Remembrance Road

A warm cuppa, a chair with the right amount of bounce, and working from home never dissipated the knife wound in my lower abdomen. The pain had long gone, but the cold steel ghost haunted my muscles each time a car drove by my isolated house in the country.

The last motor, a half-hour ago, caught me by surprise. Lost in my job, it whizzed by my attention as if it popped out of a patch of mist from another world. Shook my momentum. The wind bending every tree in the back garden and the woods beyond obscured its engine. Today, I planned on stepping outside for the first time in a year, but this event put the brakes on my feet. On my mindset. I heard the next car a minute before it drove past, giving me a chance to hide in the next room until silence descended again.

“Benny, you should play loud music. All this quiet just compounds your issues.” That’s what my wife, Jennifer, said when she last visited. Her last attempt to iron away our problems. But she was done when she left three hours later. I felt the sigh she caged deep in her ribs as she recognised there’s no breaking through my walls. She just hoped I’d get a better job before the bank threw me out onto the streets. 

I see the knife everywhere I go. Never the man who wielded it. Just the blade, following me through the air, looking to finish me.

I inflated my lungs again. That breath might last until bedtime. I answer questions on the internet, from lonely people done with Twitter. They want one-on-one chit-chat with someone anonymous and will pay for it. The next one asked, “What should I do on such a windy day? Dance in the swirling leaves, fly a kite, or just stay indoors and watch Netflix?”

It troubled me that Netflix hit me as the obvious answer. I remember long walks in the wind. It plugged you into the world and electrified the senses. But out front, the ancient oak tree danced in the October storm, conjuring the devil, and the rain must follow.

I tapped the first letter on the keyboard when my eye flickered at movement outside. I grabbed the edge of the desk and held tight. A moment later, as I gathered myself, I tilted forward off my chair and laughed. A crumpled ball of paper buffeted the outhouse’s wall and danced up its surface with every new gust. My mirth cut short. In the city, you can expect a constant stream of litter. Out here in the country, that’s weird. Motorists are considerate most of the time and take their rubbish home. All those months indoors made me scan left and right, though I knew my nearest neighbour lived a mile away. I used to help her when we moved here two years ago. Old lady, house as isolated and ramshackle as mine. Her smile sad and grateful at somebody’s interest. 

Her name? I couldn’t remember. I wanted to say Irene. Began with I, I’m sure. Had she sent me a message? I stood by the door and watched the paper twirl and rise. Soon it would either lift above the wall and fly away, leaving its words in my imagination, or the rain would dissolve paper and ink together. 

It’s my front garden. Mine. What’s the problem? Well, the man who walked down the country road toward my house glued my feet to the indoor mat. His dull red raincoat flapped and though I wanted to slide from the window, it mesmerised me to watch if he would take off into the air any second.

He leaned into the gale, out of the whipping branches’ reach, and paused at the sight of me. My scar stretched over my abdomen in warning at this standoff. The crumpled paper swirled close to the outhouse roof. When I glanced back toward where the man had stood, he’d gone, his red raincoat a slash across my memory. I planted my forehead against the door’s glass pane and condensed it with quick breathing. Swung the door wide open and girded myself against the wild weather as it attempted to blow me deeper inside. 

The internet client awaited my answer. My initial boost for Netflix wilted at the fresh air. Now I’d resisted the wind’s push, it wanted to pull me out instead. My first step outdoors in a year shook every bone, but I didn’t collapse, and neither did I melt. I snatched the note just as a gust from the gods sent it across the woods and fields to the next set of eyes. It felt secret, conspiratorial. I blinked. This is what happens when you closet yourself from society. Everything becomes dramatic. Including a dumb scrap of waste paper. I opened the A4 sheet, expecting nothing more than a discarded shopping list. The spidery letters rose and dipped Gothic. Even the ink spilled, extending the P at the end of HELP.

HELP?

The wind buffeted me away from the garden gate, but I fought it to look down the road. I could frame the man in the red raincoat between my thumb and forefinger as he reached the junction. He needed no assistance. The note seemed to reach out to him and he glanced back at me, uncertain. Waited for some reaction from me.

The heavy outhouse door slammed against the structure, on repeat, but when I turned to shut it, I realised it was my heart that drummed a red alert. My slow walk away from the gate, designed to put the man at ease, sped up as I left his sight. I closed the door, rested my back against it, and rubbed warmth into my hands. The note came from Irene. It must have. And that outsider headed from her direction.

Not my problem. I had no business with Irene. Putting shelves up in her kitchen, helping her use her new phone so she could contact her overseas daughter, inviting her over for Christmas dinner - none of it an excuse to get involved. Except I imagined her on the floor, crawling to this piece of paper, desperate as she scribbled. Reminded me how I dragged myself from the gutter when the knife found me. And my best pal never helped. And has never visited me since.

I rummaged for the locket the lady gave me that Christmas. Expensive. I can’t remember the exact words, but she insisted I have it. “You’re the only people who ever cared a damn these last few years. Thank you. Thank you, both.”

I banged the back of my head against the door, spun by the guilt that I hadn’t bothered with her since. Breathed hard to drag every inch of heroism I’d lost back into my system, and pushed myself outside. The gust asked if I was sure. No. But Irene needed me. The car keys rattled in my shaking hands. The end of the garden blurred, and the tree rooted by the side of the house gave way and crunched my Volvo into scrap. I shielded myself from shattered glass and an explosion that never came. Across the road, a branch snapped from its parent and splintered on the tarmac. 

The roar screeched to higher decibels, and I pulled my coat tighter. Tilted my head to the gale and legged it over the fence after the gate wouldn’t budge. Every step worked the muscles until I reckoned it a warning to stay away. The note remained in my tight grip and pulsed at me to resist the easy way out. A woman needed my help. I’d never forgive myself if I never checked. Any chance Jennifer would come back ended the moment I hid within those four walls. Even if I told her nothing, she’d see through my haunted face.

Leaves plastered against my body and legs. Flying grit stung my eyes. I kept my mouth shut to avoid eating anything untoward. If I unzipped the coat and stretched my arms, this wind would turn me into a bat. Sometimes it hit so strong it robbed the breath. I dug my hands deeper and girded my flesh against the gust mugging my warmth. I shivered and pushed. Attempted walking sideways, then backwards. Must have walked half-a-mile, but looking back, my house sat a hundred feet-or-so away. A flash of red made me pause. It streaked, just for a moment, in the woods across the road. I touched my scar, as if that stopped the guts from spilling out, and ploughed on.

The rolling black clouds opened their taps, and the wind slashed the rain horizontal. Blinded. Found the seams of my coat and trickled down goosebump-addled flesh. The shirt stuck to my skin, and trousers wrapped around my legs like cling film, but I powered onward. It took fifteen minutes to reach her house. It sat round the road’s bend, a 1930s bungalow smothered in vine and neglect. Weeds tangled the garden in impenetrable gloom, and any passing child would think of grim fairy tales and run away, one eye over a shoulder in terrible fascination.

But I knew better. Irene - I’m sure her name is Irene - ate with us that Christmas, quiet mostly, but shining in company. No witch. Just a lonely soul in an empty nest she couldn’t upkeep in her old age. But antique stories, told by my dad using torchlight, picked at mental fabric. And in this green and brown landscape, drowned by lashing rain, the trees in a pagan dance under a black sky, I wondered whether I’d misread Irene. Did she call me over to boil me in a pot? Feed me to the cats?

A thick, weather-blackened branch broke from a tree and landed a warning. Tea, crumpets, my warm kitchen, that question I never answered - it all called me back. Stupid to think a crumpled piece of paper endangered my life like this. I gasped at something that hit my cheek. Shook my head, touched the impact point, and stared at the blood smear on my finger. I turned to go home. But my place stood further than Irene’s. Shelter lay a hundred yards away, my house a mile. And the red struck colour across the muted woodland, again for just a second. A gush of wind almost knocked me off my feet, but somehow filled my shaking bones with courage. I swivelled and marched on, wondering if the man in the blood-coloured raincoat targeted me because I’m me, or because he guessed I suspected the crime he’d committed against Irene. 

Her rusted gate didn’t budge. The bottom had dug into the path. Rose thorns wound round the iron. I called Irene’s name, hoping I remembered it right. A year of isolation made everything fuzzy. Some days I imagined we had children, and the next I shook off the images, wondering if I saw a future, or planned that future. 

Did Irene exist? Had she visited us that Christmas, or did I misremember that, too? A lack of action cooled the water on my flesh and I shivered as I glanced back across the road, scared that I also imagined the man in red. Saw nothing but the flutter of dead leaves and flying debris.

I jumped the fence and picked through grabbing plants ripping at my sodden jeans. Rain cascaded down the windows, but couldn’t clean the dust inside. Irene sat in the dark, or this storm cut the electricity. Maybe she’d gone to stay with her daughter.

I knocked hard, loud enough for an old lady to hear over a savage squall threatening to tear off her roof. Did she wear a hearing aid? Did she keep it switched off to silence the world? If I ever lost that sense, would it shut off the voices in my head?

The panic rose in my throat at Irene’s non-response. I hammered the door, rattled her windows, and repeated it all around the back. Shouted her name until I ran my pipes ragged and sore. A tile from her roof slid to the ground and smashed into tiny sprinkling pieces. I hugged the wall at the red in the corner of my eye. Shifted across to the home’s other side to circle and catch him from behind. My coat flapped, and I wrapped it tight to my body to reduce the noise. The abdomen wound pulsed, expecting a reinsertion. I squeezed my eyes to rinse out the fears. But on the third circle of the house, I didn’t find him. 

Something unravelled in my head that had threatened to do so for the last year. I grasped Irene’s door handle as if it represented reality. Another tile smashed, and another, and though Irene hadn’t the legs to fix a roof, she can’t have let the place slide so badly in such short a time. I twisted the handle and shoved, but the door wouldn’t shift. My shoulder couldn’t budge it either, so I punched the glass in and shredded my forearm. 

“Oh, God.” I turned the lock and clattered indoors. The wind whistled through the broken pane, but the walls dampened its roar. I stumbled into the kitchen, looking for the woman. In every shadow, I expected to see the bottom of her feet, toes pointing at the ceiling. She didn’t warm the stove, and neither did she sit cosy by the electric fire. 

I swung round at the tap on the living room window. Nobody greeted me with a smile or a threat. A single armchair faced the corner, where a TV stand sat, without the telly. She hadn’t turned the electric fire on for days and the room’s cold infiltrated deeper than outdoors.

“Irene.” I called her name again and again, searching every room except the bedroom. A gap there enticed me, though I had no wish to look. The light inside looked dank, full of browns and greens. Musty as the cellar my dad used to lock me in as a kid. I had no desire to peek at any of it.

But the hurt is intense when people walk on by, so I planted my fingertips on the door and pushed. It creaked like a tree falling and raced my heart around my chest. The silence afterward spooked me worse. The dim daylight revealed only humps and sharp outlines. I fumbled with my phone and turned on the torch, concentrating on the threadbare carpet for a moment, then the bed’s trim, and the mattress. 

The wind whispered to me, reminded me of things. Things I’d done. The thing I’d become. I ran the light from Irene’s foot, up her blue leg, and torso, all the way to her decaying face. Who did this?

The stink made me dizzy, and I backpedalled until the wall stopped momentum. I rested a hand against it, doubled over, my stomach lurching. Something slapped the living room window. I staggered, falling to the floor. Red. Red. I lost my breath. I doubted I’d ever draw it again, but the red turned out as nothing more than a red sheet the storm must have blown from somebody’s washing line. 

It fluttered hard against the pane and lifted with the gust’s change of direction. As it flew into the air it revealed a man, face dripping wet, his hair a mop beneath the hood of his red raincoat. I never thought of myself as somebody who whimpered, but I let out a cry, not sure if the intruder or myself terrified me most. I wiped the blood from my torn arm on my coat and scurried from the sight of him. When I looked back, he’d gone. 

Where? Into the recesses of my imagination, or to the entrance? I scrambled to my feet and bounced off the walls, reaching for the door before he entered. Saw no outline through the frosted glass. I held the handle, ready to lock it, though a hand through the break could unlock it just as quick. Why didn’t I call the police? I remained unsure. Until the man crashed inward, sending me across the rough carpet. The stranger in red towered above. I kicked as he attacked and he collapsed on me when I struck his shin, taking my senses with him. He straddled my chest and banged my head against the floor.

“What did you do with my mother-in-law?”

Australian twang. He hit my skull again and Christmas flooded back, warm and festive. Irene at my table, complaining her girl never called. That her Australian boyfriend wanted Irene’s money and couldn’t wait until she passed it on to her offspring. This man, his hood now down, looked like the one in the bejewelled locket Irene gave me, his arm around his wife. Said I’m more of a son than her child is her daughter. She didn’t say it at my table, though. No. Told me when I visited her a few days later.

It shone on her neck. Diamond-encrusted. Top quality gold. She had more like it. I saw it in her jewellery boxes. 

“What did you do to her?”

He jumped off me and pounded into the bedroom. I rolled on to my side, shaken, vomiting. The Australian croaked, gurgled, and let stream a dozen anguished cusses.

“What did you do?”

I blinked at him and the kitchen knife in his hand. “I … I strangled her.” What could I do but reach for my wife’s fingers as the blade came home? But I don’t think she existed. The cold metal made sure I never found out.