It Knows Where You Live (21 page)

(pause)

The market has changed. Viewing tastes have altered and become more radical, less predictable. In the past, it was all about blood and sex, but now they don’t seem to want that. It’s passé.
 

The current trend seems to involve intense anatomical exploration... hence the need for someone like you, with your background in medicine.

A
surgeon
, no less...

(pause)

It’s difficult to guess the next thing they’ll want to see, but we’re expecting this to be what is usually called a game-changer.

(pause)

I’m sorry, what did you say?
 

Oh, yes, there is that. The guilt... but don’t feel guilty afterwards, not on my behalf. I assure you I want this. I want it very much. The last thing I need is to... linger. I always said I’d rather go out this way, providing a service to my customers.
 

Like I said before, I’ve been preparing for this. It isn’t just something I decided on the spur of the moment. I suppose it was my intention all along, once I found out I was dying.

Excuse me. That’s just my phone. A text message.

(pause)

Yes, they’re on their way.

It won’t be long now. Not long at all.

YOU HAVEN’T SEEN ME

Trendle hated being out this late in the Grove estate, long after the working populace had packed up and gone home. It was a leftover fear from the time, almost seven years ago, when he’d been mugged by a masked stranger as he was walking home from the pub. The man punched him twice in the kidneys, and when Trendle was on the ground his assailant kicked him in the head. There followed the feeling of hands going through his shirt pocket, coat pockets, trouser pockets, and removing anything of value. The bastard even took his watch.

But that was a long time ago, and he realised he should be over it by now. Should be, but wasn’t. He still carried the scars—both physical and mental—and walking these dark streets brought back all the memories with a force that was at times like a psychological echo of those initial blows.

Just before running away, his attacker had leaned in and whispered, with a note of amusement in his voice, “You haven’t seen me. I was never here.” The words seemed to resonate even now with something beyond their apparent meaning, and the fact that the mugger was never caught served only to underline the implied threat. He was still out there somewhere, probably doing the same to other people.

Trendle had stayed late at the council offices on Far Grove Way this evening because he needed the overtime money. He thought it would be okay. He convinced himself he no longer feared being out here, on the streets, as darkness fell. Or at least his need for extra cash outweighed the terror he carried with him, hoping nobody would notice.

But he had lied to himself. Right now, he just wanted to get away, to be safely home within the sanctity of the small house where he had lived alone since his mother died over a decade ago.

He hurried past boarded-up shops, businesses that hadn’t traded in years; dark alleys opened like hungry mouths along his route to the bus stop, belching out a twitching sodium-tinted darkness.

“Stupid,” he whispered. “Stupid, stupid man...” He always did this, created illusory fears to supplement the ones that already existed. Sometimes Trendle believed he secretly enjoyed being afraid.

Hadn’t there been something in the papers recently about a murder nearby? Or was he just making that up, too, his mind conspiring with the environment to scare him even more? Fears lined up to bait him like paupers in a breadline, and he embraced them all, giving them sustenance.

Shadows juddered up ahead, a nervy dance of darkness. Trendle slowed his pace, wondering if he could go back, perhaps stay overnight at the office. He could sleep on the sofa in the reception area. But, no; that was foolish. He couldn’t do such a thing. What on earth would people think if they found him there?

Just then, a slim figure bent forward out of an adjacent alley, sniggering. Trendle realised the sound was not snickering laughter, but the figure’s feet trailing the black plastic bags that littered the ground.

“Evening,” he said; a reflex reaction.

The figure straightened, became upright. It was so thin it might not even be a figure at all. He couldn’t make out its features in the gloom. The plastic bags ceased their jittery noise, as if silenced by his presence.

“You haven’t seen me.” The voice was low, flat, without accent or inflection. The words fell slowly and heavily, like stones in a black river.

“I’m sorry? What was that?”

The dark figure became darker still as it retreated into the mouth of the alley, moving smoothly and silently, as if on castors or pulled by strings. Trendle’s vision dimmed and then brightened: a fluke reaction to that stealthy movement in the darkness. When the figure was no longer visible, the order—for that’s surely what it was—came again, cold and disembodied. “You haven’t seen me.”

Trendle hurried past the alleyway, stepping off the kerb and walking on the road, just in case someone lurched out to grab him. Nobody did. He made it to the bus stop unscathed.

The bus was quiet. Only two other passengers rode with him: an old woman wearing iPod headphones and a much younger woman who seemed to be weeping softly as she read a paperback book. The weeper disembarked two stops before Trendle; the old woman remained on the bus when he got off, her head nodding back and forth to whatever tune was playing in her ears.

Trendle walked the few hundred yards from the bus stop in a state of repressed panic, and when he unlocked his front door, stepped inside, then locked it again, he leaned against the wall and tried to stop himself from crying.

What if that mugger from all those years ago had returned to finish him off? Who knew how these people thought? Perhaps he’d even been stalking Trendle ever since the incident, waiting patiently for the right time to make himself known. The police couldn’t help—they’d been useless last time. Nobody could help; he was entirely on his own.

He made a late dinner of beans on toast and picked at it without much enthusiasm. Afterwards, he watched a documentary on television, something about a woman who’d pretended to be a survivor of 9/11 when in reality she had not been there at all. Her smug, fat face haunted him as he climbed the stairs to bed, trailing him from the screen to his room. There seemed to be some sort of correlation to her story and the events earlier this evening, but he was unable to understand what it might be.

He slept badly, tossing and turning and mumbling. He woke himself up twice, and each time he thought he saw a far-too-slender figure bending outwards from the wall. He heard a whispered voice: “You haven’t seen me.” But the voice was only in his mind. He knew that; he was certain of it.
 

In the morning he felt tired and on edge. His back ached. His scalp itched. He thought he might be coming down with something, so he emailed work and told them he wouldn’t be going in for a couple of days.

He spent the day doing nothing. His head was filled with televised images of the World Trade Centre towers toppling, and the repeated phrase he’d heard on his way home last night.

He couldn’t go out. Everything outside his front door seemed threatening. People walked by his front window, bent almost double, as if they were carrying heavy burdens. He could not make out their faces; they were slim and dark and frightening.

When night fell, he was unable to move from the living room. The silent television flickered; but no, it was his eyes, his vision fading and re-establishing itself like a cheap nightclub strobe effect. He remembered this happening after the attack. He’d sat on the ground for a long time afterwards, waiting for his vision to return to normal, wondering if something behind his eyes was dislodged by the violence.

Eventually he was too tired to sit up any longer. He reached out and grabbed the remote control, flicked the channel on the television. The image on the screen went to black for a second, and he saw reflected there a figure. It was tall, absurdly thin, and bent forward at the waist, as if caught in the act of emerging from the darkened plasma rectangle.

He heard the words before they were even spoken—if they were spoken at all.

“You haven’t seen me.”

He felt a slight pressure on his shoulder, as if a hand were resting there. Slowly, he turned his head to look behind him. There was nobody there. Of course there wasn’t. He was scaring himself, allowing his imagination to run wild simply because he’d been taken by surprise by a beggar in a back alley.

He turned back to the television screen, at the same time switching off the set with the remote control, which was still in his hand. Just before the screen went dark, he caught sight of an odd image on whatever programme was airing: a static shot of the back of a man’s head. The hairstyle looked like Trendle’s own, and he’d recognise the shape of the head anywhere.

Trendle stood and turned out the lights. He went upstairs, feeling stalked but refusing to turn around and acknowledge his weakness. He went to bed without bothering to wash or to clean his teeth. Why bother with such details anyway, when there was no one in his life to benefit from them? He was alone; he had always been alone; the only thing he had to keep him company was his own formless dread.

That night he dreamed of dark alleys, backwards moving figures, and the rear of someone’s head rising up from behind his desk at work. He woke before daylight, sweating and afraid. He couldn’t get back to sleep, so he sat up in bed and stared at the bedroom door, praying the handle would not turn.

He went back to work because he could think of nothing else to fill his time. He couldn’t sit there all day and watch television, and the thought of being outside for any length of time held little appeal.

That evening he left the office on time. He didn’t want to walk by that same alleyway, so he chose a different route—one that took him slightly out of his way but seemed a lot safer. He got on the bus and watched the streets pass by like a film set outside the window. Every face he saw looked sad; each person looked grey and pale and weighed down by unfathomable miseries. He wondered if anyone was happy, or if they all felt like him: hollow, empty, discarded.

He got off the bus a stop early and went into a pub he knew. It was a nice place, quiet: a generic brewery-owned theme bar, with framed football jerseys on the walls and a screen above the long wooden bar that showed non-stop sporting highlights. He drank five pints of a local bitter—much more than he was used to consuming in a single session—without speaking to anyone. When he started feeling dizzy he decided to leave.

On his way out the door, a woman barged out of the toilets and brushed against his arm. He turned, holding the door open with one hand, and said, “Sorry.”

The woman stopped. She smiled. “No, my fault. Hang on...don’t I know you?”

They’d worked together for five years. He saw her almost every day at the photocopier or in the basement print room. She never spoke to him and not once did he try to instigate a conversation. They were just faces passing in the rooms and corridors of the council offices, going about their business as if separated by a sheet of glass.

“No,” he said, feeling small and hopeless. “I don’t think so.”

She screwed up her eyes and pushed her head forward, as if trying to see through a mist. “No, I’m sure we do. You look very familiar.”

He smiled. He held open the door. He wished he could turn away and leave, but politeness held him in place. He’d never been able to end a conversation. He always hung around until the other person got bored and made up an excuse to leave.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

He let the door swing shut and followed her back to the bar, where she ordered two cocktails without even asking him what he wanted. For the first time since he could remember, he felt noticed...someone had acknowledged his presence in the world.

“This’ll put hairs on your chest,” she said, grinning.
 

Trendle realised she was slightly drunk. Perhaps that was why she couldn’t remember how they knew each other. It was almost certainly the reason she’d felt sorry enough for him to offer him a drink.

“I’m celebrating my divorce,” she said, after they’d exhausted what little small talk Trendle was capable of. “I lost my friends up the road about half an hour ago...didn’t want to go home, so decided to stay. I’m glad we bumped into each other. It saves me from drinking alone.”
 

Trendle raised his glass, took a long swallow of something sickly-sweet. “Me, too,” he said. And he really meant it. He was sick and tired of being on his own. Maybe this was what he needed to kick-start the rest of his life—a night spent talking to someone, focusing on things other than himself and having a similar type of attention turned upon him, even if it was out of drunken pity. Other people did it, so why not he? Wasn’t he just the same as everyone else?

After a while she moved and sat next to him, her warm thigh touching his leg. She smiled a lot, put her hand on his knee, giggled whenever he said something he didn’t think was all that funny.

Trendle realised what she was doing, and he welcomed her advances. She was lonely, drunk, in need of affection and companionship. Just like he was.
 

“I don’t live far from here,” he said, recalling a line he’d once heard in a film. “We could go back there. For coffee?”

She took her hand away from his knee. Her face seemed to fall inwards, deflated.
 

Right then, he knew he’d crossed some kind of line.

“What kind of woman do you think I am?” She was swaying slightly in the chair. She slammed the palm of her hand against the table top.

“I’m sorry...I...”

“You what? You thought you were onto a winner, eh? Thought I’d go back to yours and jump your bones?”

“No...there’s been a mistake. I’m not very good at this.”