I swear I had no idea that it was actually a sauna. Absolutely none. It was an honest mistake. I thought it was just a shed – that our dear Miss Hahn was simply rootling around inside a shed (something that I don’t doubt she is often – very often – wont to be found doing). In fact there were other sheds in the vicinity. Several of them. In various stages of collapse. One of which appeared to be hanging off a small precipice.
Although what kind of an idiot – an idiot – would you have to be to persist in inhabiting a place that is so patently unsafe? Not out of dire need. Or poverty. Or mental illness (at least not so far as I am aware). But to actively pursue it – to … to celebrate it, almost like it’s some kind of wild and crazy lifestyle choice! A place where the ground might slip right out from under you at any given moment?
What kind of a stupid, arrogant, bumptious, over-confident fool would you have to be to actively pursue a life on the edge of an unstable cliff? Not even on the edge – beyond the edge (a significant section of Miss Hahn’s ‘garden’ was in ‘tiers’, below the drop!).
No. It simply made no sense to me. None at all. It just seemed so … so unbelievably … complacent. Yes. That’s it. Such … such complacency. To be so … so cocky, so complacent. Even uttering the word. Even uttering the word – ‘complacent’ – made my hackles start to rise. Even so much as … as uttering the word. Even engaging with the concept. To be so complacent. To be so … so complacent.
These (the above, but artfully edited here of swearing etc.) were (approximately) my thoughts as I wandered through Miss Hahn’s strange, little bungalow (the front door was left wide open!), calling out her name, then (having had no success in discovering her actual whereabouts), into the back garden which was a huge, ramshackle affair with astonishing views (natch! View-schmiew! Yeah. Change the damn record why don’t cha?), the shabby lawn peppered with a succession of visible faults (well, to the knowledgeable eye, at least), and then falling, in a succession of dramatic (and patently unstable) steps, down, down, down into the sea far below.
These, in fact, were my thoughts as I tiptoed, very tentatively, across that fractured lawn, finally detecting a very slight and vague – almost inaudible – answer to my call. I was thinking: To be so … so arrogant, so complacent as to believe that it simply won’t happen to you, that it simply couldn’t happen to you. As if all those other poor buggers in the world who …
I’d already decided to tear her off a strip. Yes I had. I really had. I was suddenly livid – perfectly furious. Almost disproportionately so. Was it the …? I glanced around me, tensed, as if waiting for some terrible impact … There was something about the vista, the view, the … the … which suddenly brought to mind … which filled me with a perfectly explicable (yet correspondingly inexplicable) sense of …
Foreboding? Fear? Awe? Déjà vu?
I knew why.
When I finally routed Miss Hahn I planned to tell her about a tragedy I once covered as a reporter in Yungay, Peru, where the whole town had been decimated by a giant landslide of mud and ice and glacial rock after the Ancash earthquake sent a giant chunk of the north section of a nearby mountain crashing down on to it. An American scientist friend of an American scientist friend called Charlie Sawyer had warned the Peruvian press almost ten years before that a giant slab of rock was being worn away by the glacier and threatened to obliterate the town. He and his research partner were promptly driven out of the country under threat of arrest.
Fast-forward to 1970, and 25,000 people were buried alive under that same giant slab. A grand total of ninety-two survived. They didn’t even bother to excavate Yungay in the end, just left it as it was, planting a giant statue of Jesus on top of it, like a demented, Catholic cherry on a stupendous – and completely avoidable – cake of death. In fact I travelled back a few years ago for the ten-year anniversary. I’d made a great Peruvian friend in the area – a wonderful man called Mateo Amaru Mamani Martinez – whose mother actually ran the little boarding house I stayed in on the trip. He was training to be a geologist. His girlfriend (later his wife) and her entire extended family all lived in the town. Every single one of the girlfriend’s relatives (twenty-seven family members, in total) was killed.
Like I say, I’d decided to tear Miss Hahn off a strip but it was just a question of … of finding the damn woman to facilitate this process when … uh … that curiously muffled response originating from … uh … was it … uh … was it …? I delivered a sharp rap to the shed door and then yanked it open. Even as I did so I was reprimanding the poor creature in no uncertain terms (I’d built up quite a head of steam by this stage – which, in retrospect, was rather appropriate given that Miss Hahn was sitting, all but naked, inside a tiny sauna).
‘I’m astonished by your complacency, Miss Hahn!’ I snapped, and then … Oh yes. Then the awful, dawning realization that … uh … As I already mentioned. Ho-hum.
Miss Hahn was tying a towel around herself. My glasses immediately fogged up. But not before I’d had the chance to note, internally, that she was slightly pink, all over, and that she had very beautiful shoulders. The particular jut of her pinkened collar bones was extraordinarily …
‘My complacency?’ Miss Hahn sprang to her feet. I took a couple of steps back (quite risky in this location with absolutely no – zero, zilch – visibility).
‘Yes,’ I persisted, slightly losing the thread of my thoughts, ‘to voluntarily set up permanent camp in such a …’
‘I’m having a sauna, Mr Huff.’ Miss Hahn’s voice was quite clipped (Germanic. Even more so than normal – although it isn’t that clipped normally. Nor Germanic). ‘Do you honestly think it’s appropriate behaviour to barge in on a lone female while she’s … while … in the privacy of her own home and then accuse her of … of …’
She waved her pinkened arm.
‘Complacency,’ I repeated.
‘Complacency,’ she finished off. But there was a slight question mark in her voice. This was probably because there is nothing specifically complacent about the act of taking a sauna, I suppose. Although saunas strike me as such ridiculous things. To sit in a tiny room and sweat. It’s so ludicrously Swedish. And the Swedes are – by and large – a somewhat supercilious, ridiculously reasonable, utterly dull and, one might easily say, maddeningly complacent tribe. Although not so bad as the Norwegians with their sanctimonious Peace Prizes and their pesky trolls and their endless bucket-loads of North Sea oil.
‘Now if you’ll kindly excuse me,’ Miss Hahn continued, ‘the sauna is all fired up, so I must head back inside.’
Well the sauna wasn’t the only thing that was all fired up! What a prickly woman Miss Hahn is! And slightly humourless, to boot. Ha! So much for her determinedly bohemian exterior. Didn’t take very long to scratch the surface of that particular paper-thin badly glued-on walnut veneer.
‘There’s a hole in your towel,’ I informed her.
It was perhaps the oldest, tattiest towel I had ever set eyes upon. Of indeterminate hue and – worse still – of questionable hygiene.
Miss Hahn looked down at herself. The large hole in the towel corresponded with her pinkened lower thigh area. She emitted a growl (Yes, an actual growl. She really was quite incensed!), and then snatched the towel away from her body (she was naked. Underneath. And pink. I think I may have already mentioned that), bundled it up at one end (I thought she might be planning to whip me with it!) and then draped it (well, slung it, more like) over my shoulder.
‘That’s because it’s the floor towel, Mr Huff,’ she snapped. ‘It’s intended to be used for the floor. It may have escaped your notice, but you’ve caught me somewhat on the hop.’
Then she slammed her way back inside (the imprint of a slatted, wooden bench indenting her pinkened thighs and buttocks as she angrily retreated).
I gingerly removed the floor towel from my shoulder. How odd. Did she grab the floor towel by mistake, I wonder? Doesn’t she bring her own towel to the sauna? Or a robe? A towelling robe? Or – perish the thought – does she never actually use a towel in the sauna? Does she just … Does Miss Hahn simply saunter about the house and the garden (I glanced around me. Nope. She wasn’t noticeably overlooked by any neighbours; possibly because their properties had all fallen into the sea by this stage), getting in and out of the sauna, at will, completely and utterly – unapologetically – starkers (and by that I mean with no clothes on whatsoever)? Might this be her Russian-German ancestry coming into play here?
‘Miss Hahn?’
I knocked on the door.
No response (Well, perhaps a gentle harrumph).
‘Miss Hahn?’
Another knock.
‘Either join me in the sauna,’ she yelled (irate! Plainly irate!), ‘or please go away, Mr Huff!’
‘But Miss Hahn …? Might we just …?’
‘I am having this sauna, Mr Huff, come hell or high water. It takes several hours to fire it up and I’m not going to let it go to waste on your account.’
Pause.
‘On anybody’s account’ (she modified).
Pause.
‘It’s nothing personal.’ (Almost regretful, now.)
‘Miss Hahn, might we just …? I don’t …’
No response.
‘I can’t possibly come into the sauna in my woollen suit, Miss Hahn,’ I informed her (quite strictly). ‘And are you aware of the fact that there is a small fissure, a crack, running right across your lawn which disappears directly beneath this structure?’
No response.
‘I just wanted to return … to talk to you about the money you left scattered all over the floor at the cottage, Miss Hahn.’
No response.
‘Look, I’m very sorry to have walked in on you like that. Unannounced. It was rude – ungentlemanly. And I didn’t mean to call you complacent, either … Well, I did, but that was simply when I thought this was … that you were …’
No response.
‘How long does a sauna generally take, Miss Hahn?’
No response.
Oh for heaven’s sake! I took off my suit and shirt and placed them (neatly folded), on to the warping seat of a dilapidated wicker lawn-chair. I pulled off my shoes and slid them underneath. I then removed my glasses and slipped them into the top of my sock (for speed of access). I cleared my throat. ‘I’m coming in, Miss Hahn!’ I announced. A noise emerged from within which I would struggle to describe (worse still interpret). I then knocked on the door (as a final precaution) and entered.
Urgh! A dense wall of steamy heat! It was terribly close – terribly, terribly close – in there. And very small. Claustrophobic. And dark, just a tiny, sullen, red bulb blinking in one corner. And the air – what little remained of this most precious of commodities – was redolent with herbs (sage? Marjoram? Mint?). Miss Hahn was sitting bolt upright with her knees together and her arms crossed. I sat down next to her on the tiny, slatted bench.
‘I haven’t got my glasses on,’ I said (by way of defending her honour – such as it was).
‘Are you seriously thinking of taking a sauna in your socks, Mr Huff?’ Miss Hahn barked.
‘I’m not what you might call an habitué of the sauna,’ I confessed.
‘Well do you make a habit of wearing gloves in the bath?’ Miss Hahn demanded (in a flawed attempt to draw some ridiculous kind of parallel, I suppose).
‘I’ve always thought saunas a little sordid,’ I confided.
‘I imagine even the innocent Snowdrop might be considered “sordid” if apprehended by a sufficiently warped mind!’ Miss Hahn retorted.
‘I can’t entirely go along with your logic.’ I shrugged.
Silence.
‘And I can’t pretend that I don’t feel a measure of anxiety about remaining in here – such a small space, such a tight space – partially undressed, when there’s a giant crack, a fissure, running straight across the lawn which finishes up directly beneath …’
I gazed down at the concrete floor. It was very dark (like I said), but wasn’t that a … a …?
‘I didn’t think you’d actually come in,’ Miss Hahn informed me, stiffly.
‘Oh. Oh dear,’ I muttered, still inspecting the floor, running my be-socked toe over the perceived ‘fault’ and realizing that it was just a water-mark.
‘I mean it’s only a tiny sauna,’ she explained.
‘Yes,’ I conceded. ‘It’s certainly small, extremely small, but is it structurally sound? I wonder.’
‘Probably not,’ she sighed (as if this was the very least of her concerns). ‘Although now that you are here,’ she continued, ‘I think it only fair that you remove your underwear. Otherwise you run the risk of placing me at a psychological disadvantage.’
‘I’ve always been led to believe that the dynamics of power in a situation in which one party is naked and the other dressed, generally tend to favour the naked party,’ I confided.
‘Who led you to believe that?’ Miss Hahn enquired.
‘I think it’s an idea that’s quite commonly accepted.’ I shrugged.
‘People used to think the earth was flat,’ Miss Hahn opined.
Silence.
‘But it’s round,’ she eventually added.
‘I fear we may be getting a little bogged down in the details.’ I smiled.
‘Speak for yourself,’ she muttered, and as she was speaking her words were all but obliterated by a loud creaking sound.
‘Do you think this structure is safe?’ I bleated, knuckles whitening as I clung, for dear life, on to the rickety bench.
‘Probably not,’ she repeated, ‘but I had to try and do something to get all this indelible ink off.’
She touched a hand to her cheek.
‘Have the cracks running across the lawn been there long?’ I wondered.
‘About as long as I can remember,’ she snorted, ‘but if you’re too scared to risk it, Mr Huff, then by all means …’
Scared? Scared?!
Typical of our Miss Hahn to cleave so quickly, so readily, to the lingo of the schoolyard!
‘I’m not remotely “scared”, Miss Hahn!’ I snapped.
Oh but I was! I was! I kept stopping myself from looking up. Into the dark rafters above. I’m not sure why I felt this sudden urge, or the corresponding need to counter it. But if I gave in to it and looked up I was convinced I might scream. Like a girl. Or that I might simply collapse. In a heap.
‘Then just too bashful, perhaps?’ She smirked, pityingly.
‘You should probably know that one of my first jobs as a rookie reporter was covering the Ancash earthquake in Yungay Province, Peru,’ I tartly informed her (focus, Franklin, focus man!), ‘where an entire town was decimated by a giant landslide of mud and ice and glacial rock …’
As I continued to speak Miss Hahn calmly placed the flats of her hands over both her ears. Interestingly, she performed this manoeuvre without fully uncovering her breasts (by leaning forward slightly, and compressing them between her elbows).
‘Miss Hahn?’
The hands remained in place.
After a minute or so – she’s impossible! Quite impossible! – I removed my vest.
(Can’t breathe! Can’t … Can’t breathe!)
‘Happy? See? I’m not remotely scared – or bashful! It’s simply that I … I … I have an important meeting which I’m supposed to be at … at … a … a phone call! Yes! An important, international phone call. About the will. And the book deal. From my lawyer. So I need to …’
The hands remained in situ.
After another minute I removed my underpants.
Hands shaking, uncontrollably.
‘I’ve removed my underpants.’
No change.
‘I can’t remove my socks, Miss Hahn,’ I hissed, ‘I’m storing my glasses—’
‘Then remove one sock,’ she interrupted (thereby proving that she could actually hear me, all along). I removed one sock. It was soaking wet.
Miss Hahn promptly took her hands away from her ears.
‘You were saying?’ she asked, perfectly civil, now.
‘Sorry?’
(Need to look up! Want to look up! Must look up!)
‘The Peruvian earthquake?’
(And I do know why! I do! To see those strange, black birds circling, high above … remember?)
‘The Peruvian earthquake, Mr Huff?’
‘Oh. Oh. Yes. The entire town was decimated,’ I panted, ‘there were casualties totalling over …’
While I was speaking Miss Hahn leaned forward, dipped a tiny, handle-less china cup into a small, dented enamel bucket of water and then tossed this liquid on to some hot coals which were suspended in a little grate directly to the right of her.
The coals hissed furiously, and a cloud of scalding steam billowed up, enveloping us both. I instantly began to cough (to be asphyxiated in a sauna! How ignoble an end!) and it was as much as I could manage not to slam my way out of there in sheer panic. Miss Hahn, on the other hand, seemed to find the billowing steam deeply therapeutic. She pulled up her legs, wrapped her arms around her knees and threw back her head. It was a curiously closed-up and yet deeply expansive pose, putting me in mind of a figure – perhaps a nymph or an angel (real or possibly imagined) – from a William Blake watercolour.
We were silent for a while (my mouth dry as the Gobi Desert) and then Miss Hahn sighed. ‘I’m dreadfully keen for you to return to Montserrat, Mr Huff …’
‘Monterrey,’ I corrected her.
‘… but the bad news is that Orla seems to have very different ideas. And for reasons which I can’t even pretend to understand …’
‘Sorry?’
I knocked a drop of sweat from the tip of my nose.
‘She doesn’t want you to leave, Mr Huff. She tried every trick in the book to stop me from returning you that rent money this afternoon.’
She paused.
‘Please, please tell me you haven’t gone and brought it back again?’
‘The envelope’s on your kitchen counter,’ I confessed. ‘Sorry about that.’
Another creak! I almost sprang to my feet, but then the urge to pursue this line of enquiry, this sudden chink in Miss Hahn’s previously steely armour (a chink aided, even abetted, I presumed, by the dizzying abundance of scalding steam) proved too much to resist.
‘When you say “Orla doesn’t want you to go,”’ I muttered, ‘are you referring to the … to what I might be given to understand is the … the ghost of Orla Nor Cleary?’
‘Heavens no!’ she exclaimed, horrified, and then, ‘Well, yes, but not … More the … the spirit, the … the essence …’ She grimaced, irritated. ‘I’m no expert in this area, Mr Huff, I can’t pretend to understand the technicalities of the thing.’
‘But then …’
(Breathe from the stomach, Franklin! That’s right. Yes. That’s better.)
‘… isn’t it possible you just …?’
Uh … How to put this politely? How to un-jumble the kaleidoscope of tumbling words inside my head? How to straighten them out into something approximating a straight line and then slowly, slowly, teeter my way along it?
‘Isn’t it possible that what you take to be a ghost,’ I finally gasped, ‘a … a … a spirit, an … an essence, as you say, is simply the expression of some … some deep-seated, unconscious desire of your own which is somehow compelling you to … uh …?’
‘Yes. I already thought of that.’ She nodded. ‘But it makes no real sense. Because I don’t want you to stay, Mr Huff. No offence intended, but at best you’re a problem to be solved, at worst you’re a threat. It’s nothing personal … well it is personal because you lied to me about your identity – you ran over my mother’s cat … Although of course that’s all water under the bridge as things currently stand.’
‘I’m not sure if you fully comprehend the meaning of the phrase “unconscious desire”,’ I still persisted (very bravely, slightly piqued). ‘And in point of fact I didn’t run over your mother’s cat—’
‘What you need to realize,’ she interrupted, ‘is that quite contrary to what you seem determined to believe, I’m not heading a passionate campaign to defend the honour – or otherwise – of Orla Nor Cleary against the cruel assaults of a secular world. This isn’t about that for me. It never was. What I’m actually doing is defending myself – and those I love. I’m maintaining a distance. I’m protecting myself from Orla.’
‘From the ghost of Orla?’ I was confused.
‘I can’t surrender,’ Miss Hahn murmured, rubbing distractedly at her cheek with the back of her fingers. ‘I saw what happened to that poor girl close at hand. Just being near her …’ She shuddered. ‘At the end. I saw how …’
She was silent for a while. I waited, nerves jangling.
‘Religion – faith, for Orla – was, is all about forcing yourself to do the things you don’t want to do,’ she finally continued, ‘for God. For souls. All about suffering, guilt, surrender. And I can’t. I can’t. Not more than I already have. I won’t. Because … Because it scares me. To obliterate the self, so joyously, the way she did. The way a child does. Can an adult do that? Should they? Because when will it ever end, Mr Huff? What are the boundaries? When does it ever stop?’
‘Are you … Are you suggesting … Are … Are …’
(Hold it together, Franklin!)
‘Are you saying that you think we may have common cause here, Miss Hahn?’ I stuttered, slightly breathless. ‘Because I’m not entirely sure …’
‘There was this passage from the Bible Orla always loved to quote.’ She smiled as she remembered. ‘Whenever her actions provoked any kind of an argument, she’d murmur, “Our Lord said, ‘Do you suppose that I came to give peace on Earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division.’”’
She slowly shook her head. ‘I always found that so … so confusing. I honestly used to believe – before, before Orla – that the New Testament was all about everybody just … just loving one another! Jesus suffering so that the rest of us didn’t really need to.’
‘Jesus as the Get Out Of Jail Free card!’ I panted, grinning, slightly ghoulishly.
‘The truth is that when God gives you something’ – she scowled – ‘it’s a kind of … a kind of … I suppose the word I’m thinking of is bribe, but it’s not quite so …’
I quietly watched her talking – struggling to amass her thoughts – in profile. She looked straight ahead of her. She seemed almost … almost compelled to speak. To explain. It was as though my abundant discomfort, my strange, pulsing anxiety (I was deafened – utterly deafened – by my own heartbeat!) had somehow released (untapped!) this little geyser of words from within her. But the more she spoke the more intense my claustrophobia grew. As if the very information I had craved all along was acting as some kind of … of tinder to my soul. It wasn’t quenching me, satisfying me, but rather setting me on fire. Lighting up my fear. But of … of what exactly?
‘“For everyone to whom much is given,”’ she finally quoted, ‘“from him much will be required: and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.”’
She turned and gazed at me, intently.
I was perplexed. Confused. Terrified. I slowly shook my head.
‘Orla appeared in a dream and healed my hands,’ Miss Hahn sighed. She held them up for me to inspect. My vision was slightly blurry. But I blinked at them, nonetheless, quite gamely.
‘So … so you think …?’
‘And she definitely doesn’t want you to go,’ she insisted.
But I must go, I thought. I must. I must.
‘Perhaps you … perhaps you healed your own hands?’ I volunteered.
‘Then she adjusted my alarm clock so I’d think I couldn’t make the bank …’ Miss Hahn paused, scowling. ‘Although that could’ve just been me, like you say … A simple mistake – an accident. I might’ve knocked it over myself, after the dream, in a panic.’
She cradled her head in the crook of her arm for a minute, plainly in conflict.
Another loud creak.
I yelped (inadvertently masking my genitals in my panic).
‘Then I left my bag on the bus,’ she continued, perfectly oblivious, ‘something I’d never normally do. With the money in it. But the driver stopped the bus and returned it, which is a breach of all regulations, apparently. And as I was crossing the Sea Road to fetch it I was hit by a passing cyclist.’
‘Hit?’ I was concerned (and furtively removed my shaking hands). ‘Were you hurt?’
She straightened her head, shook it, and indicated, dismissively, towards a small bruise on her shoulder. I blinked at it, owlishly.
‘Then I was almost knocked down by a car, seconds later.’
‘But wasn’t that just …?’ I started off.
‘Sheer stupidity on my part?’ she snorted. ‘Very possibly.’
‘Mrs Barrow said … uh …’ – I struggled to focus my thoughts – ‘something … something about a hornet sting. On your …’
‘So then I headed up Toot Rock,’ she continued (ignoring me), ‘and my handkerchief was suddenly snatched away by a gust of wind. It landed in some nearby brambles …’ She paused. ‘It was an airless day – I don’t know if you …? If you noticed that at all?’
‘Your …?’ I echoed, blankly.
‘Yes. And while I was retrieving it – which took an age – Joyce got into the bag and took the money.’
‘Joyce?’
‘Mrs Seelinger’s spaniel.’
‘Oh. Oh.’
‘I found it – the envelope – after a short hunt, buried inside a mole hole.’
‘Okay …’
(I was starting to think Miss Hahn – and possibly even I – might’ve been indulging in hallucinogenic drugs by this point.)
‘But then Joyce managed to dig up a mole – in a different hole – so I grabbed him by the tail …’
‘Do moles actually have tails?’ I gasped.
‘The dog’s tail’ – she grinned – ‘Joyce’s tail.’
‘Joyce is a … a … boy dog?’
Boy dog?!
‘Yes. And I fell into some nettles to save the mole and was stung all over.’
‘Ouch,’ I murmured. For some reason … for some inexplicable reason, the hair on my body was all beginning to stand on end. As if alerted to something … As if my body had become aware of something that my eyes, my nose, my ears hadn’t even quite yet …
‘I couldn’t find any dock, but there was this powerful smell of eucalyptus,’ Miss Hahn continued, ‘Orla’s smell. In fact every time something bad happened, there was the smell, that sweet, fusty smell, all around me.’
That was it! Eucalyptus! It was eucalyptus! In the air! Not mint or sage or marjoram! It was eucalyptus!
It was eucalyptus!
It was eucalyptus!
The girl was here!
The girl was here!
With me! With Miss Hahn!
Eucalyptus!
And the more I heard the word echo in my head the less sense the compound sounds made to me: You-Cal-yip-tus!
I just … I just really had to stop her from talking! Surely it was her words that were releasing this … this intoxicating … this asphyxiating … this dreadful vapour! But the urge to discover and then … If I could only … But without … If I could only … But these conflicting impulses … How to …?
‘Eucalyptus,’ I repeated, just repeating things, now, quite eradicated, now.
‘So I went up to the house and when I got there I went to see the old mulberry tree, just to take a look. And then I found myself pulling all this ivy off the dead trunk …’
‘Well this has been … uh … great. Very … uh … illuminating. But I should …I should probably …’
Did I say that? Or did I actually ask, ‘Which old mulberry?’
I started scrabbling around for my clothes.
‘The old mulberry that the cottage originally got its name from. It was in my dream – last night. But in the dream it was still in full leaf, shedding leaves. And I was gathering them up. And then I was collecting up the fruit – the mulberries. They were falling down … so … so hard … almost pelting down on me. And I thought my hands would be all crimson – from … with the juice. But my hands were a pure white, and I felt …’
She shook her head. ‘Suddenly I was inside the cottage, but I was still gathering up the leaves. Although now they were eucalyptus leaves; you may remember I’m allergic to disinfectant, so I was feeling a measure of anxiety. Then Orla appeared and—’
I drew myself up straight. ‘Is there anything more … more boring … more … more … boring than other people’s boring dreams?’ I interrupted, determined to silence her, to shut her up, before her porous words drained away all final vestiges of peace, of … of quiet, of air … or … or … before they released any more of this … this terrifying vapour …
Which was it?
Neither?
Both?
She turned to glare at me, balefully. ‘I’m as infuriated by all this as you are, Mr Huff,’ she grumbled. ‘I think it’s ridiculous. I honestly do. I just want it to stop. It had, stopped, to all intents and purposes, before you arrived here. That’s why I wish you’d never come. That’s why I long for you to leave and head back to Montserrat. For my sake. And for yours. It’s nothing … nothing personal.’
‘Monterrey, Miss Hahn,’ I croaked. ‘Montserrat is … is … is an island in the Caribbean.’
‘I know,’ she sighed.
Another creak. But was it from without, or … or – Oh God! – from within?
‘Do you hear that?’ I asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘A creaking sound?’
‘Uh’ – she cocked her head – ‘it’s probably only the gulls …’
She listened harder. ‘Or it could be the shed, creaking. The surveyor said it would probably come down at some point.’
‘It’s very … very hot,’ I noted.
‘There’s always a slight risk of more land slipping,’ she conceded, ‘but we generally find the biggest problems develop after heavy rain – sustained periods of wet – when the soil becomes saturated.’
Another creak. My hands gripped on to the bench.
‘I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it,’ she murmured, ‘but I once heard a recording of the noise glaciers make. It was such a strange, haunting, almost … almost intelligent sound. Huge chunks of ice just moving and shifting and freezing and melting. Lost in their own abstract conversations. Just giant slabs of inanimate matter but so … so … burdened somehow …’
‘To cut a long story short,’ I said, grabbing for my vest, ‘I’ve brought you back the rent money. I can’t possibly accept it. Thanks – and everything – but no thanks. That’s it. That’s all I wanted to say. Good. Great. So now I’d better …’
She grimaced. She was looking down at her arm.
‘Nearly gone,’ she mused. ‘See?’
She showed it to me.
‘I’m … What …?’
I wiped the sweat from my eyes.
‘The number. From my dream. It’s almost gone. I’ve sweated it out. How’s my cheek?’
She turned her cheek towards me.
‘Uh …’
‘She tells me the number,’ Miss Hahn patiently explained (each word sucking another ounce of precious calm away from me, each word splitting the wood inside me – my core – with the cruellest of linguistic axes), ‘she tells it to me in my dreams. Or maybe you’re right and I just tell it to myself. Sometimes I don’t even remember having dreamed it, but then, when I wake up, I’ve written the number down; on the back of a book, a piece of paper, on the wall next to my bed. Once in a pile of flour on the kitchen counter. On my hand, my arm …’
That creak again!
‘4.0.0.4,’ she murmured, ‘I suppose I …’
She passed her hand across her cheek.
‘I must’ve accidentally pressed my face against my arm while I was sleeping, and the ink got transferred …’
I nodded. But I wasn’t really focusing. I was listening out for the creak, and I was wondering how straight the floor was, and I was staring at Miss Hahn’s breasts which seemed perfectly uncontentious – in size and quality – for a woman of her age and physique. They were very well positioned on her … her ribs, her … her diaphragm. Either side of it. In the … in the manner of most woman … female … woman breasts, I suppose.
Woman breasts?
I pulled on my vest. It was soaking wet. I was soaking wet.
‘But when I stripped all the ivy off the old mulberry this afternoon,’ she continued, ‘moments before I was stung, I thought I saw it there – the number. Etched deep into the bark.’
She grinned. ‘You probably think I’m stark, staring mad, Mr Huff!’
‘You?’ I echoed. Although I meant me, obviously. The you that was me. Her you. Me.
‘But no matter what we happen to think of each other,’ she chuntered on, doggedly, ‘the fact is that we do actually have something important in common: neither of us really wants to take this thing any further.’
‘This?’ I echoed.
Thing?
‘This story.’ She frowned. ‘This situation. And for our own perfectly good reasons, too. Neither of us truly believes, for starters. At least you won’t. And I can’t. Neither of us really wants to engage. You find the whole thing ridiculous – all of it, all of us. I just want to … to erase it …’ – she shuddered – ‘to keep my head down. To quietly get on with things. Because I simply can’t … I can’t give anything more to it, Mr Huff. I won’t surrender to it. Not again. I just … No. No. I can’t. I’ve suffered enough. In my own, very shallow way. And I suppose I’ve grown – without even realizing it – I’ve grown very … very cynical about it all. About everything. Same as you have. Same as you are. So that’s … that’s another thing we share – another thing we both have in common, Mr Huff.’
I pondered this for a while – this professed commonality between us – as I pulled on my underpants, my eyes – my vision – swimming with a succession of giant, orange-yellow blotches. And the urge to look upwards! It was so strong! Away from the … into the … Oh! Up into the …
When did I last breathe? Was I still breathing?
‘Gotta go,’ I whispered, but it sounded horribly like, ‘You were her nurse?’
(Is it … Is it possible to say two things at once? To project two, diametrically opposed impulses in a single linguistic thrust?)
‘No. No.’ She shook her head. ‘Not her nurse. No. I just … I sat with her. I was just a student back then. I sat with her at night. And on some days.’
Oh God. I honestly think she would tell me everything! Everything! But would it matter? Does it matter? Here? Now? Is it …? If I could only … If I could simply … but the … I grabbed my glasses out of my sock. A feeling of such powerful, such intense and unspeakable claustrophobia enveloped me in that moment. I really had to leave. I really needed to leave, before …
Right now.
Yes.
Right then.
Yes.
Right this/that minute.
‘So she was very ill by that stage?’ I garbled.
Was I trying to kill myself?!
‘Not too ill. No. Not at first. But her parents wanted to stop her from praying. She had a special, little prayer that Father Hugh had taught her which she liked to say. But literally all the time. All the time. To save souls. Every time she said it she saved a soul. They thought it was … they thought she was mentally ill. Fixated.’
‘Goodbye!’ I announced. But I was actually saying, ‘And they both thought that? Bran? Kalinda?’ I reached for the door. I tried to turn the handle, but my fingers kept slipping, the mechanism wouldn’t … My fingers couldn’t …
‘I think it was one of the only things they ever actually agreed about.’ She chuckled. She clambered to her feet. ‘Here, let me … It sometimes tends to …’
She drew close and reached for the handle. Her mouth was still moving. If it moved any further … if she said anything else … if she … if I couldn’t … But it did … It did … And so I … So I … simply to shut her up … I just … Soaking wet … I just … With my mouth … I … I pressed … On … on … on her mouth. She gasped.
Then the door was open and I ran out. I simply fled. I ran. Out.