Before You Wake Page 3

  He removed his hands from his face and sat still in the darkness. The figures from the dream faded quickly.

  Some ambient light from a distant streetlamp distinguished his thin curtains from the surrounding walls. The rest of the room remained dark. Which was galling because the sound of scratching from the wrong side of the ceiling, directly above his bed, was not something he could investigate with his wide open, beseeching eyes.

  He turned sideways and scrabbled for the switch of the bedside lamp. He was so frightened, and his cringing among the bedclothes impeded his movement to such an extent, that it seemed to take about a minute for him to get the lamp switched on.

  During the appalling wait for light, he’d imagined that something was hanging from the ceiling by its feet, and that a face was no more than a few inches from his own. Moments before the room was lit, he’d also heard the sound of determined wings beating against the plaster of the ceiling. He’d imagined that an animal was struggling to squeeze back through a small hole.

  With the overhead light on, as well as the bedside lamp, the noise ceased. Frank could see that there was nothing on the ceiling either, and no evidence of any intrusion to account for the commotion above his bed. But he was left with an enduring fear that something within the building was now determined to show itself.

  He dressed hurriedly and picked up his wallet and phone. He’d leave the building and wait out the remainder of the night, walking the streets if necessary, because that was infinitely preferable to staying inside the building.

  Frank never made the stairs.

  Once the door to his room was open, he became too afraid to enter the corridor.

  Out there, on the staircase, the air was being cracked by the sound of dry wings. The noise of a dirty pigeon rising from the greasy cement of Trafalgar Square, but one hundred times louder. At the end of the passage, where a little light fell through the window over the stairwell, the silhouette was visible of someone who wasn’t Malcolm, Jimmy, Lillian or Granby.

  Nor could Frank be certain that the wizened figure’s feet were even touching the stairs. He lacked the presence of mind to speculate how it was possible for the figure to hover like that, as well as flicker in and out of his sight. The image appeared and then disappeared before the window. But whoever, or whatever, it was, the intruder was in a state of great agitation at the sight of him.

  What he could see of the form’s outline shook a misshapen head about in the air. What might have been fingers at the end of the long arms repeatedly clenched into fists, then unclenched. The idea of turning the corridor light on and seeing the figure in more detail was something Frank found too unbearable to contemplate.

  Cringing inside his doorway, he only found his voice after he’d swallowed the constriction in his throat. ‘Money. I’ll get it. Please don’t. The money. I’ll get it.’

  Somewhere upstairs in the house he heard Granby’s voice over the sound of the beating wings. ‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’ the man screamed in a kind of mantra, as if he had entered into an animal frenzy, one part fury and one part intense sexual excitement at the thought of violence and blood within the wretched building.

  Frank was sure he was about to be torn apart by the thing on the stairs. Or, even worse, taken somewhere else that the building offered access to, through the ceilings of its scruffy rooms. And it was at that point that enough clarity returned to his mind for him to make a suggestion. To offer a compromise to the noisy and foul air batting against his face.

  He was never sure whether he spoke, or whether his offer was a thought or even a prayer to this unnatural thing that was moving from the window and up to the ceiling of the first floor. But he closed his eyes and made a pledge that he would collect money on behalf of the thing before the window. And he boasted that he would be better at collecting than Granby ever had been.

  When a stench fouler than anything he had ever experienced engulfed his face and made him vomit onto his shoes – a miasma that might have hung over a cluttered battlefield, or a plague pit – Frank collapsed upon the hard carpet.

  What revived him was the commotion of the old wings moving upwards and through the centre of the stairwell. This noise was soon followed by a series of screams in the attic, human cries made amidst a terrible thumping, that of a solid object connecting with a wall, and with tremendous force.

  Gradually, the noises died away and silence returned to the building. A respite blessed to Frank’s battered senses.

  When he got to his feet he knew what he had to do.

  The door to Granby’s room was open, but Frank never entered. Instead, he peered inside from the doorway.

  Frank never turned the light on either. What he could see of the room was half-lit by the residual streetlight shining through the skylight. That was more than adequate.

  A ceiling sloped either side of a central roof beam.

  Bulging black bin bags covered the floor. The nearest bag was packed taut with bank notes. He assumed that all of the other bags were filled with money too.

  On the table under the window, wristwatches and items of jewellery glinted. In one corner of the room a large collection of shoes formed an ominous pile.

  In the centre of the room, as if adored by the congregation of rubbish sacks, four stone rectangles stood upright. Each short column had a small stone figure mounted upon it.

  Frank only glanced at the sculptures; he found himself unable to look upon them for longer than a second. But, as he stood in the doorway, he was in no doubt that they were rifling through his mind. Inside his thoughts, he heard a flock of little wings.

  Being so close to the figures, for so long, must have driven Granby half-mad. Even though the inanimate quartet appeared to have been carven from rock, and had since become rusticated by a great age, for a man with more intelligence and imagination than Granby, cohabitation with the figures would have been a guarantee of the fullest insanity. Merely being in their presence assured Frank of this.

  To withstand the angels for so long, Frank could only assume that Granby had sealed himself inside the old sleeping bag. It was rolled up beneath the table covered in watches and rings.

  There wasn’t much of Granby left to ask about the sleeping arrangements. What remained of him was mostly still inside the white tracksuit. The fabric was near luminous in the faint light – a sodium glow, occasionally supplemented with bursts of red from the flickering signage of the fried chicken takeaway across the street from The Angel. But the former landlord of The Angel had recently been rearranged into new configurations, fresh contortions of limb and posture.

  The curly hair had been completely torn from his head, along with most of his scalp. The top of Granby’s skull shone wetly upon the floor, directly beneath the closest column. It was not possible for the legs and arms of the living to bend in the way that Granby’s limbs now did. The man’s spine had come to resemble broken crockery covered by a handkerchief.

  As Frank’s eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, he was aware of the shapes hanging from the picture rail on wires. There were at least a score of them. At first he had mistaken the shapes for overcoats, but now realised that, although he had correctly identified at least two coats, their owners were still inside them. The other hanged figures were naked and had withered to not much more than bones. Not seeing greater detail was a blessing.

  Inside the vast house below, Frank heard the first signs of life: Malcolm closing the bathroom door and running the only working tap over the basin.

  On the second floor there must have been two empty rooms, and Frank was sick of the sight of Lillian, so make that three empty rooms.

  Frank took one final look at the smashed figure of Granby, and noticed the man’s teeth were also missing. He thought it a strange city that allowed its old gods to keep such odd tokens.

  But now he needed to get the empty second-floor rooms occupied quickly. £125 a week seemed like a reasonable rate. At least to start with.

  Always in Our
Hearts

  I could turn quickly on a wet road, fail to execute an emergency stop in time when a child runs into the road . . . lose concentration and plunge into oncoming headlights, drive too close to the vehicle in front, fall asleep on a motorway at night, reverse over a toddler not visible in the rear-view mirrors, or just get slammed into by another car at any time . . .

  Ray Larch often marvelled at the sheer range of potential traffic accidents awaiting motorists. Such thoughts mostly occurred to him in the few hours when he wasn’t driving a taxi. As a mere speck among millions of other motorists, from the moment he turned the ignition key he knew he risked an involvement in any number of incidents, at any time, as did anyone inside a vehicle. It was a lottery and every driver and passenger had a ticket.

  He guessed the clincher about the outcome of an accident came down to reactions. In critical situations, his reactions needed to adequately respond to a situation within the time it took him to inhale a breath. The speed of his reactions required cooperation from the equally rapid reactions of the other road users and pedestrians involved. Considering the outcome of the wrong choice on either side of this nexus, was there even a full second available to make those crucial choices of stop, accelerate, swerve or jump?

  When he thought of the deaths, the physical torment and human misery of long-term physical rehabilitation, the lifelong grief or disability that he could inflict upon an individual through a traffic accident – in the amount of time it took a person to realise they were having an accident – he often wondered why he was even allowed to drive a car at all. Or why anyone else was allowed to drive one either.

  He’d still had near misses. He had them all the time. He drove a private hire car seven days a week. He never slept more than five hours in any night and would haul himself, baffled and blinking, out of bed at 3 a.m. for an airport fare, or to pick up drunken girls in short skirts at the weekend when the clubs closed. The upskirt potential alone on those latter jobs could be the cause of any number of accidents, because when he looked in the rear-view mirror he wasn’t always checking the traffic behind him. Endeavouring to glimpse gusset, it would be so easy to jack-knife a tipsy pedestrian over the bonnet and bring an end to their days of unassisted mobility.

  The more he thought about potential accidents, the more Ray also wondered why more vehicles out there were not suddenly crashing. Or why the entire network of roads did not become one long sequence of traffic accidents. How did it all just keep going with such fallible, easily distracted creatures behind the wheels? Maybe drivers should undergo the same assessments as train drivers and airline pilots? Or did that come down to a matter of scale?

  We drive because we forget, he decided. We forget pain, we forget fear, we forget the hot-cold paralysis of near misses, we forget consequences. We forget our vulnerability: the very fragility of our bodies. We forget about our wobbling heads packed with brain matter, mounted on a thin spinal column – the weakest link in the entire animal kingdom. And we forget how we are dependent upon those minuscule threads of nerve tissue that, once severed, remove all sensation from the legs, and introduce the wheezing apparatus that will stand sentinel at our white-sheeted beds.

  We forget the picture of the car smashed beneath the truck on the hard shoulder, and the blackened silhouette of a figure burned into its seat in a motorway pileup. We forget the vestiges of wreckage in a newspaper picture in which four teenagers died. We look away from the dirty, wilting flowers tied to metal railings on that corner that you have to slow down for (if you know the road). In time, we’ll even begin to forget how we felt at the funeral of a child.

  Our entire existence was contingent on forgetting horror. Maybe the repeated infractions of our species were a direct result of us not remembering the horrors of our past infractions.

  Case in point: Ray was beginning to forget the worst of the time he clipped a cyclist on Rocky Lane, two years before. He never stopped his car. After a sudden metallic thunk against one of the passenger doors, he barely heard anything else because of the volume of his radio. Only at the edge of his hearing, as he drove away, was there a suggestion of keys hitting tarmac, somewhere behind his car.

  At the time, Ray had been doing at least forty m.p.h. in a thirty zone, and weaving around a row of badly parked cars. He never noticed the cyclist until the back of a man’s jacket filled his windscreen.

  The kid was black, he thought, though he wasn’t sure. He’d glanced into his rear-view mirror and there was absolutely no cyclist in the road. He’d put his foot down because he’d barely touched the guy, or so he told himself later. Not for a fraction of a second had he thought of stopping. Getting away had been his only consideration.

  When he decided against buying the next day’s Mail, Ray realised that he did not want to know anything about the night before. He avoided television and left the radio switched off for three entire weeks. By avoiding all local news, he felt that he’d not been involved in what might have happened. By the end of his self-imposed news blackout he was almost certain that his car had in fact only grazed the cyclist’s knee. The kid must have quickly turned his bicycle onto the pavement, which is why he had vanished from Ray’s rear view of the road. Ray told himself this so many times that he eventually believed it to be the truth. But only for a while.

  Three weeks after the incident, and long after the paint job on his car had dried, Ray was compelled to return to Rocky Lane on his way to a fare at Alexander Stadium. A great mound of flowers at the roadside was tied to a lamppost in more or less the same place where he’d come upon the cyclist so unexpectedly.

  Two days later, at the taxi rank on Colmore Row, Ray made an offhand mention of the flowers on Rocky Lane. As he spoke out loud he fiddled with his phone to appear casual. He learned from another driver that he had indeed killed a teenager. The youngster had been riding a mountain bike to the Hamstead chip shop, without a helmet or lights. The other taxi driver wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think there were any witnesses.

  ‘Fucking cyclists,’ they’d both agreed, and rolled their eyes knowingly.

  Ray had never again driven along Rocky Lane and still circumnavigated that entire estate if he was ever asked to pick up or drop off close to it. He’d also arrived at the conclusion that if we vividly remembered the misery of every cold, cut and bruise, in anticipation of the next illness or misfortune, we would all go mad. The ability to forget was a kind of advance braking system of the mind. The effectiveness of his own mental ABS surprised him.

  So, did the insane have perfect recall? Did they possess the ability to imagine the consequences of existence, and the full horror of those consequences? Now there is an idea, Ray thought, and turned into the street to pick up his next fare.

  Ray had never made a pickup from this part of North Birmingham and was unaware that residential houses were even still standing in the area where Hockley became Aston and the Jewellery Quarter. The place was close to the city centre and remained a labyrinth of closed redbrick warehouses, revived industrial estates and hole-in-the-wall commercial interests attached to broader industries. These were interspersed with cash-and-carries, mostly closed retail units, developments of unsold flats, barely functioning churches and one or two old-school Midlands pubs.

  His satnav directed him to a small settlement of houses by a wall of red brick. The houses were opposite a patch of waste ground used for storing white commercial vans.

  The side of the street that remained residential was typical of a Midlands terraced row: the houses remained permanently in shadow, slouched at the curb as unappealingly as a group of scruffy labourers stood in line for work both soul-destroying and poorly paid. This street had somehow escaped clearances, Luftwaffe bombs and gentrification.

  The eight terraced houses also looked to be shuffling away from the road as if they didn’t want to meet the eye of any passing motorist. Their dark, begrimed windows and peeling window frames didn’t give much away about their interiors. At a glance, Ray would have
guessed the houses were all unoccupied. From the rear of one of the properties dirty black smoke rose into the sky, suggesting a bonfire.

  The man who emerged from number 129 came out with a smile that Ray found disproportionate to the prompt arrival of a taxi at his address. He wasn’t wearing a coat and his feet looked too big for the pair of brown slippers at the end of his legs.

  The front garden was small and a wreck, filled with sodden cardboard boxes containing bottles, rusting tins and what looked like garden waste. Bracken sprouted high enough to obscure the ground-floor sash window.

  The call from the controller had listed this address and provided the name John and a landline phone number. ‘Wants taking to various places’ was the only instruction. Apart from the last piece of information it was an ordinary enough job.

  Ray watched the grinning elderly man make his way to the driver’s-side window.

  ‘Afternoon!’ the man said, and then looked at a sky glooming towards a rainy dusk.

  Ray nodded, and looked about the man’s person as if querying the lack of a jacket. ‘John, is it?’

  ‘She’ll be out soon,’ John said.

  Perhaps the tatty bastard in slippers was not the passenger. Ray hoped so; he disliked the man’s half-smiling face. Unless they were attractive and female, or an airport fare, Ray found it hard not to greet every passenger with an attitude of weary, surly impatience. He didn’t like this tendency, but couldn’t help it. Working from seven until eleven and providing a service to the general public would make a saint irritable.

  Behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, John’s eyes were alight with excitement. ‘I’ll need a hand with her.’ He appeared surprised that Ray didn’t share his enthusiasm for the task.

  Not a fucking wheelchair.

  ‘You’ve a very special passenger this evening. You’re going all over. But she’ll look after you eventually.’ The man winked to embellish the tantalising suggestion of a generous tip.