The Grin of the Dark

FORTY-FOUR - NOEL, NOEL

I dream of being summoned out of darkness by a bell. It's the ringing of a mobile, but not mine, because the tune that it's wordlessly shrilling is 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas'. I twist in bed, dragging at the emptiness that's Natalie, and grope so blindly at my old bedside table that it shakes with age. I baptise my fingers in the mug of water before I find the mobile. It's mine after all, and when I sprinkle my ear I'm greeted by voices singing the song of the phone. I'm beginning to feel it has programmed their brains by the time Mark dispenses with the last few words to say 'Guess what I got for Christmas, Simon.'

'Hurry up, son,' my mother calls. 'Somebody's getting restless.'

'He's been,' my father shouts loud enough to be audible through the floor as well. 'The fat lad.'

They both sound determinedly animated, which may be a show they're putting on for Mark. First I want to learn 'Who's been altering my ringtone?'

'I did it for you,' says Mark.

However well he meant, the idea of interference while I was asleep makes me uneasy, and so does his expertise. I have to thank him as a preamble to saying 'I'll be down as soon as I'm decent.'

Mark giggles until I cut him off and scramble out of bed. I'm in my childhood room, which has acquired a musty smell too faint for me to locate or identify. The entire room looks faded, not just my teenage posters of the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges that cover much of the white walls. The furniture helps it resemble a museum of my youth, especially the wardrobe that still won't shut tight. When I was a child the surreptitiously open door put me in mind of an entrance to some unimaginable place, but now, even in the pallid daylight, I don't care for it. I remember holding it shut from within when I was playing hide and seek.

I've yet to feel awake. I could almost fancy that I'm dreaming the large bathroom, where the white tiles date from before I was born. I'd be happy to accept that I dreamed some or indeed all of last night's visit to church. Even once I've showered I have the sense that my consciousness is strained close to breaking – that it's in real need of closing down for a spell. I take the chance to rest my jittery eyes while I dress, and then I set out down the childishly prolonged corridor.

A wave of dizziness seems to render the stairs as steep as they were in Amsterdam. Everyone is in the front room, where a tree is fluttering its lights beside a television as decrepit as the one in Egham. My mother is wearing silk pyjamas that look sharpened by the angles of her bones, my father is stuffed into a suit and shirt. He leaps up at the sight of me, or intends to. 'A drink,' he pants as he makes a second attempt.

It's clear that he and my mother have had at least one, and Natalie's quick Christmas kiss tastes of alcohol as well. 'Aaah,' says my mother at the spectacle and gives my father a reproachful look for not imitating us with her. 'Sherry,' she adds, perhaps on my behalf.

My father staggers off the couch and fills a brandy glass with sweet sherry. 'Get that down you,' he tells me. 'You've got some catching up to do.'

My throat feels so raw I might have been shouting for hours, even if I never heard myself. It's suffering from the harsh smell of dust on the orange bars of the electric fire embedded in the hearth, a lump of the past set in an earlier one. Several mouthfuls of sherry do little to restore my dried-up voice. I smile and gesture my thanks for the various presents my father hands me from under the flickering tree: bunches of socks, underpants printed with grinning cartoons, a computer mouse pad. 'It's the youngsters' time,' my mother declares more than once, and watches anxiously while Mark unwraps books aimed at boys of about his age. 'You can change them if you like,' she assures him. 'We didn't know you were so old for your years.'

'It's all right, they're funny,' he says with his broadest grin.

Perhaps she feels he's overstating his enthusiasm. She takes to uttering an irritated grunt each time my father returns from distributing presents and drinks to plump beside her on the couch. I've bought Mark a computer game set in a haunted city where no route leads to the same place twice and you can never be sure what's beyond a door you've already used. He thanks me hard, though he won't be able to play it until we're home. I feel starved of access to my own computer, not just for working on my book. Could this be another reason why my mind is reluctant to function – because it doesn't seem worth the effort to grasp so much irrelevant festive detail? Mark starts playing one of the games on the mobile that Natalie's parents have given him, and I feel as if he's acting out my desire to be elsewhere. It may be his behaviour that provokes my mother to say 'I'll bet you've never had a Christmas dinner like mine.'

I haven't – not like this one. Either my childhood is blurred by nostalgia or her cooking has worsened with age. Perhaps she was ensuring that nothing's underdone. Natalie and Mark and I voice compliments that grow increasingly wordless as we saw through our portions of wizened turkey and well-nigh impenetrable potatoes and sausages as black as unexposed film. I for one feel bound to compensate for my father's silence, which seems to constrict the panelled kitchen and intensify the heat from the black iron range. 'See, it was worth coming. That's what the Christmas boy gets,' my mother cries as Mark disentangles another pound coin from a cellophane wrapping encrusted with currants. Have the adults really drunk seven bottles of wine? I take another mouthful of dessert wine to sweeten the taste of charred pudding. 'Who's for a walk to get our weight down?' says my mother.

All the plates and utensils have been piled in the stone sink under the moist grey screen of a window. 'I'll do the washing-up,' I say, 'and then I might have a nap.'

'Guess where we are, Simon.'

'Upstairs,' I mumble, because there's movement overhead.

'Of course we aren't,' Mark giggles. 'We're out.'

'I hope you haven't woken Simon,' says Natalie from further off.

It feels more as though my consciousness has omitted several events – as though a lurch in time and space has dumped me in this armchair from my childhood. I can't even recall walking to the front room. My faint reflection, which looks trapped within the dormant television screen, performs a rudimentary mime as I say 'It's all right.'

'He says it's all right.'

I'm even less convinced by the repetition, and he doesn't help by adding 'You'll have to come and find us. Your mum and dad don't know where this is.'

'I'm not lost at all. Can't speak for Sandra.'

'One of us has to be, Bob.'

'Well, it damn well isn't me. I'm still having my wander and then I'll get us home.'

They sound shrunken by remoteness, which makes me blurt 'Can you see its name, Mark?'

'I saw one a long way back. I can't now, it's dark. We're in Something Lane.'

'I don't remember any lanes round here. How long have you been walking?'

'Hours.'

Surely he's exaggerating, but when I peer at my watch in the light of the Victorian streetlamp outside the window I see that they could have left more than an hour ago. I'm about to tell him to keep talking until they reach somewhere he can name when Natalie says 'Stop bothering him now, Mark. Look, there's the end.'

Before I can speak, they're gone. Could the call and the background dialogue have been a joke? I still think someone was moving softly about upstairs. I hold onto the mobile in case Mark rings back and rest my head against the musty cushion to listen.

When I open my eyes, however, the voices are beyond the front door and singing as best they can for laughter. Are they really chanting 'Good King Senseless'? The name is past by the time I recapture some kind of awareness. Either they cut the carol short or my mind loses hold of it, because I next hear them all on the stairs. The flat slaps of my father's slippers on the hall floor are almost as loud as the flapping of my mother's looser ones. My parents couldn't have worn slippers outside the house – they must have gone upstairs to change.

'So you didn't need to call me again,' I say to Mark.

'Not when you've got up.'

'To help you find your way back, I mean.'

'Why'd we do that?'

He and the others look as confused as I won't allow myself to be. I'm sure it was a Christmas joke. There's no doubt in my mind that Mark is concealing amusement, and I don't think he's alone in it. My mother appears to have had enough of clowning, and drops on the couch. 'Put on a show,' she urges.

My father falls to his knees in front of the television, which has never had a remote control, and the floor quakes like California. 'Shout out when you see something you like,' he says.

'Is it all black and white?' says Mark.

'It's like us. It's a museum piece.'

'All your colour goes as you get older,' my mother says.

I suspect I'm not the only person who can't identify the link. My eyelids sag shut, and I'm imagining every channel filled with the same luminous gleeful face when Mark calls 'Quick, Simon, look. It's him.'

'I didn't mean shout,' my father protests. 'Spare my old head.'

He seems unable or unwilling to finish changing channels. Did I actually glimpse a familiar face peering around the edge of the screen, or was that my lingering imagination? 'What are you saying you saw, Mark?'

'It was Tubby. I'm sure it was.'

'In what?'

'I don't know,' Mark says, jigging with impatience on his creaky chair. 'Go round again.'

As my father continues his search, which looks close to automatic, Natalie says 'It was just someone big, Mark. There are people like that everywhere.'

'I saw his face. I know Tubby.'

Which of the programmes could have contained him? Hardly the footage of riots after a suspected bomber was shot, nor an advertisement for a Christmas suicide counselling service. A Berlioz oratorio about Christ is just as unlikely a context, but I suppose a clip of Tubby might have been among the films projected on a screen behind the band at a Second Coming concert. My mother adds a squeal to those emitted by the guitars, then claps her hands as the next channel proves to be broadcasting Laurel and Hardy. 'Let's have them. We want fun for Christmas.'

Their film could have included Tubby as an extra, but surely not to the extent of making Ollie's face turn into his while Stan's is swollen wider than his body by a helpless grin as he weeps at the transformation. That's only what I dream, having been the first to go upstairs. Later Natalie is pressed against me in the narrow bed. Beyond the dim mass of her sleeping face, which looks enlarged by her tousled hair, I can just distinguish that the wardrobe door is ajar. I'm reminded of one of Lane's less comprehensible notes. What portal did he fancy could lead everywhere? What was the medium 'in which all must swim or drown'? Perhaps he had the cinema in mind. This brings back his lurid grinning face, and I splash water on mine to regain awareness of my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I'll be able to stay awake once I'm at my desk, I vow as my mother says 'I'll bet you've never had a Christmas dinner like this.'

My father and Natalie must be pretending not to notice the repetition. Mark looks solemn too, but how long can he maintain the mask? I'm afraid that any second it will give way to his Tubby face – that he'll be overcome by mirth, at any rate. The possibility doesn't help my appetite for the lukewarm leftovers. Besides, I've grown fat enough; I should have joined yesterday's walk to lose some weight. The very first mouthful makes me feel I won't be able to rise from my chair. Nevertheless I retake my enthusiasm while Natalie and Mark put on an equally good show. Natalie's next line, or at least the next I'm aware of, is 'I suppose we ought to be thinking of leaving.'

'We've not had any games yet,' my mother complains. 'I thought we'd be playing some old ones with Mark. Real ones instead of on the phone.'

'Can't we?' Mark pleads.

'Maybe just one,' Natalie says, 'if it's quick.'

'I know, we'll play Simon's favourite,' says my mother. 'Hide and seek.'

They never found me in the wardrobe, and nobody's going to now. If I back into the corner I can still hold onto the half of the door that opens. If anybody should look inside they won't see me in the gloom. I thought I'd cleared everything into the suitcase, but an item is hanging up behind me. I must have overlooked it from exhaustion. It's an old coat padded fat with paper or mothballs. Perhaps I should use it for extra concealment. Keeping hold of the door, I reach for the hanger to inch the coat along the rail. There's no sign of a hanger, but my fingers touch a yielding mass within the collar. I'm able to believe it's a bag of mothballs until I feel the soft swollen chin above the flabby neck. My fingers scrabble in helpless panic at the thick lips that frame the bared teeth.

I seem to have forgotten how to work my body. One hand continues to hold the darkness shut tight while the other claws at the gleefully quivering features. Before I can snatch my hand away it dislodges the face, which peels away from the skull and slithers downwards. Was it some kind of parasite? As I hear it thump the floor of the wardrobe, the bones at which my fingertips are unable to stop fumbling give way like a puffball. My hand plunges into the depths of the dark, taking me with it. I clutch at the door and fling myself towards it, which slams my head against the seat in front. 'Where are we?' I gasp.

'Don't do that,' says Natalie. 'You'll have me thinking we're lost again.'

I'm not sure if she's talking to me or to Mark, who gives me a grin that looks secretive in the mirror. The bare stage beyond the windscreen is an illuminated patch of deserted lightless motorway that the night is paying out, a spectacle as convincing as a backprojection. An oncoming signboard indicates a junction for Manchester. Once we're safely past I ask 'Did I say goodbye?'

'Just about,' Natalie says with a hint of a frown. 'You seemed very anxious to leave all of a sudden.'

'We never found you,' says Mark.

Is that supposed to be encouraging? It makes me feel trapped in too small a space. Of course I'm not still in the wardrobe, whatever pale object is darting towards my feet. It isn't solid; it's light from the sign for another junction – for Birmingham, which leaves Manchester about a hundred miles behind. Then the car tilts, because we're in London and descending the ramp to the basement car park. Now it's standing on end and lumbering upwards. No, that's the lift, and once Natalie unlocks the apartment I stagger along the corridor to dump the suitcase outside our room before blundering into the main one. I need to sit somewhere that isn't moving, and I don't mind where. On second thought I do, and there's only one place that seems stable to me. I may even close my hands around the sides of my computer to embrace it as I sit at my desk.