Derry Cottage

Part 5

The cottage exhaled when they opened the door, as if it had been holding its breath for them to come home. Damp breath like water in the lungs, horrible dying cancer breath like the gust of air before a cough.

‘Come on.’ Mike said, sounding cheerful, ‘let’s get the kettle on. I could do with a cuppa and a sit down.’

Mary’s head still spun and she waltzed into a chair, collapsed backwards and it creaked beneath her weight.

‘This rain won’t last.’ He said, pouring out the tea with movements like butter, smooth and thick and slow, and as servile as a butler, as if she were his governess and it made her feel as if she had age and dignity, neither of which she wanted.

‘I can see the sky getting lighter over there.’ he said, sounding more optimistic still ‘Maybe tomorrow it’ll be fine again, but the forecast did say they’d be showers. I just wasn’t expecting a downpour like that.’ He shrugged his shoulders and went on talking and it was as if they were on a sea-saw, with him going up and her going down.

She felt the booze from earlier wearing off, felt her world become sticky and slow and her head stung a little, her eyes began to close.

Outside the estuary filled with water as the tide came in, too shy to be near land during daylight, it found confidence in the oily light of dusk. The windows of the cottage became like mirrors, reflecting her white face, featureless in the warped reflection and darkness closed in on the cottage like a black cloth over a bird’s cage. She felt so tired her eyes stung and each blink came with magnetic force, such force that it was hard to keep them from closing.

‘You look tired.’ Mike said, drinking tea and with a book open on his lap, a book so old it had a battered red cover, the pages like old dirty cream, yellow at the edges like the dried crust at the lip of the tub and she could smell it from here, it was so old.

Damp paper, how could he stand it directly beneath his nose?

‘If you’re tired, why don’t you go to bed?’ he said in a kind voice, kind like a nurse.

‘No,’ Mary replied, ‘No, no. I mustn’t sleep. It’s a waste of the evening if I sleep.’ And she rubbed her eyes, stifled a yawn. ‘What are you reading? It looks interesting.’

‘Oh, just some old book I found on one of the shelves downstairs. Junk I think, some journal, I don’t think it’s real.’ He flicked through the pages, shook his head as he spoke and then showed Mary the cover. ‘It’s some kind of pretend journal I think, something about an adventure in Africa. Some search for a gorilla. It looks real, but way too fanciful to be real. Someone must have written it as fiction, written it by hand like this to make it look real. Too badly written thought to be any good though.’

Mary went over the chair where he sat and looked at it over his shoulder. She stood with a straight back and looked like a school girl being shown something by her school master and she wanted to put her hand on his shoulder or around his neck so that she might break the spell, might feel more like his lover, but she couldn’t.

She wanted to see how old the book was, how stained the pages were, the dark red blotches, prints form dirty thumbs, brown scratches, she wondered how he could ever touch it, so dirty, so old.

He must wash his hands, she thought and said, ‘I need coffee.’ She pushed herself away from him and walking to the kettle. But it didn’t help to sober her, instead only making her feel worse, gave her a headache. So she drank more wine and so did Mike and they fell asleep before it was even half past eight.

Mary woke to the sound of Mike’s snores. He never snored and she couldn’t think any less of him for snoring in the way he was snoring now, so loud and so uncomfortably. His throat will be sore in the morning, she thought and reached across him for his watch, which lay on its side on the bedside table like a discarded robot, still working but immobile, useless. It was half past two and she felt suddenly too awake to go back to sleep, so instead she went downstairs and made coffee, using the same cup she had used in the evening.

Then she took the chair that Mike had sat in last night. Its wicker frame was lit by moonlight that shone through the window, which was the only light, and the chair creaked beneath her fresh-from-bed, naked frame. Leaning back, she sat listening to the silence.

There was no sound except the steady, gentle breathing of the wind outside. It was as if the estuary slept, snored silently as it slept. But inside the house was quiet, too quiet, as if it were being intentionally quiet in order to scare her and in her sleepy state she thought of all the people who had lived here, thought how old the house was and thought of all the voices that had been here. How many? She made a calculation in her head - two hundred, three hundred, four. It was impossible and the thought made it seem all the more silent here.

Like a stadium during a minute’s silence. Silence overbearing, silence when you know someone’s there, can hear their thoughts, hear the air tremble across their nasal hairs. It was too much and Mary stood up. The chair creaked. She walked across the room and down the three stairs to the living room.

It was dark, cold, filled with furniture that shouldn’t be there. Beige sofa, carpet, the arm of the chair felt dirty beneath her touch, rough too, the texture like dried dish-cloth and on the walls pictures. She looked at them all. Some of the house, some of people who Mary thought must have lived here, and each with eyes that seemed to stare at her. She felt the house watch her and imagined that the house felt her move inside it, move like a tapeworm, like a louse, like an injection.

The house didn’t want her here, wanted to spill her out like we spill out diarrhoea, like vomit or water from a boil.

She ran from the house, out through the back door, across the terrace and out onto the bank of the estuary. She dared not look back, but she did and the house, with its piggy eyed windows, its ugly thatched roof and squat flatness looked at her and sneered.

It was such a relief to be outside, such a relief that she didn’t care about the cold, the morning chill. She walked quickly along the path that led round the estuary. It was warm and she didn’t care that she was only wearing a dressing gown and like a mad woman who’s escaped the asylum she half ran, half walked, but as fast as she could, up the road to Noss Mayo, up the path that led onto the cliff, only realising when she was almost there and the sun was making its first red warning on the horizon, that she didn’t have shoes on her feet and they probably bled beneath the caked slabs of mud that had gathered about her toes.

It didn’t matter though. On top of the cliff she felt free. She wasn’t going back to the cottage. She couldn’t. Instead she ran along the path, one foot in front of the other, so fast that it was impossible to keep her balance, until it was impossible not to bound off the path and onto the slope and then she really felt free, free like a bird that’s found a way out of its cage.