He considered the problem for the rest of the morning, during which time his secretary proved barely capable of common civility. She appeared briefly throughout the day to dump dockets on his desk, and at one point when he glanced up at her looked as if she was about to file a harassment suit against him. Michael felt the ground shifting fast beneath him. As he was leaving the building that evening, the doorman grumpily revealed that his parking space had been switched to a smaller, more awkward stall further away from the main doors.
* * *
Marla already sounded bored with the topic of conversation. They had washed up the dinner things together. Now she had turned back to the sink and was wiping down surfaces unnecessarily; the cleaning lady was due first thing tomorrow. Eventually aware that he had asked her a question, she sighed and faced him. “I just don’t know, Michael. These things happen. There’s no point in getting paranoid. Nobody’s out to get you.”
“Well, it certainly feels like they are,” he complained, digging a bottle of Scotch from the cupboard and pouring himself a generous measure.
His wife made a face: disbelief, dissatisfaction, he couldn’t read which. “You know,” she said slowly, “maybe you’re just experiencing the real world for a change.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She gestured vaguely about her. “You know what you’re like. You’ve always had this kind of – aura of perfection surrounding you. People go out of their way to make things easy for you. Perhaps they’re not doing it this once, and you’ve simply noticed for the first time.”
He drained the glass and set it down on the kitchen table. “Marla, that’s ridiculous and you know it.”
“Is it? You glide through life in a golden haze expecting people to move out of your way just because you’re you.” She fell silent for a moment, then turned back to the sink. “It was something I noticed about you the day we met. A quality very few men ever possess. It’s something you normally only find in very pretty girls, and then just for a couple of years. Doors automatically open. No one has ever found me special like that, only you. The rest of us trail in your wake. Well, maybe it’s our turn in the sun for a while.”
It seemed to Michael that he was being presented with a day of revelations, that he was somehow seeing himself clearly for the first time, from above, perhaps, or from a distance.
He rose and moved to his wife’s side, gently placing his hands upon her hips. “I can’t understand why you’ve never talked to me about this before,” he said softly, “why you couldn’t have been more honest with me.”
“What’s the point when you’re not prepared to be honest about yourself?” she asked, coolly removing his hands. “If you want complete candour, then I’ll tell you. I really don’t think I can bear you touching me any more.”
The room fell silent and remained so. Sean would not come down to kiss him goodnight and hid behind his mother’s skirt until she took him up to bed.
* * *
He didn’t think the situation could get any worse, but it did.
Marla would not talk about her refusal to allow his touch. At night she kept to the far side of the bed and took to sleeping in a T-shirt and pants. In the mornings she was up and dressed before him. She had usually washed and fed her son by the time he arose, so that the pair of them presented his sleepy form with a smart united front.
Although she refused to be drawn on the subject of their halted sex life, she conceded that no one else was stealing her affection from him. It was simply something that had finally, and perhaps inevitably, occurred. Frozen out of his own home, he increased his hours in the office.
But there the situation was just as bad. The Trowerbridge case had been lost and everyone now regarded him with suspicion, as if he’d been caught stealing office supplies and let off with a warning. Sometimes members of staff insulted him just out of earshot. At the very least, they ignored him. Michael became aware that parties and dinners were being arranged behind his back and that he had become the butt of cheap, stupid jokes. Much of the time no one seemed to notice him at all. If he joined a group at the coffee machine and struck up a conversation, they would glance over his shoulder, noting something or someone that interested them more. If he tried to make a social arrangement they cried off with transparently feeble excuses, not even bothering to convince him of their unavailability.
Petty grievances, of a kind that had never occurred before, began to accumulate. He was given the dullest briefs to work on. Someone left a bottle of Listerine on his desk in response to an office perception that he suffered from halitosis. Even the parking attendant had the temerity to suggest that he attend more carefully to his personal hygiene.
At last, at the end of his tether, he asked his secretary to enter his office and to close the door behind her.
“I want you to be honest with me, Michelle,” he said carefully, seating himself and bidding her do the same. “I find everyone’s attitude towards me has changed drastically in the last two weeks, and I’m at a loss to understand why.”
“You want the honest truth?” asked Michelle, pointedly examining her cuticles.
“Please,” pleaded Michael, ready to absorb her reply and analyse it at length.
“Well, it’s the way you treat people, like they’re satellites around your planet. I used to find it exciting, very masculine. I rather fancied you, all that rugged decisiveness. Others did too. Now I wonder how I could have been so blind.” She shifted uncomfortably. “Can I go now?”
“Certainly not!” He snorted, wondered, shook his head in bewilderment. “Explain what you mean. What do the others say about me?”
Michelle stared up at the ceiling and blew the air from her cheeks. “Oh, I think you know. That you’re self-centred, boring, pushy, less clever than you think you are. You’re just not a very likeable man any more.”
“And you can sit there and say this to my face?” he asked.
“I’ve already applied for a transfer,” she answered, rising.
Michael realised then that if he went out and bought a dog it would probably run off, just to be away from him. Seated on a wet bench in the bedraggled little park beneath the office, watching as the pigeons strutted toward his shoes and then veered away, he became seized with the idea that someone had placed a curse on him. Not your usual get-boils-and-die curse, but something subtler. There was only one wild card to consider, one suspect, and that was Mr Whatever-his-name-was on the bike, the Latin chap he’d knocked over. The more Michael considered it, the clearer it became that his troubles had truly begun after that angry night-time phone call. He remembered the voice on the line: “What’s your biggest fear…? Don’ take much to break a man like you… When you come to find me – an’ you will…” It all began to make sense. Could there be a rational explanation for what was happening to him? Was the guy some kind of shaman in touch with the supernatural, a malevolent hypnotist, or just someone with the power of suggestion? Wasn’t that how voodoo worked? He was determined to take positive action.
It was dark by the time he finally got out of the office. Nosing the car back toward the intersection where the accident had occurred, he remembered the cyclist’s response to his offer of a lift. “I just live over there.”
“Over there” proved to be a prefabricated two-storey block of council flats. With no other way of locating his tormentor, he began ringing doorbells and facing irate residents, most of whom were in the middle of eating dinner. One of them even swore and spat at him, but by now he was used to that kind of behaviour. Trudging along the cracked, flooded balconies like a demented rent collector, he suddenly recalled a name mentioned in the phone call – Patty. Hadn’t she checked out the cyclist’s damaged shoulder? At least it was something specific, a person he could ask to see.
After being abused in four more doorways, he was nearing the end of the first floor with only a few apartments remaining when a young Asian man with dragons tattooed on his arms pointed to the f
lat at the end of the corridor.
“She’s married to a Mexican guy who plays weird music all night,” he complained.
Leaning against the garbage chute was the bicycle that he had hit, now repaired.
“That’s the one,” said Michael, thanking him and setting off. He stood before the door and read the printed card wedged next to the broken bell.
“You’re back sooner than I expected,” said Ramon del Tierro, faith healer, opening the door at his knock and ushering him in. “I didn’t think you’d come to me for at least another week.”
The hallway was in darkness. Mariachi music was playing in one of the bedrooms. The flat was slightly perfumed, as though someone had been burning incense earlier. Ramon was slighter and smaller than he remembered, pallid and unhealthy looking. His left eye was milky, blinded. He led the way to a small, smartly decorated lounge and waved him to a seat. Michael didn’t want to sit. He no longer considered the situation absurd. He just wanted an answer, and an end to the hatred.
“You did this to me, didn’t you?” The tightness in his voice made him realise how much anger he was holding back.
“Did what? Tell me what I did.” Ramon shrugged, faking puzzlement.
“You made me – made everyone detest me.”
“Hey, how could I do that? You soun’ like a crazy man. You want to know how my shoulder is? Thank you for askin’, it’s gonna be okay.” He turned away. “I’m gonna make some coffee. You wan’ some?”
“I want you to tell me what you did, damn it!” Michael shouted, grabbing a scrawny arm.
Ramon glared fiercely and remained silent until he released his grip. Then he softly spoke.
“I have a gift, Mr Townsend. A crazy, pointless gift. If it had been second sight or somethin’ I might have made some money from it, but no. When I come into contact with strangers I can see what makes them happy or sad. Sometimes I can sense what they fear or who they love. It depends on who I touch. Sometimes I don’ feel nothin’ at all. But I felt it with you. An’ I made you see how life can be when you don’t have the one thing you value most. In your case, it’s your popularity. I took away your charm. You’re no longer a likeable guy. I just didn’t think it would screw you up as bad as this. I guess you must love yourself a whole lot more than you love anyone else.”
Michael ran a hand across his face, suddenly tired. “Why did you pick on me?”
“Because I can, and because you deserved it. Now, what you gonna do about that? Go cryin’ to the police, tell them nobody likes you?”
Fury was rising within Michael, bubbling to the surface in a malignant mist. “What do you want?”
“I don’ want nothing from you, Mr Townsend. You got nothin’ I want.”
“You sabotaged my job.”
Ramon shook his head. “No sir, I did not. Anythin’ that’s happening to you is happening ’cause people just don’t like you no more.”
“Then you can make it end.”
The healer considered this for a moment, scratching at his chin with a thumbnail. “I guess I could, but I don’t want to. See, it’s better for you to relearn yourself from scratch. Won’t be easy the way you are now, but just makin’ the effort would turn you into a better person.” Michael knew that if he moved too close he would lash out at Ramon. His temper was slow to rise but formidable to witness. Now he clenched his fists and advanced on the little Mexican. “You get this fucking thing off me straight away, you filthy little spic, or I will beat you unconscious and burn this shit hole down with you in it, do you understand?”
“Now you’re showin’ your true colours, Mr Townsend.” Ramon took a step back, wary but not nervous. “A soul like yours takes an awful lot of fixin’. Tell me what it is you want.”
“I want you to make everyone love me again,” he said, suddenly embarrassed by the realisation of his needs.
“That I can do.”
“How soon?”
“In a few seconds, with just a touch. But you won’t like it. Consider the other way, I beg you. Relearn. Begin again with the personality you have now. It will be more difficult, but the rewards will be much greater.”
“I can’t do that. I need this to happen tonight.”
“Then it will have to be the hard way. Come closer to me.”
Michael walked into Ramon’s outstretched arms. Before he had time to realise what was happening, he felt the thin-bladed knife that Ramon had pulled from his pocket bite between the ribs traversing his heart. The fiery razor edge sliced through the beating muscle, piercing a ventricle and ending his life in a single crimson moment.
* * *
So many people turned up at St Peter’s Church that they ran out of parking spaces and had to leave their cars on the grass verges lining the road. The funeral service boasted eulogies from the senior partners of Aberfitch McKiernny, from friends and relatives, from his colleagues and from his adoring wife. Everyone who went to the burial of Michael Everett Townsend volubly agreed; the man being laid to rest here was truly loved by everyone.
THE MERRIE DANCERS
ALISON LITTLEWOOD
It was after nightfall when I first saw my new neighbour, though I didn’t know when she had decided to go out into the garden. I’d been busy unpacking boxes and telling myself I should be grateful for what I had, and it was dark when I went to draw the curtains across the window. She was in a wheelchair, nothing but a hunched, shadowy shape against the shrubbery. I might not have seen her if it wasn’t for the movement of her feet, kicking continually at the blanket covering her legs. I thought of Parkinson’s, of restless leg syndrome, other illnesses I couldn’t name and knew little of. Had she been taken ill just now, or was it of long duration? Did she need my help?
I felt bad that I didn’t know. I’d never met her before, though Mum had lived in this house for some years. I’d left home as soon as I was eighteen, anxious to experience all that London had to offer, and only came back when she got ill. I’d chosen to look after her, though I hadn’t wanted it, and by the time I reached her it was already too late. Now I was here, it was as if I couldn’t leave again – couldn’t be so ungrateful as to abandon her a second time, even though she was already gone.
The old lady next door tilted back her head to stare up at the stars, shielding her eyes as if they were too bright, and I just made out the smile that touched her lips. It seemed suddenly terribly romantic. She was old, infirm, perhaps couldn’t even walk, and yet there she was taking in the night air and dreaming, while I was twenty-four and acting as if my life was already over.
I didn’t go to check on her after all. I didn’t see her again that night, didn’t watch to see that she’d gone inside, closed the doors behind her, that she was safe. I slept right through to the next morning, stretched the stiffness from my limbs, brushed my teeth and dressed before I opened the curtains to see her sitting there, still in the place she had been.
I couldn’t breathe. Was she stuck there, unable to get inside by herself ? Had she fallen asleep – or something worse than that? She was old and alone and she had needed help; help that, once again, I had failed to give.
Thinking of heart attacks and strokes and other terrors of the elderly, I rushed downstairs and into my own back garden. Our two houses were the only ones set at the top of a leafy lane, separated from each other and the softly rolling hills around us by knee-high fencing. I stepped over it and rushed towards her, calling to see if she was all right, and she turned towards me, her look of astonishment stopping me dead.
“Goodness,” she said. “Have you seen a ghostie, lass?”
My alarm turned to apologies. I explained my concern and introduced myself, and she told me she was Annis Scollay, that she had just this moment stepped outside again – wheeled, I thought but didn’t say. Her legs still kicked against their blanket, a grey tartan, and the thought came again that she had some kind of illness, a muscular palsy over which she had no control. I tried not to look, though now and again a sharper kick dre
w my gaze.
“I did come out for a wee while last night,” she said. “I hoped to see the merrie dancers. It was on the news they might be seen this far south, but I didn’t see anything at all. Did you happen to see them, Sophie?”
I said I had not, though I remembered the news item she referred to – I should have thought of it before. If I hadn’t been so set on finding a place for everything, I might have tried to see the Northern Lights myself, though despite the newscaster’s assurance it had seemed unlikely they would grace the skies of Lincolnshire. They were meant for wilder climes, more northerly parts of the world.
“It’s still oorlich, though,” she said, shivering as if to explain her meaning. “We had that part of it, at least.” She fumbled under her blanket, pulling another one free; it looked as soft as mohair. She passed it to me and I shook my head – I’d come out here to help her, not the other way around – but she said, “That shade of brown, it’s called a murat. One of the finest you’ve ever felt about your neck.”
A strange curiosity came over me and I took it, wrapping it around my shoulders, and felt comforted at once. I snuggled into its warmth.
“My father reared the sheep gave that blanket,” she said. “Shetland sheep, on the isles. That one’s from my favourite. Bonxie, I called her, after the Great Skua chicks that lived on the sea cliffs. She was one of the best; the kindly sheep we called them, the ones that gave such wool.”
I couldn’t resist rubbing it against my cheek, almost thinking I could smell not the lanolin of sheep but the briny scent of the ocean.
“That’s right,” she said, as if I’d spoken. “There were ponies too, of course, our neighbours had them, and I’d go there whenever I could. I’d put on their halters and lead them about like dogs, for they were no bigger.”
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