Echoes. Laura Dockrill

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СКАЧАТЬ more, I headed back to the house. We’d have tea; he always had a mug of tea poured into his bowl, sometimes he liked a slice of toast too. But tonight he didn’t seem interested. He sat in the corner of the kitchen, crumpled round the cupboard chewing on whatever he had as I washed and saw to my wound. The tea I had poured for him in the bowl went from hot to warm to lukewarm to cold. I decided to leave the damned canine, and sort it out in the morning.

      

      In bed, the wind swept the windows, rumbled the glass rooted into the ledge. I tried to sleep. My eyes wouldn’t stick to their lids. I couldn’t relax, my dispute with Mozart was playing on my mind, I felt the bandage around my hand, the throbbing ache beat with a pulse of its own. I had to go downstairs and see what it was he had.

      I let myself out of the bedroom; the corridor was dark and cold. The floorboards felt like planks of ice under my milky trembling toes, black-wired hairs standing on end. I could hear the water boiler, filling, trickling and churning. When I got downstairs, Mozart was snoring in his corner. I squeezed in through the crack in the door, not wanting to wake the dog with the un-oiled muuuuu of the hinge. Light flooded in, a luminous box of shadow darted over the kitchen tiles. The dog’s ribcage was going up and down, up and down, up and down. I squinted my eyes in adjustment, trying to focus, to get a better look. A slice of silver glimmered, shone at me like a chink of light. I went over. In between his paws was the object. I carefully put my hand forward, I didn’t want another bite. The dog flinched. I moved back quickly, breathed, and tried again, my hand quivering in its forwards move. I grasped it–ha!–and escaped quick as can be into the hallway to look at my prize.

      It was a comb. A small silver one, antique. Beautiful. Each prong as perfect as the next and the design butterflies engraved into the silver, heavy, not too heavy as to break hair, but not cheap. He was a funny old dog, sensitive old fool. Still, he could hurt himself on the comb so I decided to keep it upstairs with me. Much more relaxed now, I went to bed and lay down, within moments I was sleeping, heavily.

      

      I awoke at around four to an alarming noise; it was Mozart, that silly dog, missing his comb. I could hear him at the bottom of the staircase, crying his needy little heart out. I thought about not getting up but he was really upset, he had a real wail going. ‘Okay, boy,’ I reassured. ‘I’m coming.’ I put on my housecoat and made my way downstairs to tend to the dog.

      But the dog wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs. He was asleep, sound asleep. The wails were still going, screaming now, like a crazed fox or a deranged woman. I searched the house; it sounded the same distance away everywhere I searched. Piercing, it was, screeching. The house shook, the ornaments rattled, falling off the mantel, the knifes rang in their block, the pots and pans on the ceiling harness jangled, murmurs whistled through the keyhole from the treacherous wind. My ears were bursting and I covered them with my palms as I ran round the house. Mozart was awake too now, his tail down, his heavy salty eyes the size of snooker balls. I scooped him up and took him to the bedroom where he trembled in my arms. I put him into the bed with me and pulled the blanket over the top of us. Our bodies shaking in rhythm together, squeezing him closer I felt his tiny heart flattering. I tried to calm him with my voice, soothe him with a stroke; the noise was unbearable, it made me nauseous.

      Then, at last, the screaming stopped. I let out a heavy sigh. I slowly pulled back the blanket and peeped my eyes out from under the quilt. It was as though nothing had ever happened.

      Until I saw her.

      At the window was an old woman. Toothless, black-eyed with white wirey hair, a tatty black shawl round her haggard shoulders. She looked me dead in the eyes, her bony arm slowly lifting upwards, and that was when I realized she was hovering.

      ‘AWAY!’ I shouted.

      My mouth clammed up once more. Her arms reached higher and higher until she rolled her fragile hand into the shape of a fist, about the same size as a small plum and she knocked.

      And knocked.

      And knocked.

      Three times in total and then pointed her finger, straight at me, her nail shooting into the glass like a warning. I looked down the bandage around my hand I had used to cover my wound from Mozart–it was drenched in thick red blood. A tremendous pang weighed me down, filling my larynx with a cloggy bogginess, unsure of what this feeling was leading me to believe, it crept up on me like hands in the dark and something made me think–it was my turn.

      

      I woke up to the sound of the bin men arguing with the neighbours. My bed was a damp nest of perspiration and muck. The white sheets had changed to a murky sour colour, the corners of the pillows like smokers’ lampshades. I got up out of the dismal filthy pit and thought about making coffee. Last night’s incident was nothing but a nightmare, my life was not fiction, this was not a storybook, this was nothing but a calculation of the mind.

      I finished my coffee in the chair by the window. Mozart was still distressed from last night’s activity and was shaking himself into a fuzzy ball underneath my footstool. This made everything only too real for me to deal with. My hand throbbing away in its bandage and I knew I needed to talk to someone about this. I decided to call the vicar. I wasn’t religious but it seemed only appropriate. I found his telephone number in my address book under ‘V’, Vicar Doddley, written in pencil. I dialled his number and waited for the for his voice.

      

      We met later that day at the entrance to the park. The vicar was early as was I.

      ‘Shall we walk?’ he asked. ‘I know a sweet little teashop nearby.’

      The vicar pushed his bicycle by the side of the river, the sunshine beaming off the spokes. The elderflowers candied the air like billowing perfume of a fat aunty. The geese gossiped over crusts.

      ‘Something strange happened to Mozart and me last night, Vicar. I had gone to bed, and I heard this strange wailing; it was sharper than a dog cry, almost the fix between an owl’s hoot and a woman’s moaning more like a…’

      ‘Foxes!’ the vicar sussed. ‘It’s foxes. My wife and I had a similar anxiety until not so long ago, it is—’

      ‘Wait,’ I interrupted. ‘When I looked to the window I saw—’

      ‘Good grief, look–it’s Sally-Anne Reeves, Betty and Colin Reeve’s little one. Well, she’s not little anymore…Sally-Anne, Sally-Anne, over here, my love!’ The vicar jumped up and down to get the young girl’s attention, ‘Her parents own the little trinket shop, you know the one?’ He began peering up on his stretched legs like a small yapping dog. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Jim? It’s just I haven’t seen her in such a long time! Sally-Anne, over here!’

      ‘No, not at all.’ I kicked the soil with my feet and bent down to give Mozart a stroke. Sally-Anne strode over; she was confidently flirtatious even in her walk.

      ‘Good afternoon, Vicar, how are you? And…?’

      ‘Yes, this is my very good friend, Mr Jim Beam.’

      ‘As in the Jim Beam?’

      I shake my head.

      ‘I like whisky,’ Sally-Anne smiled, and twisted a dark lock of hair around her finger.

      ‘Sally-Anne Reeves, surely you don’t. That’s a gentleman’s refreshment. Next you’ll be saying you like beer!’ The vicar СКАЧАТЬ