Imperfect Strangers (14 page)

CHAPTER
19

I wish
the little Keith that resides in my mind would keep the memories to himself. Whatever this one was, I broke from it in a cold sweat. I’m only two hours into my shift, and already this feels like the longest Friday that I’ve ever worked. Saturday being so full of promise it almost feels as if it will never arrive.

Checking my watch every ten minutes isn’t going to make it go any faster, but my mind races with the possibilities of what might be. And like playing a fish, I let the fantasy run its own course rather than risk forcing it and snapping the line of connection. Up on the thirteenth floor
, all is in darkness. As I look from the corridor into the office and Sally’s desk within, I consider entering. The city scene beyond the room is quite active, car-lights of red and white stream like a string of beads over its inky-black surface. Seven thirty is too early to enter rooms where I’m not supposed to be, and with reluctance, knowing there are still people in the building, I pull myself away. I glance at my watch again, frustrated that time can move so slowly.

My pager buzzes.

It buzzed five minutes ago, and I ignored it.

Someone in the lobby has pressed the button and wishes to be let out. I consider taking the lift, but then make my way to the dim
ly lit stairwell instead. This place is my domain at night. Here, at this time, I am in charge, and whoever it is, they can wait until I get there, no matter how long it takes.

A man in a grey suit only several shades darker than his silver hair sits on the black leather couch by the reception desk talking into a mobile telephone. The interior design book I read last week would describe him and the couch as a neutral background that needed an accent colour to tie in with the rest of the room. A large palm with sweeping serrated leaves dominates a collection of plants to his left. The combination of well dressed man and arranged plants looks like a photo shoot in a clothing catalogue. When I quietly move from the unlit stairwell into the brightly lit foyer
, it startles the man, which amuses me.

“I don’t want to discuss it over the phone, Kerry,” he says, sounding a little cross. The name is familiar enough to make the hairs on my neck stand to attention, but I don’t know why. “No, I wouldn’t want my wife to find out!” He sounds angry now, but quietly so, talking through gritted teeth and looking away from me as if that means I won’t be able to hear. “Can we meet
…? Okay… Thirty minutes?”

He hangs up and I keep a straight face as the man lifts his head and looks at me. If he is irritated by my slow response he hides it well. This art of reading body language is more difficult than I’d dared to imagine. Without speaking,
and with no change to his expression, he rises to his feet and makes his way across the wide lobby to the doors. He looks out into the night, not once glancing back at me walking towards him. I will look at the book later and see if I can learn anything.

I unlock the door
and keeping my posture open to show that he doesn’t intimidate me, I say, “good-night,” as he exits.

The man pauses a moment in the doorway – a twist in the narrative of our respective body dialogue –
he then turns to face me. “Pete, one of my employees is still up there. Floor sixteen, Dagon Graphics. Thought you’d like to know.”

I nod my understanding
then watch the man disappear down the steps before locking the door.

The corridor lights are already dimmed on the timer
s. Floor sixteen has extra illumination though. Slats of bright light cut into the gloom through half-closed venetian blinds. The gaps cast horizontal strips onto the wall opposite. With cat-like steps I make my way down the corridor. When I look through the slats I see a man sitting in front of a computer screen. I can only see the back of his head, his hair gelled into the wind-swept kind of sculpt which seems to be fashionable these days. Quietly as I can manage, I open the door and step into the room and tap him on the shoulder. The man I take to be Pete almost leaves his seat with fright. His hand on his chest, patting his ribcage, he swivels the chair to face me. I keep a straight face, but inside I’m howling with laughter and little Keith’s giggling madly.

“Oh, it’s you,” he breathes, his eyes wide with alarm. “Made me jump.”

“Sorry…”

A silence hangs in the air between us. Pete is perhaps the same age as me, but as far as having anything in co
mmon we could be decades apart.

“Er
… You wanting me to leave or something? Keith, isn’t it? Only I’ve got this job to finish. I’ll perhaps be another hour yet.”

Pete twists his lips, and I know the expression signifies something, but I can’t remember what it might be.

“No,” I say, stepping beyond Pete’s chair while looking around the room. “Just doing my rounds, that’s all. I saw the light in here, and... I thought everybody had already gone... I was going to switch it off. The light.” I’m allowed to enter the offices for that now: part of the office complexes green policy.

“Well, I’ll be another hour yet. If that’s alright?”

A different tone has entered Pete’s voice, which proves as difficult to interpret as his expression. Impatience maybe? Annoyance, but well disguised? Indifference possibly? Certainly not deference, despite the questioning tone.

“Yes, it’s alright,” I answer, before being deliberately taciturn and adding to the bubble of silence that already fills the void between us. Most people don’t cope well with silen
ce in the company of strangers.

“Did you want anything else?”

I decide that I won’t immediately answer, as I look around the walls, at the elaborate artwork in stark looking frames of plain aluminium. “What is it you do here?”

“Graphics,” Pete says. “For printing mostly
. Some web design. But mostly for print: brochures and posters and packaging. My boss does the designing. Mostly, I just manipulate images, mostly.”

He used the same word four
times in one short passage of speech; two in the same sentence – not very literate. “What’s that involve?” I try to mask from my voice the genuine enthusiasm I have for learning anything new.

“Alright, then,” Pete says
, beckoning me over to his desk, “I’ll give you a quick demo.” Pete moves the mouse around the desktop, his eyes fixed on the huge screen. Various pictures that look like folders open to reveal a column of other folders that have titles by the side. Pete quickly clicks on them to open yet more folders. By the time I’m standing at the side of Pete, two images scroll onto the screen. The images are almost identical and depict a group of five women in glitzy clothes who look to be out-on-the-town. Mother would have referred to them as the kind of brazen-hussy to be avoided, if you know what’s good for you.

“Pull a chair over, Keith. I’m Pete, by the way.”

I draw a chair from the desk next to Pete’s and sit down. Surprisingly, Pete shakes my hand and reveals his upper teeth in a seemingly genuine smile.

“Right, then. See these two images?” Pete begins, using the arrow to point as he speaks. “They’re for a packaging update were working on for a range of stockings. This one on the right is the image that the client prefers, but one of the models is squinting. See?” The
arrow hovers around the squint.

Nodding that I’ve seen it, I realise he’s looking at the screen, not at me. “Where the arrow is.”

“Cursor.”

“Curser, right. Not arrow.” Curser
:
someone who uses obscenities or oaths to bring harm to someone or something
. That doesn’t make sense, but I say nothing.

“Her face is fine on the other picture. See? But the client doesn’t like the body posture of the two women on the right. So what I do is this.” Pete begins moving the mouse, clicking on various icons. He draws a dotted line around the preferred face from one image and uses it to replace the squinting face of the preferred image. He then proceeds to select further icons, and zooms into a close up of the image
; he then blends the join with pixelated paint so that it is untraceable. When he zooms out I look closely, and there’s something odd about the once-squinting woman’s appearance.

“What do think to that, then?” Pete asks, leaning back in his chair looking rather smug.

“Very good.” I mean it. The demonstration was quite impressive. But the peculiar look of the whole irritates me. I wonder if Pete’s even noticed as I point to the screen. “Looks a bit odd there.”

“Yeh, that’s a slight difference in the lighting and colour hue. Just needs masking off and adjusting. Normally I’d take a lot longer than I just have. Done properly, you’d never tell. I could even put a different person’s head on, and you wouldn’t be able to tell. Well, Obviously if I put your head on, say, the torso of a body-builder you’d tell, but–”

“Why?”

“Well, because... you know..
.? Me too, if I put mine on one of them inflated hulks. Obviously, they’d not be the same person. Huh, maybe not, like I’m certain their head shrinks to compensate for all the extra bulk, maybe.”

Pete laughs at that, and I’m a little confused as to why he would want to put my head on a muscle man’s body in the first place. “Why? Why w-would you want to?”

“Huh? For a laugh.” Pete flicks through a few folders then opens one that is named,
just for fun
. He clicks on an icon and an image opens which incorporates Margaret Thatcher’s head on top of a busty woman draped over a couch. Pete chuckles almost silently as the image scrolls onto the screen. “Did that image for a mate’s birthday card.”

I fail to see the funny side, but fake a small chuckle. “Very good,” I say, “but the skin colour’s different. I mean you can tell it’s not real.”

“Well, I think that’s kind of the point, Keith. Anyway, I’d best get on.”

I look around the room and wonder what it would be like to work somewhere like this with people who laugh at putting politician
s’ heads on obviously fake bodies, rather than checking the corridors of an obviously empty building. Pete and I would go to the pub after work and laugh about the card we’d just posted to our mate. I wonder what else might be in the
just for fun
folder.

“
What I actually mean, Keith, is will you leave? So I can get on.”

“Oh!
Right. Yes. Thank you for showing me.”

I pause a moment at the door, struggling with the handle, my discomfort rising in the steel of Pete’s watchful eye. People like Pete don’t laugh in the pub with the likes of me; they laugh in the pub with mates about the likes of me. Easing the door shut
, I pause a moment to make certain the word-snakes are motionless, before heading to the dark stairwell. I pause at floor thirteen, Sally’s desk drawing me with its irresistible magnetic force. Thinking better of it, realising there is plenty of night still left to kill, I head for the ground floor, to the reception, where I will sit, attempt to read my book, and wait for the building to empty of late-working stragglers.

An hour and ten minutes have passed when Pete emerges through the sw
ish of the elevator doors. I sit upright on the chair behind reception, an open book and an empty mug on the desk.

“I was wondering,” I say, as Pete approaches. “That thing you did with the picture. Can you do that on any computer? A computer at home?”

Pete sighs and glances at his watch before deviating from the exit doors and heads toward the desk. He can’t get out until I unlock the door anyway. “Yeh, sure,” he says, swaying his head from side to side as he walks, like a boxer dodging a punch. “But you need a computer that’s powerful enough to run the right software. Like an Apple G5 running Photoshop, for example.”

“Photoshop?”

“That’s the programme I was using to alter the images. It’s expensive, but it’s the best. Also, you need a good scanner to get decent images in there in the first place. Well, that or a good digi-camera. And a good printer too, if you want them to look anything like decent when you print them off.” Pete takes another look at his watch. “You gonna let me out then, or what?”

I saunter from behind the desk, taking my time. In here I’m in charge, I want to tell him, but I don’t. I demonstrate it instead, not rushing, fumbling with the large bunch of keys
that hang by a chain from my belt-loop. “Mac-G5 and Photoshop. Good scanner. Good camera. Good printer. Got it.”

As I watch Pete descend into the dark of night b
eyond the office complex steps, promising myself an hour of relaxation in Sally’s chair, I take the silken-ball from my pocket, hold it to my nose and inhale the scent of passion.

CHAPTER
20

That first time we wet the bed
we got a good dose of what-for: a whole new level of what-for that began with a cleansing. It’s necessary, she said. We had to be scrubbed of the dirty-boy bed-pee. Into a bath of cold water she added cups of bleach. She then scrubbed every inch of our skin with the stiff-bristled brush.

“Dirty. Filthy. Dirty. Filthy.” She chanted as she scrubbed, breaking the monotony of it occasionally to add
: “bet you did it for spite.” Although she was by now in word-snake mode and it ran more as, “Bechadidditferspyt.” She spat the end of that phrase - spyttt. Spat it with real green venom, her saliva spraying our face.

She stood on the rim of the bath then, her hand on the wall for balance, and unhooked one end of the rag-drying
rope. She had to stride over us, one foot on either side of the tub, to reach the end above our head. We looked away. We looked at the wall, rather than risk chancing a glance up her skirt. Rather than look at her red skeletal knees. Knees like butchered bones. Knees red-raw from neat bleach and crawling on the kitchen floor, scrubbing at dirt that didn’t exist with the brush that had just scrubbed our skin.

The rope fell into the tub, remember? Some of the length into the water, some of it trailed over our shoulder and our hiked up knees, which were dithering because the water was so cold. We flinched, picturing the bleached-blood-rags that usually hung from its length
: the bleached-blood-rags of shame that dripped pink-bleach-foam into the tub, hanging in the bathroom because they were too shame-filled to be shown the light of day.

Tears brimmed in our eyes, but we held them back didn’t we?

Yes. A bleach bath is quite enough, without a dose of somattercryfer on top of it.

But it turned out that the bleach bath was not enough, didn’t it? Dirty boys – dirty, filthy boys – do not deserve towels. The flannelette pyjamas, when she told us to dress without first drying off, stuck to our skin, absorbing the stench of watered down bleach. They felt uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the rope when she drew it from the water and wound it around our wrists, then around our elbows, wound it so tightly that we thought the bones would pop from our sockets.

We knew the bed would be wet, and we knew we were in for an uncomfortable night. We didn’t quite realise just how uncomfortable a night, though; we didn’t realise that we were not going to be sleeping in our bed.

She forced us into her bedroom, her talons scratching our shoulder
blades, and opened the wardrobe door. Get in, she demanded, opening the door. We were afraid. We could see cobwebs, billowing on the fringe of darkness. It reeked of mothballs and dust and decay.

“Gerronin,” she demanded, clawing the back of our calves, tearing the skin.

Tears brimmed in our eyes, but we held them back, didn’t we?

Cobwebs trailed over our cheeks, which we were unable to brush away, as we shuffled onto the gritty board, four foot by two. We dared not look around to face her. We dared not let her see the water in our eyes. And so, kneeling there looking into the wardrobe back, we felt the rope jerk. We felt it winding around, binding our feet together and drawing our wrist close to our feet. Tight. Constricting. The sharp bones in our ankle
s seemed to pierce each other.

“You stay in there, you hear
. Yerstay-inthereyerear. If I hear a sound–”

The undisclosed threat was worse than a revealed one. Our imagination ran riot. If she hears a sound she’ll do what?

“If I hear a sound you’ll know wotfer.”

You’ll know what for – that was a ne
w one. We didn’t know what for.

We heard her undress and climb into bed, but
we continued to look at the back of the wardrobe, tears rolling down our cheeks. We prayed for the back of the wardrobe to open up on Narnia, for the goat-man to untie our bindings and warm us by his fire. But we wouldn’t tell anyone, especially the witch, because we had one of our own. We heard Mother snuffle and eventually snore, but we made not a sound because we did not want any you’ll know what for.

It was dark. Real dark. Coffin dark. And cold
: continual, shiver-inducing cold. Had our fantasy worked, and had the wardrobe back opened to a world of snow, it could have been no colder.

As we curled on the base
of the wardrobe, we realised the grit was from her shoes. Everywhere else in the house was painfully clean, but in here it was dirty. Filthy. But this is where we belonged, where we deserved to be because we were no good.

We were dirty. We were filthy.
We were nothing but a dirty, filthy, no-good boy.

You deserved all you got. You were the dirty one. I’m not you any more. I’ve got Sally now. I don’t need all this memory crap. I’ve had enough of it, so you just leave me be.