It Knows Where You Live (12 page)

I followed her inside, shutting the door behind me. “Tonight, I’d hate it more if I had to be alone.”

“Want a drink?” She stood, still unsteady on her feet, and headed towards the small kitchen.

“The strongest you’ve got.” I sat on the bed and stared at the small device still clutched in my hand, the player of dreams.

Tina returned with two glasses filled to the brim with cheap whisky. It was horrible, but I gulped at it like it was iced water from a natural spring. “I’ve seen it, Tina. I’ve seen beyond...all
this
. I’ve seen through the filth and the shit and had a look at what’s beyond.”

Stoned, Tina sat down heavily beside me. The bathrobe slipped down one shoulder, exposing her breast. There was a fresh bruise around the nipple; it had not been there when I’d last seen her. “There’s nothing beyond this, Jules. Nothing. Just more crap. Under the crust, you get the softer stuff. That’s all: it’s just the same, but softer.”

“No, Tina. That’s not right. All this is a sham. You don’t need the drugs, the sex, the beatings. None of it matters; it’s not what’s real. There’s different coloured grass and streams that smoke. Weird animals and trees with leaves that are beautiful birds.”

Tina rocked, her head resting on my shoulder. “I thought I was the one who’s high?” She giggled again, but I couldn’t stand the sound.

My nerves became blades, turning in on me and slicing.

“That’s what I am,” said Tina. “The soft stuff; the stuff under the crust. It’s what we all are. The drugs and the booze just make it all go tough, like scar tissue. The sex, too. That helps.”

She laid her hand on my knee. The fingers were wrinkled, like those of an old hag.

I put the ear buds in place, switched on the player, and closed my eyes. The hissing sea was there, but when I strained my senses I was unable to reach beyond it. Outside of me, in the world, nothing changed. The world remained the same; the walls and floors and roof kept up their act.

I struggled to gain entry to the world I had glimpsed, and for some reason I could not quite reach it. I knew it was there, waiting for me, but time after time I failed to navigate my way towards it.

Tina stroked my leg, my thigh. Her wizened fingers plucked at my crotch, seeking something I usually gave freely but now wanted desperately to deny her.

I strained...struggled...
listened
.

It kept me at arm’s length.

When I opened my eyes Tina was still there, next to me on the bed. She had taken off the robe. Her sagging breasts sickened me; the pallor of her flesh was like death; the sub-aural sounds of her anatomy were suddenly loud in my ears.

My hand made a fist around the device, and when I looked down I saw the light on the screen was fading. I’d been offered a chance and had not taken it. Back in the park, when I was alone and in a receptive state, the world beyond this one had bulged towards me...and stupidly all I’d done was sit and stare, a perpetual onlooker.

“Maybe the battery’s flat.” Tina’s voice was the screaming of dying children; the stench of her flesh was the rot of the world—my world, the one I had chosen without even realising a choice had been made.

“Come on,” said Tina, repulsive to me now. “Come on, love, let’s fuck.”

Her arms went around me. Her legs rose and knotted about my waist. I squeezed my eyes shut, listened with everything I had, but all I could hear was the hollow sound of my interior: a sound worse than any silence I had ever known.

THE TABLE

It was there when he got home, standing at the front of the lounge, wedged into the belly of the bay window. Ben noticed it immediately—he would, of course, because when he’d left the house to go to work that morning he did not own a dining table; and now, here one was, where before there had been nothing but bare carpet.

He put his wallet and keys on the top shelf of the bookcase, as usual, and walked across the room, never taking his eyes off the new piece of furniture. It was an ordinary pine table, a bit worn at the edges but in reasonably good condition. Like something you might pick up cheap in a second-hand shop. Someone had varnished the wood, and it shone in the gloom. The surface was pitted here and there with tiny marks and scratches, and if he looked hard enough and allowed his mind to form patterns, some of them began to look like they might have been intended to represent numbers or letters.

Ben reached out and turned on the main light; the marks on the table top faded beneath the intense illumination. The varnish shone.

As tables went, it was nice enough, but he had no idea what it was doing there.

He went to the phone and lifted the receiver, dialled Jill’s number. The phone rang eight times before she picked it up.

“It’s me,” he said, staring at a spot on the wall where the paint was fading. He’d have to do something about that eventually.

“Hi. How...are you okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“Listen. About last night. We should talk.”

“Forget about it. We were both drunk.” He twirled the phone cord in his fingers, thinking he might replace the item with a cordless model. “I have something else I want to say.”

“But we should talk. Really talk.”

“A table.”

Jill went silent.

“A table,” he said again.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Ben? What’s this with the table?”

“That’s what I’m asking you. What’s with the table? I know you said I needed some new furniture, but if you wanted to get me some I think a chair or a sofa might have been a more appropriate gift.”

“You’re evading the issue again. Why won’t you talk to me?”

“How did you even get it in here? I never gave you a key.”

“Quit it with the table talk, Ben. I believe in us.”

“Did one of the lads help you? I gave Maccas a spare key. It was him, wasn’t it?”

“Talk to me, Ben. We can’t go on like this.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Listen, I’ll speak to you later. I have a headache.” He put down the phone. Jill was still talking, but her words were beginning to sound like bad song lyrics.
I believe in us
. Just what the hell was that supposed to mean anyway?

He looked again at the table, at its delicate knotty surface, at the half-visible scratches in the wood. It was darker nearer the centre, perhaps where something had been spilled. He wondered if it would clean up nice, or if the stain was permanent. There were no matching chairs; just the table. It looked odd that way, somehow impermanent.

Later that evening, after eating a microwave meal and sipping a can of tepid lager, Ben sat in the dark fast-forwarding through a DVD. He was restless, couldn’t settle. Light from the television played across the carpet at his feet, creeping steadily towards him. He lifted his feet up onto the chair, tucking them beneath his bottom. Glancing out of the window and into the small back garden, he watched the bushes sway like drunken line-dancers in the wind.

Bored, he pressed pause on the DVD remote control. On the screen, a Japanese warrior ceased mid-swing with his sword, cutting the air. Ben glanced to his left, towards the dark bay window, and saw someone sitting at the table. There were four of them, gathered around as if waiting for a meal. They all stared across the top of the table, not really at each other—just into the air above the middle of the table, where the darkness seemed somehow pinched or folded.

Ben did not feel afraid. He stared at them: a man, a woman, two children—a boy and a girl. They all had dark hair, pale faces: they looked vaguely oriental. He could not make out much more regarding their features because of the darkness and the fact that their faces looked smudged, like paints running together. None of the people moved; they all stared at the same point above the centre of the table.

The air was still. Ben could not even hear his own breathing. He was afraid to look away from the family—yes, of course, that was it: they were a family. He stared at them for what felt like a long time but was probably only the space of a few minutes. He did not blink. Then, finally, he was able to tear his gaze away from the group. He glanced at the door leading out to the hall, at the silent warrior on the TV screen, and when he looked back at the table they were gone. Gone, but still there, under the surface—he could still make out the way the darkness clung to them, like old sheets.

Ben turned off the television, got out of the chair, and climbed the stairs to bed. Even though he could no longer see them he knew the four figures were still there, sitting silently at the table, and the thought comforted him. He thought about them as he drifted off to sleep, and was puzzled to realise that he could not recall what they looked like.

He dreamt of his mother, sitting in an old dining chair at the roadside—perhaps a chair that had once belonged with the table in his lounge. The street was empty; the houses were all derelict. There were black marks on his mother’s skin, thick scrawls and curlicues across her face and arms. Her eyes were open. She was crying, but silently. After a while he realised she was tied to the chair and unable—rather than unwilling—to move.

•
   
•
   
•

The next day he rang his friends and asked each of them if they had helped Jill with the table. None of them knew anything about it—or that was what they claimed. The whole thing was a mystery. He began to doubt Jill had arranged delivery of the table. It was as if it had simply appeared in his house, perhaps summoned by some obscure need.

Just before lunch, when he was thinking about going out for a pint and a toasted sandwich at his local, the doorbell rang. Ben put down the book he’d been reading—Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot
—and went to answer the door.

Jill was standing on the step, her hair mussed by the wind, faint spatters of drizzle on her face and shoulders. She was trying to smile but couldn’t quite master the technique; her mouth looked twisted, as if she were suffering from the effects of a mild stroke. “Hi. I thought you might like some company.”

Ben stepped aside. “Okay. I was just thinking about lunch—fancy some cheese on toast?” He walked backwards, into the hall, and motioned her inside. Jill followed him, shrugging off her coat, and as she stepped over the threshold dark clouds moved across the sun and it began to rain with sudden force.

She stood behind him in the kitchen as he prepared the toast, placing thick slices of cheddar across the buttered surface and returning them to the grill. He boiled the kettle and made instant coffee; the room smelled of burning. Rain hammered at the windows, shutting them in. The air grew hot and heavy.

“We still need to talk,” said Jill as he passed her a plate. She had taken off her shoes, and her bare soles whispered on the vinyl floor as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. “We can’t keep fighting like we did the other night—we won’t last two minutes if we can’t stop getting at each other’s throats.”
 

He stared at her neck, at the pale, loose flesh. She was getting old; the skin there was starting to tighten. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I feel...detached lately, like I’m not really here. I shouldn’t take it out on you.” He heard the words but did not feel them; they were less than meaningless.

She followed him into the lounge. “Is that the famous table?” Crumbs scattered across her chin as she bit into her toast. She cocked her head, indicating the bay window.

“Yeah. Are you sure you didn’t buy it?”

“I think I’d remember if I had. And besides, why the hell would I buy you a table...and a second-hand one at that?” The rain did its best to drown out her words, but he could still hear them. She licked her lips; her eyes glistened in the half-light.
 

They finished eating and sipped their coffee. Ben thought it tasted bitter, but Jill did not voice an opinion. She watched him closely, carefully, throughout the meal, as if waiting for the right moment to strike.

They kissed because he thought they should; it was perfunctory, an act lacking in real passion. Jill tried to push him to the floor but he shook his head and drew her across the room, tugging her by the hand towards the bay window, and the table. She leaned back across the tabletop, bringing up her legs and wrapping them around his waist. He felt cold; her skin was like ice. She could not touch him inside, where it counted.

He pushed her across the polished surface, pressing his pelvis between her legs. Her skirt rode up around her thighs and he pawed at her breasts. She clawed at his buttocks. They went on like this for a while, and then Ben pulled away, stepping back from her. He thought she looked like some kind of sacrificial offering, spread-eagled there on the table, with her top buttons undone and her skirt in disarray. She was panting hard; sweat shone on her chest and forehead. Ben thought he heard a snatch of music, just for a second, but then it was gone. Perhaps someone had walked by the window with music playing on their mobile phone, or a car had gone by with the windows open and the stereo turned up loud.

The four figures were sat once again at the table, each in the same place as before. There were no chairs—they hovered above the floor, as if seated, and held their arms out across the table, palms upward. Jill’s head was resting at the centre of the table, right at the point where their sightlines converged. A crimped halo of darkness hung directly above her. She was looking at him, her eyes reflecting a kind of pleading; she could not see the family.

“I can’t,” he said, not quite knowing what he meant but realising the family would understand even if he didn’t. Their faces were immobile, lacking real expressions, yet he had the sense that beneath their skin they were struggling to express some inner emotion—the muscles beneath their blurred faces tensed, twitching as if insects were burrowing into their cheeks. Something was on the verge of breaking through: he could feel it; he could taste it, like electricity on the tongue.

Jill stood and rearranged her clothes in silence. She glared at him as she stalked across the room. In the hall, she pulled on her coat and opened the door. Then she paused, as if waiting for him to approach her, to perhaps beg her to stay. Ben stayed where he was. The family remained at the table. Jill slammed the door behind her. He watched her through the bay window, as she was slowly erased by the rainfall. He knew he would never see her again.