The Abattoir of Dreams: a stunning psychological thriller

by Mark Tilbury

  At least you’ve got some proper memories now.

  My mother’s murder? Some fucking memory.

  I felt a sudden urge to hold up the earring and shout out it was real. R-E-A-L. Might have even done so if the old woman hadn’t spoken to me.

  ‘It’s so hot in here. I don’t like the heat; it always makes me tired.’

  I closed my hand around the earring. ‘A fan would be nice.’

  ‘Fans only swirl up the warm air. You need something which will make the air colder.’

  The man next to me hacked up something unpleasant, and spat it into a small, silver spittoon.

  The old woman looked at me. ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘I’m okay.’ Quite possibly the biggest lie I had ever told.

  ‘Try not to worry too much about your legs. As long as you’ve got your mind.’

  How did she know about my legs?

  ‘Hold tight. Keep the faith.’

  I forced a smile. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

  ‘Folk are always too quick to judge, point the finger, but you know what they’re really saying, don’t you, Michael?’

  How did she know my name? ‘No.’

  ‘They’re saying, hey, look at me, at least I’m not as bad as him. I don’t stab my girlfriend with a kitchen knife and jump off the top of a block of flats. That’s what they’re really saying, isn’t it?’

  I could barely breathe as I watched the old woman’s features smooth out. The wrinkles blended into one another and then vanished. Her mop of frizzy white hair straightened and grew longer. Darker. Fixed back in a loose ponytail.

  ‘That’s the trouble with this world, Mikey. Everyone’s too concerned with what’s going on in other folks’ backyards.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Until it’s their turn to be in the firing line. Then it’s a different story. They want justice for others, and compassion for themselves. But you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?’

  I watched her blue eyes turn brown. A purple bruise form on her rejuvenated cheek. A split on her bottom lip. ‘No one wants to know the truth, Mikey. Not the real truth. They don’t want to think too hard about their own rubbish lives. That’s why they watch the soaps on TV. To watch someone else’s suffering.’

  I closed my eyes and counted to ten. This had to be another hallucination. It wasn’t. She was still there when I opened them again.

  She touched the bruise on her cheek. ‘If they want the truth, Mikey, then you tell them this is the truth. This is what happens when you turn a blind eye.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  She didn’t answer. ‘Stay close to the truth.’

  ‘Are you my mum?’

  She smiled. ‘I’m whoever you want me to be, Mikey.’

  ‘But, I don’t understand.’

  A strand of dark hair fell across her face. She brushed it away. ‘You will, as long as you look. As long as you listen.’

  ‘Listen to who?’

  ‘To the truth. Listen to the truth.’

  Something glinted in her right ear. A small gold stud. I held up the one in my hand. ‘Is this yours?’

  ‘I wondered where that had got to.’

  ‘It was on—’

  ‘The stairs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It must have fallen out when Billy pushed me. I want you to keep it. Keep it always and forever, Mikey. Can you do that for Mummy?’

  Tears spilled onto my cheeks. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want you to promise to be a good boy for Mummy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Always tell the truth, no matter what. I know it’s hard to tell the truth, when you’re surrounded by dirty liars, but I want you to try, okay?’

  ‘Yes, Mummy.’

  ‘Remember, Mikey, the truth will always out. What goes around comes around. You just have to be patient.’

  I watched her dark hair fade to grey, then white, then back into the old woman’s frizzy mop. The bruise on her face vanished. The leathery cracked skin returned. The lips thinned.

  ‘Be true to yourself, love-bug. Stay strong and do what’s right.’ Her mouth stilled. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and her head flopped to one side.

  The old woman was dead.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They moved me back to my old room a few hours later. I was grateful to get away from the man in the bed next to me, who kept asking me why I’d been talking to a dead woman. I didn’t have an answer for him, or the strength to make one up. There was a new message scrawled in spidery red writing on the emergency door: Be true to yourself, love-bug. I didn’t know whether to draw hope from the earring and the conversation with the old woman, or to question my sanity.

  Dead women don’t strike up conversations, much less turn into dead mothers.

  Jimmy walked into the room. A friendly face. A rare thing. ‘You look a bit better. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Washed out.’ A strange expression. Wrung out was probably a more apt description.

  ‘I came to visit you two nights ago, but you were in a bad way. Kept babbling on about some fat man taking you to a boiler room.’

  ‘Emily said.’

  ‘Does it mean anything to you?’

  ‘Fat Man does. The boiler room doesn’t.’ I told him about my latest journey into the tunnel, the murder, and the visit to the building, with the Fat Man leaning on the stone pillar.

  He sat by the bed, silent, chewing his fingernails. When I was finished, he took a deep breath, and let it out between clenched teeth. ‘Jesus, Michael, what the fuck is all this?’

  I held out my mother’s earring.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘I picked it off the stairs at the house. Brought it back with me. How fucking crazy is that?’

  He took it out of my hand and studied it. I told him about the old woman in the bed opposite me.

  ‘How the hell could she turn into your mother?’

  I shrugged. ‘Scared the shit out of me. Scared the shit out of me even more when it turned out she’d been dead all along.’

  Jimmy seemed to mull this over, and then said, ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you dreamed it. Or had another hallucination, or something.’

  ‘She had my mother’s face, Jimmy. Her eyes. The bruises. The split lip. The matching earring. Everything. And now it says be true to yourself, love-bug, on the door. What the fuck am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Sit tight and see what else happens.’

  ‘Oh, and Carver wants to put me on remand.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Even if all this stuff with the door and the tunnel is really happening, it’s going to stop once they move me out of the hospital, isn’t it?’

  Jimmy didn’t answer that. ‘This house where you found the earring?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Do you know the address?’

  ‘It had a number “19” hand-painted on the front door.’

  He laughed. ‘That narrows it down to most of England.’

  ‘Whitehead Street.’

  ‘Do you know where?’

  I didn’t. ‘Oxford, maybe?’

  ‘I’ll have a look on a street map. See if there’s a Whitehead Street in Oxford. Go out there.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s the least I can do. You saved my life, remember?’

  I couldn’t. There was still a huge black hole between my mother’s death and winding up in the hospital. ‘The woman I went to after the murder lived about five or six doors along. Her name’s Rachel.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find her.’ He was thoughtful for a moment, and then said, ‘It’s as if something’s giving us a series of clues.’

  ‘Or telling me I’m just like my old man.’

  ‘No, Michael. I know you. And Becky. I’ve never seen that girl with a mark on her face. I’ve never heard her say a bad word about you. Ever. Lucy used to hang out with Becky sometimes. Same. Not one bad wo
rd. If you’d been anything like your old man, one of us would have known.’

  ‘People hide things, Jimmy.’

  ‘You can’t hide the big stuff. The bruises. Depressions. Shit like that.’

  ‘What does Lucy think?’

  ‘She doesn’t know what to think. She’s only got the official story. What Carver said. You went home and stabbed Becky to death. That’s it.’

  ‘But, she must have an opinion?’

  ‘She can’t believe you’d do such a thing.’

  ‘Have you told her about the wheelchair? The emergency door?’

  Jimmy shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to risk that, mate. It would only convince her you were…’

  ‘Nuts?’

  ‘I’m certain you never killed Becky.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you can’t remember the real you, can you? You don’t remember the Michael Tate I do.’

  ‘Do you know how much that scares me.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘What do you think all this stuff means, Jimmy? Really means?’

  ‘If I had to pin my money to a horse, I’d say your memory’s coming back, bit by bit.’

  ‘But, what about the earring?’

  ‘For what it’s worth, I think you’re travelling back into your own past.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘As mad as that seems, yeah.’

  ‘So, who’s the Fat Man at the gates of that building?’

  ‘I don’t know… but I reckon you’re going to find out.’

  I shuddered, as I remembered his glinting blue eyes, sweating face, shock of dark curly hair, finger ticking backwards, telling me the world ran anticlockwise. A sudden thought struck, chilling and realistic: maybe Carver was somehow related to him.

  ‘Are you all right, Michael?’

  I jumped back to reality. ‘Yeah. Fine.’

  He put a hand on my arm. ‘It’ll be all right. I’m going to get off, see if I can find this Whitehead Street.’

  I thanked him and flopped back against the pillows. I felt stronger for having him fight my corner, comforted by the fact I’d rescued him from a knife-wielding thug. At least I wasn’t all bad, wasn’t a total coward, and possessed a tiny sliver of decency.

  Emily came to see me, just before she went off shift. Like Jimmy, she told me I was looking better. I wished to Christ I felt it.

  ‘Do you want anything before I go?’

  I want you to stay. ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll be off until the weekend.’

  My heart buckled. ‘Doing anything nice?’

  ‘If you call celebrating my divorce nice, then, yes.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t—’

  ‘It’s all right. To be honest, I’m glad it’s over. He was a nasty piece of work. If I had a shilling for all the promises he made and broke, I’d be a rich girl by now.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘You’ve got enough worries of your own. You don’t need to listen to me rabbiting on about my problems.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ It came out a lot quicker than I’d intended. And then, a little slower, ‘You’re the only person who hasn’t judged me.’

  ‘I’m only showing you a duty of care, Michael. Others might do well to remember their responsibilities.’

  ‘But, you don’t have to be nice. Not to someone like me.’

  ‘You’re innocent until proven guilty in this country.’

  I didn’t feel very innocent. ‘What does the future hold for you?’

  Emily spent the next half an hour talking about everything, from her newfound freedom to her pending promotion to staff nurse.

  ‘That sounds like a good enough reason to celebrate,’ I said, as she finished up and straightened a crease in her pale blue uniform.

  ‘Can I say something, Michael?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I like you. You don’t seem like you’ve got a bad bone in your body. For what it’s worth, I hope justice is done.’

  My mouth hung open. I wanted to thank her. I wanted to tell her not to be stupid, I was guilty as charged. Carver knew it, I knew it, and soon, the rest of the world would know it, too.

  She smiled down at me. ‘Just stay strong, love-bug. Stay strong, and glue all the pieces together.’ And then, she left, gliding out of the room in that odd, majestic manner of hers.

  I spent the rest of the day trying to come to terms with the fact my mother had spoken from the lips of an old dead woman, and the lips of a beautiful young nurse.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jimmy returned the following morning. He looked about ready to explode. He’d barely made it into the room, before he started talking like a man possessed. ‘Jesus Christ, man, it’s true. It’s all true.’ He paced around the edge of the room, close enough to the emergency door to bang his hip on the bar which, of course, he didn’t. It passed right through him. ‘I looked Whitehead Street up on a map of Oxford. It’s right before you get to the bridge, just off Dixon Street.’

  Dixon Street meant nothing to me.

  ‘Big row of terraced houses, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Number 19?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Slap bang in the middle of the street?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jimmy stopped pacing and turned to face me. ‘It was all like you said, Michael. Except the number wasn’t hand-painted on the door. It had proper brass numbers. But, there were steps leading up to the front door, just like you said.’

  I had a sudden flash of my mother being thrown down those steps, lying unconscious in the pouring rain.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t get no answer when I knocked, so I went further along the street to see if I could find Rachel.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The first door I knocked on said Rachel lived next door. Horrible old bag, who kept asking if I was from the social.’

  ‘But, you found her?’

  Jimmy grinned. ‘Yep. Said I was a mate of yours passing through. Promised to look her up for you.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She seemed a bit shocked at first. Asked me how you were. Where you were living. I told her we were flatmates in London.’

  ‘London?’

  Jimmy shrugged. ‘The best I could do with short notice. Anyway, she finally invited me in, after I mentioned Oxo.’

  My heart stalled. ‘Is he still there?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s old. Poor thing can’t walk anymore. But, it was weird, like he knew me, was really pleased to see me.’

  I imagined Oxo, with his head resting on my knee, brown eyes ever watchful. ‘Maybe he knows.’

  Jimmy smiled. ‘I reckon he does. I told him you loved him. He looked like he understood, Michael. Really understood.’

  I wanted to get out of that hospital bed, go to Whitehead Street, and give my best pal a hug. Tell him how much I loved him, how much I missed him, and how I wished we’d spent the rest of my childhood together.

  ‘He’s got a good home with Rachel.’

  I wiped a tear from my eye. ‘I’m grateful for that.’

  ‘Anyway, she made a pot of tea. I told her we worked in a hotel together in Piccadilly. Close enough to the truth to stop my nose from growing long. She asked me if I knew what had happened with your mum. I made out I didn’t. Then, she told me, Michael. Told me everything.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Same as you. How your dad was a nasty piece of work, and how he’d been beating up your mum for years. How she used to make excuses for him, saying she’d walked into doors and all that stuff and nonsense. Said she was going to get some cleaning jobs while he was out at work, save the money, and get as far away from him as possible.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘She probably couldn’t risk telling you, in case you got too excited and gave the game away. If you ask me, your mum was a brave woman. She didn’t have too many choices. It’s easy to say she should have just
left him, but most battered women don’t have anywhere else to go. They’re trapped.’

  ‘I feel so sorry for her, living with that bastard for all that time.’

  After a few moments, Jimmy said, ‘Do you want me to carry on?’

  I nodded. I wanted it all. Every piece of information I could get. Whether it would help me in the long term was another matter altogether.

  ‘It happened on Friday, December fifth, nearly ten years ago. Rachel said it had been pissing down all week. Your old man had already attacked your mum on the Thursday night. You banged on her door at about two in the morning. At first, she thought it was your mum, you know, run away from your dad again, but it was you and your dog, both soaked to the skin. She let you inside and called the cops. Exactly like you said, Michael.’

  Thoughts formed in my mind and then popped like soap bubbles.

  ‘Rachel said the whole street lined up for your mum’s funeral. All paid their respects. That says a lot about your mum, Michael. A hell of a lot.’

  It did. But, it still didn’t make the pain any easier.

  ‘Your old man got life. Minimum of twenty years.’

  ‘At least there’s some good news.’

  ‘Rachel went to court for the trial. Said he showed no emotion. Just stood there like a lump of rock, staring ahead like a zombie. The judge called him a callous man, and a danger to women.’

  ‘Stating the bleeding obvious.’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He hanged himself in jail a few years into his sentence.’

  This news should have pleased me. Delighted me. My mother had finally got justice for all the years of abuse she’d suffered. But, it made me feel numb. Random thoughts popped into my mind. Good riddance. How did he hang himself? Now, I’m an orphan. How am I supposed to feel?

  ‘Are you all right, Michael?’

  Probably the daftest question I’d ever been asked in my new short-term-memory life. I felt like laughing and crying at the same time. ‘So, what happens now? It doesn’t alter anything, does it? Maybe I should just take what’s coming. Go to prison, do my time, forget all this other stuff.’

  ‘You can’t think like that, Michael. Try to stay positive.’

  ‘What for? Becky?’

  ‘She wouldn’t want you to give in.’