But she didn’t turn to look behind. She sat simply staring at me in astonishment, as if I had gone insane.
‘Jack,’ I said to the phantom standing behind her.
And it was, for a moment, as if I actually did see him standing there.
This time Justine, letting out a cry of shock, twisted her body violently round. For a moment she must have wondered if I had killed Jack at all. Unless she believed in ghosts.
I watched the back of her body relax when she saw no one was there and she turned slowly round again to face me, her expression calm and cold.
‘You are having bad dreams,’ she said quietly. ‘That way madness lies.’
But after she had picked up the tray and left the room, I bent down under the bed and picked up the knife which I had kicked out of sight under it.
SEVENTY
Lunchtime next day came too slowly and by the position of the sun I could tell that Justine was late. Justine was never late. I finally heard her footsteps echo down the corridor. Imprisonment in a room meant footsteps now were always precursors to her presence, were always how she made herself first felt.
It was my turn to play. Possum. I lay down on the bed, my arms dangling over the sides as if I were unconscious. The metal of the knife concealed in my left hand was sticking hotly to the flesh of my palm. I listened to the key turn in the lock and the door open. The sound of her footsteps clipping on the wooden floor as she crossed the room stopped abruptly. I, on the other hand, felt calm in this new black world where Justine had become reduced to a series of arrhythmic sounds. I heard her put the tray down on the floor, too loudly. I had unnerved her. Her grandmother footsteps started up again.
Justine’s breath smelt of lilies as she bent down over me.
In another world she would have been about to kiss me.
I swiftly brought up my arms about her neck as if in an embrace. I could hear her inhale sharply in surprise. With my eyes still shut I stabbed her sharply in the side of the neck. I could feel the metal of the knife penetrate the surface of the skin, meet bone. I had expected her to collapse. Instead Justine began to grapple with my body with what seemed superhuman strength. It was as if my action had created a monster.
I opened my eyes to be met with her face bearing down directly above me. It shone with beatific joy. It made her beauty seem demonic. The knife stuck out of the side of her neck like a bolt.
We fell from the bed on to the floor, our bodies intimately intertwined. I screamed out loud as the chain pulled my leg violently and painfully taut. Her body was muscular and powerful, resistant to all my attempts to subdue it. Relentless arms pulled back mine, her legs kicked up into my groin, her head butted into my face, forcing the back of my skull to bang hard against the floor. Pinioned to the floor, I looked up into her clear all-seeing eyes. My eyes slowly filled with tears.
Astride my prone body she stood up to her full height and looked down at me. Reaching up her hand to her neck, with a cursory movement she pulled out the knife.
She didn’t flinch. The knife came out unstained – the only trace of a neck-wound was the faint outline of a hole in the shape of a heart.
‘That was a mistake,’ she said.
She picked up the tray of untouched food and took it out of the room, locking the door behind her. Long after she had gone, I could still hear her footsteps echo down the corridor.
SEVENTY-ONE
Justine didn’t return. I lost count of the days that passed without food or drink. The hair that had grown on my face was a source of constant irritation to me, and I constantly scratched at the skin around my beard until my face grew raw and inflamed, I now no longer noticed the smells that emanated from the room or from my armpits and groin.
Soon afterwards the hallucinations began. Not the dreamy/nightmarish hallucinations that I had experienced while opiated but hallucinations that featured scenes from my past, real life events, transposed into the present.
I saw my mother crouched down beside the wall, young and beautiful, diamonds glittering in her hair, smiling comfortingly at me. Lethe would come up to me as I sat at the table, and rub her head against my leg. Part of my room would be transformed into an exact replica of Kensington Gardens, and looking out of the window I would see not the maze, but the square’s gardens. I began to look forward to these hallucinations, as a form of nostalgic entertainment, as if they were scenes from a film I had watched as a child.
I woke up one morning to see that the walls had now been papered over in a fine yellow wallpaper. I am sure I saw the patterns on the wallpaper shift. At first I wasn’t. Now I am. I could smell the scent first. Of sweet flowers, then I see them growing in paper patterns all over the wall. They are giant red roses with a green intricate filigree of fine leaves. The roses seem too big for the slim stems as if their heads are about to break off their swaying necks. The roses are engorged blood-red, the shadowed crevices between the petals making them look three dimensional as if they are growing out of the wall, as if their heads are peering out into my small world. The leaves curve out into the shape of a J as if reaching out to an invisible sun. Then the flowers start to change shape. They grow larger and paler, their petals spread out and open, become hooked. The red drains from the petals to leave a bled whiteness, veined by red before the red finally disappears altogether. The roses become lilies which sway in my sleep, which sway through my brain suffocating my thoughts with their heavy perfume.
Sometimes I feel sure that a woman is trying to break through the wallpaper from the outside but then I realize that she already has. She is creeping about the house, like a ghost, haunting me.
That night I dreamt that I saw something moving from behind the wallpaper. I saw the paper protrude in the shape of a naked woman’s body before she broke through the paper to reveal herself. It was Justine. She bent down over me, and gently undid my clothing and caressed my weary limbs. Her hands were soft and knowing, as if they had touched me before. She sat astride me and held my arms to the floor above my head and I simply lay there, too enfeebled to move, while she seized her pleasure from me. Her skin shone in the darkness like silver. I came helplessly, while she came loudly, triumphantly. I hadn’t touched her with my hands, or kissed her once. Still astride me, she bent down and whispered in my ear,
‘Am I what you imagined?’
I could hear her still laughing, long after she had slipped back behind the wallpaper.
I woke up, semen sticking to the inside of my thighs. A succubus, I thought, had come to me in the night. Except that I was now naked and my clothes were no longer in the room.
SEVENTY-TWO
The pain in my stomach had come back and in the form of birds trying to peck their way out of my body. I felt a kind of dreary lassitude where the outside world no longer had any power over me. Rather, I was gently slipping out of it. Over the next few days, I lay in my excreta, and urine and blood, watching the bones protrude from my body one by one.
I must have been unconscious for days, the evening Justine finally returned. The noise of the door opening brought me round. When I looked up and saw a woman standing in the doorway I thought at first it was Salome. Justine was wearing a black veil which transparently clothed her naked body. She turned slightly to the door so that I could see the upward sweep of her breasts. I could tell, by the flicker of the smile across her face that she was taunting me. In spite of, or now perhaps because of, my debilitated state I desired her, but it was mixed with a rush of hatred which eroticized her still further. She stood above me so that I could now see the under curve of her full breasts above me, the pink aureole of the nipple just beginning.