The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (32 page)

“No, I think it’s a terrible idea,” I say, watching her face fall, then leave it a couple of moments before adding: “I think you should do it here.”

She laughs. “I really want to live in London,” she says.

I look away at a line of DVDs standing between bookends on my desk.
Apocalypse Now
,
The Tenant
,
Eraserhead
,
Se7en
.

“Actually, I think it’s a great idea,” I say, turning back towards Rebecca. “I’ll write you a reference. I did the same thing myself twenty-five years ago.” As I say it I realise the figure is actually closer to thirty. “It was when I saw all these for the first time,” I add, indicating the films on my desk. “Well, apart from
Se7en
.”

“That’s great. Thanks,” she says, looking straight into my eyes.

“You’re welcome.”

There is a pause. I often fill such pauses, feeling it is unfair to expect students to do so, but on this occasion I say nothing.

“So,” she says, finally, “do you think I’ll get on?”

“To one of those courses? Oh yes. You can punctuate a sentence.”

She laughs uncertainly, pauses and then says, “Is that it? I can punctuate a sentence?”

“You’d be surprised how unusual that makes you these days,” I say. “But luckily that’s not all. You’re one of the good ones. You’re one of the ones I come in for. One of the ones I get up in the morning for.”

“Thank you,” she says, “I think.”

“Rebecca?” I say.

“Yes?”

“Do I look any different to you today?”

“Er.”

“It’s all right. You don’t have to answer that.” I lift my hand, instinct or habit making me want to run it over my shaved head. Instead, it hovers in mid-air.

Rebecca gets up. “Thanks again,” she says.

“You’re welcome. Good luck. Put me down for those references,” I say as she opens the door and leaves my office.

I watch the corridor through the doorway, since she has left the door open. A couple of first-year students pass by. I turn again to the pile of dissertations on my desk and look through them for Rebecca’s. I pull it out, turn to the first page and read the opening paragraph, then close it and write on the marksheet: 80%.

I get my stuff together, thread my arms into my fluorescent jacket and pause with my hand on the door handle. I look back. I return to my desk and go through the dissertations until I find the first one I’d been looking at, the one with the faulty punctuation. I write on the marksheet: 50%.

I cycle home, where I go straight upstairs and stand in front of the bathroom mirror. I try to focus on my neck. I want to examine the extremity. But every time I get close to doing so, I find my mind drifting from the specific task in hand to my more general preoccupation with the overall problem—or absence. I get a hand mirror and hold it behind me, picturing as I do so a well-known Magritte painting of a man viewed from behind looking into a mirror, not at the reflection of his face, but at the back of his own head. This is what I should see in the reflected hand mirror, the back of my head, but I don’t. If anything, this confirmation that my head is missing when viewed from behind—as well as from in front—is even more dismaying than the original sight in the mirror that morning, perhaps because I am mimicking the view that others have of me from behind, without my knowledge, without my ability to be aware, without any self-consciousness. But, instead, I wonder if it should encourage me that other people—my wife, strangers in the street, my colleagues and students—see nothing wrong.

Or nothing different from normal.

I have wandered out of the bathroom and now find myself in the bedroom, standing at the window looking down into the street. A neighbour from a few doors down walks past with her dogs and looks up and waves. I wave back. She sees nothing amiss. Can she not see? Is it that she is not looking at me properly?

I realise that I ought to be reminded of a different Magritte painting, in which a dead woman lies on a red couch, her head and neck at an unnatural angle to her body, a white scarf obscuring the conjunction of neck and torso.

I take my phone out of my pocket and open the address book. I find the number for the local GP surgery and my finger hovers over the call button for a moment. I look out of the window, see my neighbour turning the corner at the end of the street with her dogs. I press the button. A couple of rings and then the recorded voice of the practice manager. I know the spiel: I press the appropriate key to get through to make an appointment.

The receptionist offers me an appointment in a week’s time. I tell her I don’t necessarily have to see my own doctor. I’ll see one of the others. She says I can see one of the other doctors in three days’ time. I tell her I need to see someone today. She asks if it is an urgent matter. I pause for a moment, then tell her, yes, it is. She asks if I can explain what the problem is. I remain silent for a few seconds, thinking. She says my name, asks if I am still there. I tell her I can’t tell her what the problem is. It’s personal. She says she understands and that I should come down to the surgery and they will fit me in as soon as they can.

I walk down the road and enter the surgery. I see the receptionist and then sit in the waiting room and watch a procession of people with heads on their shoulders getting called to see the doctor before I do. Finally, I hear my name. I get up and leave the waiting room. As I turn into the corridor that leads to the consulting rooms I catch sight of my reflection in a pane of reinforced glass in the door that leads to the stairs. There’s the same empty space where my head should be and, I presume, used to be. Is it possible I never had a head, but only hallucinated it? What kind of question is that to be asking yourself as you knock on your GP’s door and hear her invite you to enter?

“Good morning, doctor,” I say. “How are you?”

“Very well, thank you,” she says, meeting my gaze. “How are you?”

I think carefully about my response. “I’m not sure,” I say finally. “I suppose I want you to tell me.”

“Well,” she says, “you requested an emergency appointment.”

“Yes,” I say.

The doctor looks at me. Her face betrays neither surprise nor dismay, nor the slightly indecent excitement a doctor might feel when presented with an unusual case.

“I feel,” I say, “like something is missing.”

The doctor smiles and frowns at the same time.

“From your… life?”

“Something is missing and I feel as if I can’t carry on without it, and yet it’s very hard to say what it is… what it is that’s missing. Do you see?”

“Have you been feeling depressed?” she asks.

“More alarmed than depressed,” I say.

“Have you been feeling anxious?”

I look at her, unsure how to respond.

“Panic attacks, uncontrollable distress?”

I look away from her towards the frosted glass of the window.

“Do you feel as if you are losing your grip?” she asks.

“I think I need to go,” I say.

The smile has disappeared and now there is only a concerned frown.

“If you’d like to see someone… a referral?”

“I’m okay,” I say, getting to my feet. “I’ll be okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m fine.”

“Make an appointment to see me in a week or two.”

I thank her and leave. I walk back home without delay.

I stand in the hall. The house is silent. I’m thinking. I go into the kitchen and open the drawer where we keep the larger saucepans and the rice cooker. Then I close it again. I try the tall cupboards. I open all the eye-level cupboards and look quickly inside each one before closing them again. I open the fridge. Milk, wine, butter, cheese, salad stuff, yoghurts, a bowl containing leftover chilli that will inevitably be thrown away.

In the cellar I open the doors to all the cupboards. I look in the old plastic dustbin I store firewood in. The shelves—nothing that shouldn’t be there, just jam jars containing screws and curtain hooks and Allen keys and brass hooks bought to go on the backs of doors that have never been fitted.

I climb the steps back to the hall. There are cupboards in the lounge containing LPs that have not been played in twenty years. The cushions on the settee conceal only biscuit crumbs, loose change and the TV remote control that has been missing for two days.

Upstairs I check the wardrobes and the airing cupboard. I pull down piles of bedding and towels and leave them in a heap on the bathroom floor. I rummage behind the hot water tank. I look around the landing. The linen basket contains nothing but a few pairs of socks and some underwear. I take the stairs to the top floor and my study. The drawers of my filing cabinet are filled with hanging files overstuffed with papers and manuscripts and press cuttings. I look at the bookshelves. Books, DVDs, VHS tapes, copies of
Sight & Sound
going back fifteen years. There are no gaps on the shelves. There is nothing under my desk except my printer and a box I use as a footrest and lots of fluff and dust-furred wires and cables.

I go back down to the first floor. There’s an empty wardrobe in the spare bedroom, but that’s exactly what it is—empty. I carry a stool in from the bedroom and stand on it so I can see on top of the empty wardrobe, but all I see is empty space.

Slowly I walk downstairs. I open the front door and step outside. I approach the bins. The brown one, emptied recently, contains a couple of wine bottles and several tin cans; the blue bin is two-thirds filled with paper and cardboard; the green one is less than half-filled with grass cuttings and compostable bags of food waste; and the grey bin conceals a single bag of non-recyclable rubbish collected from various bins and baskets around the house. It has a drawstring neck and the plastic tape used to secure it has been tied in a knot.

I look up from the bin. The windows of the house across the street return a blank stare.

I reach into the grey bin and pull out the bag. I dump it on the drive and bend down to pick at the knot. It won’t come, so I press my finger nails into the plastic at the top of the bag and tear it open. The bag is almost full. I plunge my hands into a mass of stained cotton wool balls, disintegrating toilet roll holders and spaghetti in tomato sauce that should have gone in the green bin. There are damp tissues and an empty blister pack of heavy-duty pain killers and a rolled-up ball of my wife’s hair. Well, it’s certainly not mine. I picture her standing at the sink, viewed through the half-open door, pulling the hair out of her brush and rolling it into a ball between her palms, looking up and seeing me watching her and then looking away to direct her right foot at the pedal bin.

I pick the bag up by its bottom corners and upend it over the drive. Its contents hit the asphalt in a large pile into which I delve, coming up empty handed.

As I’m shovelling the worst of the mess back into the bag, one of my neighbours walks past the end of the drive. She gives me a look similar to the one the doctor gave me.

#

My wife comes home.

“What’s all that mess on the drive?” she asks.

“I was looking for something,” I say. “I’ll clean it up.”

I pour her a glass of wine, which she takes through into the lounge, while I locate the dustpan and brush in the cupboard under the sink. I hear the television go on and a newsreader’s voice saying something about the situation in Syria. Violence in Damascus. Calls to arm the rebels. I take the dustpan and brush outside and start clearing up the mess. When I come back in, I can hear a reporter on the news doing a piece to camera. I stow the dustpan and brush and go upstairs to put the towels away and anything else I’ve left lying around in my hunt through various cupboards and drawers.

As I come back downstairs and enter the lounge, I hear another news reporter saying, “The head was removed by police, who are conducting further enquiries.”

“
What’s that
?” I say, aware of the sharpness in my voice.

“Severed head found in a plastic bag in London,” my wife says, before draining her wine glass. “Was that an especially small glass you gave me?” she asks.

“What?”

“It didn’t last long.”

“
What
?”

“That glass of wine.”

“What about the head, the severed head on the news?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I wasn’t really paying attention. Someone found a severed head in a Sainsbury’s bag.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. London, somewhere.”

“Did you see it?”

“The head?”

“Yes.”

“Of course I didn’t see it. They’re not going to put a severed head on the six o’clock news, are they?”

“Where in London was it? They must have said.”

“I daresay they did. I wasn’t really listening. What difference does it make? A severed head is a severed head wherever it’s found.”

I grab the remote and press rewind. The details are that a man’s severed head was discovered by a woman out walking her dog at ten past eight that morning on the Parkland Walk between Highgate and Finsbury Park. It was, as my wife had said, inside a supermarket carrier bag.

“I wonder if it was a bag-for-life?” my wife says.

On to the screen comes a still image of an empty, regular Sainsbury’s plastic carrier bag, orange and lightweight.

“Apparently not,” she says. “You’d think they’d have used something a bit sturdier, wouldn’t you? I mean, those things are no good at all. One medium-sized chicken and you’re lucky if you can get it from the shopping trolley into the boot of the car without the bag going.”

“Is this the last item on the news?” I ask her.

“What do you mean?”

“Is this the last item? The joke item. The light relief. You think it’s funny?”

“I suppose you’re right,” she says. “I don’t imagine the owner is laughing. Where was the remote anyway?”

I leave the room and climb the stairs two at a time. I open my laptop and go online, logging on to Network Rail. I book a ticket—a single—for the morning. It’s expensive, but that’s too bad.

“I’m going to London tomorrow,” I tell my wife later in bed.