The Grin of the Dark (34 page)

He demonstrates by shaking hands with his dwarfish server. As I
shake Mark's hand I notice that members of the congregation are
kissing each other. This makes me uncomfortably aware of the
headscarfed presence at my side, or rather at as much of my back as
I can manage. I don't turn away from Mark until an elbow nudges me
in the ribs, unless it's a fist; in either case it feels more like a lump of
dough or jelly. More to avoid it than in any other response I turn
towards its owner, and a hand clasps mine.

It's a hand, despite feeling like a large stuffed glove with very little
in it besides padding. Its texture and its coldness suggest leather more
than cloth. Leather would have to be old if not positively fungoid to
have grown so white, but all this is a diversion from the rest of my
predicament. My neighbour wants more than a handshake. As she
squeezes my hand so hard that I could imagine my fingers are merging
with hers, the draped head swings towards me.

I've just glimpsed a pallid pouchy cheek that looks not much less
porous than a sponge when I'm overwhelmed by light and uproar. A
spotlight has found me, and a fanfare celebrates it, or rather
headlamp beams are streaming through the spidery outlines of the
nearest stained-glass window and dazzling me to the tune of a
raucous horn. Blindness seems to swell out of the depths of the
headscarf and close around my vision, so that the face that's pressed
into mine is no more than a bloated whitish blur with eyes and teeth.
It comes with an oily smell that might belong to some kind of
makeup, though it reminds me of preservative. As the scarf drifts like
heavy cobwebs over my face I hear a whisper. 'Have a very special
one.'

It's so faint or so discreet that I'm not even certain of hearing it.
The engulfing hand releases mine, and my fingers writhe in an
attempt to dislodge a sensation of being gloved. I hear more than see
the worshippers trooping out of the church. I turn to all my family for
reassurance and to be ready to follow them the instant they leave the
pew. Eventually they move, and I lurch after them. Isn't the crowded
porch unnecessarily dim? My spine is crawling with the sense of a
presence at my back. I hurry to keep up with Natalie and Mark as
they step into the night. I'm emerging from the porch when another
whisper overtakes me. Is it 'Not long now' or 'Lots wrong now?' I'm
not sure which I would prefer even less.

As I twist around I shut my eyes, but only to clear my vision. In no
more than a couple of seconds I open them. The porch is deserted. I
dash into the church and throw the inner doors wide to reveal just the
priest and the server at the far end of the aisle. I run into the street to
be confronted by Natalie and Mark and my parents. 'What's wrong?'
Natalie says.

I could take it as another version of the whisper, not least because
it feels as if it lacks the final word. 'Where did she go?'

'Who, Simon?'

All four faces look concerned, but I'm not sure whether anyone's
pretending. 'The woman who was behind me,' I tell them.

'We were the last ones out of the church.'

'Except her. She was next to me in the pew.'

'That was Mark. There was nobody in it but us,' Natalie says and
shares a sympathetic smile with my parents, to whom she explains
'Too much travelling.' Everyone is wearing the expression as they
move towards me, even Mark. 'Looks as if somebody else needs his
sleep for Christmas,' says my mother.

I dream of being summoned out of darkness by a bell. It's the ringing
of a mobile, but not mine, because the tune that it's wordlessly
shrilling is 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas'. I twist in bed, dragging
at the emptiness that's Natalie, and grope so blindly at my old bedside
table that it shakes with age. I baptise my fingers in the mug of water
before I find the mobile. It's mine after all, and when I sprinkle my
ear I'm greeted by voices singing the song of the phone. I'm beginning
to feel it has programmed their brains by the time Mark dispenses
with the last few words to say 'Guess what I got for Christmas,
Simon.'

'Hurry up, son,' my mother calls. 'Somebody's getting restless.'

'He's been,' my father shouts loud enough to be audible through
the floor as well. 'The fat lad.'

They both sound determinedly animated, which may be a show
they're putting on for Mark. First I want to learn 'Who's been altering
my ringtone?'

'I did it for you,' says Mark.

However well he meant, the idea of interference while I was asleep
makes me uneasy, and so does his expertise. I have to thank him as a
preamble to saying 'I'll be down as soon as I'm decent.'

Mark giggles until I cut him off and scramble out of bed. I'm in my
childhood room, which has acquired a musty smell too faint for me
to locate or identify. The entire room looks faded, not just my teenage
posters of the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges that cover much
of the white walls. The furniture helps it resemble a museum of my
youth, especially the wardrobe that still won't shut tight. When I was
a child the surreptitiously open door put me in mind of an entrance
to some unimaginable place, but now, even in the pallid daylight, I
don't care for it. I remember holding it shut from within when I was
playing hide and seek.

I've yet to feel awake. I could almost fancy that I'm dreaming the
large bathroom, where the white tiles date from before I was born. I'd
be happy to accept that I dreamed some or indeed all of last night's
visit to church. Even once I've showered I have the sense that my
consciousness is strained close to breaking – that it's in real need of
closing down for a spell. I take the chance to rest my jittery eyes while
I dress, and then I set out down the childishly prolonged corridor.

A wave of dizziness seems to render the stairs as steep as they were
in Amsterdam. Everyone is in the front room, where a tree is
fluttering its lights beside a television as decrepit as the one in Egham.
My mother is wearing silk pyjamas that look sharpened by the angles
of her bones, my father is stuffed into a suit and shirt. He leaps up at
the sight of me, or intends to. 'A drink,' he pants as he makes a
second attempt.

It's clear that he and my mother have had at least one, and
Natalie's quick Christmas kiss tastes of alcohol as well. 'Aaah,' says
my mother at the spectacle and gives my father a reproachful look for
not imitating us with her. 'Sherry,' she adds, perhaps on my behalf.

My father staggers off the couch and fills a brandy glass with sweet
sherry. 'Get that down you,' he tells me. 'You've got some catching
up to do.'

My throat feels so raw I might have been shouting for hours, even
if I never heard myself. It's suffering from the harsh smell of dust on
the orange bars of the electric fire embedded in the hearth, a lump of
the past set in an earlier one. Several mouthfuls of sherry do little to
restore my dried-up voice. I smile and gesture my thanks for the
various presents my father hands me from under the flickering tree:
bunches of socks, underpants printed with grinning cartoons, a
computer mouse pad. 'It's the youngsters' time,' my mother declares
more than once, and watches anxiously while Mark unwraps books
aimed at boys of about his age. 'You can change them if you like,' she
assures him. 'We didn't know you were so old for your years.'

'It's all right, they're funny,' he says with his broadest grin.

Perhaps she feels he's overstating his enthusiasm. She takes to
uttering an irritated grunt each time my father returns from distributing
presents and drinks to plump beside her on the couch. I've
bought Mark a computer game set in a haunted city where no route
leads to the same place twice and you can never be sure what's
beyond a door you've already used. He thanks me hard, though he
won't be able to play it until we're home. I feel starved of access to
my own computer, not just for working on my book. Could this be
another reason why my mind is reluctant to function – because it
doesn't seem worth the effort to grasp so much irrelevant festive
detail? Mark starts playing one of the games on the mobile that
Natalie's parents have given him, and I feel as if he's acting out my
desire to be elsewhere. It may be his behaviour that provokes my
mother to say 'I'll bet you've never had a Christmas dinner like
mine.'

I haven't – not like this one. Either my childhood is blurred by
nostalgia or her cooking has worsened with age. Perhaps she was
ensuring that nothing's underdone. Natalie and Mark and I voice
compliments that grow increasingly wordless as we saw through our
portions of wizened turkey and well-nigh impenetrable potatoes and
sausages as black as unexposed film. I for one feel bound to
compensate for my father's silence, which seems to constrict the
panelled kitchen and intensify the heat from the black iron range.
'See, it was worth coming. That's what the Christmas boy gets,' my
mother cries as Mark disentangles another pound coin from a cellophane
wrapping encrusted with currants. Have the adults really
drunk seven bottles of wine? I take another mouthful of dessert wine
to sweeten the taste of charred pudding. 'Who's for a walk to get our
weight down?' says my mother.

All the plates and utensils have been piled in the stone sink under
the moist grey screen of a window. 'I'll do the washing-up,' I say, 'and
then I might have a nap.'

'Guess where we are, Simon.'

'Upstairs,' I mumble, because there's movement overhead.

'Of course we aren't,' Mark giggles. 'We're out.'

'I hope you haven't woken Simon,' says Natalie from further off.

It feels more as though my consciousness has omitted several
events – as though a lurch in time and space has dumped me in this
armchair from my childhood. I can't even recall walking to the front
room. My faint reflection, which looks trapped within the dormant
television screen, performs a rudimentary mime as I say 'It's all right.'

'He says it's all right.'

I'm even less convinced by the repetition, and he doesn't help by
adding 'You'll have to come and find us. Your mum and dad don't
know where this is.'

'I'm not lost at all. Can't speak for Sandra.'

'One of us has to be, Bob.'

'Well, it damn well isn't me. I'm still having my wander and then
I'll get us home.'

They sound shrunken by remoteness, which makes me blurt 'Can
you see its name, Mark?'

'I saw one a long way back. I can't now, it's dark. We're in
Something Lane.'

'I don't remember any lanes round here. How long have you been
walking?'

'Hours.'

Surely he's exaggerating, but when I peer at my watch in the light
of the Victorian streetlamp outside the window I see that they could
have left more than an hour ago. I'm about to tell him to keep talking
until they reach somewhere he can name when Natalie says 'Stop
bothering him now, Mark. Look, there's the end.'

Before I can speak, they're gone. Could the call and the
background dialogue have been a joke? I still think someone was
moving softly about upstairs. I hold onto the mobile in case Mark
rings back and rest my head against the musty cushion to listen.

When I open my eyes, however, the voices are beyond the front
door and singing as best they can for laughter. Are they really
chanting 'Good King Senseless'? The name is past by the time I
recapture some kind of awareness. Either they cut the carol short or
my mind loses hold of it, because I next hear them all on the stairs.
The flat slaps of my father's slippers on the hall floor are almost as
loud as the flapping of my mother's looser ones. My parents couldn't
have worn slippers outside the house – they must have gone upstairs
to change.

'So you didn't need to call me again,' I say to Mark.

'Not when you've got up.'

'To help you find your way back, I mean.'

'Why'd we do that?'

He and the others look as confused as I won't allow myself to be.
I'm sure it was a Christmas joke. There's no doubt in my mind that
Mark is concealing amusement, and I don't think he's alone in it. My
mother appears to have had enough of clowning, and drops on the
couch. 'Put on a show,' she urges.

My father falls to his knees in front of the television, which has
never had a remote control, and the floor quakes like California.
'Shout out when you see something you like,' he says.

'Is it all black and white?' says Mark.

'It's like us. It's a museum piece.'

'All your colour goes as you get older,' my mother says.

I suspect I'm not the only person who can't identify the link. My
eyelids sag shut, and I'm imagining every channel filled with the same
luminous gleeful face when Mark calls 'Quick, Simon, look. It's him.'

'I didn't mean shout,' my father protests. 'Spare my old head.'

He seems unable or unwilling to finish changing channels. Did I
actually glimpse a familiar face peering around the edge of the screen,
or was that my lingering imagination? 'What are you saying you saw,
Mark?'

'It was Tubby. I'm sure it was.'

'In what?'

'I don't know,' Mark says, jigging with impatience on his creaky
chair. 'Go round again.'

As my father continues his search, which looks close to automatic,
Natalie says 'It was just someone big, Mark. There are people like
that everywhere.'

'I saw his face. I know Tubby.'

Which of the programmes could have contained him? Hardly the
footage of riots after a suspected bomber was shot, nor an advertisement
for a Christmas suicide counselling service. A Berlioz
oratorio about Christ is just as unlikely a context, but I suppose a clip
of Tubby might have been among the films projected on a screen
behind the band at a Second Coming concert. My mother adds a
squeal to those emitted by the guitars, then claps her hands as the
next channel proves to be broadcasting Laurel and Hardy. 'Let's have
them. We want fun for Christmas.'

Their film could have included Tubby as an extra, but surely not
to the extent of making Ollie's face turn into his while Stan's is
swollen wider than his body by a helpless grin as he weeps at the
transformation. That's only what I dream, having been the first to go
upstairs. Later Natalie is pressed against me in the narrow bed.
Beyond the dim mass of her sleeping face, which looks enlarged by
her tousled hair, I can just distinguish that the wardrobe door is ajar.
I'm reminded of one of Lane's less comprehensible notes. What portal
did he fancy could lead everywhere? What was the medium 'in which
all must swim or drown'? Perhaps he had the cinema in mind. This
brings back his lurid grinning face, and I splash water on mine to
regain awareness of my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I'll be able
to stay awake once I'm at my desk, I vow as my mother says 'I'll bet
you've never had a Christmas dinner like this.'

My father and Natalie must be pretending not to notice the
repetition. Mark looks solemn too, but how long can he maintain the
mask? I'm afraid that any second it will give way to his Tubby face –
that he'll be overcome by mirth, at any rate. The possibility doesn't
help my appetite for the lukewarm leftovers. Besides, I've grown fat
enough; I should have joined yesterday's walk to lose some weight.
The very first mouthful makes me feel I won't be able to rise from my
chair. Nevertheless I retake my enthusiasm while Natalie and Mark
put on an equally good show. Natalie's next line, or at least the next
I'm aware of, is 'I suppose we ought to be thinking of leaving.'

'We've not had any games yet,' my mother complains. 'I thought
we'd be playing some old ones with Mark. Real ones instead of on
the phone.'

'Can't we?' Mark pleads.

'Maybe just one,' Natalie says, 'if it's quick.'

'I know, we'll play Simon's favourite,' says my mother. 'Hide and
seek.'

They never found me in the wardrobe, and nobody's going to now. If
I back into the corner I can still hold onto the half of the door that
opens. If anybody should look inside they won't see me in the gloom.
I thought I'd cleared everything into the suitcase, but an item is
hanging up behind me. I must have overlooked it from exhaustion.
It's an old coat padded fat with paper or mothballs. Perhaps I should
use it for extra concealment. Keeping hold of the door, I reach for the
hanger to inch the coat along the rail. There's no sign of a hanger, but
my fingers touch a yielding mass within the collar. I'm able to believe
it's a bag of mothballs until I feel the soft swollen chin above the
flabby neck. My fingers scrabble in helpless panic at the thick lips that
frame the bared teeth.

I seem to have forgotten how to work my body. One hand
continues to hold the darkness shut tight while the other claws at the
gleefully quivering features. Before I can snatch my hand away it
dislodges the face, which peels away from the skull and slithers
downwards. Was it some kind of parasite? As I hear it thump the
floor of the wardrobe, the bones at which my fingertips are unable to
stop fumbling give way like a puffball. My hand plunges into the
depths of the dark, taking me with it. I clutch at the door and fling
myself towards it, which slams my head against the seat in front.
'Where are we?' I gasp.

'Don't do that,' says Natalie. 'You'll have me thinking we're lost
again.'