Tana French - Broken Harbour

“Pat laughed-he didn’t even look at me, he was just staring into this cupboard -and he said, he said, ‘That’s what it wants you to think. It’s right there, inside the wall, I can hear it, if you’d shut up for a second you’d hear it too. It’s smart, it keeps very quiet till I’m just about ready to give up and right then it does a quick little scrabble, just to keep me on my toes, it’s like it’s laughing at me. Well fuck that, I’m smarter than it is. I’m staying one step ahead. Yeah, so it’s got plans, but I’ve got plans too. I’m keeping my eye on the prize. I’m ready to rumble.’

“I go, ‘What are you talking about?’ and Pat goes-he’s hunched over towards me, practically whispering, like he thinks this thing can understand him-‘I finally figured out what it wants. It wants me . The kids too, and you, it wants all of us, but most of all it wants me. That’s what it’s after. No wonder I couldn’t catch it before, fucking about with peanut butter and hamburger- So here I am. Come on, motherfucker, I’m right here, come and get me!’ He’s like beckoning at the hole with the hand in the cupboard, like a guy trying to get another guy to go for him. He goes, ‘It can smell me, I’m so close it can practically taste me, and that’s driving it wild. It’s smart, all right, it’s careful, but sooner or later-no, sooner, I can feel it, any minute-it’s going to want me so bad that it can’t be careful any more. It’s going to lose control and it’s going to stick its head out of that hole and take a big bite of my hand and then I’ll grab it and bam bam bam not so smart now motherfucker not so smart now are you -’”

Jenny was shaking with the memory. “His face was all red, all covered in sweat, his eyes were practically popping out-he was smashing the vase down over and over, like he was hitting something. He looked insane . I yelled at him to shut up, I was like, ‘This has to stop, I’ve had enough, look at this, look- ’ and I shoved this thing in his face.” She had both palms on the drawing, pressing it into the blanket. “I was trying to keep it down because I didn’t want to wake up the babies, I couldn’t let them see their dad like that, but I guess I was loud enough that at least I got Pat’s attention. He stopped waving the vase around and grabbed this and stared at it for a while, and then he was like, ‘So?’

“I said, ‘Emma drew that. She drew it in school.’ He was still looking at me like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ I wanted to scream at him. Pat and I don’t have screaming rows, we’re not like that-weren’t. But he was just squatting there looking at me like all this was totally normal, and it made me-I could barely even stand to look at him. I knelt down next to him on the floor, and I said, ‘Pat. Listen to me. You have to listen to me. This stops now. There’s nothing there . There never was anything there. Before the kids wake up tomorrow morning, you fill in every single one of these bloody holes, and I’ll take these bloody monitors down to the beach and I’ll throw them in the sea. And then we’ll forget this whole thing and we’ll never mention it again, ever ever ever .’

“I actually thought I’d got through. Pat put down the vase and he brought his bait hand out of the cupboard, and he leaned over and took hold of my hands, and I thought…” A quick breath that caught Jenny off guard, juddered her whole body. “They just felt so warm, his hands. So strong, just like always, just like they’ve always felt since we were teenagers. He was looking straight at me, properly-he looked like Pat again. For that one second, I thought it was OK. I thought Pat was going to give me a hug, a big long hug, and then we’d find a way to fix the holes together, and then we’d go to bed and sleep wrapped round each other. And someday, when we were old, we’d have a laugh about the whole insane thing. I actually thought that.”

The pain in her voice went so deep that I had to look away in case I saw it open up in front of me, a blackness gaping right down to the core of the earth. Bubbles in the magnolia paint on the wall. Red leaves rattling and scraping at the window.

“Except then Pat goes, ‘Jenny. My sweetheart. My lovely little missus. I know I’ve been a crap husband the last while. God, I totally know that. I haven’t been able to look after you, I haven’t been able to look after the kids, and you guys have stood by me while I sat here and let us fall deeper into the shite every day.’

“I tried to tell him it wasn’t about money, money didn’t even matter any more, but he wouldn’t let me. He shook his head and went, ‘Shhh. Hang on. I need to say this, OK? I know you don’t deserve to live like this. You deserve all the fancy clothes and expensive curtains in the world. Emma deserves dance lessons. Jack deserves tickets to Man U. And it’s been killing me that I can’t give you that stuff. But this, at least, this one thing, this I can do. I can get this little fucker. We’ll have it stuffed and mount it on the sitting-room wall. How’s that?’

“He was stroking my hair, my cheek, and he was smiling at me, actually smiling-he looked honest-to-God happy. Joyful , like the answer to all our problems was shining right there in front of him and he knew exactly how to catch it. He went, ‘Trust me. Please. I finally know what I’m doing. Our lovely house, Jen, it’s going to be all safe again. The kids, they’re going to be safe. Don’t worry, baby. It’s OK. I won’t let this thing get you.’”

Jenny’s voice was rocking wildly; her hands were fisted in the bedclothes. “I didn’t know how to say it to him: that was exactly what he was doing. He was letting this thing , this animal, this stupid insane imaginary it was never even there animal, he was letting it eat Jack and Emma alive. Every second he sat there staring at that hole, he was giving it another bite out of their minds. If he didn’t want it to have them, all he had to do was get up! Fix the holes! Put the bloody vase away !”

Her voice was so thick with damage and tears and rising hysteria, I could barely make out the words. Maybe someone else would have patted her shoulder and come out with the perfect thing to say. I couldn’t touch her. I took the glass of water from her bedside table and held it out. Jenny buried her face in it, choking and coughing, until she got some water down and the terrible noises subsided.

She said, down to the glass, “So then I just sat there next to him, on the floor. It was freezing cold, but I couldn’t get up. I was too dizzy, it was the worst it’s ever been, everything kept sliding and tilting. I thought if I tried to stand up I’d fall over face-first and smash my head on one of the cupboards, and I knew I couldn’t do that. I think we sat there for a couple of hours, I don’t know. I just held onto this thing”-the drawing, spattered with drops of water now-“and I stared at it. I was terrified that if I stopped looking at it even for a second, I’d forget it had ever existed, and then I’d forget that I needed to do something about it.”

She wiped at her face, for water or for tears, I couldn’t tell. “I kept thinking about that JoJo’s pin, up in my drawer. How happy we were back then. How that had to be why I’d dug it out of some box: because I was trying to find something happy. All I could think was How did we get here? I felt like there had to be something we had done, me and Pat, to make this happen, and if I could just find that, then maybe I could change it and everything would be different. But I couldn’t find it. I thought right back to the first time we kissed, when we were sixteen-it was on the beach in Monkstown, it was evening but it was summer so it was still bright and so warm, the warm air on my arms. We were sitting on a rock talking, and Pat just leaned over to me and… I went through every moment I could remember, every single one, but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t work out how we had ever got here, this kitchen floor, from where we started out.”