Thieving Fear (17 page)

'If he ever needs his neighbour he knows where I am,' Mrs Devi said and withdrew into her house.

Charlotte felt watched but could see no observer. As she advanced up the path she had the impression that the house wasn't growing as it should. Of course this was an illusion, but she could almost have imagined that the house was shrinking to shut her in, like a cottage in an unpleasant fairy tale. She spent some energy in fending off the idea as she thumbed the grimy plastic bellpush.

The electronic tolling sounded blurred by dust or age. When it brought no response, Charlotte rang again and levered the knocker up and down above the equally rusty letterbox. The reluctant clanking was followed by a protracted rattle and a thud. Though it sounded like the springing of a trap, it was the sash of an upstairs window. Hugh leaned out, only to stare both ways along the street. 'I'm here,' Charlotte called.

As his eyes met hers she saw they looked hollow and sleepless, presumably from worrying about his brother. 'Are you coming to let me in?' she eventually had to ask.

She was waiting for his footsteps on the stairs when he reappeared at the window. 'Can you?' he said.

He jerked a fist over the sill, so violently that he might have been trying to punch someone invisible in the face. By the time Charlotte grasped his intention he'd dropped the key beside the path. As she retrieved it she smelled earth, but she wasn't taking that as any kind of omen. She twisted the key in the stiff lock and pushed the door wide.

The interior smelled stale, too nearly airless. At the end of a narrow hall halved by stairs and watched over by copies of Rory's family portraits, she saw and heard a tap release a dull flat drip into a metal sink. As she closed the front door the hall with its drab brownish wallpaper took on more gloom. She was expecting Hugh to appear at the top of the stairs by the time she reached them, but she couldn't even hear him moving. 'Are you all right?' she called.

'I'm still here.'

The tap emitted another drip, and she wondered how long he'd left it that way. She made for the kitchen, past a room where a dusty television squatted near a bookcase rather less than full of Cougar books and shabbier volumes. A gentle turn sufficed to quell the drips, and she was returning to the hall when she faltered. It couldn't really have narrowed. Perhaps that was an effect of the gathering darkness, which seemed capable of transforming the space beneath the stairs into a den. Of course nobody was crouching there, and so she oughtn't to have sounded nervous as she called 'Aren't you ever coming down?'

'You come up first.'

If his tone had betrayed any enjoyment, Hugh might almost have been proposing a game. Charlotte hurried past the earthy shadows under the stairs and grabbed the banister. At the top she was faced with a rudimentary landing beneath a low roof. A faint glistening trail wandered back and forth over the faded brown carpet, starting in the room from which she heard the spring-like trickle of a presumably unstoppable flush. The track, reminiscent of a snail's but surely too large, also led in and out of the front bedroom. She couldn't help hesitating before she pushed the door open and ventured into the room.

Hugh was standing with his back to her beyond the single bed and facing the window. The end of the plain pale quilt near the foot of the bed was grubby with marks, from which she deduced that he'd been lying down with his shoes on. As she stepped forwards she kicked an object on the floor – a plastic cap that belonged to the can of shaving foam in Hugh's hand. She had trouble believing she'd identified the source of the trail that led from the bathroom to him. 'What on earth have you been doing?' she said. 'Why have you made such a mess?'

'It's my house.'

'Nobody's saying it isn't,' Charlotte told him, though there was little in the shabby room to demonstrate his ownership – just some discarded clothes on a chair. 'People are worried about you, that's all. Mrs Devi was saying you haven't been to work for days. You'll have taken them off because of Rory, won't you?'

'Who?'

Charlotte's attempt to laugh only shook her voice. 'Rory. Your brother.'

'I know who my brother is. I asked who else you said.'

'Mrs Devi. The lady from next door.'

'First I've heard she's called that. I didn't know you'd be checking up on me.'

'How long are we going to talk like this? Can't you look at me?'

He only shrugged – left shoulder, then the right, and again as if trying to establish which was which. Oughtn't she to go to him? She'd taken a step, watching her feet to avoid the trail on the carpet, before she realised he was moving, so tentatively that she could almost have concluded he was having to remember how to turn. His wary gaze found hers at last, only to fall to the can in his hand. Much of his face reddened as he lurched to grab the cap beside his feet and jam it onto the container, which he dropped on the bed. Having waited for an explanation or even for him to look at her again, Charlotte said 'All right, I won't ask.'

'Don't.'

That hadn't worked the way she'd hoped it would. As his gaze sought her face he held out a hand. She could almost have thought he was pleading mutely to be led from the room until she realised he must want his key back. When she planted it in his hand his fingers twitched as if they were eager to close around more than the key. The room was threatening to feel as small and dark as the inside of her skull. 'Aren't you going to offer me a drink?' she said.

His face grew yet more mottled. 'I'd have to go out.'

'You've nothing to drink in the house?'

'Not the kind you're after. Are you feeling bad?'

'No,' she said and more truthfully 'I'm feeling thirsty. We're talking tea here, Hugh.'

'I've got that. I'm some use.'

'I'm sure nobody would say you weren't.' When his eyes remained guarded, little better than blank, Charlotte said 'I expect it's in the kitchen, is it?'

'It will be.'

Even this didn't move him until she made with some impatience for the stairs. As she reached the landing she felt his breath on her neck. At least it was Hugh, not some imaginary pursuer, but she said 'No need to get so close.'

'Sorry,' he gasped, which tousled her hair.

'I'll follow you down. I'm just going to the private room.'

She didn't glance back as she shut the door. The overcast sky blackened the window, which was already on the way to opaque with a rash of glass pimples. A greyish shower curtain sagging from immovable plastic hooks helped confine her in the token space between the bath and the opposite wall, where its reflection in the mirror failed to add even a pretence of spaciousness. The trickle of the cistern behind her might have been mocking her own activity, but she hadn't finished when she realised she had yet to hear Hugh go downstairs. Was he listening like a sly jailer outside the door? The room seemed shrunken by darkness, and the light cord was out of reach. She rose to her feet as soon as she could, because she felt watched too. What was twitching the shower curtain aside to peer around it? Her own hasty movement had stirred it, and the shrivelled clawlike hand consisted of wrinkles in the plastic. It was enough to put her in a fury at her rampant imagination, and when she stalked out of the room the sight of her cousin loitering in his bedroom doorway made her angrier still. 'What do you think you're doing now?' she demanded.

His face was reddening again, a process that her question accelerated. 'Waiting for you,' he mumbled.

'Don't you think I can find my way around your little house? I wouldn't mind if it was twice the size.'

She oughtn't to seem to be denigrating where he'd chosen to live, but he had to be the reason why she was on edge. She felt worse than guilty for wishing Ellen would arrive so that she wasn't alone with him. 'Come on, let's make that tea,' she said.

The instant she planted a foot on the top stair he came after her. 'Not so close,' she had to warn him again, and kept hold of the banister. Gaining the hall would have been a relief if it had been wider. She was heading for the at least slightly roomier kitchen before she noticed he had frozen three steps up. 'What's –' she cried as she turned to see what in the front room was appalling him. He was gazing across it and through the window, and in a moment she saw the figure outside the house.

As Ellen plodded into the station concourse a voice as large as the building finished an announcement, and she heard a tuneless humming behind her, which rose as if she'd aggravated its impatience. Nevertheless it was being emitted by an invalid tricycle, not its rider, who called 'Can you mind out, love? I can't see round you.'

She might have fled without looking at him, to a different exit and home – she'd already had children turning to stare at her once they'd sat ahead of her on the bus across Southport – but she mustn't care about anything more than Rory. As she moved aside the tricycle droned past her, laden with a pensioner whose pink scalp peeked through his grey hair and who bulged on both sides of the seat, not least his tweedy buttocks. At once he halted, blocking her progress. 'I still can't make it out,' he complained. 'When's the next train to Manchester?'

'In just a few minutes, and I'd like to be on it if you don't mind.'

'Can't stop you if there's room.'

She felt as though he were putting into words the image that had haunted her for days and equally sleepless nights, and so her retort was more of a plea. 'What do you mean?'

'The same as I say, love. It's an old-fashioned habit of mine.'

As the tricycle cruised forwards its humming grew more laboured. Perhaps Ellen should have saved her breath as she did her best to overtake, but a remnant of her old profession made her say 'You ought to have that serviced. It's under too much strain.'

His large already purplish face shook as he poked it up at her. 'What's it to you?'

'I'm only advising you. I used to care for people like you.'

'Given up now, have you?' he said and slitted his overflowing eyes as if to keep a thought in. 'Hold on a tick. Weren't you in the paper?'

She only had to run for the train, if her legs were up to running. She was stumbling away when he said 'It was you plain enough. No wonder you didn't want to show your face.'

The tricycle hummed alongside her, sounding unbearably smug, and she turned on him in the hope that some of the scattered commuters might come to her defence. 'Why shouldn't I?'

'Good God, woman, don't grimace at me. You're ugly enough.'

It must be a standard insult of his, Ellen tried to believe – perhaps one he'd levelled at any wife or wives he had – but it didn't tell her anything she didn't already know. Nobody was going to intervene on her behalf, since they could see the truth of his remark, if they could bear to look. Indeed, she had a sense that one of the spectators was delighting in her experience. Their glee seemed to pace her as she trudged ahead of the old man, her eyes so swollen that they felt like insomnia rendered solid, her lips too engorged to utter another word.

The first carriage on the train had a space for wheelchairs and the like at its near end. Ellen dumped her wheeled case in the luggage alcove of the only other carriage and plumped herself onto the closest pair of unoccupied seats. She was wearing her most voluminous clothes, but she couldn't tell whether they were clinging to her because they were no longer large enough or with her inelegant sweat. As the train filled up, more than one person thought better of sitting next to her. She was beginning to dread that someone might have to – that she would be trapped with their reaction or their attempts to conceal it all the way to Manchester – when the train jerked forwards.

She felt the vibration travel upwards from her feet, a quivering that passed through every inch of flesh. As she moved uneasily the seat seemed to yield too much, unless she did. She lifted a ponderous arm to open the meagre slat of the window, which brought her upper regions a humid breeze, although it also intensified the earthy stench that had become her companion, no doubt a symptom of her state. She was so enclosed in bloated flesh that she couldn't judge how hot she was. Whenever a shadow moulded itself to her she could have taken it for moisture welling up from her body. She tried gazing out of the window, but the headlong countryside occasionally halted by stations was eager to parade the sight of her face bulging like a fungus under bridges or being dragged like a fallen moon – an object as rotund and blotchy and porous – over fields and townscapes. Sometimes the spectacle compelled her to touch her face, but she was unable to determine how swollen if not rotten it might be – no less than her groping fingers. If she rested her hands in her lap she couldn't avoid noticing how much they resembled stranded sea creatures, bloated and pallid and ready to grow more discoloured. In the end she had to settle for staring at the back of the next seat, although it made her feel caged, like an exhibit but one so unsightly that spectators couldn't bear to look. She would be with her family soon, and surely they could stand whatever she'd become or at least show her a modicum of sympathy. The prospect went some way towards sustaining her as far as Manchester, and the thought of Rory did. In one sense he must be in worse shape than her.

The train wobbled to a halt at Manchester, and then she did. She kept her seat while the carriage emptied, not least because nearly everyone who passed her stared at her, unless they glanced at her and quickly looked away. She remained seated even once she was alone in the carriage; she didn't want another confrontation with the tricycling pensioner. Or was she alone? Perhaps if she peered into the dark under the seats she would find she wasn't quite. She would do nothing of the sort; she might be missing the next train to Huddersfield. She stumped along the aisle to grab her luggage and lower herself from the train.

The tricyclist was blocking the way off the platform while he lectured the ticket collector about facilities for invalids. Neither man immediately acknowledged Ellen. 'Excuse me,' she said to the collector, 'could you ask –'

'Just because I'm in a chair doesn't mean I can't talk.'

'I'm aware of that. So could –'

'See, there's people like her that don't think us cripples ought to be heard. We're just in their way, that's what they think.'

Ellen was growing hotter with frustration, which made her feel heavier still. 'Well, if you don't mind my saying so –'

'I do mind. We're not meant to have feelings, you see,' the old man informed the collector. 'At least there's some that still care about us. She got fired from her job for mistreating the likes of me.'

She might have tried to refute this if the collector hadn't said 'Do you two know each other?'

'I know all I want to know about her, thanks very much.'

'You don't know anything about me.' Despite feeling like a child in an outsize body, Ellen couldn't resist adding 'And I'd rather not know anything about you.'

'See, she admits it. That's how much she cares about cripples, and they were supposed to be her job.'

Ellen had a sense of helplessly performing a script for someone else's amusement or worse. 'I always cared for my patients, however disabled they were.'

'You can see how much, can't you? She won't even face me. Maybe she thinks I'm nothing to look at, but –'

'I don't care how you look,' Ellen said and stared at him. 'It isn't how people are on the outside, it's inside that counts.'

'And you're as bad one way as you are the other. Don't go putting on your nasty face again. I told you, there's no need to make yourself worse.' As Ellen's cumbersome lips shifted he said 'Just dry up, you ugly woman.'

She thought the collector was coming to her defence until he said 'Can you both go through now, please? There's another train in.'

She must have deserved everything, then, since he apparently thought so. As the tricycle moved off with a satisfied hum she brandished her ticket at the collector, though her distended fingers came close to dropping it on the ledge of the booth and letting it lie. She dragged her case and herself across the concourse to the departures monitor and saw that the next train to Huddersfield left in ten minutes. Having shown her ticket to another official, who looked unimpressed by it or her, she blundered into the nearest carriage on the train.

Despite its size, the train was nowhere near full by the time it left the station. Ellen couldn't blame the handful of commuters for wanting to avoid her, especially once she saw her blurred face slithering sluglike across the inside of a bridge. It was as dim as some bedroom item rendered monstrous by a nightmare that refused to dissipate. She closed her bloated eyes and clasped her hands tight in her lap against the temptation to finger her face. They felt like clammy lumps of tripe resting on more of the same, and in general refusing to see only aggravated her sense of herself as just a hulk of loathsome meat. Now and then sunlight flooded over her, unless it was some exudation of her own, which reminded her of the old man's advice. She wished she could indeed dry up and wither too. Writers might be meant to use their own experiences, but she was afraid she'd passed the limit. Her imagination felt crushed by her body, reduced to a sense of the misshapen mass of flesh.

At last the train wavered to a stop in Huddersfield. Once she heard she was alone, unless someone was silently watching her, she opened her eyes and heaved her deformed bulk towards the platform. Perhaps the ticket collector had seen her coming, because he took her ticket without looking at her. She trudged out to a taxi rank, where she felt her midriff swell like an inflated tyre as she bent to the window of the first vehicle. She was sure the driver barely managed not to shrink away, but she wasn't going to subject him to her presence in the car. As soon as she'd obtained directions to Empire Street she stepped back.

The beginning of the route was steeply uphill. The dark sky looked laden with moisture, if no more so than Ellen felt. A bridge over the ring road seemed to coat her with noise and grimy fumes before the route led between a factory and a wall overhung by trees. When she plodded into the shade of the foliage it seemed to leave her moister. Most of the few people she encountered were on the opposite side of the road, and all were by the time she came abreast of them. Were they glancing hastily away from her or from somebody behind her? Surely she was bad enough. If there appeared to be a scrawny shadow on the pavement when she turned her burden of a head, it must be an elongated stain. The clumps of outstretched spindly objects at the ends of two thin twisted branches of the main discolouration couldn't drag her back or down or chase her off.

Beyond the factory a side street led past a copse to Hugh's house. An unpainted gate slouched in the entrance to his garden, more like a scrap of wilderness. However shabby the building was, it looked like a haven to her. Whatever had befallen her, surely Hugh and Charlotte would understand. She was suddenly so desperate to see her family that she grew afraid of being prevented somehow as she and her thunderous luggage made for the house. She had almost reached the gate when she saw Hugh.

He was on the stairs, framed by the window and the doorway of the front room, and seemed paralysed with shock. There was no question that she was the cause of his distress. In a moment Charlotte peered across the room at her and cried out, unless she was too appalled to make a sound. Ellen couldn't run, but she and her case lumbered away as fast as they could. The front door must have opened, because this time she heard Charlotte, whose question only spurred her onwards. 'Oh, Ellen, what have you done to yourself?'