by Jo Gatford
I waved away her incredulous expression, pretended the point was moot, “I mean, no matter what happened to her, wherever she died, she’ll be a skeleton by now anyway.”
“That’s all very well,” she said. “But what if she’s still alive?”
Chapter Twelve
When the police stopped looking for Heather I found someone who would continue the search, albeit with a slightly different approach. No-one knew what Gloria did. I explained her away as an old friend, a colleague of Heather’s that I’d kept in touch with. Moral support in a thin disguise. People talked - moving onto the next one so soon after she was gone? But it wasn’t anything romantic at first, just desperation. It was only after Alex was born that things became adulterous, but if Lydia ever suspected what I did with Gloria she was only half right. She would have laughed at the real reason for our monthly meetings at Gloria’s mousehole of a flat.
I found her number in the Yellow Pages a few weeks after they finished investigating me for bodies under the patio and motives for violence, after they dropped Heather’s case like a punctured ball, after the solicitor told me that I could officially mark her down as deceased and cash in on the life insurance. Gloria listened to my garbled explanation on the phone and said, “Come and see me tomorrow.”
I fall into tomorrow with a click of the knees and a lightness that reminds me how skinny I became after Heather left, as if my bones might break into little pieces at the slightest knock. I stand outside Gloria’s place under a black, wet sky that looks about to collapse. If I hadn’t known it was there I might have walked right past it. Her flat barely fits in between a bookies and a laundrette. The building is covered with scaffolding that seemed to have always been part of the structure, though I never saw anyone working on it. Visiting Gloria feels more like coming home than returning to my own ghosted house.
She lets me in by the peeling, warped side door and nods unsmilingly when I tell her who I am, why I’m here. I expected more showmanship. She lacks a certain flamboyance that I thought was a prerequisite; she is almost disturbingly unassuming, standing there in leggings and a cardigan that reaches her knees, neatly brushed hair curling under her chin, the smell of a casserole snaking down the communal stairs behind her. She leads me up to her flat, aiming a gentle nudging kick at a slow old dog attempting to escape the front door, and tells me to wait in the living room while she turns off the cooker. This, at least, is slightly more appropriate: lamps draped with silk scarves, a hazardous amount of candles, a cloud of incense and a red light bulb that smooths the grooves in our skin and dilates our pupils to monstrous size.
I remain standing in the doorway until she pokes me with a knitting needle to move further into the room. I take a seat on the sofa beneath a four-foot fish tank that appears to be empty, but into which she sprinkles a pinch of fish flakes, reaching over my head on bare tiptoes, brushing against the side of my head with her armpit. She lays a ball of wool and her needles on the back of an armchair and settles into it, resting her head on the knitting with a guttural sigh. “Peter,” she murmurs, “I don’t have much for you, but you want to give me your money anyway, don’t you?”
I nod with something that would probably have been a smile if I still had the ability, but this time, this place, this memory is my very own stone age when nothing grows, nothing flourishes, nothing shines - so no, there are no smiles, not even for Gloria. I dig a hand into my pocket and place a small fold of bank notes on the coffee table next to a glassy globe covered in fingerprints and a pack of death-omen cards that she never uses for me.
“She’s not dead, Peter. Not yet,” Gloria says, eyes lifting from the money to my face, which must look half relieved and half disappointed. “Also, your father is looking for a bus stop, and your mam is looking for a pub.”
“They’re definitely dead,” I say, stupidly, and she humours me with a nod.
“But your wife is not.”
“Can you… tell where she is, even if she is still alive?” I ask her, past being embarrassed about something as bizarre as asking a woman I’ve just met to seek out the aura of my missing wife.
Gloria shakes her head in a distracted way, as if she is trying to shake something out of her ear. “Your dad wants a good roast beef – honestly, that’s hardly here nor there.” She speaks to the curtained window now, forehead furrowed irritably. “Are you going to say anything relevant, chuck? Or you just going to moan about your stomach? Your lad’s heart just got tossed in the fire.”
“My mum was a bad cook,” I explain.
“But a good drinker, he says.”
I nod. My dad’s obituary talked about his engineering service, his love of the Isle of Skye where he spent his childhood summers at his grandparents’, of his young wife and younger son left behind, of a quiet bookish man who played the piano and wrote limericks for the local paper. My aunt kept the cut-out summary for me but I failed to ally it with the memory of a man who ate like a bird but always gave me any sweet thing he could find, who swore under his breath when someone near him hit a bad note singing hymns on Sundays, who planted sunflowers instead of carrots when rationing began, who would brush his wife’s hair and lay her out like a fresh corpse when she passed out drunk, who used to pretend to fall asleep snoring on my chest when he said good night until I’d flounder and flap at him to wake up, semi-seriously concerned about suffocation, giggling in fear that he really had done it this time. He’d grunt and snort and sit up as if he didn’t know where he was, then kiss my nose and leave me to sleep, sniggering in the dark.
“Aunt Fern used to save him the end piece of beef,” I tell Gloria.
“Yes. The crusty bit. With rosemary and butter parsnips.”
“That’s it. She’s dead too now, long ago.”
“He says he’ll look out for your lady if she goes his way and he’ll let me know.”
I give him thanks inside my head.
“He says it’s not so bad. He keeps away from your mam mostly, she’s still quite cross about him not checking his deaf side twice like she told him. How on earth you could miss a bleedin’ fire engine I don’t know. But he’s glad to have met your boy.”
“Matthew?” He is two. There is no Lydia yet, no Angela, no daunting pregnancy and the trappings of a new family. Just me and the boy and the ever-present guilty shadow of Alice. “You mean Matthew?”
“No. The other one. Your littlest. He’s angry, doesn’t want to talk, but I can see he misses you. Guilt there too.”
“My other one?” A bag of nausea drops down my throat as if from a gallows, swinging heavily in my stomach. This isn’t how it happened. Doubt blurs my vision of her. She got it wrong. Maybe she was bluffing all along. I look around for a doorway, an escape. This place has a danger to it, suddenly, that makes my lungs close up.
Something aches at me like a full bladder. What am I forgetting? My desperate previous self needs to believe every word Gloria says, needs to know she could find my wife, and resists my probing. But the other me, the one thrashing inside this younger body won’t let us be ignorant. What other son? The uncertainty swells in my throat and I gulp down a hard ball of air. I make a conscious decision to open my eyes, even though my body thinks they are open already.
I am still in Gloria’s living room, but not quite. An irritating beeping and the rumble of a television in another room join the hum of the fish tank. I blink, carefully. Gloria still sits opposite, smiling sadly at me. She is warm and gentle and doesn’t pity me. She lets me forget.
“I don’t have any children,” I say.
“Right you are.”
“I don’t, Gloria. I have no children.”
“If that’s what you say.”
“You’re wrong.”
“No.”
“I don’t have any children!” I don’t, do I? I am on my feet. A blup blup of bubbles escapes the fish tank behind me but I ignore the chance to glance at the elusive resident. Gloria reaches for a knitting needle and uses it to gently slid
e my money over to her side of the coffee table, tucking it under her left thigh. She taps the needle on her knee and looks back up at me.
“You have a big grey hole in your side,” she says, gesturing in a circular motion with the knitting needle at the space to the right of my stomach. “A void. The rest of you is okay - a bit weak, yellows and greens, wavering. That can strengthen in time. But this hole. That’s damage. Might not ever close up. Shrink, but not heal.”
“I don’t have any… ”
“Yes, I heard you. No children. Well. I’ll see you next month then.”
I nod when I don’t want to nod. I turn and leave her to the clackering of her knitting and walk into the wet night, wondering if my grey void could get so big that eventually it might engulf me.
The rain somehow isn’t wet, although its incessant drumming thuds onto my head, makes it difficult to see. There is no doorway ahead of me but the world closes in like a corridor anyway, so narrow that it scrapes against my shoulders. Someone grasps my arm and my heart skitters against my ribcage. Gloria, come to gloat.
I whirl to face her. To tell her she’s wrong.
“Peter… It’s me.”
“Stop it, Gloria.”
“It’s Angela.”
“Angela?”
“Your daughter.” She looks at me as though the words feel strange on her tongue.
“I don’t have any children.”
“Peter - ”
“I don’t have any children!”
“Okay.”
“So… ” I deflate with lack of contradiction. “Good.”
“Okay.” Gloria looks down at her hands, the same way Angela does when she’s trying not to cry. She has the same hair, the same uniform, the same voice. There are no doorways, just the nursing home’s long corridors and the sound of my stepdaughter’s breath. What on earth is she doing here?
“Angela?”
She exhales as if she’s been holding her breath. “Yes?”
“I know what it was,” I tell her, conspiratorially.
“What do you mean?”
“In the tank. I know what was in the tank.”
Silence.
“A lobster. A blue lobster.”
“Right.”
“Gloria?”
“It’s Angela, Peter.”
“It was a lobster.”
“Okay, Peter.”
#
“Where’s my pudding, Skinandbones?” Ingrid yells at me as I walk past her room on my way back from breakfast.
I shrug, trying to remember what I have just eaten, until I realise that you don’t have pudding with breakfast. But she’s already passed that hurdle and moved on.
“How’s your little broken wing?” she asks.
I flap my plastered arm once or twice to show her it’s okay, wincing involuntarily, causing her to scowl.
“Heard you had a stroke. A baby one. Still, not good, Mr Solemn.”
I snort at the thought of my strokes procreating. Little baby ones, frolicking on the squashy expanses of my brain, waiting until they’re big enough to tear off a piece of grey matter.
“Does it hurt?”
“Mmm.” I rather like it, if I’m honest. A constant reminder that I exist, at least from elbow to wrist, a sign that I am present in this world, feeling something, even if it’s pain. I don’t take the painkillers they give me. I’ve amassed quite a collection of tablets and capsules in the box under my bed with my abstinence. When Alma brings me medicine I know it’s poison. The pain means her attempts aren’t working.
“Before these gave up on me,” she says, tapping her legs with a bookmark, “I used to visit the kitchen boys.”
I nod, wince, unsure what I am about to hear.
“Self-medication, you understand?”
I don’t follow. “With pudding?”
She laughs until she can’t speak. When she recovers, her skin glows and her grin is dirty. “No, Mr Solemn. Some very nice marijuana.”
A tingling flush creeps up my neck and nestles behind my ears.
“Much better pain relief than anything the nurses give you,” Ingrid says. “Chris, I think his name was. Blonde, short hair, smelly little teenager. They have their fag break at about eleven out the back.”
She chuckles as I back out of the room, folding my elbow out of the way of the doorframe like a good little bird.
#
On the patio outside the nursing home kitchen stands a shrivelled pergola, held up by the brittle clematis and thick wisteria that have claimed it in loving strangulation. I shrug deeper inside my dressing gown and huddle behind a post, rolling a cigarette with shaky fingers and watching the kitchen doors. An anxious laugh waits in my throat.
A lad shoulders his way out of the back door. He is tall and distinctly unhandsome. Cultivated stubble barely disguises the skin of a terrible diet and probably even worse personal hygiene. He lights a cigarette – angry with it in some way, judging by his roughness – and toes at the gravel. I copy him, slippers muffling the clinking of the stone, and he looks over in surprise, so camouflaged was I against the twist of the helix. Or perhaps I’ve been assimilated into the pergola, withered and splintered, full of rot and burrowing worms. When I take a step forwards and he realises I’m going to speak to him, the boy lets out an aggravated sigh.
“Chris?” I ask.
He nods, confused.
I start to cough with laughter before I even get the words out and he recoils against the wall like I’m about to offer to buy his soul.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I’m out of breath and have to pause. “Hang on.”
“What’s funny?” he grunts.
He reminds me of Alex, and I imagine my son wheezing with mirth at what I am about to say.
I try to be serious. “I want some drugs, please. Is twenty pounds enough?”
Chris smiles. He half-shrugs, a diagonal sliding of his shoulder that is an unrecognisable gesture but one that I take for affirmative. He takes my money anyway, and slaps me on my good shoulder. “What room are you in?”
“Twenty-seven. I’m Peter.”
He shakes my prosthetic hand with distaste and quickly lets go again. “Nice to meet you.”
#
On my way back inside the conservatory the uPVC doorway flares and melts all around me, plastic lagging on my dressing gown, the stench of burnt rubber drilling down my throat. Choking. Falling. Throwing my arms up to grab onto something as I am sucked through to the other side.
My hands slip on the rungs of the ladder, smearing the notched metal with syrupy blood - my brain cannot understand why my right hand is unable to grasp properly, has not yet caught up with the fact that I am down to one thumb. I make it to the top and haul myself into the roof space, eight feet safe from a dog that cannot climb ladders anyway.
The Dalmatian runs small circles on the landing, sent stupid with conflicted impulses: excitement at such unexpected action, rousing it from its nap; flat-eared fear that causes it to sporadically piss itself, sprinkling the mottled carpet with acrid urine; and carnivorous awakening, the taste of human flesh, hot blood, living bone.
I clutch my wet fist to my chest. The stump of my missing thumb twitches.
“Hank!” the client, Catherine, yells from the kitchen. The kettle pops. A teaspoon is cast down in irritation. “Hank, stop that!” The dog keens and cringes backwards into its bed next to the balustrade. My blood drips from the attic hatch and seeps a crescent shape into the carpet below.
My old soul settles into my younger body and damps down the panic. There is no pain. There won’t be, not until we arrive at casualty and a nurse binds up my hand as tight as she can, when it begins to throb. Catherine comes with me, after having a mild panic attack at the top of the stairs when I explain quietly what has happened. She hits the dog, too, the poor little bastard. “Hank, you are the worst dog, the worst. How could you eat the plumber’s thumb?” It would have been funny – it was funny – but I didn’t think she’d
tolerate me laughing so I waited in the attic until she’d shut the dog out in the garden.
It was a beautiful thing, with a happy whipping tail and clean speckled jaws that snapped off my thumb in one neat bite. I’d finished replacing the valve on the cold water tank and dropped down the last few rungs of the ladder, landing on a back paw and startling it from its nap. It yelped, turned, and its jaws clamped briefly over the hand I had outstretched in apology. For a moment it looked surprised to find something in its mouth before appetite took over and it tossed back its head and gulped the digit down.
At the hospital I sit staring at my lap where my hand lies, wrapped in gauze. Catherine’s hand is on my knee, blue plastic hospital waiting room chairs beneath, reflecting our faces back at us. Pain now - a deep dull aching, splintered through with undulating sharpness. And guilt that I have not yet called Lydia to tell her what’s happened. I feel like stepping out of my body to reject the playback. I am becoming more like a ghost each time I visit these memories; less able to move and unable to influence. More like I did when they happened the first time.
Doorways lead back to Catherine’s, to the vet for Hank’s last injection. Catherine cries and so do I. She offers to pay me double for the work. I offer to pay for a new landing carpet. We compromise on a bottle of wine and I find out that her breasts aren’t real - a post-divorce present to herself, she said, after three kids and twenty wasted years. She kisses like she’s drowning.
I want to skip this, speed it up, but I can’t. None of the doorways lead back to the nursing home. Not yet. I yearn for my little padded cell and a regular supply of tea, for patronising nurses and the assumption that I am harmless, but the dream will not let me go.
The next doorway takes me two weeks forward into my bathroom. My bandage is loose and there is vomit on the floor. Lydia is a few minutes short of throwing herself at the door to get me to open it. She hammers it with the flats of her hands, calling me things that I know Alex can hear downstairs and will repeat back to me for weeks. I synchronise the shaking of my hands enough to unwind the rest of the dressing and reveal my stinking, gangrenous hand. It smells like fermenting guts and my stomach convulses, emptying itself into the sink and over the side of the bath and onto my bare feet.
