Bernard sank back into his pillows, glad of the peace and quiet that night-time brought. He found constant chatter bothersome. He could never keep hold of the thread of the conversation. It was easier lately just to nod and smile, rather than try to converse. They seemed placated by that, the people who drifted in and out of his life, whose faces were vaguely familiar but whose names increasingly escaped him. He preferred to be alone, except he never was, quite, with ghosts from his past whispering around him. Waiting, Bernard felt, for him to right the wrongs he’d done them in life.
Closing his eyes, hoping sleep would soon claim him, his thoughts drifted to the young woman who’d visited him tonight. She wasn’t happy with him, he sensed, but he was buggered if he knew why. He was bemused as to why she kept calling him Dad, too, but he’d smiled and nodded when she’d addressed him, hoping to appease her, and eventually she’d gone away. Had she been crying when she’d left? He tried to recall, but his brain was uncooperative, sluggish, desperate for respite from the effort of thinking.
He attempted to empty his mind, allow it to meander to some happier place where his night terrors wouldn’t haunt him. He was tumbling softly, pleasantly, like a kite on a summer’s breeze, when it snagged on the one memory he could never expunge, the smell of petrol and burning flesh, like pork crackling on Sundays, jerking him wide awake. Sweat pooled at the base of his neck, wetting the sheets beneath him, but he didn’t dare move to wipe it away. Ruth hated it when he disturbed her. She could never get back to sleep. The alcohol she drank was an anaesthetic – Bernard had tried to explain it to her – and once it wore off, sleep would be impossible. He should know. He’d once drunk his fair share, too. It never helped him forget, bringing the horrific details into sharp focus instead: the terror in eyes that would soon be bulbous and opaque, the piercing scream cut suddenly short, details that would haunt him to the grave.
Shifting his position slightly, once he was sure he hadn’t disturbed his troubled wife, he lowered his eyelids and tried again. A short time later, or it could have been hours, his mind lurching frantically from thought to disjointed thought, he couldn’t tell if he was awake or still dreaming. A moment ago he’d been running, the long landing in front of him stretching on to eternity, the door ahead of him growing more distant, the floor like treacle beneath him, sucking his feet in. The room he was trying to get to was empty when he reached it, stark walls, nothing to tell him why he was there. And then the door slammed behind him and the dark descended, and there was no door, no window, no way out of his nightmare.
Guessing he was awake, as the sounds of the night reached him – the resident in the adjoining room coughing, the lonely hoot of a tawny owl – he raised his head from his pillow, and a new sense of panic started to take root inside him. He wondered at first whether the figure on the other side of his room was a figment of his imagination. When it approached, he didn’t recognise the person looming over him. The features were familiar, yet not. Fleetingly he had a memory, but it floated away before he could grasp it, disappearing into the night like a soft white djinn. Tormenting him. Always the memories tormented him, hovering on the periphery of his recollection.
But he wasn’t hallucinating, he soon realised. This person was real, tangible. He could hear the controlled breathing, as if they were holding their rage in. By the amber glow of the fire escape light spilling in through the bay window, he could see the seething sheen of malice in eyes that seemed to be looking right into his soul. He smelled the cloying odour of floral cologne, and he knew it; knew who it belonged to. He groped for the name of the face that danced just out of his reach, sifted through the quicksand in his mind. He couldn’t catch hold of it before the face was lost to him.
This individual meant him harm. Cold certainty settled like an icicle in his chest. ‘What do you want?’ he rasped, his throat thick with fear.
The loud silence that followed was filled with tacit threat. And then, ‘I know what you did,’ the person whispered. The voice, tight with suppressed emotion, tugged at the frayed edges of his consciousness.
Another soundless minute ticked by. And then the figure moved, its penetrating gaze holding his briefly before it turned away from him. His heart thrashing wildly, he strained to hear the sounds above it: soft footsteps; the window opening; rain plopping heavily from the roof. Her name – the woman who was long ago lost to him – he heard that, too, carried mournfully on the wind that whistled through the trees in the grounds. A distant dog howled, soulful, blood-chilling, the primeval cry of an abandoned animal. And then…
‘She’s here, Bernard,’ his visitor said softly. ‘She’s waiting for you.’
Bernard had known she would be. He’d sensed her waiting over the years, nothing but the flimsy shadow of death between them. He’d imagined her lying next to him, sharing his bed again. He’d searched often for her lately, hearing her treading quietly along the landing, calling out to him, urging him to stop fighting. His heart heavy with guilt and grief, he’d wanted to give in, to be with her, as they once were. He’d struggled, though, to find his way, the doorless walls confounding him, the landing a maze of obstacles, defeating him.
She was here now. Shivering with cold though he was, Bernard experienced a blessed sense of relief as he gazed down at the gravel path leading through the lush gardens below. She’d always loved her garden, found solace in it as she’d pottered. She would show him the way. He’d been devastated when she’d turned away from him. He hadn’t blamed her. He’d never intended to hurt her so badly. He’d meant to console her, to calm her, not push her. If only she hadn’t been drinking. If only she hadn’t been about to say out loud what they’d promised each other not to, and disillusion their little girl about him forever.
‘Do you think she’ll forgive me?’ he asked his visitor, his voice almost drowned out by the heavy patter of rain against the metal frame of the fire escape.
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ his visitor suggested.
Bernard felt an acute sense of panic as he flailed forward. Then his skull cracked on the iron steps as he bounced and tumbled his way down, and he didn’t feel anything more.