Despite the number of words, nothing really seemed to happen, although after a while J’s paranoia began to produce a kind of mirage of a plot, as if something was about to happen at every moment and yet never did. A typical paragraph (for there was little to choose between them) read like this –
J felt a tenuous uncertainty as to which of the several tenebrous passages his presumed tormentor had chosen to disappear into. He permitted his imagination a brief glance down into that darkness to find what it would, but recoiled from the sudden vista of – not despair and madness as he had expected, but rather the torpor and enervation to be found there. He was made fully aware now of the kind of horror that his mental games had led him to and speculated as to the –
And so on and so on. No wonder the sleeper on the bed was in such a sopor, breathing in Archie’s somnifaciant words all the time. A sudden gust of wind lifted the curtains and sent an icy blast into the room, ruffling the pages of Archie’s novel and sending several of them flying through the air like autumn leaves. I jumped up and chased around the room after them and managed to retrieve all but one, which floated serenely out of the window like a birdless wing.
I tried to get the manuscript back into some semblance of order but the pages, for some annoying reason, were not numbered so that it was impossible to tell what sequence they should be in and the sense of the text gave me no clue whatsoever. At a loss, I skimmed the page in my hand and discovered J in the process of meeting a nasty death. He was at the top of a flight of stairs when a banister he was leaning against gave way and sent him plunging down into the dark depths of a stairwell –
Falling, falling, into the dark depths of the unknown and unknowable chasm, the abyss of his own imagination rushing to greet him, to enfold, to smother him, the darkness circumscribing him, obfuscating his senses and finally stilling even the faintest glimmerings of cognizance and speculation –
Which I think meant he was dead. There was no knowing where this particular page belonged as Archie was obviously the kind of writer who thought nothing of killing off his main protagonist within the first fifty pages. In the end I just put all the pages back together at random and stuck them as far under the bed as they would go.
Another gust of wind sent a sudden chill shudder through the sleeping body on the bed. I pulled the blanket up further and closed the window—
~ How much more sensible if you’d done that to begin with.
I don’t think Nora should talk about sensible, not when she herself is standing on a rock that is being lapped by an incoming tide as if she is trying to command the sea.
—I could just see the bridge from the window – a train was crossing, one bright headlamp marking its passage from the black unlit banks of Fife across the even blacker water, like a messenger from somewhere else. I drew the curtains.
The water in the kettle had almost boiled away by the time I got back to the kitchen and I had to start the tea-making process all over again—
Nora makes a great display of boredom.
—closely observed by the current McFluffy, which was standing up on its hindlegs, holding the bars of its cage in its tiny pink hands. Its cheeks were bulging with food and it looked unusually alert, as if it was about to embark on the great escape. I noticed that the salmon, previously whole and unsullied by anything except death, now had a large bite taken out of its side. It really should be in the fridge, especially as it had another day to go before its party appearance. I could almost see the microbes congregating festively around its silvery corpse. When I turned away from the salmon I found another old woman sitting at the table. Were they breeding?
When this one saw me, she gave a little scream and clutched her breast. ‘Wha’ a fleg you gave me,’ she said. She was as small as a dormouse and almost entirely spherical, you could probably have rolled her from one side of the kitchen to the other. She heaved herself up from the chair, with the help of a walking-aid, and introduced herself as ‘Mrs Macbeth’. I gathered she was Mrs McCue’s friend and a fellow escapee from The Anchorage.
Mrs Macbeth was being followed around by an old fat Westie which seemed almost as lame as its owner. Its fur was a Chinese yellow and it seemed to have gone rusty around the mouth. Its teeth were as yellow as Mrs McCue’s and in some strange way it reminded me a little of her. Its aged eyes – one brown, one slightly wall-eyed – looked at me in a resigned kind of way when I addressed it.
‘She’s cried Janet,’ Mrs Macbeth said. ‘We’re no allowed pets at The Anchorage, but I couldna get rid of her, she’s been my wee pal all these years.’ She sighed and Janet seemed to sigh too, her lungs wheezing like a tiny pair of accordions.