The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (34 page)

At dinnertime Des stayed in Porth and got something from the school canteen—silly driving all the way home to barely have time to bolt his food—but Kelvin came back, and this was a time she looked forward to. They could talk about stupid things. Different things. But today Kelvin didn’t seem to want to talk at all.

She asked him what was wrong. At first he didn’t want to say. She asked if it was about his dad. He said no. What was it, then? “Come on. Tell me. I’m your mum.”

“I don’t know. I just saw these boys on the way home, and they had a toboggan, just a box with wheels on, but it had this guy in it and it had a—one of those—waistcoat things and a sheriff’s badge pinned on it, and a face with a beard stuck on, and a floppy hat—and it looked
brilliant
.”

She shrugged. “Well, we can make one of those.”

“Can we?” His eyes looked like they’d pop out.

“‘Course we can. Don’t be daft. It’s easy.”

“Dad won’t like it though.”

“‘Course he will. He did it himself when he was your age. Everyone did. Come on. He’s staying in school to do some marking tonight, so we’ll start it now and do the rest before he gets home.” Before she’d finished the sentence her son was out of his chair, baked beans on toast abandoned. She smiled. For some reason she felt almost as excited as he did.

They chose the clothes together. Iris suggested that old, baggy pair of trousers Des wore when he was decorating. They’d seen better days and were only fit for the dustbin. Then there was that red polo-neck jumper that
had
been put out with the rubbish, shrunk in the wash and too tight for her husband’s burgeoning pot belly—she salvaged that from amongst the potato peel and tin cans. It smelled of tomato soup and earth, but Kelvin said it was great, and he was the boss. He snatched it off her and she couldn’t admonish him. It was fabulous to see him enthusiastic about something, lost as if in a quest for treasure as they raided bedroom drawers for a pair of old grey football socks and some woollen gloves that were a Christmas present from an auntie in Aberdare: white, with green holly leaves on the back.

They laid out all the items on the carpet in the sitting room. Even the rough shape of the trousers, socks, gloves and sweater had the immediate semblance of a person, although an extremely flat one—this was shortly about to change. Iris switched on the transistor radio. They sang along to the recent number one,
In the Summertime
by Mungo Jerry. Kelvin was grinning from ear to ear. Iris dumped a mound of old newspapers, which had been gathering beside the fireplace, and both of them started scrunching up the pages of newsprint into balls, stuffing them deep into trouser legs Iris had knotted at the ankles with string. In no time the lower limbs began to thicken lumpily, rolled-up paper filling in the hips, groin and pelvis.

“Don’t do any more till I get home,” Kelvin said breathlessly as he left for school, but Iris couldn’t resist finishing the task she’d begun. Sewing box open beside her, she stitched the bottom of the polo-neck to the waistline of the trousers, after which she bit off the loose thread with her teeth. Alone in the house now, looking down at the semi-deflated body draped across her lap, she felt ridiculously like a surgeon repairing some wound. Repairing a life. Not building, but resurrecting. Silly…

She abandoned it for the ironing, not even looking into the room for the rest of the afternoon. She didn’t know why. But when Kelvin burst in his feet didn’t touch the ground. He skidded on his knees onto the sitting room carpet and he was instantly shoving more screwed-up pages of the classified ads from the
Western Mail
—births, marriages, deaths— into the cavity of the pullover. She chuckled as he stuffed it into the open neck, watching the torso fill as if with bone and tissue. The arms were tied at the wrists and soon sported white woolly gloves with flappy, insubstantial fingers like the teats of uninflated balloons. They worked to
Tears of a Clown
by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles,
Back Home
by the England World Cup Squad, and
The Wonder of You
by Elvis Presley—a song Kelvin said was for old people but his mum said she liked it because it was romantic. She knelt on the floor with him and sewed the football socks, now bulked out with paper like the rest, onto the knotted stumps of the ankles.

“I know!” An idea galvanised Kelvin and he vanished upstairs, reappearing with a shiny, frog-green anorak that hung in his wardrobe even though he’d grown out of it a long time ago. Together they dressed the guy in it, sliding one arm then the other into the sleeves. It lolled between them, feeling as though it should be heavy but light as a feather. Kelvin stood back, admiring his handiwork. “He looks good doesn’t he? I think he looks the
best
.”

His mum smiled. “Needs a head though, don’t you think?” The hood gaped like a feeble mouth. “What are we going to use?”

“We’ll find something.”

“Hang on. Where are you going?” He’d already hoisted the guy in his arms and was shuffling to the door en route to his bedroom. “Don’t you want to show your father?”

Kelvin whispered, “Not yet.” He put his finger to his lips as he heard the back door open and close. And when, over tea, Des detected the whiff of secrecy between them and asked what the two of them had been up to, both of them said, almost in unison: “Nothing.”

#

Friday was the day Iris got her meat and veg from Ponty market and, as often as not, if her timing coincided, went to Tyfica Road to collect her son from school at home time. Children were already drifting out of the school gates in twos and threes, chatting and playing boisterously or blowing pink spheres of bubble gum, yet her heart ached a little bit to see her own son walking alone, idly scuffing his feet along the pavement, the strap of his school bag pulling his jumper half-off his shoulder.

“Look!” He suddenly piped up as he saw her, running up, thrusting a punctured Adidas football in her face—the black and white patterned type they’d used that year for the World Cup in Mexico. Seeing her perplexed expression he swiftly added, almost too excited to get the words out: “For his
head!
”

#

Des remarked that the boy had lost his appetite and found a horse’s. Kelvin scoffed his fish fingers in record time, asked if he could leave the table and was gone in a flash.

“He’s got ants in his pants.”

“That’s boys for you.”

“What does he do up there?”

“I think he’s got a hobby.” Iris didn’t like lying and knew she wasn’t good at it. She watched her husband get up from the table, turn over the cushions on the settee, delve through the magazine rack. “What are you after?”

“Last week’s
Echo
.”

“I chucked it out, I expect.”

“Thanks. I hadn’t read that.”

“Sorry. How was I to know?”

“Bloody hell. I better move quick round here or
I’ll
get thrown out.”

“That’s true.” She kissed him on the cheek, sat down and turned up the telly. Gordon Honeycombe was reading the ITV news and she pretended to watch, but she was thinking about the guy upstairs, with his Adidas football head, which she’d sewed into place on the throat of its scarlet polo-neck, sitting cross-legged on her son’s bed, Kelvin watching her raptly, chin on his fists, before her husband got home.

#

As she made the bed she stepped on a human hand and jumped back with a shrill yelp. Quietening her heart with the flat of her hand she looked down at the white Christmas glove at the end of a misshapen arm sheathed in anorak green.

Hell!

Annoyed, she poked it with her toe, but each time it fell back into place so she bent down to shove it back under the bed where the rest of the effigy was hidden. Now on her knees, she couldn’t avoid seeing its bulbous chest packed with paper sinews sandwiched between the carpet and the bedsprings. In the dark it looked like a body wedged in a coffin. She didn’t look at it for long, and stood up. It was Saturday so Des had gone to Cardiff with his cronies to see a match. Cardiff City were playing Hull F.C. at Ninian Park and they always went to a pub first to get the ‘atmosphere’ with other supporters over cheap pies and Brains bitter. Kelvin had nipped out to spend his pocket money, but when she heard the front door slam—that making her jump too—she knew he’d returned.

“What’s that?” she said, meeting him on the landing. He was carrying a brown paper bag. He walked straight past her.

“Come and see.”

By the time she’d entered the bedroom again he was hauling the guy out from its hiding place, and slung it, football-head nodding and jerking, onto the bed.

“I bought it from Gould’s,” Kelvin said, meaning the newsagent’s round the corner from the Army Recruitment Office, opposite the Muni. It was where he bought his
Beezer
,
Dandy
,
Spider-Man
comics and Marvel Classics like
20,000 Leagues under the Sea
. But this wasn’t any of those. This was a plastic mask with an elastic loop at the back. A shiny, pink mask of the face of a baby, with a ginger curl in the centre of its forehead and holes for pupils.

“Why that one?” Her thought came out in a breath. She heard it like it was said by somebody else, trying to blink but fixated on watching him place it over the blank football-head. “Why not Guy Fawkes, love? I mean—the traditional one, with a pointed beard?”

“I don’t know.” Kelvin shrugged, his back to her. “I just saw it and I thought it would suit him. Come on. I want to show you something else.” He jumped up, taking her by the hand, the guy trailing under his other arm. “I got it from the dump.”

At the bottom of the stairs was a pushchair, filthy and scuffed, but otherwise fairly intact.

“His car. His chariot,” Kelvin said, hoisting the guy and plonking it into the seat. The baby face tilted to one side and he adjusted it, punching it gently into position, tucking in one stray, poking-out arm.

“Does he like it?” she found herself saying, just to say something. Just to fill the air.

“He doesn’t
like
it—he
loves
it!”

And—silly—she didn’t remember much else except the squeak and squeal of the wobbly wheels as he manipulated the pushchair towards the open door. She didn’t remember—silly thing—what he said, just that he was going out and she was still standing on the stairs and she remembered telling him, hand splayed on the wallpaper, not to be long and that she was going to have a (breath) lie down… Just a (breath) little lie down for five minutes…

#

The door banged and she woke in fear. Her first thought was that Kelvin had just left, but why was she lying on the settee, and why was the room in darkness? Why wasn’t the light on? Why was it dark outside and why weren’t the curtains drawn? She looked at her watch and saw to her shock it was half past seven. She shot to her feet, but the blood drained from her head instantly and she had to steady herself on the back of a dining chair.

“What the bloody hell’s going on?” Des filled the room, flicking the light on, blinding her. When she could see again she saw him marching in Kelvin like some condemned prisoner, the kid clutching the guy to him in a tight and resilient embrace with his father’s meaty hands clamped on his shoulders.

“I don’t know. I fell asleep. I told him not to be out long. Where was he?”

“Where
was
he? I’ll tell you where he was. Down the bloody precinct! Out begging!” Her husband’s eyes were ablaze. She’d never seen him so angry. Never so close to being out of control, and that frightened her, but instinct to protect her son overwhelmed it.

“Des. It’s a
game
, for God’s sake—they all do it.”

“Yes, the layabouts! Those boys with no hope. The
poor
kids. Boozing and smoking fags because they’ve got nothing better to do. From Berw Road and up the Common. Educationally subnormal, the lot of them!” He tossed a sheet of cardboard emblazoned in black block capitals with the words PENNY FOR THE GUY onto the settee where she’d been curled up asleep moments before. He gestured at it, gasping for words, as if its very existence were a massive personal insult. “Is
that
what I’m working for, all the hours God sends, and your mother’s slaving away at home for? Is it? For you to go out there and show us up? Well,
is it?
” Kelvin was staring at his shoes, his shoulders hunched, and Iris felt sorry for him, in fact she wanted to hug him, but dared not. “You know who was in the car with me? Elwyn, Dick, Ike Jones—my
friends
. The people I work with. What do you imagine they were thinking, eh?” Kelvin didn’t have an answer, or didn’t feel inclined to give one. “I’ll tell you what they were thinking. That I can’t look after my own son, and there he is out on the street like a bloody ragamuffin asking people for money because he doesn’t get given enough at home! Like his parents are bloody
depriving
–”

“Des–”

“It’s not
begging
,” Kelvin muttered, showing a scowl now. “
Everybody
does it.”

“Yes, well
you
’re not everybody!” Des heard his son mumble something. “What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing. Good job it’s nothing. It
better
be nothing, I tell you!” Des turned away, exasperated beyond his power of expression, walking back and forth in the miniscule sitting room like a bear in a cage. “I’m… I’m ashamed of you!” He snatched up the cardboard sign and threw it onto the open fire.

“Oh for God’s sake!” Iris cried out, crouching quickly and retrieving it before it fully caught light. “I tell you what you should be ashamed of. The fact your son was afraid to tell you about this because he knew you’d blow a flamin’ gasket!” She thrust the flimsy sign, only slightly charred, towards Kelvin, a gritty whiff of coal smoke stinging her nostrils. The boy held it tightly to his chest and backed away. Pulling out the sheet of cardboard made the glowing embers of the coal fire re-ignite with crackling vigour. But this was as nothing compared to the inferno Iris saw in her husband’s dry and unblinking eyes as the realisation sank in.