Rita-May seemed satisfied that I’d done my best, and reached up with her hand to pull my face towards hers.
‘It’s not going to be easy,’ she said, when we’d kissed. ‘For you, I mean. But please stick with it. I want you to catch up with me some day.’
‘I will,’ I said, and I meant it. Slowly, I was beginning to understand. I let go of the lamppost with my left hand, and looked at my watch. Only another minute had passed. There was still no sign of Rita-May, just the slowly swarming mass of tourists, their bright colours warm in the sun. From a little way down the road I could hear the peal of one long trumpet note, and it didn’t sound so bad to me. I glanced down Decatur towards the sound, wondering how far away she was, how many times I would have to wait. I decided to ask.
‘As long as it takes,’ she said. ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’
In a minute Rita-May would give me the rose, and I’d go back to the bar to pass out as I had so many times before. But for now I was still here, in the silent square, where the only sign of life was a couple of tired people sipping café au lait in darkness at the Café du Monde. The air was cool, and soft somehow, like the skin of the woman I held in my arms. I thought of my house, and London. I would remember them with affection, but not miss them very much. My sister would look after the cat. One day I would catch up with Rita-May, and when I did, I would hold on tight.
In the meantime the coffee was good, the beignets were excellent, and there would always be a muffeletta just around the corner. Sometimes it would be night, sometimes day, but I would be travelling in the right direction. I would be at home, one of the regulars, in the corner of all the photographs which showed what a fine place it was to stay. And always there would be Rita-May, and me inching ever closer every day.
‘I’m sure,’ I said. She looked very happy, and that sealed my decision for ever. She kissed me once on the forehead, once on the lips, and then angled her head.
‘I’ll be waiting,’ she said, and then she bit me softly on the neck.
The Dark Land
It started with the bed.
After three years at college I’d come back home, returning to the bedroom I’d grown up in. It was going to be a while before I could afford to move out for good, and so in the intervening month I’d redecorated the room: covering the very 1970s orange with a more soothing shade, and badgering my mother into getting some new curtains that didn’t look like they had been designed on drugs by someone who liked the colour brown a great deal. I’d also moved most of the furniture around, trying to breathe new life into a space I’d known since I was ten. It hadn’t worked. It still felt as if I should be doing French verbs or preparing conkers, musing on what girls might be like. I knew it was largely an excuse for not doing anything more constructive—like filling out the pile of job applications which sat on the desk—but that afternoon I decided to move the bed away from its traditional place by the wall and try it in another couple of positions. It was hard work. One of the legs was rather fragile and the bed had to be virtually lifted off the floor rather than dragged around—which is why I hadn’t tried moving it before, I remembered. After half an hour I was hot and irritated and developing a stoop. I had also become convinced that the original position had been not only the optimal but in fact the only place the bed could go.
It was as I struggled to shove it back up against the wall that I began to feel a bit strange. Light-headed, nauseous. Out of breath, I assumed. When the bed was finally back in place I lay back on it for a moment, feeling rather ill—and I suppose I just fell asleep.
I woke up about half an hour later, half-remembering a dream in which I had been doing nothing more than lying on my bed and remembering that my parents had said that they were going to extend the wood panelling in the downstairs hallway. For a moment I was disorientated, confused by being in the same place in reality as I had been in the dream, and then I drifted off again.
Some time later I woke up again. I found it very difficult to fight my way up out of sleep, but eventually managed to haul myself sluggishly upright. After a while I lurched to my feet and across to the sink to get a glass of water. Drinking it made the inside of my mouth a little less dry, but no more appealing. I decided that a cup of tea would be a good idea, and headed out of the bedroom to go downstairs.
As I reached the top of the staircase I remembered the dream about the panelling, and wondered where a strange notion like that could have come from. I’d worked hard for my psychology paper at college, and was confident that Freud hadn’t felt that wood panelling was even worth a mention. I trudged downstairs, still feeling odd, my thoughts dislocated and fragmented.
When I reached the halfway landing I ground to a halt, and stared around me, astonished. They had extended the panelling.
When you enter my parents’ house you come into a two story hallway, with a staircase that climbs up three walls to the second floor. The panelling used to only go about eight feet up the wall of the front hall, but now it soared right up to the ceiling. And they’d done it in exactly the same wood as the original. There wasn’t a join to be seen. How had they managed that? Come to that, when had they managed it? It hadn’t been like this that morning, but both my parents were at work and would be for hours and…well, it was just impossible. I reached out and touched the wood, bewildered at how even the grain matched, and that the new wood looked just as aged as the original, which had been there fifty years.
Then: Wait a minute, I thought. That isn’t right. There hadn’t used to be any panelling in the hall. Just simple white walls. The stairs themselves had been panelled in wood, but the walls were just plain white plaster. How could I have forgotten that? What had made me think that the front hall had been panelled, and think it so unquestioningly? I remembered that I’d recently noticed, sensitised to these things by having repainted my room, that the white in the hall was a little grubby, especially round the light switches. So what was all this panelling doing here? Where had it come from? And why had I been so sure that at least some of it had always been there?
Something wasn’t right. I walked into the kitchen, casting bewildered glances back into the hall. I absently-mindedly registered a soft clinking sound outside, and automatically headed to the back door—too puzzled about the panelling to realise that it was very late in the day for a milk delivery.
Both the front and back doors of the house open onto the driveway, the back door from a little corridor full of muddy shoes and rusting tools that connects the kitchen to the garage. I threaded my way through the gardening implements and wrenched the stiff door open. It was late afternoon by then, but the light outside seemed very intense, the colours rich as they are before a storm.
I looked down and saw the milk bottle holder, with four bottles of milk in it. They weren’t normal milk bottles, however, but large American-style quart containers somehow jammed into slots meant to take pints. Someone had taken the silver tops off.
A movement at the periphery of my vision caught my attention, and I glanced up towards the top of the driveway. There, about thirty yards away, were two children. One was fat and sitting on a bike, the other slim and standing. I was seized with sudden irritation, and started quickly up the drive towards them—convinced that the clinking sound I’d heard was them stealing the tops off the milk.
I had covered scarcely five yards when someone who’d been at my school appeared from behind me, and walked quickly past me up the drive, staring straight ahead. I couldn’t remember his name, had barely known him. He’d been two or three years older than me, and I’d completely forgotten that he’d existed, but as I stared after him I remembered he’d been one of the more amiable seniors. I could recall being proud of having some small kind of communication with one of the big boys, how it had made me feel a bit older myself, more a man of the world. And I remembered the way he used to greet my yelling his nickname, with a half smile and a coolly raised eyebrow. All this came back with the instantaneous impact of m
emory, but something was wrong. The man didn’t seem to register that I was there. I felt disturbed, not by the genuinely strange fact that he was in the driveway—or that he was wearing school athletic gear—but merely because he didn’t smile and tilt his head back the way he used to. It was so bizarre that I wondered briefly if I was dreaming, but if you can ask yourself the question you always know the answer. I wasn’t.
My attention was distracted by a reflection in the glass of the window in the back hallway. A man seemed to be standing behind me. He wore glasses, had a chubby face and basin-cut blond hair, and was carrying a bicycle. I whirled round to face where he should have been, but he wasn’t there.
Then I remembered the kids at the top of the driveway, and turned to shout at them again, needing something to take my bewilderment out on. Almost immediately a tall slim man in a dark suit came walking down the drive; briskly, as if slightly late. Maybe it was a trick of the light in the gathering dusk, but I couldn’t seem to fix on his face. My eyes just seemed to slide off it, as if it were slippery, or made of ice.
‘Stop shouting at them,’ he snapped. He strode past me towards the back door. I stared at him open-mouthed. ‘They’re not doing anything wrong,’ he said. ‘Leave them alone.’
The kids took themselves off, one on the bike, the other walking alongside, and I turned to the suited man. For some reason I felt anxious to placate him, and yet at the same time I was outraged at his invasion of our property.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘It’s just, well, I’m a bit confused. I thought I saw someone I knew in the drive. Did you see him? Wavy brown hair, athletics kit?’
For some reason I thought that the man would say that he had, and that that would make me feel better. All I got was a curt ‘No’ as he entered the back hallway.
Then another voice spoke. ‘Well then. Shall we go into your old house?’
I realised that someone else was already standing in the back hall. The man with the blond hair and glasses. And he really was carrying a bicycle. He wasn’t talking to me, but to the man in the suit.
‘What?’ I said, and hurried after them, catching a glimpse of the suited man’s face. ‘But it’s you…’ I stopped again, baffled, as I realised that the man in the suit was the same man who had been in athletics gear.
The two men marched straight into the kitchen. I followed them, impotently enraged. Was this his old house? Even so, wasn’t it customary to ask the current occupants’ permission if you wanted to visit? The suited man was peering round the kitchen, which looked very messy. He poked at some fried rice I’d left cooling in a pan on the stove. At least, I seemed to have left it there, though I wasn’t sure when I would have done so. I don’t just cook up rice in the afternoon for the pure hell of it. I still felt the urge to placate the man, however, and hoped he would eat some of the rice.
He merely grimaced with distaste and joined his colleague at the window, looking out onto the drive, hands on hips. ‘Dear God,’ he muttered. The other man grunted in agreement.
I noticed that I’d picked up the milk from outside the back door, and appeared to have spilt some of it on the floor. I tried to clean it up with a piece of kitchen roll which seemed very dirty and yellowed as if with age. I was trying to buy time. I felt very strongly that there must be some sense to the situation somewhere, some logic I was missing. Even if the man had lived here once he had no right to just march in here with his friend, but as I continued trying to swab up the milk before he noticed it—why?—I realised that there was something far more wrong than a mere breach of protocol at stake.
The suited man looked about thirty five, much older than he should have been if he was indeed the guy I’d been to school with. Yet that would still leave him far too young to ever have lived here. Between our family and the previous occupants I knew who’d lived in the house for the last forty years. So how could it be his old house? It didn’t make sense. And was it actually him? The boy from my school? Apart from being too old, it looked like him, but was it actually him?
I did the best I could with the milk, and then straightened up, staggering slightly. My perception seemed to have become both heightened and jumbled, as if I was very drunk. Everything pulsed with an unusual intensity and exaggerated emotional charge, yet there also seemed to be gaps in what I was perceiving, as if I was receiving an edited version of what was going on. Things began to flick from one state to another—with the bits in between, the becoming, missing like a series of jump cuts. I felt hot and dizzy and the kitchen looked small and indescribably messy, the orange of the walls—the same colour my bedroom had once been painted—seeming to push in at me beneath a low and unsteady ceiling. I wondered if I was seeing the kitchen as they saw it, and then immediately wondered what I meant.
Meanwhile they stood at the window, occasionally turning to stare balefully at me, radiating distaste and impatience. They were evidently waiting for something. But what? Noticing that I still had the piece of kitchen roll in my hand, I stepped over all the rubbish on the floor—what the hell had been going on in this kitchen?—to put it in the overflowing bin. I squeezed my temples with my fingers, struggling to stand upright against the weight of the air, and squared up to the men.
‘L-look’, I stuttered, leaning on the fridge for support, ‘What exactly is going on?’
I immediately wished I’d kept quiet. The suited man slowly turned his head. It kept turning and turning, until it was looking directly at me—while his body remained stayed facing the other way. Like an owl, though he wasn’t blinking. I could feel my stomach trying to crawl away and fought the need to gag. I sensed he’d done it deliberately, done it because he knew it would make me want to throw up, and I thought he might well be right.
‘Why don’t you just shut up?’ he said. Then he twisted his head slowly back round until he was looking out onto the drive once more.
I decided not to ask any more questions.
Meanwhile, the mess in the kitchen seemed to be getting worse. Every time I looked there were more dirty pans and bits of rubbish and old food on the floor. My head felt thicker and heavier, as if everything was slipping away from me. I slumped against the fridge and clung to it, almost pulling it away from the wall. I began to cry too, my tears cutting channels in the thick grime on the fridge door. I dimly remembered that my parents had bought a brand new one only a few weeks before, but they must have changed it again. This one looked like something out of the 1950s. Very retro. Or original. To be honest it was hard to tell, because it was swimming back and forth and there was a lot of white in my eyes. Both the men were both watching me now, as if mildly interested to see when I’d fall.
Suddenly there was a terrible jangling impact in my head. I flapped hysterically at my ears, as if to stop someone hammering pencils into them. Then the pain happened again, and I recognised first that it was a sound rather than a blow, and then that it was the doorbell.
Someone was at the front door.
The two men glanced at each other, and the blond one nodded wearily. The suited man turned to me.
‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked.
‘It’s the front door,’ I said, quickly, still trying to please him.
‘So you’d better answer it, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Answer the door.’
‘Should I answer it?’ I queried, stupidly. I couldn’t seem to remember what words meant anymore.
‘Yes,’ he shouted, and picked up a mug—my mug, the mug I’d came downstairs, I remembered, to put tea in—and hurled it straight at me. It smashed into the fridge door by my face. I struggled to pull myself upright, head aching and ears ringing, aware of a soft crump as a fragment of the mug broke under my foot. The doorbell jangled again, the harshness of the noise making me realise how muted all other sounds had become. I fell towards the kitchen door, sliding across the front of the fridge, my feet tangling in the boxes and cartons that now covered the filthy floor. I could feel the orange of
the walls seeping in through my ears and mouth, and kept missing whole seconds of time—as if I was blacking out and coming to like a stroboscope.
As I lurched across to the kitchen door and grabbed the handle to hold myself up, I heard the blond man say ‘He may not go through. If he does, we wait.’
It didn’t mean anything to me. None of it did.
I made my way towards the front door, ploughing clumsily through drifts of rubbish in the hallway. The chime of the doorbell had pushed the air hard, and I could see it lapping towards me in waves. Ducking to avoid the sound, I slipped on the mat and almost fell into the living room. As I crouched there on my hands and knees it was getting dark in there, really dark, and I could hear the plants talking. I couldn’t catch the words, but they were definitely conversing, beneath the night sounds and a soft rustling which sounded a hundred yards away. The living room must have grown.
I picked myself up and turned to the front door. The bell clanged again, and this time the sound caught me full in the face, stinging bitterly. It should have been about four paces across the hall from the living room door to the front door, but I thought it was only going to take one and then it took twenty, past all the panelling and over the huge folds in the mat. It was not an easy journey.
Then I had my hand on the doorknob and then the door was open and I stepped out of the house.
‘Oh hello, Michael,’ said a voice. ‘I thought someone must be in, because all the lights were on.’
‘Wuh?’ I said, blinking in the fading sunlight.
The woman in front of me smiled. ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you?’
‘No, that’s fine.’ Suddenly I recognised her. It was Mrs Steinberg, the woman who brings us our cat food in bulk. ‘Fine. Sorry.’ I glanced covertly behind me into the hallway, which was solid and unpanelled and four paces wide and led to the living room—which was light and airy and the size it had always been.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 25
