Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Constant Visitor

By the time I reached home my hands ached from gripping the wheel, and my neck had grown stiff from twisting my head around whenever a glance in the mirror failed to suffice. I was afraid the absence of any unwelcome reflection needn’t mean I was alone in the car. Each time I found myself surrounded by traffic, panic closed in too, a fear that I might be distracted from driving and cause a crash as my father had. When I left the motorway at last I felt just as vulnerable at every junction, fearful I’d be tricked into losing control, crossing the line in front of an oncoming vehicle or lurching past a red light. I hoped the tunnel could offer some respite, but it felt like being buried too far underground for miles. Knowing the river was overhead for much of the length of the tunnel didn’t help. Surely even Bella couldn’t cause it to be flooded, which simply meant she had some other fate in store for me. I kept telling myself I’d needed to act as I had in order to protect Roy, but until I did I’d failed to grasp how I would be alone with whatever I’d brought on myself.

The whole of my apartment felt as if it housed a threat, even once I’d switched on all the lights. The emptiness of every room needn’t mean any of them would remain deserted when I turned my back. Although the bathroom mirror showed nobody behind me, I couldn’t help glancing around, for the reflection had started to feel like a trick. I was glad to leave it behind, even if this meant retreating to my bedroom. At least the quilt lay too flat to be concealing an intruder, and I was trying to persuade myself that I should do my best to sleep when I noticed a faint trail glistening on the pillow.

It might have been left by a snail or a slug. Was it meant to tell me nowhere was a refuge? When I seized one corner of the pillow I felt as if I were about to turn over a stone. I jerked the pillow aside, and the object that had left the trail reached to lick my wrist before withdrawing into a mouth. Apart from the wide gleeful eyes, these were the only features the flattened face displayed. With a grin that promised worse to come, it vanished into the mattress as though sinking into a marsh.

I was in the corridor before I had the least idea where I was going. The face had hardly bothered to resemble Bella’s – just enough to let me know she could turn up wherever she chose. There was no point in trying to sleep on the couch – she could find me there quite as readily – and so I fell into a chair, which at least had its back to the wall. I tried not to think that the intruder could seep through the bricks or otherwise reappear. The remote control of the television found me a comedy even more monochrome than the night outside the window, but I was distracted from the elegant antics of the wealthy characters, so prosperous in the midst of the depression that they might have been inhabiting a fairy tale, by an incomplete but vigorous figure that kept prancing less than wholly into sight behind them. Was I glimpsing the reflection of a visitor flattened like a cut-out or an insect on the wall beside me? Before long the sideways jerking of my head revived the ache in my neck, and I yielded to closing my eyes. I had a hopeless notion that unawareness couldn’t leave me any more at risk than awareness would.

I awoke whenever I nodded, unless slumber sometimes dragged me too deep. Apparently the channel was broadcasting an all-night marathon of comedies, because I kept catching fragments where different performers were enacting similar routines, all of which felt like a joke at my expense. Some of the soundtracks were so worn that whispers seemed to lurk behind the dialogue, and more than once I lurched awake with a sense that somebody had spoken close to me. One thought masqueraded as reassurance: that when day came I should go to my office at the university. It felt like a remote promise of the dawn.

At last the world outside the window grew as grey as the onscreen film, and eventually regained colours – red roofs, blue sea and bluer sky. Switching off the television, I headed for the bathroom, where I stood in the bath and backed away from the shower so as not to be chilled by the initial rush of water. Despite the August day, I felt cold, still more so when a red-hot needle jabbed my shin. It was a splash of scalding water from the shower.

When must I have switched on the immersion heater to make the water so hot? I couldn’t recall the last time I had, which might suggest I’d done it in my sleep, unless somebody had meant me to be injured, perhaps disfigured. I leapt out of the bath to crane around the vicious onslaught of water and ease the hot tap nearly shut. Steam rose from the bath, clouding the mirror on the cupboard by the sink. As I cleared the glass with a thoughtless gesture I remembered the moment at my aunt’s when I’d revealed a trespasser behind the condensation on a mirror. This time I’d uncovered nothing of the sort, but as my wrist snagged the corner of the mirror the cupboard door swung open, and a grinning face swelled out on a neck like the elongated tube of a balloon.

I staggered backwards and barely saved myself from overbalancing into the bath, where the water that had gathered might have scalded me or worse. Had this been the plan? When I recovered myself I saw the cupboard contained nothing unfamiliar. “Playing games, are we?” I said but felt it best to keep any further challenge to myself.

I let the water out of the bath before stepping in. The mundane action left me feeling trapped between the uncanny and the banal, unable to engage with either. One idea let me believe my behaviour had some purpose: I needed to get ready to go to my office. The bath felt perilously slippery under my bare feet, and I clutched at the handle on the tiled wall once I’d brought the shower up to a timid temperature. If I lost my balance I felt certain I would fall through the glass panel beside the shower – if a face were to thrust itself out of the water into mine. I finished showering as soon as I could, and as I clambered out of the bath a face sprang at me from the cupboard on the wall. My shoulder slammed against the glass panel before I grasped that it was my own blurred face in the mirror.

The realisation didn’t stop me feeling spied upon. As I dried myself and dressed I had to restrain a compulsion to challenge the watcher. I was afraid that acknowledging its presence would invite some worse intrusion. Even breakfast felt composed of threats – the water bubbling in the percolator, the red-hot interior of the toaster. How easily could I be tricked into injuring myself with them? I had a growing sense that I would need to be constantly on guard for the rest of my life.

On my way downstairs I took out my car key and then returned it to my pocket. I mustn’t risk driving while I could be fatally distracted, and I didn’t know if I would ever drive again. I bought a ticket at the station and made for the platform, only to retreat into the booking hall, having seen there was no train. I wasn’t about to risk being thrown under the next to arrive. I’d already felt at the mercy of traffic while crossing the road.

A protracted squeal announced a train, and once it crawled to an absolute stop I ventured onto the platform. Just a few passengers left the train, but I had a sense that somebody was using every one of them for cover, dodging behind them all without ever straying into sight. As far as I could see, which no longer meant enough, the carriage I boarded was deserted. When a woman spoke close to me I started as though I’d been wakened from a dream, though it was only the overhead voice of the train. “In the interests of passenger safety…” The advice to stay alert felt like a grim joke at my expense.

I’d still seen nobody in the carriage by the time the train moved off. When it reached the next station someone looked in from the platform, but didn’t appear to board. At the following station they loomed outside the window again, and I glimpsed the face that was regaining its features, which were all too familiar. Each time the train halted, the gathering figure grew more recognisable, closer to human. I did my utmost to ignore it, especially once the train sped underground, where the face took to swimming out of the dark between the stations and pressing itself like a perfectly flat mask against the glass. It was only trying to work on my nerves, I told myself, to leave me more susceptible to peril. “Childish,” I muttered. “Not even puckish. Not clever at all.”

This didn’t work. It was no kind of spell. The apparition left me nervous of my next encounter once I was off the train. As I rode up to the station concourse I seemed to glimpse it leaping upwards behind scattered commuters on the downward escalator. I couldn’t locate it in the street, where crowds were busy ignoring squatters on the pavement and in doorways. I peered at every seated figure and every supine one to reassure myself their faces weren’t familiar, and before long I ran out of change to drop in plastic cups. I had a vague sense of bidding to buy myself grace, but no idea whether that would work.

I was climbing the slope to the university when I found myself straying towards the edge of the pavement. Perhaps this was a symptom of sleeplessness, but it felt as though a companion was leaning against me, so nearly insubstantially that I hadn’t noticed they were inching me towards the traffic. I kept having to lurch away from the road as I trudged uphill. When I reached a crossing between sections of the campus I poked the button and gripped the pole until the red light halted the traffic. I’d set foot on the crossing when a van jerked forward to speed through the lights, and I felt the chill wind of the side mirror that had barely missed my head. It left me shaking, and I suspected the driver had been no more to blame for the incident than my father had been responsible for his crash.

A few students were wandering the campus. Since they weren’t mine, they must have wondered why I stared at them or more precisely past them in search of a dodging lurker. My card let me through the barrier by the reception desk, and the receptionist said “Dr Semple,” surely not alerting anyone to my arrival. I tramped up the bare stairs and unlocked my office, and stared around the room. As I blinked at the shelves of books and the desk occupied by a computer, I felt as if I was very gradually wakening. There was no reason why I should be here today at all.

I remembered imagining I heard a whisper in the night, and now I knew I had. While I was asleep I’d been directed here by a spell that felt close to hypnosis. Perhaps the purpose was to lure me away from my apartment so that some mischief could be perpetrated there – and then, as though I’d wakened fully at last, I knew it was more dangerous. I’d been decoyed into the open, where I would be most at risk.

I locked my room and kept hold of the banister all the way down the stairs, where every step felt like a chance to be tripped from behind. I couldn’t begin to anticipate how many opportunities to do away with me the homeward journey might contain. “Dr Semple,” the receptionist said as though my departure called for an announcement too. “Leaving us already?”

“That’s the idea,” I said, feeling as if we’d hastened my demise. I had no time to choose my words, because the traffic lights had halted a taxi outside. Dodging through the barrier, I ran at the automatic doors, only to realise that if they didn’t open fast enough I would smash the glass. Perhaps this was to be a variation on the fatal injury I hadn’t suffered in the shower, and all the intervening events had been contrived to leave me careless. The doors sidled aside just enough to let me through, and I dashed onto the pavement. “Taxi,” I shouted, waving violently as well. “Taxi.”

“I hear you, pal.”

This was both an acknowledgment and a gruff rebuke. The driver’s greying hair trailed over the shoulders of his matching T-shirt, and appeared to have tugged the crown of his squat head bald. With a look that barely rose above morose he watched me clamber into the back. “Can we go to New Brighton?” I said.

“Go anywhere you want long as you’ve got the price.”

I assumed he wasn’t prompting me to confirm I had, though his attention lingered in the mirror before he started the meter. The taxi swung away from the kerb rather too close to a car, and I told myself I was safer here than on foot. Whenever the driver glanced in the mirror as we sped towards the tunnel, I hoped he wasn’t being distracted in order to put me in danger. The tunnel shut me in with dimness, and I wished I could be sure where he kept looking – at me or the road behind? Surely if he saw I’d acquired a companion from the dark he wouldn’t stay as silent as he was. I couldn’t see any intruder, even when we emerged into daylight. Once we were past the pay booths I said “Up the ramp and second exit from the roundabout.”

We were on the roundabout when the taxi swerved into the adjacent lane, and a lorry roared behind it like a dinosaur. “Make your mind up, pal,” the taxi driver said.

I thought he should have directed the reproof at himself. “What did he do?” I asked instead.

“Not him, pal, you. Which way do you want?”

“The way I said. Towards New Brighton.”

We veered back into the inner lane and raced around the roundabout while the driver objected “That’s the thing you said first.”

I stared into his eyes, though willing him to keep his attention on the road. “It’s all I said.”

“Don’t be having a laugh, pal. Nothing wrong with my ears,” the driver said and swung the taxi off the roundabout at speed. “Then you told me to go the other way instead.”

Although I knew that no response would be any use, I couldn’t help retorting “Did it really sound like me?”

He stared at me in the mirror longer than I thought was safe. “You’re the only feller in here besides me.”

I mustn’t add to the distractions that might be brought to bear on him, and I stayed quiet until we approached a junction. “Straight on,” I said, and hastily “When the lights are green.”

This time his stare was even more prolonged. “Don’t need to tell me that, pal.”

I managed just to send him onwards at each set of lights, until at last we had to turn right. The road led to the station, and the taxi drew up outside it, not quite what I’d directed. “I’m just across the road,” I said.

“Good for you, pal.”

He either didn’t trust my guidance or had tired of it, and I’d had enough of him. Surely I could cross the street without being run over. I dug in my pocket for notes and handed them through the gap in the glass partition. “Sorry I’ve no less. Just give me six,” I said.

He glared at the handful I’d passed him and screwed his head around on his stubby reddish neck to train all the force of his disfavour on me. “Less of the laughs, pal. That’s no joke.”

“I’m sorry, what isn’t?”

He thrust his hand under the partition, and I saw he was holding torn scraps of paper. I recognised the writing on them – Lumen Scientiae’s script – and glimpsed the names Bal and Bel before the driver threw the handful out of his window. “Let’s have the cash,” he said, “or I’ll be calling the law.”

I fumbled money out of my pocket, or at least that was what it felt like. Yes, I’d found a scrawny wad of ten-pound notes, two of which the driver accepted with a display of ill grace. He passed me a pound coin and a crumpled grubby fiver, and as I climbed out I saw the fragments of the page under the taxi. I was loitering on the pavement to retrieve them when he moved off, and a trickle of oil from beneath the vehicle blackened every scrap. The sight infuriated me so much that I stalked across the road, and if I’d failed to notice any traffic I might well not have reached the other side. My survival only postponed the next attempt on my life.

Nothing appeared to have changed in the apartment, but this needn’t mean nothing was hidden. As soon as I finished searching all the rooms I felt compelled to search again, though what would this achieve? If an intruder was waiting to rear up behind me in the bathroom mirror, unless it revealed its lair behind the shelves of books or produced its flattened face out of the blackness of the television screen, I would know soon enough – when it decided to amuse itself with me again or else exact a worse revenge. Nowhere in the world was safer than my apartment, which was by no means to pretend it was safe.

I sat in front of the computer to persuade myself I had a future I should work for, and succeeded in adding a few sentences but less insight. I heated up a casserole I’d made days ago, and almost dropped it when the oven door sprang open, perhaps because I’d neglected to secure it properly, unless it had been undone from within by the owner of the face I seemed to glimpse shrinking into the dark. Afterwards I sat in my chair against the wall and watched a variety of television broadcasts. The documentaries and newscasts seemed as unreal as the fiction films, every one a brittle shell of narrative that hid a lethal truth. The intrusion could reveal itself anywhere in the room, and the wall at my back felt just as unreliable as protection, but I found the prospect of going to bed more daunting still. I had no idea when I began to nod and flounder awake, nor when I remained asleep.

A change wakened me. There was more light in the room than I remembered having seen. I opened my eyes to find daylight paling the overhead bulb. I had a feeling that it wasn’t the only development, but why was I afraid to learn what else had happened? I was alone in the room, and not just in the room. As I made my awareness reach out I sensed no threat of any kind, nor the least hint of a presence.

At first I thought it was a trick, although I didn’t see how my sensitivity to the kind of trespassing I’d suffered could be blocked. If I was really no longer in danger, why did I feel more nervous than ever? Because there was only one reason why Bella would relent, and the possibility dismayed me more than staying endangered myself. I had to know, and I groped for my phone, but the call went unanswered for so long that I’d begun to wonder whose voice any recorded message might use by the time the simulated trill was interrupted. “Yes.”

Though the flatness of the word invited no response, I said “May I assume we can talk?”

“You may assume what you like.”

“Then I’m assuming I’m to be left alone.”

“Quite an assumption after all you’ve tried to do.”

“All the same, it feels as if I am.”

“You’ve opened up your mind a little, have you? Then you should discover for yourself whether you can trust it. It’s hardly up to me to provide reassurance.”

“If I’m right, I’d just like to know why you’ve finished with me.”

“Patrick, you sound as if you feel jilted.” With the same faint amusement Bella said “Because you failed.”

As though this weren’t enough to confirm my worst fears I heard Roy say “Is that my dad?”

“I’m afraid so,” Bella said.

“Let me talk to him.” In a moment his voice grew close and harsh. “What do you want now?”

“Just finding out the situation, which I can’t pretend I understand.”

“That’s because you don’t understand us. That’s why you didn’t manage to split us up.”

Less like a plea than an expression of dismay I said “So make me understand.”

“Bell showed me what she was wearing when you saw her back. She’s got it on now.”

“I did more than see, Roy, and she let me.”

“Why are you keeping up this shit? It won’t work on me.” A cough delayed more of his protest. “Bell says you never touched her,” he said, “and she was never in your room.”

In growing desperation I said “Then where did we meet?”

“On the promenade, Bell says.”

“And why would we do that?”

“Because she wanted to find out why you’re so against us, and she thought it might be easier for you to say if I wasn’t there.”

I was searching for a way to regain his trust when I had a thought that seemed to offer some hope. “Your mother’s been persuaded too, has she?”

Roy’s cough let him pause before admitting “She doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t know you’re back together, you mean.” Since he let this pass unanswered I said “How do you think she’ll react when she does?”

“I expect her situation would be very much like yours, Patrick,” Bella said.

I hoped Roy could sense the threat this hardly bothered to conceal, although wouldn’t the insight endanger him? Instead he retorted “Tell her if you want. She won’t break us up any more than you did.”

His voice trailed away into a stutter of dry coughs, and I was sure his energy had been depleted by the spell Bella must be exerting over him. “And where are you now?” I tried asking.

“Where Bell needs to be.”

I’d feared so. “How much more of that is there?”

“The last one’s tomorrow.”

I wanted to believe this would release him, but I was afraid how much it might drain him. Before I could ask their present location he said “Got to go.”

It sounded nothing like an invitation to call again, and his companion issued none. “Come and see me, Bella,” I said. “There’s something we ought to discuss.”

Roy had already ended the call, but I knew she would receive my summons, and it was better that he didn’t hear. No doubt she would come to me wherever I was, but suppose she assumed I’d found another way to thwart her? Once again I felt safest staying at home. In time shadows crept into the apartment, and then Bella did. Her silhouette appeared against the wall beside the television at least a few moments before she took shape like a cut-out figure swelling plumper. She wore a blouse that exposed her shoulders, or at any rate the apparition of one. “So that’s how you fooled him,” I said in an attempt to contain my shiver. “That’s one of the ways you did.”

“How concerned you are to reduce everything to your level, Patrick.”

“I’m just concerned for my son.”

“I presume that’s how a parent is expected to behave.”

“You’re the one whose behaviour is restricted, Bel, or is it Bal? You’ve admitted that’s how you are.”

“Not for much longer,” Bella said with a smile of careless triumph.

“Tomorrow’s the day, is it? What happens then?”

“I shall be free.”

“Free to do what?”

“To live as I have every right to do.”

“And what will that entail?”

“I shall know that when I’m whole at last.”

I found this menacingly ominous, and it mightn’t even be the worst development. “What about Roy?”

“What indeed. Another issue to be settled in the future.”

I wasn’t going to let this lie undefined. “How much more are you going to take out of him?”

“He should live.” As my reaction choked off my speech Bella said “And if not he’ll have lived more than most of you achieve.”

My nails bent as I dug my fingers into the leathery arms of the chair, but I managed to relax a fraction before saying what I’d already vowed to propose. “Use me instead.”

“That’s quite touching, Patrick. Playing the father up to the hilt.”

I didn’t know if she was mocking me or simply found my behaviour almost too alien to understand. “You don’t need him,” I persisted. “You just need someone, and you were after me in the first place.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost the young mind you once had.”

“What does it have to do with minds? All you need is someone’s energy to draw on.” As a shiver overwhelmed me I said “You’re using mine right now to help you be here.”

“I find younger is preferable, Patrick. More vital.”

Despite feeling appalled by her clinical attitude, I could only do my best to match it. “I promise you I’ve got enough vitality for your last excursion.”

“I wonder. Perhaps you might have.” As I dared to hope I’d persuaded her she said “But I’ve grown really quite attached to Roy.”

“Attached.” I had to swallow before I could restrain myself to saying “Not the way I am, or his mother.”

“You have no idea of my feelings, Patrick.”

Was she feigning pique, or had I reminded her that she wasn’t as human as she liked to appear? “Then give me some idea,” I said.

“I see no need, and in any case it’s too late.”

“Not if I take you where you have to go tomorrow. That ought to save some of your energy for where you’ll want it most, and you’ll be giving me a little of what you say you’ve given Roy.”

Bella widened her eyes as though to make space for my words, and I was afraid my attempts at persuasion had cancelled one another. “Well, I believe Julia is right,” she said.

With some reluctance I said “In what way?”

“You’re jealous of your son’s relationship with me.”

“If that’s what you need to believe.” When this didn’t shift her amused look I risked saying “My aunt thought I was worth sharing secrets with. Perhaps you should too.”

“You’re trying to appeal to nostalgia, are you, Patrick? You want me to indulge you for old times’ sake.”

“If that’s how you see it. However you care to that lets you” – I fumbled for a phrase that might persuade her – “accept my help.”

Her amusement was starting to fade. “Perhaps you had an insight after all.”

“Which would that be?” I had to ask.

“Being driven by you would conserve some of my energy tomorrow.”

“Then you want me to.”

I was afraid my eagerness had made her think again until she said “You’d best collect me as early as you can.”

I was relieved to think I wouldn’t have to spend the night in any sense with her, and she couldn’t spend it with Roy while he was at his mother’s. “Where from?” I said.

“Where we both know I live. You see, there are insights we share after all.” Bella’s teeth gleamed, not quite in a smile. “Show me you trust me, Patrick,” she said.

I could think of no excuse to avoid asking “How would I do that?”

“Close your eyes while I depart. Don’t open them until you feel I have.”

This seemed unavoidable as well, to prevent her from changing her mind about tomorrow. I shut my eyes and squeezed them tighter in a bid to fend off a sense of a transformation in the room. I had the impression that my visitor had reared up nearly as high as the ceiling and was determined to make me look, to betray how false my show of trust was. I seemed to sense a face reaching off the head to hover so close to mine that I ought to feel its breath, and hands stretching on their elongated arms to finger the air just inches from my face. My eyes were throbbing with an imitation of light by the time the face and hands withdrew, and at last I sensed how the entire body did, into a distance to which the empty air led. My eyes faltered open, and on seeing I was alone I let out a gasp that left all words behind.