Morag Joss - The Night Following

He hasn’t noticed, or maybe he just doesn’t see, that the front doors are now secured top, bottom, and middle by three hinged metal bands whose hasps are chained and padlocked.

Come on, I say. I think there’s a way in round the back.

It’s difficult, though. The broken window of the extension is impossibly high for Arthur and it takes time and a lot of strength for me to haul the vandalized benches and litter bins round to the break in the fence, get them through, and fix them under the sill so that he can climb up and step over.

We find ourselves in a bare classroom. It must always have been warped and thin and damp, but it now looks as if water has flooded through it. Mould stains streak the walls and the ceiling is buckled and slack. White deposits of mineral salts encrust the crumbling cladding material. The floor is gritty with it, and also with bird droppings and cigarette ends and burnt rubbish. There’s a trapped, soaked stench of rain and ash and urine.

Through the door and across a corridor is another room, identical except that there’s a heap of rags and bottles in one corner and it’s darker because the window boards are still in place. The sun is bleeding through the gaps, casting wavering needles of light onto the far wall that’s covered by a painted, chipped relief map studded with arrows and circles and crosses. Arthur gazes at it, enraptured. He wanders across with a hand outstretched and stabs at a point between some brown ridges and an irregular dark blue oval.

He strokes a fingertip across it and then touches his finger to his lips.

Here. Just here, he says, replacing the finger with tender and tremulous precision back on the exact spot on the map. Here, Ruth.

Then he moves into a shaft of light that illuminates his face abruptly and dazzles him so that he has to squeeze his eyes shut, and he loses his balance and begins to stagger. His eyes fly open in fright. I rush to take hold of him before he falls, and our bodies fold together. He shakes in my arms. I watch the light tremble on the floor and across the walls. Then I take his hand and lead him out and along to the end of the corridor where there’s a solid old door connecting the extension to the main house. Arthur produces the keys again, and finally we find the one that fits. Beyond that is a kind of long scullery and another locked door, but it turns out we have the key to that, too.

He meanders through the house, raising dust. All the rooms are bare and dark and seem to me even more abjectly and irretrievably abandoned than the classrooms; their emptiness is sadder and deeper in a way I can’t explain. But for Arthur it is pure reunion, unalloyed by melancholy. Behind every heavy, squealing door is something, or someone, he is delighted to see. In a room with a wide bay window he tries to draw my attention to the fireplace.

Remember! he says. Remember? We thought it so old-fashioned, that old marbled ebony, the maroon tiles! Worth a fortune today, old painted tiles like that.

He gazes at the wall admiringly as if the fireplace, rather than the raw gap where it used to be, were actually here. He takes me into the stripped-out kitchen that still holds a brackish vegetal smell, and from here into what he calls the eating and recreation quarters, now blank and damp. On the linoleum floor there are black streaks and dented circles where rubber-tipped chair and table legs were set down and scraped back in the clamour of innumerable institutional meals. Arthur stoops forward as if to catch again the trooping of children’s feet from serving hatch to table, the crash of plates and dishes, the clang of dropped cutlery. A dartboard still hangs on the wall.

As we go on he grows spry, pointing out this feature and that: the deep cornicing and skirting boards, and in the stairwell, where now hangs only a length of tied-off electrical cord, the original Edwardian brass electric candelabra with the little parchment shades. He leads me upstairs and first we inspect the teachers’ accommodation on the floor between the girls’ and boys’ dormitories. He remembers the room I slept in but not the name of the red-haired phys. ed. teacher I had to share with. I don’t, either.

Then we look over the top floor and the first floor, each one with five or six featureless rooms where, he reminds me, the kids bunked up in sixes and eights. He shows me their bathrooms with lines of collapsed shower stalls and basins clogged with dead insects. His fatigue has lifted; he walks the whole house, open-mouthed. I follow, answering his excitement with a quieter pleasure.

I’m assessing each room, thinking about practicalities. Most are completely empty but here and there I note the hulks of furniture that must have been too heavy or too worthless to move. On one landing stands a grey metal cupboard without doors that still has pillows and some cardboard boxes of cleaning fluid and toilet paper in it. Nearby, three or four narrow bed frames with broken slats are upended against the wall.

It’s broad daylight now. I drive the car round to the hole in the fence and we unload, Arthur fairly trotting up and down with the lighter things. I’ve settled on the darkest room to sleep in, a small one with a boarded window on the middle floor at the back that lies in the shadow of the hillside. It’s probably going to get very cold; there’s a little fireplace but I’m too tired to think now about whether or not the chimney might still work. I’m also too tired to drag in a bed frame. I fetch some of the pillows and put them on the floor and cover them with the thickest of our sweaters, and we arrange blankets over us. We lie close together.

Trees are being pushed to and fro outside, and light through the gaps in the window boards flows across the walls and ceiling in a shadow show of shifting irregular beads, the fuzzy little ghosts of moving leaves and branches. I watch, listening, and Arthur is watching, too; I glance at him and catch sight of his fixed open eyes glistening in the room’s pale darkness. His mouth gapes and his breathing is rising and fading with the sweep of shadows reaching in, keeping time with the swoosh of the wind.

Yet something in all this swaying and ebbing of his breath, and of the trees and the wind, seems sly and mocking; something in or maybe beyond the room protests, wants this pattern of heartbeats and pulses disturbed, their rhythms arrested and rearranged. It is as if a tight, mewling voice is struggling through a tiny mouth and a knotted throat to say something unfinished and tremendous and full of sadness, perhaps anguished and violent. Arthur turns to me.

Ruth?

What is it? We should try to sleep.

There’s something you have to tell me.

It’s a statement, not a question, so I don’t reply.

Now that we’re here, there’s something you should be telling me, isn’t there? Something about what happened.

About what happened? Where, when? To the baby, you mean? The baby in the story?

He grunts. That, yes. But something else as well. What happened to you.

To me? Oh! Oh, what happened to me, that’d take too long to tell, now.

Don’t say that. You have to tell me. What happened that day? You want to tell me.

Yes. Maybe. But I can’t.

You can. You want to. You know what happened. You know who killed you.

Yes.

You have to tell me. Why won’t you tell me? You’re afraid of what I’ll do.

No.

Then why won’t you tell me?

I can’t. Because knowing will be worse than not knowing.

Worse? That’s nonsense! How could it be worse?

His voice rises and he thumps a fist on the blanket. Worse, who for? He should pay the price. He deserves to suffer!

Maybe they are suffering, I say dreamily. They are. Not in the way you do, but in their way. So much has happened. Go to sleep.