by A. S. Hatch
‘Oh god,’ Ruby said, not whispering any more. The back door was wide open. I pulled it shut and locked it. An expression of terror drew itself across Ruby’s face, her mouth becoming an oval.
‘What, Ruby? What is it?’ I went to her and placed the palm of my hand on her cheek. Her wild wide eyes frightened me.
‘It’s him! He must have heard I’m out.’
‘You mean …?’
‘He must’ve tracked me down. Oh, god!’ She lowered herself into a chair beside the clock.
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Why not? I found you.’
‘Then we should call the police,’ I said, rummaging in my inside jacket pocket for the Nokia. Ruby leapt to her feet.
‘No, don’t!’ she cried, and tried to grab the phone from me. ‘Please don’t … don’t do that.’
‘Why not? If you think you’re being stalked by your ex then we should report it.’
‘We just can’t call the police about this.’
‘Ruby, this is crazy.’
‘Dan,’ she took my face in both of her hands and looked into my eyes. My instinct was to put her on the spot and force her to explain. ‘Please, Dan, just trust me.’ It made no sense not to call the police if she had nothing to hide. I suspected she had orchestrated this ‘incident’ herself, intentionally leaving the light on, the back door open. But why? And why bring Lee up? I was bewildered. My thoughts led nowhere, resolved to nothing. I felt like a rat in a maze, entangled in a scheme too complicated for me to understand. The only thing I felt certain of was that this was yet another reason not to trust her.
‘Tomorrow I’ll change the locks,’ I announced, ‘if it makes you feel safe.’ She burrowed into me like a tiny animal.
I was stirred in the night by the sound of my bedroom door creaking open. I froze, half-hoping that it was a dream, and squeezed my eyes shut. Then, soft padding footsteps made their way over to my bed. Then, a wave of cold air on my bare legs as the sheet was lifted. Then, a pair of arms, folded like wings, tucked themselves softly into my back. Then, one of the arms opened and draped over my body. She wriggled closer to me until her body was pressed flat against mine. I could feel her breath on my neck. I could feel her heart beating. I lay still, trying to preserve this sensation. Just before I fell asleep in a bubble of warmth I had a thought: was this simply to make sure I didn’t call the police behind her back? If it was, in that moment I didn’t care.
***
Robbie called today. But it was not a normal visit. He came in, switched the telly on, turned the volume up, but didn’t look at it. He was wincing, pressing a hand to his stomach. I asked if he was feeling all right. He ignored me. His eye is looking much better these days. It’s still swollen but at least it’s stopped seeping. He increased the volume even further. Is his hearing going now too? I thought. Every so often he would clutch at his stomach and emit a low growl. Then, when whatever it was had passed, he’d continue on. This happened a number of times. I could not ignore it.
‘Jesus Robbie you’re sick,’ I said.
‘Oh god.’ He was bent double. ‘It’ll pass,’ he said holding his arm out and keeping very still.
‘Do you want some water?’ I said, half-rising from the desk. He shook his head and very slowly started to unfold himself. He settled gingerly back on the bed and continued with his story. He didn’t get very far before he was seized by another attack.
‘Fuck!’ Robbie grabbed at his stomach with his fingers like he was trying to pull something out.
‘Shit Robbie, you really need to see a doctor,’ I said.
‘Honestly, Danny … it’s nothing,’ he said.
‘Robbie, that’s not nothing, you need a doctor.’
I stood up and made for the door but somehow Robbie found the energy to leap across the room to block me. He shouted in my face: ‘NO!’ one hand in my chest the other dug deep into his stomach, ‘Sit back down and don’t even fucking think about it.’ His voice was demented. He stood in the doorway like a troll, bent, his good eye squinting against the pain. ‘I don’t need a doctor.’
I was trembling. I’ve never seen that side of him before. He just snapped. Lost it. I lowered myself into my chair with my hands raised in surrender. He looked at me out of his bad eye, then up at the telly, then back down at me, and then he turned and left.
***
As promised I changed the locks and installed anti-theft devices on the windows. Ruby had me go outside to simulate someone trying to jimmy them. Though she still looked fraught she seemed satisfied. If this was a ruse it was an elaborate one. I kept the thought to myself that these locks would make no difference against a brick.
We did not speak of the night before. Not because lying together was forbidden. We did not speak of it simply because there was no need to. It had felt right to do it. It felt safe. In the morning Ruby had awoken with a long decadent yawn. I turned to face her. Her plum red hair was splayed over her face and pillow in every direction like a trampled bouquet. She let me rearrange it while she lay there with her eyes closed.
Wasting no time, Ruby got on with her project, the pretext which had kept her here. I stood and watched her use my pencil – a carpenter’s most important tool, my father used to say – to transfer the flora and fauna in her mind onto the whitewashed walls, which she then gave colour and depth to with the brush. She painted adroitly. Under her careful supervision I added small details; the dots on a beetle’s wing, the stamen of a flower. She was a good instructor and inspired in me a desire to please her. This must have been how she was with her patients, with Lee. It was in moments like this that I grew more convinced of her story. I wanted it all to be true. Even, yes, the atrocities. Because if they were real, then this was real. Don’t misunderstand, the sceptic within me was still there, still whispering its incessant suspicions. I had simply stuffed a sock in its mouth.
The rainforest extended out from the nursery, leaf by leaf, vine by vine along the corridor, as though it was a living expanding thing. We stood back to admire our work.
‘See, it’s growing,’ she said.
The next day a chain of wet days began that would last the whole week. There was something of the quality of school summer holidays to those days. Outwardly we cursed the rain’s siege but secretly we savoured the enforced closeness. Cooped up indoors together in our socks with the sound of the rain on the shale and the roof, I could feel the bond between us growing stronger. We were fuzzy from the lack of fresh air but fearful of one day having to venture outside again in case this spell should be broken. We did not wear shoes the entire week, except for the daily dash for the eggs and milk. Ruby squealed as she ran back to the cottage, cutting across the clearing as I waited for her inside the door with a towel.
The ivy grew quickly in the rain. We slept in my bed together every night and wore the same paint-spattered clothes every day. At night we talked about places Ruby wanted to travel to. Her eyes lit up with talk of Morocco and Tibet and Peru. I was jealous of these places, jealous of the extinct tribes and dead heroes which captured her imagination and lured her thoughts away. I wanted us to stay here like this forever. Some nights she wrapped her arms over my body and other nights I wrapped mine over hers and she took my hand and held it to her stomach.
‘Have you seen Alfred lately?’ Ruby said one afternoon, her brush poised in the air before the pencil outline of an exotic bird. I realised I hadn’t seen or heard Alfred since the break-in. Recently, I had taken to putting larger piles of feed in his cage, enough to sustain him for longer periods, and I hadn’t been into the nursery to inspect it in days. There had been interludes of absence like this since I had let him free, but when Ruby said those words I suddenly sensed something wrong. His food was still piled high in a mound, undisturbed. We searched every room calling his name over and over but there was no sign of him. I even shone my torch up the chimney. We might’ve unwittingly roasted him. He wasn’t there. Since I changed the locks we hadn’t left any
windows or doors open at any point, so he couldn’t have just flown away.
Tomorrow Ruby was returning to Stoke for another meeting and when we went to bed there was a new and unfamiliar quality to the atmosphere. Alfred’s disappearance was a pinprick to the bubble in which we’d been living and we regarded each other over the bed warily, suddenly hyperaware of each another. That night for the first time we lay facing each other. She burrowed into the nook of my neck. I felt her mouth move over my skin. Was this a kiss? Her lips moved so gently it was impossible to tell.
I woke in the night needing the toilet. Ruby wasn’t in bed. In the corridor I saw her shoes were gone. The wax jacket had been removed from its hook. I opened the door. There was soft rain and a full moon. The Mini was parked in its usual place. I got back into bed and tried to stay awake for her return but I was too tired and soon fell asleep. I stirred when she came back and wriggled near to me. She felt cold and her hair smelt like pine.
The following morning Ruby found Alfred’s body by the gate. She brought it back with the milk and eggs, placed it on the kitchen table. His spine was broken. He’d been practically folded in half. The image of Lee’s broken body flashed into my head. She said she found him propped up against the bottle of milk. I sat down and she put her hands on my shoulders.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. I stayed quiet for a long time listening to my thoughts. I thought through the sequence of events on the night of the pub. I thought of the steak knife she had produced so suddenly when we had come back from the pub. Where was it now? ‘I think it was Lee,’ she said suddenly, as though sensing the path my mind was on and trying to divert it. She lowered herself delicately into the chair next to me. ‘It’s him. He’s found me.’ She began to cry. As the tears fell she fixed her gaze on me, making a display of her emotion. ‘Dan, I’m scared.’ She squeezed my hands. ‘I’m scared,’ she repeated.
‘Does he ride a motorbike?’
‘What?’ she asked, screwing up her pinkened face in vexation.
‘Does Lee ride a motorbike?’
‘He didn’t when we were together. Why?’
‘Then I don’t think it’s him.’ I explained then about the motorcycle engines I’d been hearing and the skid mark on the grass and the two motorcycles on their kickstands outside The Lighthouse. ‘Alfred’s killer was probably in the pub when we were. They’ll have nabbed him while we were out. But who would want to terrorise me like this? I don’t know anyone well enough to make an enemy out of them.’
‘Strange,’ Ruby said. She was calmer now, sheepish even. She looked down at her hands. ‘Maybe people around here just don’t like newcomers?’
I thought of the Brexit sign and considered that she might have a point. But I was a Wild’ un, born in the area, and Gray had been giving me surplus from his farm this whole time.
I looked at Alfred’s broken body on the table, his luminous green plumage flecked with mud. ‘We should bury him.’
I wrapped him in a gingham tea towel and put him in a jar. I made a hole in the sand and buried him under a pile of his favourite pebbles.
Back inside the cottage Ruby said she had to set off or else risk missing her next appointment, which was later that day. Sullenly, I said it was OK. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to her potter about packing her things. And then she came and kissed my cheek, like a wife leaving for work, and said she’d be back that evening. I heard the side door close and I was alone. With Alfred gone there was nothing of my old life left.
This was the twenty-second of October.
When she came back that evening the rain had stopped. The first time in a week.
In the night she disappeared. I found her sitting outside smoking a cigarette. She was wearing the waxed jacket. The night sky was clear, a dome of indigo speckled with October stars. You could see the curve of space.
‘Some nights I could see the stars from my cell,’ she said, ‘if it was clear like tonight and I put my head at the foot of my bunk. It’s hard to believe these are the same ones.’ Beside her lay her Nokia and the little dark book. Who had she been calling so late? She put out her cigarette and stood up crookedly. She stooped to pick up her mobile and notebook. She walked towards me and placed an icy hand on my arm. ‘That one’s the North Star,’ she said, pointing to a throbbing silvery dot in the sky. ‘If you can see that, you’re not lost.’
That night I dreamt I was inside Ruby’s mural, working through the thick undergrowth with a box of razor blades tucked under my arm. I hacked and slashed, using a fresh blade for every vine – I had an unlimited supply. The cut vines bled onto the rainforest floor. I was trying to get somewhere. I had a goal. I became aware that my face was lacerated each time I cut a vine. My cheeks and chin stung and I had dripped a trail of blood behind me.
The next morning Ruby issued the decree that we ought to go ‘all out’ for Halloween. Then she said those things about honouring the dead and saints and martyrs that I mentioned earlier. And so, for a week leading up to her next appointment on the twenty-ninth, we began dressing up the house. Ruby had a vision for Lanes End, which she executed – despite the tackiness of the season – with artistic flair. She had me cut orange and black pieces of craft paper into strips and glue them together in loops so they formed long chains, metres and metres of them, which we hung from the ceiling. She had me paint various slogans on offcuts of sheet timber like: KEEP OUT! ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK! TURN BACK NOW! which we mounted on stakes by the gate.
‘Let’s spook them away, whoever is fucking with us,’ she said, delivering the final mallet blow. I made crosses out of the wooden slats of the disassembled cot and turned the clearing into a ‘cemetery’. One of the slats had DANIEL carved into it and I gave this ‘grave’ prominence. We painted other names on the crosses too: Alfred, Ivy, her father’s name and mine. She created lanterns from orange crepe paper. She cut spiders out of black card that looked like they were crawling up the walls. She erected a sheet ghost in the corridor. She made ‘spooky’ boiled sweets. When it was all done she wasn’t satisfied. ‘It’s tame,’ she said. So I brought out from the workshop a number of bottles – bleach, paint thinner, lacquer – and we re-labelled them: ACID, DANGER, CORROSIVE SUBSTANCE, DO NOT DRINK, and so on, and displayed them on the sides in the kitchen and in the sitting room. She had me fetch tools: pliers, chisel hammers, hacksaws and so on, and lay them out on a tea tray like a surgeon’s implements, which was set out on the coffee table. Using one of the hammers herself, she drove nails into the beams in the corridor and hung nooses, made out of an old hosepipe, from them. ‘There,’ she said, ‘much better.’
A few hours later, whilst cutting out what felt like my millionth paper bat by the fire, I heard Ruby emit a sort of animal wail in the corridor. I ran to her.
‘What is it?’ She was clutching a piece of paper. She would not look up at me or respond in any way. Her hand was clasped to her mouth. I touched her shoulder. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s him. I told you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Look.’ She gave me the paper and turned away from it as though it were toxic, as though she couldn’t bear to see it. I unfolded the note.
I never forgot you did you forget me?? It must mean something that I never forgot you even after what you did to me! Who is this other [illegible]? I don’t trust him. It was only a few [illegible] we [illegible] each other I only ever tried to protect you from the world I have forgiven you three and [illegible] years is ages gives me time to think and I forgive you and I will always love you and am HERE FOR YOU NOW I want you to know this.
Lee
It was water-damaged and some of the words were smudged and could not be read. But I got the gist. Lee was back. Lee had tracked her down. Lee was ‘HERE … NOW’. I admit, I was alarmed. But at the same time I didn’t really believe in it. The picture Ruby had painted of Lee was not of a stunted delinquent with an infantile scrawl. The letter seemed too melodramatic to be genuine, too obv
iously crazed, just as her initial Halloween decorations were too gaudy, too schlocky to scare anyone. She was pressing both palms to the wall now and hanging her head between her arms and breathing deeply in through her nose and out of her mouth. If she had forged the letter, what action had it been designed to provoke? What feelings? Pity? Love?
I wanted so much to screw the note into a ball, to hurl it at her, eject her from my house, from my life. Instinct told me to do this. But I could not. Something always seemed to hold me back when it came to Ruby. Something like a fog descended. I wanted to walk one way, but when the fog cleared, I’d end up having walked miles in the opposite direction.
‘Where did this come from?’
‘It was in the letter box,’ she said between breaths.
‘Where’s the envelope?’
‘What?’
‘The envelope. It’ll have a postmark on it. Maybe we can trace where it came from.’
‘There was no envelope.’
‘It was just there? This little note? In the letterbox?’
‘I told you, Dan. I told you, but you wouldn’t believe me. He’s really found me. He’s really here. Out there somewhere.’
I watched her, chest heaving, attempting to control her breaths, and I felt the heat of anger cooled by a sudden wave of sadness. For I was beginning to recognise as truth what I had long suspected. That Ruby was not just a master manipulator – she was mad. That she was desperate for someone, some man, to take her and make her the Centre of His Universe. Her troubled relationship with her father was perhaps the only thread of truth in this whole tapestry. I was also sure that she had been in prison. But not of the reason why. And not of the duration. Probably everything else she had ever told me was a lie. Stoke. Art Psychotherapy. Lee. Jade. Yes, it was beginning to make sense now.
