Infinite Rooms: a gripping psychological thriller that follows one man's descent into madness (5 page)

6

T
he train moved slowly from the station and under the walkway spanning the rails. It went through a short tunnel before coming out between the high walls of a cutting. The carriages set up a rocking motion. A wall moved by, streaked with ragged runs of dampness. The bricks were locked by boxes of mortar, cracked and crumbling. With the train’s lazy speed the wall appeared to be endless. Not only a ponderous repetition moving backwards but row upon row upwards. Clement tried to see the top by flattening his cheek to the window. Perhaps the wall soared upwards forever, and maybe it went on and on across the countryside, slicing through towns and villages, dividing houses and public buildings and parks. Conceivably it was an immense brick barrier with the earth as its epicentre, moving out forever to make separate vastnesses dividing the cosmos. Two sides of an infinite coin, yin and yang, Bernadette and Donald. Mrs Froby would like that concept, Clement thought.

It was as if the oppressive walls possessed magnetic fields
capable of pulling back the carriages – already they were decelerating. At this rate he was going to be late for the first day at work.

The train stopped. No morning light between train and wall, only muddy shadows. And this dimness spread thickly through the carriage as the illuminated strips in the ceiling blinked twice and went out.

If only he was capable of opening the window fully and easing out one of the bricks. Maybe no earth compacted behind but a cheering sky.

The train creaked then jolted into movement and began to pick up speed. Brighter again as the walls quickly came to an end and a cold sunlight plunged into the carriages. The brown roofs of a housing estate stretched away and up the side of a valley.

He inspected his fellow passengers. Over to the right, a woman sat, reading a book. In front of Clement, a besuited man intent upon reading his newspaper which shielded him from the sharp morning sun.

Clement leaned forward and announced with excitement in his voice, ‘I know you in the material world.’

The middle-aged man in the striped suit brought the newspaper down and with his brow creased, inspected Clement while adjusting his spectacles.

‘Do I know you, young lady?’

‘Donadette today.’

‘Donadette?’ He appeared confused and flinched from his
chunk of raw sunshine before taking the spectacles off to clean the lenses with a part of his shirt. Once the glasses were replaced he gave a snort and growled, ‘What – the – hell is your game, hmm?’ His eyes were enlivened, unsure as to where he should rest his sight.

The auburn wig which Clement wore was cut to a bob. His sallow face, twitching and beige with foundation, had mascara, lipstick and rouge roughly applied. Over his embroidered blouse he wore an overcoat and where this finished was the bottom of a bottle green skirt. From this protruded lumpy knees held together, his skinny legs covered with tights. What appeared as a random pattern were the flattened hairs under them. A pair of women’s block heeled sandals were on his feet.

‘Remember me, Jeremy? I’ve got reliable corridors and mindrooms now.’ Clement showed a pale palm with a thick green elastic band around his wrist dividing the two watches there.

Keeping his mouth hard as if attempting ventriloquism, Mr Finch replied, ‘How do you know my name?’ His cheeks had become a flustered red and he looked quickly about the carriage with obvious embarrassment.

‘Still at Penshart I’m guessing. Haven’t appeared in a while. Where are you living for real this time?’

‘I know who you are now. Donald Clement. The one with the — problems. So they’ve let you out, have they?’

Clement ignored the sarcastic question in favour of extending his hand, the nails there painted with a green
varnish. ‘That’s me. Pleased to see you still exist. And I have solutions.’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ was all Finch could reply, avoiding the handshake.

‘I lodge in living quarters, an overall womb in Cressmore Street. Do you know, I’ve forgotten your surname.’ Finch, still disturbed by Clement’s appearance, was unable to speak. Clement continued, ‘Hang on, don’t tell me … Finch, yes? Finch on the fiddle.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘No offence meant, Jeremy,’ Clement returned, ‘if you didn’t realize your label. You know what the workers at Penshart Press were like. Used to call me Don the deranged. Just because they found my theories hard to comprehend. Because I perceive differently. Couldn’t understand me wanting to be a scriptwriter. Or discern any transformation. Like today, they wouldn’t get it: subduing the inferior haters, destroyers, the perverted minds. I’ve invited part of the woman for a while, you know, permanent love and understanding, welcoming forgivers and peacemakers. I can actually be anything I want really, since protecting myself. Still doing accounts? Juggling numbers, becoming fat or slim, depending how much you feed them. Sure you get my artistic meaning.’

After a pause, Finch answered with a suspicious tone, ‘Actually, I’m executive accountant at Stansbird and Swale. You’ve heard of them no doubt. Anyway, nice to have met you again but I need to read my paper before the next station.’

Both were having to raise their voices above the clattering of wheels as the carriages changed tracks.

Clement had leant back and was seemingly communicating with his lap. ‘Not them with their theatrical fabrication. Willbeam or something. Wilson, was it? I did tell you to forget that travesty, doctor.’

Finch hid behind his newspaper, hands shaking.

‘Oh,’ said Clement, raising his wigged head. ‘Walstaff, that was it. Unreal interruption, supposedly expensive. There, we’ve come round to those elusive numbers again, haven’t we?’ Finch buried his back to the seat and let a shrug be answer enough. ‘Haven’t we?’ stated Clement again. A simple enough question.

‘Yes,’ Finch muttered finally and hurriedly, glancing at his watch then out of the window, willing the train to go faster. ‘Well then,’ he added, throwing his newspaper beside him, ‘Still no better, I see. Where do you work now? Proofreading for the asylum pamphlets perhaps?’

‘I remember the printing business. Those greedy machines, floods of colour, enough to paint the town in new shades. Imagine no grey concrete. How pleasant to see it in another vibrancy. Orange, maybe. Don’t know what you think.’ He nodded, and grinned at his own humour.

‘I don’t know what
you
think,’ Finch said quietly.

‘Another for you: eidetic or diuretic?’

‘Look, you are feeling alright – you’re looked after.’

Clement nodded with a benign appearance taking over.

Finch began to fold his newspaper in preparation to leave at the next stop. The train was already slowing. He regarded Clement and was disconcerted to see him still nodding and grinning.

Clement’s former colleague cleared his throat. ‘Thanks for an interesting conversation,’ he lied. ‘Alright then…’

The carriage rocked from side to side as the train slowed the more.

Finch was feeling uncomfortable at the odd expression on Donald Clement’s lipstick-painted lips. In an attempt to break the spell of his companion’s obsessive behaviour he blurted, ‘Sorry about your divorce. I’m sure it worked out to a satisfactory conclusion.’

Clement finally became still. ‘Barriers,’ he said with a sour look upon him, his coloured eyelids flickering.

Jeremy Finch got to his feet, moving to and fro with the motion of the train. He was gripping a luggage rack. ‘Pardon?’ he said.

‘Dr Leibkov. He’s demands I tear them down. Of course, I tell him what sort they’ve become.’ Clement spoke quietly as if imparting secret information: ‘Stronger than any metal, they’ve an opacity quite unlike any solid object. These barriers are such that, by comparison, a boulder or a stove, or the stump of a tree – you name it – is positively transparent.’ A line of people hurtling past the window appeared as if they were on some wildly moving platform propelling them past a stationary train. Finch pretended interest of this phenomenon
and peered intently out. Clement continued, ‘Sometimes I’ll let through a small offering, though not often. For instance, it’s two-fold and the appointed observer, you see. Since spirals from primordial slime there’ve been mirrored relationships. Things have dualism or will have, agreed? Perfectly matched pairs, one with its opposite. Synthesis of real with the unreal now. Tell me, is that so bad? What weight of argument have you to accent your reasoning on this matter?’

Clement believed his speaking to be fine and filled with meaning, and was surprised at his own eloquence this early in the morning. He wanted to express his innermost feelings and the compulsion was helped by Finch’s listening ears. If only Jeremy would stay longer, he wished, then there would be a discussion of the highest calibre.

The train was slowing to a standstill. Finch was ready to move to the carriage doors. He was trying his best to ignore this colleague of old, the young man who had changed for the worse, who gaped up at him in a disturbingly childlike manner, tapping Finch on the knee with a finger. Dressed as a woman, face caked with make-up. Accentuated movements of the hand, the wrist there with two watches and elastic band, speaking with spirited features without any apparent meaning.

‘Forget nonsense, he insists in a definite fashion. But you see I require protection from those spawned ideas because they were like pokers straight out of a fire, or like … like some brutish acid-exuding creature eating me away inside.’

Before the train had finally stopped, Finch stood hurriedly
and went over to punch the door button, willing the doors away. When the train finally came to a standstill and the doors slid open he leapt out of the carriage, nearly losing his balance as he pushed his way through the lines of awaiting passengers. ‘Out of my way,’ he ordered.

Clement had stood to walk to the automatic doors and was leaning out. ‘It’s alright, Jeremy,’ he shouted after him over the heads, ‘barriers can’t hurt. Quite the opposite. They’re for inspired protection. Nice to meet you again, goodbye.’

‘Move please,’ stated an elderly man from the platform.

Clement nodded with a friendly expression and moved further inside the carriage to allow the traveller to alight. The man stepped up in a cumbersome way and stood panting.

7

Y
ou are a real one. I can discover immediately what sort of person you are from just a few seconds of analysis. See into you as easily as looking through clear glass. For example, your ancestors would have lolled under eucalyptus trees, instilling in their genes a lethargy which would impart certain physical attributes to future generations.

You’re an ageing version with a sunken chest. Jacket shining with patches of grease. What hair you have is sickly like the leaves of a wilting plant. And those rusted fingers – a heavy smoker, no doubt.

You bloat yourself with beer and scotch, take up that reality space there in the corner leading to the beer garden. Sucking on a miserable bit of rolled paper, meagre strands of tobacco lining the inside. And a vile slurping when you drink. Rattling cough as though your lungs are about to liquidize, to come out onto the stained handkerchief clutched to your mouth.

‘Can’t you say anything? I think he’s positively disgusting.’

I agree with Bernadette; weaving my way between the
empty tables to the bar counter.

There’s Daniel behind the bar, checking stocks, pointing a pencil to a barrel of sherry. ‘Already? You’re good for business today.’

‘No thanks, not yet.’ I’ll sit on a stool and rest elbows on the counter soakmat. I see you, doctor, and Daniel’s double with slicked hair, and part of my face, given back from a piece of mirror not covered with glinting bottles and optics. You can be the ambient one reflected. ‘The scruffy guy in the corner. Well, to be honest he’s a bit dirty, isn’t he?’

‘The old boy’s here every afternoon; waits outside for the doors to be unlocked. He’ll have his ale and be gone. Quite harmless. Been coming here for years. One of the locals.’

I have an admiration for the doddering duffer. Fifty minutes of brown ale is his meaning of existence. He has this daily ritual, an ambition if you like, as modest as it is. An excellent obsession perhaps. His life is there in the glass and cigarettes and corner.

Daniel is tapping his top teeth with the pencil. I know you can’t see much from where you are, Dr Leibkov, on the walkway, in the mirror, in a bar of the Neptune Hotel.

‘Who is he, then?’

The barman nodding towards the opposite corner to where the old man sits. You stay behind, inverted laterally, doctor. You can listen from there. I’ll be over by the red oak panelling, looking back to judge Daniel’s aim.

‘What, this?’ Placing a finger onto a brass ship’s clock,
shining but deceased. A shake of the head.

I’ll take a step away from the boat wheel to survey the whole wall. On one of the shelves, a stuffed halibut in the safety of its case. Below, in another glass case, is presented the long twisted horn from a narwhal. A grubby stuffed fox – which might once have been a taxidermist’s masterpiece – glares as it sinks on its patchy haunches by the coat stand. The rest of the wall is covered with yellowing engravings, paintings and sepia photographs, and a fine layer of dust.

I shall be your perception again, my psychiatric shaman. I’ll put my nose close to one of the engravings. There’s the studious workmanship of lines. Step back a little and the picture becomes alive with tonal variations though produced only with black ink on white parchment.

Thrashing spikes of the sea pushing and dragging at a lifeboat. The helmsman clutching a rope to the rudder, a petrified girl huddling in the comfort of another. Roaring waves, shrieks of wind, sobs of a women quivering amidst twelve others. An oilskinned sailor struggling with the oars, trying to gain purchase with the blades in the violent waters, the side of the doomed ship looming beside them. A mother still on the ship’s deck, her child wrenched from her. Others fight like wounded animals, scratching and biting, tearing at each other’s clothing, the struggle for survival, primitive impulses driving them. Creaking of the sails, splintering snap as the bowsprit is broken, a despondent song from the rigging, impotent cries of those left behind to die. One struggling
vainly with the ship’s wheel, another holding his comrade upright, yet another clinging to the boom which had lowered the lifeboat, reaching out imploringly, his life about to be taken by those mountains of water, the mindlessly animated vastness of ocean…

‘No, not that one. Next to it.’

A small photo, showing portside of a fishing smack snuggled to the side of a jetty, the sea behind placid and sunlit. A younger version of the spitting man in the corner sits mending nets. He’s surrounded by lobster pots and yards of mesh. Smoke from the briar clamped between his teeth.

I must call over to Bernadette. ‘Come and have a look.’ She’s pretending not to hear as she reaches for her drink.

The fisherman made an uneasy truce with the sea to reap a harvest of fish and lobsters. He deserves his prominence and distinction: a crown of amethyst shells, sea flowers and coral armour. He will become semi-transparent – like a jellyfish – to blend with his mighty ocean and all it contains.

Under that beam spanning the bar, holding lanterns and a bell, the impressive figurehead stands painted in its bold colours. The heavy chunks of timber glued and carved into a winged messenger, its shoulders hunched forward: it’s the fisherman’s sea-soaked shoulders. Across the brown ceiling, covered with shrivelled starfish and compasses, there are paddles and clumps of rope; glance back over to the engraving – there he is again as the captain of the doomed vessel, superior resignation upon him, standing as still as a boulder
while others are madness about.

And there you were in the corner by the ornate fireplace hung with brass, gone to your Atlantis to be with your willing sirens and mermaids, until tomorrow morning when you’ll return for your pint of brown ale.

‘You here again? Twice in one day?’

A group of tourists are arranged in the wise fisherman’s province. They sway drunkenly from side to side singing a bawdy ballad, the throb of a train’s wheels acting as metronome.

‘My wife went off to do shopping and a wander round the antiques.’ An explosion of laughter from another quarter. ‘Can’t be bothered with that stuff.’

‘Three, four, five pounds; thanks.’ The hand receiving the change retracts into the forest of customers lining the bar.

‘What’s the time? Quarter to seven; I’ll down another swift one before I pick her up. Give it another three quarters of an hour. It’ll do my headache good anyhow. I don’t think the market shuts until half eight; and I’ll be on this train for a while longer. Mine’s the usual when you’re ready.’

Raucous laughter, someone sobbing with tears of mirth and slapping their thigh. Every table top invisible under a layer of glass jugs, plates, snack packets. You’ve put your pint away pretty smartish for a doctor. Another quick one then. A hyena cackle, bubbling murmurs, whooping buoyant airs. These shaking heads, those nodding ones. Hyena for a second time
then a trumpeting elephant. Baboons still rock in the corner; a whinnying horse or should it be a seahorse? If I drink quickly there should be no worries. With clicking dominoes and thudding darts into the board, this is becoming a bit hazy. Congealing into one growling babble. Riff-raff are jostling me. Try as I might I can’t gain any enjoyment from watching the darts players though I’ll take one of their sandwiches on offer. Tastes of puffed mush. Look, someone’s drunk my beer by accident, already it’s finished. One more hop-bittersweet frothing pint, just to round off the evening, shouldn’t matter. The anchor bolted to the oak panelling is sliding down, I’m convinced. If I was to use my imagination more, I’d persuade myself we’re not in a bar of the Neptune Hotel in a train carriage but inside of a whale. If only I could focus enough to see the time from the clock above the fruit machine. It’s registered, beer equals doctor, both dissolve barriers. These stupid false memories barging in, beginning to create inebriated tears. Quickly dismiss them. Let them percolate through this zoo, the babbling mixture with flashing teeth and chinking glasses, while everyone is treading into puddles. Maybe it’s their drinks slopped to the floorboards. But it can’t be, the pools have quickly joined and the drinkers stand or sit in two inches of water. Not that anyone seems concerned, they continue their raucous banter. Glimmering water has risen more; it’s level with their knees and fast rising still. This liquid of the fourth pint has rendered my face numb. Water laps at the table edges. Splashes when hit with a drop of the arm or sharp
movement of the hand. A bottle of beer bobbing past. There’s the barman, quite unconcerned, taking money from a customer and casually wiping slops from the counter. Now holding tongs clutching ice cubes but strangely at the other end of the bar now, pulling on a pump again. And the gabbling and gossiping goes on, the waffling and singing, heavy drone of a million flies in this deceptive room; clapping hands, insidious ale still poured down their forgiving throats, the subterraneans unaware of the communal bath rippling about their necks. And this chilly water has taken feeling from my arm. I must try to move it though progress is sluggish as the whole of me has been reduced to slow motion. But there at last, as dregs of ale run from the bottom of the glass, the waters have reached the dusty ceiling and completely covers all. And there’s time enough to watch a ponderously moving crowd with sounds muffled and echoing, bubble streams rising from their noses. Mark them move like sea plants wafted by currents before the vile taste of salt-bitter liquid rushes down my gullet, making me want to vomit. ‘Excuse me,’ I must insist as I swim through these smirking crowds, plastering a hand across my mouth as stomach heaves, turning over like a cement mixer, threatening to eject its contents. ‘Excuse me,’ as I sway up to the pub entrance which is rippling in that unnatural way underwater…

‘Excuse me.’