by Peter Benson
Bob’s sauna almost filled his living-room; as he waited for it to reach optimum temperature, he smiled and congratulated himself. The showroom had distorted its size, but as he undressed, he didn’t care. He wanted the deep cleaning experience, and a skin of open pores bleeding the taste of the last meal he’d eaten. A big box of heat; it was fitted with a light that went off when it was ready for use. Bob was a patient man; he lay naked on his sofa and traced patterns on his chest.
Mrs Austin booked into the Atlas. She sat on her bed, stared at the wallpaper, and then phoned the police. A desk sergeant tried to connnect her with Evans, but the man had gone off duty. ‘Then you’ll take a message,’ said Mrs Austin.
‘Madam?’
‘I’m Cyril and Diana Austin’s mother.’
‘Austin?’
‘Yes.’
‘The murder?’
Mrs Austin’s throat cramped, then relaxed, then cramped again, then relaxed again. ‘The inspector phoned me in Canterbury; I was asked to come down to —’ she took a deep breath ‘to identify their bodies. I’m staying at the Atlas. Would you ask him to phone me in the morning.’
‘The Atlas.’
‘Yes.’
‘Mrs Austin?’
‘Correct.’
The desk sergeant’s pen ran out. He looked at it, shook it, breathed on it, then tossed it into a wastepaper-basket. He picked up another and scribbled on the corner of a sheet of paper. ‘The Atlas…’ he repeated. ‘Number?’
Mrs Austin boiled. ‘Don’t you have a telephone directory?’ she snapped, and she put the phone down. She stood up and walked to the window. She looked down at the street, and watched a slow fall of snow drift across the sky. When Cyril was a boy, snow had been his delight, and his sister had helped him build snowmen in the garden. That old garden in Canterbury, with the shade of apple and pear trees, and old shrubberies. She felt in her pocket and pulled out the handkerchief the man on the train had given her. She put it to her nose and blew hard. ‘Children,’ she whispered at the window, and it rattled back, from the joy of another town to the numbing of Brighton.
Mrs Platt felt the spirits as they gathered above her, but she did not open her eyes. She focused on the backs of her eyelids and repeated her incantation. She saw spots of light and sheets of dark against the spots; she kept her hands on the table and took deep, steady breaths. The spirits concentrated their strength, they directed their power at Joey’s jam jar and then they began to move it.
It began by moving slowly and steadily from side to side, rucking the table-cloth as it did, and a low whistle came from its lid. As soon as Mrs Platt heard this, she opened her eyes and her body filled with heat. The spirits descended and surrounded her, swirling like water around a stranded rock. The jam jar was shivering, the whistling raised its pitch, the crockery on the kitchen shelves began to rattle, and an egg-cup fell and smashed on the floor. The smell of roses rose and fell like a ship at sea, and began to clog her nostrils. One spirit touched her skin, and then another, and then another, and then they were forcing themselves beneath her clothes, rubbing her stomach and pinching the loose skin on her arms. One nestled in her armpits, and others found homes in the creases of her stomach. When they came into contact with her skin they began to multiply, and they encouraged each other by whispering and singing. Their phantom lips tickled Mrs Platt, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind at all, she didn’t want them to leave her. She was reminded of Mr Platt, and she remembered long summer days, plump fruit and long grass. A sweet and musical brook, the smell of his hair and his fingers’ touch. She felt his revenant fold its arms around her waist, and it murmured in her ear. She could see his eyes and they watched her, and she said his name. The word smashed the air, and it shattered the mood; the spirits released their grip, and began to dissolve. They were not afraid but they were unsettled; they gathered together by the window, and they looked out at the night. Snow washed the sky, covered the garden and weighed the branches of an old apple tree; Mrs Platt said her husband’s name again and the spirits popped, and then disappeared. She felt refreshed, as if she’d just stepped out of the bath. She ran her hands through her hair and felt like a girl getting ready for an exciting date. She looked at Joey in the jar. His feathers were bright and shiny. She believed in other worlds, in the mysteries of reincarnation and the riddles in a spirit’s gift. She smelt roses and she felt warm. ‘Fred,’ she said, and then she stood up and went to make a cup of tea.
16
Davis walked through the night, and his spirit was swathed and then overtaken by darkness. It came up on his blindside, tapped one shoulder and then the other, and it laughed its persuasion. If Chips could have spoken to him, he would have told him to stop. Revenge was not worth dignifying with pain. Life goes on. Buy another dog, change your job, move to another town. Do anything but choose a bus-driver at random, ask him an innocent question and kill him. Do anything but compound the grief, do anything but allow yourself this luxury. Go for a long walk, write a poem, learn to speak Italian. Book a holiday in Lapland, start collecting postcards of stained-glass windows, learn Irish history. Find out all you can about the dynamics of amateur psychology. Bleed knowledge and laugh at people who smoke. How many things can fill a man’s head?
Davis walked from the front to the bus station, along the streets of closed shops, under the strings of decorations that swung and illuminated the night. When he passed the entrance to a pub, a pair of drunks forced him to step off the pavement and walk through a pile of slush. One stared at him, and said, ‘What you doing, shit-head?’
The second drunk laughed, focused and spat.
‘Yeah, shit-head,’ said the first.
Davis looked over his shoulder at the two men. The second was bent double, holding his stomach; the first had a large head and short hair. ‘I’m sorry?’ said Davis.
‘Shit-head,’ said the drunk, and he took two aggressive steps towards Davis.
‘You’re talking to me?’ said Davis.
‘Bet your arse.’
Now Davis took two steps towards the drunk, narrowed his eyes and balled his fingers. He began to seep the scent that animals weep before they set themselves for a fight, and the drunk sensed it. He drew himself up and said, ‘Going to do something about it?’
‘Do?’ said Davis. ‘Do?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do?’
‘You heard me.’
Now Davis laughed, and the laugh came from deep in his stomach, from a dangerous and willing spot. He looked at the other drunk. The other drunk was puking, shooting a slim river of bile on to the pavement and clutching himself around the waist. A faint curtain of snow was falling, settling on the men’s hair and coats. ‘Yeah,’ said Davis, ‘I think I am going to do something about it.’
And the able drunk laughed.
‘Anyone ever tell you that you’re an ugly bastard?’ said Davis.
The drunk’s mouth dropped open, and he fixed his feet solid to the pavement. He let the words fidget in his head, and they spelt themselves for him. ‘What?’ he said.
‘You heard,’ said Davis, and then he hit the drunk a quick one in the stomach. He had a hard punch, a snappy thing all fist and physics, and as the man doubled, he sliced him across the back of the neck. ‘No one calls me that.’
The other drunk looked up from his sick, saw his friend writhing, saw Davis standing and watching, and he puked again.
‘No one,’ said Davis.
The first drunk pulled himself to his knees and wiped some blood from his mouth, but Davis kicked him down again. A woman came from the pub and saw the scene. She ran back inside and screamed for help, but before she reappeared, Davis was away up the street, turning a corner and whistling ‘Invitation to the Blues’, an old song.
It was a mile to the bus station, but he didn’t hurry. On the corner of Break Street and South Road, he stopped to watch a woman walk her dog. This was a mongrel, a hairy black and white terrier/collie cross, an intellige
nt-looking animal with a big waggy tail and flat feet. It stopped to shit by a lamppost; the woman looked the other way as it dropped the turd, then said, ‘Well done, Bruce.’
‘Bruce?’ said Davis, softly. He believed in dog names for dogs, but he didn’t have a thing about it. Not a thing like he had about bus-drivers. They had no defence. They could think but they didn’t think clearly or enough. He saw that now, and understood his reason for living.
Bob sat in his sauna and sweltered. Sweat streamed from his forehead, over his cheeks, down his neck and on to his chest. He ladled some water on to the rocks, the steam hissed and rose; he leant back and closed his eyes.
He felt his life was just beginning, and he began to feel released. He was light and seemed to float above the world. The heat manumitted his heart, and set it off down a bright and comfortable road. How many obligations had once followed him, and how many times had he felt that other people were controlling him? From his father to his teachers, to his first boss and to his bank manager. His wife. His children. Frank. His building society, the shoes he walked in and the sky above. Everyone has a release and Bob had found his. He smiled at his good fortune, but he wasn’t smug about it. He had worked hard, he had accumulated debt but he didn’t lose sleep over it. Money meant nothing to him.
The sauna was lit by a dim bulb, enough to see the shape of a hand in front of a face, and enough to see the door handle glint, but that was all. The fresh yellow of the wooden seat was its own shadow, and the steam that rose all around thickened. Bob’s pores began to relax and give themselves all the time they needed. He stood up, spread a towel on the floor, tossed another splash at the rocks and then lay down. He stared at the ceiling, counted to twenty and then closed his eyes.
He slipped into that drifty place that whistles between awake and asleep, and his thoughts settled on memories of his sister, Deborah. Never Debbie, never, ever; born with palsy, she could do nothing for herself, but she could see different and perfect worlds teeming over the backs of her hands. She spent her entire life in a wheelchair, dribbled a lot, and sung with an atonal voice that forced tears from marble. Bob had understood Deborah and she had understood him; he had felt her frustration and had understood her triumphs. No one else came close. She had triumphed when she nodded her head in time with ‘Kentucky Avenue’. Deborah with the unfocused eyes, the yellow fingernails and the tiny feet. Dead now, stolen at sixteen and buried in a plot only Bob visits. Dead girl in the ground, dead girl with curls on her head she could never brush. Crease, gods; kill some rattlesnakes with a trowel or prove that you care. Bob always wore a suit to the cemetery, and carried flowers to the grave.
Frank sat beside Lisa and held her hand. She was living in a slice of the world that most people never see, a place where the senses are heightened by pain and given new toys to play with. She felt his grip on her hand, and she smelt him, and though she wanted to open her eyes, she couldn’t. She could feel her baby as it raged against the walls of her womb, and it filled her mouth with the taste of liquorice. Her head filled with a jumble of memories that rearranged themselves in bizarre stacks. One minute she was back in the chemist’s shop, standing on a ladder to tidy a shelf of perfume, but the perfume wasn’t in bottles, it was in porcelain envelopes. Then she was in her flat, and Frank came down to talk to her. He rode a motor bike around her kitchenette, filling the place with exhaust fumes. He was choking her. She spasmed and coughed. She opened her mouth and tried to say something, but the words stuck in her head. She tried to rub her chest but her arms were tied. Her three machines beeped, tweeked and dripped. Frank stood up and called for a nurse. ‘Nurse?’
‘Yes?’ said the nurse. She strolled into the room, adjusted her dress, licked some cake crumbs from her fingers and glanced at the monitors.
‘I think she was trying to tell me something.’ Frank’s voice was cracking at the edges, and flakes of it were lying on the floor.
The nurse tapped a screen with her finger, tweeked a knob and shook her head. ‘She’s okay,’ she said.
‘That’s debatable,’ said Frank.
The nurse gave him a look only a nurse can give, a meld of arrogance, compassion, impatience and sex. With her red hair and her flat forehead, her fat thighs and her big hands, she made Frank angry. A little power in the hands of a nobody is a dangerous thing; it absorbs a dead personality and magnifies itself, and sticks in the eyes. ‘Debatable?’ said the nurse. ‘And you know something I don’t?’
‘What?’ There was something about her voice, something that reminded Frank.
‘About this condition.’ She looked at Lisa and crossed her arms.
Frank said, ‘No.’ It was in the centre of her voice, a deceit she could not conceal.
‘Then what are you trying to say?’
‘Did you train?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Did you train to be like this?’ Frank knew now; the nurse had Janet Black’s voice, winging its way across thirty years and landing with a slap on his forehead.
‘I’m an SRN.’
‘Is that all?’ said Frank. Janet Black and the pain of those beautiful boots. Spanish hand-tooled leather; they clacked on pavements like a come-on. He licked his lips, he filled with a thousand pains and memories. He had failed and the failure cut. His life was reducing itself, tumbling through regret and chaos, death and insult. Something Bob had said, something about the futility of the agency’s work, came to him, and he found himself agreeing. The importance of life was grown from grief, longing, hope and wounds.
The nurse narrowed her eyes, and said, ‘I think you’d better leave now.’
‘You think?’ said Frank. ‘My God.’ He stood up and rubbed the back of Lisa’s hand while his words sank into the nurse’s head. He had loved Janet Black, but one warm day she had told him that he made her cringe. ‘That’s extraordinary.’ Neither of them noticed, but Lisa opened one of her eyes and smiled at the ceiling; her pain had dulled for a moment, and all her troubles were reduced to nothing. She tried to turn her head but the thought brought the pain back with a crack. Her machines watched her and Frank left. The nurse worked on what he had said but couldn’t get past the idea that he was making fun of her. But how? How and why? She shrugged and went back to the staff room.
Davis reached the bus station at half-past ten. The place was quiet; a few drunks were loitering around the toilets, and an inspector was writing in his notebook. A cat appeared and rubbed itself against Davis’s leg; he reached down and stroked it, and made purring sounds through his teeth, then bought a cup of coffee from a van and settled down on a bench to drink it.
He waited for ten minutes before a late bus pulled up, dropped a raggle of passengers, and reversed into the garage. The driver sat in his seat to complete his log, then opened the door, jumped down and strolled to a rest-room. Davis finished his coffee, said goodbye to the cat and meandered across the pull-ins, and leant against a photo-booth. He was wearing a leather jacket; he zipped it to his neck. He was wearing a baseball hat; he pulled it over his eyes and steadied his breathing. It plumed in the freezing air. The moon slipped behind a slash of cloud, and a few flakes of snow drifted out of the sky and settled on his head. It was a still and perfect winter night, as sharp as a knife. Two minutes later, the driver came from the rest-room, called ‘Goodnight!’ to someone, patted the side of his bus and left the garage.
He passed twenty feet in front of Davis. He was a young man with a round, baby face, a loping walk and long brown hair tied in a pony-tail. Davis loathed babies and pony-tails. He waited a minute, then followed.
He was careful and walked with deliberate, steady steps. He waited when the driver stopped to look at televisions in a shop window, and ducked into a doorway when the man suddenly turned and started to walk back the way he’d come. Then, for no reason at all, he turned again and carried on, crossing the road in a long diagonal; he checked his pockets for change, then went into the Lamb and Flag.
Davis didn’t like pubs
; he hated the smoke, the music and the lights, and he hated the false smiles and greetings of barmen, and he hated the effect alcohol had on people. People should keep their bodies pure. They shouldn’t allow poisons to alter the way they behaved. They should keep their fingernails clean and they shouldn’t have to listen to pop music if they didn’t want to. And most of all he hated pubs because of something that had happened when Chips was alive. He’d gone to a pub with the dog and been ordered to leave immediately. What had been the problem? It was a blameless animal, free of guilt and poison. It had stared up at the bar with trust in its eyes, and its reward had been the door.
But revenge knows no restrictions, no barriers, frontiers and no dreamland; it is a pure thing, like a baby’s thoughts. It’s a slice of life that’s missing worry; Davis followed the driver into the Lamb and Flag, ordered a tonic water and sat down. He scanned the faces for his man, but couldn’t see him; then he saw him come from the toilets, kiss a woman and sit down six feet away.
This woman was blonde, wore glasses and had a small, pinched mouth. Davis was scared of women, frightened of their hips and lips and alarmed by their voices. Some WPCs had reduced him to nausea and half a day off; the scent of their perfume or a sight of their hairless legs or the smell of their locker room or their talk. Their talk about anything. He had never made love, he had never sat in a chair with a woman in a chair opposite and wished himself into her arms, and he’d never stumbled over words he’d said but wished he hadn’t. He’d never said something like ‘Would you like to stay over?’ and then felt the words slamming back at him later, battering him with longing and guilt. He’d never laid awake all night and wished that a woman would write or phone or think about him, a woman with light curly hair and a voice like a song you’ve heard but can’t quite remember. He’d never shared a lift with a woman whose scent overwhelmed him, a scent of trees, sex and another man, and he’d never prayed that a woman who wore cycling shorts would send him a record by Little Anthony and the Imperials because it reminded her of him. He’d never planned a holiday in St Albans or Kent with a woman who clung to his waist and said, ‘Yeah, I fancy it like mad.’ He’d never nodded with drink and salted nuts and watched a woman slip out of a beige two-piece suit, expensive underwear and soft leather shoes. He’d never smoked dope in bed, made love, smoked some more and then made love again. He’d never slipped into a shower and made it like a rabbit and not known what he was doing until the water turned cold, and she’d yelled and bit his neck. He drank tonic water because it was strong. He’d never made love while an old film had been shown on the television, and he’d never scratched a woman’s name on his skin. He’d never been to Paris for five days and missed all the sights. He’d never had a woman offer to cover herself with carbonara sauce and do him in Italian. He’d never laid naked on the deck of a Greek fishing boat, and dreamt himself in love. He’d never sat in a club with a woman he never imagined would look at him twice, and found that she was staring at him with big eyes, glistening lips and an unbuttoned blouse. He had never unbuttoned a blouse. No woman had ever slipped her arms around his waist and whispered, ‘You’ve burnt your name in me.’ No woman had made plans and then changed them because he had walked across a room and said, ‘Good evening.’ He’d never heard a saxophone and willed himself into the head of the man who was playing, and he’d never eaten a meal he didn’t like because it was the route to a woman’s mouth. A woman had never sat up all night and realised that she had ruined her life for him, and no one had ever bought him a present that cost £355. He’d never sat in a field and been told that he looked like some film star, or some pop star, or some old star, or some star anyway. Any star, anywhere. Who cares? Davis didn’t. He leaned back, sipped his drink and watched his bus-driver, and wished him a happy evening with the blonde. He would sit for as long as it took, then follow the man home. He would note his address and he would take his time. He would go home and dream a sweet and blameless sleep, and he would wake with a fresh head. He would eat his breakfast and think about Chips, and remember how the dog had sat up on his hind legs for a cornflake. Davis lived in a world that nudged reality but refused to talk to it. He was in control, more control than he had ever imagined.
