by Karen Perry
17
Anton
A vase of sweet peas adorns the bedside locker. While he has been in hospital, the bedroom has been tidied and aired, the sheets changed. He had not wanted to come home, and now that he sees these kindnesses from his son, Anton feels sad and ashamed. What kind of a father is he? Outside in the hall, the carpets have been ripped up. Discarded, he presumes, although he hasn’t asked. He hardly cares.
Downstairs, Mark is busy in the kitchen, making tea. He intends to treat Anton like an invalid – he’s said as much already. Passing along the landing on the way to his room, Anton had glanced through the open door to the front bedroom – a room he still thinks of as Charlotte’s – and there he had seen a travel bag unzipped and open on the floor, clothes, shoes, books falling out of it, deodorant and aftershave sitting atop the dressing-table. Anton is unhappy about having his son to stay. He doesn’t want company, can’t bear the thought of being constantly watched. And he feels an accompanying sense of failure and apprehension. Mark should not be here. This house is not good for him.
Anton closes the window in his bedroom, glances outside. The garden is empty: no laundry pinned to the clothes line and fluttering in the breeze; no movement from the patio below. Downstairs feels curiously silent. They must have gone, he surmises. They must have moved on. He can hardly blame them. He had taken his chance, and it had backfired. Anton turns away.
He takes off his shoes and lies down on the bed, closes his eyes. Immediately, he hears Charlotte in his head.
‘Have you been a naughty boy, Anton?’
Her voice is sly in the lidded darkness. A hard edge undercutting the playful tone.
In the hospital, his mind had been quiet. But always she waits for him. Biding her time, like a faithful lover – his Penelope – watching for his return.
‘Think I don’t see, Anton? Do you think I’m thick, or blind?’
An old argument, dusted off, unspooling in his thoughts. His own voice played back at him, weary, disingenuous: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, woman.’
‘Your little friend downstairs. That plain mouse.’
You cross a line – a word said, a phrase used – and something changes. His heart hardened.
‘I’ve seen you sniffing around her, like a dog in heat. Pathetic.’ Eyes narrowed, a plume of smoke coming from her mouth. Half cut and not even lunchtime yet.
‘You’re drunk,’ he’d told her.
‘Maybe. But not stupid.’
‘You’re imagining things. There’s nothing going on.’
These words spoken in their bedroom across the hall. Outside, a lawnmower whining. The smell of fresh-cut grass sneaking in through the open window.
‘Are you going to tell me about her? Come on, then. I want all the gory details,’ she’d demanded, and he’d ignored her, kept buttoning his shirt under her watchful gaze, his eyes on his reflection in the wardrobe mirror.
He’d tucked in his shirt, paused to run a hand through his hair, examining his hairline in the mirror. Something about that gesture had enraged her, because she was on him then like a cat, clawing at him, plucking and scratching. He felt the burn of her cigarette on the inside of his wrist as he tried to get her under control. Her arm banged on the wardrobe, the mirrored door swinging back, and he saw Mark reflected there, hiding in the hall beyond, eyes wide in his solemn face.
Anton sleeps intermittently through the day, waiting.
His throat is dry and sore. His head hurts. A sour taste in his mouth, his tongue furred and parched. The bed feels lumpy beneath him, the sheets bunched and coming away from the mattress, but he hasn’t the energy to tuck them back into place. The Mr Men wallpaper surrounds him and his eyes move over their figures, tracing the repeating pattern, the bright colours dulled with age. Years ago, he had sat in this room, reading bedtime stories to his children. The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Henny Penny, Winnie the Pooh. He sang songs to them, recited nursery rhymes. Cautionary tales couched in childish language. He wonders what lessons they learnt from them.
Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly.
’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy.
Cassandra liked that one, drawn to the macabre, the delicious shudder of horror it brought to her little shoulders. Teddy bears and trains printed over her nightdress.
All so long ago.
A door opens downstairs, and he listens to the footsteps coming up the stairs – slow and deliberate. He knows it’s not her. Knows she won’t come.
Mark pushes open the door with his elbow. Anton opens his eyes, tries to sit up.
‘There,’ Mark says, putting the tray on the empty chair. Charlotte’s china, neatly arranged. Slices of cake.
He reaches behind Anton, pulls the pillows up so that they’re supporting the small of his back. ‘How’re you feeling?’ he asks.
‘Tired.’
Mark takes a seat near the end of the bed. ‘I’ve been doing a bit of work in the garden,’ he says. ‘Jesus, it’s a real mess.’
‘Yes, I imagine it is.’ Anton’s head aches. He is too tired for conversation. Longs for the boy to go and leave him in peace. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
‘I’ve taken some time off.’
‘I don’t want you clucking around me, like a hen.’ He sees the instant hurt in Mark’s eyes and is angered by how easy it is to wound him. This feeling is chased by regret. ‘Sorry, son. I just need to be on my own for a while.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘I’ve managed for years without you looking over my shoulder, haven’t I?’ Words spoken, not unkindly.
‘True.’
The question pulses between them, unsaid. Please don’t ask me, Anton thinks.
‘So, then, why now?’
‘It was a mistake,’ Anton says quickly. He can’t bring himself to meet Mark’s gaze.
‘But –’
‘A stupid mistake. I didn’t mean it, all right? Now, can we just leave it?’ Anger leaking into his tone.
‘I need to know you’re okay.’
‘Why?’ Exasperation punching through the word.
The look Mark gives him. It’s like the boy is six years old once more, looking for reassurance.
‘Because you’re my dad.’
Sudden emotion comes as a lump into his throat. He shakes his head. There is nothing he can give him now. His hands are empty. Hoarsely, Anton says: ‘Let me rest, son. Please.’
At the door, Mark hesitates, concern in his face as he looks down at Anton. ‘Call me if you need anything.’
Days drift by. Anton loses track. People come and go. He hears them from the confines of his room. Builders come to repair the damage. The house reverberates with the sound of hammers and drills, radios tuned to some tinny pop station, the syncopated beat and syrupy love-songs drifting up the stairs to him. He hears Mark talking to them, haggling over prices, instructing them to do the bare minimum. There is strain in his voice – Anton hears it, knows the lad is out of his depth, but he cannot help him. He cannot face anyone. In bed, he turns over and faces the wall.
He thinks about Leah. Somewhere in those fevered hours while he drifted in and out of consciousness, he caught snatches of her presence. The brush of her hair against his temple. The sound of her voice in his ear.
‘I know,’ she had whispered. ‘I understand.’
But this memory cannot be verified or trusted. He’d only wanted to feel close to her, but he’d thrown away his chance.
He doesn’t ask Mark about her. Doesn’t want to worry his son further. When he hears the hammering downstairs in the basement, he imagines the walls being stripped of plaster, the floors ripped up. The bones of the place exhumed.
‘Seven fifty. Eight hundred, if you’re lucky.’
A woman’s voice downstairs.
Anton pulls back the blankets, swings his legs out of bed.
Opening the door slowly, he hears the voices grow louder, ident
ifies his son’s words, his agitation.
‘Is that all? I mean, I’ve looked online. There are houses round here going for way more than that.’
‘Let me guess. You thought it would be at least seven figures?’
Anton tiptoes to the stairs, puts a hand to the banister. From where he is standing, if he angles his head he can just glimpse them. Blonde hair arranged into a neat chignon. A black trouser suit, handbag over her shoulder, a clipboard in her hands. He cannot see her face. They stand by the bottom of the stairs, Mark peering down at a sheet of paper, tension in his shoulders.
‘The market is slow at the moment,’ the woman says. ‘Houses like this one – large properties in need of a serious cash injection – are challenging to sell right now. People are worried about Brexit, and the recession is not in the distant past either. Buyers remember. And this house needs at least two hundred thousand pumped into it before you could even move in.’
Anton listens as she reels off all the negatives, needled by a sense of intrusion. Anger stirs to life inside him, caused by her presence, by Mark’s presumption. He grips the banister tightly.
‘Eight hundred thousand is still a lot of money,’ the woman says.
‘What if we were to paint it,’ Mark says, ‘maybe put in an Ikea kitchen?’
‘Look, Mr Woodbury – Mark.’ She softens a bit. Her voice drops, grows conspiratorial. Anton strains to hear. ‘Attracting a buyer would be difficult enough but we have an added problem here. Yours is what we term in the business a stigmatized property.’
The sour taste is back in Anton’s mouth. He starts softly down the stairs.
‘It refers to a property that buyers may shun for reasons unrelated to its features or physical condition,’ she goes on, unaware of Anton coming down behind her. ‘People are squeamish at the thought of their house having once been the site of a suicide, or a murder.’
‘It’s not haunted,’ Mark says, laughing a little but it’s clear she’s offended him.
‘Listen, I’m just pointing out the facts. Personally, it wouldn’t bother me.’ Then, her voice changing, losing its edge of professionalism, she asks: ‘So your father is out of prison, then?’
Anton bristles at her curiosity. Her prurience.
‘That’s right,’ Mark answers stiffly.
‘And you’re all right with him?’ she asks. ‘I mean, it was your mother he killed, wasn’t it? And yet you’re living here with him? You’ve forgiven him?’
‘That’s really none of your business,’ Mark says, and then he looks up and sees Anton.
The woman turns around. Her eyes, heavily fringed with mascaraed lashes, flare with interest and disdain. And Anton sees himself through her gaze: an old man in his pyjamas, wild and bewildered, a dangerous animal on the loose.
The door bangs behind her, and Mark sighs heavily, guilt in the eyes he raises to meet Anton’s.
‘This is my house,’ Anton says, his voice low with anger. ‘I say what happens to it. Do you hear?’
‘Fine,’ Mark answers, moving towards the kitchen, like a sulky teenager. ‘But I don’t know why you stay here. There’s nothing but bad memories and ghosts.’
He sleeps, and when he dreams, images flood through him awash with violence. He dreams of Nigel and Salim, of Fat Eric and Liddy Fitz. He dreams they are back in the prison gym, and that he is on the bench press, trapped beneath barbells that have fallen on his chest. He tries to cry out, but there is just the echo of his own voice, joining the chorus of souls crying out for pity or justice. Fat Eric approaches, and Anton tries to ask for help. In the corner, a small boy plays with his toys, not watching. Fat Eric pushes down on the barbells, bursting Anton’s chest. He feels blood rushing into the cavity behind his ribcage, but when he opens his eyes, it’s not Eric pushing down on him, but Charlotte, her dress hanging open, revealing the livid wound. Anton’s heart is engorged, blood rising into his mouth – he tastes the salt of it on his tongue.
He wakes, his skin cold and slick with sweat. Pressing his tongue gingerly against the inside of his lip, he tastes blood. When he puts his fingers to it, they come away red.
Voices in the hallway. Whispers coming up the stairs.
He cannot cope with this. Cannot cope with Mark’s ministrations, his concern. He needs to be alone with his thoughts and his memories.
The voices grow nearer, and he feels his anger bubbling up from within. When the door opens, he turns, eyes wild, ready to pounce.
‘I’ve brought someone to see you,’ Mark says gently.
And then she steps into the room behind him, and instantly his anger falls away.
The nursery rhyme in his head again:
The Spider turned him round about and went into his den,
For well he knew the silly Fly would soon come back again …
The smallest smile pulls at her lips. Shyness in her gaze.
He holds out his hand to her. ‘Come a little closer,’ he says.
18
Leah
‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ Mark had asked. ‘It’ll just be for a week or two.’
‘It’s no problem,’ Leah had assured him.
It was only afterwards that she considered what Jake might say about it. How he would react. She knew without having to ask that he wouldn’t be happy.
Still, she had made the commitment, and it wasn’t much to ask, really. That she keep an eye on Anton, check in on him from time to time. She could easily call up for five minutes after work each day.
Mark would be away, filming a commercial overseas, and he was worried about leaving his father alone. ‘Terrible timing,’ he had told her. ‘What with everything.’
‘These things can’t be helped.’
The conversation took place in the kitchen of the big house, their tones hushed as though Anton might be listening. Downstairs, in the basement flat, two workmen were re-plastering the rooms at the back where the water damage lay.
‘It goes without saying,’ Mark said, ‘that I won’t be charging you rent this month.’
‘Oh. Well … thank you. Are you sure? I mean …’
‘How could I in all conscience? The mess of the place – it’s hardly habitable.’
In the immediate aftermath of the event, Jake had wanted them to move out.
‘But where would we go?’ Leah had asked, on her knees picking up bits of detritus and dumping them in a bucket. Between them, they had carried their sofa outside into the garden, along with the mattress from Matthew’s bed, hoping that the good weather would hold and they could dry out in the sun.
‘We’d find somewhere. I’ll send out word. Someone will give us a sofa or a floor.’
But Leah didn’t want to go back to that. She would rather stay and face the discomfort and intrusion of the clean-up than subject themselves to the insecurity of sofa-surfing, reliant on the temporary goodwill of friends.
‘Besides,’ Mark says to her now, ‘after what you did for Dad that night, I really owe you.’
‘I’m just glad I was there,’ she answers truthfully.
‘It must have been awful,’ Mark says, his eyes fixed on her in a way that made her go very still. ‘Finding him like that. It must have been a terrible shock.’
She shrugs, made embarrassed by the sombreness of his tone, but also flushed at the memory of that night.
Yes, it had been shocking. Frightening, even. But there was also something about it that had felt … intimate. She had pressed her ear to his bare chest, found the faint heartbeat. In the ambulance, she had stroked his hair.
‘And, look, I’m sure he won’t try anything again,’ Mark tells her. ‘He’s still a bit low, but he seems quite stable. Remorseful, in fact.’
As he led her up the stairs, she could not help but think back to the previous time she had been there, the confusion of darkness and water, the fear that had drummed in her veins.
And now she stands in the doorway, looking past Mark to where Anton is crouched in his bed. She
is shocked by what she sees: how thin and pale and hollow he looks, the skin on his face dry as tissue.
‘Ah. It’s my saviour,’ he croaks when he sees her.
All the colour seems to have drained from him. She watches as he struggles to sit up in his bed, fighting an instinct to rush forward and help him. A flash of memory comes to her – those moments while waiting for the ambulance to come, she had held his hand.
‘I’ve asked Leah to look in on you over the next couple of weeks while I’m away,’ Mark explains.
‘There’s really no need,’ Anton says, and there’s bewilderment on his face, a pleading in his eyes as he gazes up at his son. She feels the rise of his anxiety, his dignity shredded at being infantilized. ‘I don’t want to be a burden.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ she says gently. ‘Please, Anton. I’d like to visit you.’
His eyes go to hers, the lids half closing in relief or surrender. He manages a weak smile. ‘Very well, my dear.’
The first evening, she comes to him straight after work. She is still in her office clothes, her hair pinned back off her face. When she comes up the inner staircase, she is purposefully noisy, her low-heeled shoes clattering on the bare boards. She doesn’t want to startle him. When she calls his name, something stirs overhead.
He’s in his bed, cheeks sunken, although his expression seems to brighten when she comes into the room.
‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ she tells him. ‘Let’s go outside.’
She has set up chairs for them on the grass beneath the tree. There is dappled shade, and he walks forward gingerly, his feet in slippers, an old plaid dressing-gown wrapped around him, the drawstring tied at the waist. She brings out mugs of tea and finds him with his face upturned to the sun, eyes closed, the lids shaded purple.
‘How kind you are,’ he says. But he puts the mug on the grass beside his feet, and Leah watches as it grows cold.
