THE SECRET OF ANATOMY

Mark Morris

www.sfgateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

1

Feeling Bad

1

The beach was as grey as his mood the day that David Fox looked out to sea and wondered how and when all the bad stuff would end.

It was December, and cold. An aggressive wind gnashed at his slight frame, snapping his trouser cuffs, trying to tear his coat from his back. David screwed up his eyes, unimpressed by its bared teeth. He had lived with his own storms for two months now; storms which reduced this sea-squall to insignificance. Having paused for a moment, he strode on, his clothes and his blond hair flapping like flags.

He looked down as he walked, watched the pressure of his feet squeeze the moisture from the sand with each step. The retreating sea had left debris behind – straggles of seaweed, lumps of sodden paper with their colour bled away, cans so rusted it was impossible to tell what they had once contained.

A tiny crab, almost translucent, burrowed frantically into the sand as his foot descended, an inch from its scuttling legs. David wished his problems could have so simple a solution. But there was no running away from the turmoil of his own thoughts. They rode everywhere with him, hostile passengers, their jabbering voices filling his head. Even now he could hear their poisonous words; they made him feel victimised, desperate. So desperate, in fact, that instead of going to work that morning, he had driven sixty miles to the seaside town of Starmouth, intending … what?

‘Suicide.’ He spoke the word and was surprised by it. It tasted strange, like a fruit whose plump colourful flesh concealed a flavour that was bad and bitter.

Suicide? Had he really come here with such a notion? He looked out to sea again, and suddenly recalled a conversation he’d had not so very long ago with his friend, Ralph Joyce.

Ralph was an avuncular man, big and bespectacled, with a laugh that could rattle china. When they were seven years old, Ralph had bowled over a bully who was using his fists to persuade David to relinquish a whole week’s dinner money. In this way a friendship had been born, and it was one that had endured despite that great leveller – distance. Even during Ralph’s two-year sojourn in California back in the seventies, the two had kept in touch.

Now Ralph lived in Bristol with his American wife, Diane. A medical man, he had finally achieved his ambition of opening his own practice in 1985. Diane described him as ‘that great contradiction in terms, a sensitive gynaecologist’. The conversation which now sprang to David’s mind had taken place the last time he, Ellen and the girls had spent a weekend with the Joyces in Bristol.

It was one of those two-thirty in the morning conversations. Ellen and Diane had gone to bed over two hours before, sleepy with too much food and wine, bored with obscure schoolboy reminiscences. David and Ralph were sitting in front of a log fire that would have graced Henry VIII’s banqueting hall, Ralph’s Old English sheepdog, Boss, snoring on the rug between them. Ralph was holding up his brandy glass, squinting at its contents as though looking for foreign bodies. It was their third nightcap, and it would not be their last.

‘If you were to kill yourself,’ Ralph said after a few minutes of companionable silence, ‘how would you go about it?’

David sipped his brandy and blinked at his host. Though he was not really drunk, he felt relaxed enough to melt.

‘Is that a serious question?’ he asked.

Ralph shrugged with his face, jutting out his bottom lip. ‘Well … semi,’ he said.

David looked into the fire, its movements so subtle they almost defied the eye.

‘I don’t know,’ he said after a moment. ‘It wouldn’t be anything painful.’

‘Painful?’

‘You know … like hanging. Slashing my wrists. Crashing my car into a wall. I wouldn’t fancy any of that.’

‘What about jumping off a tall building?’

‘Urgh … no.’

‘Why not? It’d be quick. And you’d make an impact.’

David grimaced at the joke. ‘What if you changed your mind on the way down? Besides, I don’t like heights.’ He was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘No, I think I’d just take a load of pills washed down with a bottle of whisky. I’d tuck myself up in bed and drift away.’

‘It’s not always that easy, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sometimes people who do that die by choking on their own vomit. Or they start to have convulsions and die in terrible pain. Or they’re found too soon, and saved, and then spend the rest of their lives brain-damaged.’

David sighed. ‘Well, what would you suggest?’

‘I think I’d have the booze and pills and everything, but instead of tucking myself up in bed, I think I’d drown myself.’

Though he felt as if the fire was slowly roasting the left side of him, David shuddered. ‘Drown yourself? You wouldn’t!’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it’s the thought of it. Inhaling all that water. You’d be panicking and kicking. It’d be horrible.’

‘Not if you were completely out of your head. Not if you were exhausted. I’d swim out to sea as far as I could, and then I’d just let myself sink. Apparently drowning is quite a pleasant death. The denial of oxygen is supposed to bring on a feeling of euphoria.’

David shook his head and then wished he hadn’t; it made him realise he was drunker than he’d thought. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘what about afterwards? You’d be all white and bloated. All the fish and things would have eaten your eyes.’

‘Where did you get that from?’

‘Well … that’s what they do, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Ralph. He shrugged. ‘Maybe. I suppose it all depends on how long you’re out there for.’ He raised his arms, slopping brandy on to his hand. ‘But so what? You’ll be dead. Past caring.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said David, ‘I wouldn’t fancy it.’

Another short silence descended. The fire popped and hissed like roasting meat; the clock on the mantelpiece ticked sonorously. Boss groaned in his sleep, right hind foot jerking, claws scraping the rug.

‘He’s dreaming of the prairies,’ said Ralph.

‘How do you know all this?’ asked David.

‘All what?’

‘All this stuff about drowning? How do you know it’s so pleasant?’

Ralph looked as though he was about to get pompous, then he smiled widely. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a well-known fact, isn’t it? Besides, it stands to reason.’

‘Does it?’

‘Of course.’

‘I don’t see how. No one’s ever talked to someone who’s drowned themselves before, have they?’

Ralph’s eyes twinkled like a Christmas card Santa’s as he reached for the brandy bottle. ‘True,’ he conceded, then held up the bottle. ‘Fancy another?’

It was not long after this that David had begun to feel unsettled. It was a feeling that seemed to have crept up on him unawares, insinuated itself into his consciousness until finally it was dictating his every move, his every decision. At the time it had seemed a gradual process, but viewed with hindsight it became clear that it had all happened very, very quickly. One day he had been content with his life, sliding happily through the groove he’d carved for himself, and the next, for no reason at all, it had all seemed so pointless and stifling; he had wanted to scramble his way out of the groove, to destroy everything he’d lived and worked for and start again.

Mid-life crisis. That was what they called it. Before now David had regarded the concept as a myth, or at least a nebulous thing, vague and without substance. If he was going to suffer one at all – and he doubted it – it would be little more than a glitch, a bumpy patch which he would ride over and then forget.

How wrong he was. If someone had told him six months ago that he would be standing on a grey beach in a grey town a week before his fortieth birthday, pondering on suicide as a viable proposition, he would have laughed hard and long in their faces.

While he’d been thinking, his feet had carried him some four hundred yards further along the beach. Before him crouched the pier, hunchbacked and creaking on its stilts as though ready to pounce. David walked underneath it, water dripping around him. Beyond it, the beach dwindled to rock pools and caves, and beyond that, trying to puncture the scowling sky, was the fairground, silent now for winter.

Suicide. Could he really, if it came down to it, stride out into the sea, among waves that looked like shifting slabs of concrete? Could he simply drift out there, waiting for water to fill the places where his life had been? He shook his head, part frustration, part despair, part amusement, part anger at himself. He had no intention of doing away with himself, nor ever really had. So what had possessed him to drive all this way out here today? He had made nothing more than an empty statement, a dramatic gesture known only to himself. His emotions, so unpredictable, so volatile, just lately, boiled into rage inside him. He hated this, this turmoil, this confusion. It was like a pain so bad he wanted to gnaw it away.

He turned and began to stalk back along the beach, towards the steps that led up to the promenade where he’d parked his car. There was little evidence of Christmas here on the seafront; a few coloured lights twinkling from the direction of the hotels further along the promenade, but that was all. He wondered whether Ellen knew that he’d not turned up for work that morning, and felt a sudden rush of shame. He had put her through hell the last couple of months, her and the girls. Numerous times he’d wanted to apologise for his behaviour, to make it up to them, but the monster that had taken residence inside him had not allowed him to do so.

It was only when you were in the throes of such an experience that you realised just how appropriate all the old clichés were. Like the familiar refrain of the murderer: ‘It was like someone else was killing the girl, like I was just watching what was going on through someone else’s eyes.’ Or ‘It was like I was possessed,’ or ‘I wasn’t myself,’ or ‘I couldn’t help what I was doing.’ To David, such excuses had always seemed a convenient way of passing the buck, of shifting the responsibility for foul deeds on to an agent as mystical as it was unpunishable.

But now he found he identified with such self-justifications, and to do so was frightening. It really did feel as though there was someone or something inside him, some malign presence, manipulating his emotions and deeds, putting words into his mouth. It felt almost like a kind of possession, but more subtle than that. The influence came not from outside but from some deeper, darker part of him, a part which had reared its head only briefly, and at his behest, in the past, but which had now risen despite him and was claiming ascendancy.

From the corner of his eye, David glimpsed a flash of light somewhere out at sea, and he turned instinctively to look. He might have thought it was the sun glinting on the waves if it wasn’t for the fact that clouds dark as smoke were amassing on the horizon, climbing towards him like a slow tidal wave. A boat then, perhaps? But there were no boats, unless one had just slipped out of sight, beyond the horizon. He stood for a moment, blinking away the after-effect of the light, a green sun which flared behind his eyelids, and wondered where it could have come from, for there was no evidence of it now. After a moment he shrugged irritably and moved on. He had taken no more than a step when his right foot clunked against something.

He looked down, and was surprised to see a bottle lying at his feet, which he could have sworn hadn’t been there a moment ago. The bottle could have been half-submerged in sand, however. It was mushy here; it sucked at the soles of his shoes, hungry but toothless. He stooped and plucked the bottle from the soft mouth of the beach, remembering holidays where he, Ellen and the girls had spent hours exploring coastal rock pools, picking up old bottles like this one, oddly shaped stones and shells, the empty carapaces of crabs. This bottle was small with squared-off sides, and looked as though it had been in the sea for a long time. The movement of sand and salt over its surface had scratched it almost opaque.

It was odd, but the bottle felt warm as flesh in David’s hand, and somehow soothing. It gave him a ripple of pleasure, almost of security, which was not unlike the feelings associated with lying in a warm cosy bed at night and listening to rain battering the window. Without quite knowing why, he held the bottle up to the sky’s dubious light. He saw immediately that there was something inside it, something tubular, possibly a scroll of paper. Despite himself, he felt a flicker of excitement. Could he really have found a message in a bottle?

Less than five minutes later he was sitting in a café on the promenade, shuddering the cold out of him. As a middle-aged woman with a plastic Snoopy apron took his order for coffee and apple pie, the sky split and he had to raise his voice above the rain. When the woman had gone, David draped his coat over the back of his chair and slipped his hand into the right hip pocket. The texture of the bottle against his fingers was comforting, as if the glass was projecting its own nature on to his mind – scouring his thoughts smooth, erasing the sharp edges.

David had always liked rain, the more torrential the better. As a boy he had driven his mother to distraction, coming home as he often did with his hair dripping and his face shining wet.

‘David, look at you! Why didn’t you put your hood up?’ she would wail.

To which he would reply, ‘I didn’t want to. I like getting wet.’

‘But you’ll catch your death,’ she would say.

‘No, I won’t,’ he would reassure her, ‘it’s only water.’

He wanted to tell her that she was more likely to catch her death smoking all those cigarettes than he was by getting his head wet. But he never did. His mother had been a skittish, fragile person. He had always been afraid that criticism, however slight, would be liable to snap her in two.

The rain beat harder against the window, turning the road to grey-blue metal. Clouds the colour of smoke boiled overhead, giving the day a flat, grainy twilit feel. The sea frothed and roared and lunged at the shore. A plastic bag fled along the promenade in panic, pursued by a Kentucky Fried Chicken box and a magazine that was spreading its wings and trying to fly.

The woman came back, appearing from a door behind a counter trimmed with red tinsel. She was carrying a tray which she set on the table before him. A large shaggy Alsatian prowled into the room at her heels and made straight for the bedraggled Christmas tree in the corner, black snout twitching.

‘Don’t you dare, King,’ the woman snapped. ‘If you want to go out you can go on the yard. Come here.’

The dog gave her a bland look but complied. The woman scribbled out David’s bill and tucked it very obviously between the coffee pot and a jug of milk. David thanked her, but she was already striding across the room, shooing back the Alsatian, which was gazing at her dolefully from the doorway.

The apple pie was too sweet, the pastry damp, but David relished it. That was another thing – a couple of months ago, he had been a health-conscious man of the nineties, but now he just didn’t give a shit. It was almost as though by stuffing himself full of junk he was raising two fingers to the world, or as though he was punishing not himself but the beast inside him. He was drinking heavily too, and the more he drank the more furious he became. Subconsciously he would be thinking, ‘See how you like this! And this!’ as each new shot of alcohol hit his system.

After his plate was emptied, he found his fingers straying once more to the booty in his pocket. Whilst caressing the rough-smooth glass he glanced surreptitiously at the half-open door behind the counter, as if his actions were somehow shameful. Although eager to examine the bottle, he was reluctant to do so in public, though exactly why he couldn’t say. Finally, his heart pumping, he pocketed the knife from his plate, left some money – including a hefty tip to compensate for the pilfered cutlery – on the table, and walked out of the café.

The wind took hold of him immediately and bullied him all the way to his car. Normally David liked to turn his face to the rain but on this occasion he was forced to bow his head, and reached his destination half-blind and with his scalp stinging. Nevertheless as he slid into the driver’s seat he felt invigorated. With hands that felt gloved in ice he switched on the engine so that the heater could warm him through. Then he turned on the interior light and took the bottle from his pocket.

In this light it resembled crystal. Or rather, something crystalline – more ancient and unusual than crystal itself. Here in the car he felt safe, able to examine his treasure without the threat from prying eyes.

He drew the stolen knife from his pocket and began to scrape at the stuff around the bottle’s neck that sealed it. At first he had thought it was some natural cement formed by the accumulation of flotsam in the water, but on closer inspection he decided that it was more likely to have been caked around the bottle cap by whoever had tossed the vessel into the sea. It took David some five minutes of busy work with the knife before the sealant finally gave up its grip. By this time his right wrist was aching and his flesh felt prickly inside his layers of clothing. He switched off the heater and glanced at the world through the windscreen. Rain still drummed on the roof and writhed on the glass, fracturing the scene into obscure splinters of light and shadow.

As he unscrewed the cap of the bottle, another odd thought occurred to him, simply slipped into his mind as if it had been placed there, like an envelope into a slot. He felt that once he read the note that would be it, there would be no turning back. By the simple act of viewing whatever was on that paper he would be committing himself. But to what?

The cap came off grittily, and so fumble-fingered was he that David dropped it between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. He swore, then upended the bottle into his palm. The tightly rolled tube of paper slipped easily into his hand as though it had been waiting to do so.

He unrolled the paper, which was nothing more than a page from a cheap notepad. It was yellow and brittle, but not so far gone that it crumbled at his touch. Carefully, little by little, he revealed its message.

His first thought was that the author was unused to writing with a fountain pen given the smudged lettering and the fact that the nib had torn the paper in at least three places; his second thought, that this was the handwriting of a child. He scanned the note quickly, but by the end realised that he had digested only a fraction of its meaning. He took a deep breath and started again.

PLEASE HELP!

MY NAME IS JOHN MARSHALL. I LIVE AT 58 CRANLEIGH PARADE, LONDON, N15. I AM ELEVEN YEARS OLD. TODAY’S DATE IS 22ND JUNE, 1953. I LIVE WITH MY MUM AND DAD, CELIA AND MALCOLM. MY MUM IS NICE BUT MY DAD IS TRYING TO KILL US. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. IF WE DO NOT GET HELP SOON WE WILL BE DEAD. PLEASE CALL THE POLICE OR TRY TO HELP IN ANY WAY YOU CAN.

THANK YOU.

JOHN MARSHALL

2

‘I’m at my wits’ end, Diane. I dread to think what might have happened to him.’

‘Hey, calm down. Nothing’s happened. I’m sure of it.’

‘But what if he’s … you know … done something stupid?’

‘Killed himself, you mean?’ said Diane, ever the pragmatist. ‘No, not David. Look, just relax, Ellen, okay? He’ll be home soon. He probably just decided to take the day off, that’s all.’

The conversation had been circling in such a manner for the last ten minutes or so. It seemed to Ellen to match the feeling of doom that was circling her too, like a shark. The nightmare had started just before midday when a colleague of David rang to enquire why he had not shown up for work that morning. Normally Ellen would have shrugged off the anomaly, but David had been so weird these last couple of months – cold, distant, erratic, given to fits of rage at the most innocuous of provocations – that the news had immediately set alarm bells ringing in her head. As the day progressed, and phone calls to family and friends drew a yawning blank, the alarm bells had increased in volume and tempo. Something had happened to David, she was sure of it. She called the police and told them everything she could think of, pausing intermittently to control her cracking voice, then she called Diane back.

Even without the grounding of history behind them, Diane and Ellen had become almost as close as their husbands were to each other over the past seven years. However, they had not always liked one another; their friendship had been preceded by conflict and barely concealed hostility. Initially Ellen thought of Diane as a gum-cracking, loud-mouthed California bimbo, whereas Diane for her part regarded Ellen as a repressed, tight-assed, double-talking Brit. They had warmed to each other gradually, even reluctantly, over the months following their original high-voltage encounter, which had taken place in a Japanese restaurant called, of all things, Big Fish.

Both women agreed the real turning point had come after a night spent bowling, and eating Lebanese food. It was a Friday. Ralph and Diane had travelled up from Bristol that afternoon to spend a weekend with the Foxes in Leeds. Neither woman had been looking forward to the encounter very much, but they knew their husbands were and so kept their reservations to themselves. As it turned out, the bowling, suggested by David, had been a great success. Usually conversation between the two women started out politely, albeit distantly, and ended up with them spitting bullets at each other. With the bowling, however, there had been interaction without much need for conversation, so by the time they entered the restaurant around ten everyone was feeling relatively relaxed and pleasantly drunk. Halfway through the main course, David made a comment about his food which made both women shriek with laughter. They looked at each other, surprised by their simultaneity, which set them off again.

‘See,’ Ralph piped up, ‘I told you you’d love each other, given time.’

It wasn’t love, not then, but it was a start. After floundering for months on the rocks, the women had finally found some common ground which was firm beneath their feet. In the months ahead they were to stride across that ground together with ever-increasing confidence.

‘Tell me what you really think, Diane,’ Ellen said now. ‘If there’s one person I can rely on for straight answers, it’s you.’

‘Okay, you wanna hear it?’

‘You know I do.’

‘Okay, here goes.’ Deep breath. ‘I think he’s having an affair.’

Ellen opened her mouth but her throat had been stunned into silence. Suddenly her skin felt cold and tight. Now that Diane had said the words it sounded like the obvious solution, and she couldn’t believe that the suspicion hadn’t been in her mind all along. But the fact was, the possibility had never, at any time, occurred to her. Why not? Had she simply disallowed it entry? The concept of David with another woman, naked in bed with another woman, kissing another woman as passionately as he kissed her (used to kiss her), was absolutely unthinkable.

David would never do that to her. Never.

Would he?

‘Ellen?’ Diane’s voice was all concern. ‘Honey, are you okay?’

Ellen was trying to speak but no words were coming out. Finally she managed to make some kind of sound.

‘What was that?’ said Diane.

With a supreme effort, Ellen said, ‘You don’t really think that, do you?’ Her voice was a plea, as if she believed that Diane’s dismissal of her own suggestion would make its possibility a nonsense.

Neutrally Diane said, ‘Don’t you?’

Ellen ran her fingers up her cheek and through her hair. Her hand was trembling with a ferocity that frightened her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and could say no more. Her thoughts were whirling vertiginously, too chaotic to contrive words that would form a measured response.

‘Well, of course,’ Diana said, ‘I may be wrong. I haven’t been there with you the last two months. I only know what’s been going on through what you’ve told me. But from what you have said, that’s the way it looks to me.’

‘What should I do?’ Ellen whispered.

‘Confront him with it, I guess. That’s what I’d do.’

‘But he’s been getting so mad.’

‘Mad?’

‘Angry. Furious. At everything. Sometimes I think he’s going to hit me. Or one of the girls.’

Diane sighed. ‘Honey, you’re the one should be getting mad. You’re the one with a right to be mad. Just face him with it, see what he says. Threaten to leave him if he doesn’t tell you.’

‘I don’t want to leave him,’ Ellen said, and now she heard the tears behind her voice, running to catch up. ‘I just want things to be back the way they were.’

Diane sighed again, deeper this time. There was a pause in which Ellen could almost hear her friend thinking. Finally she said, ‘Listen, what if I ask Ralph to come up there, take David out to lunch, talk to him? Would that help?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well … do you want me to ask him or not?’

‘I … yes. Yes, please. Thanks, Diane.’

‘No problem. Listen, if you want anything, anything at all, just ring me, okay? Any time of the day or night. I’ll be here.’

‘Thanks, Diane.’

‘Hey, I mean it. Three o’clock in the morning, you want me, you ring me. Okay?’

‘Yes, I will.’ Ellen’s guts were churning so violently she thought she might faint. She leaned back against the wall to take some of the weight off her feet. It didn’t help much.

‘How bad is this hurting the girls?’

‘Bad, I think. They try not to show it, but they go round looking scared all the time. Scared of David. You can see it in their eyes, in the way they hold themselves. It’s breaking my heart.’

‘That is bad,’ confirmed Diane sadly. ‘You want to send them here for the weekend? Kim would be pleased to see them, and we all know Olly will.’

Kim and Olly were Diane’s children from her first marriage. Sixteen-year-old Oliver had a crush on the Foxes’ oldest daughter, Rachel, who was fourteen. Jane and Kimberley were both ten. Ellen recalled once remarking scornfully to David, ‘Kimberley? What sort of a name’s that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Well … have a think about it. No pressure. But you know they’re always welcome here.’

‘Yes. Thanks. Again.’

‘Hey, no need. You’d do the same for me.’

‘Yes.’ Ellen closed her eyes as a sudden wave of misery washed over her. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what’s worse. The thought of David killing himself or the thought of him having an affair.’

‘Yeah,’ said Diane sympathetically. ‘It’s a bummer both ways. But look, maybe we’re both wrong. Maybe things are just getting on top of him and he went off to be by himself for a while.’

‘Maybe,’ said Ellen, but she sounded unconvinced.

Two things happened simultaneously then which made her turn round. Jane stepped out of the lounge door into the hall, en route from the kitchen – where she’d been making a jam sandwich for herself – to her bedroom; and there was the sudden roar of a car engine in the drive, followed by a sweep of white light across the stained glass of the front door.

As abruptly as they had made their presence known, engine and lights were extinguished. There was a beat of silence then where mother and daughter looked at each other, both fearful for different reasons.

The moment was broken by Diane’s voice on the telephone saying, ‘Ellen? Are you still there?’

‘Er …’ Ellen brought the receiver up to her ear. Her hands felt clumsy. ‘Yes, but … listen, I think David’s home.’

‘Okay. Speak to you later.’

‘Okay,’ said Ellen and fumbled the receiver back into its cradle.

Jane was looking at the sandwich in her hand, one corner of which was oozing jam, with a stricken expression. Ellen felt her heart tearing. Had things got so bad that the prospect of being caught snacking between meals by her father elicited such fear in the girl?

‘Up to your room quickly,’ said Ellen. ‘I want to talk to Dad.’

Jane scampered up the wide staircase, gratitude on her face. She was still in her school uniform, one sock up, one down. Ellen felt her heart tear a little more at the sight. Just recently she had found poignancy in the simplest of things, had become increasingly conscious of form and texture, depth and plane. She had experienced this heightening of awareness only once before, and that had been after her father had died very suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six. Then, as now, she had felt like an open wound, her emotions raw and horribly vulnerable. She remembered how the tiniest, the most banal, of details had elicited tears. Finding two of his golf tees in the fruit bowl; taking back his library books, one of which was half-read and his place marked with a brown envelope; coming across two tickets to a dinner dance which was to have taken place the Saturday after his death; seeing his battered road atlas on the back seat of his car and remembering him saying, ‘I must get another one of these. They’ve built a lot of new roads since this was published.’

She braced herself as she heard the car door slam, saw David’s shape loom at the front door. At least he’s alive, she thought, but the surge of relief she had felt on hearing the car was gone now, replaced by her fear of where he’d been, what he’d done. Would she be able to smell it on him? Perfume; sex; guilt? Would she be able to read it in his face, hear it in his voice, taste it in his mouth when (if) he kissed her?

He came in, scowling as if he resented having to come back here day after day. Ellen remembered Diane’s words – Honey, you’re the one should be getting mad. You’re the one with a right to be mad – but she couldn’t just turn her anger on and off like a tap. Instead she forced a smile which fluttered at her lips, and said, ‘Hi.’ She didn’t know what to do with her hands; they hovered uncertainly at her sides.

David looked at her, still scowling, and muttered, ‘Hi,’ back. One tiny syllable, and yet Ellen felt a plug being pulled in the pit of her stomach. There was no feeling in the greeting, no warmth, nothing. If she had kept her mouth shut, she felt sure David would simply have walked past her without a word.

‘So,’ she said as he closed the door behind him, ‘where have you been?’

He turned back and there was a blankness on his face that was frightening. In a voice just as expressionless he said, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Tony called. He said you didn’t show up for work today.’

David’s eyes briefly met hers – a rare occurrence these days – before skittering away. He shrugged and said, ‘Oh.’

His indifference roused the first spark of anger in her. She welcomed it. She took a step towards him.

‘So where have you been?’ she said, her voice firmer this time.

‘Nowhere.’

‘Nowhere? Come on, David, I’ve been worried sick about you.’

His brow furrowed, though not in anger, and just for an instant Ellen thought she had got through to him. She was no fool, but she was so desperate for things to be back to normal that she had a momentary vision of reconciliation – David gathering her into his arms, showering her with kisses, apologies.

Then, as though she had made her desire too obvious, as though he could read it in her face, he withdrew. His furrowed brow smoothed out, his expression became blank, unencouraging, like a visor sliding down.

‘There was no need,’ he mumbled, half-turning away, peeling off his wet overcoat.

‘But where have you been?’ she demanded. Her anger was prickling now, but she was fearful too. Her voice wavered as it increased in volume.

He swung back on her, half-removed overcoat swirling like a cape. Spittle flew from his mouth as he snapped, ‘Nowhere. I told you. Nowhere. What does it fucking matter?’

He hardly ever used that word when the girls were within earshot, and his use of it now was like a blow to her, more evidence that he just didn’t care any more.

‘Don’t use that language with me!’ It was more plea than threat.

‘What, English?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Well get off my f … bloody back then. Stop hounding me.’

‘I’m not hounding you, David. I just want to know where you’ve been.’

He snapped. It was sudden and terrifying, as always. He lunged towards her, making her flinch. ‘Why?’ he yelled. ‘Why do you need to know? What’s the matter with you? You’re bloody obsessed!’

His voice echoed in the wide high-ceilinged hall. Ellen imagined the girls cowering upstairs, terrified. Jane would probably be crying now, giving vent to the kind of misery that was inconsolable. She looked at her husband, his face red, his reason and his patience gone, superseded by a primitive sickening rage.

How can this be happening? she thought. What has gone so wrong between us?

In a small tight voice, a tone that she hoped would soak up his anger, she said, ‘I’m not obsessed, David. There’s nothing wrong with me. You didn’t turn up for work today and nobody knew where you were. It’s only natural for me to be worried.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘I love you, David.’

His snort of exasperation was like another blow, a harder one. She was cowed by her husband’s fury, though something inside her, some part of her, wanted to beat its fists against his chest, scream at him, make him see how … how unfair he was being, how close he was to tearing the family apart.

‘Where were you?’ she persisted.

‘For God’s sake!’ He swiped at his head, clawed at his scalp, as if it was she that was driving him mad, as if she was the unreasonable one.

‘Where were you?’ She heard her voice fading, and hated the fact. If he didn’t answer this time, she felt she would not be able to ask again.

He shuddered, sighed, looked up at the ceiling. When he replied it was quietly, silkily, through gritted teeth. ‘If you must know, I went for a drive. I wanted to be on my own for a while. To think.’

‘A drive? Where?’

‘Just around. To the coast.’

‘The coast? Why the coast?’

He gave her a strange look that made her feel uncomfortable. ‘I … wanted to be somewhere different. And near to the sea. I … wanted …’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Ellen didn’t want to move, or even to breathe too loudly for fear of breaking this moment. She felt as though David had not been this close to opening up to her, letting her in, for weeks.

‘Please tell me,’ she said quietly. She wanted to add how much she needed him, how much she thought he needed her, how much she loved him and wanted him back the way he was … but she made the words stay silent in her head. It would be the wrong move just now to lay bare her heart. Too much too soon.

He looked troubled, and turned away from her again. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he growled, and she knew that she was losing him once more.

The knowledge made her desperate. ‘Please,’ she said, moving forward, touching his shoulder. The muscles bunching, tensing, under his jacket felt like a hand pushing her away. ‘David,’ she said, ‘we need to talk.’

‘Not now.’ He began to walk away from her.

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t hassle me.’ Trailing his overcoat he began to walk up the stairs.

She took a few steps after him, and closed her hand over the square post that supported the banister. She gripped it so hard it dug into her palm, leaving a white divot that would later feel tender without her remembering why. ‘David,’ she said, but he turned the corner and was suddenly out of her sight.

‘I’ve got work to do.’

‘David, please …’

He didn’t reply. His footsteps grew fainter as they spiralled to the top of the house. She heard the door of his study open, then close with the finality of a full stop at the end of a sentence. Immediately it had done so, her body sagged; she felt drained, exhausted. Her unspoken thoughts, what she wanted to articulate to her husband, and couldn’t, what they needed to say to each other, felt like sharp, heavy lumps of metal, sticking in her stomach and her chest and her gullet. There was a pressure building and building inside her head, inside the house. If it wasn’t released soon, she felt sure it would rip all their lives apart, like a gas explosion. What was wrong with him? What had happened to change him so drastically? Ellen felt poised, in limbo. Desolate. Confused. Angry. Something had to happen soon. It had to. She couldn’t go on like this.

She walked across the silent hall and into the sitting room, too empty even to cry.

3

Danny was five and he could only write little words. That fact didn’t matter, however, when Teddy was around. It felt a bit like a dream when Teddy spoke to him or when Teddy made him do things, as if there was a part of Danny that wasn’t quite there. His Aunt Mathilde had a funny word for it. Fyoog she called it, or at least that’s what it sounded like. His Aunt Mathilde had lots of funny words. Animis was one, and orricle and flux. She spoke all these words to Danny as if she expected him to understand them and he just nodded and tried to look as though he did so as not to disappoint her.

His hand stopped writing and Danny was fully awake again. Teddy had finished. He looked at the words Teddy had made him write in purple crayon on the back of his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, but he didn’t know what any of the words meant. He looked around his bedroom, which was cosy in the subdued light from his Glo-Bug. There was a poster for Jurassic Park on the wall which the nice girl in W.H. Smith’s had let him have, and there was his clown, Patootie, sitting at the end of his bed, and some of his toys were on the floor and not in the toy chest where they were supposed to be, and his soldiers were all standing in groups on the shelves and windowsills in readiness for tomorrow’s battle.

Danny liked his room and he liked his Aunt Mathilde. After his mummy and daddy went to the angels he had come to live with her, and she was nice because she nearly always gave him everything he wanted. She even let him have monsters, which his mummy and daddy never had because they said they would give him nightmares. But they didn’t give him nightmares. Instead Danny’s monsters protected him from the baddie monsters outside. He heard the baddie monsters sometimes, screaming and howling in the distant dark, but although he sometimes felt a little scared, he never really felt in danger. He knew that his wallpaper dinosaurs would protect him, and his dragon money box, and the funny talking robot that Bernard had given him on his fifth birthday. Bernard told him the robot came from a telly programme which Danny had never heard of called ‘Doctor Who’, and that the robot’s name was a Dalek. He said that he would get Danny some videos of proper Daleks but he hadn’t yet. The Dalek said things like ‘Exterminate, exterminate,’ and ‘What are your orders?’ in a funny voice that sounded like Aunt Mathilde when she was angry.

Danny was getting very excited about Christmas, which was only a week and a bit away. The thought of Santa landing on the roof of the house, climbing down the chimney and leaving loads of presents wrapped up under the Christmas tree was the most exciting thing in the world. Danny couldn’t understand why his Aunt Mathilde didn’t feel just as excited as he did. He had the feeling that she wouldn’t even have had a Christmas tree and all the decorations if Danny hadn’t said he wanted them. A week and a bit … In Danny’s world that seemed such a long time; he feared it would never come. He imagined Santa and his helpers in the toy factory in Greenland getting all the presents ready for the children, putting things in boxes, wrapping them in brightly coloured paper, and the thought made him feel sick with excitement.

It was very windy outside, the kind of windy that Aunt Mathilde always said was ‘wailing like a banshee’. Even so, when the wind dropped a little, Danny heard voices from downstairs, so soft and low that he couldn’t make out any of the words. Teddy had given Danny a message to give to his aunt, not just the one he had written down but another one as well. Danny knew he would have no trouble remembering the message. Teddy would remember it for him. He always did.

Danny got out of bed, his feet searching for his Turtle slippers. He kicked his plastic Roman soldier’s sword halfway across the room before he found them, by which time he was feeling a bit cold. He went downstairs, clutching his comic, the cool darkness pressing against him and making him feel a little scared. His fear faded, however, as he descended each step, and the voices of his aunt and her friends grew louder and louder, louder than the wind outside. Now he could distinguish one voice from another, and he could even hear separate words, though he didn’t really listen to what was being said because it was grown-up talk and he wasn’t really interested in it. Grown-ups talked about boring things which were hard to understand. He reached for the door handle which was level with his nose, pulled it down and pushed the door open.

The voices stopped as if by opening the door Danny had switched them off. There wasn’t proper light in the room, which wasn’t unusual. Aunt Mathilde didn’t like strong light; she said it hurt her eyes. In the daytime she kept the curtains half-closed and when she went out she wore dark glasses, even when it was dull and rainy. Sometimes people looked at his Aunt Mathilde and said things about her and laughed at her. She didn’t seem to see them but Danny did, and it made him feel nervous and scared and confused. He was not too young to have noticed that his aunt was a bit different from most people, and he thought vaguely that it was because she was different that people laughed at her. She wore long flowy dresses like fairies might wear, and brightly coloured waistcoats with sparkly bits on that she let Danny dress up in sometimes. She also wore lots of beads and bangles that meant Danny could hear her coming even when she was miles away, and sometimes she wore a thing round her head that made her look like a pirate. Also she was fat all over like a barrel; Danny liked to tickle her smooth white chins and make her giggle. She had very long hair and purple lips and fat warm hands with black fingernails. Danny had no idea how old she was; he guessed about a hundred.

Danny blinked as he stood in the doorway, trying to adjust his eyes to the flickering candlelight. The people in the room were like shadows outlined in a wavy orange glow. The settee and the chairs were full of them, and someone – Bernard, it looked like – was sitting cross-legged on the hearth, so close to the fire that it must have been burning his back.

Heads turned to look at him, and just for an instant Danny was scared. Just for an instant he thought that these weren’t people at all but something else, monsters dressed as people perhaps. Their eyes looked all shiny and wet in the candlelight, and Danny heard a faint squeaking sound which he thought was somebody’s unoiled head rotating until he realised it was the castors of the old red armchair, which sometimes squeaked when you moved about on it. A bulky shape moved away from the rest, and in the gloom seemed to slide towards him like oil. Then the shape said, ‘Hello, Danny,’ and he recognised Aunt Mathilde.

‘Hello,’ said Danny and, his fear fading quickly now, moved into the room. As he got used to the candlelight he recognised the faces that were smiling at him with glistening teeth, greeting him in soft friendly voices. It was Bernard who was sitting by the fire, and as well as him Danny recognised Tammy and Mr Worthington and the little man with the funny voice and the purple neck, and one or two others who never spoke much but always smiled at him as if he were an old friend.

‘What can we do for you, little man?’ Mr Worthington asked. Danny liked it when Mr Worthington called him little man. It made him feel important.

Danny held the comic out for his aunt. ‘Teddy drew some words for you and he telled me something as well.’

Danny sensed the thrill of excitement ripple round the room, and although he didn’t fully understand it, it pleased him nevertheless.

Aunt Mathilde took the comic from him with a chubby hand. In her high fluttery voice that reminded him a bit of a bird, she asked, ‘What did Teddy tell you, Danny?’

It was not often that Danny had such a large audience. Usually when Teddy told him things there was only his Aunt Mathilde to pass the message on to. Now, though, everyone was looking at him, and, it seemed, hanging on his every word. He couldn’t remember quite what Teddy had told him but he hoped that once he opened his mouth and began speaking, the words would just come, as they always did. He opened his mouth – and sure enough the words flowed out.

‘We have to get the bottle back. Mr Worthington has to go and fetch it.’

Mr Worthington seemed to flush beneath his white moustache, though it was difficult to tell in the dim light. He looked pleased, as if it was an honour to be chosen.

‘If I may just ask,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘what exactly is “the bottle” and where do I find it?’

Danny said nothing. There were no more words. He looked at his aunt, who silently handed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic to Mr Worthington.

Mr Worthington took the comic and held it up to the light of a candle flame. He was silent for a few moments, his brow furrowed, as he deciphered the words scrawled in purple crayon. Everyone in the room seemed to be holding their breath; the windows rattled beneath a sudden onslaught of wind. Wood collapsed in the fire with a soft crumbling sound. ‘It’s a name and address,’ Mr Worthington said. ‘It must belong to the bottle’s owner.’ Everyone listened as he read it aloud.