The Concrete Grove (21 page)

“We can go up now,” he said. “That’s Dennis. He comes here every night. Never gets in the ring, just shadow boxes for hours. We leave him in peace. He pays his dues so we let him do his thing.”

The man kept moving; he was never still. His feet shuffled across the smooth floor, shushing like the delicate touch of a drum brush against a hi-hat cymbal. His face was stern, almost grim, and his eyes were focused on a single point on the wall. Whatever he was fighting, he would never be able to beat it. The man’s private bout would last forever, or at least until the moment when he shadow-boxed into his grave.

“Shall we go now?” Francis increased the pressure on her arm. His fingers were wide, his grip insistent. It was not a question.

“Yes,” she said, looking at his face, concentrating on his small, piggy eyes. “Yes, I’m ready now. Let’s go and see Monty Bright.”

The silent boxer didn’t even acknowledge their presence as they passed from his view. She doubted he even realised they’d been there. The thought filled her with a deep sadness that made her flesh tingle.

Her thoughts and feelings were corrosive. She felt like she was on the verge of losing her mind, and she welcomed that madness, wishing that it would hurry up and take her away from all this. Hoping that it would help her to get through whatever happened next.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
OM WAS STANDING
on the landing outside his room. He could not remember how he had arrived here, or even when he had woken and climbed out of bed. The last thing he could picture was the bedroom ceiling as he closed his eyes to try and sleep.

He felt like a little boy, dressed in his pyjamas and wandering after midnight through the family home. His fears were those created by a broken childhood; his desperation not to be seen was born of the fact that his father was home and he had been drinking.

He was unable to sleep; his mind was racing with unfocused thoughts that he wished he could suppress. Lana Fraser, Hailey with her strange biology, and a debt that must, at some point, be repaid. He was gripped by a sense of urgent panic, as if he knew that somewhere someone important to him was in trouble, but he couldn’t do a thing to help them. Events were racing to some sort of conclusion, but he had no idea how to stop them or even what those events might be.

He padded across the landing to the bathroom and stared at his face in the mirror. His jowls sagged; his eyes were small and narrow, like piss holes in the snow. His skin had taken on a slight yellow hue, as if it were jaundiced. He could not recall ever looking so worn out. He was exhausted yet he could not sleep.

The book he’d been reading earlier was on the shelf by the basin. He must have left it there before going to bed. Dostoevsky:
Crime and Punishment
. He was attempting to wade through the classics he had not looked at since school, when a strict English teacher and his dry methods had rendered them cold and turgid and lifeless.

The title of the book had taken on a resonance that made him feel uncomfortable. Thoughts of Lana and her loan shark floated in his brain, bobbing on the surface while darker, more complex thoughts ran in the deeper currents of his subconscious mind.

He thought about the sea cow downstairs, lost in her paraplegic dreams. Then he thought again of Lana: her dark-sparkling eyes, her hair, her smooth, pale skin.

“I love her,” he said to his reflection. The reflection smiled, completely unsurprised, but Tom didn’t feel his own face take on the same shape. It was like another person was looking at him, placing him and his emotions under scrutiny.

“I love her,” said his reflection, belatedly; but he didn’t feel his lips move in harmony with those in the mirror and the voice sounded deeper than normal. He was two people now, or one person split down the middle. His life had been cleaved, as if someone had taken a large axe and brought it down at a point right between his eyes, separating the two opposing sides of his brain.

Was he awake or dreaming? He didn’t feel as if he were asleep; the world was solid around him and his senses were alert. No, this was not a dream. He was caught in a space between sleeping and waking, an interstice in which the rules of both of these states battled for supremacy. The imagery of dreams was bleeding into his waking world, and it felt like a drug trip: intense yet hazy, a blend of fact and fiction, a whole new world of contradictory sensations and images. For a moment he smelled wet grass; then the odour became that of rotten meat.

He’d read somewhere that people with brain tumours often experienced phantom smells.

But no, he wasn’t ill. Perhaps the explanation was as simple as insanity. Maybe he was losing his mind.

In an attempt to wake himself up, he brushed his teeth. Whenever he looked down, at the sink, he had the impression that his reflection was staring at the top of his head. But when he looked up again to check, his reflection seemed to move with him. He felt twitchy and paranoid; he needed to relax.

He put away his toothbrush and moved over to the bath, where he put in the plug and turned on the hot tap. Soon the room began to fill with steam. He stripped off his T-shirt and pyjama bottoms and sat naked on the edge of the tub, staring at the plumes of water vapour as they rose and gathered in the air. He began to see shapes forming: clenched fists, compressed faces with knotted features. Rudimentary heads shifting in the patterns made by the steam.

He twisted the hot tap off and turned on the cold, adding some bath oil. Testing the water first with his hand, he then turned off the cold tap and climbed into the tub. Despite the addition of cold water, the bathwater was too hot. It burned his skin, turning his legs red, then his belly. He sucked in his breath sharply as he lowered his upper body into the water. This was a small yet pleasurable pain; a brief and biting agony that soon faded as his body became accustomed to the temperature of the water.

As he lay there he pictured Lana, naked. Her soft curves were cupped by shadow, and the visible parts of her skin were almost luminescent. She stroked herself with her fingertips, running a hand across her breasts, down towards her stomach, and then to the dark patch below. A large shadow loomed behind her, stretching like a black sheet around her body…

Tom reached down and began to fondle himself. His hands were clumsy; there was little response to his self-attention. He tried to masturbate but couldn’t quite sustain enough focus. That shadow – a vast billowing presence behind the imaginary Lana – was too distracting. He knew what the shadow was, what it meant. It was the shape of her debt, a crude representation of what she owed to that man Monty Bright.

Angry and frustrated, he got out of the bath and stood, dripping wet, before the mirror. His reflection was smiling again, but this time he felt the expression mirrored on his face. The smile was bitter, cynical: there was not a trace of humour evident, just a cruel trace of thwarted desire.

He grabbed a towel and dried himself off, feeling as if he were tending to someone else – a man who was sick and not completely sane. His last ten years spent as a carer – a person whose sole aim in life was to appease the needs of another – had changed him in many ways, and some of them only ever peeked above the surface during times of great stress or anxiety. Sometimes he viewed the world as a place filled with those needs, and he felt as if he’d been cast adrift in a landscape of pain and disability.

He put on his night clothes and went back out on to the landing. The house was quiet; he couldn’t even hear the ticking of a clock, or the sound of traffic passing by on the street outside. He glanced at his watch. It was almost 2 AM. Even the night people had quietened down.

He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the dimness. It looked like the darkness was a sea. He imagined creatures swimming down there, in the shadows, perhaps even his wife had floated out of her bed to ride the night-time currents, her mouth gaping and her hands grasping.

Tom descended, gripping the handrail tightly. He realised that he was tense, perhaps even afraid. His strange experience in the bathroom had wrong-footed him, making him feel as if he and Helen were not alone in the house. He felt as if a stranger was moving through the rooms below, silently examining their belongings, picking up and inspecting the minutiae of their lives and judging them as worthless.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs he saw the stone wall in the hallway. He knew immediately that it was a portion of Hadrian’s Wall – perhaps even the same section where he’d picnicked with Lana and Hailey. It had emerged from the front wall of the house, near the front door, and looped around the door to return through the same wall on the opposite side, forming a barricade to prevent him leaving.

I am dreaming after all
.
So there’s nothing to fear.

But that was a lie. Everything was a source of fear: terror hid in every corner, and was displayed on every shelf and surface.

He stared at the crude segment of the wall. It was a surreal image: the arrival of something ancient in his home, the stone dirty and with patches of fungus spotted along its length. He wasn’t afraid of the wall. His feelings towards it were more complex. He experienced a rush of strangeness, a thrill of exhilaration at the sight of the old stone. Then, at a deeper level, he felt honoured that such a vision should present itself to him, a normal man, a struggling husband and potential adulterer. What had he done to deserve this? Why had he been singled out for such a reward?

Then, as he watched, the section of wall slithered, moving like a great, dry serpent. The old folk rhyme returned to him, and he recited it once again in his head:

But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,

An’ grewed an aaful size;

He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,

An greet big goggly eyes

But there were no eyes on this worm. It did not even possess a face. It was a long, shifting portion of the ruined Roman wall, and its presence here was simply an indication of a deeper mystery.

The wall moved continually now; a moving barrier, blocking his way to the door. He knew it was meant to keep him inside, to hold him hostage. There was a grinding sound, stone upon stone, and he remembered Hailey’s comment about baby bones being buried beneath the foundations.

“Dreaming,” he said, feeling more awake than he had in days. If this was a dream, then it was a lucid one, and rather than succumb to the logic of the dream he would be required to act, to move freely through the dream and not simply become part of its story.

The door to Helen’s room was wide open. Darkness bulged from the doorway, pressing through the frame like oil. He watched it for a while, wondering if he should feel more afraid – his fear was slight now, like a vague notion of how people were supposed to react when confronted with the unknowable.

Without thinking about what he was doing, he began to walk towards Helen’s room. It felt right; part of the dream. He was meant to see inside that room.

As he drew closer to the open door he began to make out sounds: a soft, smothered grunting noise, like a pig snuffling at a trough; creaking bed springs; a gentle slap-slapping of flesh on flesh.

It sounded like someone was having sex in there.

That Man
, he thought, wildly.
Is it his ghost, returned to finish what he and Helen started? To finally consummate the relationship that was cut short by his death and Helen’s paralysis?

He stood before the door but could not see inside. The darkness was solid. Slowly, he reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger against it. The darkness bulged inward, like a balloon. Yes, that was it: a huge black balloon. But he was stuck inside the balloon and Helen was on the outside, in the real world.

Still he was not afraid enough to turn away, and even if he could, there was nowhere to go. The wall was still blocking his exit. He could either continue on, into the room, or return upstairs to confront his rogue reflection.

He stepped inside the room, his face pressing against the surface of the balloon, stretching the material, forcing it past its elastic limit… and then, with an audible popping sound, he was through and standing on the other side of the darkness.

The sounds were louder now, unfiltered as they were through that cloying blackness. Helen’s lamp was on, so there was enough light to see what was happening on the bed.

The bed.

Helen’s bed.

The same gathering of fists he’d seen at Hadrian’s Wall was inside the room, hovering above and around Helen’s bed. The fists were huge – each one the size of Tom’s head – and they formed a loose netting around something that was twitching and bucking at their centre. The fingers moved liked birds’ wings, flapping slowly; their motion was odd and slightly nauseating. Then, simultaneously, they all tightened once again into hard fists.

It was a flock of hands, all gathered above the thing in the bed. A flock? Was that even the right expression? What was the collective noun for fists, anyway? A pummel? A flight?

No, a flock: that sounded best.

He was using his frantic, panicked thoughts to delay his reaction to the sight on the bed. He could barely understand it, let alone absorb what he was actually looking at.