by Bark, Jasper
“Peter, I’m sorry, you really aren’t making any sense. Did we have to sign for what?”
“The bed of course, the ruddy great bed in the spare room.”
“Wasn’t that already there?”
“So you’ve seen it. You do know what I’m talking about.”
“I might have glimpsed it.”
“But I thought you said you didn’t go anywhere near the spare room?”
“I had to get the cat down from upstairs at one point.”
“The cat’s not allowed upstairs.”
“Exactly, so I… must have… chased her up there and caught a glimpse of it through the doorway. It’s quite noticeable.”
“I’ll say it’s bloody noticeable.” Peter stared at her intently. Rose could tell he suspected she wasn’t being entirely frank, but that wasn’t the biggest of his worries. “So you really have nothing to do with it being there? Because it wasn’t there when we left and you’re the only person who’s been in the house.”
“Peter, I hardly know you and Bethany. Why would I put a bed in your spare room while you were away? I’m an old woman and Stanley’s plagued by his back. How could we get a four poster bed up those stairs.”
“You didn’t pay someone else to do it then?”
“Why would we? We live on a pension. We’ve got better things to do with our savings than waste them on senseless practical jokes and expensive furniture.”
“You didn’t see anything suspicious while we were away. No one else calling round with deliveries or something.”
“No, not a thing.”
“You would tell me if you had seen something, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course.”
Peter shook his head and stared at the floor, trying to puzzle it all out. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” He looked up and stared Rose straight in the eye. “No one’s threatening you are they? To keep quiet about all this I mean. You can tell me if they are.”
“Peter, listen to yourself.”
Peter stared up at the window of the spare room next door. Then he turned to go without saying a word of thanks or goodbye. Rose had the distinct feeling she’d been dismissed.
The sausages were burned black when she got back to the kitchen and she had to open a tin of beans instead. Her hands were shaking so much it took two attempts to get the lid off.
She thought at first it was from the confrontation with Peter. When she considered it however, she realised it was the bed that had shaken her. The mysterious bed that had seduced her and Stanley. The four poster bed that hadn’t been in the spare room when Peter and Bethany left for their holiday, but had somehow been waiting, just for her.
III
Late next afternoon, Rose saw workmen carrying chunks of carved wood and a mattress out to a skip in next door’s drive. She recognised some of the carvings and the designs on the fabric that the men slung in the skip.
At the end of the day a truck came and took the skip away. Peter and Bethany probably paid a premium to get such prompt service.
Rose was surprised by how upset she felt about the disposal of the bed. It was an antique after all and probably one of a kind. It was wanton vandalism to hack it to pieces and dump it in a skip. It made her wonder what sort of people Peter and Bethany were to treat a rare object like the bed with such violent disregard.
Rose had let go of any foolish thoughts she had about the strange power of the bed. She and Stanley had just indulged in a foolish and uncharacteristic moment of madness that was all. A brief attempt to recapture their youth and deny the stifling hand of age. She was rather embarrassed by the whole incident now, as enjoyable as it had been.
Stanley hadn’t looked her in the eye since. He’d retreated into his private world of snooker and DIY catalogues. Rose knew that he felt just as foolish and blamed her for it. It was childish of him, she knew, but he’d get over it if she gave him a bit of time and space.
She didn’t suppose that Peter or Bethany would ask her to look after the property next time they went away. She didn’t mind too much about this. There were too many memories in the house for her. The extensive renovations hadn’t dulled the impact of those memories.
When Darren and Samantha lived there, Rose had been round at least twice a day. Their young children, Paul and Emily, had loved Rose and she was always babysitting and baking them treats. Rose would often have the kids after school once Samantha started work again, to allow her and Darren could keep up with the mortgage.
She and Stanley hadn’t been able to have children, though Rose would dearly loved to have been a mother. They tried for a long time but it never happened. Rose had wanted to see a doctor but Stanley wouldn’t agree. He felt it was a personal thing that should be kept between the two of them. He didn’t want to go sharing these sort of problems with a stranger, even if that stranger was a trained professional.
In truth, Rose knew that Stanley suspected the problem was with him, and he didn’t want that medically confirmed. He already had enough hang ups about his sexuality and Rose didn’t want to make him feel any more insufficient.
Stanley turned to poetry to cope with the erosion of his confidence. For a while he was more prolific than he was when Rose first met him. He even placed a couple of the poems with prestigious publications. One of the poems he showed Rose ended with the line:
“Her womb was an instrument of revenge.”
She wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but she knew he was subtly taunting her. Turning his inadequacy into hostility towards her. Making it all her problem. It was typical of Stanley to use his intelligence and learning to goad her in such a way that he remained above reproach, while Rose was made to feel insufficient because of her lesser intellect.
As the years drew on, Rose felt increasingly hollowed out by her broodiness. A deep yearning would chip away at her insides every time she saw a pregnant woman. Whenever she heard a small child call out ‘Mummy’ in a supermarket, Rose’s own need to be called ‘Mummy’ would echo round her hollow interior like a cry of anguish in a canyon.
On her fifty first birthday, Rose stopped bleeding altogether. The ticking of her biological clock had been silenced, once and for all, by the menopause. She crawled into the bath with a bottle of red wine and tried to drown the emptiness with which she was swollen. The mocking emptiness that had eaten the life Rose longed to feel inside her.
Samantha had instinctively known this of course and, while they were good friends, she didn’t mind exploiting it, not when it meant endless free child care. When Darren left her, quite unexpectedly, for a younger woman he’d met at work, Samantha relied on Rose even more to help with the children.
That’s when the problems started. As Samantha fell apart and was unable to cope, Paul and Emily came to depend more and more on Rose for their everyday parenting. When Samantha started to recover, she began to resent this. Rose was only trying to help, but the closer Paul and Emily got to her, the more Samantha hated her.
“You’re not their mother,” Samantha had screamed in her face, the last time Rose had seen her. “They’re not your children, you can’t take my place!”
Rose had simply come round with the schedule for the school’s parent teacher meetings. She had offered to drive Samantha there because her car was being repaired, and to wait for them if need be. Samantha had slammed the door in her face.
A month later they moved out and put the house on the market. Samantha didn’t leave a forwarding address, nor did she bother to say goodbye.
Paul got in touch with her on Facebook for a while. Rose was overjoyed to hear from him and to find out how he and Emily were getting along. As soon as Samantha found out however, she blocked Rose and threatened her with a restraining order if she ever got in contact with the children again.
A long period of grieving followed for Rose. She was mourning not only the end of her relationship with Paul and Emily, but all her hopes of motherhood. She would never get to comfort or nurture them, or an
y child, again. She would never see them fall in love for the first time, go off to university, get married or bring home their own first born child for her to see.
The emptiness that filled Rose made it so easy for people to get inside her. And when they did, something deep within her always died.
IV
The next morning Rose was violently sick. She woke feeling nauseous and only just made it to the bathroom before emptying her stomach.
By lunch time she felt fine and put the vomiting down to a fleeting tummy bug. Her stomach was quite painfully bloated though, and the front of her pants felt tight and restricted. She sighed at the thought that her waist was growing once again and she’d probably have to let out all her clothes.
Rose opened the fridge to decide what to have for lunch. As she scanned the contents for inspiration, she was gripped with a sudden desire for pilchards and pickled gherkins. She hadn’t had either for over a decade. She had no idea where the desire came from, but Rose could already taste them. Her mouth watered and her stomach rumbled its appreciation. They weren’t foods she liked, but the need to eat them was overwhelming, as though the oily fish and sour vegetables would instantly fix everything that ailed her.
The next morning she woke just as nauseous and brought up everything she’d eaten the night before. There were no more problems for the rest of the day, other than a severely bloated stomach and a few odd cravings.
This pattern continued for the next few days. The doctor told her it was nothing to worry about, probably just a bug. “Come and see me in a few days time if the symptoms continue,” she said, without looking up from her computer. “I’ll give you some pills for the nausea.” Rose had waited for over an hour and the appointment lasted less than three minutes.
The symptoms did continue, though Rose didn’t bother to return to her doctor. The bloating got so severe all Rose could wear was a pair of old leggings and her sweatpants.
She stood in front of the mirror in their bedroom, about a fortnight after the nausea started, and stared at her gut. It was noticeably protruding now. She looked like a famine victim with a distended belly, except she wasn’t malnourished, despite the early morning vomiting.
Stanley, who was already in bed, looked up from his book and saw her stroking her belly.
“How Blakean,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh Rose thou art sick,
The Invisible Worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
“Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.”
Rose turned and glared at Stanley with such venomous fury that the smug grin dropped from his face. He looked shocked and a little scared. Like a guilty schoolboy who’s just been overheard using bad language. He blinked, swallowed and went back to his book.
V
A week later they were just settling down to watch Masterchef when there was a loud rapping on their door. Rose got out of her armchair and winced at the pain in her lower back. Stanley stood and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“You sit yourself down love,” he said gently. “I’ll get it.”
Rose patted his hand and sank back into her chair with a painful sigh. Stanley was worried about her health. The early morning vomiting had stopped, but her stomach had really swollen. It was heavy and painful. Stanley wanted to call the doctor, but after the last debacle Rose wasn’t keen to go back.
“Peter?” Rose heard Stanley say in the hallway, followed by the sound of Peter barging in. “Why don’t you come in?” Stanley continued as Peter marched into the living room.
Rose got to her feet to greet Peter, holding her stomach. There were dark bags under Peter’s eyes. His clothes were rumpled, his hair hadn’t been combed, he needed a shave and there was alcohol on his breath.
“Have you seen her?” he said. “Has she been in touch?”
“Have we seen who Peter?” Rose said. Peter looked irritated by the question, as though Rose was stupid for asking.
“Bethany of course,” he said. “She’s disappeared. Has she called round or been in touch with you?”
“No, I haven’t seen her in days. When was the last time you saw her?”
Peter stared at Rose with disbelief, as though he couldn’t believe she could ask such a question. Then he shook his head and stared at the carpet, massaging his temples with his left hand.
“We went to bed last night, same as normal. I woke up this morning and she was gone. I’ve called everyone I can think of, no-one knows where she is.”
“Maybe she just needed to get away from everything,” said Stanley. “Sometimes people do. She might even be back later tonight.”
Peter turned to look at Stanley for the first time. Regarding him with such withering disdain that both Stanley and Rose frowned.
“You don’t understand,” Peter said. “We were in the bed.”
“Isn’t that where people usually are first thing in the morning?” said Rose.
“Not in bed. In the bed. The one we got rid of.”
“I’m not following you Peter.”
“We went to bed last night in our usual bed. The one that cost a fortune from John Lewis. When I woke up this morning I was in the four poster. Our old bed was gone and the four poster was in its place, right there, in our bedroom.”
“I don’t quite see how that’s possible.”
“Don’t you think I know that! Do you know how much I paid to get rid of it the first time? But there it was in our bedroom.”
“Was Bethany in the bed with you?”
“Yes… well no. I mean, she was to begin with, I swear she was. I could feel her next to me as I woke. Her back was pressing against mine. I rolled over to spoon, with my eyes still closed, and there was this faint noise, like a hiss or someone wheezing and trying to catch their breath. Then suddenly she wasn’t there. The sheets were still warm. I could smell her on them but she was gone, as though she’d just, I don’t know… fizzled out.”
“Fizzled out?”
“Yes,” said Peter, getting annoyed with her. “That’s the best way I can describe it, okay? That’s what it felt like.”
“How are you and Bethany getting on at the moment?” said Stanley.
“What business of yours is that?” Peter retorted.
“Well none really, only, looking at this objectively, the most obvious explanation is that she’s probably behind all this.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Peter’s voice was frigid with disapproval.
“Well, think about it for a moment. Who is best placed to deliver a four poster bed to your house if not one of the occupants? Someone who knows when you’re going to be away. Maybe the second time, she slipped you an incredibly strong sleeping pill, then had the old bed taken away and put you back in the new one before you woke. Perhaps she slipped away just as you were waking, but you didn’t see her go because you were still a bit drugged.”
“That is the single most ridiculous thing I have ever heard! Why on earth would she want to do that? Why would anyone want to do that?”
“Maybe she’s trying to drive you mad. Maybe she wants you out of the way. I don’t know, that’s why I asked how you were getting on. But how would anyone else manage to deliver two identical beds to your house without at least one of you noticing?”
“But it wasn’t two identical beds. It was the same one. The exact same one. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“It couldn’t possibly be the exact same bed.” said Rose, in measured tones, trying to calm Peter. “You destroyed the first bed, hacked it to pieces.”
“I know, but it keeps coming back. The same bed keeps returning. You couldn’t replicate something this unique. The carvings, the curtains, the throws, they’re all identical.”
“Even the tapestry on the underside of the canopy?” said Stanley. Peter stopped what he was about
to say and glared at Stanley with suspicion.
“How do you know there was a tapestry?”
“Well I… I mean I… erm…” Stanley went dead-white and Rose could have throttled him.
“He saw it in the skip, when you threw it out,” she said. “I would have thought that was obvious. Such a waste too, it was unique, it must have been worth quite a bit.”
“But we didn’t throw the tapestry in the skip. We burnt it separately. There’s no way you could have known about that tapestry unless you’d been on the bed. You wouldn’t have seen it if you’d just looked through the door of the spare room.”
Now it was Rose’s turn to go white. “That’s not the point,” she said, trying to gather herself. “Bethany is missing and someone is delivering beds to your house without you knowing. Let’s focus on the important issues here.”
Peter wasn’t listening. He was staring with horror at Rose’s belly. He backed away from her shaking his head ever so slightly. “Oh my God,” he said. “You didn’t, you didn’t, you have no idea what you’ve done, have you?” The back of his legs touched the sofa and he collapsed on to it, like a rag doll someone had tossed onto the furniture. All the life drained from his muscles. He put his head in his hands and began to cry.
Rose and Stanley exchanged a puzzled look. This was not the response they expected. “Go and get some brandy,” Rose told Stanley. She sat beside Peter, settling carefully into position to accommodate the weight of her distended belly.
“You don’t understand what you’ve done, do you?” Peter muttered, staring at his lap. “I’m fucked, I’m absolutely fucked.”
“Peter, you’re not making any sense,” Rose said. Stanley returned with a large glass of brandy and Peter sipped it gratefully.
“Peter,” Rose said, putting a hand on his arm. “What is it that you think we’ve done? What don’t we understand? Does it have something to do with Bethany’s disappearance?”
