The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER EIGHT





TOM WOKE IN darkness. He knew that he’d been disturbed, but he was unsure what might have caused it. Perhaps Helen had shouted, or the telephone had rung, stirring him from restless slumber. He waited for the sound to come again, and when it failed to appear he wondered if his own conflicted thoughts had roused him, his fears tumbling like performing clowns around his skull as he slept.

He sat up and looked around the room. Nothing had changed; it remained as always. He didn’t know why he’d expected any difference, and the thought confused him, making him doubt that he was fully awake. He slipped out of bed and went to the window, opened the curtains a few inches. The street was quiet and empty; not even a single car moved along its length. A slight breeze stirred the privet hedges along the garden fronts; litter prowled the edges of the gutter outside the house opposite.

Tom turned away from the window and went out onto the landing. Shadows pooled in the corners, like dark water. Yellow light, refracted from the streetlamps through the landing window, hung in the air like an incandescent fog. He walked along the landing, passing the open door to the upstairs bathroom. From the corner of his eye he spotted something, but when he spun around to look at it directly there was nothing there. He could have sworn that there was a man – or at least a man-shaped shadow – sitting on the edge of the bath with his hands held up to his face. But, no: more tricks of his tired mind, his aching eyes.

He walked slowly down the stairs, being careful not to make a noise. Helen slept well, but she was easily disturbed. Her ears, even as she rested, were attuned to even the subtlest of movements within the house. He turned at the bottom of the stairs and headed for the kitchen. Then he stopped. Backtracking, he turned again and went to Helen’s room. Her door was ajar – she always demanded that he leave it that way. She was too afraid to have it fully closed yet nervous enough that she would not rest if it was wide to the wall. She wanted to be able to hear him as he wandered about the house. She said his movements comforted her.

He played his fingers along the doorframe, and then traced a line across the middle of the door, grasping the handle. He pushed gently and stepped inside. His bare feet sank into the carpet – this was the only room where they’d spent a bit of money, because Helen was always in there, never leaving, even to use the toilet.

She was a huge mound on the bed, her bulk only partially covered by the heavy winter quilt she insisted upon using whatever the season. He often wondered how someone so fat could always be so cold. Then, ashamed and saddened, he would try to forget that he’d ever thought about her in that way.

She was his wife, and he loved her. At least he used to love her, before she became like this. He did, he loved her, with all of his heart. But he also hated her, and wished that she would die.

Gritting his teeth against these familiar thoughts, Tom approached the bed. Helen was snoring lightly, the air wheezing through her nose. Her lips shone in the darkness, coated with drool. Her hair – never styled these days, rarely even washed unless he did it for her – lay like rat tails on the pillow. She was flat on her back, with one arm raised above her head, as if grasping for the headboard.

A sea cow – a manatee: that was how he often pictured her. He’d watched a documentary a few years ago about the creatures, and the image had seemed appropriate. His sea cow wife: all fat and lazy and defeated.

“Helen,” he whispered. “I think I love you. I do still love you. I don’t know what I feel.” He often did this, late at night or into the early hours, when sleep was his enemy and he felt as restless as a thief. He came down here, to her sick room, and he spoke to her in low tones, telling her how he felt or how he thought he felt, sometimes even how he knew he was supposed to feel but didn’t, couldn’t, or just wouldn’t.

“You make my life a living hell, but I’m glad that I’m here for you, to take care of you. Yet I wish… I wish you would pass away quietly in your sleep.” He leaned in close as he spoke, his lips mere inches from her slack, flabby cheek. “I do. I wish you would just go away.” He closed his eyes. “When I open them again will you be gone?”

No, she was still there, on the bed, snoring and sweating and filling his life with regrets. His very own pet sea cow.

Tom did not even realise that he had raised his hand, curled it into a fist. He looked to his left, staring at the fist as it hovered in the air. He thought about bringing it down, as hard as he could, and repeatedly smashing her in the face. The distance between thought and action narrowed; it would be so easy to beat her to death.

“But messy,” he said. “Far too messy.”

He grabbed the other pillow, from the side of the bed where her head was not resting. He held it in both hands, feeling its soft weight, and scrunching it into a shapeless wad of material. He moved the pillow down, close to her face. There was an inch between pillow and skin; a tiny fraction that she filled with her stinking breath.

He could kill her in minutes. It would not be easy – he’d read somewhere that it was difficult to suffocate someone, that it took longer than you might think – but it would be clean and almost merciful. She would wake in confusion, gasping for air, and by the time she knew what was happening she would be on her way down, into the darkness.

Yes, he could do it. It was feasible that he could murder his wife. Especially if he continued to think of her as an animal, a wounded sea cow…

He replaced the pillow on the bed, turned stiffly away, his bare feet shuffling across the carpet.

No. he couldn’t do it; of course he couldn’t. He never would.

“Tom?”

He stopped dead, shocked that she was awake. Had she been awake all along, waiting with her eyes closed? Waiting to see what he would do?

“I wouldn’t blame you, Tom. Not really.” Her voice was slurred, as if she were drunk, but she was not talking in her sleep. She was aware; she knew what had been on his mind, and that he had fought against it.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, without turning around. “It’s late.”

“I won’t wake up next time. If you do it, I’ll consider it a mercy.” She was fading again, diving deep, going under. “A mercy…”

Tom stayed where he was, unable to move. He did not start moving again until he heard Helen begin to snore, and even then he moved slowly, carefully, afraid that she might be faking it, giving him an opportunity to go back to the side of the bed and pick up the pillow.

He closed the door behind him. Shut it tight, just the way Helen didn’t like it.

“Mercy,” he whispered, wondering exactly what that was, what it meant. Could mercy be quantified, weighed and measured like sacks of grain? And if so, how much did he have inside him? Not much, he thought. Not nearly enough.

He passed the bottom of the stairs and glanced up the stairwell. There was the suggestion of something having just moved away, sloping across the landing to stand round the corner, near the entrance to his room. He stood there for a few seconds, trying to regain his balance, to get a grip on his sense of reality. Everything was slipping away, becoming fluid, and he felt like he was drawing close to the brink of some kind of mental abyss.

He had never felt so alone.

That woman – Lana – appeared in his mind. Her dark eyes, gypsy-dark hair, beautiful half smile. Why was he so drawn to her that he would think of her now, in his darkest hour? Just what was it about the woman that made her haunt him in this way?

The telephone at the bottom of the stairs began to vibrate. It didn’t ring, not fully: just a gentle thrumming sound, like an electric razor. He moved across the floor, picked up the receiver and placed it against his ear.

“Hello.”

All he heard on the line was a series of electronic ghosts: clicks, hisses, distant connections being made. Then, growing closer, as if it were travelling along the miles of overhead lines and underground cables, he began to make out a sound that reminded him of childhood.

When he was a boy, before the madness of adulthood drew him in, he would ride for miles on his bicycle. He and his friends, adventurers to a man, would set off in the early morning and not return home until well after dark, their prolonged absence causing mayhem in the family home. Sometimes they would take wooden lolly sticks and place them so that they stuck in the rear spokes of the bikes, and when they pedalled the noise was like fingers snapping at a hundred miles an hour, or the fast, harsh music of Spanish castanets.

This was the sound he heard now, on the other end of the line. It drew closer and closer, getting louder and louder, until all he could think of was those friends and the long bike rides they enjoyed. It was like a calling – an echo from summers now long dead – and part of him wanted to answer. He listened to the clicking noise, allowing it to reach inside him and grasp his heart, but once it had him he began to doubt its authenticity. It seemed false, faked: a sound fabricated to lure him elsewhere.

He thought of Helen lying in bed, her face blue, vomit on her chin. He thought of punching her saggy sea cow face until the bones broke and the flesh tore beneath his knuckles. The clicking sound seemed to encourage these thoughts, to embellish them and make them even more vivid in his mind.

“No,” he said, pulling the phone away from his ear. “This isn’t right.”

As if on cue, the clicking sound began to fade, leaving him behind. Part of him wanted to follow it, to get on his bike and pedal after the sound through summer lanes and across sunlit fields. But the part of him that mattered – the strong part, the undefeated fragment of his humanity – held back.

The clicking sound diminished, absorbed into the digital static, the black-hiss voices undulating through the ether. For a moment he could have sworn that he heard a snatch of laughter, followed by the mumbled word “Soon.”

Tom put down the phone and grabbed his coat from the hanger at the bottom of the stairs. Still barefoot, he took his keys from the pocket and unlocked the door. Stepping out into the cool night air, he took a breath and allowed his legs to carry him to the car. He reversed out of the drive, spun the car in the road, and set off to the place he had been thinking about all day.

He drove to the Concrete Grove.

Passing through Far Grove, he saw a police car parked outside an all-night kebab shop. One uniformed officer was holding a young man across the counter, cuffing his wrists, while his partner radioed a report in to the station. The boy’s eyes locked onto Tom’s as he drove by; the boy smiled at him, and went limp.

The waste ground adjacent Far Grove Way was burning. Someone had set light to a sofa, and black smoke and yellow sparks rose from it like ugly phantoms, dissipating into the black night sky. Tom slowed down as he passed the blaze, staring at it through the side window. There was nobody around. The fire continued as if the fuel had been laid out and ignited for his eyes alone.

A fox crossed the road as he put his foot down on the accelerator, its eyes blazing red as they caught the light from his headlamps. It was an example of his mental instability that he thought the fox, too, was smiling – just like the boy in the kebab shop. He felt like everything was turning its gaze towards him, waiting to see what he would do, how he would respond to this situation. The area, and everything within it, was ripe with expectancy.

Paranoia, he thought. I’m f*cking paranoid. It was a feeling he knew all too well.

He cruised along Grove End, past the terraced houses on one side and the primary school on the other. He stared between the school railings, hoping that he would not catch sight of that strange human-faced dog. He knew the beast was a fantasy, a fiction, yet still he was afraid of seeing it again… and part of him desired just that: a single glimpse of a thing that could not be, another look at the numinous, just to prove that there was something else beyond the life he was leading now.

He parked the car at the end of the street, beside the mini roundabout. Sirens wailed far off, like banshees, and he heard the sound of breaking glass. A dog barked, disturbed by the sound, and he listened to its rhythmic cadence.

He watched Lana’s window, wondering if she was in there, sleeping, or possibly out for the evening. There was no way of knowing whether or not she was home, but he felt that she was safe in her bed. More than a feeling, in fact, it was a certainty. No doubt she slept lightly, like most people who lived in troubled neighbourhoods, and all of her dreams would be bad ones.

It came to him like a light going on inside his head: he could help her, if he liked. He could possibly even save her. He didn’t know what kind of trouble she was in, or how serious it was, but if she would only let him he could help her out of the mess.

If he’d been asked, he couldn’t say how he knew this: he simply did. Sitting here, in the car, outside her building, he felt closer to her than he ever had to another human being – closer even than he had ever felt to his wife. He gripped the wheel with his hands and stared out through the windscreen. Then, overcome with an emotion he could not name, he lowered his head and began to weep. His hands still gripped the wheel, tighter, tighter, until his fingers ached.

“What am I doing here?” he said, looking out at the sky, the depthless dark beyond the fine grey skins of clouds. There came no response – just as always. Even if the universe knew the answers, it was not telling. It would never willingly divulge its secrets to the likes of him.

Tom waited there until the sun turned the sky in the east a light shade of red, like blood smeared along the blade-edge of the horizon. Then, his face still wet with tears, he started the car and set off towards home, the place where he now realised his heart had never truly belonged.