The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (39 page)

“Penny for the guy?”

Two munchkin sentinels stood outside the Spar. One wore a mask of Frankenstein’s monster in lurid green and the other, a girl in pigtails, the more traditional Guy Fawkes. Their construction, which sported a ‘Dai’ cap and cricket pullover, wasn’t nearly as impressive as her son’s—its face merely a child’s crayon drawing wrapped onto a cardboard box with Sellotape.

Iris ignored their biscuit tin of coins as she went inside, and ignored them again as she came out.

“Penny for the guy? Penny for the guy, please, missus?”

The words screamed round the inside of her head with the repetitiveness of a stunt motorcyclist on the Wall of Death. Halfway up the hill she saw a four-year-old child in a pink duffel coat and woolly hat sitting on a wall. The little girl made shapes in the air with a lit sparkler, mesmerised by its intensity. The man and woman in charge of it smiled and Iris smiled back, but didn’t pause. Kept her head down. She didn’t know them, and didn’t want to.

Before she reached her door and took out her key from her purse, she was rubbing drips of water from her cheeks brought on by the cold air, the blighted air, thinking:

He would have been four years old by now.

Four years old, to the day.

#

She couldn’t hear anything from upstairs and she didn’t want to go upstairs so she called Kelvin down, and he took his soup up on a tray with some sliced bread. The Grand Canyon of the afternoon widened ahead of her, as did the silence. She switched on the wireless. It was playing
Love Grows
by Edison Lighthouse. She made a cup of coffee and thought of the children with snotty faces and shoddy clothes—who should’ve been in school, not out playing truant—and the lumpen figures with twisted limbs at their feet.

Penny for the guy? Penny for the guy?

The coffee made her more jittery still. One hand on the newel post, she called upstairs.

“How is he?”

“Fine. I’m trying to keep his mind off it.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No, thanks. Oh, wait a minute. I’ll ask him.” Pause. “He says no, thanks very much.”

Iris closed the door of the sitting room after her. She looked at the clock above the fireplace and wondered how she could fill the next couple of hours. She tried to read, but a flashing fizz in the sky would make her head jerk upright, or the sound of little padding footsteps across the bedroom floor above.

Penny for…

Penny for them…

Her mouth felt parchment-dry and she fetched herself a glass of water from the kitchen tap. She hated water. Never liked the taste of it—people always laughed when she said that—but she drank it nonetheless.

I see no reason…

No reason…

Des arrived ten minutes later than he’d predicted, holding up a large box of fireworks, the bright colours carnivalesque in the dull room. Horrified, Iris jumped up, snatched it off him and hid it in the sideboard, out of sight, slamming the drawer as if it were some illicit and disgusting contraband.

“I thought…”

“Really? You could’ve fooled me.” She rubbed the goosebumps on her bare arms. “Don’t you realise anything?”

“I thought he could watch from his bedroom window…”

Iris shook her head, eyes squeezed into squints of irritation. She bent forward and hooked her fingers into her hair.

Des looked down at the packet of sparklers in his hand, discarding it onto the table with a sigh. Then sat with his knees apart and his elbows on them, wiping the anguish from his face.

To her, the air in the room felt acrid, bitter, sour—perhaps she’d brought it in with her, but those were its ingredients. The stuff that contributed to the burning she felt inside. The chemistry that was her.

“My dad used to hammer a nail to the door of the shed for a Catherine Wheel, every year without fail.” Her husband spoke, but she didn’t even know if the words were for her. “I can see him lighting it, taking charge, standing back, all of us willing the little glow of light to burst into life. But it always just fizzled into nothing, spun round once or twice and went out. We all expected something so great and it never bloody worked.”

She stared at the blank television screen. She could say nothing. Her throat felt scorched.

“I talked to the Head today. I told her the problem.”
You didn’t talk to me
, Iris thought, listening.
You didn’t talk to me.
“She was very understanding, as a matter of fact. She wasn’t the cow I thought she’d be, looking down her nose at me. She said we could get in a child psychologist.” Iris didn’t hear
child
, she just heard
psychologist
. She heard
get a psychologist
, just like she heard it four years ago, when the problem was her. “They know what they’re doing, she said. She was very sympathetic, actually. I was pleasantly surprised.”

“Bully for you,” Iris said, without looking at him.

The silence hurt. He went into the middle room to smoke one of his Hamlet cigars and listen to the news. When he came back twenty minutes later he said:

“I’ll call him for his tea.”

“Leave him,” she said. “He’ll shout if he wants anything. If you want something, make it. There’s ham and there’s sliced bread.” She didn’t move as he walked past her, other than lift the cigarette to her lips.

Shall never be forgot…

Be forgot…

Des returned to the middle room while she watched
Top of the Pops
, the sexually provocative but, to her, faintly ridiculous Pan’s People gyrating to the hardly ribald White Plains song
My Baby Loves Lovin’
. A sparkly green glow saturated the room and, peering between the curtains, she could make out the fronds of a Silver Fountain in the yard next door. Something red corkscrewed across the black sky, blooming into machine-gun arcs of lavender and puce. With another boom, copper blue and orange rain mushroomed and fell.

The blasting gust of a Roman Candle accompanied her pouring Kelvin’s hot water bottle. The music had turned to Jethro Tull’s
Living in the Past
as she went upstairs.

The guy was in his arms. Her son was fast asleep. Iris tugged it slightly but he woke immediately, whining and hugging it back to him.

“I’m only putting it to one side, love. He’ll be here when you wake up. You don’t want it in bed with you, do you?”

“Yes. I do. I
have
to.”

His head sank back into the pillow. His lids were heavy. He had trouble keeping his eyes open, poor mite.

“Don’t worry. It’ll all be over tomorrow.”

“Did you hear that?” he said to the baby mask, the football-head secreted in the sheath of its green anorak hood. “Tomorrow you’ll be safe. She wouldn’t lie to you.” He struggled to keep his eyes open, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. Grasped one empty glove with urgency. “She knows you’re special. She made you, silly. She doesn’t want you to die. She wants you to live.”

That feeling, that old feeling, that stab of acid in the churning ice bucket of her stomach, came again and she thought she might faint. Her hand pressed against it.

“Go to sleep, love.”

“Don’t let anything happen to him, mam, will you?”

“I know.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” Iris switched off the bedside light, put last year’s
Doctor Who
annual with Patrick Troughton and Jamie and a Cyberman on the cover back on the shelf. She leant over and kissed him, as she always did. His cheek was blisteringly warm, almost pulsating.

“You have to kiss him goodnight too.”

She wanted to say no, but she knew he would insist. Her stomach loosened. She felt hollow. She felt outside herself, looking in. Not part of herself at all. She bent down, already feeling the tension in her back rebelling against it, and pressed her mouth to the inert plastic.

#

Before entering the sitting room she wiped her mouth as if she had tasted something abhorrent. She’d pinched her lips together with her fingers as soon as she’d shut the bedroom door, but still her stomach jerked, wanting to void itself of something revolting, some intrusion, some infestation. She took several deep breaths, telling herself to pull herself together. That was all behind her now, the pain, the worthlessness, the drifting, disembodied
other
-ness that had possessed her for too long. She remembered being organised, being meticulous. Knowing something was wrong and going to her GP with a well-thought-out list:

Can’t sleep (but always feeling tired)

No appetite

Aches and pains

Feeling of heaviness

Headaches

Anger

Don’t want to go out / see people

Can’t be bothered to do things I used to enjoy

Sex (difficulties)

Grief

The doctor looked down the list and showed her what was written at the bottom—the word
Grief
. He said, there’s your answer right there. That was the cause of all the other things. And she mustn’t put a time limit on it. Everybody’s different. Not everyone has the same reaction or behaves the same, or gets over things the same way. There was no way of predicting it, but the one thing she shouldn’t do is punish herself about it. Time is a great healer, he said. But sometimes it isn’t. It just isn’t.

#

She sat with Des watching
Play for Today
. It was called
Angels Are So Few
and it was by somebody called Dennis Potter, who Des knew of but she didn’t (she didn’t pay attention to things like that), but it had that actor in it she liked, Tom Bell, from that film
The L-Shaped Room
—one of those ones who had a surly sort of charisma and was strong and handsome but didn’t feel the need to smile a lot to make you like him. Hypnotised slightly by his face swimming in and out of shot, she realised she hadn’t been following the story at all. It could have been
Sooty and Sweep
for all she was concerned.

“Do it,” she said halfway through.

Des looked at her.

“Do it,” she repeated. Elaboration was unnecessary.

He went into the hall and took his mac from the hook. Pulled his leather gloves from the pockets.

Iris listened not to Tom Bell in his television play, but the sound from the landing as Des crept into her son’s bedroom, easing open the door.

She was alternately holding her breath and sucking at her cigarette, a combination that quickly made her feel light-headed. The picture on the TV screen became blurred and wishy-washy, the words gobbledegook.

Seconds later she heard his footfall on the stairs again.

She got up and stood by the door into the hall, one hand on the jamb, cigarette smoke rising, holding back behind an imaginary line as if present at an accident where her inexperience in what was needed might be a hindrance.

Des descended the stairs—the guy’s fat, misshapen sleeves and green hood dangling down his back. The thing was slung over his right shoulder in a fireman’s lift. His right hand held it in place where Iris had stitched the polo-neck to his old, paint-stained decorating trousers. His left hand reached to open the front door—and she knew her task was to close the Chubb quietly after him so the sound wouldn’t rouse the boy. The sound from the TV set was garbled: its shimmer a nebulous flicker back-lighting her.

He left carrying his unnatural cargo without turning. As she closed the front door she saw them dissolve into the night as he walked to the garden gate and the path to Llwynmadoc Street…

And
after
she closed the door, now standing with her back pressed to it—did she see a slight
wiggling
of those arms, or was it caused by the natural sway of her husband’s motion? Did she see what was—no, silly, ridiculous—empty white Christmas gloves
beating
on his back in tiny fists? Little malformed hands
clawing
at the material of his mac? A manic dwarf
struggling
in the flashing-then-dead strobe light of an exploding rocket?

#

How many fires were burning? How many children cheering in wonder, wrapped against the cold of night? She buried what she saw—
imagined
she saw?—in other thoughts, any thoughts. Turned up the TV, but the cacophony outdoors only seemed to cut through even more violently.

Remember, remember…

But she
did
remember. There was no need to demand it. She remembered that November four years ago when they had another child. One that died. She remember the fuzzy, crackling Tom Bell voice of the consultant, telling her of the abnormality they’d detected. She remembered him telling them that it wouldn’t live after it was born. That they’d have to induce labour. She remembered asking him not to use that word. Please. Please don’t…

Never be forgot…

Never. Never. Never.

#

Des returned as the Big Ben chimes of
News at Ten
tolled their sonorous knell. Alastair Burnet and Reginald Bosanquet talked as he lowered himself into his armchair, brown leather-gloved hands resting on the white arm covers. He sat staring at the screen with blank eyes.

“Did you see it burn?”

“Yes.”

“
Did
you?”

“
Yes
. Iris. I watched it
burn
. What more do you want me to say?” He made it sound as though he’d been made to do something unwillingly, and despicable. Then he softened, realising that had upset her and it wasn’t fair. “There were others,” he told her, “other guys already on fire. I threw our one in. High as I could, into the middle where the flames were biggest. A shout went up. I don’t know who was doing the shouting. It buckled, went up. The mask started melting. Football head caved in. Gloves evaporated into ash. Something gave way behind and it fell into the centre, alight all over. Then some bangers went off. Kids were running round waving sparklers like they were Zorro. Mostyn Edwards and his boys were there. They said hello. They asked where Kelvin was. They asked where you were. I walked away. I didn’t say hello back.” He rubbed his eyes. They must have been stinging from the smoke. They were red-rimmed. “Yes, I watched it burn.”