999

by Al Sarrantonio

  He assumed this referred to the argument that had started or recommenced in the room where the light he’d seen switched off had been relit. Having lost count of the number of arguments he’d dealt with in the Hackney kindergarten where he worked, he didn’t see why this should be any different. “I’ll have a stab,” he said, and marched into the room.

  Despite its size, it was full of just two women—of the breaths of one at least as wide as her bright pink dress, who was struggling to lever herself up from an armchair with a knuckly stick and collapsing red-faced, and of the antics of her companion, a lanky woman in the flapping jacket of a dark blue suit and the skirt of a grayer outfit, who’d bustled away from the light switch to flutter the pages of a television listings magazine before scurrying fast as the cartoon squirrel on the television to twitch the cord of the velvet curtains, an activity Shone took to have dislodged whatever notice had been in the window. Both women were at least as old as the person who’d admitted him, but he didn’t let that daunt him. “What seems to be the problem?” he said, and immediately had to say “I can’t hear you if you both talk at once.”

  “The light’s in my eyes,” the woman in the chair complained, though of the six bulbs in the chandelier one was dead, another missing. “Unity keeps putting it on when she knows I’m watching.”

  “Amelia’s had her cartoons on all afternoon,” Unity said, darting at the television, then drumming her knuckles on top of an armchair instead. “I want to see what’s happening in the world.”

  “Shall we let Unity watch the news now, Amelia? If it isn’t something you like watching you won’t mind if the light’s on.”

  Amelia glowered before delving into her cleavage for an object that she flung at him. Just in time to field it he identified it as the remote control. Unity ran to snatch it from him, and as a newsreader appeared with a war behind him Shone withdrew. He was lingering over closing the door while he attempted to judge whether the mountainous landscapes on the walls were vague with mist or dust when a man at his back murmured, “Come out, quick, and shut it.”

  He was a little too thin for his suit that was gray as his sparse hair. Though his pinkish eyes looked harassed, and he kept shrugging his shoulders as though to displace a shiver, he succeeded in producing enough of a grateful smile to part his teeth. “By gum, Daph said you’d sort them out, and you have. You can stay,” he said.

  Among the questions Shone was trying to resolve was why the man seemed familiar, but a gust of rain so fierce it strayed under the front door made the offer irresistible. “Overnight, you mean.” He thought it best to check.

  “That’s the least,” the manager presumably only began, and twisted round to find the stooped woman. “Daph will show you up, Mr. …”

  “Shone.”

  “Who is he?” Daph said as if preparing to announce him.

  “Tom Shone,” Shone told her.

  “Mr. Thomson?”

  “Tom Shone. First name Tom.”

  “Mr. Tom Thomson.”

  He might have suspected a joke if it hadn’t been for her earnestness, and so he appealed to the manager. “Do you need my signature?”

  “Later, don’t you fret,” the manager assured him, receding along the hall.

  “And as for payment …”

  “Just room and board. That’s always the arrangement.”

  “You mean you want me to …”

  “Enjoy yourself,” the manager called, and disappeared beyond the stairs into somewhere that smelled of an imminent dinner.

  Shone felt his overnight bag leave his shoulder. Daph had relieved him of the burden and was striding upstairs, turning in a crouch to see that he followed. “He’s forever off somewhere, Mr. Snell,” she said, and repeated, “Mr. Snell.”

  Shone wondered if he was being invited to reply with a joke until she added, “Don’t worry, we know what it’s like to forget your name.”

  She was saying he, not she, had been confused about it. If she hadn’t cantered out of sight his response would have been as sharp as the rebukes he gave his pupils when they were too childish. Above the middle floor the staircase bent towards the front of the house, and he saw how unexpectedly far the place went back. Perhaps nobody was staying in that section, since the corridor was dark and smelled old. He grabbed the banister to speed himself up, only to discover it wasn’t much less sticky than a sucked lollipop. By the time he arrived at the top of the house he was furious to find himself panting.

  Daph had halted at the far end of a passage lit, if that was the word, by infrequent bulbs in glass flowers sprouting from the walls. Around them shadows fattened the veins of the paper. “This’ll be you,” Daph said, and pushed open a door.

  Beside a small window under a yellowing lightbulb the ceiling angled almost to the carpet, brown as mud. A narrow bed stood in the angle, opposite a wardrobe and dressing table and a sink beneath a dingy mirror. At least there was a phone on a shelf by the sink. Daph passed him his bag as he ventured into the room. “You’ll be fetched when it’s time,” she told him.

  “Time? Time …”

  “For dinner and all the fun, silly,” she said with a laugh so shrill his ears wanted to flinch.

  She was halfway to the stairs when he thought to call after her. “Aren’t I supposed to have a key?”

  “Mr. Snell will have it. Mr. Snell,” she reminded him, and was gone.

  He had to phone Ruth as soon as he was dry and changed. There must be a bathroom somewhere near. He hooked his bag over his shoulder with a finger and stepped into the twilight of the corridor. He’d advanced only a few paces when Daph’s head poked over the edge of the floor. “You’re never leaving us.”

  He felt absurdly guilty. “Just after the bathroom.”

  “It’s where you’re going,” she said, firmly enough to be commanding rather than advising him, and vanished down the hole that was the stairs.

  She couldn’t have meant the room next to his. When he succeeded in coaxing the sticky plastic knob to turn, using the tips of a finger and thumb, he found a room much like his, except that the window was in the angled roof. Seated on the bed in the dimness on its way to dark was a figure in a toddler’s blue overall—a teddy bear with large black ragged eyes or perhaps none. The bed in the adjacent room was strewn with photographs so blurred that he could distinguish only the grin every one of them bore. Someone had been knitting in the next room, but had apparently lost concentration, since one arm of the mauve sweater was at least twice the size of the other. A knitting needle pinned each arm to the bed. Now Shone was at the stairs, beyond which the rear of the house was as dark as that section of the floor below. Surely Daph would have told him if he was on the wrong side of the corridor, and the area past the stairs wasn’t as abandoned as it looked: he could hear a high-pitched muttering from the dark, a voice gabbling a plea almost too fast for words, praying with such urgency the speaker seemed to have no time to pause for breath. Shone hurried past the banisters that enclosed three sides of the top of the stairs and pushed open the door immediately beyond them. There was the bath, and inside the plastic curtains that someone had left closed would be a shower. He elbowed the door wide, and the shower curtains shifted to acknowledge him.

  Not only they had. As he tugged the frayed cord to kindle the bare bulb, he heard a muffled giggle from the region of the bath. He threw his bag onto the hook on the door and yanked the shower curtains apart. A naked woman so scrawny he could see not just her ribs but the shape of bones inside her buttocks was crouching on all fours in the bath. She peered wide-eyed over one splayed knobbly hand at him, then dropped the hand to reveal a nose half the width of her face and a gleeful mouth devoid of teeth as she sprang past him. She was out of the room before he could avoid seeing her shrunken disused breasts and pendulous gray-bearded stomach. He heard her run into a room at the dark end of the corridor, calling out “For it now” or perhaps “You’re it now.” He didn’t know if the words were intended for him. He was too
busy noticing that the door was boltless.

  He wedged his shoes against the corner below the hinges and piled his sodden clothes on top, then padded across the sticky linoleum to the bath. It was cold as stone, and sank at least half an inch with a loud creak as he stepped into it under the blind brass eye of the shower. When he twisted the reluctant squeaky taps it felt at first as though the rain had got in, but swiftly grew so hot he backed into the clammy plastic. He had to press himself against the cold tiled wall to reach the taps, and had just reduced the temperature to bearable when he heard the doorknob rattle. “Taken,” he shouted. “Someone’s in here.”

  “My turn.”

  The voice was so close the speaker’s mouth must be pressed against the door. When the rattling increased in vigor Shone yelled, “I won’t be long. Ten minutes.”

  “My turn.”

  It wasn’t the same voice. Either the speaker had deepened his pitch in an attempt to daunt Shone or there was more than one person at the door. Shone reached for the sliver of soap in the dish protruding from the tiles, but contented himself with pivoting beneath the shower once he saw the soap was coated with gray hair. “Wait out there,” he shouted. “I’ve nearly finished. No, don’t wait. Come back in five minutes.”

  The rattling ceased, and at least one body dealt the door a large soft thump. Shone wrenched the curtains open in time to see his clothes spill across the linoleum. “Stop that,” he roared, and heard someone retreat—either a spectacularly crippled person or two people bumping into the walls as they carried on a struggle down the corridor. A door slammed, then slammed again, unless there were two. By then he was out of the bath and grabbing the solitary bath towel from the shaky rack. A spider with legs like long gray hairs and a wobbling body as big as Shone’s thumbnail scuttled out of the towel and hid under the bath.

  He hadn’t brought a towel with him. He would have been able to borrow one of Ruth’s. He held the towel at arm’s length by two corners and shook it over the bath. When nothing else emerged, he rubbed his hair and the rest of him as swiftly as he could. He unzipped his case and donned the clothes he would have sported for dining with Ruth. He hadn’t brought a change of shoes, and when he tried on those he’d worn, they squelched. He gathered up his soaked clothes and heaped them with the shoes on his bag, and padded quickly to his room.

  As he kneed the door open he heard sounds beyond it: a gasp, another, and then voices spilling into the dark. Before he crossed the room, having dumped his soggy clothes and bag in the wardrobe that, like the rest of the furniture, was secured to a wall and the floor, he heard the voices stream into the house. They must belong to a coach party—brakes and doors had been the sources of the gasps. On the basis of his experiences so far, the influx of residents lacked appeal for him and made him all the more anxious to speak to Ruth. Propping his shoes against the ribs of the tepid radiator, he sat on the underfed pillow and lifted the sticky receiver.

  As soon as he obtained a tone he began to dial. He was more than halfway through Ruth’s eleven digits when Snell’s voice interrupted. “Who do you want?”

  “Long distance.”

  “You can’t get out from the rooms, I’m afraid. There’s a phone down here in the hall. Everything else as you want it, Mr. Thomson? Only I’ve got people coming in.”

  Shone heard some of them outside his room. They were silent except for an unsteady shuffling and the hushed sounds of a number of doors. He could only assume they had been told not to disturb him. “There were people playing games up here,” he said.

  “They’ll be getting ready for tonight. They do work themselves up, some of them. Everything else satisfactory?”

  “There’s nobody hiding in my room, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Nobody but you.”

  That struck Shone as well past enough, and he was about to make his feelings clear while asking for his key when the manager said, “We’ll see you down shortly, then.” The line died at once, leaving Shone to attempt an incredulous grin at the events so far. He intended to share it with his reflection above the sink, but hadn’t realized until now that the mirror was covered with cracks or a cobweb. The lines appeared to pinch his face thin, to discolor his flesh and add wrinkles. When he leaned closer to persuade himself that was merely an illusion, he saw movement in the sink. An object he’d taken to be a long gray hair was snatched into the plughole, and he glimpsed the body it belonged to squeezing itself out of sight down the pipe. He had to remind himself to transfer his wallet and loose coins and keys from his wet clothes to his current pockets before he hastened out of the room.

  The carpet in the passage was damp with footprints, more of which he would have avoided if he hadn’t been distracted by sounds in the rooms. Where he’d seen the teddy bear someone was murmuring “Up you come to Mummy. Gummy gum.” Next door a voice was crooning “There you all are,” presumably to the photographs, and Shone was glad to hear no words from the site of the lopsided knitting, only a clicking so rapid it sounded mechanical. Rather than attempt to interpret any of the muffled noises from the rooms off the darker section of the corridor, he padded downstairs so fast he almost missed his footing twice.

  Nothing was moving in the hall except rain under the front door. Several conversations were ignoring one another in the television lounge. He picked up the receiver and thrust coins into the box, and his finger faltered over the zero on the dial. Perhaps because he was distracted by the sudden hush, he couldn’t remember Ruth’s number.

  He dragged the hole of the zero around the dial as far as it would go in case that brought him the rest of the number, and as the hole whirred back to its starting point, it did. Ten more turns of the dial won him a ringing padded with static, and he felt as if the entire house was waiting for Ruth to answer. It took six pairs of rings—longer than she needed to cross her flat—to make her say “Ruth Lawson.”

  “It’s me, Ruth.” When there was silence he tried reviving their joke. “Old Ruthless.”

  “What now, Tom?”

  He’d let himself hope for at least a dutiful laugh, but its absence threw him less than the reaction from within the television lounge: a titter, then several. “I just wanted you to know—”

  “You’re mumbling again. I can’t hear you.”

  He was only seeking to be inaudible to anyone but her. “I say, I wanted you to know I really did get the day wrong,” he said louder. “I really thought I was supposed to be coming up today.”

  “Since when has your memory been that bad?”

  “Since, I don’t know, today, it seems like. No, fair enough, you’ll be thinking of your birthday. I know I forgot that too.”

  A wave of mirth escaped past the ajar door across the hall. Surely however many residents were in there must be laughing at the television with the sound turned down, he told himself as Ruth retorted “If you can forget that you’ll forget anything.”

  “I’m sorry.

  “I’m sorrier.”

  “I’m sorriest,” he risked saying, and immediately wished he hadn’t completed their routine, not only since it no longer earned him the least response from her but because of the roars of laughter from the television lounge. “Look, I just wanted to be sure you knew I wasn’t trying to catch you out, that’s all.”

  “Tom.”

  All at once her voice was sympathetic, the way it might have sounded at an aged relative’s bedside. “Ruth,” he said, and almost as stupidly, “What?”

  “You might as well have been.”

  “I might … you mean I might …”

  “I mean you nearly did.”

  “Oh.” After a pause as hollow as he felt he repeated the syllable, this time not with disappointment but with all the surprise he could summon up. He might have uttered yet another version of the sound, despite or even because of the latest outburst of amusement across the hall, if Ruth hadn’t spoken. “I’m talking to him now.”

  “Talking to who?”

  Before the
words had finished leaving him Shone understood that she hadn’t been speaking to him but about him, because he could hear a man’s voice in her flat. Its tone was a good deal more than friendly to her, and it was significantly younger than his. “Good luck to you both,” he said, less ironically and more maturely than he would have preferred, and snagged the hook with the receiver.

  A single coin trickled down the chute and hit the carpet with a plop. Amidst hilarity in the television lounge several women were crying “To who, to who” like a flock of owls. “He’s good, isn’t he,” someone else remarked, and Shone was trying to decide where to take his confusion bordering on panic when a bell began to toll as it advanced out of the dark part of the house.

  It was a small but resonant gong wielded by the manager. Shone heard an eager rumble of footsteps in the television lounge, and more of the same overhead. As he hesitated, Daph dodged around the manager towards him. “Let’s get you sat down before they start their fuss,” she said.

  “I’ll just fetch my shoes from my room.”

  “You don’t want to bump into the old lot up there. They’ll be wet, won’t they?”

  “Who?” Shone demanded, then regained enough sense of himself to answer his own question with a weak laugh. “My shoes, you mean. They’re the only ones I’ve brought with me.”

  “I’ll find you something once you’re in your place,” she said, opening the door opposite the television lounge, and stooped lower to hurry him. As soon as he trailed after her she bustled the length of the dining room and patted a small isolated table until he accepted its solitary straight chair. This faced the room and was boxed in by three long tables, each place at which was set like his with a plastic fork and spoon. Beyond the table opposite him velvet curtains shifted impotently as the windows trembled with rain. Signed photographs covered much of the walls—portraits of comedians he couldn’t say he recognized, looking jolly or amusingly lugubrious. “We’ve had them all,” Daph said. “They kept us going. It’s having fun keeps the old lot alive.” Some of this might have been addressed not just to him, because she was on her way out of the room. He barely had time to observe that the plates on the Welsh dresser to his left were painted on the wood, presumably to obviate breakage, before the residents crowded in.