Figures of Fear Read online

  ‘No, Seanie!’ Michael shouted, standing up again, but his voice was snatched out of his mouth by the wind, and Sean was already elbowing his way back into the tunnel.

  In three long leaps, like an astronaut walking on the moon, Michael bounded across the side of the dune and seized Sean’s ankles, twisting his fingers into the laces of his rubber dollies so that he couldn’t get himself free. Sean bellowed, ‘Let go of me, you gowl! What the do you think you’re feckin’ doing? Let go of me!’

  Sean struggled and twisted and kicked at him, but Michael held on to him and tried to drag him backward. He wasn’t strong enough or heavy enough to pull him more than a few inches, but in the end, Sean grew so furious that he struggled his way out of the tunnel himself, and stood up, and punched Michael on the left cheek. Michael staggered backward and fell over, rolling down the side of the dune and landing on his back, winded. Up above him he saw ragged white clouds, and seagulls.

  Sean shouted, ‘You’re a feckin’ eejit, do you know that? You’re the biggest feckin’ eejit I ever knew! I wish to God that my da and my ma had never took you in, you gimp!’

  He stalked back toward his tunnel, but as he did so it collapsed, with the same soft thump that Michael had heard so many times in his dreams.

  Sean stood in front of the dune with his arms spread wide. ‘Now look what you’ve done! Now look what you’ve feckin’ done! I spent all feckin’ afternoon digging that hideout and that’s it!’

  He kicked at the sandy depression where the tunnel had been, and then he came back down the dune and stood over Michael and kicked him in the hip. ‘Gimp,’ he repeated, and then he started walking back along the beach towards the hotel.

  Michael sat up, dabbing at his cheek with his fingertips. His eye was beginning to close up already. But he turned and watched Sean shrinking smaller and smaller and thought: I saved him. I hate him but I did the Christian thing and I saved him, even if I made him so angry. I don’t need God’s forgiveness any more. I don’t need Sean’s forgiveness either.

  He hadn’t felt such inner peace in years. He closed his eyes and the wind gradually died down and the sea whispered softer and softer. Soon there was absolute silence, except for the surreptitious ticking of a clock.

  Somebody laid a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Michael? Michael? You must have fallen asleep. Come on, Michael, we have to get to Togher before seven.’

  He opened his eyes. He was sitting in a brown leather chair in a gloomy oak-panelled room, lined with bookcases. Through the windows he could see that the clouds were deep grey and that it was raining.

  He looked up. Father Bernard was standing over him, smiling.

  ‘I must be working you too hard,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Maybe I should let you have a day off. Maybe we should both take a day off, and do some fishing. The salmon are running in the Blackwater.’

  Bewildered, Michael turned his head. Beside him, on a side table, there was a half-empty cup of milky tea and a copy of Bethada Náem Nérenn, the lives of the Irish saints, open at the life of Máedoc of Fern, with a thirty-cent-off coupon from Valentino’s the pizza parlour as a bookmark.

  ‘I’m sorry, Father. I must have dropped off.’

  ‘Never mind. But we should be making haste now. We don’t want to be late for the needy of Saint Arran’s, do we?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  Michael stood up and brushed biscuit crumbs from the front of his soutane. He couldn’t think why he felt so disoriented. He couldn’t remember coming into the library or where he had been before. He couldn’t even remember getting up this morning.

  ‘How’s the eye?’ asked Father Bernard.

  ‘The eye?’ Michael reached up and touched his left eye. It was swollen and tender, and it felt greasy, as it if had been smeared with butter to relieve the bruising. ‘I don’t know. Better, I think.’

  Father Bernard laid a hand on his shoulder and steered him across the room. On the panelled walls around the door frame hung several hand-coloured engravings of fish. A salmon, a gurnard, a John Dory and an ugly-looking tropical fish with staring eyes and feathery spines. Pterois miles, the devil firefish. Michael was sure that he had seen this before. Not just here, in the library, but somewhere else, although he couldn’t think where. A house, somewhere in the city. A bedroom, where somebody else was sleeping beside him.

  But then Father Bernard steered him out into the corridor and out through the front doors and into the rainy street outside, where his old blue Honda was parked.

  He climbed into the passenger seat and the doors slammed and he forgot where he had seen the devil firefish before, for ever.

  At the same time, which was five eighteen in the morning in New York, Kate was woken up by Kieran starting to grizzle again. She eased herself out of bed and out of the bedroom and walked across the living room to Kieran’s crib. She lifted him out and he was hot and damp and smelled of pee.

  ‘There,’ she said, jiggling him up and down. ‘Is it those nasty teeth again?’

  She carried him across to the window and looked down at East 13th Street. It had been raining during the night and there were stacks of sodden cardboard on the sidewalk. There was no traffic, although she could hear a fire truck honking somewhere in the distance, and the warbling of sirens.

  ‘There, there,’ she sang, rocking Kieran from side to side. And then she sang, ‘Chip, chip, my little horse. Chip, chip again, sir. How many miles to Dublin town? Fourscore and ten, sir. Will I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again, sir.’

  She felt a hand on her shoulder, and then a kiss on the back of her neck, and then another kiss. She turned and said, ‘We tried not to wake you, didn’t we, baby?’

  ‘That’s all right, Sissikins. I couldn’t sleep anyway. Every time I closed my eyes I had dreams about Michael. I can’t think why, like. I haven’t thought about Michael for years.’

  Kate reached up with one hand and touched his cheek. ‘Poor Michael,’ she said. She kissed the top of Kieran’s gingery hair and for a long moment Kieran was silent, as if she had given him a blessing.

  THE BATTERED WIFE

  Halfway through the afternoon it began to rain, almost laughably hard, and they retreated under the canvas awning of the bric-a-brac stall.

  ‘You should leave him,’ said Heather, over the syncopated drumming of the rain. ‘You should pack everything up, take the kids and walk out. You could always come to Tunbridge Wells and stay with us until you find somewhere else to go.’

  ‘How can I?’ said Lily. ‘And why should I? Poppy’s only just started at Elm Trees – she’d be so upset if we had to move – and Jamie keeps wetting the bed as it is. Apart from that, damn it, Heather, half of that house belongs to me, and I’ve spent three years decorating it exactly the way I want it.’

  ‘But you can’t go on the way you are, Lily. One day he’s going to kill you.’

  Lily didn’t know what to say. She knew that Heather was right. It was a gloomy wet afternoon in late September but she was wearing dark glasses to conceal her two bruised eyes. Two nights ago Stephen had come home in one of his moods. He had been drinking, although he wasn’t incoherently drunk, like he sometimes was. She had cooked him a chicken-and-tomato casserole, one of his favourites, but for some arcane reason he had interpreted this as mockery.

  ‘What? You think I’m some kind of a peasant, all I ever want to eat is chicken-and-tomato casserole?’

  He had dropped the Le Creuset casserole on the kitchen floor, cracking the tiles and splashing her ankles with scalding red sauce, and then he had punched her, once, on the bridge of the nose.

  ‘Me – I would have called the police,’ said Heather.

  ‘Oh, yes. And then Stephen would tell them that he’s suffering from stress at work and how sorry he is and how he’ll never ever lay another finger on me.’

  ‘At least see a counsellor, Lily. Please.’

  Lightning crackled behind the horse chestnuts that bordered the village green, followed
by an indigestive grumble of thunder. Children scurried in the rain between the tents, screaming.

  Heather said, ‘Why does it always rain whenever we hold a fête? You would have thought that God was all in favour of us raising money for a donkey sanctuary. His son went everywhere by donkey.’

  But Lily wasn’t really listening. She was frowning at a woman who was sheltering under the cake stall opposite. The woman was wearing a grey knitted hat and a grey three-quarter-length raincoat, and she had a pale, drained face, with tightly pursed lips. She had a small grey Bedlington terrier with her, which repeatedly shook itself.

  What Lily found unsettling was the way that the woman was staring at her, unblinking. She turned her head away for a few seconds, but when she looked back the woman was still staring at her.

  ‘Do you see that woman?’ she asked Heather.

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘That woman – the one in the grey raincoat, with the dog – next to the cake stall.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She’s staring at me. She’s been staring at me for the past few minutes.’

  Heather pulled a face. ‘Perhaps she knows you.’

  ‘Well, I certainly don’t know her. And look. She’s still staring at me.’

  There was another rumble of thunder, but it was much further away now and the rain was easing off. After a few minutes, Lily and Heather stepped out from under the awning, and soon the aisles between the tents were crowded again. Lily tried to see if the woman in the grey hat and the grey raincoat was still standing at the cake stall, but she had vanished.

  Before she picked up Poppy from Elm Trees, Lily parked on a double yellow line in the High Street to buy pork chops and runner beans and a fresh loaf of bread. She went into the off-licence, too, and bought two bottles of Merlot on special offer.

  Stephen usually drank Merlot, and she thought that if she showed him that she didn’t disapprove of his drinking, so long as he did it in moderation, he might not feel that she was judging him so much. ‘You’re always judging me. Just because you’re a solicitor’s daughter. Who the hell do you think you are?’

  She was waiting at the counter in the off-licence when she turned towards the window to make sure that there were no traffic wardens around. Standing outside the window, peering in at her, was the woman in the grey hat and the grey raincoat, with her Bedlington terrier beside her.

  Lily was about to go outside and ask her what she wanted when the assistant took her bottles of Merlot from her and said, ‘Afternoon, madam. Like to put your card in?’

  By the time she had paid and stepped out of the off-licence, the woman had gone. She looked up and down the High Street, but there was no sign of her.

  She put Poppy and Jamie to bed early that evening and read them a story, Chris Cross in Snappyland, about a boy who kept losing his temper until he was taken away by monsters who could all shout much louder than he could.

  ‘Mummy,’ said Poppy, as Lily tucked her in. ‘We’re not going to go away, are we?’

  ‘Of course not, sweetie.’

  ‘But Daddy is always shouting and makes you cry. I don’t like it when he shouts and makes you cry.’

  ‘Daddy has a lot of worry at work. Sometimes it makes him cross like Chris Cross in Snappyland. He doesn’t really mean it.’

  ‘I heard you tell Daddy that you were going to take us away.’

  ‘Well, that’s because I get cross, too. But I don’t mean it, either.’

  ‘That lady said you mustn’t take us away.’

  ‘Lady? What lady?’

  ‘She was standing outside the playground today and she called me. She said, Poppy. Then she said “your mummy mustn’t leave your daddy”.’

  Lily stared at her. ‘What did this lady look like?’

  ‘She had a grey woolly hat and a grey raincoat and she had a dog that looked like a dirty lamb.’

  ‘And that was all she said? She didn’t tell you what her name was, or how she knew what your name was?’

  Poppy shook her head. ‘The bell went and I had to go inside.’

  Stephen still hadn’t come home by ten fifteen. Lily stood in the living room with a glass of Merlot in her hand, almost motionless, looking at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece as if she were someone that she didn’t recognize. A thirty-five-year-old woman with blonde, short-cropped hair, and two black eyes that were now turning rainbow-coloured, as if she were wearing a pierrette’s mask.

  She didn’t know whether to start supper or not. It was so late now that she herself had lost her appetite, and she didn’t know what state Stephen would be in when he eventually arrived home.

  She was still standing in front of the mirror when the doorbell chimed. She went into the hallway to answer it. Through the green and yellow stained-glass window in the front door she could a dark distorted shape.

  ‘Who is it?’ she called out.

  There was a moment’s pause, but then a woman’s voice said, ‘Don’t open the door. There’s no need to. But don’t take the children away.’

  ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Who are you?’

  She unfastened the latch and threw the door open wide. In the porch stood the woman in the grey hat and the grey raincoat, her face as grey as newspaper. As soon as she saw Lily, she screamed out, ‘Don’t take the children away! Not tonight! Something terrible will happen if you do!’

  Terrified, Lily slammed the door shut. After she had done so, she stood in the hallway quaking. From upstairs, she heard Poppy calling out, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Jamie’s wet the bed!’

  She approached the front door again. The light in the porch was shining through the stained-glass window, but she couldn’t see the shape of the woman any more. She slid the security chain into place, and then she opened the door a little way.

  The woman had disappeared. All she could see were street lights flickering through the trees, and all she could hear was the muffled sound of traffic.

  She switched off the lights in the living room and she was just about to go upstairs to run a bath when the front door burst open with a deafening crash.

  ‘Lily! Lily? Where the eff are you?’

  She went through to the hallway. Stephen was leaning against the open door, his hair sticking up like a schoolboy’s, his tie crooked. She could smell alcohol and regurgitated curry.

  ‘Stephen,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you recognize me! You know who I am! That makes a change!’

  He took three stumbling steps forward, lost his balance, and almost collided with her.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she told him.

  ‘Get away from you? That’s not what you said on our wedding night, you bitch!’

  ‘Stephen, you’re drunk and you stink. Go upstairs and take a shower and go to bed.’

  Stephen stood in the hallway, swaying. He had a faraway look in his eyes, and he was smiling.

  ‘Stephen,’ she repeated, and it was then that he slapped her so hard that she bounced against the wall, knocking her head and jarring her shoulder.

  She fell to the floor, but Stephen gripped the front of her dress, tearing it wide open. He dragged her on to her feet and slapped her again and again.

  ‘You know what you are?’ he kept yelling at her. ‘You know what you are?’

  Both Poppy and Jamie were crying as she bundled them into her Meriva. She heaved the big blue travelling bag into the back and slammed the door.

  As she climbed into the driver’s seat, Stephen reappeared in the porch.

  ‘Lily!’ he shrieked at her. ‘You’re not taking my kids, Lily! You’re not going anywhere, you bitch!’

  He staggered down the front steps towards them. Lily turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine. Poppy was screaming now and Jamie was crying in a high, panicky whistle.

  Stephen banged his fist on the Meriva’s rear window, and Lily put her foot down so that it hurtled out of the driveway in a spray of pea-shingle.

  There was a deep, clumsy t
hump, and Lily saw a body tumbling in the air in front of her. It turned over and over before it hit the road, but immediately, another car ran over it and its arms flew up and its hands clapped together, smack, as if it were applauding.

  Shaking with shock, Lily climbed out of the driver’s seat and stepped out into the road. The woman in the grey woolly hat and the grey raincoat was lying on her back, staring up at her blind-eyed.

  Lily turned around. A small crowd had already gathered and the driver of the second car was phoning for an ambulance. Standing next to her front gate, however, was the same woman, in her grey hat and her grey raincoat, with her Bedlington terrier on its lead.

  Lily walked across to her. The woman’s image appeared to ripple, as if she were seeing her through running water.

  ‘You’re dead,’ Lily whispered. ‘That’s you, lying in the road. You’re dead.’

  ‘I did try to warn you, Lily,’ the woman told her. ‘You should have walked out over a year ago, when he first started to hit you. But you were too frightened of being on your own. And – secretly – you enjoy being his victim, don’t you? It makes you feel wanted. You should have stayed. Because now look what you’ve done.’

  Lily said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ But the woman turned around and walked away, leaving her dog standing on the pavement. As she turned the corner, and disappeared from sight, Lily called out, ‘I’m so, so sorry!’

  THE NIGHT HIDER

  Dawn was dreaming of Christmas and snow and jingle bells.

  She was sitting in a black-painted sleigh, sliding across a frozen lake under a charcoal-grey sky. The steel runners hissed on the ice, the jingle bells jingled. Strangely, the sleigh seemed to be self-propelled, and as it came closer and closer to the edge of the lake, she began to worry about how she was going to stop it.

  Help! she called out, or thought she called out. But there was nobody in sight, only snowdrifts, and fir trees, and the louring grey sky, and the sleigh continued to glide across the ice with its runners hissing and its jingle bells merrily jingling.

  Somebody help me! She was panicking now, but seconds before the sleigh could reach the edge of the lake, she woke up, and opened her eyes. She wasn’t in a sleigh at all, she was lying in bed, in her own flat in Chiswick.