Gathering up the hammer and a fistful of nails, I laid a plank across the door and started work. Getting the nails through the wood and into the masonry was even harder than I’d expected, but within a couple of minutes it was in place, and felt reassuringly solid. I heaved another plank into position and set about securing it. This was actually going to work.
After half an hour I was into the swing of it and the wood now reached almost halfway up the doorframe. My arms were aching and head ringing from the hammering, which was very loud in the confined space of the back hall. I had a break leaning on the completed section, staring blankly out onto the drive. I was jolted back from reverie by the realisation that a piece of dust or something must have landed in my eye, distorting my vision. I blinked to remove it, but it didn’t disappear. It didn’t hurt, just made a small patch of the drive up near the road look a bit ruffled. I rubbed and shut both eyes individually, and discovered with mounting unease that the distortion was present in both.
I stood upright. Something was definitely going on at the top of the drive. The patch still looked crumpled, as if seen through a heat haze, and whichever way I turned my head the patch stayed in the same place. It was flickering very slightly now too, like a bad quality film print, although the flecks weren’t white, they were dark. I rubbed my eyes hard again, but once I’d stopped seeing stars I saw that the effect was still there. I peered at it, trying to discern something that I could interpret. The flecks seemed to organize into broken and shifting vertical lines as I watched, as if something was hidden behind a curtain of rain, rain so coloured as to make up a picture of that patch of the drive. This impression gradually strengthened until it was like looking at one of those plastic strip doors, where you walk through the hanging strips. It was as if there was one of those at the top of the drive, a patch of driveway pictured on it in living three dimensions. With something moving just the other side.
Then suddenly the balance shifted, like one of those drawings made up of black and white dots where if you stare at it long enough you can see a Dalmatian. I dropped to my knees behind the partially completed barrier.
They were back.
Standing at the top of the drive, their images both underlying and superimposed on it as if woven together, were the two men. They were standing in a frozen and unnatural position, like a freeze-frame. Their faces looked pallid and washed out, the colours uneven and the image flickering and dancing in front of my eyes. And still they stood, not there, and yet in some sense there.
As I stared, transfixed, I noticed that the suited man’s foot appeared to be moving. It was hard to focus on, and happening incomprehensibly slowly, but it was moving, gradually leaving the ground. Over the course of a minute it was raised and then lowered back onto the ground a couple of feet in front of its original position, leaving the man’s body leaning slightly forward.
I realised what I was seeing. In extraordinary and flickering slow motion, somehow projected onto the drive like an old home movie, the suited man was beginning to walk down towards the house. The image wasn’t flickering so much anymore, the colours were getting stronger, and I could no longer see the driveway through them. Somehow they were coming back through. I thought I’d got away with it, but I hadn’t. I’d fallen out. Not very far by anyone’s standards, but far enough. Far enough to have come back in through the wrong door. And now they were tearing their way back into the world, or hauling me back towards theirs. And very slowly they were getting closer.
Fighting to stay calm, I grabbed a plank, put it into position above the others and nailed it into place. Then another, and another, not pausing for breath or thought. Through the narrowing gap I could see them getting closer. They didn’t look two-dimensional any longer, and they were moving more quickly too. As I leaned towards the kitchen for a plank I saw that there was a single dusty carton on the floor. It had started.
I smacked another plank into place and hammered it down. The men were real again, and they were also much nearer to the house, though still moving at a weirdly graceful tenth of normal speed. Hammering wildly, ignoring increasingly frequent whacks on the fingers, I cast occasional wild glances aside into the kitchen. The fridge was beginning to look strange, the stark 1990s geometry softening, regressing, and the rubbish was gathering. I never saw any of it arrive, but each time I looked there was another piece of cardboard, a few more scraps, one more layer of grime. It had only just started, and was still happening very slowly, maybe because I’d barely fallen out. But it was happening. The house was going over.
I kept on hammering. I knew that what I had to do at some point was run the front door, go out and come back in again, come in through the right door. But that could wait, would have to wait. It was coming on very slowly this time, and I still felt completely clear-headed. What I had to do first was seal off the back door, and soon. The two men, always at the vanguard of the change, were well and truly here, and getting closer all the time. I had to make sure that the back door was secure against anything those two could do to it, for long enough for me to get to the front door and jump out. I had no idea what the front hall would be like by the time I got there, and if I left the back door unfinished and got lost trying to get to the front door, I’d be in real trouble.
I slammed planks into place as fast as I could. Outside they got steadily closer and closer, and inside another carton appeared in the kitchen. As I jammed the last horizontal board into place the suited man and the blond man were only a couple of yards away, now moving at full pace. I’d barely nailed it in before the first blow crashed into it, bending it and making me leap back with shock. I hurriedly picked up more wood and slapped planks over the barrier in vertical slats and crosses, nailing them in hard, reinforcing and making sure that the barrier was securely fastened to the wall on all sides, furiously hammering and building.
After a while I couldn’t feel the ache in my back or see the blood on my hands: all I could hear was the beating of the hammer, and all I could see was the heads of the nails as I piled more and more wood onto the barrier. I had wood to spare—I hadn’t even needed that last bloody plank—and by the time I finished it was four pieces thick in some places, with the reinforcing strips spread several feet either side of the frame. I used the last three pieces as bracing struts, forcing them horizontally across the hallway, one end of each lodged in niches in the barrier, the other jammed tight against the opposite wall.
Finally it was finished, and I stood back and looked at it. It looked pretty damn solid. ‘Let’s see you get through that,’ I shouted, half sitting and half collapsing to the ground. After a moment I noticed how quiet it was. At some point they must have stopped banging against the door. I’d been making far too much noise to notice, and my head was still ringing. I put my ear against the barrier and listened. Silence.
I lit a cigarette and let tiredness and a blessed feeling of safeness wash over me. The sound of the match striking was slightly muted, but that could’ve been the ringing in my ears as much as anything, and the kitchen looked pretty grubby but no more than that. I felt fine. I wondered what the two outside were up to, and whether there was any chance that they might have given up and be waiting for the change to take its course—not realising that I understood about the right door and the wrong door. For a few minutes I actually savoured the sensation of being balanced between two worlds, secure in the knowledge that in a moment I would just walk out that front door and the house would come back and none of it would matter at all.
Eventually I stood up, wincing in pain. I was going to ache tomorrow. I stepped into the kitchen, narrowly avoiding a large black spider that scuttled out of one of the cartons. The floor was getting very messy now, strewn with scraps of dried-up meat covered with the corpses of dead maggots, interspersed with small piles of stuff I really didn’t want to look too closely at. I threaded my way over to the door, past the now bizarrely misshapen fridge, and into the front hall.
The hallway was still clear of debris
, and as far as I could see, utterly normal. As I crossed towards the front door, anxious now to get the whole thing over with—and wondering how I was going to explain the state of the back door to my parents—I noticed a faint tapping sound in the far distance. After a moment it stopped, and then restarted from a slightly different direction. Odd, but scarcely a primary concern. Right now my priority was getting out of that front door before the hall got any stranger. Feeling like an actor about to bound onto stage, I reached out to the doorknob, twisted it and pulled it towards me.
At first I couldn’t take it in. I couldn’t work out why instead of the driveway all I could see was brown. Brown flatness.
As I adjusted my focal length, pulling it in for something much closer than the drive I’d been expecting, I understood. The view looked rather familiar. I’d seen something like it very recently.
It was a barrier. An impregnable wooden barrier nailed across the door into the walls from the outside. Now I knew what they’d been doing as I finished nailing them out.
They’d been nailing me in.
I tried everything I could think of. My fists, my shoulder, a chair. The planks were there to stay.
I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t come back in through the right door, and for the moment they couldn’t get in through the wrong door. A sort of stalemate. But a very poor sort for me, because they were much the stronger and getting more so all the time, and because the house was still going over and now I couldn’t stop it.
I strode into the kitchen, rubbing my bruised shoulder and thinking furiously. There had to be something I could do, and I had to do it fast. The change was speeding up. Although the hall still looked normal the kitchen was now filthy, and the fifties fridge was fully back. In a retro kind of way it was quite attractive. But it was wrong.
In the background I could still hear the faint tapping noise. Maybe they were trying to get in through the roof.
I had to get out, had to find a way. I tried lateral thinking. You leave a house by a door. How else? No other way. You always leave by a door. But was there any other way you could leave, if you were in, say, a desperate emergency? The doors…The windows. What about the windows? If there was a right door and a wrong door, maybe there were right and wrong windows too, and perhaps the right ones looked out onto the real world. Maybe, just maybe, you could smash one and then climb out and then back in again. Perhaps that would work.
I had no idea whether it would or not. I wasn’t kidding myself that I understood anything, and God alone knew where I might land if I chose the wrong window. Perhaps I’d go out the wrong one and then be chased round the house by the two maniacs outside, as I tried to find a right window to break back in through. That would be a barrel of laughs. That would be Fun City. But what choice did I have? I ran into the living room, heading for the big picture window. Thought the square window today, children.
I don’t know how I could have missed making the connection. Possibly because the taps were so quiet. I stood in the living room, my mouth open. This time they were one jump ahead. They’d boarded up the fucking windows.
I ran back into the hall, through into the dining room, then upstairs to the bedrooms. Every single window was boarded up. I knew where they’d got the nails from, because I’d spilt more than enough when I fell, but how…Then I realised how they’d nailed them in without a hammer, why the tapping had been so quiet. With sudden unpleasant clarity I could imagine the suited man clubbing the nails in with his fists, smashing them in with his forehead and grinning while he did it.
Oh Jesus.
I walked downstairs again, slowly now. Every single window was boarded up, even the ones that were too small to climb through. As I stood once more in the kitchen, amidst the growing piles of shit, the pounding on the back door started. There was no way I could get out of the house, and I couldn’t stop what was happening. This time it was going over all the way, and taking me with it. And meanwhile they were going to smash their way in to come along for the ride. To get me. I listened, watching the rubbish, as the pounding got louder and louder.
It’s still getting louder, and I can tell from the sound that some of the planks are beginning to give way. The house stopped balancing long ago, and the change is coming on more quickly. The kitchen looks like a bomb site and there are an awful lot of spiders in there now. Eventually I left them to it and came through the hall into here, only making one or two wrong turnings. Into the living room. And that’s where I am now, just sitting and waiting. There’s nothing I can do about the change, nothing. I can’t get out. I can’t stop them getting in.
But there is one thing I can do. I’m going to stay here, in the living room. I can see small shadows now, gathering in corners and darting out from under the chairs, and it’s quite dark down by the end wall. The wall itself seems less important now, less substantial, no longer a barrier. I think I can hear the sound of running water somewhere far away, and smell the faintest hint of the of dark and lush vegetation.
I won’t let them get me. I’ll wait, in the gathering darkness, listening to the coming of the night sounds and feeling a soft breeze on my face as I sense the room opening out as the walls shade away, as I sit here quietly in the dark warm air. And then I’ll get up and start walking out into the dark land, into the jungle and amidst the trees that stand all around behind the darkness, smelling the greenness that surrounds me and hearing the gentle river off somewhere to the right. And I’ll feel happy walking away into the night, and maybe far away I’ll meet whatever makes the growling sounds I begin to hear in the distance, and we’ll sit together by running water and be at peace in the darkness.
To See The Sea
When the bus reached the top of the hill that finally brought the ocean into view, Susan turned to me and grinned.
‘I can see the sea!’ she said, sounding about four years old. I smiled back and put my arm round her shoulders, and we turned to look out of the window. Beyond the slight reflection of our own faces the view consisted of a narrow strip of light grey cloud, above a wide expanse of dark grey sea. The sea came up to meet a craggy beach, which was also grey.
The driver showed no sign of throwing caution to the winds and abandoning his self-imposed speed limit of thirty miles an hour, and so we settled ourselves down to wait. The ride had already involved two hours of slow meandering down deserted country lanes. Another thirty minutes wouldn’t kill us.
We could at least now see what we had come for, and as we gazed benignly out of the window I could feel both of us relax. True, the sea didn’t look quite as enticing as it might at, say, Bondi Beach, and the end of October was possibly not the best time to be here, but it was better than nothing. It was better than London.
In the four months Susan and I had been living together, life had been far from sweet. We both worked at the same communications company, an organisation run on panic and belligerence. It ought to have been an exciting job, but every day at the office was like wading through knee-high mud in a wasteland of petty grievances and incompetence. Every task the company undertook was botched and flawed: even the car park was a disaster. Built in the shape of a wedge, it meant that anyone at the far end had to get all those parked between them and the exit to come and move their cars before they could leave. About once a fortnight our car wouldn’t start, despite regular visits to the world’s least conveniently situated garage.
The flat we had moved into was beautiful, but prey to similar niggling problems. The boiler, which went out twice a day, was situated below the kitchen, so we had no hot water to wash up with. Light bulbs in the flat went at forty-minute intervals, each turning out to be some bizarre Somalian make which was unavailable in local stores. The old twonk who lived underneath us managed to combine a hardness of hearing that required his television to play at rock concert volume with a sensitivity that led him to shout up through the floor if we so much as breathed after eleven o’clock.
Up until Thursday, we’d been planning to spend th
e weekend at home, as we usually did. By the time the working week had ended we were too tired to consider packing bags, checking tyre pressures, and hauling ourselves out of town. Perversely, the very fact that the car had packed up again on Friday evening had probably provided the impetus for us to make the trip. It had just been one thing too many, one additional pebble of grief on a beach that seemed to stretch off in all directions.
‘Fuck it,’ Susan had snarled, when we finally made it back home. ‘Let’s get out of town.’ The next morning we arose, brows furrowed, each grabbed a change of clothes, a toothbrush and a book, and stomped off to the tube station. And now, after brief periods on most of the trains that British Rail had to offer, we were there. Or nearly there, anyway.
As the bus clattered its elderly way down the coast, it passed a sign for Dawton, now allegedly only eight miles away. Judging by the state of the signpost, the village’s whereabouts were of only cursory interest to the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. The name was printed in black on an arrow that must once have been white, but was now grey and streaked with old rain tracks. It looked as though no-one had bothered to clean it for a while.
Virtually all of the minor annoyances which had been plaguing our every day were trivial in themselves. It was simply their volume and relentlessness that was getting us down. The result was a state of constant flinching, in which neither of us were fully ourselves. The paradoxical advantage of this was that we were getting to know each other very quickly, seeing sides of each other that would normally sit in obeisance for years. We found ourselves opening up to each other, blurting secrets as we struggled to find a new equilibrium.
One of these secrets, divulged very late one night when we were both rather tired and emotional, had involved Susan’s mother. I already knew that her mother had carved her name in Susan’s psyche by leaving her father when Susan was five, and by never bothering to get in touch again. A need for security was amongst the reasons that Susan had fallen into the clutches of her ridiculous ex-boyfriend. Before her mother had gone, however, it transpired that she had managed to instil a different kind of fear in her daughter.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 27
