Flock of Shadows Read online

  I turn to Mum and start to try to clean her up. Her teeth are yellow. Her skin is greyish and pockmarked with deep, bloodless, ragged holes. And out of those sour-milk eyes leak viscous white tears.

  I can see a snail floating in the bath.

  I reach in and take Mum’s hand, lift it, stroke it gently.

  — It’s all right, Mum. It’s OK. It’s all going to be fine.

  She turns and looks at me with those terrible opaque eyes, mouth hanging open. She rattles again.

  — Mum?

  And she rattles again. Dad comes back in. Mum looks up at him. Her hands splash feebly in the bath as she does so.

  — Dad, I think she knows.

  — Oh, God, he says. Oh, God. Moira?

  She begins to scream again.

  *

  My mother, now cleaned up and dressed in clothes my Dad could never bring himself to give to a charity shop or throw away like he said he had, is lying on the couch. Dad is perched on the end, stroking her forehead the way he used to when she had a migraine. Occasionally, she rattles and twitches.

  When the phone rings, she starts again to scream, until Dad takes her hand and whispers soothingly to her. I head to the kitchen to get it.

  It’s Derek.

  — Is your Dad there, Jan?

  — Um, he’s sort of busy. Can I take a message?

  — No, I can tell you. It’s probably better I tell you. You’re blood.

  — What’s wrong?

  — Well, nothing. Everything. Listen. I don’t know you so well, but you’re Moira’s. And that matters. I wanted to say goodbye. That’s all.

  I say nothing. He can hear me breathing.

  — I tried. To put things right with Mother — your grandmother, I mean — He tails off.

  — I understand, I say.

  — Yes, I think you do. I had to do right by her. At the funeral. But.

  I know where this is going.

  — I am sorry I couldn’t say earlier, Jan. To be honest, I have only just decided. I owe it to you and Eric to tell you.

  For a second, I want to say to him, Let me put Mum on, but I know that’s insane, and it would damage him, damage his own grief, not only for his sister but for his life.

  — I never told your mother why, Jan.

  Decades of hurt, several generations’ worth. And it all boils down to that one little why.

  — I wrote a letter, he says. I never gave it to her. I want you to have it. You won’t have to read it if you don’t want to. But—

  — I know, I say.

  — I think it’s better if we cut off contact now. I don’t have anything against you. I just think I need to draw a line under that part of my life.

  — I understand, I say. It was a privilege to meet you, Uncle Derek.

  — I am not sure that you’re right. Still, I’ve sent it now. I don’t know. Maybe it should have been buried.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I suddenly become aware that I am not alone in the kitchen. I am very cold. I do not turn around. I fix my gaze to the little orange display on the phone cradle.

  — I know, I say.

  I imagine a hand touching my shoulder.

  — Good luck, Jan. Send my regards to your father.

  I will not turn around.

  — Goodbye, Uncle Derek. And thank you.

  He hangs up. I put the receiver back on the cradle and I stand there silently, transfixed, my hand still on the receiver—

  I whirl around. It’s eleven in the morning, but the kitchen is dark. The shadows spread, even as I watch, from the corners of the room, leak around the edges.

  I swallow.

  I walk slowly to the sink, and I fill the kettle and I put it on, and I make a pot of tea. By the time I leave the kitchen with two mugs of tea, I can feel the shadows brushing against my skin, like the frail, paper-dry fingers of someone very old.

  I stop at the bottom of the stairs, look up. The door to Nan’s room is so covered in shadows it cannot be seen at all.

  *

  I don’t know how long we’ve been here now, Dad and me, sitting here next to Mum, me on the floor, Dad still perched on the couch. It feels like days. We haven’t slept or washed. Neither of us has eaten anything substantial apart from a few leftovers. We have up to now subsisted on tea and biscuits, but the milk is running out, and we finished the last of the biscuits, even the Rich Teas, some time ago. It’s so dark in here. All the lights are on.

  Neither of us has any idea what time it is. We have an unspoken, irrational agreement not to open the curtains, and it is unclear to me whether that is to keep people outside from seeing in or to keep us seeing what might be outside. We might have sat through a second night. Maybe even a third. We don’t know.

  When the letterbox goes, we’re both surprised. Neither of us thought it was morning.

  — One of us should get that, says Dad.

  — Yeah, I say.

  — Jan, says Dad, I don’t think I can.

  — It’s OK, Dad.

  Mum rattles.

  I stand up and take a breath. I step into the shadows. They paw at me weakly, breathe on me with a smell like old cabbage and cigarettes and poverty. They are only shadows.

  The hall stretches in front of me for miles. I cannot see the front door. Just Dad’s tatty, faded carpet. Just Dad’s magnolia walls, fading into the distance, into the dark.

  — I don’t care, Nan, I say out loud. I don’t care.

  And now I am sitting on the doormat with my back against the front door with a handful of post: a condolence card from someone I have never heard of; a bank statement; a charity mass-mailer, the sort where they include the cheap ballpoint pen so you have no excuse but to fill in the form; and a letter addressed to Mum. I drop the rest of the post on the floor and look at it in both hands.

  The shadows snake out of the air and try to snatch it from me, but they are just shadows. I pick it up, unopened, and return to the lounge through the frustrated dark.

  When I reach Dad and Mum, I open the letter and say, This is for you, Mum, and I begin to read it to her, and before I have finished she is screaming again. Dad has his hands clamped over his ears.

  It is long. It explains everything. The room gets darker as I read it. I do not stop. When I finish, Mum’s screams subside to a constant rattling, which rises and subsides in waves, which has the rhythm of something sobbing.

  The darkness stretches forward, threatens to engulf us all completely.

  I walk into it, and I run up the stairs three steps at a time, and I stand outside Nan’s door and I call in:

  — We know, Nan! We know what happened. We know why. We know why, Nan, and I don’t care. Stop punishing us for this. It happened thirty years before I was born, Nan. Derek’s moved on. It’s nothing to do with Dad anymore. No one else is alive who cares, Nan. Stop punishing us. And stop punishing Mum, Nan. No one cares. Do you hear me? No one cares!

  I am crying out at the top of my voice, and I stop only when inside the room I hear crashes and bangs, the sounds of splintering wood and smashing glass. The door bangs as something hits it hard from the other side, and then it stops and there is silence, and the house is in daylight again.

  But the screaming continues downstairs, and I realise that this time it’s Dad.

  When I get to the lounge door the smell, worse than ever, assaults me, and across the sofa is something made of mud and slime and bones and disintegrating, worm-ridden meat, and Dad stops screaming and straightens up and he has parts of my mother’s decaying flesh all down his front, over his hands and up his arms, and he has tears streaming down his face, and he is yelling at me in a broken, shrill voice: What did you do?

  What did you do?

  Piece by Piece

  Carly Holmes

  Whe
n you walk into this room pause for a moment, please, and look around you. Don’t simply scan for walls that can be knocked through, don’t just take mental measurement of the march from skirting board to skirting board and wonder how your greedy four-seater sofa will ever fit. Look down first, past the scuff of your leather shoes, and see how rich, how varied, the brown of the floorboards is. The grain carries every shade between mocha and bistre depending on the time of day. When the afternoon sun warms the wood, believe me, you’ll feel an urge to take off your clothes and lay stretched across it, legs splayed as wide as they can get. You’ll sink into it, deep down to the memory of its living roots, and you’ll dream of burrowing mice and earthworms. In the early morning chill you’ll need slippers, or socks at the very least, before you’ll dare to tread its sharp, forest length, and even then you’ll think of wolves and thorns and fear for fragile toes.

  It didn’t get this gleam by chance, you know. It was me. It was love. And hours of polishing, sliding around on my knees, queasy from the fumes. I massaged and I stroked and I drew its colours back to the surface whenever they started to flatten and fade. I talked to it the whole time. My hands would be so cramped after I’d finished, I wouldn’t be able to straighten my fingers for the rest of the day, but it was worth it. The floorboards sighed their delight and rubbed themselves against the pat of my palms, nudging my flesh until there was nothing else to do but take my clothes back off and use my body to smooth in the top coat of polish.

  Look up now and see the painted walls lighten as they drop to knee height. I did that myself, by mixing firebrick into vermilion in increasing amounts. And admire the stencil work up there by the mouldings, so delicate it’s almost shadow play. Please don’t think about wallpapering over it the moment you move in, you’ll never see this shade of red again. I cut my hand when I was getting the lids off the pots and I let my blood drip into the paint. It bled a lot and I stirred it in well. I think it added something special to the mix.

  You’re interested in the stairs, I can tell. Look at you, you can barely keep your hands to yourself. Go on, swing your leg over the banister and slide down to the newel post, there’s no one else around. I used to do that every morning, at the beginning. The sturdiness of the rail between my thighs always made me gasp and shiver. Sometimes, when I should have been on my way to work, I’d run up and slide back down, again and again. I was so playful back then. By the time I was finally settled behind my desk, damp from all the laughing, my hair one long tangle, it would be time for lunch. They let me go in the end but I would have left anyway. There just weren’t enough hours in the day, enough days in the week, and I resented every moment spent outside my own front door. I think of them sometimes, my work colleagues, rutting mindlessly in their filthy homes, rolling across carpets stricken with mould, walls collapsing around their ears, and I pity them. Who cares that a house isn’t a conventional lover?

  You’ll see from the flagstones in the kitchen, the cornices in the bedrooms, that this house has been stroked and fondled as much as any human body could ever be. They’re almost as perfect as the day they were first fitted, and they’re original pieces. But the honeymoon period ended, as it does, and by the time I reached the top floor the easy loving was gone. It wasn’t enough anymore to just polish and paint. Gone were the long and sleepless nights when we’d lie together and I’d whisper my dreams into its corners. Gone the naked jiving through from lounge to porch. When I arranged to meet a friend at the pub down the road, just a quick drink, the new pipes I’d installed buckled and flooded the cellar. Boxes of my old diaries ruined. If I hurried to the corner shop to get more milk I’d return to a cold so spiteful my breath gusted from my mouth in dense sharp spikes and the radiators shivered.

  I knew I was becoming less when I had to stand on a chair to reach the top of the doorframes to dust them. I could slip my arms through the supporting pillars of the banister, right up to the elbow. And then my fingernails began to soften and fall like bruised poppy petals. My hair unscrewed itself from my scalp and flung itself across carpets, across floorboards, across windowsills. By the time I’d finished sweeping and sponging, I had to start over again.

  I’d lie awake at night and hear the grunts, the sighs, as the house shifted around me. It groaned as it reached to pull me close and at the same time sharpened its edges to give any offered embrace the sting of rejection. Even the light switches shocked me when I touched them. We were lovers at war and it was too big a foe, too jealous a beloved, to take my softness and leave me uncrushed. My passion stripped the flesh from my skeleton and then started on the very core of me, sucking until I was nothing but gristle and nerves.

  My brittling bones, so close to the surface now, elbows and heels piercing skin, more mortar than marrow, brought me down beside the fireplace, here. The house’s gaping mouth. Its empty heart. And here I lay, and let it take me, piece by piece.

  It was always going to end like this, for me. I loved too much. I didn’t know where to draw the line. But for you it could be different. The house just needs a firmer touch, a woman with a bit more backbone. Don’t take any of its shit, and don’t let it see how much you need it.

  And if you do move in, please don’t plasterboard over the hearth, and don’t touch the mantelpiece. That’s where I am now, what’s left of me. I huddle into the cracks, crumbled as thin, as dry, as cement dust. But I still remember the feel of the banister between my thighs, the wild joy of laughing for hours, and I don’t regret any of it.

  The Wednesday Ghost

  Mark Blayney

  Isuppose I shouldn’t have killed her, but when do we ever do what we’re supposed to do? I went to the park, as often happens when the images become too intense and saw, just for a moment, a red squirrel. It was a flash, a spiral of burnt orange looping itself around a tree branch, which bounced as the squirrel ran along it before vanishing. I hoped it would reappear, but there was just the familiar trickling stream and an occasional brown leaf floating to earth in its own time. Not a care in the world. Bastard leaf.

  There’s something cleansing about the vein of blue water running the length of the park, absolving my sins, healing the guilt. Six months and two days now and each morning, the fear of the hammering on the door fades a little.

  Spat on by rain I found my gloves and diverted to the ornate gateway that leads to the history museum. This is my favourite arch. Can you have a favourite arch? It looks like stone but after walking through and turning back you see that it’s actually plain red brick, plastered on the front to look like granite. Now why has it only been decorated on one side? Is it a sign to be wary of the history within, to turn it over and look at it from both sides, before you believe it? Allusion. Illusion.

  Graffiti on the brick side. Bricks are fair target. Stone is respected.

  Calm, deadening hush inside the museum. Floor polish smell. I glided through corridors. Glid? Sounds wrong, doesn’t it, glided. The occasional distant squeak, as an attendant’s high heels glissaded – that’s better – across the dark wood floor. A cough from someone absent.

  A Max Ernst exhibition on the first floor and as the images became increasingly surreal, I felt myself detach from the high-ceilinged rooms and travel past the lead-latticed windows. The engravings were from Une semaine de bonté; I needed the leaflet to discover that ‘bonté’ means ‘kindness’. Each day had its own room. Sunday was bright orange, Tuesday blue, Wednesday yellow. I’ve always seen Wednesday as a green word. To my surprise, not everyone thinks the same.

  One of the captions began with the word ‘SO…’ in large, Art Nouveau letters, and for a moment I saw this as 50. A strange age, fifty, and only another few months to go. A decade since I was a young man; a decade until I’ll be an old one. And the daily shock of discovering solitude. Sometimes I can squint at this and believe it’s healthier, not having to put a shirt on if I don’t want to, not having to worry about eating. But if a relationship is a series
of compromises, the voluntary adoption of conventions, well. What a price you pay to sidestep convention.

  You shouldn’t have killed her then, should you, I thought as I reached the third room and saw a man with the head of a bird being devoured by a harpy with angel’s wings and chicken’s feet. The cough, that I had heard echoing earlier. A woman in her 20s stood at the far end of the room, looking at an engraving of a flamingo with a lion’s head, horror-struck as it contemplated a flooded temple. She wore a pale green t-shirt and jeans (the woman, not the lion-flamingo) and had a slender figure, shaped rather like a 7 as she leant forward to study the picture.

  I kept out of sight. You can’t talk to strangers, Stefan, not now you’re a murderer. She didn’t notice me anyway, but as my heels squeaked on the way past she looked up and caught my eye. I couldn’t help smiling and she held the smile. I paused, suddenly consumed with interest at a locomotive with severed heads emerging from its funnels instead of steam. She smiled a second time; a warm, friendly, nodding smile, almost of recognition.

  Have we met before? Surely not. I would remember. I half-opened my mouth and she nodded again, then turned back to her flamingo-lion.

  There’s only so long you can stare at an engraving of severed-head steam. I squeaked on to the next room. Of course, almost immediately lines now came into my head. ‘This place is a bit of a maze, isn’t it?’ ‘What did you think of the room with the giant caterpillars, they’re pretty amazing, aren’t they?’

  The prints in front of me – Thursday I was onto now – swirled and melted into each other. I back-peddled, went into the previous room – but it was too late, she was gone. A serpent with a headdress like a peacock, breasts curiously apple-like, stared at me. A gargoyle clawed a polite husband. There wasn’t enough space between the print and the wall; it was screwed in too tightly, impaling it against the plaster. You have to allow a picture to breathe, to let it rise and fall against its home, or it cannot rest. The gargoyle looked like it might fly out at any moment.