The Unfurling

by Mark Hardie

E-mail: markhardie1@aol.com

‘I killed my wife,’ the old man said as he stirred a third spoonful of sugar into his tea. He looked up at me. ‘It made all the papers, you can check it out if you want.  Fourteenth of October, nineteen sixty-seven.’  He drew a rectangle in the air with his index fingers.

‘“Solicitor Slays Wife!”. John Kendall, as I was then.’

He had introduced himself as Harry Mason.  An unremarkable and well-worn old man in a seedy, run-down transport café lined with greasy tongue-and-groove wood panelling.  His hair was cropped close to the skull and the colour of old steel.  A pair of sharp blue eyes in a face bearing the tan of a man who spent a lot of time outdoors.  Underlying this tan, however, was a grey that shone through like a weather-beaten building that had started to reveal a previous layer of paint.  He sat alone at a square table covered with a mustard yellow plastic table cloth, in a shiny, brown suit.

‘So, do I call you Kendall or Mason?’ I asked.  He shrugged.

‘What’s in a name?  Do you want something to eat?  Right craphole in here.’ He indicated the café with his chin and then, as if to excuse himself, explained, ‘Thursday, all-day breakfast, half price. Pensioners’ day.  They do a half-decent bacon roll. Yeah?’ he asked as I looked interested. ‘Tea?’

I nodded and he raised his hand and signalled to a plump, middle aged, red-headed woman behind the counter.

‘Angie!  Two bacon rolls and a tea.’  He pointed to the empty space on the table in front of me.  ‘I don’t sound much like a solicitor, do I?’ he asked turning back to me.    ‘That’s what nearly forty years in the nick will do for you.’

He pulled down the collar of his shirt to reveal a nasty, red and jagged scar on his neck.

‘Got this on my first week. ’Cause of the papers, y’know?  There’s always some jealous queen inside.   I was laid up in the prison hospital for weeks.  I decided that I could either go under or adapt and survive.  So when I got out of the infirmary the first thing I did was to go looking for the geezer who cut me and I paid him back with interest.  I was left alone after that. I dropped the poncey vowels, worked hard to fit in, y’know?   After a while they realised that I could be useful - legal training.  There’s always someone who needs legal advice in the nick.  Traded my legal expertise for snout.’

He fingered a tobacco tin on the table. 

‘Christ!  There’s as many rules out here as there are inside these days.’

Angie arrived with his fry-up and two cups of tea.  Up close she was older, wore too much make-up, too much perfume.  She placed the fry-up and tea down on the table between us, spilling tea in the process.

‘Yours’ll be ready in a minute, love,’ she said.

Mason watched the gelatinous pendulations of her backside all the way back to the counter through narrowed eyes.  He turned back to me with what he obviously hoped was a conspiratorial wink.

‘Don’t mind if I eat while we talk, do you?’ Mason said picking up his cutlery.

I shook my head and took advantage of the brief hiatus while he smothered his food in salt and ketchup to ask a question.

‘So why do you want to talk about this now?’

Without looking up he said, ‘Cancer.  I haven’t got long, six months, maybe.  That’s why I’m out.  I got life after all, and life meant life in those days.  But I got parole on “compassionate grounds”.’   He snorted a laugh.

‘So what’s this - some kind of death bed confession?’

‘No.  I pleaded guilty at the trial, and why not?  I mean I did it, didn’t I, I killed her.’

I spread my hands.

‘So why then?’  I asked.

He looked up and waited for Angie to place down my plate of bacon rolls.  A look passed between them and he gave her a leering wink.

‘Indulge an old man for a moment, will you, son?  Hear me out, listen to my story …’

He stood in the hallway carefully putting a neat half-Windsor knot in his stripy tie.  He adjusted it in the hall mirror.  There was that smell again.  What the hell was it?  He glanced towards the kitchen where Anna sat drinking a cup of instant coffee.  It had been driving him mad for weeks now.  He couldn’t for the life of him find out where it was coming from.  Something rank, putrid, decaying, the smell of something rotting.  But Anna said she couldn’t smell a thing.  He had washed the kitchen bin repeatedly, put bleach down the sink, even cleared the outside drain.  But he could still smell it.  He looked back towards the mirror.  In the corner of his eye he caught a movement.  It appeared to be in the doorway of the living room. Like someone, or something, had walked through.  Something unseen, something that could only be discerned by the disturbance of light it caused.  A wave, a ripple that caused the underlying image to bulge and then retreat as it passed.   

He checked over his shoulder, walked into the room.  It was exactly the same as it always was. Exactly the same, in fact, as it had been when he had inherited it from his parents.   He checked the reflection in the mirror once again.  Something was wrong, no, not wrong: different.  Something had shifted, moved almost imperceptibly. As if the silver at the back of the mirror had melted away and he was now looking, not at a reflection of reality, but through a window into Somewhere Else. Into a tableau containing the same house, the same wallpaper, the same furniture.  A film set.  He looked towards the kitchen again.  Anna sat oblivious, barely moved from the last time he had looked at her, drinking her coffee.  How many times had this happened to him in the last few weeks?    He stared into the mirror, then looked over his shoulder into the living room again.  They looked the same, but something was out of kilter.  On some level he could sense it, a disquiet, like a tickling sensation in the back of his brain.    Then the feeling was gone and he felt a little silly.  He picked up his briefcase and wandered into the kitchen. He kissed Anna, who was leafing absently through the morning paper, on the top of her head.

‘See you later then.’

She grunted from within her long mane of black hair.  Anna was not a morning person, she preferred the night.  God, how she preferred the night.  She was wearing him out. They had been married for three weeks now, had known each other for five.  They had met in a bar in Amsterdam, he had fallen for her immediately.  She had needed a visa and he, as a respectable young solicitor in Kingston-on-Thames, had required, for appearances’ sake, a wife and not a live-in lover.  So it had seemed to make sense to get married quickly. 

He had been in Amsterdam with his band.  It was Rory the drummer’s idea.  A few nights playing Hamburg and Amsterdam like the Beatles. Only a decade too bloody late!  He had agreed to it, one last shot at making it as a rock star, as a favour to Rory.  One last shot before he settled down to a steady career as a provincial solicitor.  It had been a laugh, but nothing more.  Their farewell tour.  They had done some drugs, too many maybe.  Perhaps that was why he was feeling like this.  So detached, so disconnected.  Now it was time, in Kendall’s opinion at least, to leave all that behind, to settle down.   You’ve got to settle down sometime.  He had tried to explain the same to Rory.  Rory had not taken it well.  As for Kendall, he rather liked, he was a little ashamed to admit, being a solicitor, liked to lose himself in the details, the minutiae, of the job.  He found the day went quickly immersed in the arcane vagaries of conveyancing, or a will or, on rare occasions, a litigation or other more knotty legal dispute.

So it was, today, he found himself looking up from a folder on his desk to find it already gone five-thirty.  He closed the folder and left the office, locking up after himself, heading straight home.  They had shared a rather ordinary meal. More than two bottles of a cheap red wine and a joint and he had found himself, inevitably, in bed with Anna.  He was infatuated, consumed , obsessed with her.  He loved her straight, coal black hair, her huge dark eyes, her cool pale skin, her foreignness.  He loved her smells, her scent, her apple shampoo, the musky heady aroma of her body, her knowingness.

Straddling him now, her eyes glinted in the reflection from the candles arranged around the bed, a mischievous, almost malevolent, glint.  There was a movement in the air, a draught rose from somewhere and the candles guttered momentarily.  Once again he felt a fluctuation in the atmosphere of the room, a displacement in time and space.  Somewhere, just beyond the range of his physical senses, a rearrangement took place.  The candle flames flickered, dwindled to the glow of an ember and then flared.  Her shadow seemed to detach itself from the wall, expand and enter the room of its own account.  Dread raked its icy fingernails across his skin.   

He looked into her face.  The skin beneath her eyes started to move, to slide down, sloughing away like tallow retreating from a flame.  He heard a fluttering in his ears.  The sound of his own blood pumping in his veins or the unfolding of leathery wings?  In the reflection of the candlelight a transparent eyelid closed and then opened on large almond-shaped eyes with a vertical black slit for an iris.  A tongue extended to lick engorged lips and then further to taste the air.  A long thin, vibrating bifurcated tongue.  A large pair of pinioned wings unfurled themselves from her back.  Or was that just a trick of the shadows?  No, this was no illusion, no nightmare – this was real.  Unless he could act, and act now, who knew how this would end? 

He screamed and reached for the slithering, undulating neck.  He put his hands around it and began to squeeze.  Anna’s dark eyes bulged, her sweet, full mouth gasped for breath, she clawed at his hands in apparent desperation.  He closed his eyes on this trick, this apparition and squeezed.  After a while the thrashing of the beast stopped, the hands fluttered one last time to its throat and it was still.  Still.  With his eyes closed he thrust the lifeless thing from the bed.  Lying there for what might have been hours, or seconds, rivulets of sweat running from his body to the crumpled sheets, he gasped breath past his pounding heart and into his lungs. His hands grasped, bunched the sheet beneath him in his fists. Christ.  Christ.  Christ.   Finally he opened his eyes and looked at the thing on the bedroom floor.  He opened his eyes slowly and stared into the face of that dead thing. The dead woman.   His dead wife.

There was a crash of a falling plate and the clatter of sliding cutlery as someone in the café dropped their all-day breakfast.  This was followed by a cheer and an ironic round of applause.

‘I take it that none of this came out at the trial?’ I ventured.

Mason snorted his derision and said, ‘Of course not, I mean, who’d have believed it?  I’m not sure I still believe it sometimes.  Spent a lot of years, a lot of nights, reliving that few minutes.’

He fingered the tobacco tin again.  I spread my hands.

‘So why now?’ I asked again.

‘You’re a hack, right?’ I opened my mouth to object and he put his head to one side and corrected himself with a faint, mocking smile. ‘An “investigative journalist”.’

‘So you want me to investigate something? Is that it?  Why me?  It’s not really my field,’ I said, crossing my arms and leaning back in the chair, not a little irritated.

‘I saw you on the telly,’ he said, ‘coming out of some awards dinner.’

‘So this,’ I indicated the cafe with my chin,’ is the price of fame?’

‘The woman you were with…’ His eyes were on the tobacco tin as he pushed it around the table.

‘My wife,’ I said.

‘Your wife.’

There was a long silence where he seemed to be considering his next words, then he raised his head slowly and looked directly into my eyes.

‘Your wife,’ he said at length, ‘is the same woman that I murdered forty years ago.’

©2008 Mark Hardie

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