Come a Little Closer

by Karen Perry

  Anton walks home alone. Despair has opened inside him. All these years he has pushed back hard against it. But now the last bulwark against it has collapsed: his own son is convinced he’s a killer.

  All he wants now is to be left in peace. He doesn’t look at Hilary’s house as he walks up Wyndham Park. Instead he keeps his eyes on the pavement, offering up a silent prayer that he won’t meet anyone he knows. He couldn’t handle it right now.

  He closes the gate behind him, and begins to climb the steps. Up ahead, in front of the door, Anton sees that an old coat or soiled blanket has been kicked in there. But as he gets closer, he notices the snout, the blackened tips of the ears, and the weeping cavity where an eye had been eaten out by insects or birds. He halts his progress, recoiling in horror.

  On more than one occasion in the past a vixen had made her home at the back of his garden, parading her progeny across his lawn in the hour before dusk. Anton has no idea where foxes go to die – urban creatures, mangy with disease, seeking out a quiet spot close to human habitation in which to expire. But Anton knows that this dead creature had been placed there on his doorstep. It’s a message. Over the past few weeks there have been several. Birds, bags of dog shit, and now a fox.

  He glances back at the quiet street. The evening sunlight shines strongly through the trees. From hidden gardens come sounds of unseen kids screaming, dogs barking. All that noisy living, it makes him uncomfortable, as if he’s trespassing.

  Suspicions start to stir to life inside him.

  The light is draining from the day when the idea comes to him. It was Mark who planted the seed. An idea so simple there’s a kind of purity to it.

  He waits until the hour is right. Then he goes upstairs and starts running a bath, leaving the water flowing, while back downstairs, he fixes himself a whisky, counts out the pills. There’s a science to it, and he’s careful not to go too far. Using a pestle and mortar he crushes the tablets to powder.

  The bath is hot. He sinks into it, closes his eyes, feels it all seep from him. Waves of sadness and disappointment and faded dreams. He is a man who has been pushed beyond all endurance and yet still he has survived. The leg with the security bracelet is slung outside the bath. It’s a risk, and yet it’s worth the gamble. He’s got nothing left to lose.

  And in those last few moments before consciousness leaves him, he thinks of Agamemnon, returning from Troy. His body weary and used. His soul darkened and bloody and needing to be cleansed. He wonders if Agamemnon welcomed the water as he slipped into his bath. Did he see the shadow of his wife fall over it as she approached with her net and her knife? Or were his eyes closed against the light, locked in the memory of another woman, another girl brought to sacrifice?

  15

  Leah

  Leah wakes to the sound of rain. She listens to its distant patter, a child’s cry echoing up from her dream. She knows not to trust this cry. Knows it’s not real. For a moment, she lies there, listening to the rain, waiting for her heartbeat to steady itself. If she concentrates on her breathing, the moment will pass.

  She is lying on the sofa in the living room, darkness pressing all around her. Her breasts feel heavy and tender, her mouth parched. When she tries to sit up, pain communicates itself through her neck and back, searing through the muddiness of her thoughts.

  The flat feels empty around her. Jake’s absence confuses her. It’s difficult to gauge the time, and she’s unsure of where her phone is. Distantly, she remembers him leaving earlier that evening to take Matthew home to his mother. That was when she had lain down on the sofa, exhausted from their afternoon, and from the child’s whinnying demands, his petulant sulks, all their efforts to appease him. She must have fallen asleep, sinking far deeper than she had intended. Touching her fingertips to her forehead, she feels the tightness of her skin and recalls, with a groan of regret, the hours spent under the blazing heat of the sun in Hilary and Greg’s garden. The feeling of desiccation runs deeply through her, as if every cell in her body is crying out for hydration.

  In the darkness, she makes her way to the kitchen sink. She runs the tap and leans over the basin, scooping water with her bare hand into her mouth, lapping like a cat. After a minute, she turns off the tap and leans on the counter, her whole body swamped with tiredness. The little digital clock on the cooker, the numbers normally illuminated green, is dark. And when Leah reaches for the switch on the wall and flicks it, the lights fail to come on.

  ‘Great,’ she says aloud. A power cut.

  Through the darkness, her eyes are drawn to the moonlight falling on the patio slabs beyond the French windows, pressing up behind it the deep black mass of the garden. Her thoughts run to candles and matches, with no idea of whether they possess these things or where they might be.

  By now, her eyes have adjusted to the dark. She seeks out her phone and finds it on the kitchen table. When she presses it, she sees it’s well past midnight. Scrolling quickly through, she finds no message from Jake, no WhatsApp to explain his delayed absence, no voicemail to check she’s okay. Instinctively, she starts to call him, but before she hits the button, hesitation stays her thumb. Anxiety pulses through her, a niggling doubt. She thinks of him going back to that little house with Matthew, imagines Jenna waiting, sun-kissed from a day in the garden, sipping a cool beer. Perhaps the suggestion is made that he stay a while, just until the boy is asleep. Her imagination tumbles forward, unspooling into dark corners. The two of them – Jake and his ex – sitting alongside each other in the twilit garden, sharing a beer, laughing over something their son has said or done, that old connection announcing itself suddenly, surprising them both. Despite the warmth of the day, Leah feels cold.

  They had loved each other once, Jake and Jenna. Leah knows that much. Too young to withstand the pressures of an unplanned pregnancy. But surely there must still be times when he remembers the early days of their love. And when he does remember, perhaps, occasionally, the memories are tinged with regret. The siren song of what might have been.

  The steady patter of water continues in the background, as she puts her phone down. The house is so quiet. Apart from the rain, there is no noise from upstairs.

  It is only now, as her gaze drifts outside to the garden once more, that she realizes the paving slabs on the patio are dry. Beyond, the trees are still, no dripping leaves, no dusting of raindrops on the furniture outside. There are no rivulets tracking down the French windows. It is perfectly dry outside. Yet she can hear water running – she is sure of it.

  Listening acutely, she tries to reorient herself. It seems to be coming from Matthew’s room. Using her phone as a torch, Leah pads across the floor, and when she opens the door and shines the light inside, water is streaming down the walls. The little bed is soaked through, the duvet and pillows sodden and dark. Quickly, she pulls it away from the wall, and cries out with alarm to feel the water pooling on the boards beneath her feet. Directing the torchlight of her phone to the ceiling, she sees an ugly brown stain spreading through the plasterwork, small chinks appearing before her eyes as new leaks break through.

  Hurrying back into the kitchen, she grabs saucepans from the shelf, and hastens back to the little bedroom, placing them underneath the worst of the leaks, but it’s difficult in the darkness to see where the water is coming from and the rapid flow frightens her.

  Quickly now, she goes outside, climbs the run of steps that leads up to the back door and starts banging.

  ‘Anton?’ she calls, pausing to look up at the house.

  All the windows are dark. She hammers again, then presses her face to the glass, trying to see inside, but there are only shadows and the distant sound of running water. It is clear that the source of her leak is within the upstairs rooms of the house.

  Back downstairs, she races through the flat, alarmed at the spread of water fanning out across the floor from Matthew’s room, and goes out through the front door. But all the windows to the front of the house are dark, too, and when she ba
ngs on the knocker and yells through the letterbox, only silence greets her, the house implacably closed to her.

  She is panicking now, unsure of how to proceed. She starts to call Greg but then remembers the door in the inner hall that links the flat to the house upstairs. She has to press her hip against it to slide the bolt, but when she does, the door opens easily.

  The staircase is dark, a dank smell invading her nostrils. She moves blindly up the steps until she reaches the door at the top, and it is only now, as she pushes it open, that she feels hesitation. The silence of the house announces itself. The vastness of the space looms in the cavernous hall. Doors open on to rooms dark with unfamiliar furniture. She tries to recall the layout of the space from the one occasion she has been here, at the same time waiting for her eyes to adapt to the gloom.

  The steady drip and patter of water calls to her, and she knows that it’s coming from upstairs. She puts an unsteady hand to the banister, and begins her ascent.

  ‘Hello?’ she calls. ‘Anton?’ But her voice is less forceful now that she is in his space, cowed by the unfamiliarity, the persistent sense that she is trespassing in the home of a possible killer. Fear fills her chest as she moves blindly up the stairs, alert for sudden movements from the shadows.

  As she reaches the top step, the carpet squelches. The floor is saturated, and it stirs an urgency within her, pushing her forward. She follows the noise and gathers her nerves at the door before pushing it open on to the bathroom.

  The noise of the water reaches its crescendo here, both taps open as water spills over the lip of the bath, splashing off the tiled floor before running off into corners. Immediately she sees a leg draped over the side of the enamel, skin grey in the dim light, an arm dangling, his head partially submerged. An involuntary cry escapes her lips as she rushes forward, turns off the taps and plunges her hand deep into the water to release the plug. She grapples with the body, trying to haul Anton up beneath his armpits but his skin is slippery and his weight made heavy with water and lifelessness. He slithers from her grasp and she has to plunge her arms in again, trying to gain some kind of purchase.

  The water is tepid, and his skin is so cold against hers that she thinks he must surely be dead, yet still she struggles and eventually marshals enough strength to haul him out. The thud of his body on the tiled floor fills her with a new dread.

  ‘Anton!’ she screams, looking for signs of life in his face, but there’s nothing. She has dropped her phone on the floor in her fright, and when she reaches for it now, she offers up a silent prayer that it will still work.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ she says, but as she presses and presses the buttons, the screen fails to light and she lets out a cry of frustration.

  He is stretched out on the floor beside her, inert, and when his hand turns and brushes off her knee, she drops the phone and leans over him, saying his name with a new urgency. She presses her head against his chest, the blood pounding in her ears making it difficult to detect any other noise, but then she catches it – the faintest rhythm. A frail unsteady beat.

  It spurs a new resolve within her, and she hurries out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, feeling her way through the dark until she finds a phone, an old prayer surfacing in her brain as she punches in three digits and listens to the dial tone.

  Suicide. The word makes her shudder. She sits on a plastic chair in the hospital corridor, shivering, and tries hard not to think about the moment she discovered Anton lying there. Leah has found that, over the years, she has had some success with blocking out difficult events from her memory. The tricks she has learnt to stave off an attack of unwanted thoughts whenever she feels it coming upon her. Tricks like focusing on her breathing, or willing her mind to occupy a different thought, a neutral safe place.

  Her clothes, she realizes, are soaked. She’s shaking like a drunk with delirium tremens. A nurse puts a blanket around her and gives her a plastic cup of milky tea.

  ‘He’s in the best place,’ the nurse tells Leah. She has a country accent, a rural warmth to her.

  There’s nothing to do but wait. At Reception, they’d asked her for Anton’s details, but there was little she could tell them. She had no contact number for his next of kin, and her own phone was inert, rendered useless by water. They’d allowed her to use their phone, and she’d tried calling Jake, but his mobile was switched off. She wonders where he is, what he’s doing.

  The tea helps and she closes her eyes, feeling a stillness entering her body, aware of the hard plastic of the chair beneath her. The past is tugging at her, and tonight, as she waits, she allows herself to go back there, to another time, another place, when she was a different person, her whole life ahead of her.

  She was fifteen the summer it happened.

  ‘Are you sure, now, Leah?’ Mrs Hannigan had asked, and Leah had said, yes, she was sure, then laughed because Mrs Hannigan had already asked her that three times.

  ‘It’s just for Saturday. And we’ll leave early enough so we’ll be back by midnight – one at the latest.’

  ‘There’s no rush,’ Leah had said. ‘Honestly.’

  Mrs Hannigan was the music teacher at school, and since she was nine years old, Leah had been going to Mrs Hannigan’s house for private piano lessons two afternoons a week. The Hannigans were a youngish couple – he worked for Guinness, a rep for the region – and they had a little boy, Cian, who was eight months old when they asked her if she’d babysit. Yvonne and Jim, as they kept urging her to call them, had been invited to the wedding of one of Jim’s college friends in Belfast, a two-hour drive away.

  ‘Any problems, anything at all,’ Yvonne had urged her, ‘you’re to call me.’

  They’d left the phone number of the hotel, as well as Jim’s mobile, and she’d promised to alert them if anything happened, or if she felt she couldn’t cope. But she knew she could. Cian was a sweet baby whom she’d known since he was born, and it wasn’t the first time she’d babysat for him. With his fat round face and blond curls, there was a comedy to his sweetness that touched something within her. Even then, in the throes of her adolescence, a victim of hormonal mood swings and irrational rages, something about him reached inside her and brought out softness and affection that were just for him.

  ‘How’s everything there?’ Yvonne had asked, when she rang that evening, and Leah had held the phone up to the baby’s mouth so that his mother could hear him gurgling, making his own sweet, happy noises.

  ‘Listen, we had some trouble with the car on the way here,’ Yvonne had told her. ‘I’m a bit nervous about travelling back in the dark, in case it breaks down. Would it be too much to ask you to stay over until the morning?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Leah had said.

  ‘Just say, now, if you’ve had enough. I know he can be exhausting and you’ve already given up so much of your weekend.’

  ‘Honestly. I don’t mind.’

  And she didn’t. Yvonne promised they’d be home first thing in the morning, in time to give Cian his feed. When Leah’s mother called in to check she’d be all right for the night, Leah was firm about sending her mother away, determined to do this all by herself.

  She began playing a fantasy game. Alone in the house with the baby, she imagined that the Hannigans’ home, with its framed old movie posters and shelves full of vinyls, was her own home. When she reached to take Cian from his bouncer, she imagined it was her own child she was lifting, her own son held against her shoulder, the softness of his hair against her face.

  He giggled and splashed in the bath, playing with his toys. Afterwards, he lay on the changing table, his flesh all naked and warm, pink and chubby. Kicking his legs and laughing, he pulled his little fat foot towards his gummy mouth, making his high-pitched gurgling sounds. She was laughing and tickling him with one hand, the other reaching for the cotton wool and the baby lotion. It was just there, over by the sink.

  Afterwards, she held him close against her chest, rocking him in her arms, saying, �
�Shush, there. Shush,’ even though he wasn’t crying. She kept checking him over, looking for bumps, evidence of bruising, but there was nothing.

  He took his bottle and she put him to bed. Twice in the night, she went in to check on him.

  She was still asleep on the fold-out couch in the sitting room when Yvonne and Jim got back. Blinking awake, she sat up, embarrassed.

  ‘Morning, Sleeping Beauty,’ Jim said, smirking at her bed-head, her sleepy confusion.

  For just a moment, she forgot all about the previous evening.

  But then Yvonne laughed too and said, ‘Where’s Cian? Don’t tell me he’s still sleeping.’

  ‘I wish I was,’ Jim remarked, a bleary hung-over look about him, and Yvonne slapped him playfully and said she’d go upstairs to rouse the baby.

  ‘How was the wedding?’ Leah asked Jim.

  She cannot recall his answer. That part of it has become lost to her. All she remembers is folding the duvet over the couch and listening.

  That was when, upstairs, the screaming began.

  The strip lighting of the fluorescent bulbs in the hospital ceiling burns against her eyes. She opens them a fraction, a hand squeezing her shoulder, bringing her back to the present. The nurse’s voice, warm with comfort: ‘You can come in and see him now, love.’

  Anton, heavily sedated, his stomach pumped, his lungs sucked dry, lies narrow and still in the bed.

  It’s just the two of them in the room, but Leah feels awkward, as if she’s being watched by an unseen third party. She approaches the bed cautiously. After a moment, she reaches out to touch Anton’s hand. ‘I’m heading off, Anton,’ she says. ‘You’re safe now.’

  Anton doesn’t react. No flutter of eyelids, no inclination of his head to indicate he’s heard. He looks so vulnerable, so alone in that big room.