by Simon Lelic
But whatever. I woke up again, is the point. At one fifty-nine in the morning, according to the display on my phone, and this time, even if I can’t swear it was true all the other times, I definitely had the feeling I’d heard something out of the ordinary. And I’ll be honest, it wasn’t burglars at first that I was afraid of. All I could think about initially was Norman Bates’s mother. And that cat. Our mystery visitor. Syd mentioned Stephen King earlier and Pet Sematary’s always been one of my personal favourites. Not the film, the film’s pants, but the novel … It’s like that bit in Friends, where Joey is so terrified of The Shining he keeps the book in the freezer? I’m like that with Pet Sematary. And I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but there’s a cat that comes back from the dead. Church, its name is, short for Winston Churchill, and it’s kind of alive except not, not really, and lying there in the middle of the night I was imagining that cat I found sort of clawing its way up from where I’d buried it in the garden, then getting into the house somehow (I guess however it got in last time), coming up the stairs, along the landing, towards our bedroom, and then … and then … and then who knows, quite frankly. I mean, even the cat in the Stephen King book doesn’t really do anything. But I wasn’t thinking logically. It was two o’clock in the morning and my imagination was basically working overtime.
For a moment I lay there just listening. It wasn’t Syd who’d woken me. She was face down on her pillow, so still I could barely hear her breathing. In normal circumstances she would have been the one lying awake looking at me. Syd’s had trouble sleeping all the time I’ve known her. She’ll have two, maybe three hours a night when she’s underwater, and all the rest of the time she’ll be paddling in the shallows.
‘Syd?’
No response. I tried poking her, just gently, and that’s when I heard it again. The sound that had woken me. It was a shuffling, skidding sort of sound: more the slip of a sole than the clunk of a central-heating pipe.
I sat up in bed. I checked to see whether the noise had registered with Syd, but she still hadn’t moved. I fought the urge to shake her awake, to force her to sit up and listen with me. But at that moment there was nothing to hear. Whatever sound I thought I’d detected, it didn’t repeat.
Now, I’ve seen enough horror films in my time to know never to go wandering about alone when there’s a suspected zombie in the vicinity, feline or otherwise. But there was no way I was going back to sleep, not until I’d at least had a quick look around. Plus, countering whatever fear I felt, I heard my dad’s voice telling me to stop behaving like a six-year-old. My old man would never have been afraid of spiders, for instance. He would never have worried about things that went bump in the night, not unless it was his good-for-nothing son coming home tipsy after a night out with his mates. That would have roused him, I guarantee it. But other than that? About the only thing my father was afraid of was the prospect of maybe one day being called upon to express some emotion that wasn’t indignation.
I eased myself silently from beneath the bed sheets. Given how muggy the previous evening had been, the chill that greeted my bare feet took me by surprise. Oddly, though, it also gave me some encouragement. The floorboards were solid, real. The cold of the night air was real, too.
There was nothing on the landing. I mean, there was, but I didn’t see it then. As far as I was aware it was empty except for the pictures the previous owner had left hanging on the wall. The attic hatch was sealed (I’d taken to looking up virtually every time I passed beneath it) and there was nothing except shadows on the top section of the stairs. I glanced into the bathroom as I passed it, and then into the spare room – still stuffed with junk – to check the window. When the weather was warm we’d taken to leaving it open. The windows in the main bedroom were painted shut and opening the one in here was the only way we’d discovered of enticing in some fresh air. But it was closed. I moved on to the box room, which for the time being Syd was using as her yoga studio, and then made my way back along the landing to the top of the staircase.
Here I paused. Checking upstairs was easy. But at night-time, to me, downstairs always felt like a different world. And although I was no longer worried about being accosted by Anthony Perkins dressed in drag, burglars remained a distinct possibility. The house was hardly the most secure. The windows were single glazed, the door locks old and insubstantial. Bart, he sleeps with a tennis racket under his bed. It’s a London thing, I think. I was surprised, when the topic came up, how many other people in the office admitted to sleeping close by to something they could swing. One bloke has a baseball bat wedged down the side of his mattress. Miriam from HR has the sword her great-grandfather wore in World War I propped handily against her bedside table. Personally I’d never even considered what I might use, in the case of intruders, as a weapon. Syd, I’d joked when the others had asked me. But I would have been grateful for something hefty in my hand now.
I started down.
‘Hello?’
There was no sign as far as I could tell of anything untoward. There was no light, no noise, no movement in the air. But it was chilly down here, too, as though a window, if not at the top of the house, had been left open somewhere.
I checked the front door as I passed it and saw the chain was firmly in place. The living-room windows were painted closed in the same way as the ones in our bedroom were, but I looked in anyway. I passed the dining room – what would have been the dining room, had it not currently been a staging post for the tip – and gradually worked my way through the darkness towards the rear of the house. I’d been aware all along that if someone had actually broken in, it would most likely have been through either the back door or the window in the kitchen. It was here that the house was least secure, and most accessible from the network of alleyways that separated our row of houses from those in the next street over.
I would have switched on a light had I not been worried about waking Syd. I almost called out again too, but resisted for the same reason, and anyway I was still feeling silly for having done so the first time. I’m not very good at sounding threatening, and that ‘hello?’ had come out like an impression of a bad Lionel Ritchie song. Besides, who did I think was going to answer? It was like that question you get on US immigration forms. Are you, or have you ever been, a terrorist? Well, shit – you got me. And here was I hoping you wouldn’t ask.
The door into the kitchen was pulled to just far enough to block my view. We didn’t usually close it, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t last night. I tried to see into the sliver of gloom between the edge of the door and the frame, but it was as impenetrable as a darkened window. I held my breath, listened, then started to edge closer. I reached out a hand, pushed open the door …
And found nothing. The room was empty, the window closed and the back door secure. The kitchen was coldest of all, but it was also the most exposed part of the house, and I could only assume the warm front had broken sooner than the weathermen had expected it to. As for the noise I thought I’d heard … the boiler, the pipes, the ancient floorboards – any of a hundred things might have made it, assuming I hadn’t imagined it in the first place.
Feeling like an idiot, and to the soundtrack of my father’s scornful laughter in my head, I made my way back upstairs. I stopped in the bathroom, used the toilet, swallowed some water. When I got back into our bedroom, Syd was still fast asleep. She was lying on her side, cocooned in the duvet, and I felt impatient all of a sudden to curl up next to her. As I lowered myself on to the mattress, however, she shifted slightly, then spoke.
‘Your hands are cold,’ she muttered.
When I looked at her she hadn’t opened her eyes.
‘What?’ I replied, turning more fully to face her.
She snuggled deeper. ‘Your hands,’ she mumbled again. ‘When you touched my cheek. They’re freezing.’
She rolled on to her front then, and all I could see of her after that was the messy protrusion of her hair. I sat there, staring, my lips pa
rted, and felt a drumbeat building in my ribcage. From feeling exhausted I was suddenly once again wide awake. You see, the thing was, I hadn’t touched her. Not when I’d got up, not when I’d come back into the room. Whoever’s hand she thought she’d felt – it wasn’t mine.
Sydney
I’ve had some vino. A bit too much, probably, although in another sense just the right amount. Enough, I hope, to talk some more about Elsie.
I like to run. I’m not a fitness freak or anything. My body’s more messy bedsit than hallowed temple. And I don’t run to offset my love of Skittles. I’ve got this weird metabolism, where I can eat as much sugar as I want but I balloon if I so much as make eye contact with a loaf of bread. So Christmases and holidays aside, generally I’m a completely muscle-less nine-and-a-half stone. Whether I run or not makes very little difference. But I make time for it whenever I can. I enjoy it, in an odd, God-make-it-stop kind of way. Basically, even though it often feels like I’m about to die, running reminds me that I’m alive.
I was still tweaking my route – gauging distances, trying to work out which direction felt most like going downhill – which is how on that weekday morning in June I found myself trotting past a kids’ play area I hadn’t even realized was there. It was on the edge of the nearby common, through a short but shadowy railway tunnel I’d been building up my courage to venture through. The playground was empty, save for a single figure rocking gently on a swing.
I didn’t recognize her right away. She had her back to me and anyway I was focused more on whether I’d inadvertently hit a dead end. I hadn’t – there was a path that looped around the railings – but even so I was already slowing and when I realized it was Elsie I came to a stop.
She hadn’t noticed me, despite my raucous breath and pounding heart. I felt like a hunter who’d stumbled downwind on a deer. No less unwelcome. No less deadly.
The swing was meant for toddlers, the type with safety bars around the seat. Even Elsie – slight, skin-and-bones Elsie – couldn’t fit inside it, so instead she’d balanced herself on top, her knees pulled level with her chest and her bum wedged so low it seemed stuck. She was looking at the clouds again. Not swinging: swaying. Dreaming, it looked like.
‘Hi,’ I said, a sound that reverberated like a gunshot.
Elsie slipped so quickly on to her feet she might have been oiled. She faced me and the swing, reacting raggedly, hit her thighs. Elsie didn’t flinch. She was looking at me and then beyond me, checking presumably that I was alone. I couldn’t tell whether she recognized me until she spoke.
‘It’s you,’ she said. ‘You’re new.’
I puffed a breath, de-sweated my brow. ‘I don’t feel new,’ I said, smiling. I took a step and Elsie mirrored it, re-establishing the distance between us. I took another step, towards the railings, and this time she held her ground. I pulled my ankle up behind me to stretch my thigh, my free hand resting lightly on the unpainted metal.
‘I had no idea this place was even round here,’ I said, nodding towards the rather cursory-looking slide. There were climbing bars too, as well as a scattering of farmyard animals impaled on springs. The equipment didn’t look old exactly. It looked ravaged, like a set of toys unwrapped on Christmas morning that by nightfall already needs replacing.
Elsie seemed uncertain at first whether to answer. ‘It gets busy here as soon as the mums come out. This is about the only time of day it’s ever empty.’
There was graffiti scrawled on the coloured panelling of the climbing frame. Bored graffiti: names, dates, tits, dicks. I pictured the older kids descending on the playground after school was out. Not to play. To drape. It was come here, I imagined, or get moaned at for loitering in the street.
‘Do you come here often?’ I asked Elsie, wondering if she was old enough to register the cliché.
‘Why do you ask?’ Elsie wrapped her arms around her midriff. She was wearing her school uniform, I noticed, and there was a rucksack lying on the concrete beside the swings. I didn’t have my watch with me but I’d left the house at a quarter to seven. Clearly Elsie had got up even earlier than I had and, from the way she was dressed, it seemed she intended to stay out until it was time for her to go to school.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s none of my business. It’s just … I wasn’t expecting to see you here, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting to see anyone.’
I swapped legs, wondering how long I could keep standing there like an out-of-shape flamingo before Elsie would decide I should probably be moving on.
‘Not often,’ she finally said, in answer to my earlier question. ‘I mean, all the time, sometimes. Sometimes hardly at all.’
I smiled at that.
‘Well,’ I said. I wobbled and set both feet on the floor. ‘I should probably …’ I pointed ahead. Awkwardly, the path I’d been tracking ran in a loop around the playground, meaning if I continued to follow it Elsie would be forced to watch me until I made it back into the tunnel. I moved instead to head back the way I’d come.
‘I’ve got hot chocolate,’ Elsie’s voice called out behind me. ‘And …’
I looked around.
‘And cigarettes,’ she added. ‘Although …’ She wiggled a finger at what I was wearing, at what I was in the middle of doing. ‘I’m guessing you probably don’t.’
I faced her fully. Before that day I hadn’t had a cigarette in eight months.
‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘Cigarettes and hot chocolate. The only thing you’re missing is a bag of marshmallows.’
Elsie dived into her rucksack. She surfaced, brandishing a packet of Fruit Pastilles. ‘Will these do?’ she said, smiling, and she waggled them invitingly in the air.
We sat side by side on separate swings. I was too big to wedge myself the way Elsie had – or, were I to try, I had my doubts I’d be able to get back out – but it was surprisingly comfortable being balanced across the struts. I felt a slight chill sitting there in only my sweaty running top but as the heat of the day began to build it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation. The quiet was nice too. The stillness. It isn’t quite as hard to find peace living in London as most non-Londoners tend to assume – the trick is being willing to get up early – but even so it feels precious whenever you do discover it. It’s like being let in on a secret.
‘I like it here at sunrise,’ Elsie said to me. ‘The sun, it comes up over that little patch of trees.’
She was looking ahead, out across the wildest section of the common. I was imagining the scene – the contours, the colours – but I was also thinking again about how long Elsie must have been sitting here. First light that morning had been at five. I remembered because I’d been woken by the glow from behind the curtains.
‘I don’t usually get up so early,’ she said, as though she’d eavesdropped on my thoughts. ‘It’s just … I don’t always sleep that well.’
I’d guessed enough about her life by that point that I didn’t need to ask why.
‘We shouldn’t be smoking these, you know,’ I said, peering at the lit end of my cigarette. I took another puff and exhaled towards the sky: the only cloud in what was so far an unblemished sea of blue.
‘I know,’ Elsie said. ‘I don’t do it very often. Only when I can get hold of them.’
I did my best to keep my frown sisterly. ‘You didn’t seem to have much trouble the last time I saw you,’ I said. I’d already noted, though, that Elsie and I were smoking Silk Cuts. At Mr Hirani’s she’d bought Benson & Hedges.
‘Those weren’t for me,’ Elsie answered.
‘They were for … your mum?’ I tested. ‘Your dad?’
‘My mother died when I was two,’ Elsie stated matter-of-factly. ‘The cigarettes were for my father.’
I waited but she didn’t add anything more.
‘So your own supply …’ I prompted. ‘I mean, no offence, Elsie, but you don’t exactly look eighteen.’
She did take offence, I think, briefly. But then she gave a guilty littl
e shrug.
‘I get other people to buy them for me.’
‘Friends, you mean?’
She shook her head, at the concept it seemed to me as much as at my suggestion. ‘Strangers, mostly. Older kids. Some just laugh, some say they’ll do it if I give them half. Others … I guess they take pity. I don’t like that they do, but at least then I get a full pack of twenty.’
She inhaled with her lips in a pout, then exhaled before the smoke could have reached her lungs. Good for her, I remember thinking, as I sucked my own smoke practically to my stomach.
‘I saw you,’ Elsie said, from out of nowhere and in a tone that suggested she was attempting a confession. ‘I wasn’t prying,’ she added hastily. ‘It’s just … our houses, they’re right across from one another. Out back, I mean. Ours is the one with the dirty windows.’
I’d already identified the house Elsie lived in – I’d picked it out from our spare-bedroom window the day I’d followed her home from Mr Hirani’s – but even if I hadn’t I would have known which house she was referring to. It wasn’t just the windows that were dirty. The back garden, which was mainly concrete, was more junkyard than usable outside space.
‘You were dancing,’ Elsie said. ‘You and … your boyfriend?’
I smiled, nodded. ‘Jack,’ I said. ‘His name’s Jack.’ As for the dancing, she must have been watching us the day we’d played those records. The day Jack found what he found up in the attic.
‘You looked happy,’ Elsie said. ‘It was nice.’
Again I smiled. ‘I’m not sure I’d call what we were doing dancing.’ I remembered twirling Maria-like to The Sound of Music, mock waltzing with Jack to 2001.
Elsie smiled then, like secretly she agreed but didn’t want to be rude.
‘You should come over,’ I told her, turning abruptly on my swing. ‘The previous owner, he left this huge stack of records. You’re too young to remember half the movies probably but there’s a record player and space on the rug and Jack … Jack’s brilliant. If nothing else I guarantee he’ll make you laugh.’
