Nick is behind the rampart when he hears the hoik of spit hit sand.
Christ.
They tell him they’ve killed them all.
You go, Pussy, they say, stabbing at his armband. We’re resting. Sick to death of your shots and their shots.
His gut bucks. His mouth biles.
They guffaw.
He lifts his gun.
Inches around the corner.
The camel is alone, tied to the gate with a shoestring, its green slobbers pockmarking the sand.
‘Christ, don’t press so hard!’ Tim pulls his bare leg off Mary’s lap.
‘I’m only trying to help.’
‘Help? You’re making it worse.’
‘Could you be more grateful?’
‘It’s your fault anyway.’
‘How in God’s name is my fault?’ Mary stands up and throws the bloodied white towel at her husband. It lands on his lap. ‘Do it yourself.’ She picks his shredded trousers off the floor, takes them through to the bathroom and drops them in the wicker laundry basket. She returns, leans on the fridge, and folds her arms.
‘Oh come on, love.’
‘I’ve had enough.’
‘Pretty please? I was picking them for you.’ He smiles up at her from the kitchen chair. It’s a Shaker chair. Oak ladderback. One of six. Hope he doesn’t mark it. She’d saved for months to buy those chairs. Ordered them from an old bloke in Dorset who only makes a few sets a year. She had to buy them earlier than she should have just in case he died. Tim’s pale. Pallid even. Maybe she should take him to a doctor or a nurse or whoever fixes people up these days. But it’s a Saturday afternoon. It’s an hour’s drive to the hospital. There’ll be a massive queue at A and E. Most of them drunks.
‘No.’
‘Oh come on, Mary, I’d do it for you.’ It’s a lie. Of course he wouldn’t do it for her. He never does anything for her. Nothing. Amazon vouchers for Christmas and John Lewis vouchers for birthdays. That’s it. So lacking in imagination he’s never even switched them around. Amazon vouchers for her birthday. That would perk her up. What a surprise. She smiles. Pictures the scene. They’d be laughing together. He’d say look, got you this time girl, and he’d slap her bottom, and she’d pour him a tall glass of Whispering Angel Rosé and straddle his lap. He’d lift up her satin satsuma skirt (bought with the previous year’s vouchers) and kiss her white lace panties. And then…
God, what’s she thinking? Last couple of years he hasn’t even bothered with the cards. Automated emails coming in as regular and tedious as the dreadful mantle clock his parents had given them for their wedding. Still tick tocking its mean little rasp twenty years on. She’d knocked it off the mantlepiece with her elbow twice and still the damn thing wouldn’t die.
He puts a hand on his forehead. ‘I’m all clammy. I might faint.’ He doesn’t look right, she’ll admit that. She sits down across the table from him. The table is covered with loose battered apples. They are large, rose red and pale yellow. Pink Ladies. The Pink Ladies that Tim had been stealing when he’d fallen out of the tree. A forty-nine year old man with sciatica and a heart murmur what with the too much drinking, up a tree nicking apples from the next door farmer’s orchard.
‘Have some water. It’s superficial. Shins always bleed heavy like that.’
‘It’s not superficial, it’s spurting!.’ Mary mutters of course it isn’t spurting only arteries spurt and there’s no arteries there under her breath, gets up, fills a glass with tap water and slides it through the apples towards him.
She’d heard the scream but hadn’t recognised it. She’d put down her book (The Silent Patient by Alex someone if you really want to know the details – Only she knows what happened Only I can make her speak ) and had run out of the house, into the yard and down the lane and there he was. Face down, spread-eagled on the hawthorn hedge, the hedge that was supposed to keep the townie-incomers away from the trees. Their wooden IKEA ladder lay neatly on top of him. Tim, she’d shrieked, Tim is that you?
She is embarrassed about the shriek now. What if Bob the farmer had heard. He’d be furious. He is angry enough. Forever complaining that they didn’t keep their garden just right, that they were introducing pests to his trees, that they used up too much water, that they shouldn’t keep hens if they couldn’t stop the slaughtering vermin foxes etcetera etcetera. Except Bob wouldn’t use the word etcetera. He’s not an etcetera sort of man.
Tim holds the glass with both hands and sips the water. Just in his shirt, pants and socks, his upper body is all wrong for his thick lardy legs, like someone had taken the top half of one doll and stuck it onto the bottom half of another. He’s no Action Man but Mary can’t think what other doll he might be. Maybe dolls are the wrong simile. But Mary can’t come up with another one.
‘Weird,’ she says, after a few moments of silence. ‘See the shape of the wound?’
‘What do you mean?’ Tim looks down at the large bloody laceration on his right shin.
‘Can’t you see it?’
‘No?’
‘It looks like a dinosaur.’
‘A dinosaur?’
‘Yes.’
‘Christ, Mary, I’m bleeding to death. And,’ he paused, ‘it’s probably infected.’
Mary stands up and walks around the table to hover beside him. ‘Look,’ she says pointing, ‘there’s the head, and the long jagged neck. It even has those spiny things running all the way down its back. What do they call those ones? Ameg something.’ Tim slumps forward. His eyes are shut.
‘And there,’ Mary continues, ‘look at its big belly, how did you manage that, Tim? I mean it’s perfect. Even its feet and its long tapering tail.’
‘Mary, please. I’m going to pass out,’ Blood leaks down from the dinosaur wound blotting Tim’s white ankle sock red. Be hard to get that stain out. Mary has several bottles of stain remover. Each one has a different coloured label. Each one a different level of toxicity to the environment. All of them over-promising and under-delivering. Not one of them has ever removed a stain. Not properly.
Not that she’s obsessed with stains. It’s just that Tim is a stainer. Better stainer than stoner though. Olive, Mary’s sister, is married to a stoner. Olive sprays her house with Febreze Vanilla Flower (300 mls) every time Mary and Tim visit. Before their visit that is. Olive must think they’re stupid. Mary found a box of the empty aerosols once when she was rooting around in Olive’s garage for pictures of their parents. Olive is such a hoarder. But keeping empty cans? Maybe she’d wanted Mary to find out? To help her with Trevor’s addictions? But you don’t mess with Olive. So Mary just checks that box of aerosols each time and ponders why Olive never tries another brand or fragrance. So many lovely ones to choose from.
‘Can you put something cold on my neck?’ Mary goes to the sink, rinses out a clean dishcloth with cold water, and hands it to Tim. He drapes it over the back of his neck and moans.
‘I wish I could remember the names of the dinosaurs,’ Mary says. ‘Your one there, it’s on the tip of my tongue. I can see it now. Beginning with A. It had two lots of spines, I’m sure of it.’ She leans down and rubs a spot of blood off the chair leg with a finger. Tim pushes her hand away.
‘Mary, for Christ’s sake. You care more about those chairs than me.’ He puts the white towel over the wound and presses down hard. A tight whistling bird-like sound forces its way out through his clenched teeth. Mary goes back to the fridge and leans into its warm steady tremor.
‘If we’d had children we’d know all the dinosaur names,’ she says, folding her arms across her chest. Tim stands up. The bloody white towel falls to the floor. His dinosaur shin is bare. He is half-naked with his lardy legs and a wet Lakeland dishcloth around his neck.
‘Every time,’ he says, ‘you twist things round to that. Every bloody time.’ Mary’s stomach tightens. Her pelvis contracts.
‘And why do you think that is?’ she says. He takes a step towards her, stops when he sees her lips twisting, the reddening scrunch of her eyes.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he says. She leans down, picks up the bloody towel and throws it into the sink.
‘That’s right. It was my fault. Every time. Every time. Your bloody wound is nothing. But mine? It just bled and bled.’
‘Kiss me’, she said crying. Jesus Christ. Is that Maureen’s voice? I put the watering can down and lean over the stair banister to have a look. No, can’t be. Yes. No doubt about it. It’s Maureen. With, bloody hell, with Peter. Maureen and Peter, my two neighbours on the ground floor, locked in a grotesque embrace. Never mind social distancing, I’ve seen his pants on the line and they were practically crinoline.
‘I can’t’, Peter says. His arms are all the way around her waist. His fingers, stubbed off short at the best of times, are doing their level best on an intertwine. I gulp some air.
‘Why not?’
“I just can’t.’
I get up on my tiptoes and lean over further. I am four storeys up, and the light is not as good on the ground floor. Their faces are three or four inches apart. Even in the gloom, Peter’s neck is flushing deep pink. Maureen’s hands are trembling on his back, her long baby blue nails digging deep into his spine under his grey cotton mix cardigan. Her purple skirt has slipped out of kilter.
‘Why not?’
‘I just can’t.’
I’m not ageist and I know it’s not kind to say this but you need to know that they’re both the wrong side of sixty and Maureen’s supposed to be in lockdown with her new fancy man on the other side of the high street with an adult-only tree house. And I know it’s not about what you’ve got but who you are but Peter’s only got a dumpy one-bed caravan with the curtains never washed to even get a chance of being shrunk on the boggy side of Glen Tarbert. I know where my loyalties would lie.
She pushes her lips to his. He tilts his head away.
‘I do want to,’ he says.
‘So why can’t you?’
‘I just can’t.’
‘Just for a second.’
‘No.’ She pushes her lips again. Again he tilts his head. I used to have a doll like that. Giggles her name was. She came with a plastic spoon with a heap of green on it. Every time I put the spoon to her mouth she shook her head. Her lips were permanently pursed. I raged at her obstinacy. If I had to eat spinach why shouldn’t she? Ah, Maureen’s speaking again.
‘No one’s looking.’ I sense her coquetry. I snigger and back away from the banister. The holes in my ears are doing the things pupils do when their owners have taken drugs.
‘It’s not about someone looking,’ he says.
‘What is it, love?’ Love? She called him love? What have I missed? Where have I been? Laughter is welling up my gut, about to spill all over the landing. Even the wilting petunias, waiting in growing exacerbation for their daily watering, perk up. ‘Is it me? My breath?’ she asks. Her purple skirt is skittish now. Frisky even. He coughs.
He says ‘it’s my teeth.’
‘What about your teeth?’ I see the shine of his bald crown shimmer. Then shake. He sounds like he might start crying. She pushes her groin into his. She rocks her hips. Where is my phone? I need to get this live. I pat my pockets down. Nothing. Damn thing must be inside. I lean forward again.
‘They’re not in,’ he says.
‘What’s not in?’
‘My upper dentures.’ The words are whispered. She leans back in his arms.
‘Let me see,’ she says. There’s a sound that could be a choked back chuckle.
‘No.’
‘Pretty please.’
‘It’s private.’ Her right arm has moved from his neck to somewhere deep around his front and a bit below his waist.
‘It wasn’t private last week.’ God Almighty, even I’m embarrassed now.
‘Please Maureen, don’t make me.’ He turns his head from side to side but he doesn’t look up. Must be checking to see if anyone’s about. Jesus Christ, is she for real? Can she not see his torment? But I want her to continue. Force him on. Fine tune her lustful torture. It’s the most fun I’ve had since lockdown started. A phone rings in one of the middle flats. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says. Maybe I should nip in now for my phone. But what if I miss the best part?
‘No.’
‘We’ll go inside. So I can put them in. Then…’ She interrupts him.
‘Let me touch it.’
‘What?
‘Your gums.’ There’s an interminable and dreadful hiatus before he replies.
‘What on earth do you want to do that for?’
‘Because it’s sexy, Peter.’ His stubbed off fingers jump on her back. He just hangs on to his intertwine. His pink flush has turned deep cherry red. Her right hand reappears from somewhere down there and a multi-ringed finger lands on his lips.
‘Open up, honey.’ She is dentist talking to a wayward child. I am transfixed. My mouth opens in harmony with his. I lean further over, the wooden railing digging into my stomach. She’s poking around his mouth with the finger. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘it’s really rather cute.’
‘Cute?’ He manages to get the word out despite the finger.
‘You know, innocent, adorable.’ I can’t watch. I mustn’t watch. I can’t stop watching. It is appalling. Arse-tightening. Erotic. Dreadful.
‘Really?’ His tone has changed.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘You like it without my teeth?’
‘Like it? I love it.’ Their heads move together. There’s a long squelching sucking noise. The sound of suction. I kick a foot back and knock over the watering can. There’s a stifled scream. I can’t tell whether it’s male or female. I’m too late to move away. I stare down into the gloom. I am paralysed. Two pink cheeked faces look up. They are both open mouthed. They are hungry chicks desperate for a feed.
And, dear readers, as far as I can see, there’s not an upper tooth between them.
The sudden silence is so loud, so brash, so charged, I stumble. My bare heel slips out of my platform shoe and I grab at the nearest chair to catch myself. My glasses steam up and the silence jumps an octave. I force my heel back into my shoe and rub my glasses with a finger. The Café Royal melts into focus.
The serving bar, a long fat oval, is in the centre of the room. Everything in it and about it is flashy and tiled and chandeliered. Johan had chosen the bar and I wasn’t surprised. On-line at least, he’s a flashy sort of guy.
There are mirrors of mirrors of mirrors. Multiples of multiples and shattering vulgar light. I’m confused. Are there five people or ten or fifty? I settle on around twenty including the three barman.
Across from me a woman leans on a chair by the door. She is older than me, and flustered. She is wearing the same yellow shoes. The same cropped jeans. The same neat black jacket. I frown at her and she frowns back. We blush together as we understand our idiocy. I want to scan the bar for Johan but now I’m too humiliated to look.
Still, no one speaks.
A barman, neat in a moustache and a tight black waistcoat with a tea towel draped over his shoulder, studies me. His appraisal is slow and deliberate. I pull my shoulders in. Shrink inside. He releases me, turns away and leans over the counter to a young bloke in a suit. They exchange whispers and money.
The young bloke swivels on his stool and faces me. He’s looking but not looking. He has a banknote in his fingers that he rolls and unrolls. Something gold flashes around his wrist. He doesn’t seem to blink. I drop my eyes. Sticky acrid bile catches the back of my throat. I imagine it yellow. Then green. I cough. The bloke keeps looking not looking rolling unrolling.
Still, no one speaks.
The bar is dim and cool. Everyone in it is cool and dim. Except me. I am hot. I cannot control my breathing.
I cannot control my breathing. Breaths coming short and fast. Too short and so fast. What’s wrong with these people? It can’t be me. How could it be me? I try looking to my right.
There’s a trio, standing in an alcove. A fiddler, a guitarist, and a woman who probably sings. She’s in a red dress with matching flat shoes. They are not playing music. But they’re not resting. They’re a livestream on pause. The fiddler, a tall man with angles and rough cheeks and a blistered nose, still has his fiddle under his v-shaped chin. The arm with the bow is stuck, crooked in the air. He sways lightly. He is looking at the bloke on the stool. His eyes seem distressed.
The guitarist is also looking at the bloke on the stool. He has more of a querulous look. His guitar hangs on his chest from a leather strap over his shoulder, and his right hand is a frozen pick at a fret. The woman in red has her belly out and her mouth open in preparation for a high note that does not come. She is looking at me. Where is Johan? He must have seen me by now.
Still, no one speaks.
My short fast breaths need reassurance. My hands are sticking with sweat. I try looking to my left. There’s an old woman sat on a high chair at a fruit machine. She’s wearing a sleeveless crocheted waistcoat, nicotine taupe, over a rumpled white shift. Her eyes are pulled to the line of odd fruits. Her fingers are on the red button. The fruit machine is not flashing. Its lights are stuck on glare. The woman’s right shoe makes a rapid tap tap on the wooden footrest below her. It’s the only sound in the bar. The only sound apart from my short fast breaths.
The silence blisters. A mobile phone. It rings and rings until it rings out. It comes from the far corner of the bar, the corner I can see. It comes from a group of four men with dominoes splayed out across their table. Two of the men are looking at the bloke on the stool. The other two have their hands flat on the table.
Still, no one speaks.
I feel sick. This is why I never go into bars first. Why I always wait outside. Wandering about on the pavement pretending to make a call. Maybe this is Johan? A test? A test for a first date? But how would he set the whole thing up? He wouldn’t know all these people. The woman at the fruit machine sneezes. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. I’m the only person that looks.
I need to leave. I let go of the chair. I set my face in an air of oh well nothing happening here I’ll just head home. I swing around on my platform shoes. The bloke on the stool hops down. He is bigger than I expected. He moves fast. He moves to the spot between me and the door. He is close enough to touch. He smells of onion and metal. My adrenaline roars.
I look back around the bar for help. To the trio of musicians. To the woman at the fruit machine. To the men with the dominoes. To all the others sitting in silence with their gazes anywhere but here. Someone drops a coin on the floor. Someone on the other side of the musicians. The coin bounces and spins. I can’t help but watch it. The bloke in the suit has breath that is warm and gummy across my hair.
The coin settles. It settles beside something red. Blood red. A trail of blood. The trail leads to a man. A man lying face down all crooked under a table with a couple sat each side of him. No one bends to retrieve the coin.
And still, no one speaks.
Postscript. This was a writing exercise on building tension.
He sits there, bold as brass, brassy bold, his legs apart, his belly folding over the waist of his trousers, and I wonder why, why me, why would Big Col accidently pick me?
It’s the week before the trial, his trial, not mine, and he’s bungled into the wrong stair and chapped the wrong door, not so much chapped as punched, raw-knuckled, and before I’ve checked, before I’ve peeped through the peep hole that monsters even the most fairy-like, I’ve let him in.
There he is, a soft damp frogspawn of a man, oozing liquid gel on my carpet and he’s asking for Laura and I’m saying there’s no Laura here, wrong door, wrong trousers (he has them on at least) and he’s walking through my flat, looking behind doors, peering into cupboards, then still brassy bold, folding himself down on the leather sofa, you know the one with the milk stain from the Spanish students back in 2011, and he’s demanding a cup of tea.
Men like him, they have a smell about them, and he’s no different. The smell of something fermenting under musk, something slithering under cologne, something dank or musty, not quite putrid but definitely on the way there, you know like the taste of blue-furred mould on a bread slice that’s slipped down behind the chopping board and been resurrected for toast with just the crust cut off.
So here we are, him and me, and when his mouth opens, the audience roars, or so I think he thinks and I mirror him. I sit with my legs apart, my shoulders slouched, my chin doubled, and I lean forward like I’m really interested, expecting something ground-breaking, something biblical, something on a colossal scale and we both lean in like that for some time until he says more sugar, honey, you’re not sweet enough, and I think I might explode.
His eyes are traveling down my legs, so my eyes travel his. His socks are not what I would have expected. One blue, the other black, and the skin of his ankles, yes, I see them, once seen never forgiven, the skin is mottled, the way lichen craves a gravestone, and it could have been scraped back that yellow foliose, the granite kept all clean and nice, but it’s never a good idea to prevent the living from colonising the dead.
His right shoe taps and I know he’s nervous. No one taps their foot when they’re confident, right, not unless there’s a fiddler in the room, and there isn’t, unless, no I can’t say it but we all think it, there’s just me and this big man, and we’re both tap tapping and you know what? Big Col’s not larger than life at all, he’s really rather small, the shine long gone from his brasses, and a small pool of pond life lapping the inside of his shoes.
She is sitting at the table. Top floor. Looking out. Yes, the woman could be doing something more interesting. Windows are such overused mechanisms in the arts. But, if she didn’t look out of the window, what would be the point of windows?
The woman is watching a window cleaner. The man is on a ladder, leaning into his work, wiping cloudy water off the glass with a scraper. The man has the trousers of a painter and the belted toolkit of a carpenter. The woman is surprised to see the man. She doesn’t think window cleaning is an essential service. On Easter Friday too. Although, considering the issue for a bit longer, she changes her mind. If eyes are the windows to the soul, a dirty window is not what we need right now. Never have souls been so important. And never have we needed so badly to be able to look into them. She won’t report the window cleaner. She used to be one to make a scene. Not any more.
There is a cat going about the woman’s legs. The cat, under-fed, though probably over-loved, is making small sad sounds that continue, unabated, as the waves do, lapping on the nearby shore. Without further explanation you’ll come to your own conclusions.
The woman is too poor to feed the cat.
Cat food is no longer available.
Or the woman is a witch.
The sun, bright through the naked window, does seem to be throwing the shadow of a coned hat across the light and dark of the room. In this scenario the cat is definitely black.
The plain truth is that the cat is on a diet. The cat must lose 300g in weight. The woman is doing her best to make that happen. She doesn’t always get it right. The cat is the only corporeal thing in the woman’s life right now. Sometimes the woman buries her face in the cat’s soft white underbelly and weeps. Or does she?
Beneath the woman’s feet are wooden floorboards. Beneath those, a child is laughing. A younger child is singing. It’s not possible to know whether they are boys or girls or one of each. You assume that that the children are alive. I’ve already told you that the woman is on the top floor, looking out. But if the woman is indeed a witch, the evil kind, even though the cat’s only on a diet, the children may be dead. Dead and dried and mewling. Wraiths warbling up out of the black ash and crushed shells that separate this floor from the one below.
But in this time of pandemonium and pandemics and a run on pancake flour, desiccated children are simply not required. Readers, and I include you in this, need to be consoled, cossetted, wrapped up with velvety words and slubs of reassurance. There are no dead children under the floor boards. If there had been, I would have been sure to mention the smell.
The other sound, above what is a rather lovely tinkle of young children being young, is the wind. The zephyr, thrilled finally to be taking centre-stage, is poking around the corbels, rattling spits of gravel on the window ledge, sending wisps of plastic whimsy spinning and whirling above the empty street. The woman opens the window to let the new sounds in. The swathe of silence inside has been in danger of becoming a shroud.
A pigeon lands on the guttering. The woman hears the bird’s toes click and curl around the lead rim. The woman catches the pigeon’s eye. The woman and pigeon sit there for a long time, eye to eye. The woman is pondering the shape and colour of the pigeon’s soul. You’ll have to decide for yourself what the pigeon is pondering, if anything. They sit together for longer than is comfortable for the woman. Less so, perhaps, for the pigeon. But the woman cannot stop looking out.
SANDERLINGS 