It Knows Where You Live (13 page)

The table was empty, but they were there; they were always there, waiting for a meal that never came, a form of sustenance constantly denied them.

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Miraculously, Ben managed to get an appointment with the doctor early the next day—someone had cancelled and the slot was free if he was prepared to go down to the surgery immediately. He went out into the light rain, running beneath a sullen sky. The surgery was not far from his house, and a short cut took him through a series of identical wet streets and right to the door. He must be ill—that would explain everything. A reoccurrence of the depressive fits from his childhood.

The doctor was sceptical when Ben told her about his experience with the table. “I read your file,” she said, smiling blandly. “I know you have a history of mental issues, and your mother was a severe depressive. You know it’s all about mood management, don’t you? In your case, you’re the best person to do this. I could prescribe you all kinds of pills, but I’d rather use that as a last resort. I don’t want to put you through all that again unless I have to.” She typed notes on a computer keyboard as she spoke. It did not fill Ben with confidence.

“I don’t want medication,” said Ben, wishing he had never come here. “I just want you to tell me I’m not mad, that everything’s okay.” His hands twitched in his lap; he moved his feet on the carpet in tiny circles. “Tell me I’m not slipping away again, like before. Like my mother.”

“You’re not mad. You just need to manage your condition. What happened when you were younger—your parents, particularly your mother’s suicide—left scars. It was bound to. Maybe counselling would help? Someone to talk to? I can give you a couple of numbers to try, but be aware the waiting lists are long.”

He took the information the doctor offered—three printed sheets—and left the surgery, wishing he had stayed at home.

Ben did not want someone to talk to. He knew the people at the table were not imaginary representations of his own absent family—that would have been much too simple. His father had left when he was young, and his mother had killed herself during Ben’s long illness. The police had questioned him four hours after finding her body sitting in an old dining chair outside the house. Even now, he did not miss her; not really. He missed the idea of a mother more than the physical reality. She had been depressed, yet her doctor had not recognised the signs. Ben, in his misguided attempts to make her love him, had become ill by proxy and allowed the woman to smother him.

It was a period in his life he chose not to discuss. Even Jill knew nothing about his teenage years. It was better that way; there were no awkward questions, no issues to dodge.

There was something bigger going on here than his petty problems. The family might be taken for ghosts, but again that idea was too simple-minded. They were something different—something more forlorn and complicated: more like the ghosts of ghosts. When they appeared at the table, it was as if he were being allowed a glimpse into another place; somehow the table linked them to the world, or perhaps it trapped them here, momentarily, so that he might see them. He wondered if, in that other place, they sat down at a table that became the one in his lounge, or if they were bound to it, imprisoned in an otherwise bare chamber to participate in a kind of enforced mediumship...

But these were useless thoughts. Like all enigmas, the beauty of this one lay in the fact that it could never be unravelled. There was a table, and sometimes four people sat around it, without chairs. That was all.

Later that evening he went through his address book and looked at the names of old girlfriends. Not one of them had reached him enough to make him want to start his own family. Even Jill, despite being the best of them all, he had kept at a distance. Was it a failing in him, or was it something about these women that doomed all his relationships to end the same way? He could not remember his father, and his mother’s face remained out of reach...none of the women he had ever lain with had been able to replace these dim memories with new ones.

He took a long bath and read a chapter from his book. When he returned to the lounge they were there again, sitting in their usual places around the table. The children looked to be aged between eight and ten; the parents were possibly in their mid-thirties. Once again, their faces were rigid and indistinct, but seemed just about to move. Ben felt that whenever he looked away from them they were pulling faces at him, and when he looked back their faces were once again expressionless.

“Who are you?” He did not expect an answer, and was not surprised when none came. “Please, tell me. Who are you? Why are you here?” There was no reason; they simply were.

“When I was a boy, I used to long for a family like this, sitting around a table at meal times. It’s something I never had.” He approached the table and stared at its centre, following their gaze. The air there seemed to boil, rippling and undulating as if something were trying to take shape. He watched in silence, willing it to form, but the sequence never reached its conclusion and the changes threatening to occur never did. There was just that same rippling movement; a slow churning clot of thickened air above the stained area of tabletop.

On impulse Ben took off his shoes and climbed up onto the table, his knees aching and his stocking feet slipping slightly as he hauled himself up there. He stood within that knot of shifting air, feeling nothing as it wrapped around his midriff. The family stared at him, the skin of their faces pulled taut. Their eyes were huge, straining to see something that was never quite there.

Ben closed his eyes and threw back his head, waiting for something to happen. When he opened his eyes he was alone, standing on a table in the darkness. He felt foolish, as if he’d been tricked. He climbed down and crossed the room, where he sat in his solitary armchair and stared at the wall, not even recognising his own thoughts.

It seemed like hours later when the telephone rang. The curtains were open; the darkness outside pressed against the windows. He went to the telephone and picked it up. “Hello?”

“I rang to tell you it’s over.” It took him a second or two to realise that the voice on the line belonged to Jill. At first he’d thought it was his mother, calling from out of the past.

He didn’t know what she wanted him to say.

“I thought I owed you at least the decency of telling you I never want to see you again. I thought you might ask me to change my mind...”

He shook his head, unable to summon the words to tell her how he felt—unable to even understand how he felt.

“So that’s it, then? You’re happy it’s over?”

“Jill.”

“Yes?” If there was hope in her voice, he was no longer able to recognise it.

“The table.”

“Fuck the table, Ben. Fuck the fucking table...and fuck you, too.” It was a memorable line on which to end a relationship; he was glad he was able to give her that at least. She could tell her friends about it later, in the pub, when the pain went away.

Ben returned to his chair. He grabbed it and dragged it round, so it faced the bay window, and the table. Then he sat down and waited. He waited a long time but it was no time at all, not really, in the scheme of things. He sensed that others, elsewhere, had waited a lot longer, and for a lot less.

They appeared between blinks; interstitial apparitions, locked between moments. The man, the woman and the two children. They were the same yet they were different. Something about them had changed, but Ben could not discern exactly what it was. Perhaps it was he who had changed, released now from the last thing binding him to this life.

He stood and walked across the room, stepped up onto the table. This time it was easier; his knees did not ache, his mind was clear. He sat down on the table and crossed his legs, closing his eyes against the darkness. He felt them watching him—or rather, they stared at the dense space he occupied above the centre of the table. The stirring air pushed against his chest. This time he felt it, and the sensation was both terrifying and strangely comforting, like the uninvited caress of a stranger.

A sense of complete dislocation overcame him, casting him adrift from himself, and a buzzing sound filled his ears. It sounded like hundreds of bees, or strange droning music. A moment later Ben realised he was crying. His cheeks were wet; his eyes were dripping.
 

Moist eyes. Wet hands.
 

He opened his eyes and stared at his cupped palms: they were filled with blood. He glanced at the man, the woman, and the children, at their blurred faces and their staring eyes. They were watching him now—he had their full attention at last.

They smiled in unison, the skin of their faces finally preparing to change or fall away and show their true features.

Ben reached out with his red hands, and was not at all surprised when he felt them clasped by other hands. Small fingers wrapped around his wrists, pinning him to the table. He stared at the man. At the woman. At the children. He smiled as their thin skin peeled back to reveal what had always been there, just waiting for him to open his eyes and see them.
 

He thought of his dead mother and his absent father, of his loveless life and his heavy, heavy heart. Then, calmly, he accepted the kinship of the twitching crimson things which even now were rising from the table and moving slowly forward to embrace him.

THE SHEEP

(
For Nick Royle
)

Bill knew it was going to rain again today.
 

He’d expected it long before they left the rented cottage in Corbridge that morning to start their six-mile hike. Even then the sky was dark and leaden. The river, just down from their front door, ran fast and white and furious; the early-morning pedestrians crossing the bridge to the train station all wore waterproof jackets over their fleeces.

There was also the fact that it
always
rains in Northumberland in the springtime.

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“God, this is a bit much.” Hannah struggles gamely with the hood of her cagoule, trying to fasten the ties while the edges of the plastic hood close over her face like the lips of a monstrous puckering mouth. “I fucking hate the rain.”

Bill turns fully around, walking backwards along the empty lane. “It’ll pass. Look at the sky—the sun’s trying to break through.” He knows Hannah hates his relentless optimism, but it only makes him more adamant that he will convert her to his way of seeing the world.

“Want to put some money on that, fella?”

He shakes his head, smiling. She’s finally managed to fasten the hood. “Tell you what, though. If it doesn’t stop, I’ll buy the first round when we get back to The Black Bull.”

She trudges on without response. Her face looks pale against the black cagoule. Her eyes, behind the misted lenses of her glasses, are unreadable.

They continue up the hill, passing a derelict stone building Bill’s map says is an old kiln: two dark arches framing a tableau of overgrown yellowish grass and building rubble, and a battered wooden door wedged open onto darkness.

“Spooky,” says Hannah, and he is inclined to agree.

“Look.” He points at the uneven ground just outside the open door. “It’s a boot.” The torn and filthy hiking boot is missing its twin; it just sits there, tipped over onto one side, with the laces still tied.

“Is there a foot still in it?”

Hannah’s macabre sense of humour often puzzles him. He can’t understand why she always has to look for the dark angle, painting everything black.

A solitary sheep emerges from the doorway, inching out into the grainy light. Its body is thin, its face flattened and stupid-looking. The sheep’s fleece is so grubby it could be black.

“He looks a bit sheepish. But if the boot fits....” Hannah kicks a stone and turns away, grinning.

“Very funny,” he says, and pushes on. He can hear her chuckling softly behind him, but then the rainfall intensifies and the only sound he is aware of is the sharp pitter-patter of raindrops against his plastic hood.

The road bends gently to the left as they reach the top of the hill. On the right, a rickety fence guards two large tractor tyres and what looks like a smashed bee hive but is probably just some kind of countryside relic Bill has never seen before. He glances at the pile of splintered wood, feeling more and more like a clumsy city-dweller out of his depth in this rural locale.

“If it would just stop raining, we could have a rest. Have some of that water.” Hannah’s voice is closer behind him than he expects. She moves fast for a small person: her four-foot five-inch frame seems to glide through the grey, watery air. “There isn’t even any kind of shelter.”

Round the bend are yet more fields. The green-and-yellow mosaic of short patchy grass on the left is hemmed in by a line of barbed-wire-topped timber palings. Beyond this fence, several more sheep stand and watch the couple as they walk by.

“Fuck off,” says Hannah. Bill turns around in time to see her raising her middle finger and sticking her tongue out at the nearest animal. The sheep blinks uncomprehendingly in the face of the insult, and then darts a few yards to its left, its hind quarters bucking as if it has been slapped.

“Why’d you do that?” He stops. The rain is starting to ease off, so he pulls back his hood to expose his face to the chilly air.

“The stupid thing was staring at me...maybe it could smell its Uncle Larry on my breath from that curry last night.” She winks at him—it is a manly gesture, one that makes him feel uncomfortable. Hannah possesses more natural machismo than he can even manage to fake.

They walk the fence line, looking in at the bedraggled sheep. Some of them have been partially shorn; one of the smaller animals is sporting what looks like a punkish Mohawk hairdo.

“The
fashionista
of the sheep world,” says Hannah, laughing again at her own joke. She always does this, and it never seems to bother her when nobody else finds her funny. She just carries on entertaining herself, oblivious to anyone else’s reaction.