Dead Funny

by Robin Ince

  I gazed into people’s houses through open blinds as I passed. The gaudy house-fronts, plastered with coloured lights and cheap decorations, one after another, left me feeling lost, so I sought darker avenues as I fled the town centre in the direction of my old school.

  The ground through the adjacent lane was slippery, as if many people had been rushing along it during the day, and I found myself slowing involuntarily and glancing across at the disparate group of buildings that made up the school. A single lamp lit the area of the playground, exposing the large painted face that marked the area where Christie had chased us, full of life, having feigned his terrifying heart attack. Someone, I assumed a janitor, was watching television in a small hut on the far side of the concrete field. I stopped for a moment to stare at the small alley in which I had sat alone many times during that final year, attempting to make sense of all that had happened to me. When I heard something enter the lane behind me, I moved on, quickening my pace.

  I raced down the stone steps, crossed the old platform and dropped down onto the abandoned line, pausing only to adjust my vision once more to the surrounding darkness. I moved off carefully, the noise of my footfalls interrupted only by the soft rush of wind moving through the nearby treetops. It took me longer than usual, but I eventually found the small hidden pathway into the trees and walked along it, noting that the ground here, like the school lane, was wetter and more broken up than before.

  I found the place again instinctively, clear as the event still was in my memory, and stood up straight upon the spot, making sure I didn’t slouch or bend my back in any way. I unzipped my coat and drew out the small lunch box I’d filled secretly after Christie had left the house. I removed the lid and, one by one, thrust my peeling hands into Possum’s ashes, noting the sharp, unpleasant smell my skin now emitted. Once I was satisfied that the remains were truly soiled, I tipped the powdered mess onto the ground where the man had first shown himself to me, and smeared what was left into the earth, tossing the empty box into a nearby bush, near where he’d dragged me.

  It was while I was wiping my hands clean with my handkerchief that I heard the dog. It had followed me through the empty station and was nosing through the bushes behind, tracking my scent. I thought of playing dead, but then strode out onto the footpath, holding out my diseased hands that he’d hated touching. I screamed loudly at the top of my voice and this time the dirty creature stalking me ran a mile.

  I mouthed words into the telephone receiver as my fingers tapped nervously on the dull, metallic surface of the rotary dial, flashing blue lights from the distant caravan site reflected against it. When I looked up again, the policeman who’d walked over to watch me hadn’t moved.

  ‘He put me in his bag,’ I said aloud, to the faint, hypnotic hum of the dial tone. ‘Then he carried me to his caravan.’

  The rain had returned. I peered out across the grass slope, trying to look preoccupied, as the policeman made his decision and moved toward me.

  ‘He always covered his face,’ I said, suddenly desperate for air. I nudged the door ajar.

  ‘. . . he never took it off.’

  I hung up. Foolishly, as the officer reached me, I smiled.

  ‘On your way,’ he ordered, studying my features. As I walked back to town, one of their cars followed me home.

  Christie was drunk when he opened the door, and laughed openly at the state of my hands.

  ‘That won’t help you.’

  I snatched the bottle from him and wandered through into the kitchen, swigging heavily from it. The linoleum floor stuck to the soles of my shoes.

  ‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Are you?’ he replied.

  ‘Thanks for putting me up.’

  ‘Always a pleasure.’ He grinned inanely, performing an awkward, drunken dance. ‘Always was.’

  He began to sing an obscene song.

  ‘Why don’t you go to bed?’ I snapped, taking another swig from the bottle. Swaying, I leant down and put what was left back in the cupboard under the sink.

  ‘Your present’s in the lounge,’ he said.

  I lost balance, then, and dropped to the floor. My hands touched dirt as I crawled towards the corner of the room.

  ‘Sorry everything’s so late.’ He stopped moving long enough to light a cigarette. He seemed younger to me. ‘I’ll have a car collect you tomorrow.’

  ‘They’ve found something up at the site,’ I said, eventually.

  Christie inhaled deeply, knelt down and blew his smoke in my face.

  ‘They have indeed.’

  Suddenly sheepish, he giggled pathetically, stood and stumbled off in the direction of the stairs, moving up them much faster than I’d thought he was capable of.

  I didn’t go in there immediately, as the whisky had made me feel nauseous. I smoked a couple more cigarettes and listened for a while to Christie breaking my things in the room above.

  When I did finally enter our lounge, unlocked for the first time in decades, I saw that nothing had changed since the day Christie first appeared with news of my bereavement. The tree was still there, its branches bare since the night of their funeral when he’d got me drunk for the first time and burned our decorations in front of me. I looked up to the top, where my Daddy had once lifted me to place our fairy, and saw something else I recognised.

  It was the man’s dog mask, and although now I could see only the wall behind through its cruel eyeholes, I realised it had belonged to Christie after all, and he’d worn it here beside me all these years, waiting for my courage to awaken.

  Below, beneath the tree, was my present, wrapped up in newspaper and tied at the top with an ancient ribbon. It was a large, odd-looking object, bearing an old gift tag addressed to me that hung, quite still, from a small thread of dull, red cotton.

  As I crawled toward the parcel, it twitched suddenly and a faint rustling sounded from the wrapping where the taut sheets began to bulge rapidly back and forth, as though something trapped beneath them were trying to breathe. When its long leg burst through the paper and pawed violently at the carpet in front, teeming with life, I reached out eagerly to unwrap my Possum.

  For Roger

  katy brand

  Roger was woken by the sound of scrabbling from within the walls. He had woken to the sound several times this summer, but it had never been loud enough to be the cause of his waking before. He lay in bed for a few moments, just listening, allowing his other senses to come into play. It sounded like rodents – if you have one mouse, you have a thousand – he’d heard that somewhere, a long time ago. Was it a singular mouse, trapped in the wall? Or a family in a nest, made from insulation and bits of whatever else mice feel safe in? Did the scrabbler mean to be there? Or had it accidentally become encased in a brick tomb? If Roger did nothing, would the scrabbler die, or multiply? Hard to say; he got up.

  Downstairs, Roger’s wife was already in the kitchen, drinking tea and reading the local paper.

  ‘I think there’s a mouse in the wall,’ Roger said as he reboiled the kettle.

  ‘If you’ve got one mouse, you’ve got a thousand,’ Roger’s wife said, without looking up. ‘There’s a story here about the new housing development up near the burnt-out barn. People getting very het up about it.’

  Roger didn’t care about the new housing development – the burnt-out barn was over two miles away, and in any case he thought a new influx of families would be good for the village, which was already stagnating in the still waters of an ageing population living in houses with perfectly preserved but entirely empty bedrooms, sentimentally held for children long since gone. But the local community feared for the value of their properties, believing that any new houses would damage the upward trend they had all enjoyed for decades. They all intended to leave their Georgian and Victorian cottages to their children, and their children all intended to sell th
em immediately in order to cover the inheritance tax and their own outstanding debts. Who would buy the houses was not immediately apparent as no young family could afford the market value and the rich pensioners would all be dead, but that was not part of the conversation anyone on the Parish Council was willing to have.

  ‘Should I make a hole in the plasterboard and see what’s in there?’ Roger asked.

  ‘Best call the pest controller, I’d say. Or just leave them to it – they’re not doing any harm, are they?’

  ‘They woke me up this morning.’

  ‘Well, you should be getting up anyway – it’s nearly nine, and you don’t want to sleep the day away.’ Roger’s wife rose, rinsed her cup and kissed him. ‘I’d best be off – I’ll see you later. What have you got planned? Anything?’

  Roger shrugged, though not unhappily; these long, empty days were still a novelty following his recent retirement as a maths teacher from the local FE college. He could feel boredom and futility flickering around the edges, but he would find a hobby before they really took hold. For now, he was happy just pottering. Roger’s wife was a few years younger and still worked at the library, although with closures all over the county, redundancy was always in the air. She didn’t mind too much – their pensions would see them comfortably through – perhaps the last generation who could say that with any certainty, and though hers would not come into force for a while yet, Roger’s generous teacher’s pension scheme, just nipped in time before the major changes were imposed, would keep them until then.

  Roger watched his wife walk through the living room and on to the front door. She had a big bottom, he observed for the millionth time, but not flabby. It was firm and high and jostled nicely within her trousers. She didn’t like it, but Roger was always quick to reassure her. ‘Men like a bottom they can park their bike in and rest their pint on,’ he would say, and she would giggle and feel better.

  Roger took his tea and toast into the garden and stood facing the house. He looked up at the bedroom, as if he might somehow be able to learn more about the scrabbler from its exterior. He allowed his eyes to roam over the old red brick, inlaid with relatively freshly painted white wooden window frames and discreetly double glazed panes that kept at bay the noise of the A road which lay just beyond an attractive line of trees to the west. He looked up, beyond the bedroom window, to the gabled roof under which was a loft space they had considered converting but never bothered once it was clear that they would be a one-child family. The chimney above was both pretty and functional, and provided, Roger thought, an ideal access point for all sorts of wildlife during the summer months. This he knew because last year, while he and his wife were watching a documentary about the multiverse theory of existence on BBC4, a raven had landed startled and startling in the fireplace, closely followed by clumps of twig and feather that had been the beginnings of a nest. It had badly broken its wing in the fall and Roger had killed it with a brick and buried it in the wood – a curiously sentimental thing for him to do, but they had both felt that putting it in the bin was somehow disrespectful or barbaric, or something else unnamed but uncharacteristically pagan in nature.

  Roger drained his cup and went inside. He changed out of his pyjamas and put on his pottering about clothes – an old pair of chinos and a light cotton shirt with a button missing. He went into the spare room-cum-study, pulled the pole with the brass hook on the end from its usual place in the corner behind the bookshelf and held it up to the wooden hatch door in the ceiling. Sliding the hook into the catch he pulled it open and unhinged the folding ladder that lay in the space above. He made sure the base was hard pressed against the floor and the safety catch fully clicked in place at the top, leant the pole against the wall and climbed into the loft. Flicking the switch screwed into a wooden rafter at the top of the ladder, the space was now gently bathed in the weak light emanating from a single, uncovered bulb at waist height in another rafter.

  The loft was amateurishly boarded, work undertaken by the previous owner in order to advertise a ‘boarded loft’ when he put it on the market, and was just robust enough to take the weight of an average man and a few storage boxes, sleeping bags and black sacks with stickers saying things like ‘spare duvet’ on them. Roger could stand to his full height in the centre of the loft but had to stoop as he moved to the side, and then finally drop to his knees as the roof met the floor around the square edges. The cold water tank stood quiet, black and monolithic in one corner.

  Roger stood still in the centre of the loft and strained his ears. There was a low hum – pipework, plumbing and such – but yes, there it was: the scrabbling. He could see the outline of the brick chimney breast on the east wall and this was directly above the bedroom he shared with his wife, which in turn was directly above the living room. In fact, their bedroom still had an old Victorian fireplace in it, long since bricked up and not used for over five decades. When Roger and his wife had bought the house twenty-three years ago they had considered unblocking it but never got round to it. Perhaps they would now Roger was retired – it was a dream of his since childhood to warm his feet at the end of his bed by the glow of burning coals. Roger moved towards the chimney breast, stooping as he went, seeming to rewind evolution with his posture until he crawled on all fours to the base of the brick flue. He pressed his ear against the floor and once again the scrabbling could be heard. Sitting back on his haunches, Roger was able to lift the loose board he had been kneeling on and put it to one side. Pulling his cuffs over his hands, he gently rolled back the fibre glass insulation underneath. Another layer of ply was underneath that which would not take even a child’s weight, but where it was supposed to meet the wall there was a gap of around two inches by eight. That’ll be where the little buggers have got in, Roger thought, and noted a collection of small droppings around the sides. He gingerly slid his finger into the gap, thinking all the while that this was a bad idea, that mice could bite, especially a mouse guarding its young, or trapped and frightened, and hooked it under the ply segment. It was loose, as if it had been pulled up before, and though it would not lift out entirely, it moved to create a gap large enough for Roger to put his whole hand into the space beneath. He had no idea what he would find – the interior workings of a house were as much a mystery to him as the social lives of some of his former A-level students, but he was absorbed now and curiosity led him on like a golden thread.

  Reaching down into the space, his arm was buried up to the elbow. He felt around blindly and then his fingers brushed something unexpected. It was the hard edge of what could be a small book. It had a rough cover and as Roger’s fingers explored its proportions, his mind created the image of a diary or notebook of the kind he often used to make notes in the classroom in order to keep track of pupils’ progress or lesson plans. He took the book in his grip and twisted it back through the gap. It was as he expected: it was exactly like the notebooks he had always used – a black, rough, hard-backed cover with ruled pages inside. It was even the same brand; he would buy them in bulk every August and put them aside at the end of each academic year. He could never quite bring himself to throw them away and most of them were packed into the very boxes that now surrounded him. How on earth had this one managed to get itself under here? Roger sat back, wiped the dust off the cover and opened it.

  Printed on the first page in his own handwriting formed in ink from his own familiar fountain pen were the words, ‘For Roger’. He frowned – he had no recollection of writing this; he had never begun a notebook like this before – his usual formulation was simply his full name, the date and the address of the college, should the book in question ever go astray. But ‘For Roger’ . . . ‘For Roger’ made no sense. And yet Roger’s heart was pounding because there was no doubt that it was he who had written those two words; he had a distinctive hand, looping and formal, carried proudly through his life from a formative period at a German school before he was ten years old, where the dying art of
proper handwriting was, and still is, prized. He smoothed the palm of his hand over the page as if trying to absorb some explanatory vibration, but all this was just procrastination from what was clearly the next logical step: page two.

  Roger breathed in quickly through his nose and turned the page. His disbelief could not overcome the reality as he read, again in his own hand, the message neatly laid out there:

  Dear Roger,

  Now that you have found this, I can’t say whether life will get easier or harder – it is what it is. Please accept my very best wishes for your future.

  From Roger

  Sitting down in the semi-darkness of the loft, surrounded by quiet, uncomplaining items from his life that had proved themselves unnecessary, Roger tried to keep hold of some kind of sense of his reality. The scrabbling may or may not have stopped, but it didn’t matter, because the listener was now effectively deaf to anything other than the buzzing in his ears. What he was holding in his hands could not be what it appeared to be and therefore, he thought, it must be something else. Page three beckoned. And there, Roger read with widening eyes and thumping pulse:

  July 13th: Went into loft to investigate possible mouse in the wall. Found a book under the floorboards that appears to be from myself. Not sure what on earth to do with it.

  Yes, he thought to himself, yes, today is July 13th. Yes, that is the date, that is the date today, that is today’s date. He snapped the book shut and threw it across the loft. It hit the water tank and landed fatly on the board beneath. Roger was breathing fast now, fast enough to hyperventilate if he didn’t stop. He took several deep breaths, thinking of a story in the local paper some years back about a man who had lain dead and undiscovered in his loft for over a year. Of course, that wouldn’t happen to Roger – the ladder was down for a start, indicating his whereabouts, and his wife would be home around four and would find his body in no time. But regardless of all that, he didn’t want to die, not now. He felt out of control, something he hated more than anything. He didn’t know why he had thrown the book, he was not a man given to throwing things other than cricket balls on a Sunday afternoon at the local club. It was most out of character. He sat, calming himself using a relaxation technique he had learnt at a meditation seminar on a cruise, and regarded the silent book as if it were a large spider he had not yet configured a plan to get rid of. He wondered if, like a spider, it might just go away of its own accord if he descended the loft ladder, shut the hatch and forgot about it. Or would he, as in a nightmare, awake in the middle of the night to find it crawling into his mouth, long, jointed legs probing his throat as it did so.