by Adam Nevill
Confounded by how her mind had invented terrors to torment her, she clambered out of bed and looked out at the sky, already dark, and rippled with stripes of tangerine. It was as if night was ready to reclaim the earth again at nine in the morning.
Tired and tense, as if she hadn’t slept at all, she pulled the net curtains back to allow more light inside. As she rearranged the gauzy fuss, something hit the floor at her feet and bounced. A blue and white saucer lay upside down on the carpet and near it was an iron key with butterfly-wing handles. About the right size for the drawers of the bureau. She moved quickly to the heavy and dark piece of furniture opposite the foot of the bed.
The key turned in the first lock with a tiny thump that she felt in her fingers rather than heard.
There were so many tickets in there. For train and plane travel – even tickets for journeys by sea. They were arranged into stacks by year and then secured with red rubber bands in the uppermost drawer. But not a single ticket had been clipped, stamped or torn along the perforated strip. These were tickets for journeys planned but never taken. And most of them listed the United States as the destination. From as far back as 1949, Lillian had been planning to go home.
Apryl thought about what Stephen had said about Lillian’s final farewells as she left the building for her morning wanderings. There had been a little case with her too, with an expired passport and a plane ticket inside, clearly packed for an overseas journey, on the day she died. But why had Lillian broken contact with her sister and family, when the United States was such an important a place for her to reach? It didn’t add up.
She’d heard of ritual obsessives and their precise but irrational routines, and this was further evidence of her great-aunt’s deteriorating mind. A demise beginning four decades earlier. Wearing an antique hat and veil and launching out of the building with America in mind as her destination, only to return confused and disoriented an hour later, before she reset herself and began the process all over again the following day. If it hadn’t been her own aunt and benefactor she might have smiled at the idea; but instead she wondered how in this day and age so wealthy a woman had been allowed to go on like that for so long.
In the drawer below there were copies of birth certificates for Lillian and Reginald, some old unfranked stamps, Reginald’s service medals, his wedding ring, and hair clippings in a plastic sachet. Beneath all this lay a densely stacked assortment of private papers that looked like investment statements, insurance documents and household bills, neatly ordered inside linen envelopes. Her aunt had been meticulous as well as batshit crazy. Apryl figured she’d have to make sense of it all later.
The opening of the bottom drawer, unless there was a safe or bank vault somewhere, represented the last undiscovered remains of Great-aunt Lillian’s estate. The scent issuing from it pierced her sinuses with the strong but not unpleasant fragrance of pencil shavings, dust, and dry ink. It clouded over her face and then quickly sank back into the dark wooden space that she could see was full of books. All with plain covers and from a time when book binding and production was seen as a craft. Each volume had a woven fabric or leather cover. Dusty and neglected but of some quality – which just about summed up the end of her great-aunt’s life.
Opening the red book on the top of the stack revealed lined pages filled with handwriting, but with no dates given. She flicked through the stiff pages and soon realized that a separate sheet had been used for each entry, written by an unsteady hand.
The writing was difficult to decipher. Was that a b? And what at first looked like an s was actually an f. It also slanted so far to the right that the longer strokes were in danger of lying flat and crushing the vowels against the blue lines on the paper. She flicked through to the last entry. It said something about ‘trying again in the morning’. And ‘taking the Bayswater Road, which I’ve not seen in years’.
Going back to the first page, she pressed her finger under each word and moved her lips like a child learning to read, slowly moving through parts of the scrawl, and abandoning whole sentences and paragraphs when the jumble of letters and scratchings defeated her. But on occasion an individual word would stand out, or even a clause, such as: ‘further than before here. Years ago.’ And: ‘There are cracks to get through where he won’t follow. Or be waiting.’ At least that’s what seemed to have been written, but she couldn’t be sure and the tiny muscles behind her eyes were beginning to strain. The light in the bedroom was too dim for the task.
She put the first journal aside and raised five more out of the drawer. The writing in these was similar to the first, but at least one volume had months written above the entries, though there were often question marks following them – ‘June?’ – as if Lillian were unaware of the date as she wrote.
There were twenty of these journals in total and Apryl placed them all on the top of the bureau in the exact order in which they had been removed from the drawer, assuming that Lillian’s arrangement followed a chronological pattern, with the oldest diaries at the bottom.
She was right. The writing was much clearer in the last journal to leave the drawer. It was nearly all legible and very attractive to look at. And there were no errors, as if what had been written had been carefully composed.
Delaying the phone calls she had to make, Apryl went back over to the bed and sank into the musty goose-feather pillows. And from the first journal she began to read pages at random:
Highgate and the Heath are entirely lost to me now. I have accepted this. I went there to remember so many of the walks we took together. But they will have to live on in memory alone. And I haven’t seen St Paul’s in at least six months. I cannot get near the city. It is too difficult. After my episode on the underground, I have sworn off travelling below ground. The breathlessness and anxiety may be acute outdoors in the street, but they are doubly so below ground in those tight tunnels. Even my afternoons at the Library and British Museum in Bloomsbury are in jeopardy.
Not those too? I keep asking myself in despair. When will this tormenting end and what will I finally be left with? The tightness in my chest and the flickering of my vision has occurred twice in the reading room like the slow onset of some appalling migraine. I had water brought to me. The second time a man with terrible breath tried to take advantage of me.
Doctor Hardy still insists I am healthy. But how can I be? Doctor Shelley claims I am an agoraphobic and will insist on meddling with my childhood memories. Soon I will have exhausted the wisdom of Harley Street. I dare not tell them about the mirrors. The rest shall have to go downstairs too.
Most of the other entries in the journal were along similar lines. Catalogues of fatigue and curious bodily sensations in different locations around London that Apryl couldn’t picture or even place on a map. But it seemed that her aunt had suffered acute anxiety attacks whenever she strayed too far from Barrington House.
Increasingly, the entries became lists of directions she assumed her aunt had tried to follow in order to leave, or even escape, London. Train stations abounded: Euston, King’s Cross, Liverpool Street, Paddington, Charing Cross, Victoria. Lillian had tried to reach them all but succumbed to an attack of nerves combined with unpleasant and paralysing physical symptoms at each attempt. Something she began to refer to as the sickness.
Or maybe she was attempting to test some kind of boundary she felt had been imposed upon her freedom. Sometimes it seemed these obsessive journeys were taken as a form of reconnaissance.
Some entries involved other people who were never described in any real detail, because her dead husband, to whom these journals were addressed, was already familiar with them:
East, I can reach no further than Holborn. To the West his boundary encroaches deeper. Today I was forced to call Marjory from the street to cancel luncheon. I can go no further in that direction than the Duke of York’s Headquarters. Bridge is an impossibility because Holland Park may as well be in China considering how far I can reach out these days.
&nb
sp; With every cancellation the girls wonder about me. I can hear it in their voices and they are nervous with me, though they are good enough to try and conceal it if they ever come to dinner in Mayfair. If I cancel many more appointments or refuse invitations I fear I shall have no friends left at all. And I’m satisfied that crossing the river is not an option. I have been thwarted on the Westminster Bridge twice after setting off with my head held high, only to be overcome by the profound dizziness and weariness that made me faint before I was helped to a bench like an unfortunate blind woman.
It is so hard to countenance now as I sit here writing to you, as clear-minded and upright as I have taken for my right in life. But along the Embankment to Grosvenor Road I can do little but crawl like a cat miserable with some internal injury and gaze across at Wandsworth as if it were paradise. A place I never wished to visit when you were alive, darling. But would gladly go barefoot and penniless amongst the cranes and concrete if it meant I could be free of him, and this sickness he has brought me. And the others have it too. They cannot fool me. Beatrice has not been further than Claridges for a year now. And when I told her I had been sick on my shoes in Pimlico she stopped returning my calls as if I were the contagion. She is a cowardly thing, and a terrible bully. We can’t keep the staff. She takes this imprisonment out on those who are not to blame. She will not allow the idea that he is behind this appalling situation to even enter her mind. And the Shafers are sweet enough to me, but have begun to complain of bad hips as if they are already old and infirm. Their silly heads are firmly buried in the sand, my darling. As long as a few old friends still visit them they tell themselves they do not need to leave the building. And they still will not tell me what happened the day they tried to flee London from King’s Cross.
TEN
Weakened, his stomach hollow and burning, Seth woke in his room. Pissing into a large saucepan and drinking warm tap water from an old bottle, he had kept himself alive and maintained a basic toilet until the worst of the fever passed.
Through the thin curtains he could see the glow of electric lights spreading in the apartment building at the back of the Green Man. It was dusky and darkening already. The travel alarm clock told him it was four o’clock. Avoiding all daylight now seemed inevitable in this life he led. When he finally saw it, he wondered whether the sun would replenish or kill him.
Upstairs at the Green Man, all was quiet; the other tenants must still be at work, or out wandering, or down inside the bar. Soon they would return and begin frying bacon and eggs in the kitchen. It was all the others ate, fried breakfast. The thought made his stomach deflate.
Wrapped in the duvet, Seth edged off the bed and took the one step required to reach the fridge. He turned the kettle on and opened the fridge door to retrieve the plastic bottle of milk. The vanilla light from the fridge hurt his eyes. There was only a dribble of milk left and he sniffed it. It must have begun to turn some time during the morning when he was out cold. Without milk he couldn’t eat cereal, and there was no bread. He looked across the shelves and saw a nub of hard cheese, some spice bottles with coloured lids, three stock cubes, soy and Worcester sauce, a dried garlic clove and a half-empty carton of withered mushrooms. Nothing to constitute a meal, in combination or if taken separately. On the fold-out table in the centre of the room two small apples had gone soft and become dusty. It would be like biting into the stuffing of a cushion.
It couldn’t be avoided: he would have to go out.
Feeling faint, he sat back down on the end of the bed and rolled a cigarette. Three drags made him dizzy.
Should he wash in the sink downstairs before he ventured out to the supermarket? He decided against the idea. This place was unclean; it was for the unclean.
The kettle was boiling. He poured the water on to a tea bag and heaped four spoons of sugar inside the mug: that would get him up the road to Sainsbury’s. Looking at the floor, he sipped the tea. Cherishing the warmth of the mug in his cupped hands, he thought of the hallucinations of the last few days and nights but was surprised by his lack of concern. The horrific nature of the dreams, their macabre themes and terrifying situations sustained night after night, the reappearance of the hooded boy: all this, surely, gave cause to question his mental state. But to him there seemed to be something both natural and necessary about it all: even the execution of the Shafers in that long and tortuous dream. What followed that nocturnal sojourn in their wretched apartment, he refused to dwell upon. The vaguest recollection of the indistinct apparitions in apartment sixteen still jangled his nerves.
But for the first time in over a year he was intrigued by himself. Never had nightmares seemed so real, though he could not account for this. Perhaps he was just too miserable and lethargic to be bothered by any further signs of slipping away from the path that others walked. Inertia killed motivation. Isolation made him paranoid. Poverty left him wretched. He knew all this. Put yourself through it and you never know how you will react. Hardship was supposed to be good for art. But what kind of art and at what cost?
One month previously, an uninterested doctor had tried to give him Prozac again. ‘Stop working nights. It obviously doesn’t suit you,’ he had said, bored, his pen poised over a prescription pad. But it wasn’t as simple as that, Seth had wanted to tell the man. People make me manic. They exhaust me. They drain me. Isolation is my only defence. I have to be awake when they sleep and asleep when they are awake.
‘Fuck it.’ He stood up and stubbed the cigarette out in the saucer he used as an ashtray. There were over twenty butts in there already, stiff and gnarled like the fingers of old puppets. A cloud of fine grey ash erupted from the dish when he put it on the dining table. What did his lungs look like? That would be worth painting. An exhibition of one man’s decay; his mind and emotions and morals represented in the colours and shapes of his dissected body. Maybe he should try a sketch later.
Seth sat down and rolled another cigarette.
Although they were creased, damp, and a little short in the arms and legs, Seth wore the same clothes he’d worn two days earlier. The cold came through them.
Out on the street it was hard to see anything clearly. It was like looking at this tiny rumple of the world through the watery windscreen of a car with ineffective wipers. Darkness swallowed the yellow street lights. Drizzle smudged definition. But he did notice one thing when standing on the pavement under the creaking sign and dripping gutters of the Green Man: a small boy in a hooded coat on the other side of the road, waiting solemnly between two parked cars.
He flinched at the sight of the urchin who had led him through his own dreams. But once the quick jolt of shock dissipated he attributed a sullen insolence to the small figure, imagining a weasel face inside the dark hood, grinning like a bully at the surprise and alarm on the face of its victim.
Leaning into the rain, Seth dug his hands deep inside the pockets of his overcoat and strode away from the pub and the watching figure.
A swift wind buffeted his unprotected head. Blankets of newspaper, made heavy by water, slapped into his shins. Kicking out at the tangled mess, he lost his balance and tumbled into the plate glass of the bookie’s window. It took his weight. He straightened up, swore, and tried to hurry on into the blowing air and pinpricking drizzle. Even the buses and cars on the road seemed to wheeze and struggle against the energy that came down the street like a flash tide. Raising his face in acceptance of the rain and swirling vapours, he called the universe a cunt.
Outside the paper shop a news stand displayed the Standard’s headline: Police give up hope on missing Mandy.
Anger turned to shame. That kid in the hood was out in the rain and cold and darkness. Impulsively, Seth turned towards him and raised an arm. But in the air his hand dithered, useless and indecisive. Did you wave these days or do the thumbs up? Or was some kind of rap salute the only thing cool enough to guarantee a response from a youth? He slid his hand back inside his pocket and waited for a bus to pass the kerb where he had last
seen the hooded boy. When his view of the road was clear the child had gone.
Wiping a rivulet of rain from his nose, Seth turned and pushed on to Sainsbury’s. With only nine coppery pennies in the pocket of his jeans he would have to go somewhere where a bank-card transaction was possible. ‘That fuckin’ kid,’ he said to himself, and dodged between two women carrying umbrellas to get to the pedestrian crossing opposite the taxidermist’s shop.
But something was wrong with the supermarket.
Despite most of the shelves displaying a wide variety of products, he could see nothing edible.
As usual, scores of people were pushing and nudging against each other as they filled their wire baskets. But Seth wondered how they were finding anything fit to eat. He was tempted to stop someone and ask how they intended to prepare and then consume the things they were taking off the shelves. But the young woman nearest to Seth filled him with disgust. What was wrong with her skin? Mottled pink and grey and white, it resembled the surface of luncheon meat that came in cans with a self-opening lid. And her red feet made him recoil. Even in December she wore flip-flops. Her feet looked like defrosting beef, with yellow crocodile toenails hanging over the ends of the rubber soles. Her clothes smelled of damp.
Seth moved away from the overripe tomatoes she was prodding with a finger. He would not be able to touch anything in that part of the fresh produce section knowing her salty pork face had been near it. She turned towards him and elbowed him aside so that she could inspect the hard, dry onions. Her muddy eyeballs had a blunt glaze. Her mobile phone began to ring. Clawing it from her clutch bag, she cocked her head back, delighted with the opportunity to shriek in public.
Seth walked away. But none of the other produce was fresh either. A bunch of spring onions that he held before his face sagged between his fingers. When he saw it was priced at one pound and seventy-five pence, he crushed it and threw it into the yellowing Chinese leaves.
