Infinite Rooms: a gripping psychological thriller that follows one man's descent into madness

by David John Griffin

  Clement believed his speaking to be fine and filled with meaning, and was surprised at his own eloquence this early in the morning. He wanted to express his innermost feelings and the compulsion was helped by Finch’s listening ears. If only Jeremy would stay longer, he wished, then there would be a discussion of the highest calibre.

  The train was slowing to a standstill. Finch was ready to move to the carriage doors. He was trying his best to ignore this colleague of old, the young man who had changed for the worse, who gaped up at him in a disturbingly childlike manner, tapping Finch on the knee with a finger. Dressed as a woman, face caked with make-up. Accentuated movements of the hand, the wrist there with two watches and elastic band, speaking with spirited features without any apparent meaning.

  ‘Forget nonsense, he insists in a definite fashion. But you see I require protection from those spawned ideas because they were like pokers straight out of a fire, or like … like some brutish acid-exuding creature eating me away inside.’

  Before the train had finally stopped, Finch stood hurriedly and went over to punch the door button, willing the doors away. When the train finally came to a standstill and the doors slid open he leapt out of the carriage, nearly losing his balance as he pushed his way through the lines of awaiting passengers. ‘Out of my way,’ he ordered.

  Clement had stood to walk to the automatic doors and was leaning out. ‘It’s alright, Jeremy,’ he shouted after him over the heads, ‘barriers can’t hurt. Quite the opposite. They’re for inspired protection. Nice to meet you again, goodbye.’

  ‘Move please,’ stated an elderly man from the platform.

  Clement nodded with a friendly expression and moved further inside the carriage to allow the traveller to alight. The man stepped up in a cumbersome way and stood panting.

  7

  You are a real one. I can discover immediately what sort of person you are from just a few seconds of analysis. See into you as easily as looking through clear glass. For example, your ancestors would have lolled under eucalyptus trees, instilling in their genes a lethargy which would impart certain physical attributes to future generations.

  You’re an ageing version with a sunken chest. Jacket shining with patches of grease. What hair you have is sickly like the leaves of a wilting plant. And those rusted fingers – a heavy smoker, no doubt.

  You bloat yourself with beer and scotch, take up that reality space there in the corner leading to the beer garden. Sucking on a miserable bit of rolled paper, meagre strands of tobacco lining the inside. And a vile slurping when you drink. Rattling cough as though your lungs are about to liquidize, to come out onto the stained handkerchief clutched to your mouth.

  ‘Can’t you say anything? I think he’s positively disgusting.’

  I agree with Bernadette; weaving my way between the empty tables to the bar counter.

  There’s Daniel behind the bar, checking stocks, pointing a pencil to a barrel of sherry. ‘Already? You’re good for business today.’

  ‘No thanks, not yet.’ I’ll sit on a stool and rest elbows on the counter soakmat. I see you, doctor, and Daniel’s double with slicked hair, and part of my face, given back from a piece of mirror not covered with glinting bottles and optics. You can be the ambient one reflected. ‘The scruffy guy in the corner. Well, to be honest he’s a bit dirty, isn’t he?’

  ‘The old boy’s here every afternoon; waits outside for the doors to be unlocked. He’ll have his ale and be gone. Quite harmless. Been coming here for years. One of the locals.’

  I have an admiration for the doddering duffer. Fifty minutes of brown ale is his meaning of existence. He has this daily ritual, an ambition if you like, as modest as it is. An excellent obsession perhaps. His life is there in the glass and cigarettes and corner.

  Daniel is tapping his top teeth with the pencil. I know you can’t see much from where you are, Dr Leibkov, on the walkway, in the mirror, in a bar of the Neptune Hotel.

  ‘Who is he, then?’

  The barman nodding towards the opposite corner to where the old man sits. You stay behind, inverted laterally, doctor. You can listen from there. I’ll be over by the red oak panelling, looking back to judge Daniel’s aim.

  ‘What, this?’ Placing a finger onto a brass ship’s clock, shining but deceased. A shake of the head.

  I’ll take a step away from the boat wheel to survey the whole wall. On one of the shelves, a stuffed halibut in the safety of its case. Below, in another glass case, is presented the long twisted horn from a narwhal. A grubby stuffed fox – which might once have been a taxidermist’s masterpiece – glares as it sinks on its patchy haunches by the coat stand. The rest of the wall is covered with yellowing engravings, paintings and sepia photographs, and a fine layer of dust.

  I shall be your perception again, my psychiatric shaman. I’ll put my nose close to one of the engravings. There’s the studious workmanship of lines. Step back a little and the picture becomes alive with tonal variations though produced only with black ink on white parchment.

  Thrashing spikes of the sea pushing and dragging at a lifeboat. The helmsman clutching a rope to the rudder, a petrified girl huddling in the comfort of another. Roaring waves, shrieks of wind, sobs of a women quivering amidst twelve others. An oilskinned sailor struggling with the oars, trying to gain purchase with the blades in the violent waters, the side of the doomed ship looming beside them. A mother still on the ship’s deck, her child wrenched from her. Others fight like wounded animals, scratching and biting, tearing at each other’s clothing, the struggle for survival, primitive impulses driving them. Creaking of the sails, splintering snap as the bowsprit is broken, a despondent song from the rigging, impotent cries of those left behind to die. One struggling vainly with the ship’s wheel, another holding his comrade upright, yet another clinging to the boom which had lowered the lifeboat, reaching out imploringly, his life about to be taken by those mountains of water, the mindlessly animated vastness of ocean…

  ‘No, not that one. Next to it.’

  A small photo, showing portside of a fishing smack snuggled to the side of a jetty, the sea behind placid and sunlit. A younger version of the spitting man in the corner sits mending nets. He’s surrounded by lobster pots and yards of mesh. Smoke from the briar clamped between his teeth.

  I must call over to Bernadette. ‘Come and have a look.’ She’s pretending not to hear as she reaches for her drink.

  The fisherman made an uneasy truce with the sea to reap a harvest of fish and lobsters. He deserves his prominence and distinction: a crown of amethyst shells, sea flowers and coral armour. He will become semi-transparent – like a jellyfish – to blend with his mighty ocean and all it contains.

  Under that beam spanning the bar, holding lanterns and a bell, the impressive figurehead stands painted in its bold colours. The heavy chunks of timber glued and carved into a winged messenger, its shoulders hunched forward: it’s the fisherman’s sea-soaked shoulders. Across the brown ceiling, covered with shrivelled starfish and compasses, there are paddles and clumps of rope; glance back over to the engraving – there he is again as the captain of the doomed vessel, superior resignation upon him, standing as still as a boulder while others are madness about.

  And there you were in the corner by the ornate fireplace hung with brass, gone to your Atlantis to be with your willing sirens and mermaids, until tomorrow morning when you’ll return for your pint of brown ale.

  ‘You here again? Twice in one day?’

  A group of tourists are arranged in the wise fisherman’s province. They sway drunkenly from side to side singing a bawdy ballad, the throb of a train’s wheels acting as metronome.

  ‘My wife went off to do shopping and a wander round the antiques.’ An explosion of laughter from another quarter. ‘Can’t be bothered with that stuff.’

  ‘Three, four, five pounds; thanks.’ The hand receiving the change retracts into the forest of customers lining the bar.

  ‘What’s the time? Quarter to s
even; I’ll down another swift one before I pick her up. Give it another three quarters of an hour. It’ll do my headache good anyhow. I don’t think the market shuts until half eight; and I’ll be on this train for a while longer. Mine’s the usual when you’re ready.’

  Raucous laughter, someone sobbing with tears of mirth and slapping their thigh. Every table top invisible under a layer of glass jugs, plates, snack packets. You’ve put your pint away pretty smartish for a doctor. Another quick one then. A hyena cackle, bubbling murmurs, whooping buoyant airs. These shaking heads, those nodding ones. Hyena for a second time then a trumpeting elephant. Baboons still rock in the corner; a whinnying horse or should it be a seahorse? If I drink quickly there should be no worries. With clicking dominoes and thudding darts into the board, this is becoming a bit hazy. Congealing into one growling babble. Riff-raff are jostling me. Try as I might I can’t gain any enjoyment from watching the darts players though I’ll take one of their sandwiches on offer. Tastes of puffed mush. Look, someone’s drunk my beer by accident, already it’s finished. One more hop-bittersweet frothing pint, just to round off the evening, shouldn’t matter. The anchor bolted to the oak panelling is sliding down, I’m convinced. If I was to use my imagination more, I’d persuade myself we’re not in a bar of the Neptune Hotel in a train carriage but inside of a whale. If only I could focus enough to see the time from the clock above the fruit machine. It’s registered, beer equals doctor, both dissolve barriers. These stupid false memories barging in, beginning to create inebriated tears. Quickly dismiss them. Let them percolate through this zoo, the babbling mixture with flashing teeth and chinking glasses, while everyone is treading into puddles. Maybe it’s their drinks slopped to the floorboards. But it can’t be, the pools have quickly joined and the drinkers stand or sit in two inches of water. Not that anyone seems concerned, they continue their raucous banter. Glimmering water has risen more; it’s level with their knees and fast rising still. This liquid of the fourth pint has rendered my face numb. Water laps at the table edges. Splashes when hit with a drop of the arm or sharp movement of the hand. A bottle of beer bobbing past. There’s the barman, quite unconcerned, taking money from a customer and casually wiping slops from the counter. Now holding tongs clutching ice cubes but strangely at the other end of the bar now, pulling on a pump again. And the gabbling and gossiping goes on, the waffling and singing, heavy drone of a million flies in this deceptive room; clapping hands, insidious ale still poured down their forgiving throats, the subterraneans unaware of the communal bath rippling about their necks. And this chilly water has taken feeling from my arm. I must try to move it though progress is sluggish as the whole of me has been reduced to slow motion. But there at last, as dregs of ale run from the bottom of the glass, the waters have reached the dusty ceiling and completely covers all. And there’s time enough to watch a ponderously moving crowd with sounds muffled and echoing, bubble streams rising from their noses. Mark them move like sea plants wafted by currents before the vile taste of salt-bitter liquid rushes down my gullet, making me want to vomit. ‘Excuse me,’ I must insist as I swim through these smirking crowds, plastering a hand across my mouth as stomach heaves, turning over like a cement mixer, threatening to eject its contents. ‘Excuse me,’ as I sway up to the pub entrance which is rippling in that unnatural way underwater…

  ‘Excuse me.’

  8

  Clement’s eyes sprang open. A young mother was leaning toward him.

  ‘Would you be so kind?’ she asked, flicking her sight in the direction of the train window. Heating from below the carriage seats was becoming stifling.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He stood and put fingers on the metal catch at the top of the smaller pane to open it.

  ‘Say thank you to the nice person, Emily,’ the woman said before clasping one of her children’s hands in her own.

  The young girl’s large eyes, as blue as cornflowers, dominated her petite round face. With delicate fingers she had hold of her fish-shaped toy. She wriggled her nose and looked to dimpled knees then to the countryside speeding past.

  Her younger brother clutched a stick. On the end of the stick was a brightly-coloured bird made of plastic. The boy put the tail of it to his lips and blew it as a whistle, a pleasant chirruping produced amidst the dull rapping of the wheels along a dull landscape with its dull bushes, then a valley of dull pint pot houses and winter-ravaged trees.

  Clement blinked slowly. If only we could wish to remain as we were in our early years, he thought. Instead, minds and bodies are contaminated, innocence stolen; victims of fate and time.

  It was not the physical aspects of ageing he detested, more the forgetting of wholesome laughter, the purity and optimism. The ability to repel harmful rays without the need for tin foil. Children should be admired for these things – he reasoned – and we should be allowed a little envy.

  Wondrous stories of what should be, the real dream, free from hatred and malice; learn to be pure with love. As is the powerful love for my Bernadette, he explained to the remembered psychiatrist.

  Still the world appeared to Clement as if seen through dark glasses, rendered gloomy and dismal. Sooty-barked trees with limp leaves, grey parks strewn with rubbish and lakes like sores, pylons striding across a sombre landscape. Then a factory complex with its zig-zag roofed warehouses, walls of dun-toned corrugation surrounded by joists and piles of gravel. And forklift trucks moving here and there between canisters, looking like yellow beetles, nest-building. More sterile stretches of concrete, barren streets, anonymous houses with stark slips of unkempt garden.

  Clattering of wheels on the track; tiredness, the oppressive heating…

  The window tapped, perhaps with a metal object.

  This mindroom is hazy. Not certain it should be active. It’s only with a forced effort that I’m able to see. Eyelids are somehow connected to a titanium mask fitted over face and scalp. And as my swollen eyes open they activate a vacuum. This tightens the mask giving me an acute pain. It seems to be making my brain ache – a pounding as though a heart pumping blood. Now I’m seeing properly: it’s Bernadette. Have to fumble for the key to open the car window. But she’s screaming at me.

  ‘Don’t open the window, open the damned door you drunken fool.’

  Please Bernadette, change that line.

  She is pushing me towards the passenger seat. I’ll have to climb over the gear stick. She’s out of the car again and opening a rear door, flung two shopping bags into the back. Lights from The Neptune Hotel are throwing a yellow stain over the forecourt. The sea is listening from the seafront behind the hotel.

  Bernadette’s bottom lip quivers as she holds out her palm for the ignition key. Searching in my pockets, still drunk and having great difficulty in coordinating my actions. A halfwit here, I know. I’ll make it better next time.

  You can be a wise night owl, doctor. Follow us.

  The car is coughing, moving up the incline away from the town. Engine is roaring against the pull of gravity on this steep country road. Bernadette changes down to second gear. She’s gripping the steering wheel tightly and staring ahead without a single blink. We’re at the zenith of the hill. The road has levelled out. This night is crowding us and becoming a weighted load. The headlights are cutting a white channel ahead. A segment of pastey moon casting weak illumination. Bernadette still silent. I’m trying to speak but my tongue is made of papier-mâché; lips have desiccated. Must close burning eyes but the seat is revolving fast. I’m strapped helplessly in it, like on a funfair ride. Feeling ill with drink and despair, and self-recrimination.

  This mindroom needs much repair.

  I turn to look at a pulsating Bernadette. This action makes a steel ball roll inside my cranium, already leaden, already too heavy for my neck to support. Bangs at my temples. A light is emanating from her, impregnable.

  ‘Let me explain,’ I’ve managed to say, sounding strangled and pathetic.

  Still she stares impassivel
y ahead, unreachable and resistant. Her hands have organically meshed with the steering wheel.

  Buddhists chant for days to achieve a heightened state of being. But all I have to do is bend over the lavatory pan, hands on knees, and throw up. Feel the jerking contractions of diaphragm and burning in my gullet. Gasp in between spewing. Pull the flush. The vortex of water might as well be my mental state. I’ll have to swill.

  Switch the controllers off.

  ‘Thank you very much. I was watching that film.’ She’s scowling. Never seen that expression from her before. The blank television screen crackles with static. Needs covering with tin foil. I’ll amend that.

  ‘Talking to me, are you?’ I had to say it.

  ‘You were dribbling my name and sulking. What was the point?’

  ‘Give me a break, I drank a bit too much. Really am sorry, alright? Finally been sick so I feel clearer.’

  ‘Suppose I’m meant to forgive you.’ No, Bernadette, you say something different. ‘You knew you had to pick me up at half past seven. I think you must be brain-dead sometimes.’

  Just seen for the first time this evening the pads of puffed skin beneath her eyes. She must have been crying.

  This significant event must be stopped. I’ll think on other subjects. Lock this catastrophe of a mindroom and place a heavy barrier until I can repair properly.

  Whales once had hind legs. How remarkable that would have been. They have rudimentary bones in those massive carcasses, corresponding to hind limbs and a pelvic girdle.

  Stop…

  ‘How could you, Donald. I was getting scared, waiting outside of the mall at night. And all you did was get out of your head.’ She’s on her feet.

  ‘Not fair.’ I’ve made Bernadette draw in breath. ‘Let me explain, there’s daylight until nine.’