Nicola Barker - Love Your Enemies

He coated the coffin a few times, and after a couple of layers of paint the essential woody feeling, a sensation of something porous and natural, disappeared completely. He wanted a very smooth finish so that the paint was reflective and glossy and shiny. After spraying the outside of the coffin he opened it up and sprayed the inside edges and parts of the inside so that the movement between the paint and the material would be as gradual and gentle as possible.

It felt as if he was building a house, and the temptation was great to try and put the material into the coffin before the painting was completed so that it would feel finished and snug straight away. But he resisted temptation and waited for the paint to dry thoroughly while planning and trying out a few letters and colours for the label in rough.

This was the hardest part. Things were made more difficult because he felt so ill all the time now, not just ill but inexpressibly uncomfortable and tired. He had begun to find it hard to take solid food and was also too exhausted to negotiate a trip to the shops.

Melissa’s next visit was timely. By the time she arrived again he thought he was probably about to starve to death.

When he answered the door to her ring, after a perfunctory greeting he asked quickly, ‘Would you mind doing me an enormous favour?’ He told her the location of the nearest chemist (for painkillers) and the nearest shop (for soup), and handed her all the cash he could find, which he hoped would be sufficient.

Her arrival seemed like part of a continuous dream in his mind. She didn’t seem real, she didn’t correspond with his present reality. He had entirely forgotten about any disagreement that he may have had with her. He was more concerned about getting the job done.

Steve hadn’t discussed John with Melissa again since their initial conversation. She had tried to cheer herself up and had acted as though nothing could be further from her thoughts. But she continued to think about him and worried about what it would be best to do. Eventually she decided that it would be appropriate to visit him. Two weeks had passed and she wanted to make amends.

She’d tried to phone him in advance on the off-chance that he had connected his telephone again, but he hadn’t, so she’d decided to arrive on Sunday after lunch and had taken along a small fresh cream cake as a peace offering.

After she’d rung his bell she waited for several minutes before he answered. She didn’t ring again or hesitate and turn away because she was sure he was in. The house seemed to fester, possessed and vitalized by the spirit within.

When John answered the door she tried to swallow back an impulse of sheer disgust. He looked like someone she had never met before; a stranger with a strange disease, a beggar on the streets of an alien city. His body looked broken and pathetic. As he greeted her he supported himself against the wall.

Before she could articulate her surprise he had asked her to go on a trip to the shops for him and to the chemist. He dug around in his pockets and handed her a small amount of money. She nodded, took the money and handed him the cake, for which he thanked her. As she walked away she thought, ‘Presumably he hasn’t remembered that this is Sunday and most shops won’t be open.’

She headed back towards the Mile End Road where she’d noticed that a small newsagent’s on the way to his house was open ten minutes or so before. The newsagent’s had soup and painkillers in good supply. She bought six tins of soup and a couple of packets of painkillers, hoping this would be enough.

On returning to the house she knocked on the door instead of ringing the bell again and it pushed inwards under the pressure of her hand. He had left it on the latch. She paused for a moment then entered.

Initially she headed for the kitchen because the living-room door was pulled to and she knew that this room, his work-room, had a certain sacred quality to John. The kitchen was still dirty and chaotic, and John wasn’t there. She called his name quietly but the house was silent and he didn’t respond.

She put down her bag of shopping and walked back towards the living room. Knocking quietly on the door and pushing it open, she called his name again. No response. She looked around the room and saw him lying on the sofa, curled up like a cat or a child. The room was — if it was possible — even thicker with dust and wood chips than on her last visit. It reminded her of how the moon looked on TV, everything dead and silent, the air so thick as to make any movement possible only in slow motion.

She called John’s name again but he was fast asleep. As she drew closer to him she saw that his hair and his heard were dotted with multi-coloured flashes of paint. His hands were mostly silver and white. His entire body seemed to have shrivelled but his hands now seemed incredibly disproportionate to his body. They were large and strong and rough like the hands of an old man.

After she had stared at John for several minutes Melissa turned away from him and towards the other main occupant of the room; the coffin.

It was in two pieces on the woodwork table. It was a gorgeous, glossy silver and had a white label with the beginnings of some lettering. It was perfect and intricate, very beautiful. It was impressive but also intimidating. She knew what power it had as an object, what (so far as she could see) it had done to John. It had worn him out and smothered him. She turned away from it with a superstitious shudder and headed towards the kitchen again.

Given that John was asleep, she decided that it would be a kind gesture to tidy up the kitchen, in order to make it a bit more habitable. She rolled up the sleeves of her yellow shirt, which was patched all over with bursting pink hearts, and turned on the taps in the sink.

As Melissa worked in the kitchen John slept on the couch and dreamed about his coffin, which was on a long conveyor belt heading towards an enormous oven filled with fire. Although he was a short distance away from the fire he felt it burn his face and blister the paintwork on his coffin. The coffin was initially moving fairly slowly on the conveyor belt but its speed increased with each second. He was trying to hold it back and away from the fire but it kept moving on and on, closer to the flames. As he clung on to its edges he shouted, ‘You can’t burn it yet, it’s not finished and I’m not in it. I’ve got to get in it first. I don’t want to go into the fire after it. I don’t want to go into the fire without it.’

But the coffin moved towards the fire at a relentless speed and he could not stop it or climb in. Pulling at the lid he tried to tip the coffin from the conveyor belt, but it was as if it was stuck to the base with glue; his nails snapped and still it would not open. He jumped away from the coffin as it entered the flames and it felt as though he was falling and that he would fall for ever, as though he had jumped from a cliff and was falling, falling.

It took Melissa a good hour to neaten the kitchen superficially, but she was pleased with her work and full of a sense of self-satisfaction and piety. She really believed that she had now made a difference to the quality of John’s life.

She made two cups of coffee — black because she had not thought to buy any milk — and took them back through to the living room with the cake. John remained fast asleep. She didn’t know whether to wake him or not. His eyes were darting around under the skin of his eyelids as though he was a dog dreaming of rabbits. She smiled to herself and sipped her coffee. The house seemed very quiet even though the radio was playing at high volume. She helped herself to a slice of cake and ate it slowly and carefully. John seemed no closer to waking now than he had when she’d arrived back from the shops. His face was so thin, though, and his eyes ringed with grey.