Before You Sleep (5 page)

Shouting woke me up. Through my sleep and all the dark softness around my body, I heard a loud voice. I thought it was Papa. But when my eyes opened the house was silent. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t move my arms and my feet. Rolling from side to side, I made some space in Maho’s hair. It was everywhere and all around me. ‘Maho? Maho?’ I said. ‘Wake up, Maho.’

But she just held me tighter with her thin arms. Blowing the hair out of my mouth, I tried to move a hand so that I could take the long strands from out of my eyes. I couldn’t see anything. Maho wouldn’t help me either, and it took me a long time to unwind the silky ropes from around my neck and off my face, and to shake them from my arms and from between my fingers and toes where they tugged and pulled. In the end, I had to flop onto my tummy and then wriggle backwards through the funnel of her black hair. She was fast asleep and very still and wouldn’t wake up when I shook her.

I could only sit up properly when I reached the bottom of the bed. All the sheets and blankets were on the floor again. I climbed off the bed and ran into the unlit hall. I couldn’t see the cold floorboards and could only hear the patter of my bare feet on the wood as I moved down to Mama and Papa’s room. The door to their room was open. Maybe Papa was having a bad dream and was awake, so I stood outside and looked in.

It was very dark inside their room, but something was moving. I screwed up my eyes and stared at where the thin light coming around the curtains had fallen, and then I saw that the whole bed was moving. ‘Mama,’ I said.

It looked like Mama and Papa were trying to sit up but couldn’t. And all the sheets around them were rustling. Someone was making a moaning sound, but it didn’t sound like Mama or Papa. It sounded like someone was trying to speak with their mouth full. And there was another sound coming from the bed too, and getting louder as I stood there. A wet sound. Like lots of busy people eating noodles in a Tokyo diner.

The door closed and I turned around to look behind me. I knew Maho was there before I even saw her.

Maho looked at me through her hair. ‘The toys are only playing,’ she said.

She took my hand and led me back to our bed. I climbed in after her and she wrapped me up in all that hair. And together we listened to the sounds of the toys putting things into the secret places, behind the walls, where they belonged.

F
rank remembered his mother once saying, ‘Houses give off a feeling’, and that she could ‘sense things’ inside them. At the time, he’d been a boy and his family had been drifting around prospective homes with an estate agent. He only remembered the occasion because his mother was distressed by a house that they had viewed and had hurried away from to get back to the car. As an adult, all he could recall of that particular property was a print of a blue-faced Christ, within a gilt frame, hanging on the wall of a scruffy living room; the only picture on any of the walls. And the beds had been unmade, which had also shocked his mother. His father had never contradicted his mother on these occasional matters of a psychic nature, though his father had never encouraged her to hold forth on them either. ‘Something terrible happened there’ was his mother’s final remark once the car doors were shut, and the house was never mentioned again. But Frank had been perplexed by the incongruity of both the blue skin of the Christ and a house belonging to Christians that issued an unpleasant ‘feeling’ to his mother, when she should, surely, have detected the opposite effect.

Frank amused himself trying to second-guess what her intuition would be about the first home that he’d ever owned. He knew what his dad would say about the 120 per cent mortgage that he’d arranged to purchase the two-bedroomed terraced house. But once the house was fixed up, he’d have them down to ‘his place’: his own home after ten years of cohabitation and tenancy agreements.

The narrow frontage of the house’s grubby bricks faced a drab street, cramped with identical houses that leaned over a road so narrow that two cars driving from opposing ends struggled to pass each other. But a final jiggle of the Yale key moved him out of the weak rainy light and into an unlit hallway where the air was thick with trapped warmth. A cloud of stale upholstery, cauliflower thoroughly boiled, and a trace of floral perfume descended about him.

He assured himself that the house would soon exude the scents of his world: the single professional who could cook a bit of Thai, liked entertaining and used Hugo Boss toiletries. Once he’d ripped out the old carpets, stripped the walls and generally ‘torn the shit out of it’, as his best friend Marcus had remarked with a decisive relish, the house would quickly lose the malodour of the wrong decade, age group and gender.

Enshrouded by a thin illumination that wafted through ground-floor windows begrimed with silt and the silvery nets, he quickly realised that there had been a mistake and that the place had not been cleared of the former owner’s furniture. It was as if he’d mixed up the exchange dates and stepped into what remained of the vendor’s home. ‘Pure 70s, Nan,’ Marcus had remarked, with a grin on his face, during the evening when he’d visited to assist Frank’s purchasing decision between this two-up, two-down and an ex-council property in Weoley Castle that had needed an airstrike more than a first-time buyer.

Poking from a Bakelite fitting on the wall of the front room was a chunky light switch, the same colour as the skirting boards, kitchen cupboards and fittings: the plastic of artificial limbs used until the 1950s. But the switch was stiff and, when he’d forced it down, the ceiling fixture only emitted a smoky glow from inside its plastic shade, a shade patterned with all the colours of a tin of fruit cocktail.

He stared at the cluttered room and his distaste and irritation fashioned fantasies of destruction about everything inside it: the rosewood sideboard; the gas fire grille with its plastic coals and concealed light bulbs that would glow in the hearth; the ancient television in a wooden cabinet, the small screen concave like a poorly ground lens in a pair of NHS spectacles; the tufted sofa, exhausted and faded and reduced from an article once plush and dark but now sagging into the suggestion of a shabby velour glove dropped from a giant’s hand. All of it was an affront to his taste. The furniture and appliances also made him morose, though glad that he’d been born in the mid-70s so that he’d not had long to wait for styles to dramatically change and appear modern over the next decade.

Beneath his feet a red carpet swirled with green fronds and made him think of chameleons’ tongues licking fire. He looked down at the weave and his focus was drawn into the pattern. The carpet absorbed most of the dim electric light too, and drained the last of his optimism.

As if he’d just uttered an inappropriate remark in polite company, from the dusty gloom of the sitting room an odd chastening quality descended upon his spirits.

Frank reached out and touched a wall, without really understanding why he felt the need to. The paper was old and fuzzy against his fingertips, the vine pattern no longer lilac on cream but sepia on parchment. About him the warmth and powerful fragrance of the room intensified in tandem with his curious guilt.

Momentarily, his thoughts were weighted with remorse, as if he was being forced to observe the additional distress that his spiteful thoughts about the decor had inflicted upon someone already frightened and . . .
bullied
. He even felt an urge to apologise to the room out loud.

Only the sound of a delivery truck reversing and beeping outside stirred Frank from his inexplicable shame. The unpleasant feelings passed and he surveyed the room again.

Where to start?
Before he could pull up a single carpet tack, the furniture would have to be removed. All of it.

He reached for his phone. This also meant that the terrible Formica dining table with extendable flaps would still be crowding the second downstairs room, along with the hideous quilted chairs. He checked and confirmed that all of the vendor’s furniture remained in place. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he whispered, and wondered why he’d kept his voice down.

Frank jogged up the narrow stairwell to expel a sense of fatigue, presumably caused by the stifling air or the anticipation of renovating the house.

The master bedroom was still choked by the immense veneered walnut wardrobe that he’d seen during his two viewings of the property. Beside it a teak dresser stood before him in defiance. A bed that had probably survived the Luftwaffe’s bombing of munitions factories on the nearby Grand Union Canal appeared implacable and vast enough to fill what remained of the floor-space.

One quick look around the door of the second bedroom revealed that it was also being used
in absentia
by the previous owner, as a depository for cardboard suitcases, dated Christmas decorations, candlewick bedspreads, candy-striped linen and knitting paraphernalia.

On the tiny landing, while standing beneath the white hardboard loft hatch, Frank wondered if the old woman had even moved out, or perhaps come back home. ‘She’s in a retirement home, I think. Couldn’t cope. Went a bit funny. Dementia or something,’ the wanker that was the estate agent, Justin, at Watkins, Perch and Manly, had said when Frank had asked about the former occupant’s history. So why hadn’t her relatives collected her things?

Maybe she had no one at the end
.

Frank was overwhelmed by an unwelcome notion of age, its indignities, its steady erasure of who you had once been and the recycling of your tiny former position in the world. The same tragic end might befall him one day.
Right here too
.

He was disoriented by a sudden acute empathy with a loneliness that might have been absolute. It took a conscious effort for him to suppress the awful feeling. Wiping his eyes, he went back downstairs.

He listened to an answering machine at the estate agents and left a curt message for Justin. Then turned about in the living room and forced a change of tack in his thoughts. He visualised the transformation of the house that he and Marcus would effect: wooden floors, white walls, wooden blinds, minimalist light fittings, dimmers, a wall-mounted TV, black and white movie stills in steel frames on the walls, leather furniture, a stainless-steel kitchen, a paved yard for outside dining, a spare room for his gadgets and guests, fitted closet space and nothing in the master bedroom but his new bed and a standing lamp. Clean lines, simple colours. Space, light, peace, modernity, protection.

He had his work cut out.

On the Friday of Frank’s first week in the house, the former resident’s furniture was still in place, as it had been for long enough to leave the carpet dark beneath the sofa and the solitary armchair in the living room. This had prevented him stripping the walls. Until the furniture was hauled away, the kitchen was the only part of the house that he could dismantle, even though he had become fond of using it to make egg and chips, which he’d not eaten since he was at school. He also liked to listen to the radio in that room, and BBC Radio Two, which he couldn’t recall ever hearing since childhood. As a result, he’d staved off pulling down the old wooden cabinets with their frosted-glass doors. There was also something cosy and reassuring about the cupboards and the little white stove. And anyway, as Marcus was due to arrive with his tools the following morning, Saturday, Frank was able to postpone the destruction until that time.

He needed groceries too for the weekend and hadn’t organised himself sufficiently to shop at a supermarket, so he’d been dipping in and out of the local shop to feed himself. The store was called Happy Shop, and was conveniently situated at the end of the road. A strip-lit cave run by a smiling Hindu man. This would be his fourth trip to the store in a week.
Or had it been more than that?
Didn’t matter and he was due a treat, which might just be the Arctic Roll that he’d been eyeing up the day before.
Or had that been Wednesday?
Nothing had seemed to define the days of his first week in the house; they had all been slow and pleasant.

Frank hadn’t been out much that week either, and now found himself craving human company. Going round the local shops was the furthest he’d ventured all week, because the house was immensely warm and cosy and it had made him consider the world outside the front door as not being either of those things.

On leave for the first time in six months, he’d quickly slumped into a routine of slouching on the sofa each morning to watch the greenish TV screen. This had been his first opportunity for ages to relax, which must have accounted for his torpor. But the house untied his knots wonderfully; he’d slept as if he was in a coma for an hour after lunch too, until his shows came on. Not that he’d ever seen any of the television programmes before, due to work, but he’d quickly discovered preferences on the five terrestrial channels available to him.

In the cupboard under the stairs he’d found a tartan shopping trolley on wheels. It had been parked beside a carpet sweeper that he was sure he could flog on eBay to a retro nut. Having to fetch and carry so many tins all week from Happy Shop had made the idea of using the trolley gradually less of a joke as the week progressed. And before he left the house on Friday he even paused outside the cupboard and wondered if anyone young might laugh at him in the street if he went out with the trolley. But if they did, he wasn’t sure he’d care.

Inside Happy Shop his usual tastes deserted him. The idea of sushi, or stir-fries, or anything with rice and coconut milk, or anything that had been messed about with, like the curries and chillies that he often ate, all running with sauce . . . turned his stomach. Revolted him, in fact. The store hoarded forgotten treasures from any 70s childhood and he’d spent his first week eating tinned pink salmon with a brand of white bread that he hadn’t known was still baked. There had been lots of tinned rice pudding in his new diet too, a Victoria sponge, ice-cream packaged in cardboard, and Mr Kipling French Fancies for pudding. He had rediscovered his enjoyment of condensed milk and individual frozen chicken pies. And he’d bought, for the first time in his life, a round English lettuce.

Up in Happy Shop, within minutes, a packet of Birds Eye fish fingers and a tiny bag of minted peas rustled in his basket. There were four baskets at the front of the shop that smelled of newspaper and tobacco. A tin of mandarin segments, strawberry-flavoured Angel Delight –
they still sold it in sachets!
– a box of PG Tips and a jar of Mellow Bird’s coffee went into the basket next. He avoided anything with onions as he’d recently gone off them.

To his growing haul, and because he missed its fragrance, he added some Pledge furniture polish that he remembered being stored under a sink in his family home; once he got busy with a duster and some Pledge, the veneered finish on the wardrobe would come up a treat, as would the rosewood sideboard and the teak dresser.

Frank had become fond of using the cupboard above the cooker as a space for treats, and had often found himself dipping into it before he watched telly in the afternoon. Inexplicably, the true purpose of the cupboard had suggested itself to him. So, in Happy Shop, he bought a bag of Murray Mints and a Fry’s Turkish Delight.

Almost done. What else did he need? Washing-up liquid. He seized one of the green and white plastic bottles of Fairy Liquid. He hadn’t seen that packaging in years. When he smelled the red nozzle, the fragrance of his childhood summers made him giddy. Overexposed images turned in his memory: running in swimming trunks, grass blades floating in a paddling pool, the plastic bottom blue, the water warm, suffocating with laughter as he was chased by his brother, who squirted him with water from a Fairy Liquid bottle, trying to swim in the paddling pool – though the water was never deep enough and his knees bumped the bottom – but then lying face-down in the warm water for five seconds before springing up to see if his mum was worried that he’d drowned. And he saw deckchairs in his mind too, with his mom and nan in them, watching him and smiling. He was rewound to such an extent that he even thought he’d detected a trace of creosote on a garden fence, that tang of burned oil and timber.