Drown My Books

by Penny Freedman

  ‘Simon,’ I say, ‘I’m terribly sorry but I’m in need of help.’ My heart is running so hard and so fast that I sound quite convincingly panicked. ‘I’m in total darkness,’ I say. ‘I thought it might be a power cut, but obviously…’ I gesture at the bright warmth of his hallway. ‘So I’ve got no idea what to do.’

  He stares at me. This is the last thing he expected and he doesn’t know how to react. I have to play up my role. I abandon any lingering pride. ‘This hasn’t happened since I moved here, and before – you know – my husband used to deal with this sort of thing.’ I give a helpless little shrug. ‘Call myself a feminist,’ I say, though I can hardly get the words out through my gritted teeth, ‘but when it comes to this sort of thing it’s a man I need.’

  I follow up my shrug with a self-deprecating little smile, but he is not charmed. His face is set hard and doesn’t move.

  ‘I’ve got the boys,’ he says. ‘I can’t leave them.’

  ‘No, of course,’ I say but I make no move to go; I just stand there, looking helpless, defying him to shut the door in my face.

  ‘Have you got a torch?’ he asks.

  ‘Somewhere, I think, but I can’t remember where I’ve put it. Have you got one? If I could borrow it, then maybe I could manage till the morning, only it’s so cold and the heating will have gone off, I suppose, and —’ I resist an insane urge to twist a curl of hair winsomely round one finger but I do gaze up trustingly into his face.

  He avoids my eye. ‘I can tell you what to do,’ he says. ‘You know where your fuse box is?’

  ‘Fuse box,’ I say vaguely. ‘What would that look like?’

  He sighs. It is an eloquent sigh, compounded of impatience, incredulity and triumph. ‘I’ll go and check on the boys,’ he says. ‘If they’re asleep I can leave them for a bit. It probably won’t take five minutes.’

  ‘Probably not,’ I say wistfully, ‘when you know what you’re doing.’

  He doesn’t ask me in out of the cold while he goes upstairs. I step back and peer down to the alleyway to see if I can spot Alice. There is just a glimpse of a white face and I raise a thumb in encouragement. Simon returns with a powerful torch and we proceed to my house, where Caliban breaks into frenzied barking and ominous growling – dogs are excellent judges of character, I think – and I’m afraid Simon may slip from my grasp as he backs away, so after some fruitless shouting, I grab Caliban’s collar and drag him out to rage in the garden.

  It takes a little while to negotiate my way in the dark, and by the time I get back, Simon has already found the fuse box – on the wall in the hall – and is opening it up. Panic grabs me. I had banked on distracting him, leading him to places where I ‘thought’ the fuse box might be. I pictured a good bit of time running the torch round the cupboard under the stairs. Too late. He has only been in the house for two minutes maximum and in another thirty seconds he’ll have located the trip switch and that will be it. And Alice can barely have entered her house by now. Ten minutes suddenly seems an unfeasibly long time for keeping anyone anywhere, let alone keeping a man who hates me and has sleeping children to get back to. I start to babble.

  ‘You found it!’ I cry. ‘I should have known where it was, really, shouldn’t I? Only it’s above my head, of course. One of the penalties for being small. You have no idea what the world looks like from down here.’

  The cover of the fuse box sticks, I know, so he is tugging at it, but it soon gives in, and there are the switches, exposed in the bright glare of his torch.

  ‘Gosh,’ I say. ‘Is that what they look like?’

  He summons me closer with a silent, beckoning finger. It is a gesture both patronising and threatening. It makes me want to bite him, but I advance obediently. ‘The Trip Switch,’ he says, with heavy emphasis, putting a finger on it. ‘It should be down but it is up. I push it down and—’

  ‘Let there be light!’ I exclaim as brightness floods the hall and strange clicks and whirrs indicate machines around the house coming back to life.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I gush. ‘I would never have worked out what to do. You really saved me. I’m so sorry to disturb your evening, and just when you’d got the boys off to bed —’He slams the fuse box closed and says. ‘The place probably needs rewiring. You certainly need a new fuse box. I doubt this one even conforms to HS regulations.’

  ‘HS?’ I ask, sounding as dim as I can manage. This is promising. I reckon I need to fill another five or six minutes and he is actually helping me out.

  ‘Heath and safety?’ he says, with the upward inflection that implies, Doesn’t everyone know that?

  ‘You mean it’s dangerous?’ I ask, wide-eyed.

  ‘You’ve got everything on the one circuit,’ he says.

  ‘Now you’re losing me,’ I say. ‘Can you explain?’

  He opens his mouth and then changes his mind. ‘Get someone in,’ he says. He turns towards the door.

  ‘Let me at least offer you a drink,’ I cry, hopelessly aware that I have only cooking brandy, which is far less appealing than the nice glass of whisky I have taken him away from.

  ‘I need to get back to the boys,’ he says.

  Damn.

  He is moving down the hall.

  ‘The thing is, Simon,’ I say, the panic rising to my throat and audible, I’m sure, in my voice, ‘I must have done something to make this happen, mustn’t I? So how can I make sure it doesn’t happen again?’

  ‘If it happens again, you’ll know what to do, won’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes, but it’s so scary with electrics, isn’t it? I mean if something isn’t working properly – and what you were saying about health and safety – I could have a fire, couldn’t I?’

  Am I overdoing this? He is a man with a low opinion of women but, even so, can this convince him?

  It seems it can. He is standing by the door now, poised to leave, but he asks, as to a half-wit, ‘Well did you switch something on just before the power went off?’

  This I can manage. This I can spin out. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘the thing is, I’d fallen asleep, and I woke up and realised it was dark and cold, so I switched several things on.’ I pause, as if in painful thought. ‘The lamp by the sofa – I turned that on. And then, because I was cold, I put the electric fire on. I wonder if it could have been that because I don’t use it much these days. I’ve got this wonderful woodburner, you see, so I don’t need the fire. But it had burnt down while I was asleep and I just needed some quick warmth, but the electric fire did give out quite a nasty burning smell. I thought it was just that smell you get when a fire hasn’t been used for a while – it’s the dust burning off, isn’t it? But maybe it was something more serious.’

  ‘Don’t use the fire,’ he says. ‘If you’re worried, stick with the woodburner.’ The subtext is clear: Just don’t bother me any more.

  He turns the door handle.

  ‘The toaster!’ I cry desperately.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘That’s what I switched on just before the lights went out. I was going to make cheese on toast for supper. Though, come to think of it, I did turn the grill on, too. I like to toast the bread lightly before I put the cheese on and finish it under the grill. It’s so much better that way, isn’t it – so the toast is crisp? So I couldn’t say which one it was that did it, but I suppose if I go back and try again I’ll find out, won’t I?’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’

  He pushes past me quite roughly and barges into the kitchen. He looks around and then picks up the toaster.

  ‘Where’s the bread?’ he demands.

  Rumbled.

  ‘The what?’ I ask, stalling.

  ‘The bread. You said you were making toast.’

  ‘Oh! Yes. I hadn’t cut it yet. I always put the toaster on first, to heat up
.’

  Does this make any sense? Does anyone actually do that?

  ‘It takes a while to heat up,’ I add feebly.

  ‘Well, that’s probably what did it. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before. You’re not supposed to do that. It’ll heat up too fast.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I say mournfully. ‘No one’s ever told me that. My fault then.’

  I am exhausted. However many minutes it has been of feigned idiocy have worn me out.

  He pushes past me again and stomps off down the hall, calling, ‘Get that fuse box changed’ as he disappears.

  I am pursuing him with no idea how to delay him further when I hear a faint double toot from a car some way down the road. I have to stop and lean against the wall to stop my knees from buckling in relief. My front door slams closed and then I hear his open and close. How long will it be until he is back?

  Not long at all is the answer. I just have time to double lock the front door and put the chain on and to bring Caliban in from the garden, locking the back door and removing the key, before my front door is under siege. He must have gone straight up to check on the boys and found empty beds and Alice’s note. Mixed with my terror at the furious pounding on my door and the stream of invective that accompanies it is a first pang of conscience. Was this actually the right thing to do? I picture him running upstairs and the moment of panic as he saw the empty beds, before he found the note. I do understand that Alice didn’t want a row but I’m not sure this was the right way to go about it. A screaming row would have been bad for the boys, obviously, but isn’t this scary for them, too?

  Well, it’s done now and all I can do is to lie on the sofa with a cushion over my head while Caliban barks his heart out. Eventually, it stops, and Simon retreats with a last cry of ‘Fucking bitch!’ Or is it witch?

  I spend the rest of the evening lying on the sofa. I can’t eat anything and, though the television is on, I really don’t take anything in. And I have the sound down low because I am gripped by the fear that Simon will try to burn the house down. I picture a paraffin-soaked rag through my letterbox, followed by a lighted match. My rational self tells me that he won’t do this because he knows that he must have been seen and heard creating the rumpus at my front door and would therefore be the prime suspect, but when it gets to bedtime, I can’t go upstairs to sleep in a room I could be trapped in. I fetch a blanket and pass a night of sleepless terror on the sofa, while Caliban sleeps on my feet.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE GHOST ROAD

  Sunday 23rd February 2014

  Lily

  Emma Terry had been in the house for almost two hours before she finally lost her rag with her brother, and she thought that was pretty good going. She had arrived soon after nine and, finding Jack asleep on the sofa, had made a start on clearing up the kitchen. Glad that she had thought to bring rubber gloves, she started by throwing stuff out: bread covered in a flourishing coat of blue mould, cheese likewise, and a bottle of milk, solidly sour, lodged in the fridge beside a fresh bottle. The fresh bottle was encouraging: he had probably been eating cereal, then. Cereal and pizzas, it looked like, from the toppling pile of boxes that leaned beside the back door, smeared with congealed tomato sauce. She carried the pile, in two armfuls, out to the bin in the garden. Did grief really prevent you from walking to the rubbish bin, she thought irritably. It was a traitorous thought. She had promised herself to try to understand Jack’s complete giving up on the world. As their mother kept saying, Lily had been his world so why wouldn’t he give up on a world without her? And Emma herself had never experienced any loss that came near to his, so who was she to judge? It was barely more than two weeks since Lily’s accident. She had to be patient with him.

  By the time she had swabbed, scoured and mopped the little kitchen to her satisfaction, it was ten o’clock. She looked in on Jack again to see if he wanted a coffee. He was awake, but humped himself away from her, muttering into the sofa back. She opened the curtains and let the probing, grey light illumine the room’s squalor. Beer cans littered the floor; a nearly empty bottle of whiskey stood beside the sofa with an overturned glass beside it in a dark brown pool. A pile of unopened mail lay on a chair. She picked it up and saw that it consisted mainly of cards – condolences, heartfelt no doubt, because everyone loved Lily, and abandoned unread.

  ‘I’m going to start on Lily’s clothes, Jack,’ she said to his unresponsive back. ‘I’ll clear everything out and then you can tell me if there’s anything you want to keep.’

  And then, she thought, maybe he would start sleeping in his bed again, instead of down here in all this mess.

  Upstairs, the bedroom was not tidy exactly – Lily and Jack were never tidy – but the untidiness felt alive, unlike the dreary mess downstairs. There was the expectant feel of a room that had been suddenly abandoned. Emma wasn’t a fanciful woman – not a dreamer like Jack or a reader like Lily – but even she felt that the room was waiting for Lily to come back. A couple of the vivid bandanas she liked to wear were draped over the mirror as if waiting for her to try them on, makeup lay scattered over the dressing table and a pair of red pumps lay at an angle as though she had just kicked them off and would slip them back on at any moment. Of course Jack couldn’t sleep in here. She had offered before to come and collect Lily’s stuff but he had turned her down. He’d agreed only grudgingly this time and she was not sure still if he would actually let her take it all away.

  She went over to the bed. On the floor by the bed lay a book, open and face down, where Lily had dropped it, she supposed, before going to sleep on the last night of her life. She looked under the pillows. Lily’s pyjamas lay under one of them – black with a deep pink heart on the front. A faint scent of patchouli hung about them, as it always used to hang about Lily. She added them to an IKEA bag in the corner of the room, which seemed to be doing duty as a laundry bag, and carried the bag downstairs to put a wash on. There was very little of Jack’s stuff there. She wondered if he had changed his clothes at all since the day of Lily’s funeral, when she and her mum had come over and more or less put his clothes on for him.

  Going back upstairs, she took with her two suitcases she had brought from home, and a bin bag. Lily, she knew, bought most of the clothes she didn’t make herself from Second Hand Rose in Dungate, which sold ‘vintage’ or, as they liked to say, ‘pre-loved’ clothes. Emma planned to see whether they would like to take them back to be loved all over again. Her mum had a friend who did amateur operatics and might like some of the costumes Lily had made for her singing gigs.

  Working methodically, she went through the wardrobe, separating the clothes into second-hand and homemade and putting them into the two cases. Anything that was too ragged she put in the bin bag, along with underwear, to go to the fabric recycling. There was a radio beside the bed and she turned it on and up to loud, drowning out, as best she could, thoughts of Lily as she worked. You couldn’t drown her out that easily, though, not Lily. It was her contradictions, she guessed, that had gone to Jack’s heart. They were there in her looks – dark and sexily gipsyish, but innocent somehow, with her skinny body still like a teenage girl’s. Then on stage, she strutted her stuff like a pro, but off stage she was all nerves and shyness. She could be infectiously high-spirited, the sparkling centre of everyone’s attention, and then you’d catch her face drooping as though she’d got the sorrows of the world on her shoulders. And she was so sweet, so thoughtful, so loving, and at the same time so stubborn in wanting her own way and so ugly sometimes if she didn’t get it. A true original someone had said at the funeral, and so she was. Jack was a good-looking guy and plenty of women would be after him now, but Lily wasn’t an act you could follow on stage or off.

  She lugged the cases downstairs one at a time and then went back for the bin bag. She left them in the hall and went in to Jack. She gave him a shake.

  ‘Come on, Jacko,’
she said. ‘Come and look in these cases and see if there’s anything you want to keep.’

  He rolled over. ‘What cases?’ He looked terrible – red-eyed, stubbly and sick.

  ‘Lily’s things,’ she said, doing her best to sound no-nonsense and kind at the same time.

  ‘What things?’

  She sat down on the sofa by his feet. ‘Lily’s clothes,’ she said. ‘We agreed I was going to come and pack them up today. I’m taking them to good homes.’

  ‘You’re not taking them fucking anywhere.’ He was up off the sofa, almost knocking her to the ground. Out in the hall, he picked up the cases and started up the narrow stairs with them, scraping the wall as he went. Emma remembered Lily painting that wall. Smoked paprika, that’s the colour, she had giggled. Delicious!

  Emma stood at the bottom of the stairs and yelled. ‘What are you going to do with them, Jack? Hang them up again? Or leave them out in a heap on the floor and turn upstairs into a tip like you have down here? Either way, you won’t sleep up there, will you, not with Lily’s things there? What are you going to do? Sleep on the sofa forever? Not wash? Not change your clothes? Live on pizzas and invite the rats in to share them? Not work? Not pay the rent? Let the band down? Can you imagine what Lily would think if she could see you? She sorted you out, Jack. The least you can do for her memory is stay sorted.’

  He stood still, head bowed, and she waited for an explosion. They’d always had furious fights, she and Jack, since they were kids. Then he let go of one of the cases, just opened his hand and let it fall, so that it somersaulted down the stairs and landed at Emma’s feet. Then he turned and brought the other case down , throwing it against the front door. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Take them. I don’t want to see any of it. Do what you like.’

  She put her arms round him. ‘You smell terrible,’ she said. ‘Go and have a shower and put some clean clothes on. I’ll clear up in there,’ she jerked her head towards the living room, ‘and make us a cup of coffee.’