Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

“For you,” she said, not knowing who she meant: Hailey, Timothy’s ghost, or herself.

She lifted her hand, made a fist, and knocked hard on the door. It was opened before she even had time to lower her hand.

“Hello, Lana.”

It was the fat man from the other day — the one who’d pinned her against the wall and attempted to invade her with his knee.

She swallowed but her mouth was dry. “I’m here to see Monty… Mr. Bright.”

The large man smiled. Oddly, it was a gentle smile, as if beneath the layers of fat and muscle this man might just have a heart after all, hidden within the folds of his cruelty. “I know why you’re here, Lana. And, please, call me Francis.” His lips were wide and wet. His cheeks were ruddy.

“Okay, Francis. Can I please see Monty? He’s expecting me.”

The door opened wider, and Francis stepped back into a long, narrow hallway. There were old boxing posters stuck to the walls, promoting fights between combatants whose names Hailey didn’t recognise. Dust hung in the air like a light mist; small motes danced before the fat man’s retreating form, making him take on a ghostly aspect, as if he were barely there at all.

“This way,” he said, turning slowly in the cramped space. His thighs brushed against the wall, unsettling yet more dust, and he moved ponderously, like a whale cruising through the deeps. “He’s been waiting for you. We all have.”

Following him through the murk, Lana felt the first strands of real fear brushing against her cheek. Like cobwebs, the fear stuck to her skin, drawing her in. They came to a large open space, and to her right Lana could see a dimly lit arena. A boxing ring was positioned at the centre of the room, and along the walls were hung heavy sand-filled punch bags, battered leather speedballs and all kinds of metal bars and brackets meant for performing strength exercises. She’d been in gyms before — in fact, she had once attended exercise classes regularly, back in her old life — but she had never seen such primitive equipment as this. A lot of it looked medieval: crude and cruel and meant for inflicting pain upon the human body, rather than working out the muscles for the sake of physical fitness.

A small man in a white vest and baggy shorts was dancing in the shadows. She had failed to see him at first because of the weak light and the fact that he was positioned in the corner furthest from where she stood. The man’s hands were covered in protective wrappings and he was shadow boxing. Each move, every combination, was carried out a lot slower than it would have been in the ring: it was stylised, almost like a silent mummer’s play, a weird performance dense with ritual. She watched for a while, entranced, and was only able to move away when the fat man touched her arm and whispered her name.

“We can go up now,” he said. “That’s Dennis. He comes here every night. Never gets in the ring, just shadow boxes for hours. We leave him in peace. He pays his dues so we let him do his thing.”

The man kept moving; he was never still. His feet shuffled across the smooth floor, shushing like the delicate touch of a drum brush against a hi-hat cymbal. His face was stern, almost grim, and his eyes were focused on a single point on the wall. Whatever he was fighting, he would never be able to beat it. The man’s private bout would last forever, or at least until the moment when he shadow-boxed into his grave.

“Shall we go now?” Francis increased the pressure on her arm. His fingers were wide, his grip insistent. It was not a question.

“Yes,” she said, looking at his face, concentrating on his small, piggy eyes. “Yes, I’m ready now. Let’s go and see Monty Bright.”

The silent boxer didn’t even acknowledge their presence as they passed from his view. She doubted he even realised they’d been there. The thought filled her with a deep sadness that made her flesh tingle.

Her thoughts and feelings were corrosive. She felt like she was on the verge of losing her mind, and she welcomed that madness, wishing that it would hurry up and take her away from all this. Hoping that it would help her to get through whatever happened next.

TOM WAS STANDING on the landing outside his room. He could not remember how he had arrived here, or even when he had woken and climbed out of bed. The last thing he could picture was the bedroom ceiling as he closed his eyes to try and sleep.

He felt like a little boy, dressed in his pyjamas and wandering after midnight through the family home. His fears were those created by a broken childhood; his desperation not to be seen was born of the fact that his father was home and he had been drinking.

He was unable to sleep; his mind was racing with unfocused thoughts that he wished he could suppress. Lana Fraser, Hailey with her strange biology, and a debt that must, at some point, be repaid. He was gripped by a sense of urgent panic, as if he knew that somewhere someone important to him was in trouble, but he couldn’t do a thing to help them. Events were racing to some sort of conclusion, but he had no idea how to stop them or even what those events might be.

He padded across the landing to the bathroom and stared at his face in the mirror. His jowls sagged; his eyes were small and narrow, like piss holes in the snow. His skin had taken on a slight yellow hue, as if it were jaundiced. He could not recall ever looking so worn out. He was exhausted yet he could not sleep.

The book he’d been reading earlier was on the shelf by the basin. He must have left it there before going to bed. Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment . He was attempting to wade through the classics he had not looked at since school, when a strict English teacher and his dry methods had rendered them cold and turgid and lifeless.

The title of the book had taken on a resonance that made him feel uncomfortable. Thoughts of Lana and her loan shark floated in his brain, bobbing on the surface while darker, more complex thoughts ran in the deeper currents of his subconscious mind.

He thought about the sea cow downstairs, lost in her paraplegic dreams. Then he thought again of Lana: her dark-sparkling eyes, her hair, her smooth, pale skin.

“I love her,” he said to his reflection. The reflection smiled, completely unsurprised, but Tom didn’t feel his own face take on the same shape. It was like another person was looking at him, placing him and his emotions under scrutiny.

“I love her,” said his reflection, belatedly; but he didn’t feel his lips move in harmony with those in the mirror and the voice sounded deeper than normal. He was two people now, or one person split down the middle. His life had been cleaved, as if someone had taken a large axe and brought it down at a point right between his eyes, separating the two opposing sides of his brain.

Was he awake or dreaming? He didn’t feel as if he were asleep; the world was solid around him and his senses were alert. No, this was not a dream. He was caught in a space between sleeping and waking, an interstice in which the rules of both of these states battled for supremacy. The imagery of dreams was bleeding into his waking world, and it felt like a drug trip: intense yet hazy, a blend of fact and fiction, a whole new world of contradictory sensations and images. For a moment he smelled wet grass; then the odour became that of rotten meat.

He’d read somewhere that people with brain tumours often experienced phantom smells.

But no, he wasn’t ill. Perhaps the explanation was as simple as insanity. Maybe he was losing his mind.

In an attempt to wake himself up, he brushed his teeth. Whenever he looked down, at the sink, he had the impression that his reflection was staring at the top of his head. But when he looked up again to check, his reflection seemed to move with him. He felt twitchy and paranoid; he needed to relax.