The Voices (16 page)

‘Oh, how disgusting,’ she said out loud.

A column of ants was crawling up the wall and into a kitchen cupboard. She opened the door and saw that the tiny creatures were flowing over everything: jars, tins, bags of sugar and flour. Laura traced the column backwards to establish where the ants were coming from, but when it reached the floor the ants thinned out and the line became almost impossible to follow. She emptied the cupboard and threw away those items that had been contaminated. A transparent bag of brown sugar hadn’t been sealed properly and was seething with activity. After soaking a sponge in disinfectant, she wiped the ants off the empty shelf and brushed the broken corpses into the waste bin. She mopped the floor, put the tins and unopened bags back in the cupboard and made a list of items that needed to be replaced. When she had finished
her skin was flushed. Perspiration had soaked through the material of her T-shirt, producing unsightly dark patches. She leaned against the fridge for support and fanned her neck with her hand.

While Laura had been rushing around the kitchen, Faye had been hunched over her drawing; she hadn’t raised her head once or produced a single exclamation. Laura noticed that Faye was no longer scribbling. The movement of the crayon over the surface of the paper was slow and appeared to be more controlled than usual. There were no furious strokes that typically left marks on the white Formica. Faye’s expression was serious and Laura detected a presentiment of adulthood in her daughter’s knitted brow. She thought about the cruel certainties that lay ahead for her – disappointments, heartbreak, loss – and was surprised by a stab of pity that made her eyes prickle. The unexpected arrival of such an intense emotion made her acutely aware of her own fragility. She pressed the moistness out of her eyes and went over to the highchair.

‘What’s keeping you so busy?’

Laura looked down at Faye’s drawing and found that there was something about it that held her attention. She saw the usual mass of scribble but it was contained in a crude box divided by straight lines of varying length. The
background had been coloured red. Laura bit her lower lip and noticed that if she focused on certain areas the drawing acquired a hint of perspective. Was it supposed to be a room? The image was resonating with something in her memory; however, it took a few more seconds before she made the connection, and when she did, Laura shook her head in disbelief. The vertical lines reminded her of hanging chains and the red background suggested stains on a wall. Faye had drawn Laura’s nightmare.

‘No,’ Laura whispered. ‘It can’t be.’ She was being suggestible and here was yet another example of how her volatile state could make her credulous and irrational. Clearly, her memory of the nightmare was influencing her perception of the drawing; she was resolving ambiguities prejudicially.

Faye had stopped moving.

‘Baby?’

The child loosened her grip on the crayon and it fell out of her hand. A moment later she slumped forward.

Laura resisted the urge to scream. She sank down to Faye’s level and saw that her daughter’s eyes were closed. The child was still breathing and her inhalations were accompanied by a mucilaginous snore. It appeared that Faye had simply fallen asleep, which, on reflection, wasn’t so remarkable given how hard she had been
concentrating. Laura sighed and was grateful that, on this occasion, she hadn’t let panic get the better of her. She pulled Faye’s drawing out from under the crayons and studied the image. It was just a box, some vertical lines and scribble; yet a small doubt persisted, a dimly insistent feeling of disquiet. Laura scrunched the paper up, squeezed it into a tight ball and threw it into the bin along with the dead ants and spoiled food. She had hoped that a decisive, symbolic gesture of this kind would rid her of any residual anxieties, but she was quite mistaken. Somewhere in the depths of her unconscious was a windowless chamber in which hanging chains had been stirred into collision:
clink-clink-clink.

Laura lifted Faye out of the highchair, carried her up the stairs and entered the nursery. She put her daughter down in the cot and covered her with a thin cotton sheet. The child rolled over onto her stomach and settled with her face squashed against the mattress. Laura opened the window a fraction, drew the curtains and went downstairs to make some tea – camomile for herself and English breakfast for Christopher.

She did not enter the studio immediately. Instead, she waited outside for a few moments and listened to the muffled sound of voices coming through the door. It was like listening to a party, but a party in which the
background music was supplied by a kind of industrial orchestra. Production-line hammering was punctuated by blast-furnace roars. Laura didn’t knock. She opened the door and saw Chris seated in the middle of his equipment, his hands operating slide controls and his eyes fixed on a row of jittery VU meters. He looked more like an astronaut than a composer. When the voices faded he reached up and switched off two tape machines.

‘I’ve made you some tea.’

Christopher’s office chair rotated through one hundred and eighty degrees. ‘Thanks. How long have you been standing there?’

‘Not long.’ Laura advanced and handed her husband the mug. ‘You’re working on it again – the piece?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about the android film? I thought that had to be finished soon.’

‘It’s almost done – plenty of time – there’s no rush.’

‘I’m going to the shops later. There were ants in the kitchen and some of the food got spoiled. Do you want anything?’

‘No. No thanks.’

She wanted him to stop; she wanted him to erase those voices. She could feel something like pressure building up in her chest, a pressure that promised, on release, to
provide the means of voicing her objections. But at the very last moment, her courage deserted her and she experienced a sudden deflation that made her think of air escaping from a balloon.

‘OK,’ she said.

The office chair turned and she found herself facing the back of Chris’s head. He rewound the tapes and a moment later the babbling voices and the factory rhythms returned. Clutching her tea with both hands, she left the studio and kicked the door shut behind her.

The rest of the day was dull and tiring. Laura walked to the shops, did the laundry, then the ironing, and prepared the evening meal. When Christopher came downstairs to eat, the radio was left on and they barely spoke to each other. Laura retired early and Christopher returned to his studio. He did not stay there long. Thirty minutes later she heard him coming down again, and, after he had attended to his ablutions, he got into bed, naked. Laura supposed that this meant that he would want to have sex with her, but he made no approaches and they sat, side by side, propped up by pillows, reading – she a novel, and he the book he had bought about the recording of spirit voices.

Laura did not find it easy to concentrate. She kept on thinking about Faye’s drawing, the man’s voice coming
through the baby monitor and the chill she had experienced in the garden; nightmares, hallucinations and sudden changes of body temperature. The idea that all of these might be side effects of her medication was appealing, but she didn’t believe it. She was simply trying to prove to herself that she was still capable of being rational. What she really thought was that these disturbing phenomena were all connected with Christopher’s recordings. She was concerned that he might be opening a door, extending an invitation, or, even worse, letting something in. Laura put her novel down and said, ‘Chris? Can we talk?’

He turned a page and said, ‘What about?’

‘Something happened when you were away. I didn’t mention it before, I don’t know why.’

Christopher used the inside flap of the book jacket to mark his place. ‘Oh?’

‘I heard a voice coming through the baby monitor – a man’s voice. It was in the middle of the night and I was really frightened. I thought there was someone in Faye’s room, but when I looked, there was no one there.’ She continued, giving more detail and explaining how it had seemed to her as if the voice had been addressing Faye directly, and how Faye had listened and responded. ‘It was really strange – unnerving.’ Christopher remained
silent, the slow nod of his head betraying a thought process that he did not feel obliged to share. Laura took a deep breath. ‘I wonder if . . .’ She hesitated before clumsily completing her sentence. ‘I wonder if it’s got anything to do with what you’ve been doing.’ Christopher frowned. ‘The voices. The recordings . . .’

‘It’s possible, I suppose.’

‘I was worried about Faye.’

‘Why? She wasn’t in any danger, was she? Not really.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Darling, it was only a voice.’

‘But it was talking to her.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘No, I can’t say for sure. But that’s what it sounded like.’ Laura fiddled nervously with the ribbon on her negligee. ‘You’re dabbling with the supernatural and—’

‘I wouldn’t call it dabbling,’ Christopher said, quite plainly piqued.

‘Sorry, wrong word.’

‘Look, I can see how it must have been frightening. But what actually happened? Faye got woken up a few times and you had to take her out of the nursery.’

‘Come to me, Faye?
Remember that?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Well then.’

‘I don’t understand. What are you suggesting?’

The bluntness of the question made her stop and reflect for a few moments. Chris wasn’t party to her inner world; he didn’t know about the nightmare, Faye’s drawing or the coldness that had seeped into her bones. She
could
tell him everything – that was an option – but it would be difficult to express the subtle registers of feeling that had accompanied her experiences and she might end up sounding like a hysteric. The prospect of explaining herself suddenly seemed too problematic and arduous. She waved her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re right, I’m overreacting.’

‘Darling, I didn’t say
that.’

‘I know, I know. But you’re right. Nothing happened – not really.’

‘It’s a big house. You were on your own . . .’

‘Yes.’ Laura rotated a finger close to her temple. ‘I let my imagination run wild.’ She picked up her novel again and attempted to sound breezy. ‘I’m going to see Sue next week. What shall I say about the garden? Her quote was very reasonable, I thought.’

‘I’ll check how much we’ve got in the savings account. Then we’ll make a decision.’

‘She said she’d do the rockery for free.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘We’re friends.’

‘As long as she doesn’t expect anything.’

Laura put her novel on the bedside cabinet and turned off the lamp. Christopher read for a few more minutes and then turned his lamp off too. The mattress tilted as he edged over to her side of the bed. She had her back to him and he moulded his body against hers. He flung an arm over her waist and pulled her close.

‘Is the French film going to happen?’ Laura asked.

‘Yes. I’m seeing Henry tomorrow. There won’t be much money’

‘How much money do we need?’

‘Always more than we’ve got.’

As Christopher descended the stairs he could see a letter on the doormat. He walked down the hallway and squatted to pick it up. His knee joints clicked and a sharp pain at the base of his spine reminded him that he was no longer young. Until recently he had found such daily reminders of his own mortality depressing, but since embarking on his electronic voices project, he was more inclined to be philosophical. The prospect of decline and his ultimate physical demise was less daunting given that he now believed that something very clearly followed,
although he was still agnostic concerning its exact nature. The voices he had recorded had not been very instructive and Christopher had had difficulty reconciling their brief, sometimes incoherent declarations with notions of a Christian afterlife. Indeed, he tended to think of the spirits existing in some vast, unknowable expanse. Supposing that a familial bond might facilitate communication, he had considered trying to contact his parents, but he had found the idea vaguely repellent, in the same way that he had found their bedroom vaguely repellent when he was an adolescent. Something dark and Freudian prevented him from disturbing their eternal slumber.

Christopher opened the envelope and registered his solicitor’s letterhead at the top of the page. A single paragraph explained that when Christopher had purchased the house, a comprehensive search for title had been undertaken and that the office copy entries confirmed Mr Edward Stokes Maybury to be one of several former owners. An invoice was stapled to the letter and Christopher tutted when he noted the exorbitant fee.

Here then was final proof that the spirit voices he had recorded were authentic. He really was doing something completely new. A ripple of excitement produced a private, self-satisfied smile. He put the letter and invoice
back in the envelope, folded it to reduce its size, and tapped it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

On entering the kitchen, he saw Laura standing on a chair looking into an open cupboard.

‘They’ve come back again.’

‘What?’

‘The ants.’

‘Must be something to do with the heat. It’s more like Athens than London.’

‘I don’t know where they’re coming from.’

‘You’ll have to get some poison . . . bait – that’s what they call it, I think.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘I suppose so. Actually, I can get some. After I’ve had lunch with Henry I’ll buy some in Hampstead village.’

‘OK.’

He paused before leaving. ‘What you were saying last night. . .’

Laura stepped off the chair and flicked an ant from her finger. ‘Yes.’

‘The voice that you heard . . . was it the same voice that said
Come to me, Faye
on the recording I played you?’

‘I don’t know. He was speaking too softly.’

‘OK.’

As Christopher was about to leave, Laura asked, ‘Why?’

Christopher responded with artful nonchalance. ‘Just a thought.’

At twelve thirty he was sitting opposite Henry Baylis in Le Cellier du Midi. Baylis had brought three contracts for Christopher to sign and, as usual, Christopher didn’t bother to read them. He turned the pages until he found his name typed beneath a dotted line.