the woman to hear. That’s when I felt angry for the first time, and answered just before they stormed away to the shops.

  ‘There’s no need to be so rude, you could offend people, talking like that,’ I said.

  Rose nudged Keeley with her elbow and I had the sense of them being one person – the thought starting in one and being verbalised by the other.

  ‘You’ll be a bit more than offended, Missy, if you don’t take precautions. There’s germs everywhere.’

  It escalated from then really. I noticed them more, probably because I was making a point of watching their arrivals and departures so I could avoid bumping into them. It irritated me to think that they had now become part of my routine. I tried to put it all to the back of my mind, but their presence was never far from my thoughts. That day I discovered them scrambling through my dustbin made me really mad. I came out of my back door with a bag full of kitchen waste, a tune from some annoying advert going round and round in my head. And bang. I stopped in my tracks. There was Rose, standing with a black plastic bag and Keeley filling it with rubbish from my dustbin.

  ‘Put that back, it’s mine,’ I said, too angry to care that I sounded ridiculous.

  ‘It’s a health hazard,’ said Keeley, ‘and we’re taking it away.’

  We nearly came to blows, and ended up with bits of torn plastic and tins spilling all over the place as I played tug-of-war against the Savage Twins over the contents of my dustbin.

  Of course, that meant I had to keep a close eye on the back garden as well, from then on. It all started to take up a lot of time. Once or twice I was a bit late for work. When the bin-men came that week I was very late because I had to run after them and remind them to take my dustbin.

  ‘We were told you don’t use yours, love,’ the cheerful, smelly man informed me. And when I asked who’d told him that, he said, ‘Them two what live up the top. Mad as bats, if you ask me, but when we checked, there never was anything in your bin so we stopped collecting.’

  I went straight back to my garden to see for myself. There was nothing in my dustbin. All the neatly tied bags of rubbish I’d dropped in were gone. The Savage Twins had been emptying my dustbin. Not only that, but there was a hand-written note taped to the lid. Not in use. I was shaking as I knocked on their door, brimming with indignation. But they wouldn’t answer.

  I treated myself to a jumble sale that weekend. I needed to get out of the flat and stop looking out of the windows all the time. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could find one or two bits and pieces for the flat – it still felt empty with only my few possessions rattling around in the large rooms. I was lucky. I found a decent chest-of-drawers, they only wanted a few pounds for it. I managed to get it in the back of the car and was halfway up my path with it when the Savage Twins appeared. They had come out especially to speak to me. They weren’t on their way to or from anywhere, it wasn’t the right time of day, but they both had their coats on, although had taken off their headscarves. Their hair was flattened and full of static with single grey hairs here and there waving like thin antennae.

  ‘How do you know where it’s been?’ Keeley said, pointing at the chest. ‘You take in other people’s belongings and before you know it you’ll have all sorts of diseases in your house.’

  I ignored her and continued with my struggle up the path.

  ‘Filthy habits, you’ve got,’ she went on. ‘Just like all the others. Filling the place up with all sorts of muck. How do you know it’s clean?’

  I humped the chest the final couple of feet to my front door and got it inside. As I shut the door, Keeley was shouting, ‘We have to live on top of your germs.’

  I plucked a large splinter out of my palm and made myself a strong cup of tea.

  I had taken to getting up early so I could watch the Savage Twins heading off first thing. My curtain peeping had improved and I could do it without fear of being spotted. They always had bundles under their arms on these early outings, and were gone for about half an hour. When they came back the bundles were gone. I made my mind up to find out what was going on. One morning I was up very early and waiting at the end of the terrace, hidden by the privet that marked the last garden. I saw the brown coats and headscarves heading towards the little park at the back of the cul-de-sac, where old ladies take their poodles to pooh on the grass. I bet they won’t like that, I thought to myself, and pictured Rose tapping her sister’s arm to tell her she had shit on her foot. I kept my distance and was ready to dodge into bushes if they looked round, but they were too busy rushing along in their usual way. And they stuck to the path, right away from the poodles’ little heaps.

  They put the bundles in three different bins. One on the corner of the path, one near the bench, and one by the sign saying that owners would be fined if their dogs fouled the park. Then they went home. And then I knew that I was going as mad as they were – I actually went and poked about in the bins. I unwrapped one of the bundles. It was full of potato-peelings, onion skins, bottle-tops, wrappers and tins. Rubbish. The Savage Twins were dumping their ordinary household rubbish in public litterbins, in the park. They were probably doing the same with mine. I didn’t want to look at the other bundles. I already felt as if I was taking part in someone else’s dream. I even started to miss the bed-sit.

  I had to have a day off work shortly after the park business. I couldn’t stop throwing up. It started after I’d eaten my breakfast, just as I was about to leave for work. I hadn’t felt unwell so it was a big shock to suddenly start being sick – I nearly didn’t make it to the loo in time. As the day went on, the sickness eased off but I had a vague burning pain in my stomach and stayed in bed feeling pretty sorry for myself. The Savage Twins went down their path with the empties as usual, and I heard Rose muttering back to Keeley, which was a first. I nearly threw up all over again when I caught what they were saying. ‘Bleach does the trick, that gets rid of the germs. Only need a little drop in the milk every couple of days. That will sort out her dirty ways.’

  The man at the council called them eccentric. He told me I was lucky to have a nice big flat to myself and that there was nothing much he could do. I cancelled my milk and started buying it from the shop on my way home from work. That was the only way I felt sure it hadn’t been tampered with. When I’d been doing it a while though, I wondered if I was imagining things. When I sat down and talked myself through the adventures of the Savage Twins, I had to laugh. They were just a couple of strange old drunks, that’s what I decided it all came down to. After all, there had been more than a few oddballs in the house where I’d rented my bed-sit. At least I didn’t run the risk of meeting the Savages on the
stairs or listening at my door for them to come out of the bathroom. I was on to the dustbin and the milk, and couldn’t think of other ways they’d be able to interfere. I wasn’t giving in; they weren’t going to get me out of my flat.

  If it hadn’t been raining, I might have missed the problem with the down-pipe. There was a big puddle just outside the backdoor and I stepped in it as I rushed to get my washing off the line. When the rain eased off, I had a proper look. The pipe had been cut at about waist height, and it was just dangling there, still dripping. The lower end of the pipe, which led straight into the drain, had gone. I shouted up at the Savage Twins window, ‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’

  It opened immediately. A shiny, purple Mr Punch scowled down at me.

  ‘We don’t want your germs up here. They come out of that drain, crawl up that pipe, and get round the edge of the window. It’s a health risk.’ The face withdrew and the window was banged shut. I was far beyond speech.

  I shook the black plastic pipe so hard that the bracket under the eaves came loose and plummeted to the ground at my feet like a petrified bat. I went inside and howled tears of fury.

  I heard myself sounding ridiculous as I told the man at the council office about the Savage Twins – two women in their late fifties, a bit eccentric, but not really harmful. He did take me seriously though, and patiently noted down my complaints. He seemed polite but detached. As if he’d heard it all before. There was weariness in the way he told me they would send someone to repair the pipe. I wanted more than that – the pipe had to be repaired but I had a real need to tell him what it was like living under the Savage Twins. How it made me nervous and watchful, how I wasn’t sleeping properly, and how their presence haunted my thoughts. If I told him, I would start to sound as strange as my purple neighbours, so I left with slumped shoulders and a piece of paper scrawled with a job number for the repair work.

  For the first time since I’d moved to the flat, I didn’t want to go home. A gloomy mood clung to me like fog, and I wandered in and out of the local shops, just wasting time. Eventually I made my way back. And they were there, the brown coats, sailing along the pavement ahead of me. I slowed my pace even more, so I wouldn’t catch up with them, though they were moving along at their usual forceful speed. The more I looked, the more the sight of those two moulded shapes sparked a rage in me which dissolved all the misery and feebleness I’d felt at the council offices. My fists clenched. My jaw tightened. I could feel my heartbeat thudding at my temples. A surge of energy shot through my whole system. I actually felt violent. It was a new sensation for me, but one I recognised instantly. A fork of lightning was trapped inside me, making fierce and random strikes to break out. I wanted to hit, to kick and swipe and scratch. I had to work hard to restrain myself from running up behind the Savage Twins and pushing them into the road. I could see it all in my head. Could see the two of them taken by surprise, shaken, stumbling. And afraid. The sheer frustration, disappointment, and the weeks of tension from their unnecessary intrusion into my life just boiled up inside me. All I could do was spit on the pavement, a thing I’d never done. But it didn’t help. I felt ashamed for doing something so dirty, and I was still fully charged with the lightning. The cure was elimination. I wanted to kill the Savage Twins.

  I didn’t of course. But because I’d wanted to that day, there has always been a little core of secret guilt hidden inside me like a hard, black tumour. It was Keeley who died, so I tell myself it couldn’t have been my fault. I’d wanted to kill both twins. I even thought I might have gone through with it when I didn’t see them for over a week – thought perhaps I was somehow blocking it from my memory. I was so wound up by then, I couldn’t think straight. The fury filling me that day took ages to fade. I took it home with me, wedged in my throat and locked across my shoulders. Eventually it seeped away and left me totally exhausted and heavy with the need to sleep. It infected my dreams all that night. They were tainted by the real and distorted events since I’d moved to the flat. They came every night after that, so I had no relief from the Savage Twins whether I was awake or asleep.

  The woman over the road stood on her doorstep, wearing her dressing gown. She was waving to me and smiling. Her breath came up my path in thick pungent clouds of green mist, curling and coiling its way along the concrete towards my front door. I peered at her through my window. She stood in a sea of milk bottles – dozens of them with sour, rotting milk in various shades of yellow and grey. Some had clear fluid on top of a lump of curdled, buckled cheese, like laboratory specimens in formaldehyde. Her dressing gown was slimy and coated with spilled food. Six or seven flies crawled on the sleeves, circled her head then landed again to explore the quilted surface. I imagined them sucking up the sticky mess and regurgitating it in different places, adding to the thin film of filth like another layer of fabric. As she shuffled her way through the bottles, I saw she was wearing slippers. The left one had a ragged hole where two toes stuck out, the nails thick and curved like talons, scratching thin lines into the red doorstep. I snapped the curtains shut and ran to the back of the flat, but it was the slow-motion, dream type of running – slow and useless as if you’re running against a strong current. The harder I pushed, the more slowly I moved. When I looked down to see what was preventing my progress, I was covered in spider’s webs. There were no spiders, just webs, from my waist down. They were old, dusty and thick with trapped insects and ancient flies’ wings. They were strong and elastic, with a lot of give before they would break, and they stuck to my fingers and got in my hair as I tried to free myself. It was like being wrapped in dirty candyfloss, and I was making a cocoon of it round myself as I tried to get untangled. It wasn’t horrible, not really. But I had to get out so I could make my way to the back of the flat and get away from the woman across the road. I didn’t want to be poisoned by her fetid breath.

  The dream changed abruptly then, the way they do. I was outside on a hot and sunny day. I had been sitting halfway down the garden, drinking a glass of orange juice. The other gardens were empty and it was quiet and still. The big mound of branches and brambles was at the end of the garden, just like it is really, waiting to be burned. I noticed lots of packages and bags, tucked deep in the middle. I knew what they were. The Savage Twins had been putting their rubbish in my bonfire. I rushed down with matches already lit, and threw a shower of little flames into the heap. As the fire caught, the parcels cracked open, spewing fat white maggots out in all directions. Some of them popped and sizzled from the heat. I could smell them burning. One or two landed at my feet, half melted like big blobs of lard. I kept my lips clamped together really tight so the maggots couldn’t get into my mouth, that was my biggest fear in the dream – somehow these maggots wanted to get inside me, lay eggs, make more maggots, take over. A strange fizzing noise distracted me away from the bonfire and the exploding popcorn maggots. It was coming from the down-pipe. In the dream, it had been repaired, all shiny and new. But there was something shimmering round the base, near the drain. Germs. Millions of them. They were making their way up the pipe. Tiny specks all moving in the same direction. When I looked closer I could pick out individual creatures. Whiskered, crusty, many legged things, they were. Together they formed a sort of fuzz, like the wispy mould that grows on top of jam when it’s past the sell-by date. There was a constant stream of these germs, and they seemed to expand their way upwards – they were multiplying in front of me. They moved without moving, somehow, and the pipe could have been growing its own insulation. That’s how it looked. I was panicking about the germs getting into the flat upstairs. Kept saying to myself that they were right, the twins were right all along.

  I was drenched in sweat when I woke up. My head was muzzy after such a deep sleep, and when I heard the doorknocker, I realised that I’d already been listening to it for a few seconds. It hadn’t registered as being real, but now it did, I got myself up and pulled on yesterday’s clothes and went to see who it was. Conscious of my dishev
elled state, I opened the door just enough to peer round the edge. A woman in a uniform peered back at me.

  ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ she said, and pushed the door firmly as she entered my hallway. She told me her name, then told me to sit down. I instantly forgot both and just stood looking at her, uncomfortable about my stale smell and creased clothes. She wasn’t the police, she told me. She was the ambulance service. I thought she was the police; there was a car outside, but she said the police were still upstairs.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ she said. Her coat made swishing noises as she moved. ‘There’s been a death. One of the ladies above you.’ She gestured to the ceiling. More swishing.

  I thought how hot it must be in that nylon jacket.

  ‘It looks like natural causes but there’ll be an investigation. Always is in cases like these.’

  She asked if I wanted her to make me a cup of tea. I thought I’d answered her but she asked me again and said I ought to sit down. I recall feeling numb, and then being surprised at how quickly she’d made the tea – as if not enough time had passed.

  She let another woman into the flat. This one had a clipboard and messy hair. She stank of cigarettes. They nodded at each other and the ambulance woman swished her way out of the room.

  ‘Della Stamp, Environmental Health,’ said the new woman.

  She held out her identity card. She explained that they were going to clean the flat before the surviving relative came back to live. I wondered which one it was, this survivor.