The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  But nobody’s going to be making an action movie of my life any day soon.

  And that’s perhaps why, sometimes, little ideas will get into my head and stick around for longer than they might in the mind of someone who has more pressing or varied (or viscerally compelling) things to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

  I was still thinking about this other woman.

  This different girl.

  Not in a salacious way – how could I be? I had no idea what she looked like, or what kind of person she was (beyond that spoken of by her supermarket choices). That’s the key word, I think – difference. Like any man who’s been in a relationship for a long time (and doubtless a lot of women too, I’ve never asked), every once in a while you beguile a few minutes in fantasy. Sometimes these are sexual, of course, but often it’s something more subtle which catches your internal eye. I’ve never felt the urge to be unfaithful to Helen – even now that our sex life has dropped to the distant background hum of the long-term married – and that’s partly because, having thought the thing through, I’ve come to believe that such fantasies are generally not about other people, but about yourself. What’s really going on, if you spend a few minutes dreaming about living in a scuzzy urban bedsit with a (much younger) tattooed barmaid/suicide doll, or cruising some sunny, fuzzy life with a languid French female chef? These women aren’t real, of course, and so the attraction cannot be bedded in them. They don’t exist. Doubtless these and all other alternate lifestyles would come to feel everyday and stale after a while, too, and so I suspect the appeal of such daydreams actually lies in the shifted perception of yourself that these nebulous lives would enshrine.

  You’d see yourself differently, and so would other people, and that’s what your mind is really playing with: a different you, in a different now.

  Perhaps that insight speaks merely of a lack of courage (or testosterone); nonetheless, the idea of this nearby woman kept cropping up in my mind. Perhaps there was also a creative part of my mind seeking voice. I don’t edit fiction, and have never tried to write any either. I enjoy working with words, helping to corral them into neat and meaningful pens like so many conceptual sheep, but I’ve discovered in myself neither the urge nor the ability to seek to make them evoke people or situations which are not “true”. With this imaginary woman, however – not actually imaginary of course, unless it was a man, it was more a case of her being “unknown” – I found myself trying to picture her, her house, and her life. I guess it’s that thing which happens sometimes in airports and on trains, when you’re confronted with evidence of other real people leading presumably real lives, and you wonder where everyone’s going, and why: wonder why the person in the seat opposite is reading that particular book, and who they’ll be meeting at the other end of the journey you’re, for the moment, sharing.

  With so little to go on, my mind was trying to fill in the gaps, tell me a story. It was a bit of fun, I suppose, a way of going beyond the walls of the home office in which I spend all my days.

  I’m sure I wouldn’t have tried to take it further, if it hadn’t been for the man from the supermarket.

  A week to the day after the first delivery, he appeared on the doorstep again. This was a little unusual. Not there being another order – Helen considerately books the deliveries into the same time slot every week, so they don’t disrupt my working patterns – but it being the same man. In the several years we’ve been getting our groceries this way, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered the same person twice, or at least not soon enough that I’ve recognised them from a previous delivery.

  But here this one was again.

  “Morning,” he said, standing there like a scruffy Christmas tree, laden with bags of things to eat or clean or wipe surfaces or bottoms with. “Downstairs, right?”

  I stood aside to let him pass, and saw there were a couple more crates full of bags on the path outside.

  That meant I had a few minutes to think, which I suddenly found I was doing.

  I held the door open while he came up, re-ladened himself, and tramped back downstairs again. By the time he trudged up the stairs once more, I had a plan.

  “Right then,” he said, digging into a pocket and pulling out a piece of paper. He glanced at it, then thrust it in my direction. “That’s your lot. Everything’s there. No substitutions.”

  Before he could go, however, I held up my hand.

  “Hang on,” I said, brightly. “You remember last week? The thing with the red bags?”

  He frowned, and then his face cleared. “Oh yeah. That was you, right? Got the wrong red bags, I know. I’ve spoken to Head Office about it, don’t worry.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “Hang on here a sec, if you don’t mind?”

  I quickly trotted downstairs, opened one of the kitchen cupboards and pulled out something more-or-less at random. A tin of corned beef – perfect.

  Back up in the hallway, I held it out to the delivery guy.

  “I think this should have gone back into the other person’s bags,” I said. “I’m not sure, but my wife says she didn’t order it.”

  The man took the can from me and peered at it unhappily. “Hmm,” he said. “Thought most of the delivery goods was company branded. But it could be. Could be.”

  “Sorry about this,” I said. “Didn’t notice until you were gone. I . . . I don’t suppose you remember where the other customer lived?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “As it happens, I do. Vans in this area only cover a square mile each day, if that. And I had to go through the bags with her, see, in case there was a problem with it, what with you already unpacking it here.”

  “Great,” I said. His use of the word “her” had not been lost on me.

  “Didn’t say nothing about something being missing, though,” he said, doubtfully. He looked down at the tin again without enthusiasm, sensing it represented a major diversion from standard practices, which could only bring problems into his life. I looked at it too.

  “Hang on,” he said, as a thought struck him. He gave the tin to me. “Be right back.”

  I waited on the doorstep as he picked up the crates on the path and carried them back to his van. A couple of minutes later he reappeared, looking more optimistic.

  “Sorted,” he said. “As it happens, she’s next but one on my list. I’ll take it, see if it’s hers.”

  I handed the corned beef back to him again, thinking quickly. I’m going to need my house keys. Oh, and some shoes.

  “Don’t worry about bringing it back, if it’s not,” I said, to hold him there while I levered my feet into a pair of slip-ons which always live in the hallway.

  This confused him, however. “But if it’s not hers, then . . . I can’t just . . .”

  “It’s just I’ve got to go out for a while,” I said. “Tell you what – if it’s not hers, then just bring it back, leave it on the step, okay?”

  I could see him thinking this was a bit of a pain in the neck – especially over a single tin of canned meat – but then realising that my solution meant less disruption and paperwork than the likely alternatives.

  “Done,” he said, and walked off down the path.

  I trotted to my study, grabbed the house keys from my shelf, and then back to the front door. I slipped out onto the step and locked up, listening hard.

  When I heard the sliding slam of a van door, I walked cautiously down the path – making it to the pavement in time to see the delivery vehicle pull away.

  There followed half an hour of slightly ludicrous cloak and daggery, as I tried to keep up with the supermarket van without being seen. The streets in our neighbourhood are full of houses exactly like ours – slightly bigger-than-usual Victorian terraces. Many of the streets curve, however, and two intersections out of three are blocked with wide metal gates, to stop people using the area as a rat route between the bigger thoroughfares which border it. The delivery driver had to take very circuitous routes to go relatively short dist
ances, and bends in the street meant that – were I not careful – it would have been easy for him to spot me in his side mirrors. Assuming he’d been looking, of course, which he wouldn’t be – but it’s hard to remind yourself of that when you’re engaged in quite so silly an enterprise.

  Keeping as far back as I could without risking losing him, I followed the vehicle as it traced a route which eventually led to it pulling up outside a house six or seven streets away from our house. Once he’d parked I faded back forty yards, and leaned on a tree. He’d said the stop that I was interested in was not this one, but the next, and I judged him to be a person who’d use language in a precise (albeit not especially educated) way. He wouldn’t have said “next but one” if he meant this house, so all I had to do was wait it out.

  Whoever lived here was either catering for a party, or simply ate a lot, all the time. It took the guy nearly fifteen minutes to drag all the red, green and purple bags up the path and into the house – where a plump grey-haired man imperiously directed their distribution indoors.

  This gave me plenty of time to realise I was being absolutely ridiculous. At one point I even decided to just walk away, but my feet evidently didn’t get the message, and when he eventually climbed back into the van and started the engine, I felt my heart given a strange double thump.

  She would be next.

  I don’t know if the delivery driver had suddenly realised he was behind schedule, but the next section of following was a lot tougher. The van lurched from the curb as though he’d stamped on the pedal, and he steered through the streets at a far brisker pace than before. I was soon having to trot to keep up – all the while trying not to get too close on his tail. I don’t exercise very often (something I take recurrent low-level flak from Helen over), and before long I was panting hard.

  Thankfully, it was only a few more minutes before I saw the van indicating, and then saw it abruptly swerve over to the curb again. The funny thing was, we were now only about three streets from my house. We were on, in fact, the very road I walked every morning when I strolled out to the deli to buy a latté to carry back to my desk – a key pillar in my attempts to develop something approaching a “life-style”.

  I waited (again, taking cover behind a handy tree) while the delivery man got out, slid open the van’s side door, and got inside. He emerged a few minutes later carrying only three bags. They were all red, which I found interesting. No frozen food. No household materials. Just stuff to go straight in the fridge – and probably meats and charcuterie and cheeses that were a pleasure to eat, rather than foods that came on as if they were part of a work-out.

  There were only two front paths that made sense from where he’d parked, and I banked on the one on the right – sidling up the street to the next tree, in the hope of getting a better view. I was right. The man plodded up the right-most path toward a house which, in almost every particular, was functionally identical to the one in which Helen and Oscar and I lived. A three-storey Victorian house, the lowest level a half-basement slightly below the height of the street, behind a very small and sloping “garden”. I was confident this lower floor would hold a kitchen and family room and small utility area, just as ours did – though of course I couldn’t see this from my position across the street.

  The man had the bags looped around his wrist, enabling him to reach up and ring the doorbell with that hand. After perhaps a minute, I saw the door open. I caught a glimpse of long, brown hair . . .

  And then a sodding lorry trundled into view, completely obscuring the other side of the street.

  I’d been so focused on watching the house that I hadn’t seen or even heard the vehicle’s approach. It ground to a halt right in front of me, and the driver turned the engine off. A gangly youth hopped down out of it immediately, busily consulting a furniture note and scanning the numbers of the houses on the side of the street where I was standing.

  I moved quickly to the left, but I was too late. The supermarket delivery man was coming back down the path, and the door to the house was shut again.

  “Bollocks,” I said, without meaning to.

  I said it loudly enough that the delivery man looked up, however. It took a second for him to recognise me, but then he grinned.

  “You was right,” he called across the street. “Was hers after all. Cheers, mate. Job done.”

  And with that he climbed back into his van. I turned and walked quickly in the other direction, thinking I might as well go to the deli and get a coffee.

  Maybe they could put something in it that stopped middle-aged men being utter, utter morons.

  That evening Helen had an assignation with two of her old university friends. This is one of the few occasions these days when she tends to let her hair down and drink too much wine, so I made her a snack before she went out. After she’d gone, and Oscar had been encouraged up to bed (or at least to hang out in his bedroom, rather than lurking downstairs watching reality television), I found myself becalmed in the kitchen.

  I’d got almost none of my work done that afternoon. Once the feelings of toe-curling embarrassment had faded – okay, so the supermarket guy had seen me on the street, but he’d had no way of knowing what I was doing there, no reason to suspect I was up to anything untoward – I’d found myself all the more intrigued.

  There was the matter of the corned beef, for a start. I knew damn well that there had been no error over it. I’d bought it myself, a month or two back, from the mini-market. I like some corned beef in a sandwich every now and then, with lettuce and a good slather of horseradish cut with mayonnaise. I’d fully assumed that the tin would make its way back to me. And yet, when presented with it, the woman had decided to claim it as her own.

  I found this curious, and even a little exciting. I knew that had Helen been in a similar situation she would have done nothing of the sort, even if the item in question had been totally healthy and certified GM-negative. This other woman had been given the chance to scoop up a freebie, however, and had said “Yes please”.

  Then there was her hair.

  It was infuriating that I hadn’t been given the chance to get a proper look at her, but in a way, just the hair had been enough. Helen is blonde, you see. Really it’s a kind of very light brown, of course, but the diligent attentions of stylists keep it mid-blonde. A trivial difference, but a difference all the same.

  Trivial, too, was the geographical distance. The woman lived just three streets away. She paid the same rates, received cheery missives from the same local council, and would use – probably on a more frequent basis than us – the services of the same takeaway food emporiums. If she went into the centre of London, she’d use the same tube station. If it rained on our back garden, it would be raining on hers. The air I breathed stood at least some chance of making it, a little later, into her lungs.

  This realisation did nothing to puncture the bubble which had started to grow in my head over the previous week. I can’t stress strongly enough that this was not a matter of desire, however nebulous. It was just interesting to me. Fascinating, perhaps.

  Difference doesn’t have to be very great to hold the imagination, after all. Much is made of men who run off with secretaries twenty years younger than their wives, or women who ditch their City-stalwart husbands to get funky with their dreadlocked Yoga teacher. Most affairs and marital breakages, however, do not follow this pattern. Helen and I knew four couples whose relationships had clattered into the wall of mid-life crisis, and all amounted to basically the same thing. Two men and two women had (in each case temporarily) set aside their partner for someone who was remarkably similar to them. In one case – that of my old friend Paul – the woman he’d been having a semi-passionate liaison with for nine months turned out to be so similar to his wife that I’d been baffled on the sole occasion I’d met her (Paul soon after having had the sense to go back to Angela and the children, tail between his legs). Even Paul had once referred to the other woman by the wrong name during the eveni
ng, which went down about as well as you’d expect.

  And this makes sense. Difference is difference, whether it be big or small, and it may even be that the smaller differences feel the most enticing. Most people do not want (and would not even be capable of) throwing aside a lifetime of preference and predilection and taste. You are who you are, and you like what you like. Short of being able to have their partner manifest a different body once in a while (which is clearly impossible), many seem to opt for a very similar body that just happens to have a slightly different person inside. A person of the same class and general type, but just different enough to trigger feelings of newness, to enable the sensation of experiencing something novel – to wake up, for a spell, the slumbering person inside.

  Difference fades quickly, however, whereas love and the warmth of long association do not, which is why so many end up sloping right back to where they started out.

  Most people don’t end up in liaisons with barmaids or artists or other exotics. They get busy with friends and co-workers, people living in the same tree. They don’t actually want difference from the outside world.

  They want it within themselves.

  I realised, after mulling it over in the quiet, tidy kitchen for nearly an hour, that I wanted to be someone different too, however briefly.

  So I went upstairs, told my son that I was popping out to post a letter, and went out into the night.

  It was after nine by then, and dark. Autumnal, too, which I’ve always found the most invigorating time of year. I suppose it’s distant memories of changes in the school or university year, falling leaves as an augur of moving to new levels and states of being within one’s life.

  I didn’t walk the most direct route to the house, instead taking a long way round, strolling as casually as I could along the deserted mid-evening pavements, between lamps shedding yellow light.

  I was feeling . . . something. Feeling silly, yes, but engaged, too. This wasn’t editing. This wasn’t ferrying Oscar to and from school. This wasn’t listening to Helen talk about her work. The only person involved in this was me.