Genie and Other Weird Tales (2 page)

The blast flung the snipers hither and thither, and confusion reigned for miles around. By the time they'd rescued the injured, retrieved the dead, sifted through the mess and realised Trankvil had survived he was hurtling across Russia on a sleeper train, unable to close his eyes, trying to think of igneous rocks and sediment, anything but the screams of those who'd been blinded and flayed by the showers of glass, the blooded little boy clutching a puppy, the warped bike of the girl who'd lived next door who'd once given him a chocolate egg. He strove to banish these memories, writhing and gasping and knuckling his eyes, and sometimes they'd dissolve, only to reform with ever greater clarity. They were more vivid than any dream or film he'd seen before, far removed from the sanitised snuff movies that had once filled him with zeal.

He still prays for sleep, promising the Unknowable that from now on he will devote all his energy to prevent violence wherever it occurs, and will do everything in his power to persuade people away from wrongness. He will look his erstwhile mentors in the eyes, he will confront them, he will lay down his life, he will gladly submit to torture, if only the waking dreams could stop, if only he can sleep, just for an hour or two.

Genie will follow him now to the end of his days, hiding in the shadows of his waking dreams. Every time he feels himself drifting into longed for sleep, he hears her whisper that he still has one wish left, which he'd be foolish not to use.

Elaine often talks in her sleep but last night was a real shocker. Everything about the preceding day augured well: our timely arrival in the hut complex that enabled us to catch a good two hours of sun, crisp bedsheets, a perfumed offering on the pillows, polite staff, trimmed lawns, languid sprinklers, and in the evening the atmospheric but not too intrusive croak of the cicadas over the roar of the surf. At dinner I threw caution to the wind and chose from the menu without asking the waiter to translate, and was rewarded with what I supposed was an oriental version of Duck a l'Orange. Elaine seemed to unwind as we ate. There was no longer any sign of the tiny spasm in her left upper eyelid that's been afflicting her since starting her new job at the wellness centre, and she seemed at ease as she indulged in a little innocent people watching, earwigging on the other guests. The small price we paid for the uneventful journey was that we'd exhausted all our topics of conversation by dinner. It's a blessing to be so at ease with each other in silence. And following dinner we enjoyed the longest stretch of uninterrupted Scrabble play in the history of our marriage.

So the night's little episode has left me feeling thwarted and short changed. It's been tough for me this last year and I need a proper break. Both my maternal grandparents have died, and while this puts Elaine and I in an excellent position financially it marks the end of an era for me. They're interwoven into many of my memories so it's left me feeling rather raw. That coupled with the promotion at work, and the need to find a bigger flat. Then there's this business idea that my new friend Alex keeps pestering me about. I've decided against it, I'd be mad to leave such a secure job but I keep having these moments of doubt, a feeling of letting a golden opportunity slip through my fingers.

I'd describe the rest of the evening after dinner as one of gentle bliss, playing Scrabble in deckchairs on our hut veranda by the light of a citronella candle, skin aglow and belly full, drowsy lidded and content. Looking back there may have been a warning, a precursor to Elaine's little episode. When she rubbed her eyes and said “The upper left quadrant is describing our marriage,” I laughed reflexively. But then I spotted the words “ennui”, “doldrums” and “yawn” in that corner of the board and it rather took the wind out of my sails. I'd assumed the joke would be a funny one, and laughed before I got it, but I felt like my good will had been abused. I think I'd have forgotten that tiny incident if it hadn't been for what followed in the night. My equanimity soon reasserted itself, and we enjoyed another hour of pretty decent Scrabble before bed.

It had been a long day so we both fell asleep before our heads hit the pillow, I think. But later that night I found myself awake. For a few moments I didn't know where I was, puzzled by the sound of crashing surf and the long moon-shadow of the ceiling fan. Then I remembered, and for a few minutes I savoured happy, idle thoughts. Elaine's head lay a little way from mine on the same pillow. I could just make out the outline of her nose and chin, and sound of her peaceful, even breath. Then the flimsy curtain fluttered in the breeze from the beach. A shaft of moonlight fell across her face and I saw the whites of her eyes.

I leant up on my elbow. “Elaine!” – a hoarse, shouted whisper. My heart thumped in my ears. The curtain drifted back and her face was in shadow again. She continued to breathe. Then I saw her chin move and her mouth open. Her voice came out in a rasping hiss.

“Elaine is sleeping. As she must.”

Was this a game? I wondered. It didn’t feel like a game. Normally the sleep talk was all endearing nonsense. “Then who are you?”

“I am Eleanor.” Again, the hiss.

Was I really having a conversation with my wife's unconscious mind? I felt a guilty thrill, as though I'd discovered her secret diary in a draw. “Are you Elaine’s friend?”

“I have been with Elaine from before she was born.”

I don't really know what happened next. The words just slipped out. I'm normally so careful about saying the right thing. “Does Elaine love me?”

“Elaine loves everybody”

That threw me. “Do
you
love me?” This no longer felt like a game.

“I loved you in June, July and August when we were on fire.”

I thought back to the previous summer, moving in to our new flat, the DIY, the takeaways and DVDs, and concluded she must be talking about the summer before that, when we first met. “And now?” I said, unable to stop myself pushing my luck.

“I fear a life of birch veneer and flimsy props, of saggy soft furnishings and your stale beery breath as you stumble home for a feeble fuck.”

“Elaine!” I shook her shoulder.

“Elaine is sleeping. I am Eleanor. Elaine needs to sleep because she is tired from pretending she finds your jokes funny.”

A drop of sweat trickled down my cheek. I brushed it away.

“Elaine does not want you to know when you bore her, because she loves you. As she loves her Mum, and the Queen, and Ruby.” Ruby was our labrador.

“So you find me boring?”

“I don’t find you at all.”

“I mean Elaine finds me boring?”

“Not all the time.”

“So some of the time?”

“Time and time again.”

“So what does Elaine want?”

“Elaine wants you?” She said this in a plaintive voice, rasp-free.

“But she finds me boring?”

The harsh rasp returned. “As she finds her Mum, and the Queen, and Ruby boring.”

“So what should I do?”

“I think you’ve done enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“
You
think you’ve done enough”

“I think what?”

“You’ve ticked your boxes, your trophy is on the mantel piece, time to kick back and decay. And you will be the fine upstanding victim when I rip away the cosy rug and send us all spinning.”

“Elaine!” I shook her again. “Are you having a bad dream ?”

“Elaine is sleeping. I am only allowed out on nights like this.”

The curtain fluttered in the breeze and again I saw her face in the moonlight, eyes wide open, nostrils flaring. Then her jaw sprang wide and she inhaled sharply. I panicked. This was too much. She looked frenzied and possessed. I flailed around, feeling for the light switch on the bedside table.

“Choo!” she sneezed as I turned on the light.

I turned back to Elaine and saw her looking around bleary eyed and blinking. She reached over and got a tissue from her bedside table, and then smiled at me.

“Sorry babe, just a big sneeze,” she said, then hugged me and kissed me on the temple before rolling over.

I turned off the light, lay down properly, and told myself it was all just nonsense. Dreams are just shreds of life jumbled up. There's no point in trying to make sense of them, so there's no point in trying to talk to someone who's talking in their sleep. Any one who tries is asking for trouble. I felt myself drifting under, and started to dream that Elaine and I were on a spiral waterslide inside a shell I'd found on the beach in the afternoon.

I was jolted awake by a belch and a hiss from the other side of the bed.

“Stupid fat fuck.”

Henry was very proud of his calm outward demeanour. It seemed to him like a malign force had filled his life with irritants designed to reduce him to a whimpering, twitching mess. He frequently congratulated himself on his ability to resist this malign force and maintain a peaceful facade.

The most irritating agent of this malign force was his business parter, Alex Shuttlecock. Instead of counting sheep at night Henry would sooth himself to sleep by listing the ways in which Alex was irritating, and congratulating himself on not letting them get to him: his defiant emphasis on the last syllable of his surname when he introduced himself with a wink; his harlequin pantaloons; his love of tech jargon and inspirational quotes; his ability to combine the two to nauseating effect; the way he either sat slumped in his chair massaging his testicles through the pockets of his harlequin pantaloons, or contorted himself into weird postures over his keyboard as if tortured by the force of his genius; his habit of swiping his smart phone screen as he talked to Henry, only occasionally looking up to cast him a sour glance; the way he charmed and effervesced in front of other people, which caused them to comment on how lucky Henry was to work with him; his description of himself as a 'Zen Master of the Digital Renaissance,' and the difficulty of pinning down what it was he actually did. The way he scoffed when Henry asked him when the first phase of the product would be finished and when they'd be able to market it properly.

“The word 'finished' does not belong in this domain,” Alex would say. “We iterate.”

Henry knew that these things were sent to test his calm outward demeanour by the force responsible for all the irritating things in the world.

The second source of irritation was his fiancee, Elaine, and it baffled him how someone he loved so much could pose such a threat to his hard won equanimity and poise. His life had improved in so many ways after moving in with her. She'd been coaxing him away from eating meat, and now this was something he only did on Wednesdays when he'd cook himself a massive bolognese while she attended her book club. He'd also benefited from the meditation and mindfulness exercises she bought home with her from the wellness clinic where she worked in the city, and knew that they helped him maintain and strengthen his calm outward demeanour.

However, she did have the power to irritate. Her gentle but persistent questioning was not in the same league as Alex's crassness, but that made it all the more irksome. The conversation would start in a pleasant vein as they prepared their evening meal, a fun process of chopping, grating, juicing and steaming over a few glasses of wine, with Henry being given the opportunity describe how he'd endured another day in the same room as Alex Shuttlecock. But after dinner the questions would start, in different forms each night but always with the same underlying thrust: When would vast profits from the business he'd started with Alex enable them to move from their basement flat in an outer London suburb to a detached home in a home counties village? Did he think that if he'd kept freelancing as an advertising copywriter instead of ploughing their nest egg into the business with Alex that they'd by now be able to afford to move into a semidetached house in a slightly nicer outer London suburb? How come Alex had time to do his own freelance work when Henry did not? How did he think that being cooped up in a basement flat with only a small patch of green at the back was affecting the mental health of Ruby, the Labrador she'd brought from her last relationship with a stockbroker? What state did he think Ruby would be in if her Aunty Sarah wasn't living around the corner and able and willing to look after her during the day and sometimes much of the evening? And worst of all: What was it that Copyware, the business he'd started with Alex Shuttlecock, actually did? What was it that he, Henry Fenton, actually did?

Henry always answered the questions with bloodless precision, but sometimes he'd feel pressure building inside him when the questioning intensified and he'd find his gaze being drawn from Elaine's impish eyes to the stainless steel knife set that hung above the faux vintage digital radio. Unpleasant thoughts would occur unbidden, and he'd excuse himself and retire to the shed that stood at the edge of their tiny patch of garden to smoke a joint and work on the construction of a matchstick replica of a sixteenth century galleon.

The third great irritant that linked the first two irritants was the difficulty of his job, which was to attract investment and to sell a product that, while groundbreaking, was still under development. The person responsible for the development was Alex Shuttlecock, so it was difficult to get a steer on how close it was to being finished without being overwhelmed by jargon and inspirational quotes. But Henry was supposed to prove to potential investors and clients that the product did what the company literature said it did, and that was not straightforward. Henry had written the literature when he was full of zest and hope, promising that the tech would be able to collate and digest masses of data about habits and aspirations and produce copy that could sell any product or service. This would remove the need for copywriters at advertising agencies, and the algorithms that produced the copy would be based on years of research and would be tweaked by the technology itself which would never stop learning and self-improving as long as it had access to data. Alex Shuttlecock, the self described digital renaissance man, was in daily contact with the people on a distant continent who were actually building the app, and he assured Henry that the current teething problems were only temporary.