The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (35 page)

“You
knew
about this?” His voice thinned like his lips in disbelief.

“Yes. Of course I did. I helped him, if you must know. What’s wrong with that? All the kid wants to do is go out and enjoy himself with his friends.”

Des laughed. “What ‘friends’? He hasn’t got any friends.”

“Well we all know whose fault that is, don’t we? You’re like a bloody big kid yourself.”

“And you’re not? Making a doll for him? What’s that supposed to do for him, eh? A big bloody doll. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Why don’t you buy him a Barbie while you’re at it?”

“Oh, go and boil your head. I’m sick of this. I’m sick of you and your…”

Iris stopped as she saw past Des that the ribbed glass door to the hallway was ajar, and beyond it the pushchair from the dump was parked, but there was no sign of the guy and no sign of Kelvin. She hurried past Des, shoving him out of her way, and stood at the foot of the stairs in time for them both to hear the slamming of Kelvin’s bedroom door.

“Now look what you’ve done.”

“Me?”

“Yes you.” Iris returned to the room, shook an Embassy from her packet and lit it with trembling hands. “All he was doing was going out playing because you don’t let him. What the hell is he supposed to do?”

Des pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingertips. “I don’t care. I really don’t.”

“No, you care more about John Toshack than you care about that boy up there. Well you’d better. And bloody fast, too, I’m telling you. Or do you want him to grow up hating you?” He looked daggers at her for that. “Or does what your beloved cronies down the club think count for more than what I think?”

“Christ, I can’t do anything for doing wrong, can I?”

“No. Poor you.” Iris was too angry to back down. She wasn’t having it. She’d had enough. And it was ridiculous. She took a long drag on the cigarette and blew smoke. The rat-a-tat of a firework stuttered a few streets away, followed by the distinctive skree of a rocket. “Go and talk to him.”

“Let him stay up there. A clip round the ear, he wants. He needs to be taught a—”

“Go and talk to him.
Now
.”

Bap bap bap!
something went in the sky before fluttering and sparkling earthwards.

He could see she was upset, and more because of that than that he was in the wrong (he
wasn’t
in the wrong—
bloody hell…
) he went upstairs, unbuttoning his mac and draping it over the banister before ascending. Iris watched his hand, rendered pink by the cold night air, gliding up the wooden rail until his creaking footsteps reached the landing.

Her hair felt brittle and she tore through it with her hairbrush. The skin on her face felt tight, her throat felt constricted as if half strangled, her skull blocked and salty, all the usual symptoms after she’d been weeping or felt it was imminent. She still didn’t feel fully awake and hoped that the scene that had just happened was a dream, but it wasn’t, and she wanted to wish it away, and she couldn’t. Wishes didn’t work. She of all people knew that.

Brushing her hair didn’t do the trick. She needed to give herself a wash and headed upstairs to the bathroom, squeezing past the semi-rusted pushchair, the PENNY FOR THE GUY sign dumped in its seat at a skewed angle, and went up and give her cheeks a cold swill at the sink.

As she passed Kelvin’s bedroom on her way back down, she couldn’t help listening at the door. The man’s voice was soft and sympathetic. Loving, even. It didn’t sound like her husband at all. It sounded almost like the person he used to be. Almost.

“See, I say these things because I care about you, that’s all. I get angry because I just want you to be safe and sound. I do it for your own good, see. What you got to remember is, not all people are dangerous, but some are, and when you’re out on your own you don’t know who’s who, do you?”

She wished with all her heart she could see Kelvin’s little face and know how he was reacting, whether he was nodding or just listening, snuggled down in his bed under the eiderdown, but she couldn’t. After a moment of silence, Des spoke again:

“Hey. You done a good job. You and your mam.”

“Me, mostly.”

Iris smiled. Swallowed the lump in her throat.

“Don’t!” Kelvin gasped suddenly, bursting into panic. “Don’t move him!”

“Okay, okay, okay… Cool head… Here you are…”

“He wants to stay here and sleep next to me.”

“Orright, orright… Let me tuck you in then, nibblo…” Her husband’s voice grew faint as she padded downstairs, not wanting to reveal she was standing outside, earwigging the conversation. “You’re a funny ‘apeth.” Fading away, her son replied that he wasn’t. He wasn’t any kind of ‘apeth.

She switched on the TV. When it had warmed up it showed Mary Hopkins as a guest on
The Rolf Harris Show
on BBC1. Her trilling, virginal style of folk singing grated with Iris, in spite of her being Welsh and a discovery of Tom Jones—Ponty boy himself, bit of a boyo by all accounts, and without doubt the town’s only claim to fame. She wasn’t a big fan of the bearded Aussie either with his fair dinkum, down-under cheeriness. It always seemed entertainers were desperate to create happiness, but when the programme was switched off, where was the happiness then?

Presently Des came in, Schools Rugby tie loosened, easing the glass door shut after him, and sat in the armchair that was vacant—not the settee, which was always where she sat. Peculiar the habits you got set in. He sat in the glow of the screen. By the time she was crushing out a new cigarette in the ashtray she knew she had to speak, because she could hold it in no longer.

“Did you see the mask he bought?”

Des nodded, or flinched, she wasn’t sure which. “Grotesque bloody thing.”

“Why couldn’t he get a Guy Fawkes mask like all the other kids?”

“Who knows what goes through that lad’s mind. Honest to God. I give up. He can do what he likes.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I don’t know what I mean.” Des rose from the chair as if the act was a gigantic effort. His pallor was grey. He looked exhausted. Emotionally drained. Even to talk, talk normally—to her—was clearly too much for him to bear. “I’m going to bed.”

Touch me. Touch me
, she thought.
Kiss me.

But he couldn’t. How could he?

Do I smell of blood?
she thought, in the empty room, eyes fixed blindly on the television programme.
Is that it? Do I, still?

#

On Sunday morning when Iris opened his bedroom door she found Kelvin with a snakes and ladders board laid out between himself and the guy, moving one of the counters up a ladder. When she asked if he wanted to come down the park for a walk, he shot a look at the guy—for all the world, she’d swear, as if deferring for an answer. None being forthcoming, he scuttled over and whispered via a cupped hand to the side of its earless head.

“He doesn’t want to stay in on a nice day like this, does he?” Iris said, persuasively, realising that her attempt to get her son to abandon the thing for a few hours was misguided.

Kelvin sat back on his heels. “Is Dad coming?”

“Not today. He’s got some DIY to do.” She didn’t elaborate on what they’d actually said to each other: her trying to persuade Des that getting out the putty to re-glaze a window in the scullery was not exactly a priority, Des insisting it was a job he’d put off for months, and that was what Sundays were for.
If you say so
, being her final, curt reply as she got her coat.

She helped the boy put on his shoes at the bottom of the stairs, the guy with its plastic smile perched a few steps behind him, as if sitting pillion. Observing through its holes for eyes. Observing her as she double-knotted the laces.

Kelvin rearranged the guy’s scarf, plumping the pillow in the pushchair behind its spineless back, evidently wanting the thing to be seen at its best.

“He likes sunshine.”

“Good.”

At the bottom of Mill Street they crossed the bridge over the Taff into Ynysangharad Park, the black water of the river below stark testimony to the industry of the Rhondda Valleys. As they passed the tennis courts—deserted at this time of year—she watched Kelvin run ahead with the pushchair at speed, with the intent of creating a thrill either for himself or, strangely, its immobile occupant, a figure that never looked straight or comfortable in its ‘chariot’ but awkward, ill-fitting, with an aspect of frozen entrapment reminiscent of a physically impaired child. It struck her horribly that, from a distance, a passer-by might take them for a family—especially the way Kelvin would regularly pause to tuck in a blanket around the thing’s bulbous, paper-filled legs, and whisper to it in a way that—no, it didn’t disturb her at all. Why should it? It was just play, and it was healthy for children to play, and use their imaginations. She just wanted to switch off her own.

The sticks of dead rockets lay on the tarmac, having fallen from the sky the night before. Their cardboard carcasses lay semi-charred and redundant—the spark of excitement they’d delivered now just a memory.

Iris buttoned her coat against the wind and stuck to their customary route past the cricket pavilion and band stand, inside which a small vortex of yellow leaves did a pirouette, and Iris paused to sit on a bench near the playground next to the mini-golf where Kelvin usually played on the slide and swings. She indulged in her last Embassy in the packet and opened the
Woman’s Weekly
from her bag, but after a few minutes the words, “Penny for the guy… Penny for the guy…” made her look up.

To her dismay she saw that, far from playing with the other children, Kelvin was standing with the pushchair at the gates to the playground, delivering his repetitive litany to every adult who entered. He didn’t seem unduly bothered by their disinterest and his mantra continued undiminished. This upset Iris more and more, as she saw the perplexed and then bemused looks on peoples’ faces quickly turning into expressions of unease and pity as they hurried their own children in the opposite direction.

“Penny for the guy… Penny for the guy…”

Iris hurried over and took Kelvin’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go home, love. It’s getting a bit cold and I need to get a cooked dinner on for your father…”

Heading towards the bus stop they passed Woolworths, its window resplendent with a vast display of Brock’s fireworks boxes, gaudy and brash, and a cardboard cut-out Guy Fawkes in an Elizabethan ruff and tall hat, holding a sparkler like a magic wand. Kelvin gazed at the arrangement with what she first thought was wonder, but then saw was more of a worried puzzlement, and from being chatty all afternoon the boy became suddenly silent.

On the bus she tried to lighten the mood—
her
mood, if nothing else—by unwrapping a tube of fruit pastilles and offering him one.

“I don’t like black ones,” Kelvin said. “But he does. He
loves
them.” He took a sweet between his thumb and forefinger and pressed it into the mask’s mouth, then turned to his mother and popped an orange one into his own, grinning broadly.

Iris was looking at the little boy and his guy, side by side next to her in the back seat of the bus when the stout, greasy-haired conductor arrived, ticket machine thrusting from his midriff.

“One adult and two halves, please,” she said.

Kelvin’s grin spread into a laugh, and Iris smiled too, before she saw an elderly woman with the face of a boxer dog who’d been kicked up the bum by Sonny Liston was giving them a look like they were insane, or beneath contempt, or both.

“What are you staring at?” Iris said, and the old woman turned her considerable chin—or rather, chins—in the other direction.

Kelvin was still chuckling at this as the bus changed to a lower gear halfway up the hill, taking the wide, hair-pin curve from Graigwen Place into Pencerrig Street. But Iris was glad he didn’t see what she saw, and what made her own smile fade very quickly. From the side window and then the back window, she got a passing glimpse up the rocky path leading to the quarry, where a large wigwam-like structure was taking form out of assorted planks of wood, fallen branches, sawn-down tree trunks, and pieces of discarded furniture. Even now a man dumped more wood on it from the boot of his car, and was dwarfed by the structure. It must’ve been fifteen foot high already, if not twenty. And to Iris—she didn’t know why, or rather she
did
know why—resembled nothing so much as a funeral pyre.

#

Still in his pyjamas, Kelvin brought down the guy and sat it on the settee while they all had breakfast. Des and Iris looked at each other but neither said a word. Kelvin was humming happily, his bare feet dangling under the table as he spread Marmite on his toast. Finishing first, Des picked up his car keys for the Anglia and said he was off. Iris didn’t expect him to kiss her, and he didn’t.

“You’d better run up and get dressed if you’re not going to be late,” she told her son. “Hang on. Aren’t you going to take him back to your room?”

“No.” Kelvin shot a glance at the guy. “He wants to stay down here today. He wants to keep you company.”

Iris stared at the plate in front of her, not wanting to look at the dummy in case the dummy was looking at her, and rubbed her bare arms before faking a smile through clenched teeth. “That’s nice.” Then calling, “Don’t forget to brush your teeth!” Then, in the silence, tried to address the remains of her toast but wasn’t hungry and pushed it away. It was scorched. Black. She hated that. Bread tasting like coal, because coal tasted like death. Her grandfather had worked down the mine all his life and that’s what he smelt like, however much carbolic he used to wash it off him.

Ten minutes later, when Kelvin came back down in his smart school clothes—corduroy trousers, V-neck, parka—she was sick of looking everywhere but at the thing half-sitting, half-lying on the settee. With a freshly-lit cigarette in her hand, she said:

“I’m not sure this is a good idea, love.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know what to do with him, that’s all.”