The City of This Read online

  They don’t, and I wonder to myself where everyone is as I open the doors of my housemate’s rooms only to find them clean, tidy and empty.

  Close examination of the clock through the dry eyes of the sleep-deprived reveal its approaching 9.30AM and I’ve missed an interview, already about to miss another.

  It’s a Wednesday morning. Surely everyone is already at work, but I didn’t see anyone leave and I’ve been stood outside all night, so I rummage through the jeans on my floor until I find my mobile.

  No messages.

  I ring Ben – no answer.

  I ring Ross – no answer.

  Social media tells me they’ve not been online – maybe they’ve gone on holiday? – and I give up hope of removing the piano from the house tonight. It is far too heavy to move on my own, and any attempt would likely result in serious accident or injury.

  Looking at it now it fills me with dread. Though the sun’s light shines in through many apertures, there’s a darkness and filth around it and I can see that even though I cleaned it up yesterday.

  It’s completely covered in dust again.

  Almost all of it is entirely covered in a millimetre-thick film of the stuff, apart from those three keys, which each have a little fingerprint on them.

  I quickly gather up some things and flee the house to the nearest bar.

  It’s time to call M155 F8N2C.

  I haven’t been drinking or sleeping much, and I can’t remember the last time I ate something. Has it been two days, or two weeks?

  Maybe the lack of alcohol is producing some sort of withdrawal in my brain? Is it possibly to have audio-visual hallucinations in which you don’t see things instead of do?

  Where has everyone gone? Why am I alone?

  There should be people everywhere.

  My mind races, swirling with images that are either memories or imagined futures, I can’t tell.

  I deign to call Missy (that’s what I’ve decided her name is) and tell her all the plans I have for us. All the dates I’d love to take her on. All the happiness I’d like to enjoy.

  “I want to take you ice skating” I say, into her voicemail inbox.

  “I want to take you ice skating and to drink hot wine and to eat fudge and to laugh and to love and to”- it cuts me off.

  Why won’t anyone answer me?

  What’s going on?

  The power of technology has meant that we can keep touch from a distance, whilst remaining distant and never touching, but right now I’d settle for any sort of human contact.

  I tremble like a leaf as I scroll through my phonebook, knowing already the one number I need to call if I want to get a response. I don’t know what sort of reception I’m going to get, but I want to hear a friendly voice; something that’ll make me feel better.

  Safer.

  Less alone.

  “Mum?”

  “Please leave a message, after the tone”.

  Damn.

  The cigarettes have started to produce alarming results.

  A quickening of the blood – my heart pumps erratically, “like a fucked clock”, to quote the movie I’m watching – and gives the room a certain spin.

  There’s a hacking cough now, somehow wet and dry at the same time, accompanied by a looseness that could be teeth moving around my mouth, a dead slug of a tongue or something else entirely.

  I can hear my own breath rattle through my head and the protesting of my body as I push more and more smoke down my throat and towards my soul.

  There’s both a physical and mental reaction to inhaling poison and my organs flare up in protest, with a jolt of electric pain in my back that threatens to throw me from the armchair I’m reclined in and onto the table in-front of me.

  I narrowly avoid spilling the coffee tables contents: various ash trays and empty, threatening-looking tins of diet coke, onto the wooden floors of the living room I have now invaded, so as to be as far away from the piano whilst still within the same building, and lie on the floor for a bit, wheezing and moaning.

  I must sound like the ghosts of which I am so afraid.

  Once I awake, an unknown amount of time later, I head down to the stashed coat with its cigarettes and lighters, there are several packets of matches too, I notice as I pull the entire contents of my stash out of the big blue wheelie bin.

  “No more”, I repeat to myself like a lunatic, as I tear the 80 or so cigarettes in half, littering the front garden and my clothes with tobacco.

  “No more! I want to live!”

  I throw the lighters as far as I can down the street, and watch with glee as one match finally catches the rest, resulting in a pleasing micro-explosion and the ruination of the last of my cache.

  I can imagine myself – shabby dressing gown, long, greasy brown hair, and fire reflected in crimson eyes – as I turn my attention to the other wheelie bin.

  The little green one.

  It’s meant to be for food waste, but I never told my housemates about it, and I’m hoping they haven’t found it.

  I squeal with glee as the little bin clinks whilst I pull it out from under the large bushes that fence off the perimeter of our front garden; they haven’t.

  Inside are three large glass bottles.

  Vodka, Whiskey and Rum.

  I pick up the vodka and head back inside.

  Her:

  It’s his time.

  I can feel it.

  I’m coming, and I’m so, so sorry.

  Him:

  I enter slowly, unsteadily, having knocked back a couple of fingers of sweet, numbing poison on my way up the stairs.

  The door creaks open and invites me to crawl up the dark, freezing staircase on my hands and knees like an animal, clutching the rapidly-emptying bottle of vodka to my chest like it offered some protection.

  I whimper, a little, as I hear the sound I was expecting but is unnerving nonetheless.

  Those three notes are playing, over and over again, but with a little more force, a little more urgency this time.

  As I move towards my door – I’ve made it, crawling and dribbling, onto the landing at the top of the winding stairs – the notes get louder, angrier, sharper. It sounds like someone with heavy, meaty fingers is pounding those keys, and there’s a rage emanating from behind the heavy white door.

  Against my better judgement, I reach towards it, and push it slowly open, before realising there is a keyhole through which, if I am brave enough, I can peek.

  I AM brave enough.

  My eyelids are trembling, and my vision is blurred by the first traces of tears which threaten to freeze within my eyes.

  I move my face closer to the keyhole as the sweat on my forehead becomes a cold trickle down the back of my neck, all the while the rest of my body is blasted by the malice coming from the room.

  “Hello?” a young, frightened girl’s voice asks as my eyes begin to focus.

  I’m so drunk I’ve head-butted the door, and it’s begun to creep open, but not before giving me a flash of the rooms occupant: a young girl with frizzy, ringlet-laden red hair, no older than six, sits on my piano stool, tapping out each note with one hand. The other, bone-white I notice, rests by her side.

  She began to turn as she asked the question, and I push the door the rest of the way with my previous fears allayed.

  She’s gone back to playing the notes, and I approach very slowly, not wishing to startle her. She is so thin, and her little white dress hangs from her like a huge coat on a tiny hanger, I can see a porcelain clavicle protruding as I approach from her left side, coughing a little to make my presence known.

  “oh, hello,” she says, twisting her head to an unnatural angle – it’s only her neck that moves, and as her eyes lock on me the stone of my courage drops from my heart through my stomach, towards the floor and far away from me.

  Her eyes are completely black, in stark contrast to the bone-white and flame-red of her face and hair.

  Her lips are the thinnest outline
of pink, and part delicately in a wicked smile, revealing pointy, angry teeth.

  I’m terrified, but I don’t really understand why. This girl is surely nothing to be frightened of? Perhaps she has a medical condition. Perhaps she is as frightened as I am.

  Perhaps not.

  “Do you… do you like my piano?” I ask her, trying to sound confident. She stops playing and now turns her whole body towards me, she moves closer and I have to stop myself from recoiling.

  “Oh yes, I like it very much, I never get to play mine…” she says, wistfully.

  “I’ve heard you playing this before, is that you I can hear every night? It’s okay, I don’t mind.”

  “Yes, but I can never stay for long,” she says, morosely.

  “If you’d like,” I tell her “you can play my piano whenever you want, for as long as you want,”

  I don’t know why I’m being so kind to her, especially when she frightens me so much, but I feel like something awful has happened to her, and that I must be kind.

  “Oh, I’d really love to”, she begins,

  “But I have to go soon, my friends are coming to get me!”, as she says it, the room starts to transform.

  I hadn’t noticed before, but the only light in the room is coming from the moon through the open window, and two little tea light candles flickering on either side of the piano. My guitar is nowhere to be seen, and as I observe the rest of the room, I realise it has been destroyed.

  My mattress has been slashed and stuffing is strewn across the floor, the television is smoking from a fist-sized hole in its screen. My clothes are strewn everywhere and the curtains blow in the wind as the breeze casts shadows across the room.

  “What did you say?” I ask her.

  “My friends, my friends are coming to get me” she says, as her shadow grows larger, looming at me across the room as her shadow consumes mine.

  “Who are your friends?!” I ask, as the hairs on my neck stand up and I choke back a sob.

  “You’ll see, Alex, they’re coming here to get me,” as I turn, ready to flee in horror, I realise the door had been blown shut by the breeze from the open window, and as I start to race towards it, something happens.

  It starts knocking.

  “No, please!” I scream towards my ceiling as I shout myself awake, hand outstretched not towards my bedroom door, but towards the uncaring white paint of the ceiling.

  I sit up, and as I do the empty bottle of rum rolls off the bed and lands upon the vodka, breaking both with a crash.

  “What the…” I start, as I look around at my undamaged, well-lit room.

  The sun of a January morning is smiling down at me through the window and whilst my head pounds, as my vision clears, I begin to wonder if it was all some sort of imaginary episode.

  Then I see the piano, and start to remember.

  I rifle through my pockets and find my phone; I have a lot of messages.

  I am back - it seems - in the world of the living. I can hear people outside, traffic, songbirds.

  Something lifts within me. There’s even a message from M155 F8N2C that simply says she is coming and it fills me with hope.

  As I stare bewildered at the screen of my phone, it rings.

  “Mum?”

  “Son, I had a missed call from you, is everything alright?”

  “The piano, mum, something is wrong with it, where is it from,”

  “What, doesn’t it work? Jim loved that old thing, Jim and the kids.”

  “Did you used to play it, mum, when you were a kid?”

  “Oh no, I never had any talent, but you know it was very popular with the kids.”

  “Who are the kids, mum, who are they?”

  “Oh, hadn’t I told you? Your uncle Jim used to run a home for children in need, they used to love that piano before the accident.”

  I put the phone down as the door starts knocking.

  The Men in the Snow

  Children grow up when they realise that one day they must watch their heroes die. I, for one, understood this from the start: allow me to tell you the story of the men in the snow.

  They came in steps then strides…

  Mother brought us to the new house on a bitter November morning. As we sat round the kitchen table watching the fog roll past through the thin glass windows she told me we would be safe here. Father simply read his newspaper a distance away from us, his spectacled face never leaving the pages. I remember in great detail the childish glee I experienced as I walked, ran and swam through the gardens, fields, woods and lakes near my new country home, paying special attention to the small stream that trickled close to the house, where I would often catch newts to serve as my only friends.

  I also remember in great detail the extreme cold, even in hotter summer months. The invading winter fog seemed never to leave the place, and left my limbs encased in a chill wind all year round. I’d not wanted to come to the country, but the increased bombings had necessitated a move. Father became even more distant as a result. Mother was catatonic.

  We’d left our lives in London.

  Almost immediately upon arrival I set about finding my own form of entertainment. What else was a young and spoilt girl to do devoid of her applications? The house was as gaunt and barren as my Father and Mother, so I sought solace in the frog-pond situated in a small alcove, set apart from the stream in the garden. Mother would often have to retrieve me from the freezing cold, counting frogs and chasing water boatmen, lest I perish in the merciless winds. Tea and cake were to be followed by a swift retreat to bed, as ever. Of course, Mother had never noticed that I simply must have a glass of water within reach of my sleeping arrangement and as such I would have to creep back down to the kitchen to retrieve one, perched on the tips of my cold toes so as not to make a noise on the unreliable wooden stairs I would have to descend.

  The day had been like any other, but this particular evening was defined by a strange happening. One that had never occurred before in the many other nights spent in the looming country house. As I stood, still on tip toes – in order to reach the sink – filling my glass with cloudy water from a tap showing clear signs of aging, I noticed a figure in the garden, through the pale glass.

  This creature was some ways away and situated near a large tree, the only sort of landmark I recall being in view, underneath it on the right hand side, and wondered if perhaps I had spotted a heron, standing forlorn in the dark, having failed to catch his evening meal. Sure enough, this was no heron, but a man, standing resolutely in the beginnings of the winter snow, unflinching in the bitter air. Of course, I fled this sight, having remembered the nurturing comfort of my cotton blankets and the relative safety of my small cot-bed in my small cot-room.

  I’d left the water on the work surface.

  The following morning I resolved to bother Father about our visitor, for I was an inquisitive child from the city, quite unused to this awful jungle and its lack of crowds; its lack of anyone at all. I beseeched my Father to look up from his paper and pay me heed time and time again to no avail, and Mother simply looked at me as though I was very wrong to disturb him; simply a child possessed of some girly notion of boys in the garden. At Mother’s behest, I went to play outside, and I stayed there until nightfall. Upon re-entry to the house, our sanctuary of warmth and hope, my hands and feet turned a shocking purple and I gazed upon them for a time, pondering why I felt nothing. Mother and Father were in the kitchen, and I stared at them whilst they stared at each other.

  It occurred to me for the first time that they might not be happy.

  And so, as I became increasingly ignored within this large empty space, I invented a friend. He was dreadfully shy though, and would only stand at the end of the garden, by the large tree on its right side. The next night, he had taken a step closer.

  And the night after that, he had brought a friend.

  Perhaps he had wanted company, I didn’t blame him: we had no interaction beside distant vacant stares. I watch
ed them take a step closer in unison, their feet disappearing into the snow. They must have been about fifty paces from the house. Straining my vision as much as I could, I could not make out much of their shadowed forms. I wanted so awfully to run to my friends and greet them, but in honesty, I was as shy as they. If they came much closer, Mother would surely invite them in for a cup of tea. Or maybe, if they introduced themselves, I would. I resolved to wait it out, until my friends had gathered the courage to meet me in person.