Bleaker House

by Nell Stevens

  He stopped in the doorway.

  “Fuck.”

  The window of his bedroom was no longer there. In its place, black branches jutted through the frame, and rain was streaming in from outside. The stench of grease and batter drifted up from the chip shops on Camden High Street, along with the smell of petrol. The branches were bare. They belonged, Billy realized, to the dead tree that had been rotting on the street outside, swaying in high winds, threatening to fall. The council had posted a notice on the trunk announcing a date for its removal, but the date had passed and the tree had remained.

  The branches pushed in like hands pointing at the damage they had done. The room did not look like the place he had left a few minutes previously. It was, he knew, the same: there was his bed, there was his lamp, the shoebox of gear, the stacks of CDs and flyers for the band, the bicycle frame he had lifted from a skip with the vague idea that he would, one day, fix it up into something he could ride. His keyboard was there, on its stand. But none of it looked familiar. Over everything—the floor, the bed, the CDs—were fragments of glass. In some places there were large shards; one had fallen into the groove between two floorboards and tilted upwards, jutting back at the branches where the window had been.

  Billy picked his way towards the empty frame. Fragments of the pane remained at the edges in jagged chunks. Leaning out, he peered down. It was dark, and everything looked orange in the light cast by streetlamps. In the place where the tree had stood, there was a car, turned at an odd angle to the road. Its bonnet was crumpled. Half underneath it, where the trunk had been planted, a large hole gaped like a mouth. Roots were exposed, wriggling up between the vehicle’s front wheels. The tree tilted diagonally from the pavement to Billy’s window. People were standing in a circle around the scene; somebody pointed when Billy appeared and they all looked up.

  “What the fuck,” said Billy.

  The driver was still in the car: a girl with a pale face and messy black hair. Her fingers were curled around the steering wheel. The people on the street had opened the car door and were trying to persuade her to move. After a moment, she turned and let a man scoop her out. She was skinny, Billy saw, once she was standing up, and for a second he thought it was Amy. He thought she had Amy’s face, and Amy’s thin wrists dangling from the sleeves of her sweater. He felt sick, then, and put a hand to his pocket to see if he had any pills on him. The pocket was empty.

  It was only when the wind blew rain onto his face that he realized the people below were trying to get his attention. He blinked and rubbed the water out of his eyes.

  “What?” he shouted.

  The man who had lifted the girl from the car replied: “Are you all right, mate?”

  Billy nodded.

  “I’ve called an ambulance,” the man said, “and the police.”

  Billy’s nausea returned. The rain was cold. He glanced again at the girl who had been in the car. She was crying. She looked nothing like Amy.

  He had grown so accustomed to the pang of loss each time this happened, each time he was forced to remind himself Amy was dead, that it was almost pleasurable. He let himself feel it for a second—the twist in his stomach—and then he began to move again. He ducked away from the window and began looking for his phone.

  It was under his pillow, and he had to grope around through the broken glass before he felt it. He dialled Dave the Bass’s number, cradling the mobile between his shoulder and his ear as he reached under the bed. It rang for a long time.

  At last: “Billy Keys!” It was loud, wherever Dave the Bass was. A beat was thudding down the line, and there were voices in the background.

  “Mate,” said Billy.

  “What’s going on?”

  It wasn’t until he tried to form a sentence that Billy realized how high he was. He found the carrier bag he had been reaching for under the bed and pulled it out. Inside: an eighth of weed, a tiny bit of coke that some girl had left behind after his thirtieth months ago, and an air-rifle-pellet tin half full of ketamine. He twisted the bag closed again, lifted the lid of the shoebox and put it inside.

  “Mate?” said Dave the Bass. “What’s going on?”

  The shoebox contained Billy’s own things: his prescription Valium, a baggie of pills, some weed, and a novelty bong that had the words “Get High & Get Down in London Town” on the side. He fingered the Valium packet, counting the remaining tablets; there were nine. He knew that if he concentrated he would be able to work out how many he had taken that day, but he couldn’t get a handle on the numbers, and instead leaned back, pushing the box away from him with his feet.

  “A tree came through my window,” said Billy. “The police are coming.”

  “Come over,” said Dave the Bass. “We’re having a shindig.”

  “Where are you?”

  “My place.”

  Billy clenched his jaw. “I hate your fucking shindigs, Dave.”

  “Just come over. Make sure you don’t leave anything.”

  “A tree came through my window.”

  “Just come over.”

  As Dave hung up, sirens sounded in the distance. The police would be streaming past Camden Town station; they would be outside the flat in less than a minute. Looking down, Billy realized blood was coming from somewhere, running along his wrist. He inspected his hands and found a cut on one of his knuckles. When he scratched it, a splinter of glass came loose.

  With the shoebox tucked under his arm, Billy took the stairs two at a time and left the flat through the back door. He jogged towards the high street, keeping his head down. The contents of the box were rattling; he tried to carry it as though there were shoes inside. The rain intensified, and as water soaked through to his skin, his head cleared. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t a crime to have a tree smash into your bedroom. It wasn’t a crime to leave your own flat at high speed, carrying a shoebox. The police couldn’t touch him for that.

  The sound of the party reached him as he turned the corner onto Dave’s road: music, voices. Dave’s front door was half-open and he slipped through without touching it. When he surveyed the hallway, he was relieved to see that, for the most part, the people there were familiar: members of his band or other bands.

  “Billy Keys!”

  Dave was there, pushing through the cluster of people. A cigarette hung from his lips as he smiled. He thumped a hand on Billy’s back.

  “What’s up with your face?”

  “What?”

  “You shaved off half your beard.”

  Billy put a hand to his chin. His stubble was patchy, rough in places and smooth where he had begun to shave before the crash. He shrugged. He opened his mouth to begin to explain about the tree, but Dave shouted across the room, “Billy’s here! He’s brought us a little party.”

  He meant the shoebox. Billy crouched down to open it, grabbed the carrier bag and held it out to Dave.

  “That shit’s yours,” Billy said. “This is mine.” He slid the lid back onto the box.

  Dave took the bag. The other members of the band emerged from the crowd: Tom Bone and Rat and Boyd. Tom Bone, bronzed and muscular, a foot taller than everyone else, had hair that came down to his shoulders and always seemed to have girls attached to it, their fingers playing with its blonde ends, braiding and twisting it. Billy didn’t recognize the one who was there now, clasping his elbow, but she looked like all the others. Her pupils were wide, and dark. Tom Bone’s were the same. Billy smiled.

  “Good time, Boney?” he asked.

  Tom Bone shrugged as though trying to dislodge the girl from his arm. She clung fast. “Yeah,” he said. “Good time.”

  “He’s fucked up,” said Dave.

  “Everyone’s fucked up,” said Billy. “A tree just smashed through my window,” he said, but none of the band seemed to hear.

  —

  Billy Keys, Dave the Bass, Tom Bone and Tom Bone’s girl were together in the top-floor bathroom. Dave’s house was large, four storeys high, a
nd the party sounded distant from where they were, as though it had nothing to do with them. Billy had been drinking; he had taken a couple of pills. It was nearly morning. He could see the sky brightening through the window over the bath.

  “So is it true that you knew Amy?”

  He was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, his legs pulled in towards his chest. His shoebox was tucked under his knees. The question drifted around him, and seemed at first as though it were one of his own thoughts.

  Tom Bone, lying in the empty bath, extended a leg and kicked him in the thigh. He looked up.

  “What, mate?”

  “She’s talking to you.”

  “Who’s talking to me?”

  “I am,” said Tom Bone’s girl.

  As he stared at her, Billy remembered the face of the driver emerging from the crumpled car outside his flat. He blinked, and behind his eyelids he saw the shard of glass stuck in the floor of his room.

  “Billy Keys?”

  He squinted at the girl. Her features came into focus; she had taken off her glasses.

  “Huh?”

  “Is it true you knew Amy?”

  Billy nodded.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How did you know her?”

  Dave groaned.

  Billy’s tongue ran over the backs of his teeth. He was aware that he was smiling, his lips stretched across his face; he was also aware that the smile didn’t reflect what he was feeling.

  How did he know Amy?

  He had been in the pub, sitting alone by the window. He remembered it as the same afternoon the girl who had once lived with him had packed her bags and disappeared, but it could have been another day, a different Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, drizzle outside, a draught blowing in whenever someone came or went. He had been by himself and then somebody had flicked his shoulder.

  “She just came up to me,” he said.

  He was speaking slowly; he knew there was a difference between the way he remembered it all, down to the sound of Amy’s fingernail scraping the fabric of his jacket, and the way it came out of his mouth. The difference gaped, like the hole outside his flat where the tree’s roots had been.

  “She comes up to me and says, ‘You’re in my seat.’ ”

  Her voice had carried across the whole bar. People had turned and stared.

  “She says, ‘You’re in my seat,’ and I get up and scurry away. I didn’t even think about it.”

  “Fuck,” said Tom Bone from the bath, “I just had the worst déjà vu. It’s like I’ve heard this exact story before.” He smacked himself in the face so hard that it left a pink stain on his cheek. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I have. A million fucking times.”

  “I had a whole stack of flyers with me on the table,” said Billy. The words were coming more easily. He felt as though something had been holding him back, like a soft pedal on a piano, and that it had been lifted. “I was grabbing them together to leave and I dropped one and it sort of zigzags down to the floor, and she watches it fall and then stamps her foot on it, right on it, and says, ‘Run along, little girl.’ ”

  “Leave it, Billy,” said Dave. Then, looking at the girl, he said, “Don’t get him started.”

  —

  When Billy next looked around, Dave the Bass and Tom Bone were gone. Tom Bone’s girl was still there, sitting on the toilet.

  They stared at each other in silence, Billy and the girl.

  After a while, she said, “I’ll listen to you.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m just saying—if you want to talk about Amy, I’ll listen. Tom, Dave, they can be dicks sometimes.”

  The girl slid down from the toilet to join him on the floor. She reached out and brushed his knee with her fingers. The touch made his skin prickle. Her hand trailed up along his thigh and paused, trembling slightly, just below his groin.

  “Take whatever you want from the box,” he said. He slid it out from under his legs.

  She opened it and began to sift through its contents with her free hand.

  “I’ll listen,” she said again.

  “A tree smashed through my window,” he said, “and I don’t know what the fuck to do about it.”

  He bent forward and pushed his face between his knees. He closed his eyes and when he opened them he could see the girl’s hand trapped between his legs and stomach.

  He wasn’t expecting the reply, when it came. She was close to him; when she spoke he could hear the click of saliva between her lips.

  “You should call your landlord, then.”

  He looked up and leaned back so that her hand was freed. Her fingers trailed across his crotch and hooked over the edge of his jeans.

  “I went back,” he said, “after that first time with Amy. I went back to the same pub, and I sat in the same seat, and waited. Do you ever—have you ever felt like that, like you just have something to do with someone, and they have something to do with you, and all you have to do is figure out what it is?”

  The girl looked him in the eye when she answered him. “Yes.”

  He ignored the way she was staring.

  “She was everywhere by then,” he said. “In the papers. Everywhere. Famous. I went back and waited, night after night, and then one day she was there again. For some reason she remembered me.”

  “Of course she remembered you,” said the girl. “You’re Billy Keys.”

  Billy closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. He heard the crinkling of plastic. The girl was opening his baggie of pills.

  “She comes up and says, ‘If it isn’t the little girl back in my seat,’ and I straight out asked her if she’d record a track with our band. She laughed. She sat on the table and put her feet on my legs, and she was wearing these shoes with the heels, you know, the high heels, and they dug into my legs so hard I had bruises for weeks.”

  He had, once, after she died, pushed pens into his thighs to remember how it had felt.

  “What she said—she said, ‘You’ll be OK, Billy Keys.’ She looked right at me when she said it, and you wouldn’t believe anyone else saying something pointless like that, but you sort of believed Amy, just for the moment when she was talking to you.”

  He felt the girl’s lips touch his. He didn’t do anything about it. She slid her hand inside his jeans. After a moment, Billy gripped her waist and guided her into his lap. His palm rested on the small of her back as she kissed him and ground her hips against his. Her mouth tasted of alcohol and fried food. He kissed her, but missed the story he had been telling. He missed the sound of his own voice.

  She pushed hard against him and pulled back from his lips. “You’ll be OK, Billy Keys,” she said.

  He had never spoken to Amy again, after that evening, but he had felt constantly on the alert, ready for their next meeting. Whenever the band played, he had scanned the audience for her face. He checked queues in supermarkets, at ATMs, in case she was there. He had seen her in clubs, but she had always been unreachable, surrounded by people with stronger claims to her than his. He had waved, once, and she had looked vague, then waved back. The glitter painted on her nails had caught the light; her hand had looked for a second as though it were dissolving.

  He had been patient. He had waited for her.

  “Hey,” said Tom Bone’s girl. She pushed her tongue into his mouth. She dug her hand further down inside his boxers. “Nothing’s happening.”

  Billy’s attention came back to the room and the girl straddling him. She was sweating; strands of her hair were stuck to her forehead. Her eyes, with their stretched pupils, were red, and the skin around them was grey. The smell of food on her breath made him feel ill. Then she bit him, hard, on the lip. He felt her teeth grind against the flesh.

  Billy pushed her away and she slid onto the floor. Her head thudded against the toilet bowl and she let out a giggle.

  “The papers said it was just alcohol,” she murmured, without getting up, “that killed Amy. It was just alcohol?” />
  Billy’s lip felt swollen where she had bitten him, and when he opened his mouth to reply, he spat.

  “Misadventure,” he said. “They called it a fucking misadventure.”

  Tom Bone’s girl giggled again, but more quietly, and then went silent. Billy watched her for a while: the rising and falling of her breasts as she breathed, and her eyelids as they slid, slowly, over her eyes.

  It had taken the coroner four months to declare the cause of Amy’s death. The official announcement had been made only a week previously, and the word had been spinning around Billy’s head ever since: misadventure. Death by misadventure. It was a term people found funny. Dave had roared with laughter and said, “Misadventure? I’ll show you a fucking misadventure,” before grabbing Rat’s saxophone and thrusting his crotch at the bell, groaning and then miming an ejaculation that began low and rose until it exploded in Billy’s face.

  Billy woke up. His head was pounding and his tongue felt too big in his mouth. He was still curled against the bathroom wall, his knees pulled up towards him. The girl was lying on the mat. When he reached out and tilted his shoebox towards him, he found that the only thing left was the “Get High & Get Down” bong. He dropped the box and the sound of the bong sliding against the cardboard base made his skin crawl. His only clear thought was that he needed to go home.

  He prodded the girl with his foot. Her leg wobbled where he had pushed it, but she didn’t stir. Billy cleared his throat as loudly as he could. The pressure of the cough made his head spin. He didn’t want to move. It would hurt him to move.

  “Hey,” he said, “girl?” His voice sounded explosive, as though he were underwater. “Tom Bone’s girl?”

  She didn’t move. He hauled himself forwards, away from the wall, and crouched over her. She had been sick in her sleep; a trail of vomit had dried on her chin and a pool of it had soaked into the bath mat and caught in her hair. Her left arm was extended, as though reaching for something.

  Billy staggered to his feet, gripping the toilet to steady himself. This was how she must have looked, he thought: when Amy died, she had been alone, and drunk, and this must have been how she looked.