The Hollowed

by Jay Caselberg

  Chapter Twelve

  The Vigil

  Together, Chris and Anastasia puzzled over the forms and wrote up the descriptions required for planning permission. They assembled a package of the architectural drawings and various sketches, checked it over one last time, then sat back, reasonably content that they had done a good job. They put in the relevant forms and detailed drawings to the local planning authority the next day and settled in to wait. As the days passed, Anastasia grew more and more excited at the prospect of the work they were about to begin. The local authority sent someone out to check the house, look at the plans and determine whether they met the guidelines. He was only there for about a quarter of an hour and left with the assurance that he could see what they were trying to do and that he saw no problems with getting the approval. Of course, the plans would be lodged for public viewing and letters would be sent out to the neighbors, but as far as he was concerned, it was all a formality. He didn’t like to say so, but it was pretty much a done deal.

  Three weeks later, the first objection letter came in.

  A week after that, it was followed by another.

  Stase was furious.

  She rounded on Chris in the kitchen, which had somehow become their place for any discussions of note. They knew already which neighbor had prompted the first objection. Her name was there in black and white on the letter and it told them which house she lived in.

  “Who does she think she is?” Anastasia said.

  The neighbor was a single woman, living on her own as far as they could tell. She was probably in her late thirties. Chris didn’t quite understand her objection himself, but as he stood there being buffeted by Stase’s ire, he could find some sympathy. Her letter had claimed that the size of their intended extension would block her light and impact her quality of life. There was something to it, but he thought the woman was over-reacting. It was just as likely that she was really concerned about the months of building work that would be taking place just outside her side windows. All the houses on their street were close together, so there would be no avoiding it. There would be no avoiding it for Chris either, as Stase had already told him that she planned to continue living on site during the work, so she could keep an eye on things to her satisfaction.

  “Dammit,” Stase told him. “If she screws up our planning permission, she’s going to be sorry. She’s behind the other letter too. She must have talked to them. They’re all getting together, having little chats together.” Her lip curled. “Damn them. Who do they think they are?”

  She consulted the architects. She consulted Michael. There was nothing they could do but sit back and wait for the decision to come through.

  Two weeks later, the letter came. Their building approval had been denied.

  He came home to find Anastasia on the couch, the crumpled letter clutched in one hand, her body racked by sobs.

  She looked up at Chris with an expression of disbelief and despair, her tear-tracked face pale.

  “How can they do this to us?” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  He looked out the back window into the dark tangled garden, and all he could feel was relief. Up till now, the house had dominated everything, magazines everywhere, the plans constantly folded and unfolded on the table, the strategy sessions. And their isolation; the fact that Stase wouldn’t let them have anyone over. There just didn’t seem time for anything else. Maybe, just maybe, they’d start to get their life back. He moved to the couch, sat down beside her and put his arm gently around her shoulders.

  “We knew this was a possibility, Stase.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not fair. It’s just not fair. Stupid, interfering bitch.” She shook the letter in her hand. “I didn’t really read what it said, but there’s something in here about an appeal process.”

  “Okay,” he said, gently rubbing her back. “We’ll look at that later. How long have you been sitting here? Can I get you anything?”

  She shook her head. “Bitch,” she muttered. “Bitch.”

  “Okay, listen. It’s okay. We’ll work it out.”

  Again, she shook her head.

  They sat there for about twenty minutes, saying nothing. He knew that nothing he could say would make it any better.

  “Stase,” he said, finally. “I’m going to get out of these clothes and work out something about food. You going to be okay?”

  She nodded.

  He did just that—went upstairs, changed out of his work clothes and headed back into the kitchen to prepare something for the evening meal. Something simple, like pasta, he thought. There was no point fussing under the circumstances. He dug out a couple of wine glasses and a bottle of halfway-decent red and set them up ready to take into the lounge. He was standing by the sink, grating some cheese, when he glanced out the kitchen window. There, in the darkness, in the middle of the back garden, stood Anastasia. While he was upstairs, she had gone out the back. She was staring up at the neighbor’s window, just watching. He shook his head and thought nothing of it. When he happened to look out again a few minutes later, the pasta well underway, she was still out there. She hadn’t moved.

  Okay, he thought to himself, she was upset. She blamed the neighbor for what had happened, and that was okay too. He just had to let her work through it.

  He finished the preparations for the evening meal and went out to the back door to call her back inside.

  She turned slowly and walked back towards the house, shooting the occasional glance up at the next-door window as she came. She slipped past Chris without looking at him and headed into the living room with a fixed expression on her face.

  “Bitch,” he heard her mutter under her breath as she passed.

  Moments later, the sound of the television came blaring out of the room. Chris gave a sigh and started carrying in the meal, putting everything down carefully on the table as Stase stared with a fixed expression and set jaw at the moving images in front of her. They ate in mutual silence, the television the only contribution to noise in the room. A commercial break came then, pushing the volume and thudding against the empty space surrounding them.

  A few days later, Anastasia took up smoking again. She’d smoked, briefly, when Chris had first met her, but it was a social activity, not something she did in earnest. Well, now she took it up with a vengeance.

  As soon as she got home from work, she would change out of her work things, into an old, grey tracksuit and head out to the backyard to smoke. She stood in the middle of the yard drawing aggressively at her cigarette while she watched the windows of the house next door. She made no pretense about hiding what she was doing. She was there in plain view in the midst of the tangled vegetation that they hadn’t really got around to clearing yet, blatantly staring up at the windows. Chris would watch her from the kitchen window, or from the lounge, frowning as she blew smoke between her bared teeth, scowling at the neighbor’s fence. As the days passed and they finally got the paperwork done for the appeal, she got a pinched look about her face, becoming even more pale and drawn than usual. Where her look before had been aesthetic, attractive, now she was starting to look unhealthy.

  One evening, she came back inside from her vigil, a distracted look on her face. “Where can we find out about her?” she said.

  Chris frowned at that. What was she planning now? “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.

  “The bitch has got to pay.”

  “Oh, come on, Stase. What are you saying?”

  “Well, there has to be records about her somewhere. I don’t know, electoral register, ownership details. What kind of car does she drive? We don’t know enough about her. If we’re going through an appeal process, I want to make sure that she can’t do anything else. Do you know what she drives?”

  “You’re being ridiculous now.” Chris put down his mug and leaned back against the kitchen cabinets. “What on earth do you think you can do?”

  Stase didn’t meet his eyes. She reached for some papers on t
he kitchen table and started straightening them. “Maybe we should hire a detective.”

  Chris blinked. “What?”

  “Well, there’s got to be something about her, doesn’t there? All we know is that she lives alone. I’ve tried to see inside her place, but I couldn’t see enough to tell anything really. You’ve seen her haven’t you?”

  “Well, yeah, a couple of times. We exchanged some words over the back fence when we first moved in. I’ve seen her hanging out washing every now and again. I don’t know. What are you asking?”

  Stase put her hands flat on the table and looked across at him. “Listen, there’s no way that bitch is going to get in the way of our plans. She has to know that I’m not going to let her. If we can’t do what we want to the house, then there’s no point having it.”

  Chris sighed. “I think you’re taking this a bit far, Stase. Maybe we can do some of what you were planning with the extensions, maybe a scaled-down version and get approval for that. Either that or we sell the house and move somewhere else where we won’t have the issue. Sit down and let’s talk about it. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  Stase sat, but she was gazing out the window at the backyard. Chris shook his head and put the kettle on, waited for it to boil and poured her a mug of tea. He made himself a coffee and carried both mugs over to the table then sat.

  “Look at the way we’re living, Stase,” he said. “Look at this place. It’s a decent house. If we put some effort into fixing it up properly, we could be comfortable here. Do we need all this trouble, really? Not to mention the expense that goes with it.”

  She looked down into her mug and shook her head. “No, it’s not good enough. It’s not fair.”

  “What do you mean it’s not fair? We made some plans; they got bounced. It’s not the end of the world.”

  She glanced up through narrowed eyes. “No, that’s not good enough.”

  “Well what do you suggest we do?”

  “We go ahead with the appeal, and we show the bitch that she can’t beat us. We get the best.”

  “The best what, Anastasia?”

  She turned her mug around and around on the table, not lifting it. “Shit, I don’t know. Whatever we have to do. I’m not going to give up.” She looked up again and there was absolute conviction in her expression. “We are going to do this.”

  “Fine,” said Chris. “I just think you’re going over the top.”

  Her voice became very quiet. “You think what you want. If you’re not going to support me…”

  He sighed. “Of course I’m supporting you. Okay, listen, you find out what we have to do, talk to whomever you have to. I don’t know, the architects, Michael, and we’ll do what we have to, but there’s no point going off half-cocked, not knowing what we’re doing, is there?”

  She bit her lip and nodded slowly.

  “Okay,” he said, reaching out a hand to squeeze the top of her arm. “I’m going in to watch the news. You coming?”

  She shook her head slightly, chewing at the inside of her cheek.

  “Okay.” He stood and headed into the lounge, carrying his coffee with him. He barely watched the small snippets of footage and talking heads, flipping one to the other in an endless succession of sound and image bites, as he waited for Stase to appear. There seemed to be a new trend with the newsreaders. They were no longer sitting behind desks. It was more personal, he guessed. Right there in your living room, having a chat about world events. Before there’d been the barrier of their desk, the headshot, but now…they were there, standing like some sort of attractive old friend come to visit. The news came and went, and still there was no sign of her. He flicked off the television, about to carry his mug back to the kitchen and look for her when a red glow from outside the window snagged his attention.

  Stase was out there again, standing in the middle of the yard in the darkness, smoking. The red light had been the flare of her cigarette end. She was facing the neighbor’s house again, slightly angled towards their own back windows, and as she drew in on her cigarette, the orange aura illuminated her pale face in the darkness. Her eyes were merely dark hollows in the night’s own darkness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Creating a Following

  Despite wanting to think otherwise, Chris knew his conversation with Patrick had drawn a blank; the resultant frustration was working deep inside him. The brief and unhelpful encounter had left him with more questions than he’d started with. As with many circumstances in his life and choices over the years, Chris had simply expected the solution to come to him. It didn’t always work like that, but sometimes things worked out the right way if you waited for them to fall into place. That, in turn, built an expectation that they would. It was like Stase and the precious house. They hadn’t gotten the planning permission. They couldn’t do the things they wanted to. Things didn’t work out just because you wanted them to, or because you put in a modicum of effort to push them in the right direction. Even channeling your entire focus and energy sometimes wasn’t enough to make things turn out the way you imagined they might be. Life itself conspired to make things happen and sometimes those things were like nothing you ever wanted.

  Chris shook his head. He had to find another way to work out what had caused the memory-free spaces patterning his thoughts with dappled blankness. He also had to try to understand what really had occurred with Stase and him as well. He now had no doubt that something had certainly happened and whatever that was, it had happened to both of them.

  The next day he saw Stase off to work as usual and wandered out to the backyard. Standing there amidst the smell of barely damp earth and rotting vegetation, he decided he needn’t even bother with his carefully constructed garden pretense. He simply locked up and wandered down to the bus stop to catch a bus into town. Going back to the observational ritual he’d established a couple of weeks before seemed the only sensible course of action—finding those clues that pointed to the something that had taken place beyond his remembering.

  It was late enough in the day to miss most of the rush hour, so he had no trouble finding a seat. A mother with her kids; an old lady in a floral headscarf; a shifty looking kid in a hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up all the way, who Chris gave a couple of extra suspicious glances; and an old man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a leather briefcase were the only other passengers. The bus shuddered and lurched beneath him. It was old, and every time they stopped at lights or at a bottleneck in the traffic an irregular vibration ran through the metal seats, making Chris’ vision of the outside scene shudder annoyingly. How could you search for people who weren’t moving when everything was imparted with an unnatural vibrating life of its own? Chris almost decided to get off and change buses, but eventually chose to stay put and deal with it. His real watching would take place in town anyway, right there in the center of population. Most of the cafés he frequented had those broad glass fronts with seats or benches running along the inside of the front window. He could sit in one of those, more than one of those, watching, observing and nursing a coffee or two for hours at a time and nobody would even bother him, except perhaps for a couple of questioning looks from the staff who cleared the tables, but they weren’t really going to say anything. It was part of their stock in trade.

  He got off the bus in the center of town and stood at the stop, scratching the back of his head, looking this way and that while he decided which way to go. He could start at the place where he had seen the girl and her companion, right in the thick of things. That was about where he’d seen the guy in the doorway too, but that might have just been a fluke. Synchronicity working overtime. There was the guy in the doorway and the girls in the coffee place, but his recollections were still foggy. He wasn’t really sure how much of it was dream and how much was real.

  Office workers strode around him, on the way to appointments or meetings, undertaking errands, or simply late for work. A delivery guy wheeled a trolley stacked high with green cardboard boxes. A
couple of young girls, heads close together, hung around outside a shop window and giggled at something. Chris watched them all, assessed, inwardly shook his head and let his observation wander on. He scanned faces as they passed him, looking for any clues, any sign that would indicate they were something else, something different, knowing at the same time that he would have no real way of telling. What were the signs he was looking for, anyway? Farther down the street, a large billboard moved with digitized images of happy smiling faces, leaning in and smiling large colorful grins, pushing yet another product by displaying an imagined lifestyle. He barely glanced at it.

  He didn’t actually care where he was going now. He headed for one of the ubiquitous coffee chains and, after ordering, found a seat by the window while he thought through what he was looking for and what he could remember. He recalled the bus shelter, the girl lying there. Patrick had confirmed that much at least. There was something about an older fat man. For a while, he watched shapeless faces passing outside the window, and as those nameless, unrecognizable individuals wandered past his field of vision, it started to rain. Fat, bulbous drops descended from the heavens, shattering into a myriad of lesser drops on the almost black pavement outside, lending it a look like tarnished stainless steel.

  Outside, the people quickened their pace, ducked into doorways, lowered their faces and hunched their shoulders. Chris watched the drops, coming more steadily now, bleeding into each other and merging into one damp indistinguishable skein of wetness, now slicking the darkening ground with color and light from the windows of the building opposite. Blurred reflection made wavy lines across the ground, a smeared neon simulacrum of the commercial reality opposite, the reversed and wavy words bleeding into incomprehensible streaks.