Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

But now, quite suddenly, he was experiencing that cage as an alien presence, a hard unyielding obstacle that was constricting and stifling him, denying him movement, limiting his access to light and air, standing between him and the world. Only a few seconds ago he would have called that cage himself, but it wasn’t him. It was the opposite of him. It was the thing that had imprisoned him all his life.

‘Let me out, fuck you,’ he heard his own voice screaming at it. ‘Let me out, you bastard, and let me breathe.’

After that he stopped using words. He just bellowed and roared and punched the walls, like a boxer pumping himself up before a fight, building up immunity to pain and fear.

Rain beat down on the roofs and pavements, and onto the doorsteps, and into the hedges and the little front gardens. The few cars that were out crept slowly along with their headlights on, their wipers flinging out great wet dollops with every sweep. Lights were switched on inside the houses, curtains drawn. No one but Peter was out on foot.

When he reached Tim’s house, he found the front door wide open, with rain blowing in, and the doormat sitting in a pool of water. All the lights were turned on, but when he called Tim’s name there was no answer. Peter stepped inside, throwing back the hood of his raincoat.

He found one of the living room walls stripped down, and half of another, furniture clumped in the middle of the room under sheets, and old wallpaper lying on the floor in twisted heaps. There was even a swathe of paper dangling from the wall, as if Tim had stopped in mid-scrape. Peter looked into the kitchen and the downstairs toilet. He saw a couple of teacups waiting to be washed, a dirty plate, a paintbrush set to soak in a bucket of water.

‘Tim?’ he called. ‘Are you there?’

Tim could have fallen from a ladder or something, Peter had been thinking as he’d walked over from his house. He could have knocked himself out, or broken a bone and been unable to get to the phone. But if so, where was he now? The living room was obviously what he’d been working on. If he’d had a fall, wouldn’t it have been in there?

Then Peter noticed something that he hadn’t spotted when he first came in. There were red marks on the stairs. Perhaps Tim had cut himself somehow and gone up to the bathroom to dress the wound. He could have passed out from loss of blood.

‘Tim? It’s Peter! Are you alright?’

There was nothing unusual in the bathroom, though, or in the front bedroom, or the middle room which, as Tim had told him, was going to be the baby’s.

‘Tim?’

The door of the back bedroom was ajar and the light inside was on, as all the lights had been, all round the house.

‘Tim, are you in there?’

Another possibility occurred to Peter. Perhaps there’d been a break-in. Perhaps there was a stranger in there, holding a knife to Tim’s throat, or even crouching in readiness beside Tim’s corpse. He picked up a hammer that had been propped against the landing wall, and, clutching it firmly, advanced into the little boy’s new room.

‘Tim? Are you—?’

Peter broke off. There was no one in there, alive or dead, but, strewn right across the room were bloody flaps of skin and hunks of sandy-coloured hair. Dark red strips were scattered over the bed and the chest of drawers. Congealing fragments clung to the walls, with red trails above them to indicate how far they’d slid downwards since they were first splattered over those cheerful little trains. A single narrow shred of skin was draped over the lion on the bedside table.

The scraper lay in the middle of the floor, with dark blood clinging to its blade and handle. But there was no Tim. Whatever had happened here, Tim had gone.

I made a mistake at work. I got a large order completely wrong, costing the company a great deal of money, and losing us a particularly valuable customer at a difficult time when our profit margins were at rock bottom and we were struggling to keep our market share. There was no real excuse for my blunder, and, as often seems to happen, I compounded my original mistake by making other secondary errors as I struggled to put things right.

I’d been summoned to Head Office down in Bournemouth to explain myself. There was a very good chance of losing my job and I was terrified. I’d been part of the sales force of this same company for over twenty years. I knew I wasn’t as sharp and energetic as I once had been, and that my value to the company, such as it was, lay in my knowledge of the company itself and the people it dealt with. I very much doubted I could find another job on anything like the same money, or even another job at all, but I had a big mortgage to pay and two teenaged kids, who I’d brought up by myself since their father’s death ten years previously.

‘You’re amazing, Jenny,’ my friends used to say to me back in those early years. ‘Full time work, kids, all by yourself. None of us know how you hold it all together. We know we couldn’t.’ I’d brush this off, as you do – ‘Nonsense, you’d do exactly the same as me if you had to. I just didn’t have a choice’ – but actually it had been very important to me, and a source of great pride. I felt bitterly ashamed that I’d not lived up to it, and at the same time I felt resentful, because actually, whatever I said to my friends, most people couldn’t do what I had done, most people would have stumbled, and that being so, it seemed very unfair that I should have this shame to deal with, and they should not. Most of all, though, I felt afraid: afraid of what faced me in Bournemouth, and afraid of what lay beyond: telling the kids that we’d have to move somewhere smaller, for instance, stirring up memories of that old catastrophe of their dad’s suicide.

It was a beautiful September day when I drove down, with air as clear as newly cleaned glass, achingly blue sky, and trees just lightly brushed with gold, but I saw all of this through a complicated cage of painful feelings which had the effect of setting it beyond my reach and denying me the solace it might have given me, just when I needed it most. I was terrified of being told off. I was dreading the humiliation of being cross-examined and found incompetent or unprofessional, after so long in the job. I worried that perhaps I never really had been any good at this job I’d done all these years, and that my bluff had finally been called. I rehearsed every small mistake I’d ever made, every embarrassing gaffe. And over and over again, I imagined having to tell the kids that the life I’d given them was going to have to be dismantled. Without the job, we couldn’t keep the house. We couldn’t even live in the same area.

Worry comes readily to me. I can put on a good impression of being calm and unflappable but the truth is that, even on an ordinary day, there are always a lot of things niggling away inside me, and I often find it hard to sleep. I guess when your husband suddenly kills himself, it does sap your confidence in your ability to control events. But actually I think I’d always been the worrying kind, even as a kid, and there were plenty of more recent things to worry about: Ben’s difficulties at school, for one, and my friend Carrie’s cancer, and my relationship with Harry that hovered all the time between being on and being off, and never quite settled either way. I worried a lot, but it was bad this time. This was the bedrock of everything that was under threat, and as I drove through the New Forest, I felt quite sick with fear.

All around me, the warmth of the sun was making the heather steam. A herd of deer were grazing peacefully by a stream. But that was out there. That was for the happy people. It gave me no pleasure at all, no respite. It had nothing to do with me.