by H K Thompson
And then I knocked at the door, lightly at first but when there was no reply I knocked again louder. But I felt tentative, as if in the knock and my being tentative I sort of captured the conflict I felt inside about being there at all. I waited again and then I heard a sort of shuffle inside the cottage and a few uneven footsteps and the door was dragged open enough for me to see a person inside the dark hallway. His face was half-hidden by the door but I could see eyes looking out at me and blinking in the sunlight.”
Chapter 12
Stephen Dawson woke up every day to chaos. He had acquired the cottage over fifteen years before from a drug world acquaintance whom he had cheated out of the freehold. That had been in the days before Stephen fell apart and he had still been able to manipulate and coerce any potential victim to do what he wanted them to do. Ten years before, Stephen was on the crest of a corrupt and violent wave, dealing in Bristol and retiring at regular intervals to his hideaway, the cottage, when things became too hot or when he ran out of steam. Stephen lived on a roller-coaster of adrenaline and exhaustion, fuelled by the use of cannabis, heroin and cocaine. As he had grown older, he had begun vaguely to realise that he could not sustain the pace or way of life and that taking time out was becoming a necessity.
When he was at the cottage no one knew where he was. Sometimes this was essential. The cottage had become the closest thing he had ever known to home. To find this small cottage in the middle of nowhere, unaffected by the warped and venal life he led, had been his salvation. It had called forth something minutely decent and human in Stephen which his chosen life had never allowed. He knew that when he was at Hafod Fach he could give way to his exhaustion and live as if he were recovering from the near-fatal illness that his life had always been. He saw no one, only nurturing the small seed of humanity in isolation, alone with himself and plagued by the images and thoughts which had filled his memory since he could not remember when.
To say that Stephen Dawson’s home was disordered would be an understatement. The place was filthy, every surface, beneath piles of accumulated rubbish, covered in a greasy layer of soot, cooking fat and dust that held the odours of a degraded life. There were one or two pieces of furniture – an oak table, a monk’s seat, an old chest – that suggested at least a period of time when Stephen Dawson was interested in decent things, or perhaps they were the possessions of the previous owner. Every corner, ridge or angle was filled with the detritus of life, untouched, and redolent of the suggestion that they were replete with disease. The small bathroom was particularly repellent, the faux-lino floor that was once cream in colour was now smeared and ingrained brown and black, covered in greying hair and the matted, unattended-to rubbish of human occupation. The bathroom had not been cleaned in the fifteen years of Stephen Dawson’s part-time residence there. The small window to the back of the cottage was broken, allowing in a stream of cold air. It was this draught that maintained some quality of freshness to the otherwise sour and stinking room. There was a bath, equally filthy, but no toilet, which was fortunately located outside in the garden. It was a two-seated privy with a rotting oak seat dating back at least a century and a half. The cottage was thus spared the final reek of dissolution that an inside toilet would have given it.
The bedroom contained a mattress on the floor. Its condition was balefully consistent with the condition of the living room and bathroom. It would have been unsurprising if there had not been fleas and lice inhabiting the body of the mattress, the striped cover partly hiding the springs and what remained of the padding. There were clothes strewn on the floor, some of which were good quality but had known better days. Incongruously, and in the middle of the mess of blankets and mattress, clothes and rags, there was a pair of shining and clean cowboy boots, black and decorated with a tooled star motif. They lay on the floor like emblems of hope in the ruined secrecy of Stephen Dawson’s home. The small window was curtained by a swatch of meagre and threadbare faded red curtain, pulled to one side and held in place by an old jam jar that stood on the window ledge. The curtain was rigid with grime, so much so that if the jar had been taken away it would have stayed exactly in its position. The windowpane was opaque with dirt. It too looked out to the back of the cottage and the undergrowth that impinged on the site.
The kitchen was perhaps the worst horror with which Stephen lived on the material plane. There were few pots or pans and what there were were thick with grease and barely resembling their purpose, yellow with layers of cooked- on remains. What once had been a terracotta tile floor, complete with many broken tiles, was covered with the usual accumulation of filth. The sink drain was blocked, filling the sink itself with greasy, grey, cold water in which floated the leftovers of old uneaten food. The plates and dishes lay on the draining board amid the rank remains of rotten food and greasy and waterlogged wood.
From the outside the cottage had holes in its roof, a chimney that could fall at any moment and greening walls that were once probably whitewashed. The area immediately to the front of the cottage was cobbled and was covered with moss and slime. Trees and shrubs had overcrowded the house and water gathered now in the air, drenching the fabric of the stonework with moisture that slowly and insidiously crept through the walls and into the building itself. The whole construction of the cottage gave off the overpowering aura of deep neglect, of a structure that could not go on standing, of a building that one day would give up its tenuous coherence and surrender to the stony earth that it had come from. There were no foundations to the cottage, the usual condition of the old buildings in that part of the world. Their survival depended upon the sheer weight of the rocks and mortar that fixed them together and the weatherproof properties of their slate roofs – and on their maintenance by human beings. For fifteen years Stephen Dawson had failed to tend to the needs of Hafod Fach and it was falling down. Ivy penetrated the mortar that held the stones together and there were places in the walls where the mortar had been worn back into the cracks between the stones. Soon daylight would be seen from inside and the building would begin to crumble. Stephen Dawson would slowly begin to lose his sanctuary. Such decay and degradation would culminate in the inevitability of loss.
Stephen Dawson was almost spent as a human being. He ate next to nothing, slept fitfully and was never replenished mentally or physically. He had deeply internalised the failure of his own nurturing as a child and was incapable of giving himself anything that faintly resembled goodness or wholesomeness. Every so often there were instants of engagement and lucidity, Stephen’s near-life moments that strangely illuminated his darkness, filling it with shadows and phantoms that left him deranged, until the gloom overcame him again and he could subside into lonely catatonia.
He had spent less and less time on his trawl of inner-city opportunities in the last five years. There had been a period in his life when he had spent most of his time dealing in the nooks and crannies of urban glamour and despair. There had also been a time when he had plied his trade at the parties of the well-off in the better parts of Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea. Now that time was long gone and he had slowly retreated to small-time dealing in smaller towns. He no longer had the strength to protect his market in the cities, and the towns were easier pickings for a burnt-out operator, if much less lucrative. Stephen had made enemies. He had lived in a nasty and violent world of merciless extortion and corruption, the dark underbelly of an affluent society. He had exploited those margins of affluence.
Stephen Dawson lived in a world where violence was the resort of choice. Any enforcement of the rules of addiction was violent and Stephen had done his share of perpetration. He knew what it was like to ram a broken bottle into the face of a junkie who could not pay. He knew what it was like to kick and punch a drug-addled victim into unconsciousness and come back the next day and do the same. Stephen had been merciless and without conscience. Now his world was small, contracted in spirit and body to a minuscule core of self, afraid to venture out and face even the nurturing world of Nature.
It was weeks since he had been into the town. Because he wanted to preserve the secrecy of his life, he drove in his van, recently disabled, to Fishguard to shop for bread and tea and coffee and milk, which he mostly lived on. He had little money and only what he had hidden away under the kitchen floor. When that was gone he had no idea what he would do. Perhaps he would finally starve to death.
The line between waking and sleep had become blurred. When he was awake he hallucinated, partly from the permanent damage to his brain from his addiction, and partly because he ate very little and drank even less. His body struggled for survival despite the abject neglect and consistent abuse that he meted out to it. He had reached the point where he no longer washed himself, where he had many scabs and sores, and what remained of his greying hair was matted and had been left uncut and uncombed for months. On his now infrequent visits to Fishguard he was generally stared at and avoided, both in the street and in the shops he used. He faintly realised that he may never go to Fishguard again. His van was almost unmendable and two of its tyres flat, and when he last looked into the cubby-hole beneath the broken tile in the kitchen floor he realised with what almost amounted to dismay, that his hidden money was nearly gone. He had registered the fact briefly and blanked the memory of it. He comforted himself with the fact that he still had a box of tea bags, some powdered milk and half a jar of coffee, and perhaps a last egg somewhere in the mess of the kitchen. He had neither fed the hens nor looked for eggs in days.
The worst thing for Stephen was not the extreme disorder of his waking life but the turmoil and fear of the time when he was asleep. This was worse than anything he could encounter when awake. His dreams and nightmares came in two varieties. The first, and with which he could largely cope, were dreams that brought back the memories of his dealing days, when he was in his prime and when he had been at his most violent, when he had persecuted and beaten his dependent customers. There had been one or two incidents of such extreme viciousness that the faces of his victims in the throes of pain and terror had remained imprinted on his psyche. Whilst he had been able to dismiss them from his waking world, suppress the images deep into the hidden recesses of his mind, when he slept, no matter how fitfully, the faces swam to the surface of his sleeping consciousness and presented themselves whole and intact and accurate in every appalling detail. The two faces that recurred in this agony of torture belonged to addicts whom he knew to be dead. One had died from an overdose and the other very probably from the last beating he had received from Stephen. Stephen had cast aside any culpability that he may have known to be his and retreated into his habitual state of denial. It was both Stephen’s gift and his undoing to have the limitless capacity to deny any responsibility he may have had in the suffering of others.
This dubious gift allowed him to remorselessly pursue his trade in destruction without any resort to doubt or guilt. Both feelings were, for the most part, outside Stephen’s experience. He never questioned what he was doing. This unquestioning stance allowed him to live his life in the way to which he felt entitled. He believed that it was his right to make relatively large amounts of money (in his heyday) through the torment and suffering of others. He never questioned that deeply held sense of entitlement although he had sometimes wondered how his customers could be so degraded and seemingly without such a sense of entitlement in themselves. However, he never pursued thoughts that would detract from his view of the world. That would have required some measure of self-awareness and this he mostly refused to have. So he had neither doubt about how he led his life nor about the foundations of exploitation and abuse upon which his life was built.
He felt no guilt about the faces in his dreams when he was awake. But when he was in the grip of his nightmare his whole being was a jumble of emotion, a tight web held together by fear. It was at this time that he knew that what he had done had created an unending pandemonium inside his mind and body, an extreme confusion of sensations and furores that racked him and left him drained, shocked and vulnerable. He woke feeling an instant and intense sense of guilt that he dispelled as best he could, usually by jumping out of bed or off his battered couch and walking to the window to look out into the darkness.
The second sort of dreams that filled him with utter terror concerned his mother. He knew this but did his best, again, to deny the undeniable. His continuous travail to suppress what his unconscious threw up left him tense and tired, never able to relax, always in conflict. His relationship to his mother was the crux of all Stephen’s drivenness and angst, his vindictiveness against other people, especially his drug-dependent clients, and the echoes and overtones of vengeance that characterised his way of being. Stephen Dawson was compelled in all his actions by the unresolved hatred and pain he felt as a direct consequence of his relationship with Irene Dawson. His dreams about her were replete with images of attack and harmfulness, of distance and unattainability and threat, and with an emotional suffering that he found unbearable whilst he was having the dream and at the moment he awoke. They were so unendurable that suppression was the automatic way out. This was instinctual, a reflex well developed and prized in the deeper recesses of Stephen’s soul. It had never occurred to him to face up to the content of his dreams or allow himself to think about them or mull them over. This was so even though he had realised that in the dreams he was a boy and not the grown man he was now. In his addled mental processes and convoluted and disturbed emotional world, he no longer enjoyed the luxury of clear thought and self-reflexive analysis. But he had worked out that there were two types of nightmare.
In the first kind of nightmare, not always the same but always containing the main elements, he was with his mother. She always seemed much bigger than he and he could not see her face. At the beginning of the dream she had her back to him and was involved with something in front of her which he could not see. He always felt small and there was an underlying and menacing feeling that he was powerless and that, if she wanted, she could at any minute turn on him and he would be defenceless. There was what seemed like a very long time before anything happened that he could make sense of. It was also this waiting that allowed his anxiety to grow and grow until he felt as if he would explode with it, until he felt overwhelmed and overcome and completely helpless. His feeling of powerlessness would reach such a pitch of intensity that he wondered, when he woke up sweating and in tears, how he could ever have stayed asleep, enduring such torture. He was powerless even to awake from his own unconscious.
At some point, in the further reaches of his terror, when he was rigid with unexpressed screams, his mother turned round and revealed, in a horrible moment that he dreaded more than almost anything in the world, what she had been so intently doing whilst she ignored him. She had been slowly and methodically dismembering a kitten. He was left to conjecture whether the kitten had been alive or dead at the outset of this process. He would always recall at this point that there had been faint mews coming from where his mother’s hands had been and he would then realise that the kitten could have been alive as his mother pulled it limb from limb, extracted its entrails and finally deposited a blood-mottled pelt of fur on the table.
He was always struck by how beautiful the fur was even as he looked on, horrified. What particularly distressed him was the closeness he felt with the kitten and it was this affinity that intensified his experience and he felt a small bolt of rage shoot through him. In an instant the rage was engulfed by fear and was gone. He was too small to be angry and by now he was transfixed by his mother’s face. It was grotesque and scarcely resembled the actuality of her. What he saw was a leering mask with pointed teeth that seemed intent on devouring him. Perhaps, he thought in a moment of unparalleled dread, the kitten was a rehearsal and that the real target of his mother’s predatory visage and demeanour was him. Such an appalling realisation was, perhaps, a blessing because it jolted him out of his frozen inner tumult and made him run. He ran from the room, slamming the door as he did so, and into a dark hallway. He knew w
here the door to the outside was and ran to it, grasping in the gloom at where he thought the handle should be. But the handle was never where it should have been. He was always compelled to search desperately for the knob of the Yale, to turn it and pull open the door with a huge burst of vibrating, hysterical effort, all the while hanging on to a primitive and life-preserving ability to flee in the face of the destroying virago.
After an interminable moment he wrenched open the door and fell out of the charnel house and into the outside, the garden, itself half-derelict, with a path to a gate and the way of final escape. He could hear his mother’s footfall behind him and her screams of fury assailed his ears. And the gate, he knew, was always stuck. There would be one more superhuman effort and he would be away. Then he felt her hand on his shoulder, pulling him back, back…At that dreadful moment he awoke, sweating and panting and crying. To be caught by his mother was a step too far. He knew he had to prise himself out of sleep and save his own life. So far he had been able to summon the will to succeed in that effort but what he feared more than anything else was that one night he would not be able to save himself. He would not be able to wake.
