It was while I was wiping my hands clean with my handkerchief that I heard the dog. It had followed me through the empty station and was nosing through the bushes behind, tracking my scent. I thought of playing dead, but instead strode out into the footpath, holding out the diseased hands he had hated touching. I shrieked loudly at the top of my voice and this time the dirty creature stalking me ran a mile.
I mouthed words into the receiver as my fingers tapped nervously on the dull, metallic surface of the dial pad, flashing blue lights from the distant caravan site reflecting against it. When I looked up again, the policeman who’d come over to watch me hadn’t moved.
‘He put me in his bag,’ I said aloud, to the faint electric buzzing of the dial tone. ‘And took me to his caravan.’
The rain had returned. I peered out across the grass slope, trying to look preoccupied, as he began walking towards me.
‘Always had something on his face,’ I said, starting to sweat. I nudged the door ajar to inhale the fresh sea-air.
‘…he never took it off.’
I hung up.
Foolishly, as the officer reached me, I smiled.
‘On your way,’ he ordered, studying my face. As I walked back to town, one of the their cars followed me home.
Christie was drunk when he opened the door, and laughed openly at the state of my hands.
‘That won’t help you this time.’
I snatched the bottle from him and wandered through into the kitchen, swigging heavily from it as I sat down.
‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Are you now?’ he replied.
‘Thanks for putting me up.’
‘Always a pleasure.’ He grinned inanely, performing an awkward, drunken dance. ‘Always was.’
He began to sing an obscene song.
‘Why don’t you go to bed?’ I snapped, taking another swig from the bottle. I stood up, swaying, and put what was left back in the cupboard beneath the sink.
‘Your present’s in the lounge,’ he said.
I felt like I’d been hit.
‘The lounge?’
‘Sorry everything’s so late.’ He stopped moving long enough to light a cigarette. He appeared to be gasping for breath.
‘They’ve found something up at the site,’ I said.
‘They have indeed.’ He inhaled heavily, and blew the smoke back into my face. ‘I’ll have a car collect you tomorrow.’
Suddenly sheepish, he stumbled off in the direction of the stairs, moving up them much faster than I’d thought he was capable of.
I didn’t go in immediately, as the whiskey had made me feel nauseous. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and listened for a while to Christie crashing about in my room above.
When I did finally venture into the lounge, unlocked for the first time in thirty years, I noticed that our tree remained in exactly the same position it had stood on the day Christie first arrived. It was still bare, all its decorations having been burned ceremoniously by him in the weeks following my bereavement. Now, instead, something horribly familiar sat at the top, where my Daddy had once lifted me to place the fairy.
It was the man’s dog mask, and although all I could now see through its cruel eyeholes was the damp wall beyond, I realised that it belonged to Christie, and that he’d worn it here with me all these years, waiting for my courage to awaken.
And below, beneath the tree, was my present, wrapped up in newspapers and tied at the top with an ancient ribbon. It was a large, odd-looking object, bearing an old gift tag addressed to me that hung, quite still, from a small thread of dull, red cotton.
As I got down on my knees and crawled towards the parcel, the thread began to twitch and twist. A faint rustling noise sounded from the wrapping, where the taut sheets had begun to bulge gently back and forth, as though something trapped beneath them were beginning to breathe. When its long leg burst through the paper and pawed violently at the carpet in front, teeming with life, I rushed forward, eager to unwrap the rest.
Seeing Double
Sara Maitland
HIS MOTHER HAD died when he was born. His mother had been young and at the end of a long and very hard labour, made more exhausting by the size of the baby’s head. The mid-wife had acted promptly, gathering in the baby and carrying it away. She had washed and dressed it, before bringing it back to the mother, with a delicate lawn and lace bonnet framing its sweet little face. The mother had taken the child in her arms and smiled, though wearily; but she had made no apparent attempt to count its toes, fingers, eyes and mouths, and after a moment the midwife had turned away to her immediate duties. When she turned back the mother was dead; her face was frozen in a strange rictus, which might have been the consequence of a sudden sharp pain or might have been terror. The midwife, a woman of sturdy good sense and addicted to neither gin nor gossip, deftly massaged the mother’s face back into a more seemly expression and closed her large blue eyes forever.
His father, a hero of the nation, loved admired and honoured, but now retired to his family home in the mountains, grew gentle and sad. He spent most of his time walking in the high hills above the forest or in his library where he was slowly but steadily compiling a taxonomy of the local flora and fauna. He took tender but perhaps slightly distanced care of his only son. He created a pleasure palace for the child – his own small suite of rooms, opening through large airy glass doorways onto a pleasant shaded portico and beyond that a delightful secluded garden with high walls, climbable trees and a pool designed for swimming in. At considerable expense, and to the irritation of the local community, he employed the midwife as a permanent nanny and found a blind but nimble servant to assist her.
The child grew, grew strong and straight and healthy. When he was old enough his father would sometimes take him up into the forests and the mountains beyond the forests where he learned the names of all the butterflies and many of the flowers. Sometimes at night they would climb together onto the roof of the house and watch the stars, and his father taught him to trace and see the patterns of the noble constellations and told him the ancient Greek stories that gave the patterns their names.
The Christmas that he was eight, his father gave him a train set and together they built and developed it. When it grew too extensive for the nursery floor, his father opened up the attics and they created a whole little world there, with electric signals and tiny model towns; and model mountains with tunnels through them, so that the boy could wait in eager anticipation for the engine to emerge from the darkness and sound its miniature horn. They made and remade ever more complicated timetables and were anxious that the trains should run on time, and not crash into each other at the points.
Each evening, after his bath, and when he was all clean and warm and ready for bed, his father would come to tuck him up and give him his good night kisses, one on each cheek and one very gentle special one on the back of his head. Then his father would pull up the hood of his pyjamas, tie the strings and say, ‘God bless and keep you, little dark eyes,’ and the boy would snuggle down scarcely conscious of his own happiness.
He was twelve when he found out. One morning Nanny woke up sick – not very sick, but with a feverish headache and heavy eyes. When she did not go to the kitchen to collect the breakfast the housekeeper foolishly sent one of the younger maids through with the tray. The boy was already up, hungry and eager, though of course properly concerned about nanny. He was sitting cross-legged on the sofa reading a book. The maid plonked the tray down on the little table by the window and then stood there, fidgeting. The boy did not often see people other than Daddy and Nanny and the blind servant, and he was not sure how to behave. He smiled at the girl. He had a very sweet smile, like his father’s but younger and more carefree. She smiled back. She was not much older than he was and the differences between them, obvious to grown ups, were nearly invisible to them.
He said, ‘Hello.’
She bobbed a sort of half-curtsey and said, ‘Hello’ back.
There was a pause, in which he smiled some more and she fidgeted some more.
But in the end she could not resist. For fourteen years she had heard the talk and the secret murmurs, because no respect or even love for their Squire is going to keep his tenantry from gossip about him and his, from speculation and a mild mannered sort of malice. She was curious on her own behalf, and more tempted yet by the stir she will create in the servants’ hall at dinner. And he looked so sweet, with his huge dark eyes and a smile like his father’s. And she might never have another chance.
‘Go on,’ she said, ‘show us.’
He almost turned his book towards her, assuming she wanted to see the picture, but there was something, something else; even with his negligible social skills he knew there was something else.
‘Show you what?’ he asked, but still pleasantly, almost in his father’s kindly style, which unfortunately made her bolder.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘it.’
The new pause was longer; he really did not know and she, better attuned, as all servants are, to the nuances of social meaning realised that he really did not know. She had gone too far. She was embarrassed. But her shame made her even bolder.
‘You know,’ she said again, ‘The face, the other face; the back of your head.’
Instinctively he lifted his hand to the back of his head. Through the soft flannelette of his pyjama hood, he felt the back of his head lumpy, then moving. His hand was frozen for a moment. Then he felt something bite sharply into the fleshy pad at the bottom of his thumb.
He screamed.
Suddenly Nanny was standing in the door, her hair down, grey and straggling as neither of them had ever seen it, her face flushed with her fever and fury.
‘Be quiet,’ she said in a commanding tone, and then losing her grip on her anger, ‘Be quiet, you evil, wicked girl. Go away. Go away.’
Sobbing, the little maid ran from the room and the boy and his nanny listened to her clogs go rattling going down the passage.
‘Nanny?’ he said, and had she been well and wakeful it might yet have been alright; she might have given him a cuddle and he would have shown her his hand and she could have magicked a pin out of his pyjama hood and told him she was a silly old nanny for leaving it there. But the headache was stronger than her wisdom and all she wanted was her bed.
‘It was nothing, darling,’ she said quickly, ‘nothing at all. Just a silly girl. A very naughty little girl, probably trying to be funny. We won’t be seeing her again. Now eat up your breakfast and go and play in the garden.’
He ate up his breakfast and went into the garden but not to play. He had so seldom been lied to directly that he did not understand it. Thought and speech were one in his closed world. But he knew, he knew that nanny had made a deliberate gap between her thoughts and her words. He went into the garden, but not to play. There was playing, which was not relevant; there was hearing, which was not trustworthy; there was seeing which was not possible. There was touching and feeling. He looked at the little red mark at the base of his thumb, which was beginning to bruise and very tentatively, very, very carefully, using only his finger tips and ready for sudden attack he began to explore the back of his head.
After an hour he knew. And knowing, he knew that he had always known. There was another face: he could feel its nose through the flannelette of his hood, shorter perhaps than his own, though hard to tell, but with two indentations for nostrils, certainly; he could feel its lips though carefully with the flat of his hand so as not to get bitten again. He knew already it had teeth. He thought he could feel the hinge of its jaw moving just behind his ears.
He could not untie the string of his hood, but after some effort he worked it loose enough to pull it back from his head. He placed his two hands delicately on the back of his head, either side of its nose, and could feel the hollow underneath his palms. He waited and felt a flutter, like a butterfly’s footfall. It was blinking. He pulled his hood back on and wriggled the knot tight. He went inside and sat on the sofa again and chanted his times tables, all the way from one-two-is-two to twelve-twelves-are-one-hundred-and-forty-four over and over again, all day long.
Later on, just as the day began to fade, he left his room very quietly so as not to disturb nanny and went along the passage to find his father. After he had passed the bottom of the stairs that went up the attic he did not really know the way. He opened various doors into various rooms all heavy with dust and cold. A huge cold dining room with twelve empty chairs and faded red velvet curtains; a room with an even bigger table covered in green cloth; there were no chairs and the edge of the table was turned up – he did not know what it was for. There was a long passage, a huge hall almost dark, and a room with little uncomfortable sofas and lots of little tables with lots of little things on them – that room was lighter, with long windows looking out over the shaggy field that his father called ‘the lawn’; he had only ever seen it from high up on the hillside. That room seemed a strange thing to him because it was both beautiful and pretty. He had not known that something could be both. But his father was not there.
He came to a door with light coming out underneath it. He opened it very softly. The room was warm and clean and wonderfully untidy, with precarious piles of paper and books stacked up or lying on the floor, as nanny never let him leave his. His father was sitting with his back to the boy; his bald head inclined forward over a large desk. The boy could see that he was writing. He watched him, watched the smooth back of his skull and the slight movement of his elbow.
His father was unaware of him. After quite a long while the boy said, ‘Daddy.’
His father raised his head, apparently without shock or surprise and said, ‘Hello, what are you doing here? I was just going to come for you. It must have been a boring day for you with Nanny hors de combat.’ He often had to guess what his father meant, and it did not worry him. ‘But you must learn not to be impatient.’
‘I am not impatient,’ he said with dignity. ‘I have come to ask you something of grave importance.’
‘And what is that?’ His father smiled at the formality of the announcement.
‘I need to ask you why there is someone else on the back of my head.’
The boy was aware that the warm peace of the study was broken. It made him wary – his father was a hero of the nation and should not be afraid of anything. He said nothing, awkward now. After a pause his father said, ‘How did you find out?’ He sounded weary.
‘It bit me.’ The boy walked towards the desk holding out his hand.
He was almost too big to climb into his father’s lap but the older man held him close, kissing the small bruise. He sagged there for a while exhausted by the long slow day, but it was not enough,
‘But why, Daddy?’
‘I don’t know,’ his father said, ‘no one knows. It is a strange and mysterious thing.’
‘Couldn’t you take it away?’
‘No, no, I’m afraid not. But it is not a someone, it is a part of you.’ The boy could hear a strange insistent urgency in his father’s voice; and he thought it might be fear. So his father was afraid of something. The boy’s world shivered, threatened. Perhaps it was his own fear that made him daring, because even as he asked, he knew it was a dangerous question. He asked, ‘Is it what killed my mummy?’
‘No.’ But the no was too loud, too strong, too resolute. It was like Nanny’s ‘naughty girl’; it was true but not true; the speaker chose it to be true although there were other choices which the speaker did not choose. Grown-ups, he learned far too suddenly, spoke with double voices, cunningly, so that true and not true weren’t like white and black, like either-or, like plus and minus; they were like the bogs on the hill side, shifty, invisible and dangerous.
His father’s revulsion from the boy’s deformity was very strong. Because he was a man of self-discipline rather than courage he would never admit this even to himself; this was why, each evening, he obliged his often relu
ctant lips to kiss the secret face so tenderly. This was why, too, he missed the boy’s curiosity and tried to offer him consolation instead of information.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘have I ever shown you a picture of your mother?’ He turned the boy’s head very gently towards a miniature set up on a filigree easel on his desk. She smiled there, all pink and blond and blue-eyed. She was pretty. But it was a picture, a painting; the boy knew that paintings did not always look like the thing they were paintings of. He could never be sure. And he did not much care; he had other things on his mind. But he understood that his father had let him into a secret place of his own and deserved some sort of thanks. He tried, slightly experimentally, to say the right thing, to do that grown-up speaking which makes a gap between the feelings and the thoughts and the words.
‘I don’t look much like her, do I Daddy?’
He had got it right. He felt his father smiling. ‘No, you look more like me, and bad luck to you, except that men should never be that pretty.’ Their dark eyes met in what the father thought was a sweet moment of male complicity and bonding. And a little later they went upstairs, hand in hand, to play with their train set.
But the day had been too difficult and his need had not been met. What he had learned was not about the other face, but about the way grown-ups did not want to talk about the other face. There was something dark and horrible about it. They were ashamed. They wanted him to keep it secret with them and from them.
But alone, alone in the darkness of night, and the deeper darkness of its invisibility, with delicate and attentive fingers, he began to explore the back of his head. He learned that what hurt it, hurt him, so he had to treat it tenderly; he learned that it blinked when he blinked, but did not smile when he smiled, or weep when he wept; he learned that its nose never dribbled, but if he pinched its nostrils closed, it did not breath through its mouth, but he became breathless; he learned that he could make it happy or angry, but that it seldom bothered to be sad.
The New Uncanny Page 5
