Eight Rooms

by Various

  I show the picture to Mr Bates. Hold it in front of his eyes, then in front of his loving wife’s.

  Recognise the shoe? I say, young Sam’s there, your unloved son I whisper.

  And this one? I’m whispering again. I think it has you in it I whisper. Sheryl, hope you don’t mind me using your first name? Slapping Sam, remember? See her hand Mr Bates? Your wife’s. I’m still whispering. See the imprint her hand left on his face, must have hit him quite hard.

  Sammy is still making friends with Max. I start to throw photos at her, one after the other.

  So where exactly is your love Mrs Bates? Where’s your big heart? I tap her where I think it is. She flinches, I’m sure she thought I was going for her breast. You haven’t got a drop? Did you know that about her Mr Bates, her lack of love? You seemed to have married a witch Mr Bates, did you realise that, or did she cast a spell on you, are you blinded Mr Bates?

  I know what a witch is Sam says suddenly joining the conversation.

  Do you? I say, looking around at the little boy, what’s a witch Sam? Pause, then add, is there one in the room? Sam lowers his head, I’ve put him on the spot. I shouldn’t have done that.

  That’s unfair.

  He doesn’t want

  He doesn’t want to but he does slowly raise a finger and points at the queen, Mrs Bates, Sheryl, his new mother. The witch has been found in the room.

  The next picture I lift up shows Sheryl’s screaming face, inches away from a scared little boy, her veins are up. The picture captures her venom, poisoning Sam. He’s got terror and confusion in his eyes.

  Do you know what you do to witches, Sam?

  No, he says.

  You drown them. That way mummy will be witch free?

  She’s not my mummy. Sam says coldly.

  Sheryl, how about you, you must want to be, free of the witch? I know Sammy wants you to be, don’t you Sam?

  Sam looks up, looks at his parent’s heads in bags and slowly nods his own.

  Will she be nice to me then? Sam asks, if the witch goes away?

  Of course she will, won’t you Mrs Bates?

  The bag moves.

  I think she nodded Sam.

  I put the photos back out

  I put the photos back out of harms way, I don’t want to ruin them, they’re my proof, my evidence, to get me out of this mess, Sam out of his.

  Social services would like to have a look at these, her pulling his hair, her spitting in his face, unfit to be a mother of any kind.

  I take Sam’s hand and walk to the kitchen. Max is still on the boys arm.

  He likes you, I can tell. He wouldn’t do that for any old fart.

  Sam looks at the bird on his arm, then up at me.

  Do witches really drown?

  I’m busy filling the bucket

  I’m busy filling the bucket in the sink.

  Course they do, that’s why they fly on broomsticks so as not to get wet. When have you ever seen a wet witch?

  Never, Sam replies.

  See.

  The water pours into the bucket. I turn the tap, pull the bucket out, it scrapes as it comes.

  Come on, I say turning from the sink, Come on lets go get that witch.

  Yeah, lets go. Sam shrieks.

  When we enter the queen’s shaking and so is her king.

  See, the witch is getting scared. It’s like washing hair, pour the water over and watch the witch disappear. Sheryl’s trembling as I approach.

  Will it leave on a broomstick? Will it fly? His eyes are half covered and he’s holding onto my leg. Will I see it? Will it get me?

  That’s a good question Sam, I really don’t know. Shall we wait and see?

  I’m scared. He says.

  No, don’t be scared Sam. I’ll look after you now… I say. Now watch this!

  And I pour the bucket, the bags sucked in, hard breathing, spat out. She’s gasping now, really gasping. Terror and fear with every drop, she’s fitting on the chair.

  See, it’s trying to wriggle out Sam.

  The bag’s sucked in, spat out, sucked in spat out. I didn’t pour it all, sometimes enough is enough.

  I can’t see it, where’s the witch, where’s the witch? The boy yells, grasping jean and skin. It can’t get out.

  It will, it will, just wait. I say. Won’t it Sheryl, you won’t be cruel anymore, once that witch has gone!

  And the bag gets sucked in, spat out, sucked in spat out.

  It’s not leaving, I don’t like this, the boy yells. I can’t see the witch. And he starts to cry. You don’t have to do this to daddy, do you?

  No, I think we can leave the king alone.

  Buzz.

  The front door buzzer goes, gets me every time. I lift my eyes, turn my head, know exactly who it will be. I put the gaffer tape down on a chair and walk to the door.

  Mr and Mrs Bates stand arm in arm, the happy man and wife.

  We’re not late are we? Mr Bates asks, stretching out a hand, which I take.

  No, I look at my watch. Ten minutes early. Please do come in.

  I say with a smile. No Sam? I ask.

  No he didn’t want to come, Mrs Bates replies.

  Gaffer tape, two empty chairs, brown bags on floor. Their feet enter the room. I’ve a decision to make.

  Do you know what my mum used to say to me, near as damn it all the time?

  No, Mr Bates says, looking at me, why would I know that?

  Dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer. I say, she might be right.

  That’s Supertramp. His wife, Mrs Bates says and starts to sing.

  5

  E.C. Seaman

  Every Thursday afternoon, I die again and go to heaven. That’s what it feels like, here in this room while she massages my back; all the pain melts away, and for an hour or so, one short hour in a long week, I feel almost at ease with myself.

  Her hands look too small to work such magic, but they are square and strong; very capable. I have always preferred women to maintain their nails a little longer, more feminine-looking, but her hands are the ones that do the job. When I first came to the clinic, I was treated by a physiotherapist, middle-aged, brisk and efficient. She used a kind of pain relieving gel on my back – it felt cold and chemical on my skin and she had to wear thin rubber gloves like a surgeon so the drugs didn’t absorb into her body. Then she’d make me bend and stretch in all sorts of contortions, send me away with sheets of exercises to repeat diligently at home. After six weeks of these twice-weekly sessions, the doctor told me I’d progressed as far as they could hope for and would be put into a maintenance programme of deep tissue massages once a week.

  When I saw Hana waiting for me here in the massage suite that first afternoon, I wondered whether there was any point in letting her continue. The physio worked in a bright, clinical room, lined with anatomical textbooks and a dangling articulated spine of yellowed chunky plastic, as though she’d ripped the backbone from a particularly recalcitrant patient, pour encourager les autres. Hana’s massage room was rather disturbingly boudoir, with low lighting, softly piping music and gold-framed prints of a serenely smiling Buddha. It didn’t seem an environment where any kind of medically-approved healing process could take place. I was especially sceptical when she told me she would be using aromatherapy oils.

  “What scents do you like?” she said, a tiny frown creasing her forehead.

  I had never really thought about it.

  “I like black coffee on a cold morning, crispy bacon and the smell of cut grass,” I said crossly.

  “Oh,” she laughed, “but I cannot rub you with bacon,” and then she suddenly looked very serious, “It is awfully important that the oils we use have the right therapeutic effect.”

  “Something fresh then,” I said, “to wake me up a bit.” I didn’t give a damn really, my back hurt so badly that afternoon, I just wanted to cut to the chase, to her hands smoothing out the bumps knotted into my spine from hunching over a computer all week.

&
nbsp; “Then Bergamot, I suggest,” she said, “which is a member of the citrus family, and also Pine, which is very cleansing.”

  I must have looked askance at that for she said quickly,

  “Not for the cleansing of the body you understand, but the cleansing of the mind.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “The blend I will use, some of the oils are included for their warming beneficent effects,” she said primly, and then added with an enchanting little smile, “and some because they smell oh, so very nice.”

  I think I may have quivered visibly when she said that.

  If I were a younger man, less careful… When she went out afterwards to let me re-dress, I rubbed a towel all over myself to mop up every hint of oil so that it didn’t stain my clothes. I didn’t want Danielle to pick up the scent of the massage and question me. Later, at home, when I unpacked my bag, I took out the towel and was hit by the scent of it, the scent of Hana. I closed my eyes and pressed my face into the soft fabric, drawing up that spicy warmth, like hot sunshine through a forest canopy. Instead of putting the towel out for laundering, I thrust it to the back of the wardrobe, knowing that with that perfume, I could conjure her up in a moment.

  When I need to distract myself from what Hana is doing, I let the scent pick me up and take me away. I think about the high forests that rose steeply behind my Mother’s house. When I was a teenager, I used to escape for hours, breathing in that cool crisp mountain air, walking until my legs ached and I could fall each evening into a deep and dreamless sleep. I once saw an adder lying on the path, curled neatly like a coil of rope, fat and languid in the sun. It scudded off into the sparse undergrowth when I approached, a surprising turn of speed from such a squat creature. I liked to climb up above the tree line, ramble through the wind-stunted gorse and bright lilac heather and low bushes of bilberries. Plucked carefully from their hiding places, they would burst in my mouth with a deep purple sweet-sour tartness, almost perfumed in their intensity. Such wild country.

  Despite these attempts to distract myself, I do get aroused. Of course I do. Lie any man on his belly with all that glorious pressure bearing down on his cock and have a beautiful woman run her hands up and down his body – he’d have to be dead not to get an erection. But I can control it. I’m not an animal. If walking in long-felled pine forests doesn’t distract me, then I re-run old cricket matches, or even think about work. Sixty seconds absorbed in the intricacies of line code or overseas transactions – well that could deflate anything. Hana always leaves me for five minutes at the end of our sessions, drapes warm towels across my back and lets me rest. After a few months, I suddenly wondered if she does that not so much for her therapeutic reasons, but to let the blood flow back to my brain – maybe she actually knows how aroused I get. I’m not going to think those thoughts. They might lead me to do something stupid, and this isn’t that kind of place, Hana isn’t that kind of girl. Can you imagine? There are places I could go, I suppose, if that was what I wanted. But that’s not it at all.

  I wonder how much we really know about each other. For a long time, I thought her name was spelled Hannah, British style, though I could tell from her accent that she was foreign. I didn’t ask for ages, didn’t want her to think I was too interested. I thought she might be Scandinavian, but she didn’t look quite icy-fair enough for that. She is Polish, it transpires. I joked with her, rather nervously, “

  I suppose you’ll be off home then, now our economy has collapsed.”

  She looked at me reprovingly, “It is not all about the money, you understand.”

  She can’t know much more about me than my name, and what does that tell her? John; like a tart’s client, or police slang for a dead body. Such a very dull, common name. There have been very few interesting Johns in the world, not many men who’ve managed to rise above the limitations of such a very lacklustre start. My dear Mother may as well have tattooed “I have no imagination” on my forehead. I like the way Hana says it though – she softens the ‘J’ into something closer to a ‘y’ and lifts the ‘o’, so that in her mouth, my name alters gently, exotically, into ‘Yan’. I can see him, this Yan; he would be a fighter, a lover, a dashing hero. He’d never wear grey.

  I do. I always dress soberly, reassuringly, in shades from pale slate to dark charcoal grey, except for a selection of turquoise shirts to match my eyes. That’s my one vanity, I think. Danielle once said I have piercing eyes, when she was upset with me about something. I feel I would have been good at interrogation, at the real hands-on spy stuff. But it’s not like that anymore, if it ever was. You could call me an office-based agent, I suppose. I spend my days looking at lines of data, movements of figures, tracing tiny ripples and criminal footprints across the world’s economies.

  The job complicates things. Or maybe it’s not the difficulties of the job, but of being the sort of person who would do this job in the first place. I’m not good at parties, not a natural at small talk. Danielle forces me out of myself, likes us to ‘socialise’ as she calls it, even dragged me to a dinner party with her colleagues. I did try, for her sake.

  “I’m an analyst,” I said to the woman on my left, in response to her polite question. Her face lit up delightedly, “Oh you’re a psychiatrist? Which school do you follow? Jungian, Freudian or CBT?”

  “I’m a financial analyst,” I said and her face fell again. Women love talking about themselves, it’s their favourite topic of conversation. I suppose she hoped she’d get free therapy if she chatted me up. I’m not exactly a financial analyst either, it’s just what I say; something so dull and incomprehensible to most people that they change the subject and tell me about their own fascinating careers in waste management instead. But that’s what I am paid for, to be closemouthed, to be discreet. I can’t let on what I really analyse; it’s a matter of national security. James bloody stupid Bond wouldn’t last 10 minutes in the real world. Great blabber-mouthed idiot; telling everybody his name and rank and then poncing around in a dinner jacket; about as camouflaged as a penguin in the Sahara. I don’t ever tell women what I do, even if it would help me get them into bed more easily. Even Danielle has only the haziest idea what I do all day.

  God, my erection is so hard it feels as if I could balance on it. If this keeps happening, I will have to stop coming, so to speak. Maybe I could ask Hana for a facial or something instead, just so that I could keep seeing her. Though that might cause me even more difficulties. After several months of coming here, I got careless, left some receipts lying around after emptying my pockets. Danielle pounced on them.

  “Honestly John, I can’t believe you spend so much money every week on a massage.”

  I could tell that she thought it was in some way dubious, even though this is a proper clinic. She put those little invisible quotation marks around the word ‘massage’, the way women do when they are trying to distance themselves from something, to show their disapproval.

  “I’ll rub your back myself for that kind of money,” she said, only half-joking.

  “It’s a sports massage,” I said quickly, “more like a type of physiotherapy really.”

  Thank God I can make it seem respectable.

  “Besides, it’s on BUPA,” I added, “It isn’t actually costing me anything.”

  She raised her carefully pencilled eyebrows, but seemed satisfied by the innate propriety of therapy paid for by private health insurance. BUPA certainly wouldn’t be paying for any funny business.

  Sometimes I try and analyse what goes on, here in this room. A kind of enchantment, I think. Hana is certainly beautiful, in that unpreening way of women who have no idea how gorgeous they are. I have never seen her stop and look at herself in the mirror that hangs in the corner of the room; most women can’t pass any reflective surface without stopping for a sly prink and a pout. Or perhaps she is so used to being naturally lovely that she has forgotten and simply takes it for granted. She has tiny little hands and her feet in flat black shoes look like a child wearing plimsolls
ready for PE. Sometimes when it’s warmer she wears those flip-flop sandals and when I lie with my face through the padded hole in the massage table, I can see her toenails gleaming beneath me like pink shells on a beach.

  She looks very natural, not made-up. I like that in a woman. Well, I like it in Hana, anyway. I loathe it when Danielle slumps around my flat on Sunday mornings, all whey-faced and pink-eyed, her mascara rubbed off in fat black clumps on my pillows, her lipstick smeared on my coffee cups. Hana always looks fresh and delicately rosy cheeked, never painted. She used to wear her hair in a ponytail, and once when she was leaning right over me it fell forward and slithered against my neck. I flinched, didn’t know what it was. She apologised, stopped and tied it back. I watched her pinning up all that fabulous long hair, like a length of black silk, longed to say to her, “No, that felt great, just a bit unusual,” but since then her hair has always been pulled back and plaited tightly, so it can’t ever swing loose again.

  To get Danielle off the sofa and out of my flat at the weekends, we go to a café, eat breakfast there. She likes to people-watch; it keeps her from getting restless and chattering to me; she can fork up cream cake and watch the world go by while I read the newspaper and drink coffee as black as my thoughts.

  She’s always guessing about the people passing by, making up stories.

  “I’m interested,” she says, “Don’t you look at people and wonder where they are going, what they are doing?”

  “I don’t look at other people at all,” I say.

  I have recently realised that this long-cultivated detachment may actually be hampering me at work. People who joined after me have risen higher because they have that easy knack with people, even though my skill with data, with patterns, is unchallenged.

  “John here is our financial expert,” my Departmental Manager said, laying a heavy hand on my shoulder as he showed the latest Minister around. I felt patronised, as though he was condescending to me in some way, although we both knew he could never understand what I do in a million years.