by Paul Finch
****
Mary didn't leave the house for a few days except to dig or refill the hole in the garden shed. Digging deep, but all for nothing: she sat in the conservatory, waiting, warmed by the sunlight and drowsy in the scent of contained flowers. Sometimes one of the Adams sat with her.
"You could blame the priest," he said to her. "Next door. You know they always like to-"
"Shut up."
She said it quietly, staring at the floor. Sometimes it worked. Other times it would only make the Adam more cruel and he'd sit with her through the entire night, forbidding sleep or chasing her into it with dreams that were mostly memories. Desires she thought had died, only to find they'd fossilised deep inside, heavy weights in a heart which was itself only a trace of what it used to be.
"Play with me."
"No," she said. But she looked up.
The child's naked body was entirely caked in clay, face besmeared and hair pasted flat with mud. He was every bit the dirty little boy she'd said he was, all those years ago. Show Mary an acorn and she could see the tree, or so she liked to say.
"Come on, play with me," the mudboy said again, eyeing the Snakes and Ladders board still set up on the table. He mimed shaking the dice but he did it low in his naked lap and what he threw was a scattering of soil that buried both of the playing pieces.
Mary looked away, back at the floor again, though in her peripheral vision she could see that others had come. Her foundations made topsoil through some psychological seismic shift. Dead boys given new life in being dredged up from the earth they were buried in, just as they had given new life to that earth as they slumped into soft pieces, oozing juices that fed the soil and everything that lived within it.
There was a knock at the front door.
Mary struggled to stand, her limbs and joints stiff and painful with all the work she'd busied herself with, but stand she did.
"I'll wait here," the Adam said.
"Don't bother. There's no need."
It took her a while to get to the door and in all that time there was no second knock or impatient ringing of the doorbell. He was a good boy. Considerate, the way only children could be. Or maybe he'd gone home again. Yes, and maybe that was for the best.
He hadn't gone home.
"Wow," Peter said. "What happened to you?"
Mary glanced down at herself. She was filthy, grimed with everything she'd taken out and put back again.
"There's a snake," she said. "A slow worm. In my garden."
"Really? Can I see it?"
Mary stepped back from the door and as Peter passed her she said, "I made some more of those cakes you like."
She felt a brief draft as the back door opened behind her in the conservatory and the children waiting there retreated into the garden. Into the soil. She looked left and she looked right and she saw the street empty both times, the neighbourhood quiet. She closed the door firmly on the world outside.
****
Mary had set a ladder in the pit. Peter went first and she followed. She had dug one of the edges away into a narrow opening and the ground beyond sloped further down. The wind whispered from it, short phrases in gusts that cooled the skin, a low hush of voices that came and went like the repeated chorus of some strange soil-spoken song.
"A tunnel," Peter said. "Is this where the snake went?"
The shadows seemed to writhe away from Mary's torchlight as they descended deeper into the dank, dark earth, outcrops of rock and fossilised curves, stone spirals, casting shapes that were snake-like themselves across the walls of the tunnel and the sloping ground beneath their feet.
"How far do we have to go?" Peter asked.
"All the way," Mary told him, pressing close.
The earth angled down at a steep gradient. The heavy humming of fattened bluebottles thickened the air, a droning buzz rising around them as they moved lower, lower, into the earth, and underneath that sound came the steady tom-tom beat of a powerful heart.
"I feel strange," Peter said. "I'm sick."
"Me too."
"I think I had too many cakes. I don't feel good."
"You'll feel fine in a minute," Mary said. "You'll feel wonderful. We're going to play a game." She took Peter's hand and he let her. The only sign of any fear or trepidation was in his backwards glance up to the surface where the outline of Mary's garden shed, a rectangle of light, diminished with every step, shrinking away above them. "Let's see the snake," she said.
Peter's expression was part excitement, part fear. He tried to say something but when he opened his mouth to speak he only dribbled clods of mud, his throat choked with dirt and stones that burned and burned and burned as they dropped from him, hot as coals.
"Come with me," Mary said, and she pulled him into the ground with her, an earthen mermaid swimming down into the sunless soils of the world.
THE MEANTIME
Alison Moore
'It would never do for me to come to life again.'
-Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer
The Jameses took early retirement and bought an old house in the Peak District. They stood outside, looking up at its big, grey frontage, trying to decide on a name.
"It should be a name that says something about it," said Mrs James.
"Bleak House," said Mr James.
They called it The Rambles. They were going to run it as a boarding house, providing bed and breakfast for the walkers who came to explore the Dark Peak.
Running a boarding house was something Mrs James had always wanted to do. She imagined herself receiving her guests in the dining room in the morning, offering them a choice of cereals and eggs, writing down their orders on a notepad. Her dolls, when she had played this as a child, had liked cornflakes and scrambled eggs.
Mrs James had grown up in a house that was old and grey just like The Rambles, although it had been smaller, much smaller, and was squeezed between others in a terrace, whereas this one was in the middle of nowhere. When Mrs James was quite young, her father had become unwell, in need of bed rest, and her mother had nursed him. Her mother would say, "This afternoon, we might go to the park, but in the meantime your father's sleeping and you must be quiet, Jacqueline." Her father's meals had to be taken to his bedroom on a tray, and sometimes this job was given to Jacqueline. She always hoped to find him sleeping, and went on tiptoe, trying not to let the cutlery rattle against the plate, so that she would not wake him up by going in.
The Rambles had six en-suite bedrooms including their own. Mr James, a numbers man, entertained himself by referring to the room numbers in binary, which made it sound as if they were running an enormous hotel with more than a hundred rooms spread over the three floors. As it happened, they could not even fill the five guest rooms they had; business was quiet. Mr James said that they should get a website, but for that they would need to be connected to the Internet. Recently, wanting to send off for some diet pills that she had seen advertised in a magazine, Mrs James had needed to take two buses to use the Internet in the nearest library. Her order was being sent from abroad, but in the meantime she had heard on the radio that these diet pills were highly toxic, containing, as they did, dinitrophenol, which was a pesticide, apparently. Even a couple of these tablets could prove lethal within hours. A few clicks of the mouse and she had, it turned out, ordered poison. She was quite sure that they would all be better off without the Internet. Her father had disliked modern technology; he had never allowed the family to have a television set, which in any case would have been too noisy. Mrs James had instead spent much of her girlhood with her own thoughts, her imagination.
Mr James, who had worked in the city, was infuriated by the complete lack of mobile phone signal. "It's like living in the Dark Ages," he said, standing on the landings and in the garden, holding his phone up in the air, but Mrs James was quite satisfied with the landline, and the post box, which was only a short walk away.
Perhaps, she thought, she could make the journey into town again and as
k the doctor for a safer diet pill, but in the meantime she was simply depriving herself of all the things she loved, the comfort food that made her fat.
Room five, at the top of the house, was let to a writer who never came down to breakfast. He drank coffee in his room and left the tray outside his door, so that the dirty cup could be washed and the basket of sachets replenished. Mrs James refused to take his breakfast up to his room, not that he asked. Perhaps he had food in there with him. There would be crumbs. Mrs James wanted to get in and clean but she had given each room a DO NOT DISTURB sign and room five's seemed permanently to hang on the outside of his door. He never went out and she would not clean his room while he was in it. For a year or two in her teens, she had worked as a chambermaid in a hotel. She hadn't minded it-the vacuuming, the wiping things down, the straightening things up. Except once, a man had remained in his room while she cleaned it. He had been lying on the bed, on his back, with his shirt and trousers on, his tie and belt on the bedside table. Silently, he had watched her work and she had hated that. When she went to his bedside table to remove a dirty coffee cup, he turned towards her and she thought he was going to touch her, although he didn't. She had finished the room quickly and left without a word having been said.
****
After the first few quiet weeks, the phone rang, and Mrs James tensed and hurried to answer it, not wanting room five to be disturbed. She knew that the writer himself was not expecting calls; he wanted no interruptions while he was finishing his book. There were silent retreats, she had said to him when he first arrived, where no one was allowed to have mobile phones or to speak at all. 'Sounds wonderful,' he had said, and, with a last, polite smile, closed his door.
A mother came with her little girl for a short stay, and Mrs James put them in room one, as far as possible from the writer. Even so, when the girl, who must have had a bad dream, began crying in the middle of the night, wailing like a baby, Mrs James lay in bed, tensed, thinking, "Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet." Tomorrow night, she thought, she would take a sleeping pill, and she could give one to the writer too.
The mother and the little girl did come down to breakfast. Mrs James met them in the dining room, showed them to their seats and said first to the mother and then to the little girl, "Would you like your eggs poached, boiled, scrambled or fried?"
"No, thank you," said the girl.
Mrs James looked at her with surprise. She gave the girl a patient smile and said, "You have to choose one."
"I don't want eggs," said the girl.
Mrs James's face stiffened and she turned to the mother.
The mother said to the girl, "You'll have some toast, though, won't you?"
"White or brown?" asked Mrs James, her new note pad and her silver pen held tightly at chest height, like a tiny sword and shield. She would not look at the girl now, and addressed her question to the mother. Even when the girl, with her little face turned towards Mrs James, said, "White, please," Mrs James did not look at her, but kept her eyes on the pad, on what she was writing, and then nodded at the mother and went back into the kitchen.
She could hear the girl talking to her mother in a high, loud voice. "Did you know," said the girl, "ghosts are exactly the same colour as the air?"
"Ghosts aren't real," said her mother, but the girl carried on as if her mother had not even spoken, talking on and on, and Mrs James waited for the mother to say, "Shush, shush now." Mrs James looked at the air, felt its stillness, its closeness, and then the toast popped up and made her heart race.
After breakfast, while the mother and the little girl were out, Mrs James cleaned their room, and then she stood outside room five, listening. She could not hear anything apart from the occasional creak. The DO NOT DISTURB sign was hanging from the door handle. She went away again.
She and Mr James ate lunch together in the kitchen, and Mr James said, "The chap in room 101-"
"Shhh," said Mrs James, glancing up at the ceiling, even though room five was three floors away.
Mr James continued in a lower voice: "How long is he staying?"
"I'm not sure," said Mrs James.
"You'd better ask him."
"Yes."
At suppertime, Mrs James took the writer a boiled egg, meaning to knock on his door, offer him the egg, and ask him if he knew how long he would be with them, and if she might come in and clean his room. But in the end, she left the plate outside his door and did not knock.
She found the plate there in the morning, the debris spilling over its edge, onto the carpet, like a barrier of broken eggshell to keep the slugs away.
****
In the middle of the following night, the phone rang. Mrs James woke suddenly and reached for the handset, murmuring into the mouthpiece, into the darkness, "Hello?" She handed the phone to Mr James. "It's for you," she said.
While Mr James spoke on the phone, Mrs James switched a lamp on and waited. When Mr James put the phone down, he said to Mrs James that his mother had had a fall, and that he would have to go and see her. "She's been made comfortable for now."
Mrs James thought of her father and his long illness. They had tried to make him comfortable. She had watched her mother crushing a sleeping tablet between the back of a spoon and the chopping board. "He needs to sleep," her mother had said. "Tomorrow, I'll try to think of something nice we can do, but in the meantime your father's not well and we have to stay inside and be quiet." Or her mother would say, as she slipped the powder into her father's warm milk, "We might be able to go to the funfair at the weekend, but in the meantime you can play quietly at home." Jacqueline, left to her own devices, had played with her dolls.
Mr James was dressing, buttoning his trousers, which he held up with braces, although he would rather have worn a belt.
"Are you going now?" whispered Mrs James.
"Yes," he said. "She's been asking for me. I might need to stay for a few days. Will you be all right?"
"Oh yes," said Mrs James with a quick smile. "Don't worry about me."
****
Other than Mr James ringing regularly to check that she was all right, there were no phone calls, but a man came in person. Tall and broad, he filled the doorway. When he announced that he needed a room for a week, his voice filled the hallway.
"I suppose I could put you in…" began Mrs James.
"What's that?" said the man, turning his head so as to hear her better. She made an effort to raise her voice and said, "I could put you in a downstairs room."
"That would be marvellous!" the man boomed. He clapped his hands together and the sound was like a gunshot.
She could hardly turn him away, when he needed a room and she had one free, and when business was still rather slow, but she was going to find it hard to bear, his big voice disturbing the household, carrying up and down the stairs and through the walls and floorboards. It made her terribly anxious, as if her father might yet appear on the landing, complaining about the racket, his belt in his hand, the tan leather gripped in his fist, the buckle shiny.
****
They were all in the living room, all of them except the writer. The little girl was showing the loud man the words and actions to a song, which Mrs James recognised from her own childhood. Circling her hands around each other, the girl sang, at a moderate volume, "Wind the bobbin up, wind the bobbin up, pull-" and here she changed the hand action, "-pull, clap, clap, clap." The loud man was trying to follow, singing and winding and pulling and patting his hands together, both he and the girl giggling when he made a mistake. Then the girl sang it over again, but very quietly, almost whispering it. "Wind the bobbin up, wind the bobbin up…" The third time, she sang it quietly again but at breakneck speed: " Windthebobbinup, Windthebobbinup…" Mrs James laughed and everyone looked at her. Then the girl began to sing the verse once more, but now she sang it loudly, terribly loudly, yelling it out-"WIND THE BOBBIN UP! WIND THE BOBBIN UP!"- and Mrs James said, "Stop it! Please, stop it, you must stop," and they all went quiet. Mrs J
ames heard movement at the top of the house, and everyone watched her, and then there came the sound of a door closing and the house fell silent again. "You can sing quietly," said Mrs James, but the mother said perhaps they had sung enough, and her guests all said goodnight and went to their beds.
Mrs James remained in the living room for a little while longer, listening to the ticking of the clock, and then she went through to the kitchen to make some supper. She took a tin of soup out of the cupboard, and her pills. While she waited for the soup to heat through, she filled up her water glass, put out her sleeping tablet, and prepared a tray for room five. Very carefully, she carried the tray, the bowl of soup, up to the top of the house and set it down on the carpet outside the writer's room. The tray bumped slightly against the door, and the spoon rattled against the china bowl. Mrs James did not wait to see if the door opened. She went back down to the kitchen, ate her soup and took her sleeping tablet. Then she went around the house closing curtains and locking doors. The writer had taken in his supper tray. Mrs James listened at the door for a moment and then went to bed.
In her room, she said her prayers, put on her sleeping mask and slept until dawn. When she lifted up her sleeping mask, she saw the light seeping in around the blackout blinds. She felt quite refreshed.
She dressed, made herself presentable, and left the bedroom. Pausing once more outside room five, Mrs James, in spite of the DO NOT DISTURB sign, gave a tentative knock. There was no reply. She would leave him for now, she thought. Later, she would unlock his door, check on him, take away his soup bowl, wash it up. She would dispose of the diet pills. She had only used a handful. What a waste, she thought. But it had to be done, and now she must open all the curtains, lay the table for breakfast, put out the cereals… She heard a downstairs toilet flushing, and someone laughing, the child waking up.
