STEPHEN HARGADON
illustrated by Vince Haig
Richard Haig, known to long-standing business acquaintances and certain family members as old Haig, died five weeks ago. On hearing the unhappy news, his eldest son and heir, Robert Haig, had returned from Peterborough where he had been working on his memoirs (two hundred and forty-one pages of rhyming couplets) to attend the funeral, a grand, sombre masque of white blooms and black veils. The whole town came out to smirk. Robert softened himself on gin and swapped polite words with various unremarkable cousins, nephews and simpering admirers of the dearly departed. Resisting the call of Peterborough (where his latest muse, Emily, was waiting for him in a flat above a fish and chip shop), Robert decided to stay on at Haig Heights, an ugly Tudorish pile perched on a hill at the northern end of town. Its timbers creaked and moaned in the cold winds that blew in from Russia. The home, if it can be called a home, had all the charm of a dusty and infrequently visited provincial museum, a certain dull menace, and was efficiently run by a robust housekeeper called Mrs Furnivall. No one knew if this woman was married, or had been married, or wished to be married; it seemed unlikely that she would tolerate something as frivolous in her life as a husband. On the other hand, no one could quite imagine that she had ever been a little Miss, all ribbons and plaits and moonlit intrigues. It was as though Mrs Furnivall had turned Mrs into an entirely new category of being, the mysteries of which were known only to her. While at the Heights, young Haig did his best not to interfere with Mrs Furnivall’s endless round of cleaning and arranging. He retreated to the leathery gloom of the library and set about putting old Haig’s estate in order. But young Haig wasn’t so young anymore and he wasn’t very good at putting things in order. Quite often he abandoned the library for the Cock and Badger, where he found strong ale and a serviceable muse.
***
According to employees and tradesmen and a few family members, none of whom could possibly know, old Haig had died peacefully, in his sleep, which is the mode of death most people are supposed to covet, slipping serenely, unknowingly, from one flimsy state of unconsciousness to another, more sturdy version. Dozy and snug beneath the blankets, tranquillised by dreams or drugs, and untroubled by the thought that tomorrow there will be no dawn chorus, no breakfast of sausage and eggs, no Financial Times, the sleeper slips away. Tomorrow everything stops and we return to the void that created us.
Of course, old Haig was alone when he died, so no one can comment with any certainty on the smoothness, or otherwise, of the bugger’s demise. There’s not one person on this spinning earth who knows for sure if it’s a peaceful and pleasant thing to die in your sleep. It might be quite gruesome: imagine being paralysed in bed, as pale and still as a statue, yet all the time burning with pain and fear, unable to scream or to scratch away the crawling torment, unable to open your eyes and bear witness to the monstrous hand that tips your soul into the abyss.
There are some men and women – not all of them mad and quite a few of them qualified professionals – who claim that those who die in their sleep are destined to spend the rest of eternity playing out whatever dark, silly or monstrous dream they were enjoying at the time of the reaper’s arrival. That is why ghosts are so common and why so many of the ridiculous entities seem to float, fly or hover: they are merely repeating the frivolities of a dream they cannot escape. (Flying and floating are especially common dreams, especially among the unimaginative.) Similarly, ghosts are adept at appearing and disappearing without logic, another characteristic of dreams. All this is readily verifiable in the relevant scientific literature. (Doctor Spearing of the Pleich Institute is the leading authority on oneiric parapyschology and The Melting Vortex is perhaps her best book on the subject.) It is foolish to be afraid of ghosts; they are sad, pathetic players caught in an eternal extrasensory pantomime. Be careful what, and who, you dream about, especially if you’re old or infirm. Your last living dream might very well form the basis of your eternity. Old Haig’s former business associate, the seventh Earl of Yoleham, died in his bed last year, smiling gently, and a month later his wraith was seen terrorising the children of the county with a bullwhip. Another local eminence, Margaret Trench, the care-home entrepreneur, died mid-snore in her favourite wingback armchair, a balloon of brandy in her hand. “It is how she would’ve have wanted to go,” said Cooper, her chauffeur and general handyman. “She was so fond of her afternoon nip and nap.” A few weeks later Cooper was abruptly dismissed from the Trench household, the reason being that every time he passed a portrait or photograph of Mrs Trench his manhood swelled uncontrollably. It was quite clear what Mrs Trench had been dreaming of in that armchair. Her husband, a Liberal MP and always an insipid man, withered away into a ball of self-pity and shame.
Bearing this in mind, hedonists and perverts might think it rather good fortune to die during an erotic dream. Dr Spearing has penned an instructive chapter on the many varieties of ectoplasm. But moiling joyously in coital union soon loses its appeal when there’s no finale in sight. We know that it is rash to die during a night terror: the buzz and moan of the dentist’s drill, the crackle of fire, the thick bubbling of mud in your mouth and lungs. These sounds will follow you for all eternity, without respite, as you confront your nightmare again and again, day in, day out, like a job of work. Such a death will make the rigours and heartache of life seem a mere stroll in the park. Poor Robert, incidentally, used to have terrible nightmares as a child. At the age of five he saw frogs jumping up and down on the end of his bed, frogs with spiked teeth and frogs speaking Spanish. In early adolescence he progressed to believing that the family home was burning down, and later, in a cruel modification, that his bedroom was ablaze while the rest of the Heights remained unaffected. Flames flickered up the walls, devouring his pictures of cricketers and crooners, while the other occupants went about their ordinary business, unaware that young Bobby was burning to death. In the morning, his bedsheets were always drenched with sweat and urine, and sometimes blood, for he scratched and tore at his frying skin. He used to sleep with a toy soldier for protection. Using a compass point, he scratched a magical symbol into the soldier’s back, an eye with a star in the middle. The eye would look out for him, while the star reminded him of two things, Bethlehem and a badge he had seen on a fireman’s helmet. Eventually, as Robert settled into manhood, the dreams of conflagration receded. He gained instead a recurring nightmare in which his eyes were pushed or sucked back into his head by an unknown force. The orbs then appeared at other bodily orifices – nostrils, anus, earholes, mostly earholes – and tried to squeeze themselves out with such vigour that they popped like blisters. Robert remained committed to this nightly torture: he could not resist the thrill and shame of disaster, and even in his most innocuous or pleasant dreams he somehow willed the assault to begin. This sickening urge took hold of him every night. He’d wake up screaming, convinced that he was blind. He never quite lost his capacity for nocturnal torment. On his wedding night, at the Royal Oak hotel in Bude, he suffered a particularly violent night terror and thumped his bride so brutally that she suffered a black eye. It rained all week and the service was atrocious. The marriage did not last.
Dying in your sleep, then, is as dangerous as nodding off at the wheel or smoking in bed. It is worth remembering that old Haig’s brother, Rex, died after falling asleep in front of an open fire on Christmas Eve, 1978. The photographs are quite astonishing. Barely anything in the room is recognisable, all is charred or melted, sickeningly blackened, save for Rex’s slippered feet. They look awful in their normality. A few cranks considered this evidence of spontaneous combustion. But the truth was (and always is) more mundane. Poor Rex was full of Famous Grouse. A spark here, a spark there, and up he went. Have you ever seen a human body burn? Well, it’s not necessarily as straightforward as you think. It’s not the same as burning your Sunday roast in the oven. There’s the wick-effect, meaning the body burns like a candle. Something to do with body fat and Rex had a good deal of that. The fire feeds on itself, burning with such fierce glee that it bloats itself before it can consume the entire body. That’s why a pair of feet can remain undamaged among the smouldering ashes. Old Haig kept his bother’s slippers as a souvenir.
Returning to the subject of dreams and death, if it is true that your final dream shapes your eternity (and all the evidence suggests that this is the case), then it might be best to quit this life by falling under a train or plunging off a cliff. Get the thing over and done with, clean and quick. A knife through the heart in a pub brawl. A sledgehammer to the skull. A ripped throat. The assassin’s bullet. Not everyone can have that sort of luck. Hardly anyone has that sort of luck. What happens to those that die dreamless? No one knows. There are theories and anecdotes. There have been experiments, probings. Dr Spearing has postulated and surmised. But no one knows anything. Not yet. That’s why I’m writing this and that’s why you’re reading. We are both learners. We are both dreamers.
***
Old Haig knew about hell. He made money out of it. Hell is Dulcimer Court and Tupelo Gardens on the southern fringe of town: the rotting concrete, the family of seven living in a room smaller than old Haig’s personal clothes closet; the effluent dripping from the ceilings; the mites and the flies; the bloodied underwear in the stairwell. Hell is Miss Sparrow, the abortionist on Goose Green Road, with her tongs and syrups, her oiled contraptions. Hell is the starving baby and the canal clogged with faecal slops. Hell is where money is made. Hell is the marketplace where your life is sold to the highest bidder; where your dreams are siphoned off; where what little hope you once dared to possess is rubbished and trampled underfoot by the mob.
Hell is old Haig’s toy factory on Crowfoot Lane. There was hardly a man in the entire district that hadn’t been maimed or crippled by one of his clever machines. Haig was a wise man, and not without creative guile; during his career he had invented and patented all sorts of wonderful games and puzzles. His products featured his cheery portrait, a portrait that bore little resemblance to the tough, knotted face that he took into boardroom and bedroom. Old Haig knew the score, he knew how the world worked, meaning he knew how to let others do his share of the suffering.
Why would any vaguely curious person want to die in their sleep? Who would want to miss such an occasion? Not old Haig. Definitely not old Haig. It certainly seems a shame, perhaps even blasphemous, to sleep through life’s one irrevocable event, the end. You might close this book and collapse, a sharp pain radiating across your shoulders and down your arms: who will be there to save you? Or you might walk out of your house one morning and the mere sight of you will fill another human being with such rage and loathing that they will rape or batter you, choke you till your face turns blue. Such things happen. Such things are common. Plenty of folk are willing to do those things to you. If it has been thought, it will be done, and it will be done to you. The man or woman sat next to you on the tram or train is quite prepared to kill you if necessary, and would certainly do so out of mere pleasure if they had not been deceived into thinking it impolite. The man who delivers your post has locked his wife in a cupboard and is thinking up new punishments for her – the pliers, the grater. The doctor who listens to your child’s heart has desperate urges. Your boss is a suited thug, a molester of minds. Your spouse, in his or her secret heart, detests you: never believe otherwise. You are the proof of their failure. Look in the mirror. You cannot love that face, you do not love that face, for to do so would be to love all that is foul and debased. Your reflection is your comrade in hell.
***
Old Haig was something of a railway enthusiast. He made and collected models, and of course he designed many fabulous train sets for children across the globe. He built up an extensive library of railway literature. He was devoted to the lost world of the steam engine. Spark arrestors and smokeboxes, big-end bearings, displacement lubricators. He could talk for hours on the great, handsome Mallard. One Christmas he did just that, treating his employees to a lecture on Sir Nigel Gresley’s masterpiece instead of letting them leave early. Three hours later, his employees went home glowing. It was a year-round passion with old Haig. Every day, he sent out a young man, a simple fellow called Eric, to spot trains at obscure railway stations across the northern counties. Eric’s spidery notes were then transcribed by calligraphers into leather-backed journals which were never read. No one could say that old Haig was a man without culture or curiosity. He had his softer side. And such a man wouldn’t want to sleep through his final journey.
***
We spend all our days burdened with an excess of life. It seems a shame to duck out at the very last moment. Those voices. Those smells. The memories and the promises. The fat neighbour feeding the pigeons. The letter that never arrives. The abysmal days of childhood. The loneliness of being alive. To wilfully miss the sweet cessation of all this seems crass.
“A peaceful death, it’s what he would have wanted.”
“Yes, he looks so peaceful.”
“At rest.”
So said the assembled mourners and fawners at old Haig’s wake. His younger sister Maud was particularly effusive in remarking on the serenity of her brother’s corpse as she poked her face into his coffin. Her dentures almost fell out, she was that excited. The wake was a dull and boozy affair, with a curiously flat atmosphere. Everyone, apart from Maud, seemed to be in a sulk, and the nibbles were stale. Young Haig thought that every rotten chancer and double-dealer in the vicinity had turned up just to leer at his father, the man who had done so much to turn this town into a dull and affluent backwater.
The funeral, however, was considered a good do. The townsfolk came out in large numbers to say farewell. The believers crossed themselves as the old rogue went by in his carriage, pulled by horses exquisitely shitting. A few undesirables spat and swore and waved their grubby banners but the police dragged them away and taught them a lesson with chain and truncheon. Disgruntled loafers and saloon bar metaphysicians argued that such a wicked bastard as old Haig didn’t deserve a peaceful death.
“Shoulda nailed the old git to a lamppost and let him rot in the sun.”
“We ain’t had no sun since March.”
“Smog.”
“I’d have him peeled like a spud. Ears and all.”
“Set dogs on him.”
“If there was any justice in the world, he’d have got what the dirty Japs gave my uncle Norman. Bamboo splinters, hammered right in under the nails. Simple but effective. Horrible clever blighters, the Japs. Would’ve won the war if they was on our side.”
“Old Haig only cared for money and the making of it.”
“Same as all of us, he was just better at it.”
“Piffle. He was a psychopath.”
“Remember that warehouse in Glossop, the fire – insurance job, weren’t it?”
“Nothing was proved.”
“I knew the bloke what died in it, the assistant supervisor. Carlton Lawrence. Brilliant snooker player, he was. Seen him clear up many a time. Should’ve gone professional.”
“I met that Hurricane once. Lovely chap.”
“Can’t have been the same Hurricane what I met. Tried to nut me in the Albert.”
“You’re thinking of Typhoon Tomkins.”
The debates about old Haig rumbled on in tap-rooms and grog-shops across the town. Some folk wore black armbands, others urinated on Haig’s statue, which had been erected in the town square to celebrate the great benefactor’s fiftieth birthday. No one, however, could deny that old Haig had died alone, in the dark, in a soiled bed, in a draughty mansion, in a blighted shire, in an old and dying country. That’s a queer kind of peace by any measure.
Maud, of course, knew otherwise. She always knew otherwise. After the funeral, back at the house on the desolate hill, Maud gave Robert her account of old Haig’s final moments. She claimed to have been in telepathic contact with the old man as his soul slipped through the putrid shell of his body and dissolved into eternity. She told her nephew that she had felt her brother’s death so keenly, so savagely, that it was as though she herself had died.
“I didn’t know what was happening,” said Maud. “I thought I was having a stroke. It was all so real. I sometimes think I’m not alive at all. It might as well be me in that coffin.”
Robert was too polite to agree. Maud went on to say that old Haig had spoken to her on that final night.
“On the telephone, you mean?”
“No, no, Robert. Nothing so banal. This sherry is very good, I must say. Spanish. Dickie had good taste. You see, Robert, and you might find this difficult to understand, but we had a bond, your father and I, in heart and in mind. A telepathic vibration. It was not of this earth. It was special. We were like twins.”
“He was born three whole years ahead of you. He was dark and you were blonde.”
“Spiritually speaking we were twins.”
“You could say that about all siblings.”
“Oh, poor Robert. Ever the pedant. That’s why you’re poems are so flat, dear. No imagination. Read Yeats.”
“I do not believe in telepathic vibration and I hate Yeats,” said young Haig.
“That’s your loss. It’s all there in ‘Byzantium’, believe me. I woke up in the middle of the night. I knew something terrible was happening. I felt a pang.”
“Heartburn.”
“No. It was something else. It was…the vibration. The intuition, call it what you will, Robert. You wouldn’t understand, you’re cold. You’re like your mother. You’ve got her nose, the Fitzwilliam nose. Always looking down it.”
“My mother was very kind to me.”
“She was very kind to many, when it suited her. I went downstairs and got myself a glass of milk.”
“A trusted remedy for heartburn.”
“For a poet you are unnaturally rational. I was in the kitchen. I looked at the clock. Ten past two. I could feel Dickie’s heart next to mine. A strange sensation. I could feel him going, fading away, leaving. A shiver went through me.”
“You’d forgotten your night gown.”
“Top me up, dear. Thank you. That’s when I heard him. I heard him speak to me.”
“Our ears play tricks.”
“I heard him. Clear as I hear you now. His voice was soft and low, it was him, definitely Dickie, and he was whispering to me…”
“And what did this magical voice say?”
“Glossop.”
“Glossop?”
“Glossop. That’s what he said. Over and over. Like a lullaby. Glossop. Glossop. It was the saddest and most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
Glossop: it had been a dirty word in the Haig house for years, ever since that terrible fire. Old Haig had owned a warehouse in Glossop. One night it burned down. Two employees died.
“Father hated Glossop. He loathed Glossop.”
This was true. When the town’s football team, the Wanderers, hosted Glossop North End in an early round of the FA Cup, old Haig saw to it that the opposing players were served contaminated food at their hotel. The Glossop men were taken ill with stomach cramps and vomiting. Wanderers romped to a five-nil victory. The home crowd lobbed toilet rolls at the vanquished team as they trudged off through the mud.
“Besides,” continued Robert, ”father was asleep. He was on tranquillisers and painkillers. And as far as I’m aware, he was not known for talking in his sleep. He was not known for talking much out of it either. Mrs Furnivall has given me an account of that last night. She checked him regularly – every fifteen minutes. He was spark out all the while.”
“You weren’t there,” Maud said. “You wouldn’t know.”
“No one was there. You weren’t there. You were thirty miles away.”
“Geography is for taxi drivers. You must elevate yourself to a higher spiritual plane, Robert. Open your mind and your ears. Look into the abyss. It’ll improve your alexandrines immeasurably. Such wonderful sherry. Look at the colour. Yes. I could hear him, I could hear him. His heart was beating inside me, his thoughts were my thoughts. It was sublime. Read the Greeks. Anyway, if you don’t believe in the higher sensibilities then that’s your affair. I’m not one to preach. But what you can’t deny is that I was the last person to speak to him.”
“Your fantasy, Maud, no matter how entertainingly relayed, does not count as a conversation. We’ve all chatted with the great and good in our idle moments. Told them what’s what, sorted things out. I had toast with Gandhi this morning.”
“That is beneath you, Robert.”
Robert could hear Maud’s dentures clacking in her mouth, the gums sucking against the hard material.
“Of course, Dickie was referring to that nasty business in Glossop. The fire at the warehouse. Affected him terribly. Never quite the same again. Wasn’t Carlton Lawrence the manager there or something?”
“Assistant supervisor. It’s not something we need dwell on.”
“No dwelling. He was nasty little fellow, that Lawrence. Black polo-necks and white slacks, always after a quick win, be it women or cards.”
“Yes. I know all that.”
“I’m just saying. I’m not responsible for Dickie’s last words. Last word, I should say.”
“They weren’t his last words. Word.”
“Pedant.”
She drifted away, quoting, or rather singing ‘Byzantium’, the only poem she knew by heart, having memorised it once for a school revue.
***
Robert loathed family gatherings, and he hated his father’s ornate and protracted funeral, a carnival of monotony. But he managed to stay sober. His mother had died three years previously. He could not remember her funeral in any detail, save for a pain of regret and embarrassment in his heart. He had dosed himself on pills and booze, and made a fool of himself, bawling like a child as her coffin was lowered into the ground. The lordly Fitzwilliams had not mingled with the Haigs on that day, and those that turned up for old Haig’s send off did likewise. They kept a polite distance from the moneyed oiks.
Chatty Maud downed a good few Spanish sherries after the old man’s funeral, and her theories on death and the afterlife grew progressively more outlandish and amusing as the hours passed, but she did not disgrace the family. Her stockings stayed up and her dentures stayed in.
Death, and its associated ceremonies, often brings out the worst in people. It’s perhaps understandable. Dying is by far the most dramatic thing we will ever do. We are forever failing, or losing our nerve, or deceiving ourselves and others. With death there is no failure, no deception. It’s something we’re all going to be good at, none shall fail. Perhaps that’s why there are so many ghosts floating about – the dead can’t resist bragging that they’re dead. “Look at me. I did it. I died. I’m dead.” Ghosts boast. It is something that Dr Spearing should investigate, if she hasn’t already done so.
At a funeral it’s natural to think of your own demise, to think of the vast indifference, and the small glimmers of love and hate, if any, that your own death will occasion. It’s a liberating realisation. You are nothing. You are dirt. That’s why funerals are usually such good fun, far superior to the sugary humbug of weddings. But young Haig was a gloomy chap and, in the words of Maud, something of a pedant. He was too preoccupied with the farce of life to see the joy in death. And according to one of the philosophers in the Cock and Badger, if you can’t pull at a funeral, then you might as well be in the coffin.
***
Robert Haig inherited the family fortune, meaning he inherited a vast empire of work he did not understand and a population of workers he did not know. He was a poet and no amount of money could improve his rhymes. Still, he would be comfortable for the rest of his life: he would not go short of a muse or two. He was happy, for now, to let a dour cousin called Irwin run the show.
Three weeks after the funeral, Richard was still to be found at Haig Heights. Attempting to show that he was not completely without vim, and was technically the man of the house, young Haig set to work on organising the remnants of his father’s estate. He thought of it as research for his memoirs – a prequel to his memoirs. He worked in the library, sorting through the lost treasures of a life he had never known. The library, with its oriental figurines and enigmatic bookshelves, was old Haig’s sanctuary, his laboratory, as he called it, where he conjured up new delights for children of all ages. No other family member, not even Mrs Haig, had been allowed in here. Robert half expected the old man to come storming in at any moment, roaring with anger and disbelief, smashing his cane against the desk. There were dossiers, files, receipts, bills, contracts, plans, invoices, promissory notes, pamphlets, sketches, diagrams, maps and guides. There were diaries, too, but these were strictly of the brain and not of the heart, listing business meetings, conferences, trade fairs, seminars. Robert did not know what he was looking for. Perhaps he was merely playing at being old Haig. But the more he failed to organise these papers, the more he felt a compulsion to continue, to waste endless, fidgety hours in the library not knowing what to do. The failure was thrilling.
Robert’s initial unease at invading his father’s sanctum was compounded by the activities of Mrs Furnivall. At regular intervals, her commodious bosom thrust its way into the library, followed by various energetic limbs and a ruddy face that dared the observer to ask a daft question. These components came together in a violent whirl of cleaning. Robert was not welcome in Mrs Furnivall’s world. He had been a stranger to old Haig and now he was a stranger in old Haig’s house. He did not belong. He knew that he should return to Emily in Peterborough, and crack on with his couplets, but a strange paralysis overtook him. Mrs Furnivall dusted and waxed with increased vigour. She polished around him, clattering into furniture and tutting at the insolence of the figurines. Soon the library was filled with the choking fumes of cleaning products. Young Haig started to have headaches. He retreated to the morning room, then to the games room, then to the conservatory, but it was no use, Mrs Furnivall came after him with her rags and her buffers, her pungent lotions and toxic creams. Each time he fled to a new room, Robert’s collection of paperwork diminished. He left heaps of paper in the hallway, the bathroom, on the stairs. Finally, he sought refuge in his father’s bedroom. Here he set up camp: he had exclusive use of a bathroom and access to an extensive wardrobe. There were cupboards and tallboys to explore, exotic vases and tapestries, a large bed. He had a shoebox of documents, salvaged from his travels around the Heights. There were mirrors on the ceiling and from the bay window he could see the black scab of the town.
An unspoken truce was reached. Mrs Furnivall, or more probably the lowliest maid (the one with a sore on her lip), would leave a bowl of tepid kedgeree or a plate of potatoes and lard outside his door every few hours. Mrs Furnivall scrubbed the landing but she did not enter the bedroom. Occasionally, Robert splashed his face with water and pumped himself up with words of encouragement in front of the bathroom mirror; then off he marched in a fine tweed or wool suit to the Cock and Badger. But the locals spat when he entered and his muse was nowhere to be seen. After a while, he thought it best to stay in his room. Besides, he feared a surprise attack from Mrs Furnivall if he left the camp unguarded.
Robert, his confidence boosted by this new strategy, the strategy of staying put and doing nothing, began to investigate his father’s bedroom more closely. In one old cabinet – a splendid obelisk of oak – he found a dazzling collection of toys and games manufactured under the Haig trademark (a leaping H). Sinister robots with glowing eyes. Crying babies. Crawling spiders. Water squirters and pea shooters. Spinners and wobblers of various types. Blusterballs, bizzybombs, laserbeams. Cars and trains. Soldiers, spacemen, mutants. Cards and boardgames, tricksy jigsaws. Robert took it all in. He could hardly equate all these colours and shapes and weird whirring mechanisms with the grave demeanour of old Haig. There must have been laughter and joy, and plenty of it, in that sullen head. Robert picked up a plastic soldier with adjustable limbs. This was the very one he had played with as a child, that he had taken to bed to ward off the flames. There was the scar on the back, the eye and the star, the protective symbol. Old Haig had given him the strap for that desecration. Now Robert turned the doll in his hands, the plastic soldier in khaki trousers. He held it up to his face, this tatty cheap object, and could hardly believe that it was once the most important thing in his life. He was devastated when his father had snatched it away. “I’ve burned it, boy, and let that be a lesson to you. Those toys put food in your mouth.” But old Haig had lied, for here it was, grubby and defiled, among the sleek, unused toys, the first editions and prototypes. Robert was about to put the thing down when he heard a voice. There was no one but him in the bedroom. The voice, a small voice, came from the toy soldier. Robert held it to his ear.
“Listen, listen. That’s it. Lean in, son. I won’t bite.”
It was his father. He dropped the toy.
The voice, however, continued. Robert heard it filtering up from the floor, where the doll lay face down against the jungly pattern of the carpet. It was a faint, faraway voice. It sounded like a radio in a neighbouring room. Robert picked up the toy and held it to his ear again.
“…not been too well lately. Too much red meat, says Doctor Jacobs. It’s gone solid in my gut. What does he know? A two bob quack. Solid. Can you imagine anything so ridiculous? A man needs red meat. Same as a man needs his dreams. I respect a man who goes after his dream. Takes courage. Look out the window, son, how many men or women out there can honestly say they followed their dream? One in a thousand, perhaps. One in a million. It’s all compromise. It’s all making do. And if that’s what they want, well isn’t it right that another man should mould them to build his own dream? Those that don’t live their dreams don’t deserve to live. Without dreams we die. Didn’t one of your poets say that? Wordsworth, probably. He seems to have said most things. I visited his cottage once with your mother, in the early days. Dreadful place. I tried to buy it.”
Robert put the doll in the cabinet. The ears play tricks. He was tired, overworked. He had not been eating properly. It was Mrs Furnivall’s fumes, they were seeping under the door. He must block all vents and cracks.
Later, when he passed the cabinet, Robert could still hear the doll talking away. He wondered what it was saying. He realised that he felt lonely. He took out the doll and listened.
“…wonderful, simply gorgeous. A beautiful woman was Anna. You should have seen her eyes, son. Oh they took me away, they took me away to…somewhere that wasn’t here…heaven, I suppose you could call it…you’re the poet, you should tell me. It was magical and sickening at the same time. Love is what it was. Is. Always is and always will be. Love.”
“Who’s Anna?” asked Robert. He propped the doll against the pillow on the bed.
“Love of my life. Anna. She was an artist. A bit like you, only she had talent. Paintings. Drawings. Wonderful drawings. I killed her…”
“You killed her?”
“Had to. I had no choice. It was her or me. She betrayed me. She was going with Carlton Lawrence all the time. She was pregnant, too. A disgrace. Well, they used to meet in Glossop. At the warehouse. I couldn’t bear it. I wasn’t having it. I locked them in. Set the place on fire. Accidents happen. I was well insured.”
“And mother never knew?”
“Your mother, the glorious Marian Charlotte Fitzwilliam was the one who suggested Anna in the first place. Get yourself a hobby, you dirty slob, she said, and keep your mitts off me. True. That’s what she said. So I went with Anna. But I fell in love. Or I thought I was in love. I don’t know. She was so…loving. Then the rumours started. Your mother couldn’t stand it. She insisted I neutralise the scandal. Those were her words. She was an educated woman… You know, I only copulated with your mother a dozen times at most. I can show you the diary if you like. It’s a slim volume. She never loved me. She loved my money. She had the breeding, I had the dough. A cold, cold woman. It’s the coldest who are the most generous with their love as it means nothing to them. It’s merely a weapon to them, a counter in life’s game. Oh, Anna. I wish I’d had the courage.”
Robert lay down on his father’s bed, next to the talking doll, and stared up at his reflection. He closed his eyes. In the morning, he said to himself, the voice will have gone.
“…most men haven’t a courageous bone in their body. I’m no exception. But at least I own up to it. Courage. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You…”
Robert remained locked in his father’s room for several more days, talking to the doll, listening and learning, refusing to open the door. He was, he decided, in the safest place. Soon the rest of the house was engulfed in flame. He could feel the heat. He could see the flames licking up and around the window. The sky itself burned day and night. He could hear the screams of the dying. Let them in perish in their hell.
It was the gardener who made short work of the door with his axe, and when Dr Jacobs entered the room (with a handkerchief over his nose), he remarked it was one of the most curious cases he had ever encountered. Mind you, he was more used to dealing with corpulent businessmen and their anxious wives. There on the smeared bed was young Haig, haggard and naked, clutching a toy soldier, nodding and murmuring, marvelling at something only he could see or hear. It was all too odd and unsavoury for Dr Jacobs, who arranged for the dangerous lout to be put in a straitjacket and carted off to the Maybury Clinic for Mental Hygiene. Young Haig’s condition soon moved from childlike wonder to confusion and then to aggression. The doll was taken away. The symbol on its back was deciphered by an expert as being the mark of a satanic cult. Even without the doll, young Haig continued to hear the voice of his father. He asked for pen and paper, saying he wanted to start writing poetry again. The clinicians acceded, thinking this a positive development. But the patient rammed the pen into his ears, rupturing his eardrums, and causing himself serious injuries. At this point, the peculiar case was taken on by Dr Spearing at the Pleich Institute. We await her investigations with interest. In the meantime, all we can really do is agree that it’s a sad and pitiful thing to be alive. We are too weak, too fragile, to bear such torment. There is no release save to inflict pain on our fellow travellers. It is the only way, the authorised way. One man’s death is another man’s dream. And one man’s dream is another man’s death. Really, it makes no difference. To dream, as the poet said, is to die, and to die is to dream.
***
Stephen Hargadon lives and works in Manchester. This is his fifth story to be published in Black Static, and he has another – ‘Nurse’ – forthcoming in Crimewave 13. Helen Marshall has described his stories as “strange beasts: wise, witty, and wonderfully dark”. LossLit, Popshot and Structo have also published his stories, while two essays – one on the joys of secondhand bookshops, the other on the illustrator Derrick Harris – have appeared on the Litro website. He has read from his work at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester and at Oxford’s Albion Beatnik bookshop. He is currently working on a novel. Find out more at stephenhargadon.co.uk.