When they found the handwriting behind the first cabinet – Len and Florrie, 1964 – he went into the bathroom with moist eyes and smothered his face inside one of the big lemon yellow towels he’d found in the airing cupboard.
Looking at the three wall cabinets and row of cupboards, piled like earthquake wreckage in the yard (particularly the sight of the pale unpainted wood that had been facing the kitchen wall since 1964), hit him as hard as the sight of a dead pet once had, rigid with the terrible permanence and unfairness of its final sleep, when it was still loved.
Indifferent to the inscriptions left by Len and Florrie – they had found four – Marcus cracked open the tins of white emulsion and began painting. As Marcus worked, Frank realised he despised his best friend.
They never had time to vandalise another room that weekend, and it was just as well, because his relationship with the house changed the night following their desecration of the little kitchen.
The following morning, while he sat, doleful, over some toast and a mug of tea in the newly painted starkness of the kitchen, his stainless steel units piled in the middle of the room, he mused it was as if he’d just dreamt someone else’s dreams.
Throughout the entire night he’d passed through a dark muddle of images mostly lost to him in the morning, but he did partially recall scenarios filled with the smoke of Silk Cut cigarettes, the clack of Scrabble tiles, and the same Matt Monro song playing on a continuous loop from a black tape recorder with spatters of white paint upon it. Born Free. He’d been a guest on The Price is Right too; was somehow inside the show, but also watching himself from the sofa. It had been his goal to win a small caravan. Then he was stood upon the yellow lino of the kitchen floor, counting pages of Green Shield stamps before he’d woken. Or thought he’d woken. Because there had been someone in the bedroom with him. Talking to him between sharp intakes of breath. A small indistinct figure stood at the foot of the bed when he jerked awake from the first dream to enter another he was sure was real at the time, with him fully awake within it.
In the second more vivid dream, the figure left the room quickly. So quickly, with its hands clutched over its face, he never saw its progress. It seemed to just reappear in the doorway as a hunched silhouette, lit by ambient light rising up the stairwell. And when the figure turned to him the face remained dark, but the crouching outline was visible. It was a woman, for whom he felt a rush of tenderness and affection and remorse, despite the shock she had given him by appearing at the foot of his bed like that. He was stricken with the same feeling of abandonment he remembered on his first day at school.
The dream continued until he stood behind the small figure in the spare room, in which she had bent over to mooch through plastic bags. “You need to get ready. And I can’t go without it,” she’d said, but never turned around.
He woke up at seven and realised he’d not seen the figure’s face once, but discovered his own to be briny with dried tears. He’d gone downstairs to the smell of fried sausages that competed with the stink of new paint, though he hadn’t cooked a single sausage in the house. Must have been the neighbours.
The dreams turned nasty on Sunday and Monday night, brought by the kitchen cupboards being left outside in the rain. Like his mother’s vibes about other people’s houses, he just instinctively knew that was the cause of his troubled sleep.
On Sunday night, the figure came back into his room. But her agitation and grief had intensified within the room. He’d woken to find her leaning over his face with her hands clasped across her mouth, behind which she issued grunts. He suspected a glimmer of an eye had been visible, but he saw no other features.
And he’d sat up, his heart hammering, convinced it was an actual intruder, only to see the figure fade into the dark centre of the wardrobe.
All the lights had come on upstairs and he’d conducted a search of the entire house, but there was no one in the building with him.
On Monday night what might have been the figure of the elderly woman was inside his room again, but on its hands and knees this time. Or he may have dreamed about a wounded animal, because he awoke to hear something mewl and fumble about under the curtains, though he could not see it and just lay stiff with fright in bed as round and round it went on all fours, bumping the wall in its distress.
The figure eventually went out of the bedroom very quickly and scurried across the landing; he saw the last of it and was sure it had been a dog. Nothing else could run that fast. He had been terrified, but compelled to follow, and had looked inside the spare bedroom from the doorway and seen the figure of the old woman again, but on all fours with her back to him. She searched for something amongst boxes of vinyl photograph albums he had never seen before. She was covered in a grubby housecoat and eventually held an object in front of her lowered face like she was trying to see a tiny item in front of her eyes in the darkness. Either that or she was putting something into her mouth. He couldn’t tell which, but she was breathing hard between the grunts.
When he spoke, the figure turned quickly and showed him milky eyes like those in the head of a dead sheep, and she bared teeth that didn’t belong in a human mouth.
He came awake underneath the eiderdown in the master bedroom with his fingers stuffed inside his own throat.
On Tuesday morning he carried the broken kitchen furniture back inside the house and dried the wreckage with a tea towel. It was felt as necessary as rescuing a drowning cat from a canal.
Mail from the Macmillan Nurses and from a council mobility service arrived on Wednesday morning addressed to Mrs Florrie White. He put the letters on the kitchen counter, in a neat stack beside the small toaster; he’d repaired the unit as much as possible and leaned it against the wall. It was at a tilt and didn’t help the house much, but he couldn’t bear another night of it being outside in the cold. The new steel kitchen units went outside and into the yard. Of course it could not be a permanent arrangement, but he couldn’t settle until the swap had been made.
He spent Tuesday to Thursday on the sofa, listless and melancholy, drifting through afternoon television shows for the modicum of comfort they provided, before he took long sleeps with the gas fire on; its glow and little clicking sound reassured him more than anything he could remember. The naps he would often awake from, because the figure in his dreams would mutter to itself at the top of the stairs. Though he could never remember what it said when he awoke and there was no one up there when he looked.
Frank also spent a lot of his time staring at the pattern on the kitchen table and thinking of rooms he’d occupied as a student; the cohabits through his twenties with two girlfriends long gone; the house-shares with strangers with whom he had no contact now. In the increasingly indistinct crowds in his memories there had been an alcoholic who only consumed extra strong cider and Cup-a-Soup, and a fat girl who ate like a child at a tenth birthday party and spent hours locked in the bathroom. He could no longer remember their names. Or the faces of the girlfriends. He tried for a while until he moved to the living room and fell asleep in front of Countdown.
On Thursday evening, he refused to take a call from Marcus. There had been another four since the previous weekend. All unanswered. For some reason Marcus and his calls were irritating him to such a degree, he put his iPhone in the cupboard under the stairs, inside a box of wooden clothes pegs. He hadn’t had enough time to think things through about the house and could not abide being rushed.
His sleep went undisturbed until the weekend and he found himself watching ITV from seven to nine, before going up to bed. Happy Shop kept him fed with its inexhaustible variety of memory and flavour. And when Marcus arrived on Saturday morning, Frank never answered the door, lying on the floor of the living room with the curtains shut. At the end of his second week off work, he called the office from the public phone outside Happy Shop, to say he wasn’t coming back.
On the Monday of his fourth week in the house, he finally went out for tools. Not to renovate the property, b
ut to try and repair the kitchen. It could not be put off any longer. But the act of leaving the house was excruciating.
Twice the previous week, when he’d been cooking in the wrecked kitchen, he’d looked up, convinced he was being watched from the doorway, as if caught doing something wrong, or eating something he had been told not to. The imagined presence had been seething with a surly disappointment and was dark with hostility. That room had become the focus of an intensification of the restlessness growing since the Saturday he had assaulted the cabinets. The kitchen was the heart of the house and he had broken it.
There was no one physically inside the house with him. Could not possibly have been, but the repeated sounds of small feet padding about the lino while he’d napped in the lounge during the afternoons, suggested to a region of his imagination he little used, that a bereft presence was repeatedly examining the kitchen. He actually worried the first time he’d heard the shuffle of feet that the former owner had escaped the retirement community, or worse, and let herself back into what she believed was still her own home.
Frank recovered quickly from the sudden frights, and within the confines of the comfortable womb of the terraced house eventually found this supervising presence acceptable. Deserved. Nor could he think of a single reason to doubt his instincts that amends had to be made. Within the house, such things were possible.
But functioning and navigating his way around the world outside of the house, of what no longer felt so familiar, defeated him. When he went out for tools, his actual attempts to move on the Pershore Road wasted him before he reached the bus stop in front of the bowling alley.
Unpredictable tides of energy and the staring eyes of pedestrians and motorists, all filled with smouldering threats, seemed to pull his thoughts apart and compress him to a muttering standstill. He was thinking of too many things at the same time, but then forgetting one train of thought at the same time another began.
The pressure the city exerted was tangible. Uncomfortable, like a head-slappy wind on a hilltop or a coat pocket caught on a door handle. Unless he was inside the house or Happy Shop, he didn’t fit in anywhere and was in everyone’s way. His recent life had been reduced to quick forays outside the house for very good reasons, because he was unable to cope with anything else and he wasn’t wanted anywhere else. Never had been. The house had opened his eyes. And there was now something wrong with one of his legs; a pain that started inside a hip. So he should keep off it.
The further he ventured from the house to buy the tools, the greater his physical discomfort and confusion. Frank lit endless cigarettes. Silk Cut. He’d started smoking again at the weekend, after being driven by an unstoppable urge to light up during the National Lottery. At the bus stop, fat pigeons scurried around his feet and watched him with amber eyes.
After boarding a bus, he made his way upstairs and with his bad hip it was like trying to stand upright in a rowing boat. Sitting by the window, as the bus trundled toward Selly Oak, where he knew there was a DIY store, he looked down to the streets for women wearing tight skirts and leather boots; the sight usually made him dizzy with longing. Now the women and their clothes just appeared to him as ordinary, and he felt dead to the previously strong images. It led to an incredulity that such a part of himself had ever existed.
From a seat in front of him, a mobile phone began to ring in a girl’s handbag. It distracted Frank from what seemed like important, meaningful thoughts he could barely remember a few moments later. He groaned. The girl began talking in a loud voice. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. Frank wanted to take the phone from her hand and drop it out of the window, to hear it smash on the asphalt below.
Muttering under his breath to prevent himself from swearing aloud, he was forced to listen. The girl’s voice was controlled and sounded too much like a prepared speech to be part of a natural discourse. There were no pauses, or repetitions, or silences; just her going blah, blah, blah, and addressing everyone on the bus. It was not a phone she was holding, but a microphone. It was the most disappointing thing about getting older; to still be confronted by these childish things. These increments of self-importance and vanity he saw all about him whenever he left home.
By the time he reached the Bristol Road, he felt sick from an aversion to everything around him. A hot loathing. But a fascination too, and a pitiful desperation to be included. In one mercifully brief moment, he wished to be burnt to ash and to have his name erased from every record in existence. He was rubbish. No one wanted him around. He dabbed the corner of one eye with a tissue and wanted to go home. Back to the house.
As the bus brushed the edge of Selly Oak he fell asleep. And woke to find the vehicle had trundled and wheezed into streets he didn’t recognise. He’d slept through his stop and found himself in a bleak part of Birmingham he had never seen before. Somewhere behind Longbridge maybe? In a panic, he fled down the stairs, alighted, and then stood beside a closed factory and a wholesaler of Saris.
Everything here was inhospitable. Anger choked him. Can I not leave the house without a map? He’d lived in the city for ten years, but he recognised none of this. It was as if the streets and buildings had actually moved while he slept on the bus to disorient him.
He followed a main road in the opposite direction the bus had taken, but grew tired and turned his face to a wooden fence surrounding a building site and suffered a paroxysm of such powerful contained rage it left him with a broken tooth and cuts on the palms of his hands.
Clenching his jaws together and grinding his teeth, he’d felt the enamel snap at the side of his mouth. His cheeks filled with grit. But when the tooth snapped, the tension passed from his body, leaving him confused and expecting shock-waves of agony. But there was no pain and he decided against going to a dentist. He didn’t know where the dentists were in the city. He then noticed the little half-moons of blood on the inside of his palms, made by his own nails. It had been so long since he’d bitten them. They were like unpleasantly feminine claws. How could they have grown so much and he not noticed?
Trying to retrace the bus route and find a familiar landmark, he became hopelessly disorientated. He went into a tacky women’s hairdressers, the only place he could find that offered him any sense of reassurance, to ask for directions. The girls in heavy make-up exchanged glances when he was unable to speak. He just stood there and trembled before them. After throwing his arms into the air in silent exasperation, he left the shop, crimson with shame. Speech only returned to him at the curb, where he stood muttering. Some people stared. A taxi took him home.
These things never used to happen to him, but he had a notion that the potential for such a slide had always been in place. In the back of the taxi he hid his face inside the lapel of his overcoat and bit his bottom lip until his eyes brimmed with water.
Two days later, though it might have been three or even four days, someone knocked on the front door for a long time. So he hid on the floor of the spare room. Then he could hear three voices talking in the neighbour’s garden and knew they were trying to look through the back windows of the house.
For the rest of that afternoon he chain-smoked Silk Cut, didn’t relax until it was dark outside and Coronation Street’s theme tune boomed through the living room. The thought of going further than the end of the road made him nauseous, so he stopped tormenting himself with the idea.
He tried again to put the cabinets back up on the walls, but made his fingers bleed. He went upstairs to wash them, but couldn’t remember why he was upstairs when he arrived on the landing. He went and lay down on the bed instead. And around him the smell of perfume, of old furniture, stale carpets, and chip fat clouded. The radiators came on upstairs with a gurgle. He felt safe and he closed his eyes.
Sometime that night, Florrie came into the room on all fours and climbed onto the bed. She sat on his chest and pushed a thin cold hand inside his mouth.
DRIVING THE MILKY WAY
Weston Ochse
Weston Ochse’s roots are fi
rmly anchored in the great American weird tale. If you’ve never read Weston’s stories before, you’re in for a real treat, for while his fiction seems effortless and simply told, there’s a real depth and complexity to his work that calls to mind the stories of such greats as Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. ‘Driving the Milky Way’ features an unusual take on the haunted house and brings us a moving tale about friendship and loss.
It started with a sneeze.
Chicken George, whose real name was Henry, Flipper Gordon, named as such because of his webbed toes, Frank Just Frank and Bach, whose real name was Sebastian but demanded they never call him that on fear of death, all heard it at the same time. Out in the wide open desert scrub of Arizona, there was no mistaking a sneeze for any other sort of naturally occurring sound.
They’d been playing Cowboys and Indians, with Flipper and Bach channeling the spirits of Cochise, Geronimo and a thousand other bad-ass Apaches. Both the boys wore leather belts around their heads and had used some spit and dirt to work the red sandy soil into the skin of their faces. They carried hollow yucca shoots with the seedpods rattling on the ends, which they waved around in a mad melding of a Mexican maraca and a Don Quixote lance.
Chicken George and Frank Just Frank were the cowboys. They didn’t have proper hats, but made up for it by channeling John Wayne – hooking their thumbs through their belt loops and walking stiff-legged, dead-eye stares promising violence from their almost real weapons. Chicken George carried a molded plastic machine gun circa 1920s, the kind that had made the Valentine’s Day Massacre famous. And Frank Just Frank wore a gun belt with two glistening silver toy cap guns.
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