The following morning, while Frank sat doleful over toast and a mug of tea in the newly painted starkness of the kitchen, with his stainless-steel units piled up in the middle of the room, he mused that during the preceding night it was as if he’d entertained someone else’s dreams.
All night he’d passed through a dark muddle of images that were mostly lost to him in the morning. But he did retain partial impressions of a room filled with the smoke of Silk Cut cigarettes, the clack of Scrabble tiles, and the Matt Monro song playing on a continuous loop from a black tape recorder, a device he’d seen in vivid detail with spatters of white paint upon the speakers. ‘Born Free’: that had been the song. He hadn’t heard it in years. He’d also been a guest on The Price Is Right; had somehow been inside the show while also watching himself from the sofa. It had been his goal to win a small caravan. The contest had been compelling. Just before he’d woken, he’d been standing upon the yellow lino of the kitchen floor, counting pages of Green Shield stamps. Or once he’d thought he’d awoken, because there had been someone in the bedroom with him. Talking to him between sharp intakes of breath. A small indistinct figure had also been standing at the foot of the bed.
In the second, more vivid dream – because it must have been a dream – the standing figure had left the room quickly with its hands clutched over its face. The presence had then reappeared in the doorway as a hunched silhouette, lit by ambient light rising up the stairwell. The silhouette had taken to crouching as if in pain, and, when the figure had turned towards him, the face had remained in darkness. He was sure the person had been a woman, for whom he felt a rush of tenderness and affection and remorse, despite the shock that she had given him by appearing at the foot of his bed. When he encountered her in his sleep, he had been stricken with the same feeling of abandonment that he remembered on his first day at school.
The dream had continued and he had found himself standing behind the small figure in the spare room. In that part of the dream, she had been bent over and was mooching through a collection of plastic bags. ‘You need to get ready. And I can’t go without it,’ she’d said to Frank, without once turning around to face him.
He’d woken at seven and discovered that his face was briny with dried tears. He’d gone downstairs to the smell of fried sausages that competed with the stink of new paint, though he hadn’t cooked a single sausage in the house.
The dreams turned nasty on Sunday and Monday night and were caused by the kitchen cupboards being left outside in the rain. Like his mother’s vibes about other people’s houses, Frank instinctively knew that the kitchen wreckage was the cause of his troubled sleep.
On Sunday night, the small female figure had returned to his bedroom. But her agitation and grief had intensified and he’d woken to find her leaning over his face with her hands clasped across her mouth. He’d suspected that the glimmer of a solitary eye had been visible, but he’d seen no other features on the face of the woman of his dreams. From behind her fingers she’d muffled a horrible grunt.
Frank had sat up in bed, his heart hammering, convinced there was an actual intruder inside his room, but then watched the figure of the small woman fade into the dark centre of the wardrobe.
He’d quickly put lights on and conducted a search of the entire house, but there had been no one inside with him.
On Monday night, what might have been the figure of the elderly woman was inside his room again, but on her hands and knees. He might also have dreamed about a wounded animal, because he awoke to hear something mewling and fumbling about beneath the curtains that didn’t sound like a person. Round and round the thing had gone on all fours, for a few seconds, bumping the walls in distress. He never saw anything and had just remained stiff with fright in the bed.
The intruder eventually left the bedroom and scurried across the landing; Frank only saw the last of it go and suspected it had been a dog because no human could move that fast on all fours. Terrified, but compelled to follow, Frank had peered inside the spare bedroom and seen the figure of the old woman, her small body covered in a grubby housecoat, with her back to him. She had been searching amongst boxes of photograph albums with vinyl jackets until she found what she’d been looking for. She’d held it before her lowered face and gave Frank the impression that she was either struggling to read in bad light or putting something inside her mouth. Frank didn’t know, but could hear the woman’s heavy breathing, betwixt a series of animal grunts.
When he spoke to her, the figure turned quickly and showed him a pair of milky eyes, like he’d once seen in the head of a dead sheep, and bared teeth that didn’t belong inside a human mouth.
Frank had woken underneath the eiderdown in his room with his fingers stuffed down his own throat.