By Horror Haunted Page 9

  Oh, she had been a goddess then: dispenser of buns, and knowledge, and ginger beer; provider of towels for shivering little bodies; comforter of bruised toes; inventor of enchanted games. She had known then what it was to reign over sea, and sand and summer: she had been “Mummy”.

  Now, her fingers tightened round the bottle of pills in the pocket of the thick winter coat she had chosen, summer though it was, to come and die in. A winter coat, where once she had worn a bikini, and had raced across the sands with her squealing children.

  “I can race you, Mummy! Look, Mummy, look, I can run faster than you can …!” And then the sandwiches, and the crisps, and the fizzy drinks … and after that the guessing games, and the story games, as they lay, drunk with sunshine, in the hot, sandy hollows among the marram grass. She remembered the feel of sand and salt drying on her skin in the benign, endless afternoon heat … she remembered how the damp, sandy little bodies pressed up closer: “Another story, Mummy! Please. Mummy, just one more …!”

  And now the voices were silent, her children vanished; grown, long since, into mere people, as surely as if they had died. And she, she was Mummy no longer, the glory had gone from her. She was an ageing woman, a nuisance to her doctors who could do no more for her, and to her friends, whose sympathy for her eternal aches and pains was beginning to wear thin.

  The pain! Aaah, it was coming back now!—not just the weary gnawing that went on all the time, but a heavy, bloated agony that twisted her over double, brought her to a standstill. Oh God, oh no, no …! Oh Please …! Clutching herself in a half-hoop, she saw her white, quivering feet, with water trembling over them … swollen, grotesque, like the intensity of pain itself…. And then the spasm passed, grew weaker, and she straightened up again. Now that it had gone away, she was glad—yes, glad—that the pain had returned, if only for a minute. For it had been strange the way it had ceased completely, for a whole afternoon, once she had decided to make an end to it. Just the way a tooth stops aching the moment you step into the dentist’s waiting-room. It had shaken her resolve, this eerie cessation of pain, after all the unrelenting months. Its absence had left room for the fear of death to come flooding back, and she had sat in the cheap boarding-house lounge, her winter coat already on, and had cried with the uncertainty and with the fear of it all. And then it was evening, and she didn’t go in to dinner; and then, presently, there was her landlady, and the woman from the first-floor-back, asking her what was the matter? “Nothing!” she’d said, and had had to turn her tear-stained face away, and fuss with her handbag. Nothing … nothing at all … she was just going out to post a letter, that’s all, before turning in…. Under the pitying, guarded gaze of both of them, she had managed to get herself out of the front door; and then, somehow there was no turning back. On, on, past the last of the dark houses … past the straggling beach-huts, and the silent, salty little pleasure boats, upended under the stars. Soon her feet were gliding over the grey, glimmering sand left by the falling tide, and she had known that she would never rest, now, until she had reached the Place.

  The Place. Our place. The picnic place. The hollow in the sandhills sacred to Us.

  Us? There is no such thing now. We are gone, finished. Gone like all the summer noondays of the vanished years. There is no Us now, there is only me, a dreary middle-aged woman, riddled with death, paddling through the dark, still-warm shallows, dragging herself to Our Place to die.

  *

  Nothing had changed. Even in the darkness of the moonless night, she recognised the slope of dry sand and sea-thistle that led up to the dunes. Black against the stars, she could see the spiked marram-grass, could hear its dry whispering in the night air. Once, it had been astir with insects, with galloping children, under the blazing August sky.

  All gone. The sun … the children … the insects of long ago. The dry, powdery sand, once so warm to bare, brown holiday feet, was cold now, cold like death; and the marram-grass, as it stirred and rustled against her thrusting calves, was cruel in the darkness, sharp and vicious against her flabby, ageing skin.

  And how cold, cold Our Place had become after thirty years! Bare, like a crater on the moon, and only eight feet wide! The marram-grass on the rim bent stiffly to her passing, then raised itself, and seemed to watch, grave and hostile, as she slithered and stumbled down to the very heart and centre of Our Place.

  Once there, she sat down, in the darkness; and the coldness of the soft, deep sand sent a shudder of foolish dismay all along her thighs. Somehow, she had not thought that the warmth would be all gone, but it was. Our Place knew her no more.

  Well, and why should it? Why had she imagined it would still welcome her, after all the years? She, who had once brought laughter here, and delicious food, and happy, sunburnt children—now, she was bringing only death, and her disgusting, pain-racked body. She was a pollution, a blasphemy, a sin against the golden days that were gone.

  And yet…. The impulse to die in the place where one has truly lived, is strong in all of us. So she stayed sitting there, right in the centre of Our Place, just where she had once sat in her glory, dispensing chocolate, and ideas for games, and bottles of lemonade. Now, she took from her coat pocket a bottle of plain water. It gleamed eerily in the starlight, and the water glugged and gurgled as she swallowed it, mouthful by mouthful, with one handful after another of the long blue pills. And when she had finished them all, she lay back, on that same soft, deep sand where she had once basked in her bikini, and waited for death to come. She could hear the tide, at its lowest ebb now, murmuring far off in the darkness across the flat sands; and as the pain ebbed slowly, and for the last time, from her tormented body, she could almost have imagined that she heard her children’s voices, far off, playing at the water’s edge. And as the night breeze moaned above her, she could have fancied that beyond her closed eyelids the hot blue sky was blazing. And this strange, drowsy warmth stealing over her, it was like the warmth of the sun. No, of a thousand suns … the suns of all the long-dead summer days, beating down upon her from far, far away across the years….

  *

  “Mummy! Mummy! Wake up! We’re starving! You’ve been asleep for so long!”

  Their laughter, their mock reproaches, broke through the strange, light feeling in her head. Damp, eager little hands were tugging at her, urging her into a sitting position; shrill voices clamoured in her ears.

  Dazed, almost incredulous with joy, she shook the sleep from her eyes. Gosh, what a ghastly dream! Thank goodness the kids had woken her before it got any worse! For a few moments she lay still, ignoring their clamour, and gave herself up to the incredible sensation of being young! Of having a body that was well! The miraculous, unbelievable sensation of health; of organs working exactly as they should, in magical, effortless harmony!

  “Mummy! You said we could have the picnic straight after our bathe! You promised! Oh, Mummy, come on…!”—and slowly, still dizzy with sun, and sleep, and with a stupefying sense of relief, she scrambled to her feet, the dry, powdery sand scattering this way and that from her sun-warmed limbs. How marvellous her body felt, so strong, so lithe, and, at this moment, with only the ridiculous barrier of a bikini between it and the glory of the sun!

  And now she was standing up straight; and as she stood there, her littlest child, her berry-brown little four-year-old, ran up, squealing with excitement.

  “Look, Mummy!” she cried, “Look, everybody! I’m going to go by-byes in the sand, like Mummy did!”—and so saying, she flopped down on to the patch of sand her mother had just vacated; then leapt up as if she had been stung.

  “Mummy! Mummy! It’s so cold where you’ve been lying! Mummy, why is it so cold?”

  THE END OF THE ROAD

  “WE’RE OFF THE road now, darling,” said his wife. “We’re starting up the cliff path, remember? The chalk path with the little yellow flowers growing out of the cracks. We’re out of sight of the sea for the moment, it’s beyond the bend of the Downs; but the sky is as blue as b
lue, with little white, fluffy clouds….”

  Behind his sightless eyes, behind his fixed smile, Graham’s fury seethed. He might have supposed that, today of all days, the familiar anger and irritation would have been infused with at least a streak of tenderness and gratitude; but it wasn’t. Irritation had become a habit—fixed, like the smile….

  Poor Mary. She was only doing her best. They’d actually taught her to carry on like this, up there at the Blind Centre, where she attended the classes for wives and husbands of the blind so much more faithfully than he attended his own classes in Braille and raffia-work and the rest of the fiddling rubbish. “You must be his eyes from now on,” they’d told her—meaning, it would appear, that she must prattle on, day in and day out, about grass being green and poppies being red and the kitchen curtains looking brighter after they’d been washed than they’d looked before…. What sort of a lunatic did she think his accident had turned him into, that such fatuous trivia should now be regarded as the staple diet of his churning, powerful brain, battering like a mad thing against the black walls of futility and uselessness?

  “… and the seagulls! Oh, Graham, they’re looking so white and graceful against the sky—like little white sailing ships skimming over a blue sea…!”

  *

  Was he to be stuck with passages of descriptive prose of this quality for the rest of his life? he’d sometimes wondered. Couldn’t Mary talk to him about anything real, for God’s sake?

  It was nearly a year now, since the glittering ribbon of motorway had given him, all unknowing, his last sight of the bright earth. All a-glitter with cars and noonday sun, it had sped towards his retina, and snapped, and that had been the end. Of light. Of joy. Of any meaning, hope, or purpose.

  Oh, Mary had been marvellous; of course she had. Sitting by his hospital bed, hour after hour, talking in her sweet voice, reading to him, telling him amusing little anecdotes, assuring him of her love. Cheering him and encouraging him (uselessly, as it turned out) through the tests, the treatments, the operations … forcing him to hang on to hope long after hope was gone (“Oh, but darling, I’m sure they’ll think of something! Well, of course they will! They can do such marvellous things, nowadays …!”).

  And then, gradually, a slow and terrible acceptance of the truth began to creep like a fungus into her bright chatter. Gradually, she stopped talking about specialists, and second opinions, and miracle-cures in California or Tibet. Instead, she began talking about what fun they would have, playing records and going to concerts. She talked of how she was taking driving lessons—yes, silly old her, would you credit it?—so that they could still go out into the country together; and it was then that he knew she had been talking to the surgeon, and that this was the end of the road.

  It was the end of conversation too—real conversation—between himself and Mary. Just once, a few days after he came home from hospital, he had tried to talk to her about his blindness—actually using the word, for the very first time. He had felt the little start of horror, like an electric shock, twanging through the gentle hand which clutched his so loyally through half the hours God gave; and then he felt the quiver of recovery, of self-control. He felt the tense fingers mould themselves bravely into a reassuring squeeze; heard the soothing words, the valiant attempt to cheer—and he knew, then, that he must never say “blindness” again. “His sight prevents him from …” “… It’s a bit difficult because of his eyes …”—these were the kind of phrases that Mary preferred to use, and Graham soon learned to use them too. But he never forgot, or quite forgave, that little moment of her involuntary shock; for it was then that he realised how utterly alone he was on his black journey: weeks away already into the darkness, while she, out there, and ever more distant in the fast-receding daylight, could still be shocked by the mere word!

  He never spoke the word again; never again tried to draw her with him into the terrible world he was entering. He did not tell her of the depressions so deep that he could not even move out of his chair; nor of the black storms that arose in him, and set him battling like a madman against the dark, clawing the air with his bare hands for light, while beside him, in the big bed, Mary slept peacefully.

  Or did she? How could he tell, now, whether she slept or watched; whether the light was on, or off; whether she knew, or was unaware? He had begun, already, to feel that paranoic distrust of the sighted of which he had heard; the blind man’s sense of being trapped in a jungle of watching creatures, all of them endowed with this terrible power of knowing what he is doing, while he knows nothing. Like a witch in a fairy-tale, Mary could now spy on him, know his every movement, from the other side of the room, and he not even knowing that she was there!

  On the whole, Mary was good about this—maybe they’d warned her about it at the Centre? Anyway, she most of the time went out of her way to make little noises as she moved around the house—the clink of a teacup here, the tap of a hearth-brush there, or maybe just the humming of some tuneless little song as she cooked and dusted. Desperately though the humming irritated him, Graham was reluctantly aware that he should be grateful; she was doing her best. It wasn’t fair to hate her for it, or to hate the Centre which so painstakingly inculcated the routines that she must henceforth learn to follow.

  And sometimes, of course, despite her efforts, she would slip-up, and there would be silence for five—ten—even fifteen minutes. Where was she? What was she doing? As the dark minutes ticked past, a sort of hysteria would rise in him, and he would picture her standing silently, the other side of the room, watching him … or tiptoeing across the carpet, holding her breath, peering close into his face….

  Sometimes, when the suspense became unbearable, he would spring suddenly from his chair, lunging forwards to catch her out … to feel her flying flesh … to hear her clatter backwards in shock and dismay….

  But it never did happen like that. All that ever happened was that her cheery voice would come fluting from somewhere upstairs, or from the garden: “Are you all right, darling?”—and Graham, ashamed, humiliated, and yet somehow unappeased, would mutter some appropriate reply, and sink back once more into darkness and lethargy.

  Not for long, though. This lethargy, which was the only respite from active misery that he was ever likely to know, was something that Mary could not stand. She would jolly him out of it at all costs—make him do something, go somewhere, meet somebody. And he—helpless, in her power, no longer with any power to choose—he accepted her wearying optimism, and went along with it. He allowed himself to be led around to Courses, and Classes, and Rehabilitation Centres; he even set himself, at Mary’s insistence, to learning Braille.

  “Too old? At forty? Ridiculous!” declared the bracing young Braille teacher, in answer to his doubts. “Why, we’ve had people of seventy and over … only last term we had a woman of seventy-six who …”

  Graham hated these marvellous stories about all these marvellous people. Damn their marvellous courage! He sat, teeth clenched, expressionless, while the story rattled to its fore-ordained happy ending; and then, because Mary was standing over him, he signed-on for the class.

  “He’ll do splendidly!” he heard the woman say to Mary. “A man of his abilities, his intellect….”

  But abilities and intellect weigh tragically light when set in the scales against utter despair. Graham found that Braille was beyond him. He just could not learn. And presently he found that he knew very well, deep down in his heart, why it was that he could not learn. It was because there was no point. He was never going to use it. Long before he could string the laborious symbols together well enough to read anything, he would be dead.

  The knowledge came to him, quite suddenly, during a morning class at the Centre; and at once he recognised that he had known it, in his heart, right from the beginning. Had known that he wasn’t going through with it. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

  “Oh, we all feel like that at the beginning!” George, his companion at the basket-work bench, hastened
to assure him, speaking with cheery confidence, his practised fingers flying among the straw and plywood like the rustle of birds. “We all say we’ll do ourselves in at the start—but we don’t, mate, we don’t! And just look at us now …!”

  Graham flinched. He had still not become used to this casual use of words like “look” and “see” among the blind people at the Centre; but he took George’s meaning. Look how cheerfully we apply the remnants of our powers to little tasks with wood, and wool, and raffia! Listen how we laugh, and crack jokes, and make the best of things! And useful with it! Just look at all these mats, and doilies, and paper flowers! Why, we even argue about what colours to use …!

  “You’ll adapt, mate,” George was assuring him. “You’ll find you adapt, like we all do. Adapting: that’s what it’s all about. Now, take me…”

  Here it came again: the same old maddening recital of courage, of pertinacity, of indomitable optimism. Fourteen years blind and enjoyed every minute of it, to judge from the way George was talking now. So many friends … so much to enjoy … so much useful work to be done … no time to brood. “Why, I don’t even dream in pictures, these days,” George boasted. “That’s when you know you’re really over it—when you don’t even dream about seeing any more …!”

  Quietly, Graham laid down his coil of straw, and the perforated plywood base of whatever it was he was supposed to be making. Laid them down so quietly that not even the blind man next to him, with his preternaturally sharpened senses, was aware that his companion had stopped working.

  They could keep their courage, and their resilience, and their indomitable wills. He, Graham, was for OUT.

  *