Dee

Something gives under her feet with a crack. There are bright shards among the leaves and dirt that cover the steps. It’s as if a whole box of Christmas tree ornaments has shattered everywhere. It adds a hectic edge of unreality.

Dee wonders if she’ll know, right away, when she sees him. Surely the truth will come off his flesh like a scent.

She rings the doorbell thirty or forty times. She sees movement at the window but there’s no answer, and she wonders if she should leave. Part of her sags with relief at the thought. But she doesn’t think she can put herself through all this again. Get it done, Dee Dee. Her father’s voice in her head. Their grim credo during that long half-year when it was just them, alone. Get through it, get it done; no matter how unpleasant, however hard your heart pounds in the night, whatever dreams may come. Get it done. She straightens her spine a little, and that moment she hears a shuffling within the house. A small high noise – a cat, maybe? Then heavier sounds, a large body making impressions on stairs, walls, boards.

Three different locks click and the door opens a crack. A bleary brown eye presents itself, framed by a pale face which sprouts hair. His beard is red, much brighter than the lank brown strand that falls over his brow – the shade is attractive, it gives him a piratical, almost jaunty air.

‘Hi,’ she says.

‘What is it?’ His voice is higher than she expected.

‘I’m your new neighbour. Dee. I wanted to say – well, hi, and I brought you some pie.’ She winces and resists the urge to mention that she’s a poet, but doesn’t know it. Instead she holds out the box containing the out-of-season pumpkin pie she bought at the drugstore. The box has dust on it, she now sees.

‘Pie,’ he says. A pale hand snakes out and takes the pie. For a moment Dee expects his skin to sizzle in the sunlight. She doesn’t let go of the moist cardboard, and for a moment they are caught in a gentle tug of war.

‘I’m so sorry to bother you with this,’ she says. ‘But my water doesn’t get switched on until this afternoon. Could I possibly use your bathroom? It was a long drive.’

The eye blinks. ‘It’s not convenient right now.’

‘I know,’ Dee says, smiling. ‘The new neighbour only just got here, and she’s already being a pain. Sorry. I already tried a couple houses on the street but I think everyone’s out at work.’

The door swings wide. The man says stiffly, ‘I guess, if you’re quick.’

Dee steps into an underworld; a deep cave where lonely shafts of light fall on strange mounds, jagged broken things. Plywood is nailed over all the windows, with round circles cut out to let in light.

She peers to her left, into the living room. As her eyes adjust to the gloom she sees that piles of books and old rugs litter the wooden boards. There are bare patches on the yellowed walls, where pictures or mirrors once hung. The walls are a deep green, like a forest. She sees a beat-up lounger, a TV. There’s a dirty blue rug on the floor that looks like it’s made of little pills. The whole place smells of death; not of rot or blood but dry bone and dust; like an old grave, long forgotten. Everything is decaying. Even the latch on one of the back windows is rusted through. Flakes of dark red litter the sill. The tired detective Karen’s voice is in Dee’s head. A chaotic home environment. Unmarried. Socially marginal.

Behind her the front door closes. She hears the three locks click into place. Each hair on the back of her neck stands slowly, individually on end.

‘Kids?’ she asks, nodding at the pink bicycle, which lies on its side.

He says, ‘Lauren. I don’t get to see her as often as I’d like.’

‘That’s rough,’ Dee says. He is younger than she had first thought, early thirties, maybe. Eleven years ago, he would have been just in his twenties.

‘The bathroom is down the hall,’ he says. ‘This way.’

‘Great music,’ she says, following. The song that’s playing somewhere in the house is another surprise, heartfelt country music, sung in a lovely voice. She sees that Ted has bare patches on the back of his head, as though handfuls of hair have been pulled out by small fists. For some reason this brings the light, airy graze of terror.

In the bathroom, Dee turns on both the taps. She can hear him waiting for her behind the door. His distress, his animal breathing. She’s aware, in great detail, of her own body; her skin, so strong in some places, like on her heels and her callused fingertips, so thin in others, like her eyelids. She feels the delicate hair that stands up on her forearms, the soft globes of her eyes; her long tongue and throat, her purpled organs and muscled heart, which pumps the red blood through her. It is pumping fast, now. All these vulnerable things, which can be broken or punctured: the blood can spill; bone can become a cracked white edge; eyeballs can be burst by the pressure of two thumbs. She looks for a mirror, to reassure herself that she is whole, unharmed. But there isn’t one above the basin or anywhere else in the dim, dirty bathroom.

She flushes the toilet, washes her hands and opens the door.

‘Could I have a drink of water?’ she asks. ‘I’m parched. Is it always so warm around here? I thought this place was known for the rain!’ He turns without a word and lumbers into the kitchen.

She looks about her as she drinks. ‘Do you hunt? Fish?’

‘No.’ After a moment he asks, ‘Why?’

‘You must freeze a lot of stuff,’ she says, ‘to need two freezers.’ Only the small combination fridge-freezer appears to be in use. The other – an old, industrial chest freezer – lies empty and open, lid resting against the wall.

He looks embarrassed. ‘Olivia likes to sleep in there,’ he says. ‘My cat. I should have got rid of it when it broke, but the thing makes her happy, you know? She purrs and purrs. So I keep it. Dumb, I guess.’

She looks inside. The box is lined with soft things – blankets and pillows. On a cushion she can see a hair – it is brown, or reddish-brown. It doesn’t look like a cat hair. ‘Does Olivia live outside?’ Dee asks. She can’t see cat bowls for food or water anywhere in the kitchen.

‘No,’ he says, offended. ‘Of course not, that would be dangerous. She’s an indoor cat.’

‘I love cats,’ Dee says, smiling. ‘But they’re such assholes. Especially as they get older.’

He laughs, a startled stutter. ‘I guess she is getting older,’ he says. ‘I’ve had her a long time. All I wanted, when I was a kid, was a cat.’

‘Ours used to sleep in the dryer,’ she says. ‘It gave my dad nightmares. He was so scared he’d mistake her for a sweater and …’ She mimes spinning, makes the face of a horrified cat, staring out through glass.

He gives another little choked laugh and she adds a kind of dance, like the cat paddling in the swirling laundry.

‘You’re funny,’ he says. His smile looks lopsided, creaky, like it hasn’t been used in some time. ‘I was always afraid Olivia was going to get herself shut in. At least she can’t suffocate, now.’ He shows Dee the holes that are drilled in the lid.

‘Pretty,’ she says, running her finger across one of the blankets. It is yellow, with a pattern of blue butterflies on it, and it is like a duckling’s back to the touch.

He closes the lid of the freezer slowly but steadily, so that she has to remove her hand. As he does, she notices the fading bruising on his forearm, his swollen hand.

‘Hey, you’re hurt,’ she says. ‘How’d that happen?’

‘The car door closes on my arm,’ he says. ‘Closed, I mean. I was parked on a hill. At least it’s not broken, I guess.’

She makes a wincing face. ‘Still hurts, I bet. I broke my arm once. It was so awkward, you know, opening jars and stuff like that. Are you right-handed? If you need help, let me know.’

‘Uh,’ he says. She lets the ensuing silence stretch. ‘What do you do?’ he asks eventually.

‘I wanted to be a dancer once,’ Dee says. ‘I’m nothing, now.’ Strange that this is the first time she has allowed herself to admit it out loud.

He nods. ‘I wanted to be a cook. Life.’

‘Life,’ she says.

At the door, she shakes his hand. ‘Bye, Ted.’

‘Did I tell you my name?’ he asks. ‘I don’t remember doing that.’

‘It’s on your shirt.’

‘I used to work at an auto shop,’ he says. ‘I guess I got used to the shirt.’ Manual labour or unemployed.

‘Anyway, thanks,’ Dee says. ‘You’ve been very neighbourly. I won’t bother you again, I promise.’

‘Any time.’ Then he looks alarmed. He locks the door quickly behind her.

Thunk, thunk, thunk.

She walks back slowly across the parched yard. He’s watching her as she goes, of course. She feels the weight of his eyes on her back. It takes all her restraint not to run. The encounter has shaken her more than she expected. She had been sure he wouldn’t let her in.

Dee closes her front door behind her with trembling hands and sits down on the dusty floor with her back against it. She tries to breathe, to calm herself, but she seems to have handed her body over to someone else. Her hands clench and unclench. Hot tides crawl across her skull. A sawing gasp comes from her throat. Her heart thumps in her ears. A panic attack, she thinks vaguely. Got to get it together. But it’s like sinking deeper and deeper into a sand dune; she can’t just climb out.

At length it subsides. Dee coughs and breathes. She becomes aware of an acrid scent in the house, a mingling of dry grass and pepper trees, wattle and stinkbugs. The outdoors is coming inside where it doesn’t belong. She gets up, weak as a kitten, and follows the scent to its source. In the dusty living room a pane of glass is missing from the window. Dry leaves have blown across the scarred boards. Something has been sleeping in here. Not a skunk, she doesn’t think, but something. Possum or raccoon.

‘Nope,’ she whispers to the empty room. ‘No room at the inn.’ She pushes a small bookcase in front of the broken pane, blocking it. She’ll probably have to get that fixed herself. Her landlord doesn’t seem like the type to go to any trouble. She doesn’t mind. The more he leaves her alone the better.

As an experiment, she looks around at the living room, walls brown with old cigarette smoke and corners hung with dust, and thinks, This is my home. It actually makes her laugh a little. She can’t recall the last place she felt was home. In her early teens, perhaps, when Lulu still slept in the next room, thumb locked tight between her pursed lips, emitting her light, penetrating snores.

She is surprised to discover that the gas is connected. Dee makes steak, green beans and a baked potato in the hissing white stove in the kitchen. She eats quickly and without pleasure. She can’t care about food, but she takes care of herself. She learned the importance of that the hard way. The stove still hisses after she switches it off and the kitchen smells faintly of gas. Another thing to get fixed. She’ll do it tomorrow – or maybe she will die in the night. She decides to leave it up to fate.

Dee sits cross-legged on the living-room floor as dusk falls. The night flows in, pools in the corners, spreads across the floor like a tide. She looks at the dark and the dark looks back at her. The little circles in Ted’s windows light up. Through one, colour and movement shiver – the TV, she guesses. Later the circles go dark downstairs, and for a few minutes two moons shine out upstairs. They go out at ten. Early to bed, then – no TV or book in bed either. She watches for a few moments longer. The house is dark but she cannot let go of the feeling that it is not at rest. There is something manic in its stillness. But she keeps watching and nothing happens. Her limbs are twitching with exhaustion; the dark revolves before her. She should sleep too. There is a long road ahead.

The bathroom is old white tile, mapped with cracks. A buzzing neon light hangs overhead, filled with the corpses of moths and flies. She puts blankets and pillows in the bathtub. Safest place in an earthquake, as her father used to say. Anyway, she doesn’t have a bed. Dee lays the claw-hammer down beside her on the cold tile. She closes her eyes and practises reaching for it, reinforcing the muscle memory, imagining herself just woken from sleep, imagining a dark figure looming over her.

She pictures Lulu’s face, the way expressions chased across it, clouds over the sun.

She reads Wuthering Heights. She is only a couple of pages from the end. When she finishes, she opens the book at random in the middle and continues reading. Dee only ever reads this one book. She likes to read, but you never know what books are going to do to you and she can’t afford to be taken off guard. At least the people in Wuthering Heights understand that life is a terrible choice, which you must make each day. Let me in, Catherine pleads. Let me in.

When she turns out the light the dark is rich and complete. The house breathes about her like a person, boards groaning, releasing the stored heat of the day. Stars peer through the window. The house isn’t really in the city at all – it is almost in the forest. She is so close to where it happened. The air holds the memory of the event, somehow. The particles of it are carried on the wind, lie in the earth, the old trees and dripping moss.

Her dreams are filled with burning sun and the fear of loss. Her parents walk through the desert, hand in hand, under a sky filled with stars. Dee watches as long as she can, but then the red birds take flight and the sky goes white, and the sound of their wings is a soft feathery scratching. She sits upright in the dark, heart pounding. Sweat trickles down her back and between her breasts. The sound has followed her out of the dream. From downstairs it comes again. Dee hears that it is not wings, but a scratch, like a long nail on wood.

Her palm is slippery on the rubber handle of the claw-hammer. She creeps downstairs. Each board cracks like a shot beneath her feet. The scratching continues, sharp claws or fingernails raking the wood. Dee understands that there has been some critical slippage between worlds. Let me in – let me in. Faint silver pours in through the uncurtained living-room windows. The scratching is faster now, insistent. Dee thinks she hears another sound behind the scrabbling – it is high, broken. Sobbing, perhaps. The bookcase trembles, as if the force behind it were growing in fury and in strength.

‘I’ll let you in,’ Dee whispers. She pulls the bookcase aside. It shifts with a groaning shriek. She sees what crouches outside the window, gazing in. The hammer falls to the floor. She kneels and comes face to face with it, the child, its silver-white flesh dappled in the moonlight, its mouth a black cherry, eyes gleaming like lamps, filled with the light of death, scalp stripped and wounded, where the birds have plucked the hair from her skull.

‘Come in,’ Dee whispers and puts out her hand.

The child hisses at her, an unearthly sound, and Dee gasps. Fear washes over her, so cold she thinks her heart will stop. The child’s mouth opens, her hand whips out to grasp Dee’s arm, to pull her out of this world and into whatever other awaits. Dee sees white teeth set like pearls in powerful jaws. She sees the blunt, crippled fingers. The small pale face seems to ripple in the uncertain light, as if through water.

She screams and the sound breaks the dream, or whatever it is. Dee sees that it is not a dead girl at the window. It’s a cat, jaws hissing and wide, tabby coat bleached by moonlight. The cat swipes at Dee, and she sees that it has no claws in its maimed paws. She backs away, making a soothing noise. The cat turns to flee, but looks back at Dee for a moment, pointed face eerie in the dim. Then it is gone, melted nimble into the black garden.

Dee sits back on her heels, shaking. ‘Just a stray cat,’ she says. ‘Don’t read scary books before bed, huh, Dee Dee? No big deal. Nothing to worry about.’ This is an old habit of hers – saying aloud what her dad would want to hear, while keeping her real feelings inside. There is no time to fall apart. She thinks of Lulu again and this works. Purpose calms her. Dee’s heart slows its splashy beat.

Dee looks out over the tangled growth that swarms over her back yard. It’s wild, impenetrable, scented in the night. Anything could be out there, hiding. It could creep close to the house, to the windows. And then, reaching out with a long finger … Some of the neighbours have razed their yards to the ground, she notices. Presumably to deter snakes and vermin from nesting there. Dee shivers. Ted’s yard is chaos like hers. She stares at the undergrowth that riots all over his garden. In the moonlight it seems to be moving, writhing gently. She shakes her head, nauseous. That day at the lake took almost everything from Dee but it left something in her, too. Ophidiophobia, they call it; an overwhelming fear of snakes. Dee sees them everywhere, their shadowed coils. The terror slows her mind and heart to a glacial pace.

Slowly she cups her hands and then raises them to her lips, covering her mouth like a mask. She whispers into her palms, a name and a question, over and over. Clouds scud across the moon, throwing light and shadow on her face, gleaming on the wet sheen of tears.

The next morning she resumes her post by the living-room window. She keeps the curtains drawn at all times and does not turn on lights after dark. She knows how a lit window shines like a beacon in the night. Ted does too, it seems. The plywood-covered windows make it look as if his house has turned deliberately away from her, to face the forest.

She begins to learn his habits. Sometimes he goes to the woods, and he does not return for a night, or several. Other times he goes into town, and those visits are in general shorter, sometimes lasting only hours, or an evening. Sometimes he returns very drunk. One morning he just stands in the front yard and eats what looks like a pickle spread with peanut butter. He stares ahead, blank, and his jaws move, mechanical. There are bird tables and hanging feeders in the yard, but no birds ever come. What do the birds know?

She finds out everything she can online. Ted sometimes sends in his sightings to the rare bird column in the local paper. His mother is a nurse. She is very beautiful, in an old-fashioned way that seems divorced from such things as flesh or food. In the grainy photograph she holds her certificate in delicate fingers. County Nurse of the Year. Dee wonders what it must do to you, to have a child like Ted. Does she still love him? Where is she?

The first time Dee tries to follow Ted into the forest, he stops at the trail head and waits in the dark. She hears him breathing there. She freezes. She is sure he can hear her heart. After a time he makes a sound like a slow beast and moves away into the forest. She knows she can’t follow, not this time. He felt her there.

She is relieved despite herself. The dark forest seems full of the sliding passage of snakes. She goes home and throws up.

Dee watches the house, instead, after that. After all, it is not him she has come for. She waits, patient. Wuthering Heights lies open on her lap, but she does not look at it. She stares at the house without pause, memorises each flake of paint that peels away from the old clapboard, each rusty nail, each frond of horsetail and dandelion that bobs against its walls.

Two days later, she has almost given up. Then, beneath the cicadas and the bees and flies and the chirping of sparrows and the hum of distant lawnmowers, she hears something that sounds like the tinkle of breaking glass. Every fibre of her strains towards the sound. Did it come from Ted’s house? She is almost certain that it did. So very nearly completely certain.

Dee rises from the floor, stiff from her long vigil. She decides that she will go over there. She thought she heard a window breaking, thought of burglars, she is just being neighbourly … It is a natural action.

As she does, Ted comes along the street. His walk is deliberately careful, like someone who is drunk or hurt. He carries a plastic bag by its handles.

Dee sits down again, quickly. At the sight of him, her vision goes dim at the edges, her palms are oily-slick. The body’s reactions to fear are so similar to that of love.

Ted opens the door, moving with that eerie care. Moments later there is the sound of laughter. The TV, maybe. Through it, Dee hears a high, clear voice saying, ‘I don’t want to do algebra.’

There is the low rumble of a male voice. It could be Ted. Dee strains. Her head aches with effort. The stretch of summer air that lies between the houses now seems thick and impenetrable as dough. A young girl begins to sing a song about woodlice. In all her days of watching, Dee has seen no one but Ted come and go.

Relief and horror flood her, so strong she can taste them in her mouth like mud and water. Her worst fear and her best hope are confirmed. There is a child in that house who does not leave. That’s all you know right now, she tells herself sternly. Step by step, Dee Dee. But she cannot help it. Lauren, she thinks. Lulu. Her given name, which is Laura. Lulu, Laura, Lauren. Such close sounds, lying almost atop one another.

To Dee, in that moment, the singing girl sounds exactly like her sister. The timbre, the little catch in her voice.