Glitches Read online

  Title Page

  GLITCHES

  A Collection of Short Stories

  Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

  Publisher Information

  This digital edition published in 2014 by

  Acorn Books

  www.acornbooks.co.uk

  An imprint of

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © 2014 Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

  The right of Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Dedication

  For Paul and Dan

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Carousel’ was first published online by 3:AM Magazine, Sunday, October 21st, 2007

  ‘The Last Button’ was originally written in 2008 as part of the 1001 nights cast, a durational performance by Barbara Campbell. Writers had to create a story based on a prompt Barbara Campbell extracted from one of that day’s newspaper stories about events in the Middle East.

  I would also like to thank Dan, Paul, Joseph, Paul Andrews, Charlotte, Heidi, Hester and Thea.

  About The Author

  Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone lives and works in London. Her novel, Home (Red Button Publishing, 2014), is a dark, suspenseful story that poses questions about how we deal with the old and what it means to be forgotten.

  Carousel

  In the dream there are three of them: a woman and two small children, a boy and a girl. They are carrying shopping bags, even the smallest child who has twisted the plastic over her shoulder like a sack. She makes exaggerated gestures of exhaustion. When the woman looks back at her, over her shoulder, and asks if she needs help, the little girl says she can manage. I can’t actually hear what they say, I just know, their voices seeming to speak directly to my mind. They certainly couldn’t be lifted on the wind. There is no wind. The hairs on their heads remain flat to their skulls, sweat creating an inner ring of dampness. It isn’t surprising. They have climbed to the top of a large cliff.

  Behind them all I can see is blueness; not the sea - I am too far away from the edge to see the sea - but the sky. There are a few fluffy clouds stretched and distant, pitted like the blots of spray paint thinly applied. Where the cliff edge meets the sky, there is a fringe of yellow-green grass - dry and stubborn.

  At this part of the dream, they are walking on the path, which is mostly a mud track, the odd piece of white chalk poking through soil. The path is littered with potholes, so the children’s legs lift high at the knees. It is not an easy walk. Luckily it has been dry - there are no puddles or pools of hardening mud, just dusty topsoil.

  When they reach the top of the steepest incline, the woman pauses. The two children lag behind. She puts down her shopping and waits for them.

  ‘Come on, you two,’ she says.

  The little boy gets there first. He puts down his bags and squats in the grass.

  ‘Mum, I’m thirsty,’ he says.

  The woman doesn’t reply. She is looking out over the cliff. They are closer to the edge than me. I think she must be able to see the sea from where she stands.

  The boy turns around to watch for his sister.

  ‘Come on, slow coach,’ he calls.

  The little girl sighs dramatically. ‘I’m only little,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to wait.’

  This makes me smile.

  ‘Don’t argue, you two,’ the woman says, turning her eyes from the sea.

  Both mother and son now watch the little girl. She is dressed mostly in pink and has tiny, plastic sunglasses pushed up into her hair. Something about the way she walks makes me realise that there are no insects or birds, no kites, no aeroplane vapour trails. There are just the three of them, and me, somewhere, where they can’t see.

  The little boy lies down, chewing on a plucked piece of grass.

  ‘She’s always so slow,’ he says to himself, but loud enough so that his mother could hear if she chose to.

  There are no ants or crickets running around beneath his fingers.

  Finally the little girl catches up with them. She drops the bag to the ground, shoulders rounded, and then falls backwards neatly onto the grass beside the path.

  They are silent for a while. The woman staring back out to sea, the little boy looking up at the sky, the little girl watching her mother. After a few minutes, the woman turns and sits beside the little girl. She opens one of the bags and pulls out two cartons of juice. She hands one to each child, waving the little boy’s over his face until he notices and sits up. Both kids rip at the clear plastic around the straw. The little boy does it with his teeth, but the little girl can’t quite tear it. She hands it back to her mother, who easily slips out the straw and pushes it through the foil-covered hole to the juice beneath. She hands it back to the girl. Both children suck, their cheeks hollowing and swelling in rhythmic waves. When they start to make sharp slurping noises, the woman stands back up.

  ‘Ready?’ she says.

  The children nod, hold their empty juice cartons out to her, arms out-stretched. She takes them, drops them back in the bag and then they all three retrieve their shopping bags. The woman waits for the little girl to throw her bag over her shoulder, and then sets off in front, not on the path now but on the grass, leading them closer to the edge of the cliff.

  At this point, I always want to warn the woman. I want to tell her not to walk so close to the edge, but she does not listen, or cannot hear me. She keeps walking, the two children now close to her, one on either side. When she gets to the fringe of grass, she does not stop, and neither do the children, they just walk straight out over the cliff and into the blue. There are no cries or screams, no sounds at all. Nothing changes. The horizon remains the same - just a brief flash of falling bodies, their shopping still tight in their hands, and then blueness once again. I haven’t even had time to shout, or to try to run. They just walked straight off.

  I never know what to do, always experiencing this moment with a fresh wave of unease. I feel helplessly rooted to the ground. I can’t even walk to the edge to look over the cliff, to see where they have gone, to see what remains. I just stay where I am. Still there is no breeze, no sound, just blue skies.

  After many minutes just staring, I catch a glimpse of someone walking into my vision, their head bobbing from side to side. At first I do not believe it, then step by step, I watch as the same woman walks towards me. She has the shopping bags still. The children follow her too. They are also the same. They follow the same routine, the pausing, the waiting, the sitting, the drinking, the ‘Ready?’ and then off the cliff. Only this time it is much worse. I know what is coming. I know what they are going to do.

  The dream just keeps going round and round like this, nothing changing but the cycle of events - the day clear and perfect. Even when I am awake, I see them chatting, moving under the heavy burden of their bags, sharing the load of a family shop. I watch them walking again and again off the cliff. They seem so calm. Nothing about their appearance suggests why they would continue to jump. They don’t seem to know that such a fall could kill them. They do not move as if walking to their deaths. They just go up and down, on and on and I c
an do nothing but watch them.

  Little Pig, Little Pig

  It began with the notice in the lift. ‘Security of the Building’ it read in block capitals, picked out in emergency red. It went on:

  A drunk male has been found sleeping in the stairwell twice in the last couple of weeks (the last time lying in a pool of vomit!)

  He is very aggressive (and potentially dangerous) & the police had to be called to remove him.

  Please take a couple of seconds (that’s all it takes!) to check that the front door closes properly behind you and do not leave the security door between the bike room and the bin room unlocked as often the back door shutter is open. Please also close the door behind you leading to the stairs as not only are they security doors but they are fire doors! They are being left open continually by people walking between floors using the one working lift.

  Also do not allow anyone that you do not know access to the building. That includes people randomly buzzing intercoms to gain access.

  Thank you!

  The notice annoyed Rachel on several counts: one, there was a conservative with a small c feeling about it, a holier than thou attitude that suggested, she thought, naivety in the writer - why wouldn’t you want to sleep in a warm, large stairwell, that no one else was using when it was so bloody cold outside; two, because her two-year-old kept asking her to read the damn thing every time they got in the lift - she supposed she could have pretended it said something else, but she wasn’t quick enough for that and anyway, how was a child supposed to learn to read if there was no pattern to the spoken and written word (she realised this presumed a lot on the part of her two-year-old, whom she naturally assumed was pretty much a prodigy); three, it used too many cheap and lazy ways to emphasize its own importance - the multiple exclamation marks and the italics, Rachel hated italics with a frightening passion: why couldn’t people learn to sculpt their words well enough to suggest inflection? There were probably some other reasons, like the fact it was laminated to endure, and the writer’s need to centralise the text to make it look pretty, but mostly it just made all of her middle class, but obviously liberal, Guardian-reading, broad-mindedness, rattle about so loudly in her head that she hummed with indignation. It was the way she had felt about that homeless man on The X Factor. His sudden joy at warm places with soft sofas had been considered ‘self-sabotage’ or ‘obviously didn’t care enough’ by the other contestants because he kept missing rehearsals to enjoy a comfy nap. People were so unimaginative, so stupid not to see how important simple roofs were if you lived outside all the time. What did she care if a man came and lived in their stairwell? Admittedly, she didn’t have to take the stairs very often. She lived on the third floor and having kids meant she mostly took the lift, but even so, could anyone really object? She was sure the aggressive behaviour was only in response to being asked to leave the lovely stairwell for one of the coldest January’s on record. True, she would be pissed off if the block became home to a load of druggies who left their needles everywhere, not because she minded people shooting up if that’s what they wanted to do, but because she didn’t want to have to worry about her kids picking up needles and she knew the statistics about burglary and drug-users. Though, for that matter, it wasn’t like there was much to nick in her flat that she really cared about or couldn’t replace. Really it was just a feeling the notice gave her. It was mean-spirited. She didn’t want people somehow associating her with it just because it was in her lift.

  Despite all these feelings the notice provoked, she did not try to take it down. On a couple of occasions she had found her fingers itching towards the squashed wads of blue-tack, but the notice had an official feel to it and Rachel instinctively deferred to authority. She didn’t like the notice but if someone in charge had put it there she shouldn’t remove it. If she’d recognised this about herself, she would have been embarrassed further and probably torn the notice down just to prove to herself that she wasn’t one of the herd.

  So the notice, perhaps because others also responded to its authority rather than its message, remained in the lift for weeks and then migrated to the downstairs notice board where it hung for even longer amid a few other laminated notices about shutting the front door, not letting in leafleters and not dumping large items in the bin area. Rachel acknowledged its continued presence with a wry smile every time she passed it. What had been thoroughly irritating had, over time, eroded into a symbol of her own erudite freethinking. She was pleased she wasn’t the person who’d written it or kept it fixed to the wall. It made her feel, in her own small way, better, more socially conscious, radical even.

  Then, one night, their buzzer went off just as Rachel and her husband were going to bed. It was about 11.30 and of course, it woke the kids. Thankfully, they were easy to settle.

  Rachel knew it wasn’t someone trying to come and see them. No one casually rang their buzzer at the best of times, but especially not so late at night. Most people they knew were already in bed, or in the middle of a night shift.

  At first, Rachel tried to ignore it. Whoever it was would get bored and go away. This kind of thing had happened before and it was usually kids messing around. But the buzzing went on. It went on at regular intervals of a few minutes at a time. Just as she thought she could drift off, certain the children wouldn’t be disturbed again, that the buzzer’s silly game was over, or some dope had let them in, the buzzer would sound again. On the sixth or seventh buzz, Rachel leapt out of bed, tying her dressing gown tightly around her middle, and pulled the receiver towards her.

  ‘Look, whoever you are, can you please stop pressing the buzzer. I’m not going to let you in and you’ve woken my kids. Please go away.’

  It was a futile rant. The buzzing went on. Rachel got back into bed and lay there listening. Amazingly, the children did nothing more than groan and roll over. Eventually, after what felt like hours, but was probably only five minutes, the buzzing did stop. Rachel sighed and reached for her Kindle. She would read without disturbing Matt who had pressed the pillow over his head and hidden himself in the duvet.

  She had only managed a few pages when the knocking started. Someone was knocking loudly, brazenly, on their front door.

  ‘What the fuck?’ she said, pretty much to no one at all. Matt had his headphones in and was still under the duvet and the pillow. She prodded him. He murmured slightly, one arm lazily knocking an earphone from one ear. He didn’t move to replace it. He’d probably taken something to help him sleep. He often did. He wasn’t someone who could be cheerful without sleep. Rachel had long ago accepted this and the night-duty that went with it. She could hardly complain when she was usually fine if she got a few hours straight at some point in the night. She often reminded herself that Margaret Thatcher reputedly only needed four hours a night. It was the only thing she was happy to have in common with the woman. She had tried to wake Matt from one of these drugged sleeps before and judged that it was probably best to leave him.

  She sat upright and switched off her Kindle. The whole flat was now bathed in that peculiar London darkness that is more like a purple haze. She held her breath.

  The knocking continued.

  ‘Hey,’ said a male voice. ‘Hey, lady, I know you’re in there.’

  She remained completely still.

  ‘You’ve woken my kids,’ the voice mimicked. ‘Please go away.’

  Rachel waited. Surely he would go away?...

  ‘I got in, obviously,’ he went on.

  There was a moment’s pause. Had he gone? Rachel pulled her dressing gown back on and crept, as quietly as possible, towards the front door. Her feet were bare, her toes numbingly cold against the tiles in the hall as she tiptoed up to the spy-hole. Hoping, against all likelihood, that the hinge of the spy-hole wouldn’t creak, she eased the cover up and stared through the hole. Smack up against the glass was an enormous, blood-shot eye, searingly blue, s
taring right back at her. Her breath caught in her throat and she pulled back from the door, feeling as if someone had shoved her hard in the chest. Her hands leapt to her face, fingers pressing into her flesh like a small child watching scary TV. What was this man doing at her door? What did he want? Should she try and wake up Matt? Could she wake up Matt? Every inch of her feet was now numb and the coldness was spreading upwards.

  ‘I know you’re there,’ the voice said, this time in a rasping whisper. ‘Aren’t you going to let me in?’ He made a grunting, snuffling noise. ‘Little pig, little pig,’ he said.

  Rachel took a silent but deep breath and moved towards the door for another look. After all, he couldn’t get in and she wanted to know who it was out there. She could watch until he went away. He would, eventually, go away. He would have to. Anyway, in the morning, there would be Matt, there would be light, it would all be different.

  She lifted the cover above the spy-hole once more. The eye was still there, but this time Rachel was prepared for it, and she didn’t wince. She waited. The eye moved a little, a face coming into view, a worn, stubble-edged face with watery, shifting eyes and a straggle of greying greasy hair. The man made the snuffling sound again and this time Rachel was more intrigued than frightened. His nose wrinkled with the sound, shoulders edging up a little, forcing his dark overcoat to nudge upwards, shifting lank bits of his hair. He was fascinating, grotesque. And then the smell hit her. A torrent of booze and sweat and piss and vomit, like an old man’s toilet filled with nesting mice. She raised her hand to her nose and breathed through the edges of her dressing gown.

  The man raised one hand and knocked again.

  ‘Let me in, lady,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I can wait all night.’

  She wouldn’t be goaded. She kept watching and breathing quietly through the fleecy gown. In the pit of her stomach she had the dreadful feeling that this might be the man from the notice. She should just go back to bed. This was nothing to do with her. She should never have answered the buzzer. She should just go to bed and lie down and he would be gone in the morning. Yes, she would stop watching him. She knew what he looked like now. The whole situation was ridiculous. She would be quite within her rights to call the police.