‘I’m not sure. I’ve sent him a couple of texts and he hasn’t replied to them either. I feel he’s hiding from me. I think he does that sometimes, hides away, when the one thing he most needs is to get out and be with other people.’
Tim slept very badly that night, woken again and again by the pressure inside himself, and at 6 a.m. he finally gave up on the hope of more rest, made himself coffee, and began to put up the new paper in Sean’s room. Sean had chosen it himself from a catalogue. It had a design of railway tracks and trains with cheerful drivers and passengers smiling and waving out of the windows. By 10.30 Tim had papered over his pencilled message, and by midday he’d completed the whole room. Before he went down to eat, he moved all Sean’s things back into it, made up the bed with the train-themed covers they’d bought to match the wallpaper, and carefully replaced Sean’s plastic lion on the bedside table.
‘He’ll love this,’ Tim said to himself, as he stood back and admired the overall effect. He could hardly wait to show it to his boy.
Then a sharp stab of pain made him gasp.
Damn that doctor! That hurt! This was way too raw and crude and physical to just be a trick of the mind! There was something in there, something solid and real.
But then a new and disturbing thought came to him. If there really was something in there, then perhaps there was no choice about it? Perhaps it had to come out?
Mary was not a coward and she wasn’t at all given to self-pity, but at the beginning of her labour with Sean, she’d quailed for a short while as she realised just what an assault on her body this was going to be. The antenatal classes had taught her all sorts of sensible and useful things, but they hadn’t prepared her at all for the sheer primal violence of the process, the utter indifference that nature showed towards the individual creatures that were its instruments. The classes had been warm and reassuring. They hadn’t really engaged with the fact that, through most of history, and still through much of the world, labour was a time of acute jeopardy, a time when mother or baby or both were at serious risk of death.
‘I can’t do this,’ she’d whimpered to Tim. ‘I just can’t do this.’
But of course she’d had no choice. You might as well ask a hurricane to take a different route, or a river to flow back uphill. The baby must come out of her, alive or dead, if she herself was going to survive.
And quickly seeing this, Mary had taken a grip on herself, set her brief moment of funk behind her, and begun to push.
‘No!’ Tim muttered, as he started draping sheets over the furniture in the living room. ‘That’s stupid. There’s no comparison at all.’
The living room was second on the to-do list that Mary had prepared for him.
‘For one thing there’s no danger to me,’ he pointed out as he mixed up wallpaper stripper in a bucket. ‘The doctor said so, and the tests backed him up. Whatever this is, it isn’t a threat to my life.’
But the creature inside him wasn’t listening. It gave a violent shove that made him yelp out loud. And at that moment, the phone began to ring yet again, probing into the house with its blind insistent fingers.
‘For Christ’s sake, give it a rest!’ Tim screamed at it. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone? I don’t need you to deal with as well. I don’t need you and your bloody friendship.’
‘He’s still not picking up,’ Peter said. ‘I’m actually quite worried now. I think I’ll stroll over there after tea.’
His wife was lying with her head in his lap, half-watching TV and half-sleeping.
‘In this rain? I wouldn’t call that a stroll!’
‘Well, I do own a raincoat, Sue,’ he pointed out. ‘And it’s less than a mile away. I’ll enjoy the rest of the evening more if I’ve seen he’s alright and arranged a time to meet with him.’
Tim scraped away at the living room wall so hard and so fast that he had to strip to the waist to keep cool. Covered in sweat, with aching arms and a pounding heart, he attacked the paper, he ripped it apart, he assaulted it, but all the while he was really fighting the creature inside himself. It must not come out! Nothing could be allowed to threaten the warm nest that he and Mary had made for the little boy that Tim loved far more than he loved himself, and for the new baby that he would love in the same way. It must stay inside him!
But a time came when he just couldn’t concentrate any more on scraping. He was exhausted for one thing – he’d reached a point where he had to keep pausing just to catch his breath and let his heart rate slow – but, more than that, he was finding that, however vigorously he worked, the job was still too static to be bearable in his present state of mind. He needed to move. He couldn’t bear to be in one place. Clutching the scraper in his hand, he began to roam the house, restlessly prowling upstairs and downstairs and from room to room, muttering and groaning, kicking at skirting boards from time to time, pounding his fist on the walls.
It was in Sean’s new room, as it turned out, the one with the happy trains on the walls and the lion on the bedside table, that he finally realised he’d lost the battle.
‘It just has to come out,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t hold it in any more.’
He had no more choice than Mary had had in that room in the maternity suite. No matter how many machines were humming around her, how many tubes and wires were attached to her, how many dispassionate little green graphs were tracking the rhythms of her body, the basic fact remained that the baby inside her would have to emerge in one way or another.
And now a strange thing happened, which he hadn’t anticipated at all. As he finally gave way to the brute reality which he’d been fighting for so long, he discovered that he wasn’t pushing in any more, but pushing out. It was as if the rules of the game had been reversed. Having abandoned the project of keeping the alien creature inside himself, he was noticing the rigid cage that held it in. Up to now this cage had simply been himself, the real Tim, its rigidity the expression of his own will, the measure of his own determination to contain the threat. He’d even taken a certain pride in its firmness. He knew perfectly well that others saw him as unassertive and weak, but that rigid cage had proved to him that he was stronger than they knew, brave in a way they couldn’t see.
But now, quite suddenly, he was experiencing that cage as an alien presence, a hard unyielding obstacle that was constricting and stifling him, denying him movement, limiting his access to light and air, standing between him and the world. Only a few seconds ago he would have called that cage himself, but it wasn’t him. It was the opposite of him. It was the thing that had imprisoned him all his life.
‘Let me out, fuck you,’ he heard his own voice screaming at it. ‘Let me out, you bastard, and let me breathe.’
After that he stopped using words. He just bellowed and roared and punched the walls, like a boxer pumping himself up before a fight, building up immunity to pain and fear.
Rain beat down on the roofs and pavements, and onto the doorsteps, and into the hedges and the little front gardens. The few cars that were out crept slowly along with their headlights on, their wipers flinging out great wet dollops with every sweep. Lights were switched on inside the houses, curtains drawn. No one but Peter was out on foot.
When he reached Tim’s house, he found the front door wide open, with rain blowing in, and the doormat sitting in a pool of water. All the lights were turned on, but when he called Tim’s name there was no answer. Peter stepped inside, throwing back the hood of his raincoat.
He found one of the living room walls stripped down, and half of another, furniture clumped in the middle of the room under sheets, and old wallpaper lying on the floor in twisted heaps. There was even a swathe of paper dangling from the wall, as if Tim had stopped in mid-scrape. Peter looked into the kitchen and the downstairs toilet. He saw a couple of teacups waiting to be washed, a dirty plate, a paintbrush set to soak in a bucket of water.
‘Tim?’ he called. ‘Are you there?’
Tim could have fallen from a ladder or something, Peter had been thinking as he’d walked over from his house. He could have knocked himself out, or broken a bone and been unable to get to the phone. But if so, where was he now? The living room was obviously what he’d been working on. If he’d had a fall, wouldn’t it have been in there?
Then Peter noticed something that he hadn’t spotted when he first came in. There were red marks on the stairs. Perhaps Tim had cut himself somehow and gone up to the bathroom to dress the wound. He could have passed out from loss of blood.
‘Tim? It’s Peter! Are you alright?’
There was nothing unusual in the bathroom, though, or in the front bedroom, or the middle room which, as Tim had told him, was going to be the baby’s.
‘Tim?’
The door of the back bedroom was ajar and the light inside was on, as all the lights had been, all round the house.
‘Tim, are you in there?’
Another possibility occurred to Peter. Perhaps there’d been a break-in. Perhaps there was a stranger in there, holding a knife to Tim’s throat, or even crouching in readiness beside Tim’s corpse. He picked up a hammer that had been propped against the landing wall, and, clutching it firmly, advanced into the little boy’s new room.
‘Tim? Are you—?’
Peter broke off. There was no one in there, alive or dead, but, strewn right across the room were bloody flaps of skin and hunks of sandy-coloured hair. Dark red strips were scattered over the bed and the chest of drawers. Congealing fragments clung to the walls, with red trails above them to indicate how far they’d slid downwards since they were first splattered over those cheerful little trains. A single narrow shred of skin was draped over the lion on the bedside table.
The scraper lay in the middle of the floor, with dark blood clinging to its blade and handle. But there was no Tim. Whatever had happened here, Tim had gone.