‘Hello, 635?’ she said and waited. ‘Hello? Hello hello?’
A sigh, from her chest which sounded shallow and wheezy. It would have been her birthday the week before. Seventy-two.
‘Iris!’ she called. ‘It’s doing that thing again.’ A thickness in her throat, a cold or an allergy. My sister’s voice, muffled, maybe from upstairs.
‘Just hang up the phone, Ma, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Well, what’s wrong with the phone though?’
Iris closer now, down the stairs and entering the room. ‘How the hell should I know.’ The clunk of the phone being taken out of my mother’s deeply veined hands and into Iris’s heavily ringed fingers. ‘Hello?’ My sister’s voice, sharp like always, edged with being the eldest. She listened to my silence. ‘I dunno, Mum, maybe you’ve got a pervert after you.’
On the receiver’s journey through the air into the cradle, I heard the beginning of a butcher bird’s song, ceecaw-ceeceecaw — and the line went dead. Back in my living room with the electric heater on and smelling of burnt dust, I finished the song, whistling. Pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pweeee. Dog raised his ears at the sound but it wasn’t that unusual to him. I started a set of push-ups, but halfway through lay down and stared at the ceiling.
I made some coffee and drank it. After some time had passed, I laid out my paperwork on the kitchen table and worked through it. When that was done I let Dog out to pee, but stayed in the doorway in my socks. I put the paperwork away and folded myself up on the sofa with a book that I held unopened on my lap. The wind moved through the trees, down the chimney and into the front room where it waved through the top sheet of a newspaper.
With the night outside I closed the curtains in the kitchen and put on the radio loud enough to drown out the skittering noises of leaves moving up the stone path. The only programme I could get was the soccer results. I listened to the names of places while I made sardines on toast. Wigan. What was Wigan like? I had a pretty strong sense of it just from the name, and it made me glad that I was not there. I fed a sardine to Dog and it made him sneeze.
The sitting room was cold and so I ate under a blanket. I didn’t look out the window at the dark, but I felt it there.
Burnley, three; Middlesbrough, nil.
When I could find no further reasons for not being in bed, I turned the radio off and whistled tunelessly and loudly on my way up the stairs. On the landing a feather fluttered in a draught. I brushed my teeth and must’ve scraped over a mouth ulcer, because when I spat there was an impressive amount of blood. I washed it away and blew my nose and then rolled on an old T-shirt to sleep in. Dog collected himself at the foot of the bed, and we stared at each other a moment or two before I checked the hammer under my pillow and turned off the light. I closed my eyes so that I wasn’t staring into the dark, and I tried not to take any notice of the sounds that felt unfamiliar, even though I’d heard them a million times before. A sheep’s cough had always sounded just like a person’s. A fox was being made love to somewhere in the woods and her shrieks cut straight into my room.
I fell asleep, because I woke up from a dream where I saw myself opening the bathroom door and finding all of my sheep in there, looking silently back at me. There was no colour or light in the sky, so it wasn’t past five. There was something sick in the air, like someone had lit a scented candle to mask a bad smell. The house was still. Dog stood by the closed door, looking at the space underneath, his hackles up and his legs straight and stiff, his tail rigid, pointing down. And then one creak, on the ceiling, like someone walked there. I held my breath and listened past the blood thumping in my ears. It was quiet and I pulled the covers up under my chin. The sheets chafed loudly against themselves. Dog stayed fixed on the door. A small growl escaped him.
My fingernails dug into my palms.
On the wall behind me came a noise like someone drawing a nail from the ceiling to the top of my bed’s headboard and stopping there, one straight smooth and slow line. Dog slunk over to the bed and growled long and low. I lay still, felt every muscle beat in time with my heart; my back throbbed now. I had the feeling that I had bled onto the bedsheets, that if I moved my back would stick to the material and pull at my skin.
I thought to myself, Rats, there’s rats in the walls or mice, the smaller ones with the soft little brown bodies, that is all it is, or a bit of old timber releasing air, or cracking, the temperature outside has dropped in the night, it is making it crack and the mice are scurrying around, scratching about, or it is the Rayburn’s pipe, doing its thing — the wind has changed direction.
An underwater stillness, no wind or rain, not even a small owl, just a thick blanket of silence. I shut my eyes, and felt the mattress creak as Dog loped up on it, and weaved himself between my feet. The room settled and I counted heartbeats. There was a quiet crackle then silence again.
And then a sound like someone driving a car into a tree, a crack and a slam that echoed, and then like hands slapping fast on the wall, and I stood up on my bed and lowed like a bull, clutching a pillow in front of me, and holding the hammer up as if there was someone to hit with it. Dog snapped at the air around him like it was full of flies.
In the quiet that followed, Dog started to howl. I lumped off the bed and hit the light switch. The door was now open, flush with the wall like someone had stood there, blocking the doorway, observing. The corridor beyond it was dark and longer than I remembered it.
‘Fuck! You!’ I shouted into the corridor, breathing deep between each word, and around the words I thought I could hear a whisper of someone speaking back to me. Dog stopped howling, let out a moan and ran into the darkness of the hallway. Nothing showed up at the end of the hall, just the window, and outside, the night. I took my jeans from the floor and pulled them on as I moved down the corridor to the stairway.
The light switch at the top of the stairs was not where it should have been, so I ploughed into the dark and down to the kitchen where I found the light already on and Dog sitting under the table with drool coming out of him and puddling on the floor.
We went out the door and got into the car, started the engine, and I drove with my hands shaking against the steering wheel. I was going to drive straight into town, straight to the police station and bang on the door, but as my heart slowed down, so did my driving, and I parked in the driveway of a field in sight of the lights of town, turned the engine off. Dog curled in the footwell of the passenger seat and shook, his eyes black and round. I rested my head on the steering wheel and breathed in and out until the still and the quiet became natural and Dog crawled from his footwell and let me rub his ears. ‘We’ll be okay,’ I said to him and he looked at me. ‘We’ve got options. We’re smart — right? Right?’
We watched the light draw through the sky and a barn owl on her final patrol who broke up the dawn, a lone swimmer in an empty sea.
Back home, the kitchen was just the same, the stove bleating out when the wind flew over its pipes. Standing at the door of my bedroom, my bed was normal. There was no bad smell, there was no bad nothing.
I pulled the bed sheets straight and laid the blanket over the top. Just on the edge of the white coverlet was a black mark, like I’d trailed it in the ashes of a fire. I wiped at the smudge with the flat of my hand and it faded. The wall above the bedhead also had a smudge but this one was more of a print. I must have leant against it when I was standing and yelling, and left a handprint clear and black with the fingers spread so that the webs of skin between them must have pulled and ached. But the hand was smaller than my own; I rubbed it off with toilet paper and spit.