Festival of Fear (26 page)

‘
So what's it got to do with me
?'

‘It doesn't have to have anything to do with you. Just open the goddamned door, will you? That's all I'm asking you to do.'

‘
I don't even know who you are. You sound like a maniac
.'

‘Listen to me – if you don't let me in and that kid dies, then it's going to be your fault. Got it?'

There was a lengthy silence.

‘Hallo?' I called, and pressed every bell push all over again. ‘Hallo? Can anybody hear me?'

I was still pushing the bells and banging on the door when a police cruiser arrived with its lights flashing. Two cops climbed out, a man and a woman, and came up the steps. The man was tall and thin but the woman looked as if she could have gone nine rounds with Jesse Ventura. The raindrops sparkled on their transparent plastic cap-covers.

‘What's the problem?'

‘I was next door – staying in my grandmother's place. I heard a kid screaming. I think it's the top floor apartment.'

The woman cop pressed all the buttons again, and eventually the same man answered. ‘
Look – I told you – I didn't hear no screaming and this is nothing to do with me so stop ringing my bell or else I'm going to call the cops
.'

‘I am the cops, sir. Open the door.'

Immediately, there was a dull buzz and the door swung open. The cops stepped inside and I tried to follow them but the woman cop stopped me. ‘You wait here, sir. We'll deal with this.'

They disappeared up the rickety stairs and I was left standing in the hallway. There was a mottled mirror on the hallstand opposite me and it made me look like a ghost. Pale face, sticking-up hair, skinny shoulders like a wire coat hanger. Just like the seven-year-old boy on grandma's mantelpiece.

It was strange, but there was something vaguely familiar about this hallway. Maybe it was the beige-and-white diamond-patterned tiles on the floor, or the waist-high wooden paneling. There must have been tens of thousands of old town houses that were decorated like that. Yet it wasn't just the decor. There was something about the
smell
, too. Not damp and garlicky like next door, but dry and herby, like potpourri that has almost lost its scent.

I waited for almost ten minutes while the police officers went from floor to floor, knocking on every door. I could hear them talking and people complaining. Eventually they came back down again.

‘Well?' I said.

‘There's no kid in this building, sir.'

‘What? I heard him with my own ears.'

‘Nobody has a kid in this building, sir. We've been through every apartment.'

‘It was the top floor. I swear to God. He was screaming something like, “mommy, mommy, you can't” – over and over.'

‘The top floor apartment is vacant, sir. Has been for years. The landlord uses it for storage, that's all.'

‘You're sure?'

‘Absolutely. We're going to check the two buildings either side, just to make sure, but I seriously think you must have been mistaken. Probably somebody's television turned up too loud. You know what these old folks are like. Deaf as ducks.'

I followed them down the steps. Mr Szponder stood in his open doorway watching me.

‘Well, what's happening?' he asked me, as the cops started ringing bells next door.

‘They looked through the house from top to bottom. No kid.'

‘Maybe your imagination, Jimmy.'

‘Yeah, maybe.'

‘Better your imagination than some kid
really
getting hurt. Think about it.'

I nodded. I couldn't think of anything to say.

The next morning, while I was washing my teeth, the telephone rang. It was the gingery-haired doctor from St Philomena's.

‘I'm sorry to tell you that your grandmother reached her conclusion just a few minutes ago. She didn't suffer.'

‘I see,' I said, with a mouthful of minty foam.

I called a couple of my cousins to tell them what had happened, but none of them seemed to be very upset. Cousin Dick lived in Milwaukee and could easily have come to Chicago to meet me but he said he had a ‘gonad-cruncher' of a business meeting with Wisconsin Cuneo Press. Cousin Erwin sounded, quite frankly, as if he were stoned out of his brain. He kept saying, ‘
there you are, Jimmy
 . . .
another milestone bites the dust
.'

Cousin Frances was more sympathetic. I had always liked Cousin Frances. She was about the same age as me and worked for Bloomingdales in New York. When I called her she was on her lunch break and she was so upset that she started to cough and couldn't stop coughing.

‘Listen,' she said, ‘when are you going back to Florida?'

‘I'm not in any hurry. I was fired for taking time off.'

‘Why don't you stop over in New York (
cough
)? I'd love to see you again.'

‘I don't know. Have a drink of water.'

Pause. More coughing. Then, ‘Just call me when you get to La Guardia.'

Cousin Frances lived in a terraced brownstone on East Seventeenth Street in the Village. The street itself was pretty crummy and rundown but her loft was airy and beautifully decorated as you'd expect from somebody who made a living designing window displays. Three walls were plastered and painted magnolia, the fourth wall had been stripped back to its natural brick, with all kinds of strange artifacts on it, like driftwood antlers from the Hamptons and a Native American medicine stick from Wyoming.

Cousin Frances herself was very thin and highly groomed, with a shining blonde bob and a line in silky blouses and slinky pajama-like pants. She was the youngest daughter of my mother's sister Irene, and in a certain light she looked very much like my mother, or at least the two or three photographs that I still had of my mother. High forehead, wide-apart eyes, distinctive cheekbones, but a rather lipless mouth, which made her look colder than she actually was.

She poured me a cold glass of Stag's Leap Chardonnay and elegantly unfolded herself on the maroon leather couch. ‘It's been so long. How long has it been? But you haven't changed a bit. You don't look a day over twenty-two.'

‘I don't know whether that's a compliment or not.'

‘Of course! Are you still working on that novel of yours?'

‘Now and then. More then than now.'

‘Writer's block?' I could smell her perfume now, Issey Miyaki.

I shrugged. ‘I think you have to have a sense of direction to write a novel. A sense that you're going someplace . . . developing, changing, growing up.'

‘And you don't feel that?'

‘I don't know. I feel like everybody else got on the train but I dropped my ticket and when I looked up the train was already leaving the station. So here I am, still standing on the platform. Suitcase all packed but not a train in sight.'

She looked at me for a long time with those wide-apart eyes. In the end, she said, ‘She didn't suffer, did she?'

‘Grandma? I hope not. The last time I saw her she was sleeping.'

‘I would have come to the funeral, but—'

‘It doesn't matter. We had a few of her friends there. The super from her building. An Italian guy from the grocery store on the corner. It was OK. Very quiet. Very . . .'

‘Lonely?' she suggested.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Lonely.' But I wasn't sure who she was really talking about.

She had a date to go out later that evening to some drinks party, but all the same she made us some supper. She stood in the small designer kitchen and mixed up
conchiglie alla puttanesca
in a blue earthenware bowl. ‘Tomatoes, capers, black Gaeta olives, crushed red chilies, anchovies, all mixed up with extra-virgin olive oil and pasta . . . they call it “harlot's sauce”.'

I forked a few pasta shells out of the bowl and tasted them. ‘That's good. My compliments to the harlot.'

‘Do you cook, Jimmy?'

‘Me? No, never.'

‘
Never
? Not even meatballs?'

‘I have a thing about ovens.'

She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘I've heard of people being afraid of heights, or cats, or water. But
ovens
? That must be a first.'

‘Stove-o-phobia, I guess. Don't ask me why.'

We ate together at the kitchen counter and talked about grandma and about the sisters who had been our mothers. Mine had died suddenly when I was five. Frances' mother had contracted breast cancer at the age of thirty-seven and died an appalling lingering death that went on for months and months.

‘So, we're orphans now, you and me,' said Frances, and laid her hand on top of mine.

Just after nine o'clock the doorbell rang. It was a wiry-haired guy in a black velvet coat and a black silk shirt. ‘Frances? You ready?' he said, eyeing me suspiciously.

‘Almost, just got to put my shoes on. Nick – meet my cousin Jimmy. Jimmy, this is Nick. He's the inspirational half of Inspirational Plaster Moldings, Inc.'

‘Good to know you,' I said. ‘Glad you're not the plastered half.'

‘You're welcome to come along,' Frances told me. ‘They usually have organic wine and rice cakes, and all kinds of malicious gossip about dados and suspended ceilings.'

‘Think I'll pass, if it's all the same to you.'

After Frances and Nick had gone, I undressed and went for a long, hot shower. It had taken a lot out of me, emotionally, seeing grandma die. When I shampooed my hair and closed my eyes I could still see her sitting on the end of my bed, her head a little tilted to one side, smiling at me.

‘Grandma, why did mommy die?'

‘God wanted her back, that's all, to help in heaven.'

‘Didn't she love me?'

‘Of course she loved you. You'll never know how much. But when God calls you, you have to go, whoever you are, and no matter how much you like living on earth.'

I was still soaping myself when I thought I heard a cry. I guessed it was probably a pair of copulating cats in the yard outside, and so I didn't pay it much attention. But then I heard it again, much louder, and this time it didn't sound like cats at all. It sounded like a child, calling for help.

Immediately I shut off the faucets and listened. There was silence for almost half a minute, apart from the honking of the traffic outside and the steady dripping of water on to the shower tray. No, I must have imagined it. I stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my waist.

Then, my God, the child was screaming and screaming and I ran into the living area and it seemed like it was all around me. ‘
Mommy
!
Mommy
!
You can't
!
Stop it mommy you can't, you can't
! STOP IT MOMMY YOU CAN'T!'

I tugged on my jeans, my wet legs sticking to the denim. Then I dragged on my sweater and shoved my feet into my shoes, squashing the backs down because I didn't have time to loosen the laces. I opened the loft door and wedged a book into the gap so that it wouldn't swing shut behind me. On the landing, I pressed the button for the elevator and it seemed to take forever before I heard the motor click and bang, and the car come slowly whining upward.

I ran out into the street. The wind was up and it was wild, with newspapers and cardboard boxes and paper cups whirling in the air. I hurried up the steps of the next-door house and started jabbing at the doorbells. I was so frantic that it took me sixteen or seventeen heartbeats before I realized that these were the same doorbells that I had been pressing in Chicago.

I stopped. I took a step back. I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Not only was I pressing the same doorbells, but I was standing in front of the same house. It had the same black-painted front door, the same hooded porch, the same damp-stained rendering.

I felt a kind of
compressed
sensation inside of my head, as if the whole world was collapsing, and I was the center of gravity.

How could it be the exact same house? How could that happen? Chicago was nearly a thousand miles away, and what were the chances that I was staying right next door to a house that looked identical to the one that was next door to grandma's?

For a moment I didn't know what to do. Then a man's voice came over the intercom. ‘
Who's there
?' I couldn't tell if it was the same voice that I had heard in Chicago.

‘I – ah – do you think could you open the door for me, please?'

‘
Who is this
?'

‘Listen, I think there's a child in trouble on the top floor.'

‘
What child
?
The top floor's empty
.
No children live here
.'

‘Do you mind if I just take a look. I work for the ASPCC.'

‘
The what
?'

‘Child cruelty prevention officer.'

‘
I told you. No children live here
.'

I was unnerved, but I didn't want to give up. Even if I couldn't work out how this building was the same building from Chicago, I still wanted to know what all that screaming was. ‘Just open the door, OK?'

Silence.

‘Just open the fucking door, OK?'

Still silence.

I waited for a while, wondering what to do, and then I held on to the porch railing and gave the door a hefty kick. The frame cracked, so I kicked it again, and again, and again, and then a large piece of wood around the lock gave way and the door juddered open.

I went inside. The hallway was dark but I managed to find the light switch. The walls were paneled in darkly varnished wood, waist high, and the floor was patterned in beige-and-white diamonds. There was a hall stand with a blotchy mirror in it, and there was a dry, barely perceptible smell of dead roses.

I climbed the stairs. They were creaky but thickly covered in heavy-duty hessian carpet. Chinks of light shone from almost every door, and I could hear televisions and people talking and arguing and scraping dishes. A woman said, ‘
There should be a law against it . . . haven't I always said that
?' and a man replied, ‘
What are you talking about
?
How can you have a law against body odor
?'