Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

‘I don’t suppose you…?’

‘Not tonight, Tim. It’s been a long day, and I need to get some sleep.’

Tim nodded.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’s absolutely fine. Only it’s been quite a while.’

Tim swallowed. Mary turned out the light.

Suddenly he saw the creature vividly in his mind. It was bloody and red, with fierce, burning eyes. He knew it would terrify Sean if he ever saw it. He knew it would tear their little home apart. So one thing at least was absolutely clear: whatever happened, whether the symptoms could be alleviated or not, he must keep that thing locked away inside himself, he must never never —

But now, lying there in the dark, Tim checked himself. These were mad thoughts, surely? Either this was an illness of some kind, like indigestion, or, more likely, it was something in his head, like that time he became convinced that there was a gas leak, even though Mary couldn’t smell anything, and even though the guy from the gas company came out twice and found no trace at all. An illness, or something in his head: it was one of those two. He must stop thinking of it as some kind of living thing.

‘He shouldn’t have spoken to me like that, though,’ he muttered, thinking about the young doctor and his patronising tone.

A spark of anger appeared in his mind, apparently from nowhere. It was as if he was looking at a fireplace sideways from across a room. He couldn’t see the grate, he couldn’t see the fire itself, but he could see the red hot fragment as it jumped out onto the floor.

He swallowed again.

‘I’m actually getting quite worried about Tim,’ Peter said to his wife. ‘He looks so distracted these days.’

They were washing the dishes together. She was drying. Outside the window, rain was falling into their patio from a heavy dark grey sky.

‘Hasn’t he always looked like that? I often get the feeling with Tim that he’s not really there at all. He’s somewhere far away, operating his body with some difficulty by remote control, while simultaneously dealing with something else entirely that none of us can see.’

Peter laughed. ‘That’s a bit harsh!’

She picked up a wet saucepan from the drying rack.

‘I’m not criticising him, I’m just telling you how I see him. Like he’s never quite learnt how to inhabit himself.’

‘Maybe,’ said Peter. ‘But there’s something else going on for him now. Some new thing. Sometimes, when he doesn’t know I’m looking, I see him wincing like he’s in pain.’

‘Well, maybe he is.’

‘He did say something about going to the doctor a couple of weeks ago. Something about stomach problems. But when I asked him how he got on, he just laughed and said it had turned out to be nothing. “Possibly indigestion,” he said, “but probably just hypochondria.” Something’s eating him, though, Sue. It’s obvious. Something’s really eating him. He’s not right at all.’

Peter’s wife put down the now-dry saucepan and picked up a dripping casserole.

‘Well, what else can you do about it?’ she asked. ‘It sounds like you’ve offered him plenty of chances to talk. I’m not sure there’s much more you can contribute, apart from doing the same from time to time.’

‘Tim’s on his own for a week, as of today. Mary and Sean have gone to stay with her mum in Gloucester so he can get on with some decorating before the new baby comes. I said I’d call him and take him out for a drink. Okay, I appreciate it may be his fault as much as hers but, rightly or wrongly, Mary really does scare the life out of him. I thought he might feel able to talk more freely when she was out of the picture.’

‘Good idea.’

Peter’s wife laid down the casserole and kissed him on the cheek.

‘I know Tim’s a bit of a drip in many ways,’ Peter said, ‘but I do like him. There’s more to him than meets the eye. There are layers to him.’

‘I agree,’ she said. And then, picking up a wet plate: ‘It’s not just Mary he’s frightened of, is it? It’s everyone. The only person in the world he really feels safe with is that little boy of his.’

‘Well, it would be hard to deal with other people, if you had to operate your body by remote control. Imagine how stressful it would be.’

‘God, will you look at this rain!’ Sue said. ‘I’m glad we live on a hill.’

The tests had come back negative.

‘There’s nothing inside you that shouldn’t be, Tim,’ the doctor had said with a laugh.

But there it was anyway, pressing imperiously outwards, prodding and clamouring for his attention.

He piled books into boxes in the back bedroom and lugged the full boxes out onto the landing. He rolled up the carpet, carried out all the furniture that he could easily move on his own, and then dragged the bed away from the wall and threw a dustsheet over it. It had been the spare bedroom since they moved in, but now it was going to be Sean’s. The new baby would have the middle room.

Tim doused the walls in paper stripper, and then went downstairs for a mug of tea while it soaked in. As he was pouring in the milk, the phone began to ring. He could see on the phone’s little screen that it was Peter calling, his good friend Peter, probably his best friend, ringing no doubt to arrange the drink he’d suggested earlier in the week. But Tim didn’t pick up. He just stood there in the kitchen with the mug in his hand, watching the phone ring and ring, and feeling the eerie presence of another mind reaching towards him, unable to see him, but prodding and poking into his house as it blindly sought him out. It was hard to believe, really, that Peter couldn’t sense him here, right beside the ringing phone. Tim backed away from it, as if into the shadows.

Ten times the phone rang. And then suddenly it stopped. There was complete silence. No one was near him any more. The probe had withdrawn. The other mind had pulled back, and was once again a whole mile away across the city, turning its attention to other things.

‘I’ll call him back tomorrow,’ Tim said.

He went back upstairs and began to attack the walls. The blade slid easily between the liner and the plaster beneath, right up to the handle, and he pulled away a long and satisfying strip and tossed it behind him onto the floor. It was like pulling off a scab from a large but well-healed wound. Soon he’d established a rhythm, working so fast and hard that he was able to forget all his worries, including the creature inside him.

About halfway along the wall he uncovered a scrawl in his own writing on the bare plaster.

‘Help!’ it said, and there was a little cartoon face beneath it, with its mouth open, like that famous painting The Scream .

He usually wrote or drew random things on walls before he papered or painted them. Secrets and hiding places had always appealed to him: time capsules, hidden rooms, magic wardrobes. Every room in the house had one or more of these messages, all of them intended to be funny or surreal, so perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising he had no particular recollection of writing this one. But it felt very strange to uncover this evidence of another Tim, thinking and acting in a moment that the present Tim no longer had any connection with. It was like that thing that sometimes happened on car journeys, when he’d suddenly realise he had no memory of the last ten miles. Clearly someone had been conscious and driving the car because here he was, having apparently successfully negotiated two roundabouts and a busy T-junction, and no doubt the someone who’d accomplished all of that would have considered himself to be Tim. But this Tim had no memory of that one, and of course that Tim had had no memory of a Tim who, at the time, had not yet even come into being. So in what sense could they be said to be one and the same person?