It Knows Where You Live (4 page)

It was only when the woman had gone that he remembered seeing her before. A week ago, out near the White Rose Centre, she’d been walking swiftly along the roadside verge with that same gliding motion. On that occasion too, he had been unable to make out what she looked like. Just white skin and black eyes; eyes so dark he’d assumed she was wearing too much eye shadow. It was certainly the same woman: he knew it as well as he knew his own name, yet he could not think why. Yes, her movements were the same, and even her appearance was identical to before, but this was a deeper truth than he could fathom.

Back at home, in the warmth and the darkness, he took off his coat and went upstairs. Bypassing the master bedroom, he continued along the landing and entered the twins’ room. They were sleeping in the bunk beds, each curled onto the same side of their body and facing the wall. Bobby was sucking his thumb up above; Ben, on the lower bunk, held a small stuffed toy dog in his tiny fists, clinging to it as if it might save his life as he slept.

Berger knelt down by the bunks, kissed Ben on the temple, and then stroked Bobby’s hot forehead until the boy murmured in his sleep.

“I’m failing you,” he said, kneeling there before the heart of his existence, the meaning behind his struggle.

His face was wet. If the cost of giving his babies a good life, or at least of clinging to it for a little bit longer, was to make Tony Chong redundant, then the matter was out of his hands. These boys, his sleeping sons, came first, and that was all.

He went back downstairs and sat in the darkness. He stood and opened the living room curtains, staring out at the night. A figure ghosted out of the tall bushes at the end of the garden and stood watching the window. It was a woman, and she was clad in dark clothing; a flowing dress that reached her bare feet. Her hair was long, covering most of her face, but he could make out a large pair of smudge-dark eyes.

Berger opened his hand and pressed the palm against the window, smearing the glass. The woman took a small step forward, as if tentative yet unable to prevent herself from coming closer. Then she bowed her head and clasped her hands in an attitude of prayer.

The following morning was rough. Sophie looked tired and drawn, and the twins were boisterous. He ate breakfast with his fracturing family, hoping he could do enough to keep them together, and then kissed them all before leaving the kitchen. Sophie watched him go in silence. He grabbed the post on the way out the door, stuffing it into his pocket—a letter and two bills. The former was from the bank; he could tell from the envelope.

The drive to work was a nightmare: the heavy traffic seemed threatening, faces glared at him from behind windshields, and pedestrians seemed intent on walking in front of his car.

He pulled into his parking space and bent his head towards the wheel, feeling empty and hung-over despite not drinking the night before. The whole world was reshaping itself around the damage done by the bankers and financiers; the wounds torn so ruthlessly into the economy were scabbing over with a new and fragile tissue.

Shortly he got out of the car and went inside.

Then he waited for Tony Chong to arrive.

It did not take long; Tony was punctual in his habits.

“Can I have a word in the office?”

Tony nodded, took off his coat, and followed Berger into the inner sanctum.

“I think I know what’s coming, mate. I’ll spare you the agony of breaking it to me.” Tony sat down, placed his hands on his knees, and swallowed. “I’ll accept the redundancy package.”

Berger was stunned. Had he been so stupid, so out of it lately, that he’d underestimated everyone around him? “I’m...I’m sorry, Tony. I’ve tried to keep things going the same for as long as I could, but something’s got to give. I hate doing this to you.”

Tony smiled, but it was a sad, worn-out expression threatening to slip at any minute. “I know you do. We’re old friends, and if I can’t understand this, then no one can. I’m the obvious one to cut. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for almost a month now, waiting for work that was never going to come. I’m not daft. I know the score.”

Berger felt like a shit because Tony was making this so easy for him. He would have preferred it if the man had stood and screamed, thrown the furniture, maybe even taken a swing at him.

“It goes without saying I’ll be back in touch as soon as things get better.” His words sounded hollow, bereft of weight and meaning.

“I know,” said Tony, then he stood and left the room.

Berger took out the morning’s mail. The envelopes were crumpled from being in his pocket. He selected the single letter: white paper, a small window in the envelope, the bank’s return mailing address printed in cheap ink on the back.

He opened the letter.

As expected, it was a final demand before firm action was taken.
 

He did not want to lose the house, but now his hands were tied. He was powerless.

He sat there until Vanessa came in to say goodnight, then he sat for a long time afterward, just thinking about the mess they had made—all of them; the banks, the lenders, the people who’d bought into the capitalist dream.

“I can’t do this,” he said, looking up from his desk. A figure slipped out of sight, easing through the open door and out into the main office. He heard a whisper, like heavy material brushing against a desk or a wall, and then a breeze crept in, cooling his face.

Berger got up and followed her outside. He knew it was her; it could be no one else. The only question remaining was: who was she?
What was she?

He trailed her across the car park—empty but for his vehicle—and onto the waste ground beyond. He kept his eyes locked onto her lissom form, drinking her in. There was a beauty to her that seemed...unearthly. Yet at the same time she was of the time, of the moment.

One of Charlie Eastman’s spirits of the times...but no: that was just a mad idea concocted by a lonely old man. Because of Berger’s financial troubles, he was allowing his mind to poke around in corners best left alone.

The concrete and asphalt became scrubland became dense loamy earth became thick, untrammelled grass. When Berger looked around, his gaze taking in the nature of the landscape, he saw open fields stretching into the distance. But right at the edge of his vision, just past the point where things began to blur and fade, he saw the distant flicker of flames. Fire was all around, in a vast and endless circle.
 

The sky was dark but it was deep; he sensed an ocean of possibilities above him.

The woman headed up a slight rise which turned into a hill without changing perspective. On top of the hill, its sails motionless, was the black silhouette of a windmill. The woman was heading towards the stubby structure, her pace increasing as she climbed.

Berger’s breath was ragged; his legs ached. He realised with shame that his body was unaccustomed to such vigorous exercise and the muscles were rebelling.

It took a long time to mount such a small rise, but once at its crest he stopped and stared. Even close up, the windmill remained in silhouette: its walls and single window held no fine details. There was no door in its circular central tower. It was a crude rendering of a structure, a sketch, the idea or concept of a working building only partially realised. Form without function, shelter without purpose.

“What do you want? Why have you called me here?”

The woman said nothing. She simply stood with her back against the blackened shape, her dress blowing in a wind Berger could not feel, her thin body swaying. He knew implicitly that he was meant to go to her: she had come as far as she could towards him, and now it was his turn to confront the thing he feared and could not understand.

He stepped forward.

The windmill’s ragged sails slowly began to turn, as if nudged by a giant unseen hand. The sound of its gears was like the screams of the ruined, the cries of the unemployed and the unemployable, the wail of redundant tears. The flapping of the material wrapped around the framework of each sail was the fluttering of wings stunted before they were even allowed to fly.

“I need a way out of this. All of it. This isn’t what I wanted when I was a child. It’s not what I was promised in school and college and during my early days on the job. We bought the dream and the dream went sour.”

The woman nodded her head once. Her hair did not move. Then, slowly, she stepped forward out of the shadows, at last able to come to him. As the sails turned and hazy moonlight made faint daggers across the ground at her small toeless feet, she finally emerged into view. Beneath the masking wash of dark hair, she had no mouth, and her nose was nothing but a small, neat hole at the centre of her face. But it was her eyes that Berger could not fail to notice, and to him they symbolised everything. If the eyes were indeed the windows of the soul, then the soul behind these ones was terrible.
 

In the shadow of her gaze, Berger knew this woman did not offer salvation.

Berger sank to his knees as the woman approached him, her arm going up and out and the hand opening...and then falling onto his shoulder.

Then she looked down at him with those ugly black-slash eyes that were nothing more than barcodes, just like the ones stamped onto every consumable object available in stores and supermarkets all over the world, marked on each commodity mankind could stick a price on. She did not blink; the codes were incapable of movement. She just stared, logged his ultimate value and calculated the currency of his aspirations.
 

The frail ghosts of pounds and dollars and yen fell around him in a sudden storm of fiscal waste, and finally, and without further negotiation, she deemed his soul unworthy of discount...

•
   
•
   
•

Berger awoke much later, in his own bed, lying beside his wife. He knew it had not been a dream, but last night’s experience had already begun to take on a dream-like quality.

He leaned across the bed and kissed Sophie on the cheek, being careful not to disturb her rest. Then he went into the twins’ room and watched them for a while, filled with a sense of awe and wonder at the sight of their simple, uncomplicated beauty.

Downstairs, at the dining table, he took some notes from his wallet. Using an old cigarette lighter from the kitchen drawer, he burned the money on a saucer, watching fixated as the paper flared and then turned to ash.

Afterwards, when he stood and looked out of the window, admiring the first smudged colours of dawn on the horizon, he saw a thin dark-eyed figure standing by the fence, nodding in his direction. She would always be there, pulling the strings of society, but for once he could choose not to be her slave. There had to be another way—if not a better way, then simply an alternative to the one he had been born into. Whatever it was, he swore he would find it, and teach his children better lessons than the ones taught to him.

When dawn finally broke, bringing light into the world, Berger was surprised to find he was smiling.

THE ROW

“
Does not your house dream?
”

—
K
AHLIL
G
IBRAN

The row of houses put me in mind of those sets from old Hollywood western films, the ones with a painted façade representing the buildings in a small town. Frames of timber and painted cardboard, all lined up along a dusty main street, with nothing behind the closed doors but cables, debris, and possibly an expanse of desert wasteland.

The street was like that. It had the feel of falseness, an ambiance of flimsy one-dimensional fakery being passed off as solid, three-dimensional reality.

The row of houses was located in east Leeds, in an area known for crime and poverty. Most of the neighbouring streets had been demolished—council houses well past their due date, torn down rather than being left to fall. This row, the only surviving part of what was once known as Sebastian Street, was all that remained: a fragile-looking line of eight houses, each one derelict. Wooden boards nailed across the window openings, steel security shutters in place of doors. It was a dead street, a kind of liminal space into which even the toughest street kids did not venture—not because they were afraid, but because they didn’t even realise it was there.
 

Some places don’t need ghosts to be haunted. Some places seem to haunt themselves from the inside out.

“I’ll pick you up at about five-thirty. Is that okay?” Dan sat in the driver’s seat with his elbow poking through the open window, his arm resting on the frame. He stared dead ahead, watching the empty street.

“Yes,” I said, scribbling down the time on the first sheet of paper attached to my clipboard. “That’s fine. I have a packed lunch, and if I get desperate there’s a pub a few streets away.”

Dan turned to face me, his left eyebrow raised. “You’d have to be pretty damned desperate to go in The Feathers, mate. Roughest pub in the area, that is. I wouldn’t send my worst enemy in there for a pint.”

I nodded. “Okay, point taken. I’ll stick with my sandwiches.”

Dan smiled. “You’ll be fine. None of the local crims or gangs goes near this place—there’s nothing left here to steal; all the houses have been cleared out. Just be waiting for me when I come to pick you up, because I don’t fancy hanging around.” He winked, put the council van into gear, and pulled away from the kerb without saying another word.

I stood on the cracked footpath trying to compose myself. The street was strange, almost existing within a bubble of silence separating it from the usual urban clamour of vehicles, police and ambulance sirens, barking dogs and loud music drifting through open windows. The place had a strange sense of calm...no, that wasn’t it, not exactly. It was more like a sense of isolation, as if it were cut off from the rest of the world.

I recalled what I’d read of the recent history of the row of houses during the desktop study I’d carried out back at the office. There had been only a handful of incidents worth reporting. In 1982 a woman’s mutilated corpse was found inside one of the houses. Inside her naked and abused body were found traces of six different types of semen, including one from a horse, and a yard of bubble wrap. Her skin had been slashed by thin blades, probably scalpels. The killer—if indeed there was only one—was never found.