A Sight for Sore Eyes

by Ruth Rendell

  After a while he heard Keith go into the front room. The television came on, some gangster film, all crashes and gunshots and the choking cries of the dying. He listened, heard the top of a can peeled off. Keith’s evening of gradual befuddlement had begun.

  The mirror was to have some sort of geometric inlay on its frame. Teddy hadn’t made up his mind what kind. Crosses, maybe, but not circles and crosses. He didn’t want it looking like the Oxo building. Triangles perhaps, simple triangles, in pale wood lightly stained. Sycamore or holly would take a pale yellow and a green stain. On the other hand parallel lines of inlay, all kept very light in color, apricot, gold, beige, olive, might be the best. He drew designs, found Alfred Chance’s box of watercolors.

  Keith’s return was unexpected. He hesitated outside Teddy’s door, perhaps summoning up the energy for his kick. The door flew open hard enough for the handle to hit the wall again. Keith had an open can of Guinness in his hand. “I want you out of here,” he said.

  Teddy put down his paintbrush. “You what?”

  “You heard. If you’d toed the line a bit, if you’d kept your nose clean, I might have let you hang on till the summer. But oh, no, not you, you’re destroying my home, breaking the place up, you’re a fuckin’ menace, you are, and you’ve got to go. Right? Savvy?”

  “Who’s going to put me out? You?”

  “Me,” said Keith, “and the law if that’s what it takes.” And in a movement like a fist punching he threw half the contents of his drink can across Teddy’s painting. A pool of brown liquid with a scud of foam on it flooded across the delicately colored-in drawing of the mirror frame.

  No sound came from Teddy and scarcely any movement. He had been staring at Keith before the Guinness was thrown and he continued to stare, impassively, steadily. And Keith must have been more unnerved by this cold passivity than he would have been by any violent reaction, for his own gaze fell and, taking a defiant swig of what remained in the can, he turned and left the room.

  Teddy went out to the kitchen to find a rag. The cloth in a bowl under the sink had probably been crocheted by his mother. He looked at it without sentimental feelings or indeed any feelings at all except to notice, so to speak, her trademark, mistakes in the stitches and a bright-red border. It served its purpose, that is for mopping-up operations, but of course the drawing was ruined. Teddy wiped down his table, dried it on kitchen roll, wiped the floor, screwed up the drawing and dropped it into his waste-paper basket.

  When he had taken the cloth back he went to listen outside the front-room door. The television sound had been turned down. He heard the top peeled off another can and something that might have been the cap of the Chivas bottle unscrewed. Was it at this point that he decided or an hour later? Afterward, he couldn’t have said. Best, probably, not to think too much about it. Act, don’t think.

  His room smelled of Guinness, heady, yeasty. Should he do another drawing or not? It was the pleasantest way he knew of passing the time. For half an hour or more he drew designs, but this time not coloring them in from his paintbox. Then he put the new drawings into a cardboard folder and the pencil into its box, gave the table another polish and stood by the French windows.

  The night was very dark, the hopeless blackness of midwinter when the sun, or what there was of it, had set at four and there had been no natural light for hours. He heard the yuppies next door come home. He could hear the click of their light switches, the one in the room next to this making quite a sharp crack. He switched off his own light. For a moment or two it was like being inside a black bag. Then objects outside began to take shape. Street lights were on, though not near at hand; light from next door made a yellowish glow on the air and yellow bars between the palings of the fence.

  He could see the outline of the carport, the tail of the Edsel immediately outside the windows, like a spacecraft that has landed too near for comfort. Light coming from somewhere made a pale streak on the bin-liners covering the bike. The sky was a very dark reddish purple. Next door they were switching off lights, they were going to bed. Their stairs creaked as they went up. He hadn’t got a watch, had never had one, but he guessed the time at past midnight, nearer twelve-thirty.

  Out in the hall he had to feel his way, for all was in darkness. The line of dim light under the front-room door was a guide to him. He listened. He opened the door very quietly and stepped inside. On the bright but muted television a fat comedian was telling jokes deemed unsuitable for transmission at an earlier hour. Keith lay back in his armchair, his eyes closed, his mouth open. As if to acknowledge Teddy’s arrival he suddenly emitted a rich, bubbling, liquid snore.

  The stub of the last cigarette he had smoked had failed to make it to the ashtray but had burned itself out on the table-top. A gray furry caterpillar it looked like in the dimness. The whole tabletop was scored with grub-shaped burn marks as if someone had been attempting poker work. Teddy came closer, blew at the ash caterpillar and watched it disappear in a pale cloud. Keith didn’t stir. He had drunk three cans of Guinness and, if that whiskey bottle had been full when he came in, getting on for half of it.

  Now to find another, suitable, plastic bag. There were so many names for the stuff, he knew them all because he hated them and what they stood for: polythene, polyethylene, polypropylene, polyester, polystyrene, polyvinyl. Polythene was the one needed here. There was plenty of it in the room, green and yellow and white and red bags discarded by Keith, dropped on to the floor, or thrust one inside the other, ten or eleven of them, to make a poly-cushion.

  One of these, the innermost, he pulled out. It was a biggish yellow bag with a single seam and it came from Self-ridges. How had the likes of Keith ever acquired a Selfridges bag? It was impossible that he had ever been into the store. One of his customers must have given it to him because his own had come apart or because he had something to carry home with him. The polythene was smooth, slippery and thick, what might be called an up-market grade-one superior plastic. Instead of holes cut in each side it had a stout band of the same plastic threaded through its top rather as cord passes through the waistband of track-suit pants. But this band protruded from two openings to form handles which, pulled on, would draw the top of the bag tight. It was just what he wanted, Teddy thought, it was ideal.

  Then he stopped thinking and acted. He acted mindlessly. First he turned off the television and stood in the dark, listening to the quietness. Traffic on the North Circular Road made a distant hum beyond the silence. He took off the clip that fastened the curtains together, parted them and let in the light from a street lamp that wasn’t outside but up on the corner of the side road. Keith made a gurgling noise, not quite a snore. He moved his head to the left, then back to its former position.

  Teddy picked up the yellow bag in both hands, holding it open. He disliked touching Keith but he had to, his hands coming into contact only with hair and briefly with a woollen pullover as, taking a deep breath, he pulled the bag over Keith’s head.

  A certain amount of struggling was to be expected, but Keith didn’t struggle. He was too far gone for that. Teddy drew the band on the bag as tightly as he could without breaking the plastic. He didn’t leave the room, not then, but he turned his back.

  He stood in the window, looking out at the street he had seen from this window all his life, the long straight roadway, its surface painted yellow on black from the street lamps, the squat stucco houses, each with a mean little shelf over its front door instead of a porch, the chain-link fencing and behind it, where gardens should be, his neighbors’ transport, aged cars, resprayed vans, motorbikes, push-bikes, and in one, next to a caravan, a boat with its hull uppermost.

  Teddy felt his usual loathing of it, a hatred that was always fresh; familiarity never taught him indifference. For a moment or two he almost forgot Keith and what was happening to Keith. Give mankind half a chance and it would make anything it came in contact with, anything it touched, ugly. His parents and Keith had been worse; they had found something
ugly and made it uglier.

  Outside, a cat ran across the street, squeezed through a gate and, safe now, sauntered up to the doorstep where it sat down and began washing itself. A beautiful creature, large, slender, pale—he couldn’t tell what color—elegantly detached. People had bred dogs into grotesque shapes, hideous joke creatures, presumably to have something to laugh at, but they couldn’t do that with cats, cats were always the same shape. He wondered why they couldn’t and was sure it wasn’t for want of trying. They would be bound to do their best in the pursuit of ugliness. The cat got up on to a windowsill, slithered in through an open fanlight.

  Teddy went back to his room. He dared not put on a light, so he sat in the dark. He didn’t think about Keith, it was quite easy not to, but about his mirror and what he was going to do when he left college, how he was going to live. By making furniture? He doubted if you could earn a living at it. By doing it and doing something else as well?

  He would make a start tomorrow, he would advertise. Whatever it would cost he would get the money somehow. He got up and felt in the pocket of the jacket that hung on the door. Even in the dark a faint glitter came from the diamond. The ring was like a talisman. He held it tightly in his hand and felt the stone dig into his mutilated finger. The money for advertising must be found, but not by selling the ring.

  After what he calculated was half an hour he returned to the front room, loosened the band on the yellow plastic bag and lifted it off Keith’s head. The blue rubber band came off his ponytail at the same time. It was too dark to see much and he didn’t want to see. But he had to feel. He felt for pulses on Keith’s neck and wrists and, bracing himself, thrusting his hand under pullover and shirt, palpated with his finger where Keith’s heart must be. There was nothing. The blood had ceased to circulate. Keith was dead.

  The French windows couldn’t be fully opened since the coming of the Edsel. Its tail wasn’t much more than two feet from the back of the house. Teddy unlatched the windows and pushed them ajar. The boot of the Edsel, like a grinning mouth with upturned corners, was locked. He hadn’t thought of that. It meant feeling in Keith’s pockets and fumbling through Keith’s clothes once more, but it had to be done.

  No keys, but quite a lot of money. He didn’t look closely at the money, only enough to be aware that many of the notes were reddish-brown and purple, not green. His hands were shaking, his whole body now. He hadn’t shaken when he killed Keith, but the possession of this money was making him shake. What did that say about human beings? Confirmed what he had always believed since he could reason, he told himself in a sudden gush of self-dislike, that they were low, degraded and devoted to materialism.

  He went upstairs. The keys must be somewhere. They must be somewhere in Keith’s bedroom. With mounting distaste, he hunted through Keith’s clothes, the clean, or cleaner, ones in the cupboard, the dirty pile on the floor. Through jacket pockets and trouser pockets and leathers and old canvas bags and the welter of rubbish in the tall-boy’s drawers. He looked under the bed and in the bed, under the pillows, lifted up the gray and greasy square of carpet. At least the shaking had stopped. The urgency of his hunt had somehow allayed that trembling.

  Back in the front room, avoiding the eyes of dead Keith—how and when had his eyes come open?—Teddy investigated the toolbag, the drinks bags, then turned his attention to the furniture. There were no drawers in here, only shelves made to contain books, but holding instead the clutter and debris characteristic of this household. But no keys, and none either on the table tier under the television set. The kitchen next, an obvious place. Why hadn’t he thought of it?

  Was nothing useful or worth preserving kept in this place? Even as he searched he marveled at the minds of those who filled drawers and cupboards, jars and vases and even a teapot—unused since the invention of the teabag—with pins and paper clips and elastic bands and safety-pins and hairclips and screws and drawing pins and tissues and hair combings, with broken pencils and bits of biscuit and throat pastilles and nail files and copper coins and shoelaces and aspirins. And even keys, but not the keys. He opened the cupboard over the sink and a bunch of plastic bags fell out.

  The keys must be in Keith’s bedroom. They must be there and somehow he had missed them. The kitchen clock, the only one in the house, told him the time was just after one-thirty. Hours must pass before it grew light, six, seven hours, but still the swift passing of time troubled him. Suppose he never found those keys?

  Once more into Keith’s bedroom. He had looked under the carpet before, but this time he rolled it up. Black beetles scurried away in all directions. Teddy kicked at the full Pyrex casserole, and ash and cigarette stubs scattered everywhere. He went through the drawers again, he looked inside Keith’s boots, his smelly trainers, his one pair of good shoes. Teddy’s temper was always slow to burst into flames from its steady smoldering, but now it did. The austere faces of the originators of the motor car, gazing so sternly at the window, suddenly enraged him and he tore the magazine cut-outs off the wall. Ferdinand Porsche’s portrait was the last to be ripped down and it came away more easily than the others. Necessarily so, since behind it was a hole in the wall, gouged out of the plaster. And in the hole were car keys on a key-ring from which a doll was suspended, a tiny, pink, naked woman.

  Teddy didn’t speculate for long as to what Keith’s motives might have been in thus concealing his car keys. No doubt he had suspected Teddy of going joy-riding in his absence, even though he couldn’t drive and had often expressed his loathing of the Edsel. He took the keys and went downstairs. His room was freezing cold because he had left the French windows open. Aware that putting any lights on would be a mistake, he stood shivering, accustoming his eyes to the dark. Then he unlocked the car boot and raised the lid. Ample room inside, as he had supposed.

  Keith was heavy. Was it possible people were heavier dead than alive? Perhaps. He had heard or read somewhere that you were supposed to close the eyes of the dead, had actually seen it done in some television film. But he couldn’t bring himself to lay his fingers on Keith’s eyes. Soon he would no longer have to see them. He dragged the body through the house in the dark, Keith’s quite long hair, released from its band, sweeping the floor. At the French windows he had a momentary fear that he wouldn’t be strong enough to lift Keith off the floor and hump him up and into the boot. But the events of the evening were teaching him something. He was learning that if you need to do a thing badly enough, a task demanding physical strength, if you must do it, within reason you can.

  Keith must have weighed 250 pounds. Teddy’s heart felt as if it would burst and his arms come out of their sockets as he struggled to lift him. A harness to put on Keith would help, but he knew there was no rope in the house. Drawing deep breaths, he looked up at the windows next door. All was in darkness, all was silent. Yet some faint gleam of light—there is always somewhere, somehow, a sliver of light—touched the shiny slippery plastic that covered the motorbike.

  Teddy had never bothered to examine it before, had merely glanced at it with distaste. Now he approached it, his eyes growing accustomed to the darkness. It was not a sheet but a bag, a huge bag of plastic that must have been several millimeters thick and measured a good six by eight feet.

  He lifted it off the bike and brought it in through the French windows, careful to avoid making any sort of slithering noise. Keith’s body could be rolled comparatively easily into it. Then Teddy got a purchase on the top of the bag and heaved and hauled it over the rim of the Edsel’s boot. Once bag and body were inside it occurred to him that it would be a hygienic and perhaps wise measure to seal it as best he could. Was there any adhesive tape in the house? He didn’t think so.

  Then he remembered Keith’s bag of tools, his plumber’s equipment. Inside it he found a roll of heavy black tape. He had no idea what it might be used for, possibly for binding around the joints in pipes, but it would suit his purpose. He drew together the open end of the bag and bound it around and around, twenty
times around, with the black tape. It was done. He had made no noise while carrying out this disposal of Keith’s body and now he closed the boot lid quietly and locked it.

  Somewhere, in the distance, the sound borne on the crisp, icy air, a clock struck two. He had lived in that house all the twenty-one years of his life and never heard that clock before. Perhaps his awareness had never been so great nor his senses so sharpened. He went inside and closed the French windows.

  13

  He had a bath. It was the first thing he did after what he had done. If he had gone straight to bed after handling Keith’s body he couldn’t have slept. As it was, he woke and sat up some time in the small hours, long before it was light, and still half asleep, still in a dream he had forgotten was happening, saw the sideboard up against the wall in the shadows, its finials and sugarstick columns and clouded glass and gargoyle-like carvings. He saw it as a building, as the sinister mansion of his childhood imaginings, its crenellations as towers, its finials as spires and its green glass as windows, but quivering there in the gloom. And he shouted out in horror before full wakefulness and sanity returned and nothing could any longer be seen in the deep darkness. The sideboard was gone and the room empty of all but his bed and his tools and his table.

  Memory came back then and what he had done to Keith. The body lay no more than five or six feet from his pillow, albeit enclosed in thick plastic and binding tape and in the metal casket of the Edsel’s boot. He couldn’t see it, he could see nothing. Had he done that, had he really done that? He thought of getting up and going to look in the front room, then in Keith’s bedroom. Instead he stood at the window, staring at a lamp in a side street, a lamp which shed no light as far away as this beyond a distant glow. The garden, the carport, the fences, were a dense darkness, the sky a dark reddish-brown. He realized suddenly how cold he was, he was shivering, and he went back to bed, huddling the blankets and the quilt tightly around him.