“It’s something that’s in them old houses,” was the general opinion. “For the chaps it’s not so bad, because they’re out to work. The women, though, they’re left indoors with it and they can’t get away.”
He’d often wondered, in his idle moments, what “it” was. If it was something somehow “in” the houses, then it could be damp or dry-rot, some miasmal presence seeping from the beams and brickwork that could make a person so ill that they’d want to take their life, although he’d never heard of such a thing. Besides, the way that grown-up fellows talked about the matter, nodding solemnly over their pints of watery pale ale, had given Reggie the impression they’d been speaking of a living creature, something that had wandered in one day to take up residence and then refused to leave. Something so upsetting and so miserable that you’d be better dead than stuck at home with it, trying to do your housework with it sitting in the corner wriggling and clicking, looking at you with its knowing little black eyes. Reggie always pictured “it” as a giant earwig, although part of him knew full well it was only ordinary despair.
This was the nesting horror that had done for Reggie’s mother, so he thought about it quite a lot. She’d tried to kill herself so many times that by her third try even she could see the funny side. Her first attempt had been at drowning, in the Nene where it ran through Foot Meadow, but the river wasn’t deep enough at that point to accommodate her and she’d given up. Next she’d jumped from the bedroom window of their house in Gas Street, which resulted only in a pair of broken ankles. On the third occasion she’d tried kneeling with her head inside the oven, but the gas ran out before she’d finished and she didn’t have a penny for the meter. It was that, being too poor to even gas herself, which in the end made Reggie’s mother laugh about her troubles. So surprised were Reggie and his dad to see her chuckling again that they’d joined in, laughing along with her there in the freezing kitchen, with its windows open to dispel the rubbery and acrid fumes. Reggie himself had giggled most, although he hadn’t really understood the situation and was only laughing because everybody else was. Also, he supposed that he’d guffawed out of relief and gratitude, convinced that a dark chapter of his family’s story was now over.
In a sense, of course, he’d been quite right: some few weeks after the hilarity in the cold, smelly kitchen, Reggie’s mother once more threw herself out of the upstairs window, this time managing to hit the ancient and indifferent paving stones of Gas Street with her head, which finally seemed to do the trick. A chapter certainly had been concluded, but the ones that followed it were even darker, even worse.
Following his wife’s successful fourth and final stab at self-destruction, Reggie’s dad had started drinking heavily, chucking the ale back for dear life, and then had started fights. Night after night he’d carried on like that, blood jetting from smashed noses up against a privy wall, teeth spat into the Gas Street drains like miniature bone rockets with a shower of red sparks behind them, and inevitably the constabulary would be called. His first offence, they beat him up. His second one, they locked him up and Reggie hadn’t even known which gaol his dad was in. Abandoned, Reggie had lived in the Gas Street house alone for getting on a week, eating and sleeping in his parents’ big bed for the luxury of it, not answering the door the first time that the rent-man called. On his next visit, though, the rent-man had a bailiff with him, who had simply kicked the door in, by which time Reggie was scarpering through an untended back yard, hurdling the bottom wall and making off along the alleyway.
His subsequent address had been the wasteland that they called the burial ground, opposite Doddridge Church. He’d been pleased with himself about the little house he’d built there, up against the bounding wall that overlooked Chalk Lane. Even though it had only been a plywood packing crate, Reggie was proud of his own ingenuity in turning it into a home. He’d tipped it on its side, swept out the snails and tacked someone’s discarded curtain up across the opening as a sort of door. He camouflaged it with dead branches, thinking that this sounded like the sort of thing an Indian scout would do, and made a spear with which he could defend himself by sharpening a long stick with his rusty penknife, before realising the knife itself would make a better weapon. He’d been a bit dim back then, but then, he’d only been eleven.
That said, finding food and getting by, which in the circumstances you might well expect to be a hardship, these were things that Reggie found he took to naturally. He’d haunt the edges of the square on market night and find squashed fruit and veg thrown out amongst the tissue paper, straw and empty boxes. The back doors of baker’s shops at closing time would often yield a loaf that was no longer saleable though not entirely stale, and from the butcher’s there were sometimes bones for soup.
He’d realised, after trudging through the streets with a bowed head for one long afternoon, how many small coins people lose, especially in the larger shops. Other than what he found, Reggie would sometimes beg a ha’penny or two, and had once tossed off an old tramp who’d promised him a thrupenny bit but then reneged. That had been in the jungle of unused riverside land between Victoria Park and Paddy’s Meadow, inaccessible except by paddling under Spencer Bridge, a wilderness where the damp-scented vagrant had a modest campfire made from bits of cardboard, wood and cut-off ends of carpet. Reggie still remembered with a shudder how the whiskery chap’s spunk had sizzled, following a slippery liquid arc into the yellow flames, and all for nothing, not a farthing. Still, despite such disappointments, Reggie managed to survive. He wasn’t hapless, wasn’t weak, not in his body or his mind. It hadn’t been a lack of sustenance that killed him, it had been an English winter, and however strong or clever or resourceful Reggie was there’d been no getting round it. When they’d found him curled up in his packing crate after a day or two, one of his eyelids was still frozen shut and sticking to the ball. That had been that, the end of Reggie’s life, though obviously not of his existence.
To be honest, he’d turned out to be better at death than he had ever been at life, taking to the new medium like a duck to water. Even so, he still remembered how surprised and lost he’d been, those first few hours after he’d passed on. It had been on a Sunday morning when it happened. He had woken to the sound of oddly-muffled church bells and the somehow worrying realisation that he was no longer cold. He’d tried to pull the curtain remnant serving as his door aside, but something puzzling had happened and he’d found himself crouching on hands and knees outside his makeshift crate-house, where the rags tacked up above its entrance were still hanging motionless and undisturbed.
The first thing that had struck him, thinking back, was that the grass upon which he was kneeling was now oyster-grey instead of green, although its rime of frost remained a granulated white. On climbing to his feet and looking round he’d seen that everything was black and white and grey, including the faint floral pattern on his tacked-up curtain, which he’d known should actually be an insipid blue. It made him smile now to recall how, with the subdued chiming of the bells, the black and white of everything had led him to the frightening conclusion that at some point in the night he’d been sent deaf and colour-blind, as if those were the worst things that could happen to you on a winter’s evening. It was only when he’d noticed all the pictures of himself that he was leaving every time he moved that Reggie had suspected there was something badly wrong, wrong in a way that spectacles or hearing trumpets would not remedy.
Of course, soon after that he’d started to experiment with touching things, discovering that he no longer could. Attempting to draw back the curtain from the mouth of his crude shelter, he’d found that his hand now passed through the material as if it wasn’t there and disappeared from sight until he’d pulled it out again. At that point Reggie had decided that to see inside the crate he’d have to push his face in through the fabric of the entrance, in the same way that he’d just done with his fingers.