by Jane Asher
Charlie
By the time I got home after my appearance in court and the dramatic revelation that went with it I’d more or less pulled myself together. I managed to spend a fairly normal evening with the family – or at least one of the many different ‘normal’ types that have evolved over the years. Luckily there isn’t one definitive norm – like most families, I suspect, the four of us in concert produce a creature that is more than the sum of our parts. Or sometimes less, depending on the combined moods of the participants. There’s the jolly, story-telling, happy-ish kind of animal that appears when all of us have had a good day – that’s a fairly rare specimen. Quite often Ben, Judy and I are in reasonably good fettle, but Sally has always enjoyed being confrontational, and when the rest of us are in a good mood that normally sends her in the opposite direction, so the existence of a contented foursome has to come from her lead, so to speak. And she has to be in the sort of good mood that will be exaggerated by surrounding jollity rather than irritated out of it. Which doesn’t often happen. Especially as Ben has been very moody himself lately – not at all the chatty chap he used to be.
There’s the openly hostile evening, of course, that I assume is not unknown outside our particular family circle. It amazes me that we survive these, in fact. It’s quite chilling just how much unspoken (and sometimes spoken) loathing can be exchanged between so-called loved ones who go on to wake up the next morning and talk about cornflakes. But there you are: apparently expressions of disgust and pitying sarcasm are all part of the rich pattern we call family life. I’d love to think it’s simply some sort of valve, that we are releasing tensions and having a frank and full discussion of issues, or whatever the politicians call it. It’s not, obviously. I’m pretty sure it’s just that we basically hate a certain number of things about each other and, at times, that seeps into the open.
Thankfully, more common is the sporadically silent but reasonably positive atmosphere that contains a mix of semi-argument and relayed mundane facts punctuated by the occasional laugh. That’s the nearest we get to an average evening, and it was a relief to find that the mood when I got home that night was of this kind. I used the spaces between discussions to calm myself further, and kept up an appearance of mild irritation and boredom that fitted in nicely with my attempt at mimicking normality. I resisted the temptation to go to bed so early as to arouse suspicion, but made an excuse soon after loading the dishwasher and downing a quick cup of coffee and went upstairs. As I got undressed I pushed to the back of my mind the disturbing revelation I’d had in court and tricked myself into ignoring it by taking an inordinate amount of trouble in cleaning my teeth. I’m not usually a floss man, but on this occasion I used it to excess, causing my gums to bleed in the process but succeeding in distracting myself from the thoughts that part of me was dying to explore.
As I turned over and prepared to sleep, the images I had conjured up in court inevitably dominated my thoughts, but they had already acquired a hallucinogenic quality. I felt unsure as to whether I had really had that strange vision of Stacey’s hand or whether it was some mad exercise my brain was going through to stop me falling asleep. How did I usually go to sleep anyway? Now I came to think of it I hadn’t a clue. Did I drift off in the middle of a thought or empty my head of all reflections before slipping into blankness? It suddenly seemed impossible: a nonsensical idea, in fact, that I could slither into unconsciousness every night with virtually no effort. I listened to my breathing. It sounded ridiculously loud. Loud and rasping. Was that really me?
My brain is merely a processor, I thought. A high-functioning computer that needs to go into sleep mode for a few hours to recharge its batteries and file some of its data without any new input. Right. I can easily switch off my PC and send it into limbo for the night, so I simply have to do the same thing here. I enjoy turning off the PC: I find the descending whine of its innards as it settles down for the night very soothing. All I have to do is find the ‘off’ switch for my own deeply personal computer, I thought – I am clearly pressing restart instead.
After letting my mind drift aimlessly over the subject of bits and bytes and RAMs and ROMs for several minutes I must have bored myself to sleep. Surprisingly, I don’t remember dreaming at all – in any case, not about the emotional upheaval that I had gone through in court – but, equally, by the time I woke the next morning, I didn’t feel as if I had spent a particularly peaceful or energising night. I felt vaguely uneasy, as if something untoward had taken place during the hours of darkness in which I was somehow involved but couldn’t remember. But it wasn’t the thought of yesterday’s revelation that disturbed me. Strangely, considering the extraordinary force and clarity with which it had attacked me the previous day, by the time I was wide awake and lowering my feet onto the well-worn patch of carpet, it had acquired the characteristics of an interesting and vaguely amusing dream. I thought with relief of the vision I had undergone as being a mild hallucination of some kind, in all likelihood caused by tiredness or boredom with the case I had been defending.
My relief didn’t last long. As my feet touched the floor I instinctively flinched and looked down at them, aware, in an instant, that something was very wrong. I had one sock on. Trying to ignore the irritating phrase ‘what’s afoot?’ that I was muttering to myself, I concentrated on possible explanations. I always always get undressed in the large cupboard next to our bedroom that we euphemistically refer to as my ‘dressing room’, bundle my socks into a pair – one tucked inside the other – and throw them into the laundry basket in the corner. There was no possibility of my having left one on my foot: even when drunk I had never skipped my tucking and throwing routine; the target might have been missed and pairs of socks scattered well beyond the confines of the basket, but the feet had been disrobed every time, without exception.
Then I saw my shoes. A few inches from the side of the bed, they lay casually abandoned, the right one on its side, a single black sock stuffed into the other. I still refused to believe that the night before, utterly sober, I had abandoned my regular routine of undressing next door, and as I would hardly have been likely to carry the shoes away from their place on the rack and into the bedroom, there could only be one explanation: I had worn them during the night.
Ben was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs. He turned to look at me (unusual in itself for that time of the morning: a grunt from the back of his head is the most in the way of greeting that I can normally expect) with an expression in his eyes that I can only describe as wary. I had just a split second to take it in, before he turned quickly back to his Frosties or Choco Flakes or whatever other sugar-drenched breakfast he was putting away. I moved towards the kettle under the window.
‘What?’ I said.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Were you going to say something? I thought for one rather terrifying moment that you were about to say good morning to me.’ I paused to give him a chance to retaliate with something equally sarcastic, but nothing was forthcoming. ‘No? Oh, well, why break the habit of a lifetime?’ I went on. ‘We don’t want to start establishing precedents, do we?’
‘Dad, do shut up,’ Ben muttered wearily into the bowl of soggy nourishment. ‘I’m not in the mood. Anyway – you know.’
‘Sorry? I mean, sorry. Yes, sorry about the sarky comment, but I also mean – sorry? What do you mean, “you know”?’
‘Well,’ and he looked suddenly sheepish again as he pushed his bowl away and sat back in his chair. ‘You know – last night.’
Now this really chilled me. Nothing that I was aware of had taken place before, during or after dinner the previous evening that could possibly have engendered the morning’s odd reaction in my son, and I instinctively and instantaneously linked his reference to ‘last night’ with the mystery of my shoes and socks.
When I was a child I was a frequent and adventurous sleepwalker, occasionally being woken in mid-journey by an anxious mother to find myself, terrifyingly
, in a place some way from the warmth and security of my bedroom. I never had any memory of the walk itself, and later could only recall the shocking moment of coming back to consciousness clad in pyjamas in some unexpected corner of the house. But, once I’d been told, many times, about what I had been doing on my nocturnal adventures, innocent though it invariably was, I became extremely frightened by the whole idea. The fact that my body could act independently of my conscious mind was the ultimate in loss of control. Who was the boy who walked? If his actions had no existence in my memory, then what part of him was me – or what part of me was him? Did we have the same personality, or was this alter ego the Hyde to my Jekyll and did he perpetrate unknown horrors in the hours of darkness?
I found myself reading about doppelgängers, scratching in morbid fascination at the sore that worried me, rather than ignoring it and letting it heal. I became scared to go to sleep, like the wretched children in those horror films whose only way of keeping out of the clutches of the abuser is to stay awake. My tormentor was myself, and I hated to let him loose by drifting out of consciousness. But I went on walking, not often but fairly regularly, and I went on worrying every night as I lay down to sleep.
They told me of one night when my great uncle was staying with us and had been given my bedroom to sleep in. I visited him unannounced in the early hours, to find him sitting on the edge of the bed unstrapping his wooden leg. It didn’t appear to worry me in the least, or so they told me in the morning, and I chatted quite happily to the old man about the stump and why it looked the way it did. Now wouldn’t you think you’d remember something like that?
I know my parents considered not telling me when I’d been on my outings, but I begged them so relentlessly every morning to let me know, and put up such a good appearance of not minding, that they were persuaded to be truthful. I think my father, a stickler for honesty, could also see that if they kept the walks a secret there just might be some I remembered and their lie would be exposed and I would never be able to trust them again.
And now it all came flooding back in an instant. I was suddenly sure that I had visited Ben last night. The relatively calm mood in which I had descended the stairs abandoned me and I felt an unpleasant little chill pass across the back of my head. I was reminded horribly of those childhood insecurities: what had Mr Hyde been up to this time? I knew I had to tread carefully if I was to find out without causing more problems than I could handle.
Ben
‘Holly, can you come over? I really need to talk to you. It’s important or I wouldn’t ask. What? Yes, I know … I know, that’s why I wouldn’t have bothered you unless it mattered. Please, Hol – just for a short time.’
I felt better as soon as I put the phone down, and almost rang her straight back to tell her not to come, but I knew I’d only regret it. This was always a puzzle to me – how the idea of being able to talk to Holly was enough to take all the pain out of me, but that once I was face to face with her I didn’t really want to go through with the actual conversation. Rather not, in fact. But if I didn’t then the next time she wouldn’t come, and that would be fair enough, after all. And also, if I didn’t, then I’d know inside that I wasn’t really going to tell her my problems after all, so the magic of thinking I was going to wouldn’t work any more, would it?
I knew she’d promised herself she’d work all afternoon, so it was even more important this time that I made use of her visit. At least she’d listen without that distracting look of anxiety in her eyes that made it so difficult to unburden myself to Mum. Not that I could in this case, anyway, of course. She was the last person I could discuss it with.
Holly was looking beautiful, I thought. She’d rushed straight over and hadn’t bothered to put on her make-up or even to put her lenses in, and with her glasses on and her hair pulled back in a ponytail she looked wonderfully fresh and scrubbed. I knew she hated me seeing her like this, however many times I told her I liked her face looking sort of naked. It reminded me of the few times I’d seen her first thing in the morning, when we’d been backpacking and shared a tent.
She was worried, of course, but in a comradely sort of way: non-judgemental, I suppose you’d call it. Mum had let her in, and I checked quickly to make sure she wasn’t hovering outside my bedroom door before I closed it again and sat next to Holly on the bed.
‘It’s my dad. He’s being really strange and I’m frightened. I wouldn’t say this to anyone else but I wonder if he’s going off his trolley. I couldn’t sleep last night just thinking about it.’
‘What’s he done?’
‘It’s more what he’s said. He’s not really done anything, I don’t think, although he doesn’t seem to be himself at all. He’s not been telling us about his work, or complaining about things like he usually does, or telling us terrible jokes he’s heard from his colleagues. I thought he must just be having some sort of mid-life crisis or something, but now I wonder if it’s more than that. He came into my room last night and said some truly weird stuff.’
‘What?’
I was finding this hard. Putting these things into words has the strange effect of making them both more real and, at the same time, much less so. I find myself listening to myself as I speak, as if I’m replaying my words from a distance, or as if I’m acting everything out and judging my performance as I’m giving it. Did my father really say all that stuff to me, or was I making it up? And if he did say it, so what? Perhaps I was making something out of nothing and being melodramatic. Suddenly I felt foolish and childish.
‘Hol, I’m really sorry. I think I’m wasting your time. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I expect I’m worrying about nothing. Forget it – get back to your revision or whatever and I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘It’s OK, Ben. You always do this, you know. You might as well tell me now I’m here. Maybe it’s nothing and maybe it isn’t, but you’ll worry about it in any case. You’ll feel better if you talk about it. And don’t feel bad about my work: to be honest I was thinking of stopping and going out to do some Christmas shopping. I wasn’t getting anywhere.’
‘That’s not what you said on the phone.’
‘No, but that was just to make you feel bad. And to make sure you really did need to talk and you weren’t just looking for an excuse to stop working, like I was.’
There was a bit of a silence, so I used it to give her a kiss. It was funny to bump into her glasses and it made us giggle.
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I love you in your glasses.’
‘Oh, you can’t! They’re awful – really geeky.’
‘No, I like them. And your eyes look different without your lenses. Not so fishy.’
‘I beg your pardon? Fishy?’
I kissed her again, and moved a hand to slip up inside her T-shirt to have a feel but a noise from the landing outside made me nervous and I pulled back from her.
‘So, anyway, go on. What did he say?’
‘It was about twelve thirty. I was deep asleep: I’m not always at that time but I was really tired after football practice. I’d been listening to my mini-disc and I think I must have gone to sleep with it still going, or at least with the earphones still in, because I didn’t hear him knock, and he always does. Although – I’ve only just thought of this – perhaps he didn’t this time. Like I said, he’s been doing really strange stuff lately. Maybe he just walked straight in. In any case, he was standing next to the bed, just looking at me. There’s always enough light from the street for me to see in my bedroom, even if the light’s off, and –’
‘I know that, dimmo.’
‘Yeah, of course you do. So you can picture it – me waking up and him just watching me. But he wasn’t looking creepy or anything, like in a film, I don’t mean that. I mean, it was just Dad, you know.’
‘And?’
‘And he said something like, “You are all right now, aren’t you?”’
‘What did he mean? All right about what, after
what?’
‘Well, I was half asleep, of course. You know what it’s like when you just wake up: there’s a bit of you pretends you weren’t really asleep at all, and behaves kind of extra awake and sort of knowledgeable and intelligent to cover for the fact that your brain isn’t making any sense of the world for a bit. And I wasn’t sure if I was in the middle of a conversation with him or where I was or anything, really. But I just said, “Yeah, I’m absolutely fine, Dad. Yes, I’m totally all right now,” or something as I sat up and took out the earphones. And he kept looking at me and said, “No, but you’ll manage from now on, won’t you?” And by that time I was more awake and realised that I didn’t understand what the hell he was on about or why the fuck he was in my room. So I told him. I asked him why he’d woken me up and what did he mean, and then he sat on the bed and gave a great big sigh and shook his head. This was all really odd, I can tell you. I wondered if someone had died. My gran or someone.
‘“Sorry, Ben,” he said, and that made things even odder, because he never uses my name unless he’s calling for me up the stairs or telling me off. “I’m so sorry.” “What for?” I said. “Is someone ill, Dad, or what is it? What’s the matter? Why did you wake me up? Is Mum OK?” Then he looked down into his lap and said “Mum” several times, as if he couldn’t work out what it meant. And he sort of shook his head next and turned back towards me. He smiled at me, and looked a bit more normal then. “Sorry, old chap,” he said, “didn’t mean to frighten you. Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.” And he took the mini-disc off the bed and put it over on my desk, winding the earphones neatly round it. And then he went out again.’
‘I shouldn’t worry – it doesn’t sound all that strange to me. Maybe they’d had a row or something. Your mum and dad, I mean. Mine do all the time and they’re not even in the same house. I can tell straight away when they’ve been arguing on the phone because afterwards my mother looks at me in that sort of pitying way as if I’m a poor semi-orphaned child who’s never going to feel the love of her father and all that stuff. I keep telling her, it doesn’t worry me one fart if they’re together or not. I see more of him now than when they were, anyway. It’s not really me she’s worried about, of course. She just enjoys the martyrdom of it all.’
