by Neil Cross
He looked at the ring for a long time.
He was still looking at it when he heard the front door slam.
16
Kenny had become so accustomed to the endless panic of the alarm that it had become no more than background noise – like the hullabaloo of traffic through the windows of an inner-city flat. So he heard the door slam as if in a silent house.
Hearing it, he became aware of the alarm again – at once, it was all he could hear, the unrestrained screaming of this violated house.
He scurried over to grab the loop of rope and hauled up the attic stairs, closing the hatch just as the alarm cut off.
It left in its wake a silence so profound that Kenny feared to move in case it shattered.
He put an ear to a narrow gap in the frame of the hatch. There were voices downstairs: two men.
Then the tread of feet on the stairs.
Through the gap in the frame, Kenny saw a quick blur of dark hair. The man ducked into his office, probably to confirm the computer was there.
The second man came upstairs, his tread marking him out as bigger and heavier than the first. ‘They’ve done your window, mate – out back, overlooking the garden. Got in that way.’
‘Fuck a fucking duck,’ said Jonathan Reese.
‘Most probably he was a Rupert,’ said the second man. ‘Half the junkies round here are Ruperts. The toerag that did over my place wasn’t a Rupert. He was a chav. He shat on the carpet; a great big curler. I nearly threw up. To this day, I can’t face a Cumberland sausage.’
‘Right. Thanks for that, Ollie.’
Jonathan hit the bathroom light and the extractor fan came on. Kenny heard him urinating, marking his territory. Then a flush being pulled.
Kenny strained to hear as Jonathan followed Ollie back downstairs and phoned the police. It took some time, and Jonathan grew short tempered. Then he hung up and told Ollie: ‘Apparently they’ll be round this evening between six and eight thirty.’
‘You’re a high-priority case, then.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
‘Look, I’ll be okay here. You get back on site. Dunwoody gives you grief, explain what happened.’
‘What’ll you do?’
‘Have a cup of tea. Watch Judge Judy. Do some paperwork, invoicing. Tax. Wait for Plod. Get out a glazier to fix the window.’
‘I could hang around.’
‘Nah . . . you shoot off, mate. Have a look at that bit of the path, the bit running up behind the pond. And get on to Nicholson’s about the fencing.’
‘You sure you’re all right?’
‘Yep.’
‘Give me a bell if you need to.’
‘All right. Off you fuck then. Back to work.’
There was the sound of cordial laughter. The front door closing.
Then the sounds of a man believing himself to be alone, taking a deep breath in his unoccupied hallway.
Then walking upstairs, to his office.
Through the gap in the frame, Kenny watched the blur of Jonathan’s head as he passed below.
From the office came a sequence of small, familiar noises: a mouse being jiggled to waken a sleeping computer; the weight of a man settling into an office chair; the whine of a computer’s cooling fan kicking into life, rapid tapping on a keyboard.
Kenny glanced at the pyramid of boxes which held fleeces and blouses maintaining no trace of human scent, and shoes etched with a dark stain of a woman’s heel.
Then he lay with his eyes open and waited. He was a wraith in the attic, a recording demon, tabulating Jonathan’s life, finding him wanting.
17
Kenny listened as Jonathan Reese made business calls – to suppliers, to Ollie, to various glaziers, to a couple of clients.
After 4 p.m., when he’d finished the business calls and found a twenty-four-hour glazier willing to come out after teatime, he seemed to be at a loose end.
He walked round the house for a bit. Kenny heard him checking the windows and singing a song under his breath – ‘Celebrate!’ by Kool and the Gang. Earlier, it had been on the radio and must have snagged in his head, the way some songs do.
He stood in the hallway, dialling a number, then tutted. He hesitated, then said: ‘Babe, it’s me. Half four, just about. Listen, I’m not sure I’ll make it round tonight. Had a bit of a weird day, to be honest. Anyway, sorry. Hope everything’s okay. Give us a call when you can. Love you. Bye.’
After that, he returned to the office.
Kenny could hear small-arms gunfire, the screams of the dying, the roar of tanks as Jonathan played some kind of war game.
Sometime after five fifteen, Jonathan gave up on the game and wandered away from the office.
Halfway down the stairs, his phone rang. He said, ‘Babe! How you doing?’ and sat down on the stairs.
By adjusting his head and squinting through the crack in the frame, Kenny could just about see Jonathan’s hand as it tugged and twisted at the weave of the seagrass carpet. He heard Jonathan say: ‘No, nothing really bad. Nothing like that. The house got broken into.’
Jonathan spoke for ten minutes – No, they didn’t take anything. Yeah, right, believe it when I see it - before hanging up.
He stayed sitting on the stairs for a long time, elbows on his knees. He was still sitting there when the police arrived.
As the two police officers – one male, one female – made their cursory inspection of the house, Kenny lay motionless as the dead.
Jonathan tailed the officers. ‘So the alarm goes off . . .’
‘It’s not monitored?’
‘It used to be. But forty-five quid a month? Anyway. My neighbours give me a call and I’m round as soon as I can. But he’s gone before I get back. What’re the chances of catching him?’
The female officer said: ‘Not high, I’m afraid.’
Kenny knew that certain police officers affected a contemptuous demeanour when investigating crimes they considered a petty irritation. But there was something else in this officer’s voice, a chilly bluntness that made Kenny wonder if she and Jonathan had perhaps met before, under different circumstances: perhaps she’d been to this address some years ago. Perhaps she’d stood in the kitchen while Scenes of Crime Officers in white paper bunny suits and latex gloves hunted out blood-splatter or other indications of violent disagreement.
Or perhaps she’d stood guard behind a perimeter while, out back, SOCO fingertip-searched the long garden.
In the end, Jonathan gave up seeking to ingratiate himself. He sighed and said: ‘So what do I do next?’
‘Think about fitting sturdier locks to the windows, automatic lights.’
‘It happened at nine o’clock in the morning.’
‘Perhaps buy a dog.’
‘And this is official police policy, is it? Buy a dog.’
‘Burglars don’t like dogs. What can I say?’
‘Well, thanks for the advice.’
‘No problem. Evening, sir.’
‘Yeah, yeah. See you later.’
Jonathan closed the door.
Shortly before 8 p.m., the glazier arrived. He was there for threequarters of an hour, cleaning and measuring up.
He and Jonathan discussed the number of burglaries in the area – they discussed absurdly lenient prison sentences handed out to repeat offenders and political correctness gone mad. They agreed to bring back the short, sharp shock, National Service and possibly hanging. Then the glazier gave Jonathan a quote for the job, including the cost of making a new oak frame for the sash window.
The glazier hammered at something, probably fixing a square of plywood to the broken window frame. Then he was gone, too, and the house was silent.
Jonathan drew the curtains and double-locked all the doors. Then he trudged upstairs, to the office.
*
Kenny heard him, sitting there, operating the mouse. Around nine, Jonathan’s phone rang. He ignored it.
The beams
of sunlight lancing the attic were the colour of barley; outside, the mid-summer sun was beginning to set.
Jonathan’s phone rang again at nine thirty. He continued to ignore it.
By now, there were other sounds.
They were coming from the computer speakers: a loud camcorder hiss, over which Kenny could hear a woman’s voice – low moaning and rapid breathing. A muttered word. A grunt.
‘Come on,’ said Jonathan, but not the real Jonathan; it was the Jonathan on screen, on the computer.
At this insistence, the woman’s cries progressed in frequency and pitch.
‘Come on,’ said Jonathan. Muttered through his teeth, over the camcorder hiss.
The office chair creaked as the real Jonathan sat back.
‘There you are,’ said Jonathan, on screen. ‘There you are. There you are.’
Kenny listened to the creaks of Jonathan masturbating. They were timed with the low exclamations of the woman reaching orgasm.
Jonathan spat God’s name through gritted teeth.
There followed a moment of near-silence.
Then Jonathan stood from his chair, muttering.
Clutching his unbuttoned jeans in one hand, he waddled from the office to the bathroom.
The taps ran, then stopped.
Kenny turned to lie on his back. He saw the shafts of sunlight, pale rose now, advancing from a much lower angle. Night was coming, and he was trapped in this attic while Jonathan stood a few feet away, washing the semen from his thighs and belly.
Kenny smelled distant, burning tyres. It was an oddly summery smell.
But there were no burning tyres.
The left side of Kenny’s face went cold. His heel kicked at the attic floor once, twice, three times, like a drummer counting in a song. Then Kenny went into seizure.
His teeth clenched. His mouth frothed. His body beat a tattoo on the attic floor, three feet above Jonathan’s head.
The seizure ended. Below Kenny, there was a hush.
From somewhere inside it, Jonathan said: ‘Hello?’
18
Kenny lay still.
Downstairs, Jonathan was taking the length of dowelling from the corner. His breathing was shallow and rapid.
Kenny heard the hook scraping then engaging the eyelet that lowered the attic hatch.
He scuttled like a rat to the furthest, darkest corner.
The boxes here were older – slightly damp, connected to the eaves by cobwebs grown pearly grey with dust, ornate with insect husks.
What sound he made was veiled by the grating protest of the attic hatch – and then by the clatter of the ladder being unfolded.
Kenny squatted heel to haunch in the spidery shadows, watching as the attic hatch became an oblong of electric light. He realized how dark it had become.
Across that yellow oblong passed a flicker of shadow that was Jonathan beginning to climb the ladder.
Kenny hunkered lower, his urine-wet shorts clinging to his thighs. Cobwebs caught in his hair.
Jonathan entered the attic holding a three-cell torch – a foot-long tube of battery-weighted aluminium. He swept the attic with its beam; it angled as it moved over the boxes, the suitcase, the exercise bike, then straightened and widened into the corners.
It passed over a woman’s shoe.
It stopped.
Jonathan was a silhouette behind the torch’s bright eye, staring at the shoe.
Then he probed the corners of the attic with the brisk, shaky beam. ‘Hello?’
Watching him through a narrow gap in the boxes, Kenny was almost tempted to reply - to just stand up, wave, say hello and get it over with.
Perhaps in his shock, Jonathan would take a step backwards and tumble down the hatch, breaking his neck on the way down.
Then Kenny could wait until it was late and let himself out the back door and scurry down the long, night-cool garden, concealed by the shadows of those mature trees. He could walk through the garden gate and scramble through the thicket of birch and hazel, pale in the night, and tramp along the canal towpath until he reached the trout stream.
He could stroll, half-noticed at best, to the Combi. He could drive away and be home in an hour.
But he was rigid with uncertainty, worried about the luminosity of his white hair and teeth and eyes.
Jonathan stood equally undecided, his dark form like a lighthouse behind the torch beam, saying once again: ‘Hello?’
He wasn’t scared of burglars. If that had been the case, he’d have backed away from the attic and dialled 999.
He’d been frightened by the angry knocking on the ceiling. And then shocked to the bone by that single, upended shoe – lying where it did not belong and should not be.
Then the doorbell rang.
It jolted Kenny such that he almost cried out. But any sound he made was covered by Jonathan’s bolt of fright. He shouted something and his hand flew to his chest, as if he feared his heart might stop.
The doorbell rang again – a commonplace sound now. Jonathan muttered, ‘Fuck me’ in an unselfconscious, irritated way. Not the voice of a man who believed himself to be overheard.
He shone the torch round the attic once more, then hurried down the ladder. Kenny heard him bounding downstairs, two or three at a time, then opening the front door.
A woman saying: ‘Can I come in, then?’
‘I didn’t think you were coming over.’
‘You sounded funny.’
‘Did I? Hey, come up here a minute. Have a look at this.’
‘At what?’
‘Up here.’
He hurried her upstairs. She protested all the way.
Kenny burrowed himself further into the corner, lifting his jacket to cover his white hair and curling like a hedgehog on the floor.
Two people climbed the ladder now – Jonathan, followed by the woman saying: ‘So what was it?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the point.’
‘But what did it sound like?’
‘I don’t know. Banging.’
‘What sort of banging?’
‘Just banging.’
‘It was probably a bird.’
‘Then it was a big bird – a fucking ostrich or something.’
‘We had this bird trapped in our attic, once. When I was little. They panic, birds – when they can’t find a way out. They make a lot of noise.’
‘I didn’t see a bird.’
‘It must’ve got out.’
‘I don’t even know how it got in.’
‘You need to call out a roofer, get him to have a look. Or it could be rats.’
‘But the shoe.’
‘What shoe?’
Jonathan moved to her shoulder, saying, ‘That shoe.’
She was holding the torch and he moved her wrist until its beam fell like a spotlight on the shoe.
‘What about it?’
‘It’s one of hers.’
She tutted and stepped forward to pick up the shoe. Kenny could smell her, a burst of bright perfume in this musty place. She shone the torch across the pyramid of boxes, then reached out to touch one of them.
‘You left the box unsealed.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘You must have. Look.’
She lifted a flap to show him the box was open.
Jonathan said, ‘It wasn’t like that before.’
‘So what are you saying? Someone came up here, did some breakdancing, left a shoe on the floor?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
‘I don’t know. All I know, last time I came up here
‘And when was that?’
‘Ages ago. Years ago. Before we met. Way before.’
She waited, then said: ‘It must’ve fallen out of the box when you brought it up here.’
‘The boxes were sealed.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Christ, Jon.’
‘Christ what?�
��
‘It’s a shoe. What do you want me to say?’
‘There was banging.’
‘It was birds, it was rats, it was next door’s kids banging on their attic windows. I don’t know what it was. I do know it wasn’t the Magical Flip-Flop Thief.’
She let the torch beam relax so that it illuminated her feet. Kenny could see her shoes.
She sighed, and in a much quieter voice said: ‘Why do you keep her things anyway? Are you waiting for her to come back, take up where you left off?’
‘No.’
She muttered something that might have been yeah, right and climbed back down to the landing.
Jonathan hung around for a moment, gazing into the darkness. Then he followed her.
On the landing, Jonathan was irritated, safe under the bright electric light. He said, ‘How do you think it would’ve looked, if I’d thrown away her stuff? What sort of message do you think that would’ve sent?’
‘I’m not saying then. I’m saying now.’
‘Fine.’
‘So why don’t you do it?’
‘Oh, come on, Becks.’
‘Is she coming home?’
‘No!’
‘Then why keep her stuff?’
‘It’s no big secret, and no big deal. Did you think I was keeping, like, a shrine?’
‘That’s a bit what it looks like, yeah.’
‘Hey, come on. Don’t go.’
‘I think I’d better.’
‘Don’t. Please. Come on.’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Look, Becks. I just don’t think about it. I mean, I know that stuff’s up there, but it’s not like I think about it. Or her. Or whatever. I just don’t think about it – I don’t want to think about it.’
She turned on the stair. The bannister creaked.
Jonathan said, ‘Stay. Come on. This is silly.’
‘Are you waiting for her to come back?’
‘No.’
‘I’m not sure that’s true.’
‘This has got nothing to do with her! This is ridiculous!’
‘You hear a pigeon in the attic and you see a shoe you dropped and have a full-blown episode. And I’m the one being ridiculous?’
‘Who’s having an episode? I’m not having an episode.’
