“You sent her to the bingo, and I wanted her to stay and read me a story!” Jesus, he could turn at the drop of a hat, this one. “She always does what a man wants her to, any man, and she never does what I want. Uncle Bob tells her what to do, and you tell her what to do, and she always does what you want, and she doesn’t love me, not really, and—” not even pausing to draw breath “—I don’t love her any more, and I don’t care, I won’t go back, and she started it, anyway, leaving me on my own!”
“But you can’t stay here with me!” Let’s just make that perfectly clear, shall we, before this all gets out of hand? “I can’t look after you, do you understand? I’ve . . . I’ve got to go out to work, daddies have to go to the office and that, and what would you do all day, stuck in here on your own?”
“I could go to school. You could take me to school in the morning, and pick me up from after-school club like all the other kids.”
“Hang on!” Errors in internal logic always rankled with Dan. “They didn’t have after-school club in your day! It’s 1972 when you go to school!”
“That was back then.” X was having none of it. “It’s not then any more, not here. They’ve got after-school club. And there’s telly just for kids. Cartoons and that.”
Yes, and they’ve got Wii and PlayStation too. God, if he got a sniff of all that he was never going back, was he? Newcastle in the seventies would feel like the Gulag by comparison. Think. What would have made him do what he was told, at that age? Well, obviously one thing.
“Look, I’m not messing around now. Get back.” His voice roughened, took on an admonitory edge. No more Mister Nice Guy. Where most parents go wrong is, they haven’t got any idea when it comes to discipline.
“No!” With a stamp of his foot, if you please.
“Don’t make me put down this laptop. Don’t interrupt my work.” He sounded convincing enough. All you have to do is act the part, and authority comes to you. Bluff your way through it. Remember: he’s only seven.
“I don’t want to go back in there!” The waterworks, now. Might have known. With a horrible frown, Dan set the Powerbook aside and got up from his chair.
“Right. I’m angry now. Stop that.”
But X continued to grizzle. Every time Dan said “Stop it,” he shook his head and blubbed a little more loudly, and every time it pushed Dan’s button a little more energetically. In the end it was loud enough to wake the neighbors, and that’s when Dan lost it. That’s when something happened: something not good.
The first time you hit a child will always be in anger, and Dan was certainly angry enough; scared, too, caught up in X’s own childish panic. What he couldn’t have known—what he couldn’t have anticipated, because nobody ever knows until it’s happened—was how very natural it would be. How easy it would be to do the thing, the bad thing.
Understand: it doesn’t actually solve the problem, inasmuch as we define the problem in its narrowest sense as stopping this bloody kid from crying. Yes, it may surprise the child temporarily: it might shock him quiet, the way X was shocked just for a little while when Dan . . . when he did what he did (the bad thing). But that’s not an end to tears and tantrums; it’s just one stop further down the line. It doesn’t give you peace. What it does give you is control, just for a second, or the illusion at least of control—and let’s face it, the illusion is all that most of us ever get. Only you can’t keep doing it, that’s the thing; you just can’t. Such exchanges are necessarily thermonuclear in their severity, precisely because they split apart the family nucleus, releasing huge amounts of bad, unclean energy, poisoning the atmosphere, blowing down the structures. They’re first strikes with no possibility of response: the very definition of hemispheric brutality.
Stand well clear now, because this is toxic stuff; radioactive, as already established. But ask the question anyway, even if it hurts: admit the possibility. Suppose that when you do it that first time—the bad thing—suppose it’s easier than you thought it would be. So easy, in fact, that you do it again, and again. And carry on doing it, even after the first flush of panic-anger fades.
I know, I know: not you, not me, not anyone we’d have round to dinner. But there are such people, they do exist, and not all of them are slavering Nazis in black leather. And we’re not even talking about what you go on to do once you’ve made the discovery, even though such moral choices are both necessary and inescapable—forming, in fact, the only basis on which we may ultimately be judged. Even before you get into the realm of judgement and morality, there’s the unslippable, unevadable question, waiting patiently while you get to the end of your prevarication, why? What was working inside you, when you raised your hand to a little child?
Dan couldn’t say—or wouldn’t. It all happened too fast for him to understand; that was what he told himself. Hustling X back into the cupboard, jamming home the bolts at top and bottom of the door, he wanted only to get him out of the way, to shut his noise, as Bob might have put it. The comparison with Bob was not exactly to his credit, he knew that, but he needed space to think. Maybe he actually did want to ask himself that question, the one we talked about just now. It was always the question that had scared him most of all, on the deepest, most basic level: suppose you could be a bad man all the while, and only find out once it was too late?
As the muffled sobs wore down to silence and the bangs on the cupboard door grew weaker and weaker, Dan sat as if stunned. As if he was the one who’d been hit. He cast his mind back over his forty-odd years, looking for anything that might prefigure his sudden giving way to the basest of instincts. Well—it was disturbing, in retrospect, how quickly the memory came to mind—well, there had been Rachel, hadn’t there?
Rachel his girlfriend in university, his bit of high-class damaged goods; Rachel who used to get him to smack her bottom before they did the business. Had that ever been anything other than embarrassing, though? Had it ever really been about him, even? It was hard to say: when there’s a plummy-voiced eighteen-year-old posh bird sprawled across your lap, grinding away in lascivious desperation, calling you Daddy and purring seductively about what a bad girl she’s been, your responses will necessarily be somewhat compromised. Especially if you’re a sex-starved lump of Northern discomfiture, thinking all his Christmases have come at once. Under the circumstances, it would take a saint to resist giving such a forward minx a little bit of a tap—and not every saint would have been proof against the temptation, Dan suspected. Rachel, then: not proven. And Angie had never gone in for that sort of thing, had she?
You’re forgetting that time, the unstillable voice in his head piped up, you know, when you couldn’t—Okay. Yes. It had been something they’d tried, just the once, when he was working long hours at the tech and doing Nevernesse in the evenings, and the physical side of the relationship was going through a fallow patch. Dan had read something in a magazine, and Angie was willing to go along with it for his sake, for the sake of their relationship. Had it clicked, though? Had it actually done the trick? Dan thought not: he remembered it mostly as a long, wearying and ultimately futile night, the bedroom floor littered with risibly unconvincing props like the backstage area of some provincial pantomime, and they’d never tried it again.
Only: looking at things more closely now, free from the obligation to take both sides of the equation into account . . . hadn’t it been more a case of Angie pulling the plug than of his own failure to rise to the occasion? Ange, the great deflater. And—why not follow this particular squirrel up its tree, after all?—and, wasn’t that just typical of the way their relationship had been deteriorating, even then? Dan couldn’t manage it, and Angie couldn’t be bothered. Cue lots of Penguin Classics in bed and hot milky drinks for one, till the baleful advent of rough priapic Malcolm, the Mellors to her Lady Chatterley. He taught amenity horticulture, for God’s sake, at the sixth-form college in Hawarden. Gagging painfully on his bitter cuckold’s cud, Dan wondered whether Angie was getting through quite so much Ovaltine
with him forking over her plot.
So, not proven was the best verdict he could come up with—which, let’s face it, was no sort of a distraction, and was no use whatsoever in letting him off the hook. It meant he still had to evaluate what had happened on its own phenomenological merits. Which was not in itself a piece of cake, because for a start, you had to deal with the fact that X was . . . well, what he was. A head-birth, a figment, a spirit called from the vasty deep or whatever. Through the medium of fiction, Dan had been brutalizing him for days now, from the soles of his feet to his pudding-bowl home haircut. It was the thing about misery lit: someone had to get hurt. Moodily, as if tonguing a rotten tooth, Dan rubbed his tingling palm. Something had been slapped. Something was sniveling in the cupboard still. So much for empirical analysis.
And would it even make any difference whether X was real or not, in the moral sense? On this topic, President Jimmy Carter and the late Pope John Paul were in censorious accord: sins committed in the secret chambers of the heart weigh every bit as heavy as dirty deeds done in public, once placed in the critical balance. Lust, wrath, whatever: all equally mortal. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter and the Pope? Par-tay, dude. What did they know about life as she was lived? Both of them could stand to lighten up a bit.
But it wasn’t just the guilt he had to deal with, or even the self-loathing. In a way, more worrying still—of devastating, overpowering concern to Dan as he sat slumped in his chair, too traumatised by panic and the horrors of self-realization to even realize the Powerbook was humming still by his side, the ticking cursor waiting to be pushed along the page by whatever came next—more worrying still was what was happening in his head. What was happening to his mind, which just now felt about as compromised as seemed humanly possible. Whichever way he turned, there was horror of one kind or another. It was like trying to follow a long and complicated sentence—a sentence in some foreign language, where you have to wait till the end for the verb to make sense of it—a sentence with two independent clauses, each of which contains shatteringly bad news. The ability to entertain two separate and contradictory concepts at the same time is held by some to be the true definition of “genius”; for Dan, it felt as if it were fracturing his brain, right down the corpus callosum, a cracked and shrivelled walnut split in two.
Thoughts came buzzing at him like wasps around a lolly. He’d hit a child. He’d imagined a child. An imaginary child was crouching, beaten, in the cupboard. Only he wouldn’t be there when he looked, because he wasn’t in the boot before. Only he had to be, because he’d put him there himself. It was no good, he had to look. No, he couldn’t look. Instead, he cast around for something to hang on to (almost literally—he felt like a man stumbling through the false-perspective corridors of a funhouse filled with bad mirrors) before settling as a last resort on the Powerbook. Clutching it to his lap like a lost child, he jammed down the Page Up key till he arrived at the top of the file, SAY UNCLE in eighteen-point caps. Beneath this title he typed the words A Novel by Dan Trehearne. For the moment, it seemed the best thing he could do, perhaps the only thing. Call it a novel, say it’s not real life.
The night passed, without ever really ending. Morning found Dan slumped in his easy chair, snoring with a dogged persistence. Probably the Powerbook had been sliding gently off his knees throughout his nap; only with the sunup, when gravity (or mischief) gave that last imperceptible tug, did the whole shebang, tray and all, land with a nasty-sounding thump on the threadbare carpet at his feet.
Shitshitshit. . . . Dan woke, wrenched with painful suddenness into consciousness, looking first of all for the cupboard door—still shut, thank god, still locked. Like a man who can’t find the alarm clock to turn it off he looked around in a daze, before noticing the foundered Powerbook at his feet.
At first sight it didn’t seem that bad. Nothing was obviously shattered. The power-save function had come on, and he had to hold down the On switch until the screen hummed back to life, thus revealing the true extent of the damage.
On the screen, rather than the sixteen-odd thousand neatly justified words he’d produced over the course of the last few days, there was only a gray dialogue box with the message Some of your file was not saved, and therefore may not be recoverable. Would you like to go ahead anyway? Helplessly Dan pressed OK; no other option was offered him.
It was a file of bits and scraps, tildes and pilcrows, diacritics and gibberish. A typical section read: h_snos’_brôt,’_twil_t, ¶§ wanted to run away, but å go ej∑ß_miserable küld μ±™ and I cry a lot. Rarely, if ever, did it get any more legible. So much for Say Uncle.
Dan, ready to cry a lot himself, page-downed disbelievingly through reams of this junk, fragments from a damaged mind, the pleas of a broken machine. Somewhere the story would begin again, whole and uncorrupted. This gibberish would begin to make sense. But it never did: it carried on garbage all the way through to the final para, the cursor trapped against the right-hand margin no matter how often he pressed the arrow key. Time’s arrow, nudging an immovable barrier: the unalterable, read-only end of things.
When, overwhelmed by the sheer idiot futility of it all, he went to close the file and the computer asked him whether he wanted to save changes, he clicked No. No, don’t save changes. Put everything back as it was. Put me in my proper bed in my proper house, with my proper wife, writing my proper books. Put an end to all this, because I’m sick of it.
The corrupted file vanished, and the screen went gray, waiting to see what he might do next.
With a convulsive fury sufficient to pull half the muscles in his shoulder, Dan hurled the Powerbook straight at the cupboard door. Though it had managed to survive its tumble from his lap with only minor loss of data, this was definitely its point of no return. The screen came off entirely, the black plastic casing split open; the whole thing landed at the foot of the splintered door like a roadkill crow. If only X had been there, thought Dan crazily. If only he’d been standing there in his fucking pajamas to take the brunt of it, then so much the better. He’d spoiled everything—Dan realized it through his weeping, through the paroxysm of tears that choked him up almost immediately after. He’d ruined it. It was all his fault. Not playing right, then whining like a little brat afterwards. He asked for it, you see, that was his problem. He asked for it.
“You stupid bastard,” sobbed Dan aloud, hitting himself quite painfully on the thigh with his clenched fist. “You stupid, stupid bastard . . . ” A punch on each beat, stupid, stupid, stupid, till it hurt so much he had to stop. Only when he stopped punching, it didn’t stop hurting.
After a while he had to get out. Out of the back room and all its hateful associations; out of the flat, which he loathed no less. While the world bolted breakfast and went to work he roamed, in no particular direction, down a suburban perplex of dead ends and culs-de-sac, hemmed in on all sides, the path he’d walked only a moment before vanishing behind him, unretraceable. Mummy bears and daddy bears strapped baby bears into the backs of people-carriers, remote as tiny popes inside their Popemobiles. Playgroup leaders received their charges with wide artificial smiles. Teenagers and their social networks clogged the pavements around schools, forming shoving, jostling mobs around the matchbook screens of mobile phones to bray at the filmed humiliations of the night before. Through it all pushed Dan, sealed in his misery, wholly unaware of his companion trailing after.
Those who noticed assumed the boy was off school. He did look poorly, pale and thin, as if he didn’t get out much. Scruffy, unwashed. And that lout of a bloke was no better. Why didn’t he slow down and wait for the lad, hold his hand on busy crossings? Poor little mite wasn’t even dressed for going outside, hadn’t got a coat on or anything. Some people, they’ve got no idea. So disapproval followed Dan like a bad smell, with sympathy for X its residual afterscent. If only they knew. If only he’d known himself.
Along the surly streets they trudged, Dan and his shadow. When Dan stopped, more
or less at random, for greasy coffee in a greasy spoon, his companion hung around outside the greasy window, half-hidden behind the hulking frame of a greasy customer hunched over sausage, egg and greasy beans. Pay the greasy man and be on your way. Onward, with a sour belch and the taste of defeat in your mouth. The boy watches. He follows after, determinedly.
In the precinct, they pegged Dan for a troublemaker and tried to move him on. He wasn’t causing any trouble, he protested; but his head was filled with trouble, they must have known, they must have seen it on his face, his unshaved mug deformed with an awful agitation. He couldn’t explain without starting to shout, and a security guard clamped him by the arm and hustled him out on to the pavement. As he stood in the gutter and lit with trembling hands his umpteenth cigarette of the awful morning, he glared at the figure that had caused his agitation, there in the window of Smith’s. His shouting turned half the heads on Foregate Street, but even as a space opened up on the busy pavement for the mad yelling smackhead, the care-in-the-community, the unwashed nutter, he realized, too late, the mistake he’d made. It was an advertising display, was all: a cardboard child in two dimensions gazing piteously out at the shoppers, please buy my book, it’s really really sad. The Things He Made Me Do by Conor Newlove.
The things he made me do, thought Dan bleakly. You have no idea. From behind the display a peeping head emerged, bruised black eyes fixed on Dan through the window, but he never saw it, he was gone into the crowd and the past was the past and nothing mattered.
Because we all have to go home sooner or later, or else abandon ourselves wholly to the space between things, Dan trailed back across town to the flat sometime in the afternoon. He let himself in the front door, then spent a long time crouched in the hallway, listening at the keyhole for any hint of movement inside his apartment. Nothing. A builder’s radio out in the street; the sound of distant traffic on the Hoole Road. Maybe it was safe. He decided to risk it.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 13
