It Knows Where You Live (8 page)

“Would you like a drink?” His mother’s voice was slurred—it always was by this time of the day. Her evening cocktails had become more frequent; she was rarely seen without a glass in hand.

“No thanks.” He continued to watch the street.

“A sandwich, maybe? Or a bowl of that cereal you like so much?”

Ben shook his head, aware his mother could not see his response but realising that one was not really needed. She did not offer him anything more.

They watched a gameshow where screaming contestants—each more overweight than the last—tried to guess the retail prices of electrical appliances, and then it was time for bed. Ben kissed her cheek, drawing back as soon as his lips made contact with her wet, rubbery skin, and then he headed for the door. He could not recall the last time his mother had tucked him in, although he knew she always entered his room before she retired to her own bed. She usually stood for a few minutes at the bottom of his bed, weeping, while Ben fought hard to convince her he was dreaming. He could not guess what her reaction might be if she knew he was awake.

“Don’t forget to take your tablets.” His mother spoke without taking her eyes from the television screen; they reflected a capering man in a grey suit, a drab audience perched on the edge of hysteria.

Ben took the small plastic cup from the mantelpiece and swallowed the three white pills dry, wondering what might happen if he ever forgot about them.

Upstairs, after brushing his teeth and emptying his bladder, Ben sat at his desk, staring at the sky beyond the streaky window. Big dark clouds shuffled across the vast grey expanse, seeming to rise and fall as they travelled across the horizon. Faces appeared within them, eyes and noses and gaping mouths...the disinterested gods of his empty childhood.

Standing, Ben leaned upwards to open the window and let in a sharp breeze—the air inside the room was thick and heavy, as if carrying elements of his sorrow. As he pushed the latch into its socket, jamming the window open an inch and feeling the cold air brush against his cheek, he glanced down and saw the chair. It was perched outside a house a few doors along the street, positioned in the footpath central to the gate of the property. It was an old dining chair: wooden back and legs, a beige plastic-coated cushion on its seat. The cushion looked worn, faded; its shape was lumpy.

Ben was puzzled. Why would someone place a dining chair out there, right in the front street? If it had been left out for disposal by the bin men, it was a few days early (bin day wasn’t until Friday and today was only Tuesday). He supposed the sight of the solitary chair might not be so strange during the summer, when it was conceivable that someone might have left it out after spending an afternoon lounging in the sun. But it was winter, and it was cold—the coldest he could remember in his short life. The weather reports were all predicting heavy snowfall by the end of the week, and a few dusty white flakes had even begun to fall earlier that evening.

No, the chair was a mystery, an oddity: something to distract his thoughts. What made it even more peculiar was that Ben could not shake the feeling he had just missed seeing someone sitting in the chair; if he had been quicker he might have witnessed someone standing up and walking away. The idea was frightening, yet it also made him feel alive.

The chair was gone when he got out of bed next morning. He’d dreamed of it, imagining a tall, straight-backed figure sitting there all through the night, so it was fresh in his mind when he woke. He almost ran to the window and the sight of the empty spot on the footpath provoked a dull ache of disappointment in his stomach.

Ben turned away from the window and went downstairs, where he prepared his own breakfast. The plastic cup had been replaced on the mantelpiece—its rightful place, where both Ben and his mother would always see it—and three new pills sat at the bottom. He picked up the cup, poured the pills into his hand, and then walked back into the kitchen. He dropped the pills into the sink and turned on the cold tap. It took a long time for them to swirl down the plughole.

“Wow,” he said, taken aback by his small act of rebellion. He tried to come up with a reason for not taking the pills, but none would come. He simply felt like missing a dose.

His mother emerged from her room as he was eating cereal. He heard her heavy footfalls above him, moving slowly across the landing. The bathroom door slammed shut. By the time his bowl was empty the toilet was being flushed. The sound was too loud, as if there was something wrong with the plumbing; pipes banged on the walls, like tiny fists demanding release from an unseen prison.

As his mother’s footsteps creaked down the stairs, Ben choked back the urge to scream. Had the missed medication upset the delicate balance of his nerves? Surely, he thought, any side effects would take much longer to surface.

“Sleep okay?” His mother’s eyes were barely open; her face was slack, like an empty bag. She had neglected to comb her hair and her dressing gown was buttoned up all wrong. “Did you get your breakfast?”

“I always do,” said Ben, but the words did not find their target.

Later that day it began to hail. The sky darkened and splits opened up within it, letting loose a mixture of rain and ice sounding like gunshots against the window panes. Ben sat on the sofa and watched in awe: he’d always loved these extremes of weather. Rain, snow, hail...these things excited him in a way that he failed to comprehend but enjoyed anyway.
 

His mother stayed in the kitchen a long time, sitting at the dining table and nursing a bottle. Ben entered the room several times that morning, but his mother never moved. She stared at the same spot on the wall for hours, her eyes like stones pushed into the damp unmoving mask of her face.

The telephone rang some time between noon and one o’clock. Ben stirred from his place at the window and picked up the receiver. The storm outside sounded loudly in his ear—too loud to properly make out the voice straining to be heard.

“Hello?”
 

“— couldn’t do it. Not coming...going away—”

“Hello? Who is this?” The line was breaking up, swallowed by static. “Dad?”

The voice went quiet as soon as Ben said the word. The static cleared, yet whoever was trying to speak suddenly clammed up, as if reluctant to reveal himself. The moment stretched past its breaking point. Ben glanced at the clock on the wall, but could not seem to fathom the time.

“Is that you, Dad?”

The static swelled one final time, then broke apart, leaving behind a gap into which a voice stumbled: “I’m sorry, son. You have to believe that. I never wanted any of this to happen—it wasn’t what I planned. Just remember I love you and I’ll see you again...just not now. Not yet.”

Was his father crying? Was that why the voice sounded so strained, so unlike the one he’d heard all his life, gently encouraging him from the background, urging him to be better, to face the things he feared? “Dad.”

The line went dead. Ben replaced the receiver, surprised at how steady his hands were. Missing his medication that morning seemed like a blessing—usually, after such an awkward moment of social interaction, his hands would be twitching like frightened rabbits. He smiled, but the expression felt wrong on his face, like a wet rag pressed against his lips.

“Who-was-that?” His mother could barely construct a sentence: it came out as a single word.

“No one,” said Ben, satisfied he was still able to lie to her, to make her believe he was doing okay and everything would turn out fine, in time, after the remains of battle had been tidied away.

They did not speak again for the remainder of that day.

The chair was outside again that night when he went upstairs.
 

Ben went to bed early just to check, and it sat in the same place outside the same gate, on the same part of the footpath. He once again had the sense that the chair had been recently occupied—very recently; as if, in fact, whoever had been sitting there had got up and left the exact moment before Ben looked in its direction.
 

On closer inspection he could see the chair’s cushion was badly damaged. A split indentation marred its otherwise unbroken surface, as if a body too heavy had sat there for far too long. Ben tried to remember who lived there, in the house outside of which the chair had appeared, but could not recall any overweight resident. In fact, he was sure he’d never seen anyone coming or going from the property apart from a small old lady who only ever seemed to potter around in the garden, pruning the bushes and digging in the wide soil borders.

He pressed his forehead against the window pane, trying to get closer to the chair without actually leaving the house. He had not left the house for several months—he wasn’t sure quite how many; certainly almost as long as his father’s absence, which had occurred immediately after the final argument between his parents. To go outside now would take an act of will his medication was designed to smother.

Was that why he’d chosen to miss his pills? He’d done the same this evening, before climbing the stairs—holding them in the side of his cheek until he could reach the bathroom to flush them away. He’d watched as they swirled in the pan, little white pellets caught up in a storm.

Ben’s eyes ached but he could not blink. He was afraid if he moved his gaze from the chair for even a split second, he might miss catching sight of its owner. For some reason, the thought of this filled him with a horror that felt bigger than the house, even larger than the sky above it: a gargantuan terror that could not be allowed into the open.
 

He sat at the window until his eyelids grew too heavy to support and his body began to slump. Tiredness dragged him towards his bed, and he was sleeping even before he fell lifelessly onto the soft mattress.

His mother failed to rise the following morning. All during breakfast he waited for the sounds of her stirring, but by 11 a.m. she still had not shifted. He imagined her dead up there, lying flat and stiff having choked on her tongue during the night; or perhaps she’d suffered a sudden heart attack in her sleep. He put it off for as long as he could, but by the time morning TV became afternoon TV he knew he must investigate.

Ben climbed the stairs with feet as heavy as his conscience. He crossed the landing and stood outside his mother’s bedroom door, hands hanging limp by his sides, feet pointed slightly inwards. After what seemed like hours he finally reached out to open the door. His sweaty hand clenched the handle and he pushed open the door, flinching as its bottom edge scraped with a sound like claws across the too-thick carpet.

“Mum?”

There was no answer. The room was dark and silent. Not even a chink of light could be seen through the closed curtains. His mother hated the daylight; she was a light sleeper, and even the slightest hint of illumination in the room would wake her. She’d bought special blackout curtains to hang at the windows, and the darkness they produced was thick as tar and just as hard to penetrate.

“Mother?” That was better: the more formal address felt comfortable in his mouth.

Ben crept forward, aware that his feet did not want to move, but forcing them on anyway, knowing if he did not look now he would never feel strong enough to enter this room again. He kicked something in the darkness, a small hard item. Bottles clinked joylessly at his feet.
 

“Time to get up...it’s past lunch time.”

By now he was certain the room was empty—it felt empty, smelled empty, even sounded empty in the way that his voice died as soon as it left his lips. As his hand fell onto the pillows lined up along the top of his mother’s bed, propped haphazardly against the quilted headboard, he fully expected to feel no head resting upon them, no hair spread out across the soft material...He stared down at his hands as they clutched one of the pillows, not quite understanding when or why he had picked it up. His fists clenched inside the puffy mass, fingers straining to meet. The joints of his fingers and wrists felt sore.

“Mother.” It was not a question; nor was it a request; not even a cry for help. It was a word, just a word; and one that meant less every time he said it. He put the pillow back on the bed and took a step backwards, as if denying something he was barely able to grasp.

Slowly, he turned away and left the room, closing the door firmly behind him.

Ben ate a late lunch that day. There was not much in the fridge, so he did the best he could with what he found in the cupboards—a few slices of bread, some stale cheese, half a jar of pickled onions. Not once did it cross his mind to call anyone, the police or other authorities; the absence of his mother was not a problem, nor did it seem like something he should expend much energy worrying about.

He washed the dishes and put away the plate and cutlery he had used during his meal. His hands were as steady as wooden boards; he was not missing his medication at all. Had his mother been forcing him to take it so she could manage him better? If that were the case, he was glad she had vanished. It was unfair for her to attempt to manipulate his emotions in that way, particularly when it was she who seemed unable to cope with his father’s leaving.

“I’m all alone now,” he said, and the words tasted good: sweet and somehow bitter on his tongue. But that bitterness was not unpleasant, it was strangely rewarding in a way that the chalky little pills could never be. “
Aaaaaaalllllllll
alone.” He giggled, and jerked in shock at the sound and shape of his own voice as it wormed around and into the folds of his ears.

Ben watched the shows on television his mother never allowed—cop shows and comedies deemed unsuitable for his nervous disposition. The sound of his own laughter was like a balm; the feelings he was now experiencing made him tingle all over.
 

Voices passed by outside the window, but they spoke no language Ben could recognise. He listened to the alien words, the garbled phrases, until they were well out of earshot.

Time passed. He stayed up late and ate the rest of the food he found in the cupboard. Despite the staleness of the produce he discovered there, he had rarely tasted such intense flavours. The cheese was stronger than a slap in the face, the biscuits melted on his tongue, the baked beans were like angels’ eggs bursting against his teeth. Even water from the tap sent tiny explosions of excitement along his throat.