The Weird Part 126

There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry. Occasionally I'd meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller's room, swearing in a strong c.o.c.kney accent. I remember the first time I saw him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and moaning loudly.

'Come on, you old slag,' he wailed, 'you sodding old slag. Come on, please, you cow.'

His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I could hear her voice, Mrs. Miller's voice, from inside the room, answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I could continue as usual.

I asked my mother once if I could have any of Mrs. Miller's food. She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. She dissolved a bit of gelatin or cornflour with some milk, threw in a load of sugar or flavorings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills into the mess. She stirred it until it thickened and let it set in a plain white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller and sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.

So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller's door, knocking, with a bowl at my feet. I'd hear a s.h.i.+fting and then her voice from close by the door.

'h.e.l.lo,' she would call, and then say my name a couple of times. 'Have you my breakfast? Are you ready?'

I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would tell her I was.

Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door suddenly swung open a s.n.a.t.c.h, just a foot or two, and I thrust my bowl into the gap. She grabbed it and slammed the door quickly in my face.

I couldn't see very much inside the room. The door was open for less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of the walls. Mrs. Miller's sleeves were white, too, and made of plastic. I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was unmemorable. A middle-aged woman's eager face.

If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen to her eat.

'How's your mother' she would shout. At that I'd unfold my mother's careful queries. She's okay, I'd say, she's fine. She says she has some questions for you.

I'd read my mother's strange questions in my careful childish monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she took ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost immediate.

'Tell your mother she can't tell if a man's good or bad from that,' she'd say; 'Tell her to remember the problems she had with your father.' Or: 'Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about.' 'Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and three of them used to be dead.'

'I can't help her with that,' she told me once, quietly. 'Tell her to go to a doctor, quickly.' And my mother did, and she got well again.

'What do you not want to be when you grow up?' Mrs. Miller asked me one day.

That morning when I had come to the house the sad c.o.c.kney vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to the flat flailing in his hand.

'He's begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he's so b.l.o.o.d.y angry,' he was shouting, 'only it ain't you gets the sharp end, is it? Please, you cow, you sodding cow, I'm on me knees...'

'My door knows you, man,' Mrs. Miller declared from within. 'It knows you and so do I, you know it won't open to you. I didn't take out my eyes and I'm not giving in now. Go home.'

I waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, and then, looking behind me, I knocked on the door and announced myself. It was after I'd given her the food that she asked her question.

'What do you not want to be when you grow up?'

If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliche would have annoyed me. It would have seemed mannered and contrived. But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.

I don't want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters that made her cry or smoke fiercely, and swear at lawyers, b.l.o.o.d.y smarta.r.s.e lawyers.

Mrs. Miller was delighted.

'Good boy!' she snorted. 'We know all about lawyers. b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, right? With the small print. Never be tricked by the small print! It's right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can't even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you've seen it it's got you!' She laughed excitedly. 'Don't let the small print get you. I'll tell you a secret.' I waited quietly, and my head slipped nearer the door.

'The devil's in the details!' She laughed again. 'You ask your mother if that's not true. The devil is in the details!'

I'd wait the twenty minutes or so until Mrs. Miller had finished eating, and then we'd reverse our previous procedure and she'd quickly hand me out an empty bowl. I would return home with the empty container and tell my mother the various answers to her various questions. Usually she would nod and make notes. Occasionally she would cry.

After I told Mrs. Miller that I did not want to be a lawyer she started asking me to read to her. She made me tell my mother, and told me to bring a newspaper or one of a number of books. My mother nodded at the message and packed me a sandwich the next Wednesday, along with the Mirror. She told me to be polite and do what Mrs. Miller asked, and that she'd see me in the afternoon.

I wasn't afraid. Mrs. Miller had never treated me badly from behind her door. I was resigned and only a little bit nervous.

Mrs. Miller made me read stories to her from specific pages that she shouted out. She made me recite them again and again, very carefully. Afterward she would talk to me. Usually she started with a joke about lawyers, and about small print.

'There's three ways not to see what you don't want to,' she told me. 'One is the coward's way and too d.a.m.ned painful. The other is to close your eyes forever which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: You have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.'

One morning when I arrived the stylish Asian woman was whispering fiercely through the wood of the door, and I could hear Mrs. Miller responding with shouts of amused disapproval. Eventually the young woman swept past me, leaving me cowed by her perfume.

Mrs. Miller was laughing, and she was talkative when she had eaten.

'She's heading for trouble, messing with the wrong family! You have to be careful with all of them,' she told me. 'Every single one of them on that other side of things is a tricksy b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'll kill you as soon as look at you, given half a chance.

'There's the gnarly throat-tripped one...and there's old hasty, who I think had best remain nameless,' she said wryly. 'All old b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, all of them. You can't trust them at all, that's what I say. I should know, eh? Shouldn't I?' She laughed. 'Trust me, trust me on this: It's too easy to get on the wrong side of them.

'What's it like out today?' she asked me. I told her that it was cloudy.

'You want to be careful with that,' she said. 'All sorts of faces in the clouds, aren't there? Can't help noticing, can you?' She was whispering now. 'Do me a favor when you go home to your mum: Don't look up, there's a boy. Don't look up at all.'

When I left her, however, the day had changed. The sky was hot, and quite blue.

The two drunk men were squabbling in the front hall and I edged past them to her door. They continued bickering in a depressing, garbled murmur throughout my visit.

'D'you know, I can't even really remember what it was all about, now!' Mrs. Miller said when I had finished reading to her. 'I can't remember! That's a terrible thing. But you don't forget the basics. The exact question escapes me, and to be honest I think maybe I was just being nosy or showing off...I can't say I'm proud of it but it could have been that. It could. But whatever the question, it was all about a way of seeing an answer.

'There's a way of looking that lets you read things. If you look at a pattern of tar on a wall, or a crumbling mound of brick or somesuch...there's a way of unpicking it. And if you know how, you can trace it and read it out and see the things hidden right there in front of you, the things you've been seeing but not noticing, all along. But you have to learn how.' She laughed. It was a high-pitched, unpleasant sound. 'Someone has to teach you. So you have to make certain friends.

'But you can't make friends without making enemies.

'You have to open it all up for you to see inside. You have to make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You make what you see a sort of door.'

She was silent for a long time. Then: 'Is it cloudy again?' she asked suddenly. She went on before I answered.

'If you look up, you look into the clouds for long enough and you'll see a face. Or in a tree. Look in a tree, look in the branches and soon you'll see them just so, and there's a face or a running man, or a bat or whatever. You'll see it all suddenly, a picture in the pattern of the branches, and you won't have chosen to see it. And you can't unsee it.

'That's what you have to learn to do, to read the details like that and see what's what and learn things. But you've to be d.a.m.n careful. You've to be careful not to disturb anything.' Her voice was absolutely cold, and I was suddenly very frightened.

'Open up that window, you'd better be d.a.m.n careful that what's in the details doesn't look back and see you.'

The next time I went, the maudlin drunk was there again wailing obscenities at her through the door. She shouted at me to come back later, that she didn't need her food right now. She sounded resigned and irritated, and she went back to scolding her visitor before I had backed out of earshot.

He was screaming at her that she'd gone too far, that she'd p.i.s.sed about too long, that things were coming to a head, that there was going to be h.e.l.l to pay, that she couldn't avoid it forever, that it was her own fault.

When I came back he was asleep, snoring loudly, curled up a few feet into the mildewing pa.s.sage. Mrs. Miller took her food and ate it quickly, returned it without speaking.

When I returned the following week, she began to whisper to me as soon as I knocked on the door, hissing urgently as she opened it briefly and grabbed the bowl.

'It was an accident, you know,' she said, as if responding to something I'd said. 'I mean of course you know in theory that anything might happen, you get warned, don't you? But oh my...oh my G.o.d it took the breath out of me and made me cold to realize what had happened.'

I waited. I could not leave, because she had not returned the bowl. She had not said I could go. She spoke again, very slowly.

'It was a new day.' Her voice was distant and breathy. 'Can you even imagine? Can you see what I was ready to do? I was poised...to change...to see everything that's hidden. The best place to hide a book is in a library. The best place to hide secret things is there, in the visible angles, in our view, in plain sight.

'I had studied and sought, and learnt, finally, to see. It was time to learn truths.

'I opened my eyes fully, for the first time.

'I had chosen an old wall. I was looking for the answer to some question that I told you I can't even remember now, but the question wasn't the main thing. That was the opening of my eyes.

'I stared at the whole ma.s.s of the bricks. I took another glance, relaxed my sight. At first I couldn't stop seeing the bricks as bricks, the divisions as layers of cement, but after a time they became pure vision. And as the whole broke down into lines and shapes and shades, I held my breath as I began to see.

'Alternatives appeared to me. Messages written in the pockmarks. Insinuations in the forms. Secrets unraveling. It was bliss.

'And then without warning my heart went tight, as I saw something. I made sense of the pattern.

'It was a mess of cracks and lines and crumbling cement, and as I looked at it, I saw a pattern in the wall.

'I saw a clutch of lines that looked just like something...terrible...something old and predatory and utterly terrible...staring right back at me.

'And then I saw it move.'

'You have to understand me,' she said. 'Nothing changed. See? All the time I was looking I saw the wall. But that first moment, it was like when you see a face in the cloud. I just noticed in the pattern in the brick, I just noticed something, looking at me. Something angry.

'And then in the very next moment, I just...I just noticed another load of lines cracks that had always been there, you understand? Patterns in broken brick that I'd seen only a second before that looked exactly like that same thing, a little closer to me. And in the next moment a third picture in the brick, a picture of the thing closer still.

'Reaching for me.'

'I broke free then,' she whispered. 'I ran away from there in terror, with my hands in front of my eyes and I was screaming. I ran and ran.

'And when I stopped and opened my eyes again, I had to run to the edges of a park, and I took my hands slowly down and dared to look behind me, and saw that there was nothing coming from the alley where I'd been. So I turned to the little s.n.a.t.c.h of scrub and gra.s.s and trees.

'And I saw the thing again.'

Mrs. Miller's voice was stretched out as if she was dreaming. My mouth was open and I huddled closer to the door.

'I saw it in the leaves,' she said forlornly. 'As I turned I saw the leaves in such a way...just a chance conjuncture, you understand? I noticed a pattern. I couldn't not. You don't choose whether to see faces in the clouds. I saw the monstrous thing again and it still reached for me, and I shrieked and all the mothers and fathers and children in the park turned and gazed at me, and I turned my eyes from that tree and whirled on my feet to face a little family in my way.

'And the thing was there in the same pose,' she whispered in misery. 'I saw it in the outlines of the father's coat and the spokes of the baby's pushchair, and the tangles of the mother's hair. It was just another mess of lines, you see? But you don't choose what you notice. And I couldn't help but notice just the right lines out of the whole, just the lines out of all the lines there, just the ones to see the thing again, a little closer, looking at me.

'And I turned and saw it closer still in the clouds, and I turned again and it was clutching for me in the rippling weeds in the pond, and as I closed my eyes I swear I felt something touch my dress.

'You understand me? You understand?'

I didn't know if I understood or not. Of course now I know that I did not.

'It lives in the details,' she said bleakly. 'It travels in that...in that perception. It moves through those chance meetings of lines. Maybe you glimpse it sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe it might catch a glimpse of you, too.

'But it saw me full on. It's jealous of...of its place, and there I was peering through without permission, like a nosy neighbor through a hole in the fence. I know what it is. I know what happened.

'It lurks before us, in the everyday. It's the boss of all the things hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible.

'It caught my glances. It can move through whatever I see.

'For most people it's just chance, isn't it? What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear. But now...the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It's found its way through. To me. Through what I see. I opened a door into my perception.'

She sounded frozen with terror. I was not equipped for that kind of adult fear, and my mouth worked silently for something to say.

'That was a long, long journey home. Every time I peeked through the cracks in my fingers, I saw that thing crawling for me.

'It waited ready to pounce, and when I opened my eyes even a crack I opened the door again. I saw the back of a woman's jumper and in the detail of the fabric the thing leapt for me. I glimpsed a yard of broken paving and I noticed just the lines that showed me the thing...baying.

'I had to shut my eyes quick.

'I groped my way home.

'And then I taped my eyes shut and I tried to think about things.'

There was silence for a time.

'See, there was always the easy way, that scared me rotten, because I was never one for blood and pain,' she said suddenly, and her voice was harder. 'I held the scissors in front of my eyes a couple of times, but even bandaged blind as I was I couldn't bear it. I suppose I could've gone to a doctor. I can pull strings, I could pull in a few favors, have them do the job without pain.

'But you know I never...really...reckoned...that's what I'd do,' she said thoughtfully. 'What if you found a way to close the door? Eh? And you'd already put out your eyes? You'd feel such a fool, wouldn't you?

'And as you know it wouldn't be good enough to wear pads and eyepatches and all. I tried. You catch glimpses. You see the glimmers of light and maybe a few of your own hairs, and that's the doorway right there, when the hairs cross in the corner of your eye so that if you notice just a few of them in just the right way...they look like something coming for you. That's a doorway.

'It's...unbearable...having sight, but trapping it like that.

'I'm not giving up. See...' Her voice lowered, and she spoke conspiratorially. 'I still think I can close the door. I learnt to see. I can unlearn. I'm looking for ways. I want to see a wall as...as bricks again. Nothing more. That's why you read for me,' she said. 'Research. Can't look at it myself of course, too many edges and lines and so on on a printed page, so you do it for me. And you're a good boy to do it.'

I've thought about what she said many times, and still it makes no sense to me. The books I read to Mrs. Miller were school textbooks, old and dull village histories, the occasional romantic novel. I think that she must have been talking of some of her other visitors, who perhaps read her more esoteric stuff than I did. Either that, or the information she sought was buried very cleverly in the ba.n.a.l prose I faltered through.

'In the meantime, there's another way of surviving,' she said slyly. 'Leave the eyes where they are, but don't give them any details.

'That...thing can force me to notice its shape, but only in what's there. That's how it travels. You imagine if I saw a field of wheat. Doesn't even bear thinking about! A million million little b.l.o.o.d.y edges, a million lines. You could make pictures of d.a.m.n anything out of them, couldn't you? It wouldn't take any effort at all for the thing to make me notice it. The d.a.m.n lurker. Or in a gravel drive or, or a building site, or a lawn...

'But I can outsmart it.' The note of cunning in her voice made her sound deranged. 'Keep it away till I work out how to close it off.

'I had to prepare this blind, with the wrappings around my head. Took me a while, but here I am now. Safe. I'm safe in my little cold room. I keep the walls flat white. I covered the windows and painted them, too. I made my cloak out of plastic, so's I can't catch a glimpse of cotton weave or anything when I wake up.

'I keep my place nice and...simple. When it was all done, I unwrapped the bandages from my head, and I blinked slowly...and I was alright. Clean walls, no cracks, no features. I don't look at my hands often or for long. Too many creases. Your mother makes me a good healthy soup looks like cream, so if I accidentally look in the bowl, there's no broccoli or rice or tangled up spaghetti to make lines and edges.

'I open and shut the door so d.a.m.ned quick because I can only afford a moment. That thing is ready to pounce. It wouldn't take a second for it to leap up at me out of the sight of your hair or your books or whatever.'