Dark Companions (27 page)

I wasn’t quite adjusted after all. How dare she forget me so easily? Gusts of wind helped me storm towards the village; trees woke shouting, one after the other, beside the road. By the time I reached the square I was determined to speak to her.

Wind slammed the door of the telephone booth for me, and ruffled the directory. Had the wind also interfered with the line, or had the workmen left a fault? I couldn’t rouse Rebecca’s phone; beyond static vague as wind there was only a squabbling of faint squeaky voices. “Hello? Hello?” I demanded, and the voices seemed to parrot my words.

When I stepped out of the box I was free of Rebecca. Speaking to her could only have prolonged the unpleasantness. I gazed round the square, at the antique shop cramped by the other cramped buildings. I was free of the village too. Wind soared across the fields.

As I crossed the green, the wind made me feel I was sailing. Tomorrow I would be somewhere new. The clump of trees at the edge of the green lashed convulsively back and forth; I thought of a bird caught by the tail, unable to fly. Nothing stood among the trees.

The hedges were rocking, trying to erase the path with splashes of thicker dimness. The leaves sounded like rain, and seemed to scintillate like a million fragments of breaking glass. Large bluish patches raced through the clouds. Beyond the fields I thought I heard Delamere Forest, a deafening choir made faint by distance.

As I reached Mr Ince’s cottage, the sky was clearing. Nevertheless I almost passed by, having observed casually that the trees were creaking, the grass of the unkempt garden was hissing. Had his tour exhausted him that he’d let the grass grow so long? Why, he had even left the theatre standing beside the garden path—wedged there, as far as I could see, by a couple of large stones.

The theatre wasn’t deserted. Though there was no sign of Mr Ince within the proscenium—I craned over the hedge, which pushed and clawed at me—Punch and Judy were onstage. Were they nailed to the ledge and moving in the wind? Certainly their nodding and gesturing looked lifeless, all the more so when I made out that the paint of their faces and fixed eyes was peeling, yet I had a hallucinatory impression that they were actually fighting the wind. Apart from the rattle of wooden limbs on the ledge, they made no sound.

I was still peering, determined to make out exactly what I was seeing, when the wind dropped and the figures continued to move.

Perhaps there was still an imperceptible breeze; it wouldn’t take much to make the figures totter and nod. But how could a breeze make Punch’s cap writhe while failing to stir the miniature curtains? A moment later the edge of the cap gaped, and a snail crawled out down the face, leaving its trail across one flaking eye. The snail dangled from the set lips like a lolling tongue, then fell.

As I recoiled, a gust of wind rushed over the hedge and hurled the theatre down so violently that the frame collapsed, leaving a canvas shape flattened on the grass. Above the wind I heard something, two things, fleeing through the long grass and scrabbling past the door of the cottage, which I now saw was open.

I should have fled, and then the village would have no hold on me, not even when I wake at four in the morning. But I was determined to find out what was happening—not least because Rebecca would never have let me.

I opened the gate, which had to be lifted on its crumbling hinges, and ventured up the path. Cold wet grass spilled over my ankles. A tree root bulged the path, a swollen muscle beneath cracked stone skin. The trees seemed to have closed even more oppressively about the cottage; I was unable to distinguish them from its walls.

I could see nothing through the small blackened windows. Though the entire cottage seemed to be creaking—no doubt that was the tossing of trees overhead—I made myself go to the door. It was stuck ajar, but when I pushed it, it swung wide.

It opened directly into a room. On the bare stone floor, beside a low table, Mr Ince sat with his back to me, his legs splayed straight out before him, his hands gripping his thighs. He was facing a cold fireplace. Though the door had banged against the wall, he didn’t stir.

Perhaps it was concern for him that made me enter, but still I was nervous enough to tiptoe quickly, ready to flee. Before I reached him I glimpsed the conditions under which he had been living—for how long? Both his clothes and the table were spattered with mouldy food; the fireplace and the surrounding wall seemed to be trembling with soot; sagging wallpaper revealed cracks in the walls like the bulging crack in the path. Then I saw his face.

Was he alive? Barely, perhaps, but I hoped not when I realised why his face was more visible than the rest of the room; it was patchily whitish, like an old tree. How could he bear that if he were conscious? Still, that wasn’t why I was backing away, too panicky to realise that I was retreating from the door. Two small things had crawled rattling from his pockets and were tugging, like terrified children, at his hands.

It was only wind that slammed the door, but I flinched back still farther. Perhaps the same wind moved Mr Ince; perhaps I didn’t really see his whitish mouth grimace in a parody of senile impatience—but he fell forward on his hands, splintering the objects within them.

My brain felt like a lump of metal. I couldn’t grasp what was happening; I knew only that I had to get out of that room, from which the crowd of trees seemed to have drained all but a glimmer of light. Certainly the room was too dark for me to be sure that Mr Ince had swayed upright again, that his arms were reaching out bundles that moved spasmodically. Nevertheless I grabbed a poker, which felt rotten with rust, from beside the fireplace before making for the door.

Did Mr Ince stagger to his feet? Were his eyes gleaming like those boils of sap that sometimes swell on trees? Amid the roar of foliage I thought something responded to his glare: something in a cupboard near the door. It sounded large and uncompleted, no longer much like falling brooms.

Perhaps the cottage door was wedged shut now. I fled to the farthest window and smashed the grimy pane. Panic helped me clamber through without wasting time in glancing back. As I tore myself free of a shard of glass, I thought I glimpsed a moist object swaying stiffly and laboriously out of the cupboard and across the room.

Next morning, after a sleepless night that seemed alive with creaking, I left home. A week later my mother’s first letter gave me the news that Mr Ince’s cottage had burned down. The villagers thought he must have been careless with the fire; I suspected vandals might have seen the broken window. In any case I was glad, as glad as I could be while I was still so nervous. I hoped the trees had been destroyed too—for as I’d fled past the eager tree root and the sprawled theatre, I was sure that the branches had begun to twitch like the web of a spider robbed of its prey.

Calling Card

Dorothy Harris stepped off the pavement and into her hall. As she stooped groaning to pick up the envelopes, the front door opened, opened, a yawn that wouldn’t be suppressed. She wrestled it shut—she must ask Simon to see to it, though certainly not over Christmas—then she began to open the cards.

Here was Father Christmas, and here he was again, apparently after dieting. Here was a robin like a rosy apple with a beak, and here was an envelope whose handwriting staggered: Simon’s and Margery’s children, perhaps?

The card showed a church on a snowy hill. The hill was bare except for a smudge of ink. Though the card was unsigned, there was writing within. A Very Happy Christmas And A Prosperous New Year, the message should have said—but now it said A Very Harried Christmas And No New Year. She turned back to the picture, her hands shaking. It wasn’t just a smudge of ink; someone had drawn a smeary cross on the hill: a grave.

Though the name on the envelope was a watery blur, the address was certainly hers. Suddenly the house—the kitchen and living-room, the two bedrooms with her memories stacked neatly against the walls—seemed far too large and dim. Without moving from the front door she phoned Margery.

“Is it Grandma?” Margery had to hush the children while she said “You come as soon as you like, mummy.”

Lark Lane was deserted. An unsold Christmas tree loitered in a shop doorway, a gargoyle craned out from the police station. Once Margery had moved away, the nearness of the police had been reassuring—not that Dorothy was nervous, like some of the old folk these days—but the police station was only a community centre now.

The bus already sounded like a pub. She sat outside on the ferry, though the bench looked and felt like black ice. Lights fished in the Mersey, gulls drifted down like snowflakes from the muddy sky. A whitish object grabbed the rail, but of course it was only a gull. Nevertheless she was glad that Simon was waiting with the car at Woodside.

As soon as the children had been packed off to bed so that Father Christmas could get to work, she produced the card. It felt wet, almost slimy, though it hadn’t before. Simon pointed out what she’d overlooked: the age of the stamp. “We weren’t even living there then,” Margery said. “You wouldn’t think they would bother delivering it after sixty years.”

“A touch of the Christmas spirit.”

“I wish they hadn’t bothered,” Margery said. But her mother didn’t mind now; the addressee must have died years ago. She turned the conversation to old times, to Margery’s father. Later she gazed from her bedroom window, at the houses of Bebington sleeping in pairs. A man was creeping about the house, but it was only Simon, laden with presents.

In the morning the house was full of cries of delight, gleaming new toys, balls of wrapping paper big as cabbages. In the afternoon the adults, bulging with turkey and pudding, lolled in chairs. When Simon drove her home that night, Dorothy noticed that the unsold Christmas tree was still there, a scrawny glistening shape at the back of the shop doorway. As soon as Simon left, she found herself thinking about the unpleasant card. She tore it up, then went determinedly to bed.

Boxing Day was her busiest time, what with cooking the second version of Christmas dinner, and making sure the house was impeccable, and hiding small presents for the children to find. She wished she could see them more often, but they and their parents had their own lives to lead.

An insect clung to a tinsel globe on the tree. When she reached out to squash the insect it wasn’t there, neither on the globe nor on the floor. Could it have been the reflection of someone thin outside the window? Nobody was there now.

She liked the house best when it was full of laughter, and it would be again soon: “We’ll get a sitter,” Margery promised, “and first-foot you on New Year’s Eve.” She’d used to do that when she had lived at home—she’d waited outside at midnight of the Old Year so as to be the first to cross her mother’s threshold. That reminded Dorothy to offer the children a holiday treat. Everything seemed fine, even when they went to the door to leave. “Grandma, someone’s left you a present,” little Denise cried.

Then she cried out, and dropped the package. Perhaps the wind had snatched it from her hands. As the package, which looked wet and mouldy, struck the curb it broke open. Did its contents scuttle out and sidle away into the dark? Surely that was the play of the wind, which tumbled carton and wrapping away down the street.

Someone must have used her doorway for a waste-bin, that was all. Dorothy lay in bed, listening to the wind grope around the windowless side of the house, that faced onto the alley. She kept thinking she was on the ferry, backing away from the rail, forgetting that the rail was also behind her. Her nervousness annoyed her—she was acting like an old fogey—which was why, next afternoon, she walked to Otterspool promenade.

Gulls and planes sailed over the Mersey, which was deserted except for buoys. On the far bank, tiny towns and stalks of factory chimneys stood at the foot of an enormous frieze of clouds. Sunlight slipped through to Birkenhead and Wallasey, touching up the colours of microscopic streets; specks of windows glinted. She enjoyed none of this, for the slopping of water beneath the promenade seemed to be pacing her. Worse, she couldn’t make herself go to the rail to prove that there was nothing.

Really, it was heart-breaking. One vicious card and she felt nervous in her own house. A blurred voice seemed to creep behind the carols on the radio, lowing out of tune. Next day she took her washing to Lark Lane, in search of distraction as much as anything.

The Westinghouse Laundromat was deserted. O O O, the washing machines said emptily. There was only herself, and her dervishes of clothes, and a black plastic bag almost as tall as she was. If someone had abandoned it, whatever its lumpy contents were, she could see why, for it was leaking; she smelled stagnant water. It must be a draught that made it twitch feebly. Nevertheless, if she had been able to turn off her machine she might have fled.

She mustn’t grow neurotic. She still had friends to visit. The following day she went to a friend whose flat over looked Wavertree Park. It was all very convivial—a rainstorm outside made the mince pies more warming, the chat flowed as easily as the whisky—but she kept glancing at the thin figure who stood in the park, unmoved by the downpour. The trails of rain on the window must be lending him their colour, for his skin looked like a snail’s.

Eventually the 68 bus, meandering like a drunkard’s monologue, took her home to Aigburth. No, the man in the park hadn’t really looked as though his clothes and his body had merged into a single greyish mass. Tomorrow she was taking the children for their treat, and that would clear her mind.

She took them to the aquarium. Piranhas sank stonily, their sides glittering like Christmas cards. Toads were bubbling lumps of tar. Finny humbugs swam, and darting fish wired with light. Had one of the tanks cracked? There seemed to be a stagnant smell.

In the museum everything was under glass: shrunken heads like sewn leathery handbags, a watchmaker’s workshop, buses passing as though the windows were silent films. Here was a slum street, walled in by photographs of despair, real flagstones underfoot, overhung by streetlamps on brackets. She halted between a grid and a drinking fountain; she was trapped in the dimness between blind corners, and couldn’t see either way. Why couldn’t she get rid of the stagnant smell? Grey forlorn faces, pressed like specimens, peered out of the walls. “Come on, quickly,” she said, pretending that only the children were nervous.