by A. S. Hatch
The clock was ticking. Sixty minutes until noon. I was standing now with one palm pressed to the door. I had to do something. I chucked the Nokia on the bed, picked up the milk and reached for the doorknob. I was about to go out on stage still with no real plan, but at least with a concept. Hide her. At all costs get her out of sight.
I opened the door and went through to the kitchen. Ruby was now in full costume. Replete in tattered and torn white wedding dress and veil. A demon bride. Blood-spattered and grimed. Smokey make-up over one eye denoting a fierce conjugal beating. I knew as soon as I looked at her that I did not love her. Not truly. It was love with no future. Whereas my love for Victoria seemed in that moment to be brought back to life by the sight of Ruby as a corpse.
Love is sacred, Lucy. When you believe you have it you do everything you can to preserve it. Sometimes this means doing things that other people don’t understand, can’t understand. So you see, the thing I did next I did out of love.
‘You look ridiculous,’ Ruby said, as I walked past her to put the milk in the fridge.
‘Is it too early to have a drink?’
‘I usually wait until midday. But today I’ll make an exception.’
‘Good. A toast then.’ I grabbed a half-finished bottle of wine from the pantry and poured two glasses. ‘To our dead, our martyrs and our saints,’ I said. We touched glasses and drank. I was in a state of such nervous excitement that I spilt a few drops on the floor and on my hand. I was standing where the dead mouse had been; its stain was still faintly visible in the candlelight.
Was that a sound outside? The crunching of shale? I thought. It can’t be, her note said noon, it was only five past eleven. The sound was nothing. But urgency pressed against my skin now, painfully, like a blunt needle.
‘Are you all right?’ Ruby asked.
‘Me? Oh yes, I’m fine. Wine is good in the morning isn’t it?’
‘You don’t seem fine.’
‘I’m just a little overexcited I think. There’s something I want to show you.’ What was I saying? ‘Come with me.’ The words and actions came to me unbidden by any conscious thought. When we ignore our instincts, that’s when we get into trouble, Ruby had said to me. And at this moment, it really seemed like I was being driven by some deep and elemental instinct.
‘Where are we going?’ Ruby asked. I didn’t know myself. I led her by the hand through the sitting room into the corridor and towards the side door.
‘Just wait and see.’ When I opened the door I stopped. The day was so still. I looked around. A line of glowing jack-o’-lanterns led my eye from the side door across the shale to the workshop. I picked the keys up from the hook by the door and made a beeline for it.
‘Oh, am I finally going to get a peek inside your man cave?’ We marched arm in arm across the shale, Dracula and his reanimated bride, Ruby’s tatty skirts sweeping shabbily over the ground. At the door I removed my top hat. ‘This is all very mysterious, Dan.’ I unlocked the padlock and kept it – and the key, still inside it – in my hand. I opened the door, slowly, theatrically, fixing Ruby’s gaze. She feigned a frightened shiver.
‘You may enter,’ I said. As she did so I turned on the light. Ruby gasped. I went inside after her, leaving the door open behind me.
‘Look at all this stuff.’ She went around the workshop touching things, bits of wood, bits of metal, my chisels, my hatchet. I had begun backing slowly towards the door. Ruby was digging her hands into the little pots of nails and screws mounted on the wall, pulling the roll of sandpaper from its spool like loo paper, kicking sawdust around like autumn leaves. How easy it would be just to leave her there, to close the door and quickly click the padlock into place. She’d take it as a Halloween trick. She’d play along, expecting more tricks. Then how easy it would be to say: oops the rotten old key’s broken off in the padlock, and: just wait here, buying the time I needed to covertly dispatch Victoria. Just then Ruby noticed the trunks lined up along the front wall. She inspected them. I watched her from the door.
‘Is this what you’ve been working on this whole time?’ she asked, placing her palm on the lid of the trunk closest to her as though feeling for a heartbeat. She opened the lid and stooped to fill her nose with the smell of cut wood and varnish. ‘They’re bigger than they look inside.’ She put one bare foot and then the other into the trunk. Then she crouched down. ‘I fit easily,’ she announced, her voice eerily amplified. She went to stand up again but lost her balance and fell back down. The lid closed on top of her with a bang. She began bashing frantically against it but the hasp had come down over the locking eye and the lid wouldn’t budge. It needed me to lift it. ‘Let me out!’ she cried. As I listened to the boomboomboom of her fist on the underside of the lid, remembering how she’d asked for the door of her room to be left open on her first night at Lanes End, I experienced something like the brief moments of consciousness after an anaesthetist’s needle goes in, when you start to feel weightless, when you have no choice but to let go, when you know that you will be under soon, when you feel fear but also a kind of ecstasy. Freedom distilled into its purest form. You think: if only this feeling could last just a few seconds longer. Then you think: no one even knows she’s here. And then: nobody in Ruby’s life knows anything about you, or this place. And then: her sister will not come looking because she is in there with her. And: Lee will not confront you because he is in there with her. And: you don’t know anyone around here and no one knows you. You think: there are no witnesses. You think: it’s immaculate. And then with hands that no longer resemble your hands you push the hasp further down. You slip the padlock – still in your hand – through the locking eye, slowly, delicately, and click it into place. Then you kneel at the trunk and rest your cheek on the fragrant timber as though saying a silent goodbye and you say with a calm voice that does not resemble your voice: ‘The lock’s come down and got stuck. I’ll have to remove it completely. Just hang on.’
‘OK, hurry,’ she said.
I found myself backing away from the trunk. When I reached the door I looked at the trunk and around at the other things and I thought: yes, this is good, this is safe. This is love. Love is something you do and I am doing it.
When I got outside and realised what I had done, there was a momentary and intense wave of nausea but it passed quickly. I closed the door gently behind me and then I felt only relief and good feelings. I felt I had acted sensibly. And then, suddenly, as though someone had pressed the mute button, there were no other thoughts in my head.
For the next forty-five minutes I was possessed. My body moved on its own. My arms swept up Ruby’s things from every room and dumped them into her holdall bag. My legs knew where everything was located and carried me to it; every toiletry, cosmetic, tissue, deodorant bottle, stray red hair. My hands knew to rummage through the bathroom bin, to feel beneath and inside pillows, to clean every glass, mug, knife, fork and spoon, to strip the bedsheets. They knew to grab the big green tarp from behind the kitchen that I used to cover firewood and take it and the whole sundry lot out onto the shale and throw it into the boot of the red Mini. And then I was in the Mini and driving it bumpily through the trees, to a spot so deep in the woods that I had walked there only once before, in the days of the beard and the pebbles. And then I was taking the tarp and throwing it over the Mini like a gigantic tablecloth and securing it to the ground with stones and rocks. I checked my watch. Eleven fifty-five. Five minutes. I ran back to the cottage and gave each room a quick once-over. Despite, perhaps, the Halloween trimmings, there was no sign at all that anyone else had ever been here.
I was breathless from the run but satisfied. Serene. I decided to go meet Vic at the gate. I didn’t want to risk her getting lost and stumbling across the Mini.
Her taxi appeared on the crest of the long road at five past twelve. It pulled onto the muddy triangle before the gate. Vic paid the driver and then got out, grimacing at the condition of the sludgy ground. The taxi turned around and sped of
f towards Wilder. She looked me up and down.
‘You’re a vampire.’
‘Dracula, specifically,’ I said. I noticed immediately that she was dressed normally. Gone were the yoga pants, the luminous orange crop top, the running shoes, the microfibre tracksuit jacket. She wore white jeans tucked into grey suede boots and a thick grey oversized jumper beneath a grey wool overcoat. Gone also was the tan and the irradiated blonde hair. Her skin was pale and her hair was back to its natural shade. She shot me a cautious smile, meant to convey shame, guilt, remorse, many millions of apologies. Tamely, I smiled back.
‘I had no idea you were so into Halloween.’
‘Your note said you had things you needed to say?’ I said. I had no idea why I was being so brusque. Maybe seeing her again brought back some of the pain of her leaving.
‘Can we please not do this here?’
‘Come on.’ I opened the gate and led her along the lane. Being with her again made me strangely nervous. We walked in silence.
As we approached the clearing my heart began to pound. I looked at my watch. Ruby had been locked up for over an hour. What if she had begun to panic, started screaming? I knew Victoria; she would go straight to the sound to investigate. So when we reached the shale courtyard I was relieved to hear nothing. Perhaps she’d got the screaming out of her system. Perhaps she’d given up, fallen asleep, knocked herself out. I opened the cottage side door and waited inside for Vic to enter. This was just the third time she’d set foot inside Lanes End. Her eyes widened at the mural on the wall.
‘Did you do this?’ she asked.
‘With help.’ She walked along the corridor, ducking beneath a cloud of bats suspended from the ceiling.
‘Where does it end?’
‘It goes everywhere.’ She paused at the centre point of the corridors and looked in each direction. I looked down, to avoid her gaze, and I suddenly realised why this vampire costume made me so uneasy: it reminded me of the way Frank used to dress, all in black, like a member of the clergy.
‘That cross outside. It says Daniel.’
‘Yes.’ Tears came into her eyes then but she managed to hold them back before they fell. ‘This was going to be the nursery wasn’t it,’ she said marching towards it. ‘Alfred’s cage. Where is he?’
‘He passed away.’
‘What? When?’
‘Last week.’
‘How? What was wrong with him? I mean, they’re supposed to live to thirty.’
‘I don’t know. I just found him in the bottom of his cage one morning.’
‘Oh no.’
‘What did you come here to say, Vic?’
‘Can we sit down somewhere?’
I took her into the sitting room where the fire was still going. She took off her overcoat and slung it over the back of an armchair. She continued to compliment me on the cottage. She asked about the rocking chair, the books on the mantelpiece, the painting. I said it had been painted by the same friend who’d done the mural. By the time we sat down to talk properly it was twelve-thirty. I took off my cape and unbuttoned the ruffled white shirt. Victoria eyed me strangely, imploringly. She looked as though on the verge of throwing up. She broke down.
‘Oh Dan, my life is a mess,’ she said, plunging a hand into her bag and producing a pack of Kleenex. ’I should never have treated you like I did. Scott’s a fraud. Life with him is a total fraud. I didn’t know what I was doing back then. You were just so cold, so distant all the time, always in your workshop, always working on something, never me, never us. And there was just so much pain, I didn’t know what to do with it. Every time I looked at you the pain got worse. And then there was your pain too, I know, and I ran from it. Scott is awful. He’s wracked with insecurities. He hates his life. Hates his body, as if that wasn’t obvious. He lives inside a prison. And I put myself in there with him, locked myself up alongside him. He thought achieving perfection was the key to escaping it. He started checking up on me when I was eating: have you counted those macros? When I was exercising: how many sets is that? When I was doing nothing: wasn’t your rest day yesterday?
‘I’ve been so depressed. Sometimes it seemed like my life was lived online. Everything stage-managed. Everything lit, filmed, refilmed, edited. It’s not a life. None of that is real. I hate lifting weights. I hate feeling guilty about not lifting weights. I’m sick of always having to be pristine, always having to be perfectly put together. I don’t want to eat chicken, sweet potato and broccoli every day. I hate fucking laughing yoga. I did all of that because it was something to do to take my mind to another place, a place I didn’t need to think. A place away from pain. Am I making sense? Lifting and running and meditating and all of that stuff, it was like putting my mind in a jar. But it became an obsession. It was stupid. So stupid. I see that now. Oh Dan,’ she said, her voice dropping an octave, ‘I made a terrible mistake leaving you, the biggest of my life. I’ve made myself ill. But I never stopped loving you.’
She rose then to her feet and began removing her jumper. I thought she was just hot from the fire. But once the jumper was off she slipped out of the singlet beneath it too.
‘Vic,’ I said. She said nothing. She stood before me in just her bra and jeans. Her mouth was open slightly and she was breathing rapidly through it. There was so much anguish and longing in her expression. It called to something within me and I found it impossible not to answer. I stood up and began undressing. Frantically, I tugged and pulled at each maddening layer of the costume, stumbling, almost falling. Eventually, my hands were joined in the struggle by Vic’s and we collapsed to the floor. I began pulling and twisting to get free but Vic was pushing her hand into my chest, coaxing me to lay flat on my back. I grabbed her firmly by the hips and turned her around. She sank to her hands and knees and placed her palms on the arms of the chair before her for balance. After that it was a mad, blinding scramble. When I think about it now I see only a series of fire-lit, dreamlike images: Vic before me on her knees, rising over me, sliding beneath me, her eyes looking into mine with a kind of fury, and I recall nothing of the way it felt. This was not so much an act of desire or love; this was reparation, for both of us, repayment of a long-standing debt. Something the world owed us. I didn’t think of Ruby, not because I had already forgotten her, but because I did not think of anything. And as I dozed off afterwards and my senses began to return, I felt a sensation of hollowness in my belly, a massive hunger such as I had never known. I felt as if some concentrated lump of toxic matter had been exorcised from my stomach, leaving a hole.
With the last spark of consciousness before exhausted sleep took me, I knew how I would fill that hole, how I would satisfy that hunger.
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‘Who’s Ruby?’
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‘You keep saying Ruby. Who’s Ruby?’
Am I dreaming?
‘Dan!’
‘Ruby?’
‘No, it’s Victoria.’
My feet were cold. My neck was cold. But the rest of me was warm. My eyes began to open. Orange light. Flames. Heat. The scent of varnish. Yes, this was home. Our home.
‘You’ve been dreaming,’ Victoria said. I opened my eyes now. She was sitting on the rocking chair by the fire, shrouded in a blanket. ‘You kept saying Ruby over and over. Who’s Ruby?’
Victoria’s face was radiant. Evidently, she’d been watching me sleep. I looked behind her to the window, filled now with the dark blue of evening. Where
had the light gone?
Then I remembered what I’d done.
‘What time is it?’ I said sitting upright in the armchair. Victoria brought her wristwatch to her eye and told me. Ruby had been locked up for over eight hours.
‘Is something wrong?’ she said.
I thought about this for a moment. I thought about Ruby out there in the freezing workshop. It was a pity but now that it was over I realised there really wasn’t anything else to be done. Even if I’d successfully broken it off with Ruby and somehow got through this day, I could never have trusted her to stay away. She might’ve returned at any time, at any period of my life, out of the blue, to wreck everything. I couldn’t have lived with that hanging over me.
‘No. Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going to be OK now.’ I stood up and reached out a hand towards Vic. ‘Come on, let’s go to bed.’
***
I’m probably gonna be going away soon. This is what Robbie said to me earlier today. So I may as well tell you this. The ‘this’ I could’ve had a decent guess at; you hear things around here. Which of my theories about this strange, crumpled-up old man would be confirmed? Where was he going away to? He seemed lighter, at peace, as if he had relinquished a great and troubling burden, just decided to set it down by the roadside. Is he dying? I wondered. Or is this just the way men get when they reach a certain age? It were me Danny, he said. I wrapped that scarf round Maud’s neck and I wrung the life out of her. God help me.
***
I slept soundly. I did not dream. I woke very early and watched Vic sleep. Her face was completely obscured by a mess of hair. Her breath was both acrid and sweet. I didn’t yet know how I felt about everything. But my head was clear. And my father used to say that when you do a big thing and the next morning you have a clear head, it’s a sure sign the thing was right to do. I dozed intermittently.
I was stirred by a knock. A little percussive sound of the sort the house emitted by itself from time to time. I paid it no mind and closed my eyes. But there it was again. Knock-knock. Weak. An unsure knock. I looked at Vic. She hadn’t heard it. I disentangled myself from her and slipped out into the corridor. I could see nobody through the frosted glass of the side door. I went outside to investigate. I looked left and right but there was no one. Was my conscience making a late play for attention? I went back and stood at the door for a moment, in just boxers, and enjoyed the sharpness of the November air on my torso. Then I heard a couple of crunchy footsteps. They came from my left. I looked in that direction, expecting and wanting it to be one of the motorcyclists, craving now confrontation, a final showdown, an end to everything. I felt my body ready itself, pump itself up.
