Before You Sleep Page 5

  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.

  Frank walked back to the house, dreamy and taking short steps with his head down, as if wary of hazards underfoot, until he snapped out of the new habit and walked normally.

  When Marcus knocked at ten on Saturday morning, Frank jumped up from the kitchen stool but couldn’t account for why he was so nervous. He was being silly, but opening the front door was suddenly a cause of great anxiety. So he hovered, scarcely breathing, inside the hall beside the thermostat that looked like something from an instrument panel at the dawn of space travel. When Marcus peered through the letter flap, Frank was forced to open up.

  ‘Fuck’s going on?’ Marcus said, when he saw the kitchen. ‘I brought the tiles and units with me. This shit should be long gone by now. Your stuff can’t stay in my garage for ever, mate.’

  But, despite his friend’s disappointment, Frank craved a stay of execution for the kitchen, and hoped that he could somehow delay Marcus or persuade him not to engage in the splintering of wood and the crowbarring of those kitchen cabinets from the walls. They must have been up for decades and were still in good nick. Nothing wrong with them, in fact, so it seemed such a waste. And Frank also wanted them left alone for another reason and this motive had been nagging at him as Saturday had approached: gutting the kitchen just felt wrong. Bad, like violence. Like bullying.

  Too embarrassed by his own sentimentality to defend them, and with a heavy heart, he helped Marcus break the cupboards away from the walls, and he’d felt like crying as they did their worst with the crowbars.

  When they found the handwriting behind the first cabinet – Len and Florrie, 1964 – Frank went into the bathroom with moist eyes and smothered his face inside one of the big lemon-yellow towels that he’d found in the airing cupboard.

  The three wall cabinets and the row of cupboards were soon piled like earthquake
wreckage in the yard. The sight of the pale, unpainted wood that had been facing the kitchen wall since 1964 hit him as hard as the sight of a dead pet had once done: a rabbit rigid with the terrible permanence and unfairness of its final sleep, when it had still been loved.

  Indifferent to the inscriptions left by Len and Florrie – they had found four – Marcus cracked open tins of white emulsion and began painting the bare walls. As Marcus worked, Frank recognised that he despised his best friend.

  They didn’t have time to vandalise another room that weekend, and it was just as well, because Frank’s relationship with the house changed during the night after the desecration of the little kitchen.

  The following morning, while Frank sat doleful over toast and a mug of tea in the newly painted starkness of the kitchen, with his stainless-steel units piled up in the middle of the room, he mused that during the preceding night it was as if he’d entertained someone else’s dreams.

  All night he’d passed through a dark muddle of images that were mostly lost to him in the morning. But he did retain partial impressions of a room filled with the smoke of Silk Cut cigarettes, the clack of Scrabble tiles, and the Matt Monro song playing on a continuous loop from a black tape recorder, a device he’d seen in vivid detail with spatters of white paint upon the speakers. ‘Born Free’: that had been the song. He hadn’t heard it in years. He’d also been a guest on The Price Is Right; had somehow been inside the show while also watching himself from the sofa. It had been his goal to win a small caravan. The contest had been compelling. Just before he’d woken, he’d been standing upon the yellow lino of the kitchen floor, counting pages of Green Shield stamps. Or once he’d thought he’d awoken, because there had been someone in the bedroom with him. Talking to him between sharp intakes of breath. A small indistinct figure had also been standing at the foot of the bed.

  In the second, more vivid dream – because it must have been a dream – the standing figure had left the room quickly with its hands clutched over its face. The presence had then reappeared in the doorway as a hunched silhouette, lit by ambient light rising up the stairwell. The silhouette had taken to crouching as if in pain, and, when the figure had turned towards him, the face had remained in darkness. He was sure the person had been a woman, for whom he felt a rush of tenderness and affection and remorse, despite the shock that she had given him by appearing at the foot of his bed. When he encountered her in his sleep, he had been stricken with the same feeling of abandonment that he remembered on his first day at school.

  The dream had continued and he had found himself standing behind the small figure in the spare room. In that part of the dream, she had been bent over and was mooching through a collection of plastic bags. ‘You need to get ready. And I can’t go without it,’ she’d said to Frank, without once turning around to face him.

  He’d woken at seven and discovered that his face was briny with dried tears. He’d gone downstairs to the smell of fried sausages that competed with the stink of new paint, though he hadn’t cooked a single sausage in the house.

  The dreams turned nasty on Sunday and Monday night and were caused by the kitchen cupboards being left outside in the rain. Like his mother’s vibes about other people’s houses, Frank instinctively knew that the kitchen wreckage was the cause of his troubled sleep.

  On Sunday night, the small female figure had returned to his bedroom. But her agitation and grief had intensified and he’d woken to find her leaning over his face with her hands clasped across her mouth. He’d suspected that the glimmer of a solitary eye had been visible, but he’d seen no other features on the face of the woman of his dreams. From behind her fingers she’d muffled a horrible grunt.

  Frank had sat up in bed, his heart hammering, convinced there was an actual intruder inside his room, but then watched the figure of the small woman fade into the dark centre of the wardrobe.

  He’d quickly put lights on and conducted a search of the entire house, but there had been no one inside with him.

  On Monday night, what might have been the figure of the elderly woman was inside his room again, but on her hands and knees. He might also have dreamed about a wounded animal, because he awoke to hear something mewling and fumbling about beneath the curtains that didn’t sound like a person. Round and round the thing had gone on all fours, for a few seconds, bumping the walls in distress. He never saw anything and had just remained stiff with fright in the bed.

  The intruder eventually left the bedroom and scurried across the landing; Frank only saw the last of it go and suspected it had been a dog because no human could move that fast on all fours. Terrified, but compelled to follow, Frank had peered inside the spare bedroom and seen the figure of the old woman, her small body covered in a grubby housecoat, with her back to him. She had been searching amongst boxes of photograph albums with vinyl jackets until she found what she’d been looking for. She’d held it before her lowered face and gave Frank the impression that she was either struggling to read in bad light or putting something inside her mouth. Frank didn’t know, but could hear the woman’s heavy breathing, betwixt a series of animal grunts.

  When he spoke to her, the figure turned quickly and showed him a pair of milky eyes, like he’d once seen in the head of a dead sheep, and bared teeth that didn’t belong inside a human mouth.

  Frank had woken underneath the eiderdown in his room with his fingers stuffed down his own throat.

  On Tuesday morning, he carried the broken kitchen furniture back inside the house and dried the wreckage with a tea towel. The very act of reclamation felt as necessary as rescuing a drowning cat from a canal.

  Mail from Macmillan Nurses and a council mobility service arrived on Wednesday morning addressed to Mrs Florrie White. He put the letters in a neat stack beside the small toaster on the kitchen counter; he’d repaired that unit as much as possible, and then placed it leaning against the wall, set at a tilt, which didn’t help the house much, but he couldn’t bear another night of the broken wood being outside in the cold. The new steel kitchen units went outside and into the yard. Of course it would not be a permanent arrangement, but he couldn’t settle his nerves until the swap had been made.

  He spent Tuesday to Thursday on the sofa, listless and melancholy, drifting through afternoon television shows for the modicum of comfort that they provided. He also took long naps with the gas fire on; its glow and little clicking sounds reassured him more than anything he could remember. But he would often awake from these naps, because the little figure from his dreams would mutter to itself at the top of the stairs. When he awoke, Frank could never remember what it said, and there was no one up there when he looked.

  Frank also spent a lot of his time staring at the pattern on the kitchen table and thinking of the rooms he’d occupied as a student: cohabits through his twenties with two girlfriends long gone; house-shares with strangers with whom he had no contact now. In the increasingly indistinct crowds of his memories, there had been an alcoholic who only consumed extra strong cider and Cup-a-Soup, and an obese girl who had eaten like a child at a tenth birthday party and spent hours locked in the bathroom. He could no longer remember their names, or the faces of the girlfriends. He tried for a while until he moved to the living room and fell asleep in front of Countdown.

  On Thursday evening, he refused to take a call from Marcus. There had been four since the previous weekend too. All unanswered. For some reason Marcus and his calls were irritating Frank to such a degree that he put his iPhone in the cupboard under the stairs, deep inside a box of wooden clothes pegs. He hadn’t had enough time to think through the changes that he’d once planned to make to the house, and he could not abide being rushed.

  His sleep went undisturbed until the weekend and he found himself watching ITV from seven to nine before going up to bed. Happy Shop kept him fed with its inexhaustible variety of memory and flavour. And when Marcus arrived on Saturday morning, Frank never answered the door
. Instead, he lay on the floor of the living room with the curtains closed.

  At the end of his second week off work, he called the office from the public phone outside Happy Shop to tell them that he wasn’t coming back.

  On the Monday of his fourth week in the house, Frank finally went out for tools. Not to renovate the property, but to try and repair the kitchen. That task could not be put off any longer.

  The act of leaving the house was excruciating.

  Twice the previous week, when he’d been cooking in the wrecked kitchen, he’d looked up because he was convinced that he was being watched from the doorway, as if caught doing something wrong, or eating something he had been told not to. The imagined presence had been seething with a surly disappointment and dark with hostility. That room had become the focus of an intensification of the restlessness growing since the Saturday when he and Marcus had assaulted the cabinets. The kitchen was the heart of the house and he had broken it.

  There was no one physically inside the house with him, and there could not possibly have been. But the repeated sounds of small feet padding about the lino, while he napped in the lounge during the afternoons, suggested, to a region of his imagination that he little used, that a bereft presence was repeatedly examining the kitchen. The first time he’d heard the shuffle of feet, he’d actually worried that the former owner of the house had escaped from her retirement community, or worse, and let herself back inside what she believed was still her own home.

  Frank recovered quickly from the sudden frights, and within the confines of the comfortable womb of the terraced house he eventually found the supervising presence acceptable, even deserved. Nor could he think of a single reason to doubt his instincts that amends had to be made. Within the house such things were possible.