Authors: Chloe Aridjis
But when we turned a corner and saw the imposing property with tall iron gates we thought we were charmed—not only to have won but in such grandeur—yet as we drew closer we realised our place was next door. Before moving on we set down our bags and peered through the bars, into a large landscaped garden with various pathways leading to a stately-looking home with an expansive façade. Above the entrance rose a clock tower with Roman numerals telling the wrong time. Trimmed hedges, bushes dotted with berries, tall evergreen trees. In the distance, a large man was advancing down one of the paths clutching a stick or a cane. Two women in oversized coats sat on a bench, knitting. In a rectangular airing court beyond them, two people were playing poorly coordinated badminton, not a single shot returned. Upon spotting us the man with the cane quickened his pace and headed in our direction. Worried we were about to be scolded for peering into private property, Jane and I picked up our bags and continued.
Modest in comparison to its neighbour, our B&B was an Edwardian semi, red brick with wooden shutters. We walked up the small path from the street and seconds after we rang the bell the door was opened by a woman with very short hair, a pigeon-neck silver. She introduced herself as Sam and led us into the foyer where another shorthaired woman, this one with elfin eyes, introduced herself as Pam.
They congratulated us on our prize—each year their B&B was entered in the raffle—and asked us to sign the guest book. The last entry, a Mr and Mrs Honeywell, dated from two weeks ago. Sam insisted on carrying our bags and led us up a flight of stairs to a door with a carved number 3. Beyond this 3 lay a profusion of floral print. We paused in the doorway, still in our coats, and looked around. Curtains, bedspread, wallpaper: the blossoming decor seemed to advance in small leaps and spurts from one piece of furniture to another, the only pause the spaces between objects.
Sam deposited our bags on a fold-out table and informed us that breakfast would be served between eight and nine. We removed our coats and settled in. The room was a perfect little square, furnished with a queen-sized bed, two night tables, a fake leather armchair, and a balcony that overlooked a garden whose autumn trees, their crowns tossed in the wind, seemed to mock the inert vegetation inside. Above our bed hung a large pendulum clock with a pearly face and skeleton-like black hands. It was nearing five; I felt impatient for a walk.
After we’d made ourselves a quick cup of tea from a little tray, we set out. By then dusk had turned into an empty-handed magician who kept a few paces ahead of us, snuffing out the streets seconds before we reached them, robbing us of the sights we’d come to see. One by one, the lights in shop windows were switched off, café tables and chairs brought in, postcard racks folded up.
There was always tomorrow of course, our main time for sightseeing, but I’d been hoping for at least one memorable image to make the day feel complete. From nearly every street corner, grand and autonomous and immune to the setting of the sun, the spires of the cathedral, without question the town’s centre of gravity, could be glimpsed. I looked forward to visiting, to wandering amidst the stone tombs of bishops, running our hands an inch above their carved faces, centuries of serenity transmitted to our fingertips, above us a heaven of stained glass windows, columns of rainbowed light.
It had been years since I’d visited a holy place—I once saw a man get down on his knees and pray at the Sienese crucifix in Room 51—but the only time I ever felt in the presence of something holy, maybe even mystical, was when near Caspar David Friedrich’s
Winter Landscape
.
That evening we dined at a pub, beer from a local brewery and overflowing jacket potatoes, and mapped out our Saturday. Cathedral—tea rooms—museum—tea rooms—city wall—pub. Jane had bought a map of the town though it seemed small enough to navigate on instinct. By the time we made our way back to the B&B the air had grown chillier, impatient nips of winter at the heels of November, and I remember walking close to her as we left the centre and returned to the outskirts, the warehouses with their gaping windows even more somber at that hour.
On our way out Sam had given us a key, just to be safe, she said, since they tended to go to bed early, at least by city-folk standards, and it had happened before that a guest was left standing outside for hours, frantically ringing the bell before either of them heard it since they both had remarkably deep sleep, she said, though Pam’s had grown lighter lately due to a nervous disorder.
We softly let ourselves in and held on to the banister as we climbed the stairs to our room, moving through the strangely female silence of the house, a depth of silence that’s only possible without men, the stairs lit by a small nightlight plugged into the wall between the ground floor and first.
Jane and I had never shared a bedroom but after four years of sharing a roof there was little awkwardness, and almost in tandem we slipped out of our clothes and into our nightwear, Jane to a short cotton gown and I into pyjamas. The radiators emitted a low hiss.
In the bathroom she lent me some make-up remover, a sparkly bluish solution, and afterwards I washed my face with the complimentary bar of soap. As I dried off, Jane, who’d been standing behind me waiting for her turn at the sink, asked whether Lucian used to bring women home when I was living with him.
I answered in the affirmative.
‘Often?’
I paused, wondering whether to measure my response.
She reached for her toothbrush and applied a thick coat of paste, enough for three brushes, then turned to me.
‘Well?’
‘He went through phases.’
‘How many women?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Try to.’
I stared at our reflections in the mirror, each of us darkhaired and dark-eyed yet so different, my jagged fringe in need of trimming, her undulating mane that fell past her shoulders, my complexion whiter, hers on the yellow side, and thought about how many times we had gazed into the same bathroom mirror at home yet minutes or hours apart. Until then no mirror, I realised, had held both our reflections at once.
‘Like how many, Marie?’ she asked again and turned to look at me sharply, holding her toothbrush.
I’d give her the truth. ‘I don’t know . . . a hundred?’
‘A hundred?! In two years? That’s one a week!’
‘Jane, he’s a good-looking man. And he was young at the time, and single.’
She turned on the tap and ran her toothbrush under it, brushed for a second, then removed it from her mouth.
‘Handsome, single, whatever, he’s a bloody liar. He said he’d only been with Carole, his ex, and then with Sue, another ex, and then with some girl from the Lock and then me. Maybe he’s been lying the whole time, maybe he’s up north with some girl this weekend, maybe he’s just as jaded as all the others, who knows . . . ’
No, I reassured her despite having no idea, No, I’m sure he hasn’t been lying, I said, at most he’s knocking off a few digits to appear more gallant, you really needn’t worry, but Jane wasn’t listening and again called Lucian a liar, this time a liar and a bastard, and as she spoke the water gushed out of the tap.
Each second, I began to feel, was killing a wave.
‘It obviously wasn’t only Carole, his ex, and Sue, his other ex, and who knows who else from the Lock, but a long string of them, I’m sure, and now he’s probably somewhere up north with—’
‘No, no, this was all years ago,’ I said, and motioned to her to turn off the tap but she was too caught up in phrasing and rephrasing, repeating the same thing over and over by simply varying the sentence structure, to notice. I leaned over and shut off the gushing water.
‘I haven’t finished,’ she snapped, and turned it back on.
The bed was large enough, or perhaps we were each small enough, to lie comfortably distanced from one another, my half separated by several inches from hers, a good thing since her nerves seemed more livewire than ever. Once I switched off the light she quieted down, mumbling one last thing about Lucian before falling asleep, and as I drifted off I imagined I was there on the sunken futon behind the screen in the old Camden flat, with Lucian somewhere beyond, on the sofa rolling a cigarette or reading one of his rock biographies, listening to Bowie at low volume.
Sometime in the early hours, most likely between five and six though I was never sure, I was awakened by a tapping sound. This tap was followed by another. And another. The taps came from the direction of the balcony.
‘Marie, did you hear that?’ Jane was already awake.
‘Yes.’
Tap, tap, tap.
The taps were spaced out. Nature was not so methodical; it was not a branch being driven against our window by the wind.
‘Do you want to go and see what it is?’ she asked.
Tap, tap, tap.
Jane drew the blanket around her, pulling most of it off me, and said, ‘Will you go and see? Please?’
In a sleepy haze, which curbed the adrenalin that would’ve otherwise been coursing through me, I crept out of bed, negotiating the sifting darkness of the room, and with cautious steps edged towards the balcony. I gripped the curtain and pulled it aside. A faint light was shining down from somewhere above, enough to exhibit the man standing there. His face was round and fleshy, his hair floppy and blond. Full-moon eyes peered past me and into our room. In contrast to his face, his body was long and willowy, arms dangling at his sides, and the overhead light created the strange effect of illuminating only his head and trunk as if they were floating without any bottom half, like the detached torso of a statue.
For some reason I didn’t feel fear, only tremendous curiosity, and I got up as close as I could to study the apparition on the other side of the glass, mesmerised by this presence at once startling and remote. As I stood face to face with our visitor, whose saucer eyes were now staring straight at me and no longer beyond and into the room, my hand reached for the door handle. I was so drawn to this almost fantastical ghost of a man, an inverted shadow, its negative plate, that I hardly heard Jane calling out.
‘
Don’t you dare!
’
Only then did I turn round to look at her, the diluted light entering the parted curtains just enough to provide me with a glimpse of her face and the sheets, and it was only her shriek, which followed the words
Don’t you dare
, that pulled me back into the present and made me take control. I let the curtain fall and tore myself away from the balcony, relieved once I’d left its force field.
I turned on a lamp. All the floral print sprang back to life. Jane raised an arm and pointed mutely in no real direction. I told her to stay put and remain cool, a tall command, I knew, but what else was there to say, and rushed out to fetch the women. After years of working in security there I was, face to face with a bona fide trespasser, and I went ahead and did what I had been endlessly trained to do: go and raise the alarm.
Halfway up the stairs I ran into the women charging down.
‘What is it?!’ they cried, one by one or in unison, I no longer remember, as I jumped out of their way and watched them rush into our room.
Within seconds the curtain was drawn aside and the spherical face revealed. Watching from the bed Jane lay contorted and agape, one bare leg emerging from under the covers.
‘Oh, it’s this one,’ said Pam or Sam (that night, they were indistinguishable), and signalled to her partner to release the curtain. The fabric rectangle fell over the gaze, cutting it off with a swish. The women told us not to worry and hurried out.
A minute or two later, the doorbell, followed by an exchange of words and footsteps on the stairs. Without a knock or any warning, two solemn men entered our room and went over to the balcony. One of them turned the lock and with a solemn hand slid open the door. The man outside put up no resistance. It happened so quickly, I barely had a chance to register him as he was led past. All I remember was the pale, fleshy face and the blond hair, a few tones lighter indoors, and how the lunar eyes had been emptied and lost their glow, and the bumbling shape of his long-limbed body, now attached to a pair of hesitant legs, and the blue pyjamas with a pocket on the breast. In his face, as he was led across the room and out the door, I saw the disappointment of a spectre that briefly enters the land of the living and is then ordered to return to his tomb.
By the time I joined Jane in bed, morning, a more assertive intruder, was forcing its way through the curtains, and I remember burying my face in my pillow to block out the light, overly aware of the thickening birdsong outside.
Before breakfast Jane asked me to check the balcony for signs of the night before. I too was curious, and went over to see. But there was nothing to report, no indication that a scene had been played out hours before, no footprints, no fingerprints, no trace. Beyond rose several very tall trees, half of them growing on the side of the B&B and the other half on the stately grounds next door. Beneath the wall that separated them, I imagined, their roots were deeply intertwined.
In the dining room sat Pam and Sam, each with a mug of tea and different sections of the paper. Their expressions conveyed nothing. Yet after asking whether we had any special requests and returning from the kitchen with two heaped breakfast dishes, their calm unravelled. They began to explain, interrupting one another rather anxiously, that the building next door was a private asylum, and every now and then a patient would escape. But this was only the third time in eight years.
In the mid-nineteenth century, they continued as we started on our scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, a wealthy gentleman without partner or children lived in the house next door. For some reason, perhaps out of a desire for company, he decided to turn it into an asylum. He brought in a whole staff of doctors and nurses and opened his doors to the troubled. He would interview prospective patients himself, and offer a discount when moved by someone who was unable to afford the fees.
A great recreation hall was built, seventy feet long and thirty feet wide, Sam told us, where the doctors put on dances and theatricals. A bakehouse and joiner’s shop soon followed. Days were filled with all sorts of activities, patients given small patches of land on which they could play Creator. Even those with severe concentration problems usually managed to raise something from the soil.