30th
The Signal House - 1st Draft
Later, they will call it a house and its being set back from the road, half hidden among the bracken and rhododendrons, will make those who stumble upon it imagine hidden romances that must have once played themselves out within its walls. But this is where he had lived at a time when romance had died with the suddenness of smashed glass.
Before the train lines were shut down, before the village became annexed from the towns further along the coast, the building had functioned as both a signal and mail house. Trains would slow as they approached, smoke eddying down to engulf the signalman as he stood poised to grab at outstretched mailbags and to wave at children or to anyone who would wave back. Once, time had caught him. Blinked him into a sepia portrait, the smoke bunched at his waist. It had caught him as his hand swept through a long practiced arch above his head and kept him as a memory, stored safely in the post-card rack of a local sweet shop.
But when the signalman left, the walls of the deserted building were quick to bow inward with their own misuse. Sections of the roof, thin and tremulous against the wind were soon lost. Window frames became brittle, their panes shaped like cubist canvases painted in smashed space and dust. The few floorboards were removed and taken for firewood or to be reborn as rudimentary shacks in which the local children would act out scenes from old war films.
One morning, with the forest still asleep beneath a thin quilt of mist, this is how he had found it. He had stumbled upon it half drunk, had kicked angrily at nothing and in scuffing against the rough dirt floor, had sent it bowling into the air as if with the promise of a forgotten Jinn. He had surveyed what remained of the building by running his body involuntarily against the walls, by throttling the stepladder leading up to the cramped loft space, testing it against his weight before heaving himself up and into a drunken sleep that would last for the next sixteen years.
The night she left he had been shocked by the deliberateness of her actions, even though it was a scene they had rehearsed many times throughout the course of their relationship. Through the shrunken perspective of a whisky glass he would watch her reach down for their son, would see her half pull him from the cradle only to be held suspended like an unanswered question. They would hold this pose. Neither daring to make the next move, to turn the page of a story they felt compelled to stop half through, to return to a beginning and retrace their steps as if searching for the meaning that had eluded them on their first, second or third run. But this time, at this very moment in their little ritual, as his son dangles tearfully above his cot, the forced applause of a television audience cuts through the scene and jars the cradle and his wife and their baby into unreality. His confidence in the power of his own inaction, a confidence that she will come to accept her fate as the undulating shadow held fast to the bottom of his whiskey glass, begins to falter. He holds the glass to his right eye and squinting through it, closes his left to ask, “What are you doing?” the words tear themselves from his throat. Quietly, not taking her eyes from him, she continues the motion and in one swift action has the baby up and in her arms and toward the near safety of the living room door. This is now new territory for them both and with no script to steer them, she fears he will force himself to act as he has seen others on the television act, to behave as he imagines a wronged hero should behave, to reassert what he recognizes as his crumbling authority.
A clock tocks and marks the silence between them, each dull knock shaving a sliver of time before something must happen.
He thinks he can hear the dull hum of a car engine outside. He imagines or is certain he can also hear the hushed tones of allied neighbors. He feels himself reviewed before the play has even finished, before it has begun even. He half turns to confront these specters that he pictures stand a short distance beyond the window and realizes for the first time that he must be playing as a silhouette against the curtains to anyone on the street outside, that he must have done this many times before. This time he’ll give them a show.
He stands violently with the horror of a once inanimate toy clown, jerking himself to life and reeling towards the coffee table. He pulls his back straight, steadies himself and asks her again. His voice more shrill now than he would like and as if to compensate, he rolls each word furiously around his tongue, spitting them across the room to her like unwonted pips.
“What. Are. You. Doing?”
Again his father’s clock marks the scene with its sickening metronomic tock and although she realizes now that it must be counting down towards something definite, she can’t bring herself to make those last aching steps toward and out of the front door. Instead, she watches as the neck of the whiskey bottle slips gently between his thumb and forefinger, coolly welcoming his enclosing hand. It fits so well, the glass feels so smooth against his palm and he wonders that it wasn’t designed for this very purpose.
They didn’t see him for a long while. The stories and rumors that had risen and spread like dust clouds were soon to settle, the village molded itself against them. In small English villages such as this a story can only travel so far before its lines begin to pull their punches. Someone will die, the story of an affair will appear and these new tales will crash upon the rocks of their predecessors like waves, smothering them, engulfing them.
When he returns to the village, sighted one evening trudging the road leading in against the traffic, it will cause no real stir in the bar or post office queue. Yes, they will speak of him, but he will become a living memory and then pass into the scenery of the village with all the immediacy of a war memorial. Tragedy is scratched upon his surface, but it is a tragedy that cannot be truly felt.
His reappearance will only resonate with her. She has not left the village. Although two years have passed there is something about the place that pulls her in like a vacuum. Tourists would feel sure it must be the draw of idyllic beauty, the overhung oak branches, the timid patch of green to which the cottages face, the grazing ponies, the antiquated bar with horse shoes nailed to its beams and upturned barrels instead of seats. But it is fear that has kept her here. The towns close by are small but unfamiliar, the neighboring villages are unwelcoming in a way that feels almost tribal. And so she turns her gaze to the ground and allows him to float through her life like a ghost. The villagers grow to resent him. They will talk about her and smother her with wide-eyed looks of pity. This too will grow to haunt her and like the old joke that the Queen believes the world smells of fresh paint, she will start to wonder if the same world hasn’t fixed a look of doe eyed understanding permanently upon its face.
Two years become three, become seven, become ten. Still he is there. He has taken to walking the center of roads and now those drivers that are aware are forced to slow at corners not only for the ponies but for the possibility of coming face to face with this bearded specter. But it is only those who know that do so and for his part, he greets each blind turn with equanimity, neither riled nor cowed by the presence of death.
After a time he begins to hover outside their old house where she still lives, but is soon moved on by local policemen, warned and changes the course of his action. She starts to spend her evenings in the King’s Arms, first for the certainty of companionship, then for the drink and then finally for both. Her son, now sixteen, skates up and down the car park outside with his friends where he will remain long after someone has walked his mother home; a task the local men perform half with a sense of obligation, half with the hope of sex.
He takes to positioning himself at the top of a hill looking down upon the Pub window, which frames her in the bar and plays her back to him like an old movie. She does not see him but he sees her and more; he sees her leaving towards their house with a different man each night. He plunges a whiskey bottle against his lips and will stay until he is spotted by the local boys who, recognizing him as the village tramp and for no real reason than to quell an unslakable need for distraction, will drop their skateboards to chase him into the trees, throwing rocks or whatever they can lay their hands to, in his wake.
Tonight as he sees her leave, he stands with a renewed sense of action. He has worked himself up through the drink and has played out the scene again and again in his head. Stopping them on the road he will ask the man what he thinks he is doing with his wife and felling him with one sure punch, shattering his jaw, will carry or drag her back to the house himself.
Seeing her leave tonight, he begins to move slowly down toward her. Without warning a car screeches up the hill, hugging close to the verge and dazzles him violently with its headlights. Through a blaze of horns he hears the snap as he crashes against the vehicle’s side. The car does not stop and sat by the roadside, shrouded once more in darkness, the car gone as abruptly as it had appeared, he nervously feels for his arm, applying pressure and waiting for the rush of pain. It doesn’t come. The snap, he says to himself, had come from the wing mirror swinging back, not from his body. He laughs at his own fear and realizing that she has disappeared, begins his slow amble back toward his shack. He courses unsurely and unsteadily through the trees.
After a few minutes he is aware of someone flanking him to his left. He sticks out his tongue and growls a noise he deems fitting to the monstrous figure he has become, but the growl collapses quickly into a drunken laugh. Soon he is aware of others, some to his right, some slightly ahead of him. He shouts for them to get away, to leave him alone. He waves his arms violently and lengthens his paces, to get back sooner, as one final attempt to terrify. His screams are met with a gentle barrage of stones. The final steps are taken quickly, a short little jog and he pulls the corrugated iron door shut, leaning against it for protection against whatever is out there. There is no lock. He peers out through a rusted hole but sees nothing. The night feels brighter now, the moon is almost full, a sky of stars and he sees the thin trees that surround his hovel like dark scratch marks against the green of the grass and moss. For a moment he thinks that he sees a deer moving deliberately toward him through the shadows and he starts to make kissing noises as if attracting a cat. And then his is aware of the boys.
They encircle the hut. They laugh at one another and laugh harder when he resorts once more to his guttural screams. None of them have really thought this through, not past scaring the old man who has become a menace to their parents, to the village. They stand lazily about, throwing things at one another, laughing. In the half dark their unnecessarily long arms make them seem to him as if they are the trees themselves come to life. Again he screams. Now their stones are aimed towards his shack rather than at one another. He hears them ring against the tin of the door, clatter through the beams above him, landing somewhere in the loft space where he sleeps. The boys encourage one another to throw larger and larger stones. They crash through the windows, tearing at what is left of the frames and landing with the dull thud of a body. As he peers out he thinks he sees a boy with a thick scar stretching from his right eye down the length of his cheek. He pulls the door open, yanking harder as is digs into the ground at his feet. He rushes out and for a moment the boys are startled enough to stop their barrage. He gestures towards the scarred boy, pleadingly, almost apologetically, but instead of words comes a near comic guttural choke. The boy begins to mock his gestures, turning to a friend with arms outstretched, an exaggerated grimace upon his face. The tramp shakes his head and lets them see his tears. Misunderstanding the situation, he rushes back into his shack and returns with a thick shard of glass which he holds above him as a plea more than a threat. The boys are angered by what they see as the aggressive actions of an adult to what was only a childish game to them. They move closer, throwing their stones towards him with increased venom. In desperation as they draw nearer he acts out the frantic apology he had failed to offer verbally in the moments before. He plunges the glass towards his face, slicing deep into the skin below his right eye and tearing down his cheek like a tear. His hands, his shirt, his face all covered with a dark wet blood. The children transfixed and terrified by this gory stranger stood before them in the doorway of the hut that has become something from a nightmare. They start to run back through the trees, chased now by their own screams. A terror spreads amongst them that he will follow, that he will turn the glass upon their own faces. Someone cries out “Oh God, throw it, throw it!”
There is a short silence and then the sound of shattered glass, the sound of a gas oven bursting into life. These will be the last sounds that they hear as they press deeper into the forest and back towards the village. Those who turn back, as he did, will see the hut swimming in flames, will see the dark silhouette of a man collapsed against it.
