Short Fiction

Excerpt from 'Glass Houses'

Ray lived (almost) alone, in the first floor apartment of a mouldering, Victorian town house, on the less dangerous edge of the city. Below him on the ground floor prowled the proprietor, Baptiste O’Grady; all butcher’s apron and fleshy, folded arms. Unconstrained by the stairs, walls and doors of privacy, O’Grady frequently materialized like fat ectoplasm, announced only by the flap, flap, flapping of spectral, tartan slippers and a piercing “Coo-ee!” This fearsome sound assaulted Ray’s ears, whether he was at home or not - he knew that O’Grady loomed and lumbered abroad in his world when he was at work or at the cinema or at the pub - it didn’t matter. The promising abundance of crumbs that were scattered across the emptiest room was as enticing to O’Grady as any occupant. The knowledge that his space had been or was about to be violated became as disagreeable and haunting to Ray as the cold, haranguing tongue of Grey Ridgley, his earliest schoolteacher; brain tugged taut by an iron chignon and hands like aluminium paddles - light, strong and fast. Syllabic spankings were how Ray came to understand the measure of Grey Ridgley’s callous poetry: sadistic pentameter.

However, the rent was tantalisingly low and aside from the scolding slippers, O’Grady was as far removed from Grey Ridgley as one could imagine. Weighing in at eighteen stone, or thereabouts, Ray assumed O’Grady could be around fifty years old although he could not be certain as her fleshy face resisted the creases of time, cheeks plumped out by a lifetime of Sunday roasts and scrubbed cold, carbolic raw during scores of no-nonsense ablutions. Despite the shaky plumbing that gurgled and groaned its way around that unsteady house, behind musty plaster and beneath dusty floorboards like a pipe-work python, O’Grady never washed in the bathroom; the bathroom was only for guests and ‘what-not‘. Instead, a strip-wash, in the kitchen, at six o’clock every morning and nine o’clock every night was the norm - except for Fridays. Then, the old, tin hipbath would be hauled from the pantry rafters and prepared with a steaming, miser’s piss of scalding water from the trembling, kitchen geyser. Armed for the fray with a bristling, wooden-handled nail brush and utilitarian soap block, O’Grady would plunge in, scrubbing vulnerable, white meat until it was poached, unpolluted and pink. Afterwards, O’Grady would use the same water, brush and soap to assault enemy underwear, wring it to death and spread it out across the radiators like a message to the fleet that today’s battle had been won.

Baptiste O’Grady’s kitchen was truly the heart of that ground floor domain. O’Grady cooked, laundered, bathed and gossiped here; clearly, more than one kind of fat was chewed and O’Grady kept the conversations flowing by popping batches of scones out of cast iron pods on to the ivy-edged, bone china plates that waited patiently on a dilapidated pine table, wearing their Sunday-best doyleys. “Beef sandwich?” she had ventured, when Ray came to sign the tenancy agreement. “It’s fresh this morning and the bread is home made. Mustard? It’s English.” O’Grady pushed a small, yellow-glazed, earthenware pot across the table towards Ray. It had a smiling face moulded on its front; a crackled tongue licked brown-lined lips and Ray realized that he would be required to scoop out its ochre brains with the integral, wooden spoon - that he might garnish the dead-cow cuisine, which still hovered in front of him. Blaming brunch, Ray deftly declined the phantom snack and managed to escape O’Grady’s kitchen without injury but holding a crisp, new rent book and a warm cherry scone. “In case you get peckish later, dear…” O’Grady fussed, as Ray left to collect his belongings.

The ample staircase that led up to Ray’s apartment was cleaved by a wide landing and the entire wall above it encased an enormous stained-glass window; bowed and distorted over the years, the slivers of coloured glass bulged like cancers from their skeletal leading. On Ray’s first visit to O’Grady’s, the afternoon sun was haemorrhaging through the elaborate panes, marbling the worn, indigo carpet beneath the window with multicoloured swatches of flickering light. “That one’s murder to clean!” puffed O’Grady, who was accompanying Ray on this treacherous ascent. Ray nodded and smiled as if for all the world he knew about cleaning troublesome windows and was later relieved to find the ones in his apartment quite plain, if a little rickety.

That was six months ago and Ray had gradually settled in; nevertheless, he could not cross that landing without encountering an apparition of O’Grady, balanced on a chair, yellow duster in hand, attempting to rub the distended panes smooth again. Right now, he wished he did have stained glass windows after all, as his apartment was unusually dull for that hour of the morning. There was no telltale lightening of the air proclaiming the approaching dawn and outside, the sky choked on miserable clouds, their heavy rain was spitting violently against the thin glass of Ray’s shaky windows. Ray felt like a prisoner on the way to execution, running the gauntlet of an enraged mob. He raised his eyes to the patchy ceiling, which peeled and shuddered, as the python coiled above him, to the point that Ray often lay awake at night, imagining that the ceiling might suddenly give way and he would find himself engulfed in dust, plaster and broken, wooden beams. He was less afraid of the debris than the hidden horrors it might contain. Ray would rather be buried in rubble than have to deal with the spiders that surely populated the space between joists, spinning their shrouds and ensnaring the unwary traveller that ventured there. Ray distrusted spiders. He had watched a movie once where a man, dressed all in black, entered houses noiselessly, in the darkest hour of the night. He would stand over the sleeping occupants; close enough for their heavy breath to mix with his own. He would study them for hours, maybe stroking their face lightly or patting a stray, strand of their hair with a gentle finger and then leave, as silently as he arrived. He didn’t hurt anyone but he could have. Spiders were like that.

Above him (and the spiders), on the second floor, was the studio of Max Flint, the celebrated sculptor. Ray suspected that Max had fashioned that inflexible name alongside the hulks of the oxidised blocks and vessels that landscaped the second floor rooms. Max Flint sounded like the reluctant hero from some forties comic book and Ray could never hear the address without a sly smile. Max had invited Ray up one time, to a curious cocktail party decorated with bizarre guests. Sharp, black-haired, alley-cats disguised in spiked heels, their mouths and fingers splashed with fresh blood; stout, oily voodoo-suits stuck with fat cigar-pins, balancing martinis and slapping the arses of their younger counterparts, bellowing like sea lions and waiting to catch the next fish they were thrown.

Mel Lampro