Читать книгу Echoes - Laura Dockrill - Страница 7

I often took late walks, especially whilst house sitting for the Barretts. They had a strange little dog called Mozart, friendly, but oddly curious, and I would walk him along the beach and on top of the cliffs. The seaside, at night, is terrifying. Thinking back, I don’t know why we walked that way.

Here, in the night light, the pebbles took on the characteristics of beetle’s eyes. The sea was cold and ringing, the air piercing, the wind howling, burying itself into cracks in cliffs, the loose rocks surveying the emptiness like watchmen. The subtle salt residue clung to the cliff face like leftover tears; the grass took a beating and warned the seagulls of the weather. Beacons lit the land, dusted the beach like the crumbs of a Christmas ginger biscuit. Apprehension hung in the playground like a word on a lover’s lip; ghosts swung on swings, slid down steel and round on rubber, shared kisses, and passers-by breathed invisible cigarettes and bad kids smoked real ones.

Mozart ran to the heath, barking. I threw him a ball but we were both too blind in the darkness to see it. He ran into the night, I watched the end of his tail trail off until I could no longer see him.

‘Come on, Mozart,’ I called, searching for him. The blackness was dense and secretive. It hid the world away from me.

‘Mozart, here boy…come now, boy.’ I heard his barks but he was nowhere to be seen.

‘Mozart!’ I shouted, louder this time. The barks faded. I began to walk towards the heath. My mouth tasted of copper. The wind stirred and I felt pressure behind me, heavy, as though a pair of invisible hands had shoved me forwards.

The darkness had smothered me like a kitten in a trapped curtain. I scrambled but all I could see was the end or the beginning of a dense search.

Now I am as mad as the eye of a rabid crow.

As lost as a missing glove.

As discomforted as drinking tea from a neighbour’s mug.

And my heart is anywhere but home.

At first I thought I was dreaming, as clichéd as it is. I saw her by the sea, a hood over her head, so small and dark that it would have been quite possible to have missed her, if I had wished to. Her elbows were working; I saw her shifting–forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards–as though she were sanding wood.

I should have let her be.

By the light of the beacon I made out the woman in some more detail. What was she doing out so late? I made my way over the stones, the air was cold, deathly cold. The sea hushed in and out, sweeping.

‘Excuse me,’ I began. ‘Excuse me…’

The lady clearly couldn’t hear. I went closer; the air was biting my nose, and a tear ran down my face.

‘Excuse me…’ I tried again. ‘Sorry to bother you, but you haven’t by any chance seen a dog around have you? My dog has gone wandering.’

Again, the lady ignored me. Strange.

I left the lady and walked away from the sea. I would go to the top of the heath and call for Mozart there; I would be at an advantage from the height. I felt oddly obscure without Mozart’s company, wilting, and my panic was slowly translating to tiredness. With each hoof up the heath, I figured I could see him, his little body, wagering, but it was my mind playing tricks, until he howled a scuffed, scruffy moan from the end of the Barretts’ home and he was there, chewing something in between his clawed paws.

‘Good boy,’ I ruffled his back. ‘What you got there, boy? Let me see.’ Mozart snarled as I put my hand forward. ‘Come on, boy. What have you got there?’

The dog growled, angrier this time, his eyes like yellow flames put my hairs on end. I reached in again. ‘Show me, boy, come on, Mo. GAH!’

The dog bit my hand, not as hard as he could have but a bite all the same. That was unlike him. I felt as though I wanted to cry from sheer shock, it was too unusual, unusual behaviour indeed.

‘Okay, boy. Home.’ Too tired to shout at him, and not wanting to aggravate the animal even more, I headed back to the house. We’d have tea; he always had a mug of tea poured into his bowl, sometimes he liked a slice of toast too. But tonight he didn’t seem interested. He sat in the corner of the kitchen, crumpled round the cupboard chewing on whatever he had as I washed and saw to my wound. The tea I had poured for him in the bowl went from hot to warm to lukewarm to cold. I decided to leave the damned canine, and sort it out in the morning.

In bed, the wind swept the windows, rumbled the glass rooted into the ledge. I tried to sleep. My eyes wouldn’t stick to their lids. I couldn’t relax, my dispute with Mozart was playing on my mind, I felt the bandage around my hand, the throbbing ache beat with a pulse of its own. I had to go downstairs and see what it was he had.

I let myself out of the bedroom; the corridor was dark and cold. The floorboards felt like planks of ice under my milky trembling toes, black-wired hairs standing on end. I could hear the water boiler, filling, trickling and churning. When I got downstairs, Mozart was snoring in his corner. I squeezed in through the crack in the door, not wanting to wake the dog with the un-oiled muuuuu of the hinge. Light flooded in, a luminous box of shadow darted over the kitchen tiles. The dog’s ribcage was going up and down, up and down, up and down. I squinted my eyes in adjustment, trying to focus, to get a better look. A slice of silver glimmered, shone at me like a chink of light. I went over. In between his paws was the object. I carefully put my hand forward, I didn’t want another bite. The dog flinched. I moved back quickly, breathed, and tried again, my hand quivering in its forwards move. I grasped it–ha!–and escaped quick as can be into the hallway to look at my prize.

It was a comb. A small silver one, antique. Beautiful. Each prong as perfect as the next and the design butterflies engraved into the silver, heavy, not too heavy as to break hair, but not cheap. He was a funny old dog, sensitive old fool. Still, he could hurt himself on the comb so I decided to keep it upstairs with me. Much more relaxed now, I went to bed and lay down, within moments I was sleeping, heavily.

I awoke at around four to an alarming noise; it was Mozart, that silly dog, missing his comb. I could hear him at the bottom of the staircase, crying his needy little heart out. I thought about not getting up but he was really upset, he had a real wail going. ‘Okay, boy,’ I reassured. ‘I’m coming.’ I put on my housecoat and made my way downstairs to tend to the dog.

But the dog wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs. He was asleep, sound asleep. The wails were still going, screaming now, like a crazed fox or a deranged woman. I searched the house; it sounded the same distance away everywhere I searched. Piercing, it was, screeching. The house shook, the ornaments rattled, falling off the mantel, the knifes rang in their block, the pots and pans on the ceiling harness jangled, murmurs whistled through the keyhole from the treacherous wind. My ears were bursting and I covered them with my palms as I ran round the house. Mozart was awake too now, his tail down, his heavy salty eyes the size of snooker balls. I scooped him up and took him to the bedroom where he trembled in my arms. I put him into the bed with me and pulled the blanket over the top of us. Our bodies shaking in rhythm together, squeezing him closer I felt his tiny heart flattering. I tried to calm him with my voice, soothe him with a stroke; the noise was unbearable, it made me nauseous.

Then, at last, the screaming stopped. I let out a heavy sigh. I slowly pulled back the blanket and peeped my eyes out from under the quilt. It was as though nothing had ever happened.

Until I saw her.

At the window was an old woman. Toothless, black-eyed with white wirey hair, a tatty black shawl round her haggard shoulders. She looked me dead in the eyes, her bony arm slowly lifting upwards, and that was when I realized she was hovering.

‘AWAY!’ I shouted.

My mouth clammed up once more. Her arms reached higher and higher until she rolled her fragile hand into the shape of a fist, about the same size as a small plum and she knocked.

And knocked.

And knocked.

Three times in total and then pointed her finger, straight at me, her nail shooting into the glass like a warning. I looked down the bandage around my hand I had used to cover my wound from Mozart–it was drenched in thick red blood. A tremendous pang weighed me down, filling my larynx with a cloggy bogginess, unsure of what this feeling was leading me to believe, it crept up on me like hands in the dark and something made me think–it was my turn.

I woke up to the sound of the bin men arguing with the neighbours. My bed was a damp nest of perspiration and muck. The white sheets had changed to a murky sour colour, the corners of the pillows like smokers’ lampshades. I got up out of the dismal filthy pit and thought about making coffee. Last night’s incident was nothing but a nightmare, my life was not fiction, this was not a storybook, this was nothing but a calculation of the mind.

I finished my coffee in the chair by the window. Mozart was still distressed from last night’s activity and was shaking himself into a fuzzy ball underneath my footstool. This made everything only too real for me to deal with. My hand throbbing away in its bandage and I knew I needed to talk to someone about this. I decided to call the vicar. I wasn’t religious but it seemed only appropriate. I found his telephone number in my address book under ‘V’, Vicar Doddley, written in pencil. I dialled his number and waited for the for his voice.

We met later that day at the entrance to the park. The vicar was early as was I.

‘Shall we walk?’ he asked. ‘I know a sweet little teashop nearby.’

The vicar pushed his bicycle by the side of the river, the sunshine beaming off the spokes. The elderflowers candied the air like billowing perfume of a fat aunty. The geese gossiped over crusts.

‘Something strange happened to Mozart and me last night, Vicar. I had gone to bed, and I heard this strange wailing; it was sharper than a dog cry, almost the fix between an owl’s hoot and a woman’s moaning more like a…’

‘Foxes!’ the vicar sussed. ‘It’s foxes. My wife and I had a similar anxiety until not so long ago, it is—’

‘Wait,’ I interrupted. ‘When I looked to the window I saw—’

‘Good grief, look–it’s Sally-Anne Reeves, Betty and Colin Reeve’s little one. Well, she’s not little anymore…Sally-Anne, Sally-Anne, over here, my love!’ The vicar jumped up and down to get the young girl’s attention, ‘Her parents own the little trinket shop, you know the one?’ He began peering up on his stretched legs like a small yapping dog. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Jim? It’s just I haven’t seen her in such a long time! Sally-Anne, over here!’

‘No, not at all.’ I kicked the soil with my feet and bent down to give Mozart a stroke. Sally-Anne strode over; she was confidently flirtatious even in her walk.

‘Good afternoon, Vicar, how are you? And…?’

‘Yes, this is my very good friend, Mr Jim Beam.’

‘As in the Jim Beam?’

I shake my head.

‘I like whisky,’ Sally-Anne smiled, and twisted a dark lock of hair around her finger.

‘Sally-Anne Reeves, surely you don’t. That’s a gentleman’s refreshment. Next you’ll be saying you like beer!’ The vicar laughed off his disapproval awkwardly, his mouth bent like a wire hanger slurping in his drool. He mopped his brow with an embroidered handkerchief and made his lips into a little funnel allowing a hoot of air to hush out of it. Sally-Anne crinkled her nose into a perky little shape that happened to be quite charming and her eyes, quite almond-shaped, looked into my soul and unpicked a few stitches. I decided I fancied her slightly.

‘So where are the two of you troublemakers off to?’ She winked at me, pulling me in on the joke.

‘Troublemakers!’ the vicar squealed. ‘I don’t think that we’ll be seeing any trouble from me, not as long as the Lord is watching!’ The vicar panicked under the beautiful scrutiny of Sally-Anne, his nimble hands locked into a prayer position before again making good use of his handkerchief.

‘We’re going to have tea,’ I answered, not wanting to neglect Sally-Anne.

‘Yes, we’re having tea at the sweet little teashop in the park. Do you know it?’

‘Well, I was passing through that way anyway to meet a girlfriend. Perhaps I could join your walk?’ Sally-Anne smiled, her teeth as perfect as the white picket fence I could see framing the home we shall live in for the rest of our lives together.

Sally-Anne met her friend at an indoor table and the vicar and I chose to sit outside in the sun.

‘She’s a real beauty, Jim, honestly. From one man to another, she makes me question my faith. She brings me out in these…you know…steams.’ The vicar wiped his forehead. He tried to focus on me; his blank eyes drove holes into mine. I decided it was time to draw him back to my problem.

‘Right, well, in terms of foxes, I’d say sprinkle the juice of twelve ripe lemons onto your front lawn; the smell will put them off doing their dirty business outside your home, something about the citrus. By the way, when are the Barretts back?’ the vicar asked, doing up the dorky little buttons on his jacket.

‘The day after tomorrow,’ I answered.

‘Come and see me before you go, share a tumbler of Jim Beam, Jim Beam. Tell me, before you scoot, is she looking?’

‘No, Vicar,’ I answered. She was looking at me.

The two of us left the café and made our way towards the path home. ‘Damn!’ I sighed. ‘I forgot to tip the waitress,’ I lied, clicking my fingers for dramatic effect. ‘I’d better go back.’

‘No need, I go there often, I can drop in some change tomorrow,’ the vicar offered.

‘No, it’s very rude of me. Here, take Mozart.’ I quickly took Mozart’s lead off my wrist and handed it to the vicar, ‘I’ll just run by and drop off a little bit,’ I insisted, and turned my walk into a backwards jog towards the café. ‘I’ll catch you up.’

The door fanned open and plunged at me the smell of toasted almonds, honey and coffee. Sally-Anne’s eyes hit mine like cricket balls, my eyes wanted to bleed. I acted fast, went up to the counter, tore off a piece off the corner of a receipt and hurried the waitress to find me a pen.

‘Got a biro, love, but it’s red.’

‘That’s fine, red’s fine.’ I snatched the pen away with such haste I forgot to say thank you as I squiggled my details down on the corner and called back the same waitress. ‘That girl–that woman–over there, when you give her the bill could you also please give her this? Thank you and for the pen, thank you.’ I rushed out and met the vicar.

‘Was she still in there?’ the vicar asked handing me back Mozart.

‘Who?’ I acted. I was proud of my fast response.

At home it was getting late and the darkness had already begun filtering through the sky. Mozart had decided to eat which eased my worry slightly as his instinct was usually accurate. I plucked a book from the shelf–it was a book about plants. But, much though I loved flora, I soon fell asleep.

I woke to a fast squawking ring from the telephone that startled me.

‘Hello, Barretts’ residence…’

‘Barrett? I thought your name was Beam?’

‘It is Beam. Who is this?’

‘Well who is this? Are you having an identity crisis?’ It was Sally-Anne, I could tell.

‘No, no, not at all, I’m house sitting.’ I didn’t want her to think I was married with a family.

‘I’m joking. I gathered you weren’t from here, you don’t exactly fit in. It’s Sally-Anne, by the way.’

‘Yes, I know. I mean, I thought so.’

‘So, you’re in then.’

‘Yes.’

‘When do you leave?’

‘The day after tomorrow.’

‘So I guess we’re in a bit of a hurry.’

‘I guess so.’

‘I’ll come round. Can you wait twenty-six minutes?’

‘Yes. Why twenty-six?’ But she had already hung up. What a bewitching woman. I pondered on the thought of such an entity being in my space, my comfy universe with Mozart and what it would feel like to have that ruptured. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t wait. I jumped up to bathe, put a bottle of wine in the fridge and then lit candles. I wanted to wash the sheets from last night but I didn’t want to get myself a reputation. The record began to turn and the latch released.

Sally-Anne wore a long purple silk dress, her creamy arms sat in a heart-shaped clutch in her hands. I poured her wine and she enchanted me more with her cheekiness. She wasn’t like any other woman I had ever met; within moments her feet slipped naked from her heels and began squeezing my calves.

‘I brought you a present,’ she said. ‘Well, it’s more for Mozart, really. Where is that chap, anyway?’ she asked innocently.

‘I don’t know, but I’m sure if you have a gift for him he’d like to see it.’ I jumped up and called the dog’s name. ‘Mo! Mo!’ Nothing. ‘He sometimes curls up in the oddest of places; wherever there’s an inch of warmth, he’s usually snuggled up there.’ I started to climb the house, I wasn’t really in the mood for playing hide and seek with Mozart but I didn’t want to disappoint Sally-Anne. I called him in the bedrooms, searched on the beds, in the laundry baskets, under the radiator and, after finding nothing, climbed up the next set of stairs. This floor was home to the master bedroom, Mrs Barrett’s sewing room and the door to the attic. I peered for him in both rooms, he would normally come to a call.

But while I was searching, a vile smell started to lurk up the staircase. I peered down, it was a burning smell, bitter and it hit the back of my throat. A fire! I rushed down the stairs in a panic, ‘Sally-Anne, are you okay?’ The smoke flooded up the stairs in a dark groggy fog, ‘Sally-Anne, have you got Mozart?’ As I reached the bottom of the stairs I was hit by a wall of black swirling smoke, thick like a screen of charcoal. I began to cough in deep chesty whoops.

‘Jim! Help! Help me!’ came a distant voice. It was Sally-Anne calling from the front room. ‘Jim! Please, come quick!’

I couldn’t see what with all the smog so I got low on all fours and clambered round searching for Sally-Anne. I still couldn’t hear Mozart so I had to hope his instinct led him away from the house at the first sign of danger.

‘Sally-Anne, I’m coming, cry again if you can hear me so I can reach you faster. I can’t see.’

‘I’m in here, hurry!’ she shouted.

I coughed in splutters as I concentrated the best I could. Damn candles, I thought as I reached the corner of the front room doorframe. I crawled as fast as possible towards the settee but was hit by the sound of licking flames from the fireplace, the crackling sound pounded my eardrums. I stayed low and found Sally’s feet. I grasped them with my hands and inched my way up her ankles and calves in short sharp grasps so as to not be inappropriate. ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, don’t panic.’ I pulled myself up and reached her hands, her wrists, her arms, her shoulders. I held her close, lifted her into my arms like a child, turned with my back to the window and plummeted onto the front lawn, through the window.

I threw her off me and turned over to tend to her, picking fragments of glass away from us. But, to my horror, she was not the same woman! Instead of almond-shaped petals, her eyes were sunken droopy rags over glassy black marbles. Her skin, once creamy and radiant, was saggy and wrinkled and covered in age spots. Her dress, not purple silk, but a shabby dirty nightdress, her hair, tufted, mangled and snowy. I gave her to the grass in terror and ran back into the flaming house to find Sally-Anne. I used my coat as a barricade as I went in but was trapped immediately by a barricade of screaming flames. I can remember no more.

‘Mr Beam, you have been very brave to have suffered this, we’re terribly sorry for your loss,’ the fireman said when I came to.

‘It was my fault, stupid candles. Have you seen my dog anywhere? I had a dog, Mozart, he was inside—’

‘Yes, Mr Beam, the dog was the cause of the fire, he was found in the fireplace with this.’ The fireman handed me the silver comb. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t believe it. Mozart is dead? Burnt? Dead? I can’t believe it. He was the…but what about Sally-Anne?’ I asked, on the brink of hysterics.

‘Mr Beam, you did say a woman was trapped inside the house with you, but no woman was found, I’m afraid,’ the fireman said. A line of ash under his left eye made him look like a warrior.

‘I’m sure I carried a woman out, an elderly one, not Sally-Anne but an older lady, I know I had her in my grasp. I threw her onto the lawn. She was wearing a nightdress and—’

‘Listen, Mr Beam, you are in a very bad state. Why don’t you wait until you are at the hospital to discuss this further. You should rest now. We are going to salvage as much of this house as possible and the Barretts are on their way home.’

‘No, you don’t understand. Sally-Anne, she was in my house, she was there, drinking wine, she wanted to give Mozart a gift. Please, let me have a look for myself, please.’

Later, I hung myself on a willow, on the evening of the hottest day of the year, crying as the rope could not hold my weight and I fell, slippery like a cut tongue to the floor, not because I had failed but because I was and always will be in the wretched grasp of the banshee, forever in her debt.