The Fly Guy (28 page)

She pulls the cover over herself and closes her eyes. She sees Martin with his back to her. He doesn’t turn around, and in the place where she used to feel love she now feels pity. She sees Gregor from afar, tall and confident, looking at her from the doorway of an immaculately restored seventeenth century shop front converted into a luxurious three storey townhouse, and gesturing for her to come in, come in. She feels a rush of love, an excitement. It’s suddenly easy to imagine life without Martin.

* * *

The back door of the house unlocks and then opens. Martin steps out. He drags Henry’s old limp body to the back of the garden. He comes back to the house and goes inside. The wind still rolls and roars through the tops of the trees and underneath the shadows deepen and pulse. The moonlight ebbs on the dark suit and swells on the white face of a broken old man. Martin steps out of the house with a spade in his hand. He walks back across the moonlit rectangle of grass and disappears into the shadows at the end of the garden.

* * *

When Alison wakes in the morning, she looks to the other side of the bed. Martin isn’t there. He hasn’t kissed her goodbye. She gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. The door to the office is closed. She opens it. Martin is there in the suit he was wearing the night before, sitting at the desk, typing on the keyboard. The light is on and the curtains are open. He doesn’t turn his head or acknowledge her in any way. There are streaks of mud and grime in his hair and his hands are grey and chalky. There is a pile of papers on the desk beside him and soil on the floor around him. The pages she can see have thick black marker lines crossing diagonally over the typed text. The computer screen in front of him is filling with words.

“Martin,” she says, but he doesn’t stop typing or take his eyes from the screen. She steps back out of the room and closes the door. From the other side she can’t hear anything. She listens for sounds of his fingers on the keyboard or heavy breathing, but there is nothing. She sees the mud on the floor, the footprints on the stairs. She puts her ear to the door. Nothing. She opens the door again. There he is, the words are moving along the screen.

“What about work?” she says. He doesn’t reply or even make any sign that he’s heard her. It is as if she isn’t there. She isn’t there, or she is there and he is not.

***

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Lucy. Anna. Zoe. Nicola. Marketa. Susan.
Lucy.
I’ve been watching you for so long. I have always been watching you. I have heard you knock on the walls and wail, I have watched your aching hours pass. Who you have been, who you are, who you can be, the possibilities reverberate around you, all with the tone of tragedy, as if all of the voices you have and will ever have are entwined, threading into each other, crossing over each other, winding into a chord that binds with a song of grief. Even when you sleep the room holds the echo of your sorrow. I have been watching and writing, and my heart breaks every time I write. I have seen and felt everything and yet still I condemn you. If there was one person, just one …

Now your back is to the door. You are sitting on the floor. The room is dark, the only light on is a small desk lamp on the floor next to you illuminating the tarot cards. Beyond the small pool of light the floor of the room is grimy and the flash of crumpled silver foil reflects from a corner. In the other corner in the shadows is a small bundle of naked plastic dolls, some missing limbs or their heads or with their torsos twisted around. Near the mattress is a cut up set of clothes, strips of a small red dress and tattered cuts of denim lie in a heap.

You have cut the deck into three piles face down, and now you take the top one from each and place them in a row before turning them over. You are singing softly to yourself,
the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory of all that, no they can’t take that away from me.
Your skinny hands are pale and elegant. Your skin has a luminescence in the lamplight. You see the Magician, the ten of wands and the Chariot. Your hands move delicately over the cards, changing their order. The ten of wands, the Chariot, and the Magician. You stop singing and turn your head.

There in the door is my silhouette. My frame is thin and my shoulders are slightly hunched. My jacket does not fit me and my wrists and hands protrude from my sleeves, hanging loose, redundant. Your eyes are glazed. In a weak voice you say, “Have you brought something? Have you got it? Something?” I hold my hands out, empty. You say, “You said you’d come back with it. You said. I feel like I’ve been dying.” You bend forward with your arms folded and put your face on the ground. I take two steps into the room. My movement is odd, jerky, as if I have extra knees and elbows, or there are frames missing from the film. I speak.

It’s me. I’ve come for you.
You look up again and this time rise. You are weak. In the half-light of the room you are like a ghost, almost not real. You float just above the floor and sway.

“What’s wrong with your eyes? Which one are you?”

It’s me. I’m Martin. I love you. At last I can save you.

About the Author

Irish born Colum Sanson-Regan, who now lives in Cardiff, Wales, has spent most of his adult life as a musician. He fronts his band, Goose and is a well known face around Cardiff’s live music scene. Colum is best known in the pop-culture scene as the body double for David Tennant on
Doctor Who
.

Colum studied Creative and Professional Writing at the University of South Wales, where he received the Michael Parnell Prize acknowledging his writing abilities, and went on to get his masters in Creative Writing, where the idea for
The Fly Guy
was born whilst writing his final dissertation.

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