“It was not just you. Every night I came home to it. Will she be okay tonight? Will she be normal? Or will she talk about walking in front of a bus? Will she be crying because of something I said, or she thinks I said, last fucking week? Every night. Do you think it all just went away when you went to sleep? Come out of your narcissistic little bubble and realize that the world is bigger than you.”
She looked at him, shocked and hurt. Her lower lip was trembling, and the tears came back in force.
“But I always stood by her side. Always.” He took her lightly by the arm and stood with her. “Your mother needs us. And we’re going to go see her. Right now.”
He led her toward the basement door.
What is the story of our family?
He led her down the stairs, into the cool, earthy musk of the basement, the smell of upturned soil a dank bloom in the air. His grip on her arm was firm as he descended one step ahead of her. The light from the kitchen behind them was an ax blade in the darkness, cutting a narrow wedge. It illuminated the corner of the mattress, powdered with a layer of dirt. Beside it, the bottom two feet of the support beam she had nailed the bird to; something new was screwed into place there, but he could intuit from the glistening mass only gristle and hair, a sheet of dried blood beneath it.
“What’s going on here? Oh my god, Dad, what’s going on?”
“Your mom’s in trouble. She needs us.”
Heather made a noise and he clamped down harder on her arm.
“Katie?” he said. “Heather’s here.” His voice did not carry, the words dropping like stones at his feet.
Our family has weathered great upheaval. Our family is bound together by love.
They heard something shift, in the darkness beyond the reach of the light.
“Mom?”
“Katie? Where are you, honey?”
“Dad, what happened to her?”
“Just tell me where you are, sweetheart. We’ll come to you.”
They reached the bottom of the steps and as he moved out of the path of the kitchen light it shone more fully on the thing fixed to the post: a gory mass of scrambled flesh, a ragged web of graying black hair. Something moved in the shadows beyond it, small and hunched and pale, its back buckling with each grunted effort, like something caught in the act of love.
Our family will not abandon itself.
Heather stepped backward; her heel caught on the lowest step and she fell onto the stairs.
Sean approached his wife. She labored weakly in the bottom of a small declivity, grave-shaped, worm-spangled, her dull white bones poking through the parchment skin of her back, her spine bending as she burrowed into the earth. Her denuded skull still bore the tatters of its face, like the flag of a ruined army.
“Daddy, come on.” Sean turned to see his daughter crawling up the stairs. She reached the top and crawled through the doorway, pulling her legs in after her. In the light, he could see the tears on her face, the twist of anguish. “Daddy, please. Come on. Come on.”
Sean put his hand on Katie’s back. “Don’t you remember me? I’m your husband. Don’t you remember?”
She continued to work, slowly, her arms like pistons powered by a fading battery.
He lifted her from her place in the earth, dirt sifting from her body like a snowfall, and clutched her tightly to his chest. He rested his head against the blood-greased curve of her skull, cradled her forehead in his hand. “Stay with me.”
Heather, one more time, from somewhere above him: “Daddy, oh no, please come up. Please.”
“Get down here,” Sean said. “Goddamn you, get down here.”
The door shut, cutting off the wedge of light. He held his wife in his arms, rocking her back and forth, cooing into the ear that still remained.
He pulled her away, but she barely knew it. Everything was quiet now. Silence blew from the hole she had dug like smoke. She could feel what lay just beyond. The new countryside. The unspeaking multitude. Steeples and arches of bone; temples of silence. She felt the great shapes that moved there, majestic and unfurled, utterly silent, utterly dark.
He held her, breathing air onto the last cinder in her skull.
Her fingers scraped at empty air, the remains of her body engaged in this one final enterprise, working with a machine’s unguided industry, divorced at last from its practical function. Working only because that was its purpose; its rote, inelegant chore.
THE TIGER
Nina Allan
There is a bed, a wardrobe with a large oval mirror, a built-in cupboard to one side of the chimney breast. The boards are bare, stained black.
There is a greyish cast to everything. Croft guesses the room has not been used in quite some time.
“It’s not much, I’m afraid,” the woman says. Her name is Sandra. Symes has told him everyone including her husband calls her Sandy, but Croft has decided already that he will never do this, that it is ugly, that he likes Sandra better. “I’ve been meaning to paint it, but there hasn’t been time.”
She is too thin, he thinks, with scrawny hips and narrow little birdy hands. Her mousy hair, pulled back in a pony tail, has started to come free of its elastic band. Croft cannot help noticing how tired she looks.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “If you can let me have the paint, I’ll do it myself.”
“Oh,” she says. She seems flustered. “I suppose we could take something off the rent money. In exchange, I mean.”
“There’s no need,” Croft says. “I’d like to do it. Something to keep me out of mischief.” He smiles, hoping to give her reassurance, but she takes a step backwards, just a small one, but still a step, and Croft sees he has made a mistake already, that the word mischief isn’t funny, not from him, not now, not yet.
He will have to be more careful with what he says. He wonders if this is the way things will be for him from now on.
“Well, if you’re sure,” Sandra says. She glances at him quickly, then looks down at the floor. “It would brighten up the walls a bit, at least.”
She leaves him soon afterwards. Croft listens to her footsteps as she goes downstairs, past the entrance to the first floor flat where she and Angus McNiece and their young son live, and into the pub where she works ten hours each day behind the bar. Once he feels sure she won’t come back again, Croft lifts his luggage — a canvas holdall — from where he has placed it just inside the door and puts it down on the bed. As he tugs open the zip, an aroma arises, the scent of musty bedsheets and floor disinfectant, a smell he recognises instantly as the smell of the prison, a smell he has grown so used to that he would have said, if he’d been asked, that the prison didn’t have a smell at all.
No smell, and no texture. Being outside is like being spun inside a centrifuge. He keeps feeling it, the enthralling pressure on his ribs and abdomen, the quickfire jolts to his brain as he tries to accustom himself to the fact that he is once more his own private property. Just walking from the station to the pub — the long, straight rafter of Burnt Ash Road, the blasted concrete triangle that is Lee Green — gave him a feeling of exhilaration so strong, so bolt upright it still buzzes in his veins like neat whisky, like vertigo.
The pub is called The Old Tiger’s Head. Croft has read it was once a coaching halt, a watering hole for soldiers on their way to the Battle of Waterloo. More recently it was a tram stop, where trams on their way down from Lewisham Junction would switch from the central conduit to overhead power. Photographs of Lee Green in the early 1900s show the place when it was still a village, a busy crossroads between Lewisham and Eltham, creased all along its corners, faded, precious.