Me, Myself and Them Read online

  “Perhaps I will,” Denis lied. “Maybe next time.” It was always maybe next time.

  “They say that you’re there every week. You bring him flowers. Purple ones. Jules’s favorite. That’s very good of you.” Her face beamed sympathy at him.

  “How do you take your tea again, Mom?” Denis asked. It was a stupid question, and he knew it. He was well aware of how his mother took her tea. How one takes one’s tea is an important matter, and such things never escaped his memory. He was beginning to get flustered as she dangerously approached the topic that she always seemed to be steering toward. A short retreat might suffice.

  “Strong, please,” she replied with a sigh. “Two sugars, just a drop of milk.” The battle for conversation was fought in trenches of politeness and references to the weather.

  “Will you come with me to visit your sister? You haven’t been in a while,” she tried again, another probing attack.

  Her face rose in his mind, with her nose piercing and her sharp blue eyes, stabbing at the inside of his head. Her smile and a memory of the sound of an ice-cream truck. It was an old memory, not like the picture he had found earlier. She was just a child in this memory. He pushed it from his thoughts.

  Don’t push it, you prick. Don’t you dare push it away. She deserves more than that, you selfish bastard.

  “How has work been?” he asked, completely ignoring her question and calming himself. He could focus, bury the memories and go into full retreat. She could come at him all day. She would find seven years of defensive work had more than prepared his fortifications. Stalemate was the only winner of the day.

  They returned to polite conversation. Denis lit the fire and they talked about this and that. Safe topics. Try though he might, Denis remained permanently on edge when she was around, as though she could at any minute attempt another assault.

  They discussed Denis’s mortgage. His mother had been financially very sound and had managed the family budget for as long as Denis could remember. She offered advice from the other side of the room, never hiding her desire to sit next to her son and hold him. They talked about Uncle Jack, his father’s brother. Uncle Jack still kept in touch, calling and visiting. Denis guessed that he must feel guilty about his little brother’s abandonment of his family. His mother had a lot of time for Uncle Jack. She had a lot of time for everyone really. During this part of the conversation, Denis carefully avoided any mention of his father. It was another potential landmine. For a while they discussed driving, and Denis joked about how much he hated other drivers. For a moment, as he laughed at some quip or other about motorists, his mother’s face lit up, as if merely the sight of him smiling was enough to sustain her for another week. Her joy was bitter to him. Bitter because it had to be dug up by so little a thing as a laugh. By the time she got up to leave, Denis felt like he’d been through a whirlwind. The required focus to maintain polite conversation after one had broken their mother’s heart, yet again, was tiring. Something welled up in his mind, something familiar and unpleasant. It was like the tinge of regret he had felt the day before as Rebecca had disappeared around the corner. Denis tried to push the feeling down, but it persisted as they made their way through the house, desperately trying to find a way not to think about the photograph of Rebecca with her too-beautiful smile. He was still thinking about it as he showed his mother to the door. She paused and offered him a hug, just as she had done arriving. Denis pretended to be checking on the clouds to make sure it wasn’t raining. She pretended that he really didn’t see the offered hug, and he could almost feel his soul shrivel up inside him. When would she quit? At what point would she just accept that he was broken and leave him be? Did Rebecca know? Had someone told her?

  “Denis,” cooed Penny’s voice from back inside the kitchen. “I’ve hidden a dirty plate somewhere in the house. Somewhere it’s likely to leave a stain, and I’m not going to tell you where.”

  “What kind of stain?” he asked, as his mind considered the grim possibilities.

  “Why would I tell you that and ruin all my fun?” she replied.

  He thought he could smell soy sauce, honey and flour mixed with water, and he had a strong feeling she probably shoved it under his cushion on the couch before replacing the throw on the back to keep him off the trail. He could practically see her doing it. She was right of course; it would stain. And badly. He might have to spend hours just scrubbing to get it out. He found the thought repugnant, and yet he let himself be dragged away by it and lost the rest of his Sunday evening to a sink and the effervescent action of his array of cleaners and cleansers. He went to bed a weary man.

  * * *

  “Wake up,” Plasterer’s voice barked, snapping Denis out of his dream.

  He half woke but kept his eyes closed. His feet were cold; he couldn’t feel his duvet.

  “I said, wake up,” the clown snarled at him.

  And suddenly Denis was wide-awake and standing in the middle of his kitchen. He looked about in confusion. The last thing he could remember was falling asleep and dreaming.

  “You were having a nightmare,” Plasterer told him.

  “Where’s Professor?” Denis asked, the fog of sleep inertia still clouding his thoughts.

  “Probably where you left him,” Plasterer replied.

  “In my dreams?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Denis told the clown groggily.

  “Rich, coming from you,” Plasterer rejoined. “Don’t step in the mess.”

  Denis looked about him, actually taking in what he saw for the first time since waking. The tiled kitchen floor was covered by a thin blanket of biscuit crumbs save for a tiny circle around the spot he was standing in. They must have torn the pantry apart to create such a fine-grained mess.

  “Did you do this?” he asked Plasterer, trying and failing to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  “Do you think I have nothing better to be doing?” the clown asked indignantly, but Denis thought he heard a note of amusement.

  “If not you, then who?” Denis asked.

  “Who indeed?” Plasterer asked back mysteriously.

  “You going to help?”

  The big clown just laughed as he walked about the room, his feet crunching as he moved.

  “Wanna tell me about your dream?” he asked pleasantly.

  “It was weird. You were in it.”

  “Naturally,” the clown replied modestly. “I expect you dream about me often.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Denis scoffed at him, refusing to admit that all of his housemates frequently occupied his dreams.

  “What happened?”

  Denis told him the story of the dream, struggling for details as the images, so sharp when he felt them, dulled second by second. In it, he had been standing in the hospital listening to Eddie screaming in pain while Ned and Ann smiled encouragingly at him. The Professor had stood beside him in the dream, holding wilted purple flowers, his attempted smile terrifying on his ruined, decaying face.

  Then Denis had looked again, and it was himself in the hospital bed screaming, his mother sitting by his side patting his hand consolingly. Plasterer stood next to her, holding purple flowers and roaring at him to shut up.

  He recounted the dream to his burly, heavily made-up friend in sleepy groggy tones. The terror had passed as soon as he woke up; all that was left was the memory of it.

  “Typical you,” Plasterer told him dismissively.

  “Typical me? How so?”

  “It’s all you, you, you. And you’re overdramatic.”

  Denis didn’t consider himself a particularly dramatic person. Quite the opposite in fact.

  “Anyway,” the clown continued. “It’s past my bedtime. Have fun cleaning. No more sleepwalking, okay?”

  He disliked taking orders from the clown, pa
rticularly orders that were well past his ability to obey, but it did feel like sensible advice. His feet were too cold for more sleepwalking.

  Denis thought about going to bed, but instead decided to tackle the mess. He wouldn’t sleep if he didn’t. As he cleaned, he thought about his mother, his poor mother, just as broken as he was, but she didn’t have the support network he had. No one lived with her. He thought about her good nature and her quietly determined attitude. Jules had taken after her; he had not. In his youth he had been a rogue, fond of his drink, fond of his late nights, none too fond of hard work or responsibility.

  You miss it. Don’t pretend you don’t.

  He didn’t miss it. The unpredictability of it, the flakiness. Turning up to class when he felt like it, returning calls if and when he felt like it, feeling things when he felt like it. And then justifying it all in the name of living his life. Explaining it all away with a simple “that’s who I am” as if such words excused him from all blame. He was, he decided, as he cleaned crumbs from his heels, much better off without the old version of himself. He comforted himself with that thought as he gently eased himself into bed so as not to disturb Penny, purring in her sleep.

  THERE YOU ARE

  Mondays can be tough on people. For most people it’s a result of returning to work after a weekend away from the grind, socializing with friends, sleeping in, spending quality time. For Denis, Mondays were tough because of his mother’s routinely upsetting visits, and this particular Monday was harder again because of the sleepwalking and the nightmares of the night before. Not that he wasn’t used to them; left to their own devices, Denis’s thoughts would stray into nightmare territory often, and sleepwalking wasn’t uncommon for him either. There was just something particularly jarring about his late-night escapades of the night before. To compound his misery, he had barely any cookies left. He busied himself, as only Denis could, in tasks and time-tabling. He worked, he printed things, wrote notes, scanned other things, pushed the buttons on the calculator. He had deliberately hunted for a calculator with larger, more raised buttons as he found the tactile sensation of pushing and releasing each button in rapid succession to be a wonderful, simple pleasure.

  He ate a basic lunch, cold cuts on brown bread, soup made up from powder in a pouch with the easy-tear top. He performed the act of lunch making with solemnity under the supervision of his housemates who lounged here and there. Penny, Deano and the Professor moved about, sitting by the dining table, prim and proper, or perching on the counter, absently searching through the higher cupboards for something to play with, and then to smash. Only Plasterer didn’t move around. He hovered by Denis’s shoulder in the afternoon, flexing occasionally or pressing down on the counter as if testing it. His movement was a constant anxious movement, a sort of pent-up energy that had nowhere to go. They babbled at him as he moved. Why that soup? Why that bread? Why not something else? Why this house? Why not other people? He tolerated them as he moved about, smiling to himself from time to time. Their enthusiasm was palpable. After he had finished work, he set about preparing his dinner, only to realize he was going to have to get creative with his recipes, since almost everything edible had vanished.

  Someone as organized as Denis Murphy never allowed his cupboards to go bare, but his housemates frequently found use for food items in their games and misadventures. Among the tremendous works of art they had bent their considerable creativity toward were the Leaning Tower of Pizzas, for which they had emptied the freezer and crisper, and the Milka Lisa, which took Denis over an hour to mop up and caused his house to stink, and which in turn caused him to have a panic attack. And then there was The Kitchen Chapel, for which the artists themselves had removed every single item from the cupboards in the kitchen and transferred them to the ceiling.

  Because of their artistic endeavors, Denis frequently had to restock his home with new food and cleaning products. By the time he had cooked, eaten and ordered all the various provisions that a single man and four monsters required, Denis was all out of energy. He flopped onto the couch to unwind that evening feeling drained, pleasantly tired.

  “You look tired,” Plasterer told him from his spot on Denis’s left.

  “Bad night last night,” he told the clown.

  “Well, then, isn’t it great to have us to tire you out?” Penny O’Neill asked from his right.

  “Yeah. It’s nice to have you guys around. Even if you are very annoying.”

  “Such eloquent and charming backhanded compliments,” the Professor announced loftily.

  Denis glanced at the zombie and found himself flashing back to the nightmare; Eddie screaming and the Professor smiling. He almost shuddered.

  “Not to worry,” Plasterer told him reassuringly. “You’ll sleep like a log tonight.”

  But Denis didn’t sleep like a log. Just as he settled into his bed he remembered the flash of a pink scarf, the brown hair, and for the first time in a very long time, Denis glanced to the other side of the bed and missed her presence.

  On Tuesday, he received the grocery delivery from a wide-eyed delivery man who must have heard the racket Plasterer was making in the living room, since he appeared half-terrified. Denis tried to tip him only for the man to back away cautiously from him. He shrugged it off, carried out the door-locking procedure and went back to work.

  On Wednesday, he had to take a phone call from work, while Plasterer pummeled the Professor all about the living room for reasons Denis thought he was better off not knowing. The call involved something to do with his handwriting being illegible, and someone called Marshall from Human Resources wanted an explanation. He tried to explain it all, while the bigger of his two monstrous housemates kicked the other in the ribs.

  On Thursday, a man collecting for charity arrived at the door, and Denis was forced into another awkward standoff when the man offered his hand for a shake and Denis had put his hands behind his back. He knew the man was offended, so he went to new levels of politeness and donated a substantial sum of money to compensate. Such were the trade-offs Denis made to secure a comfortable life of not touching other people.

  His week progressed, as it always did, minute by minute, job by job, day by day, and at the end of each day, regardless of how well or poorly they behaved, Denis found himself sitting down with his housemates to watch television in good form. Tired, but content.

  Rebecca intruded upon his thoughts from time to time, distracting him at a moment when his guard was down. A pop-up ad when he least expected it. An image of her, as she was when she had left many years before, and then what details he could remember from the previous Saturday. She was more tanned now; she looked more grown-up too. He wondered when she had plaited her hair. He was saved from these moments by his housemates, usually Penny O’Neill, who seemed extra-affectionate even by her own feline standards, and when the moment had passed, he found he could put Rebecca out of his head with a little effort.

  It wasn’t until Friday that Denis found his proverbial applecart well and truly upset.

  His housemates were about to begin a game of Slide, where they soak the floor of the kitchen and then take turns trying to slide the farthest, when the doorbell rang.

  As usual, they ran for safety, leaving Denis to deal with whoever was there. He always found that slightly unfair, that they knew how much he hated other people, but refused to even offer to answer the door when people came to visit. He limped to the door, his side aching. He had been sitting awkwardly all day, and now had the stoop to show for it.

  He carefully carried out his door-unlocking procedure and opened it to the stranger. Outside stood a jocular looking young man with dark skin and a short haircut. He was dressed in what Denis supposed might pass for “looking cool” these days. He smiled a tight smile of introduction. The kind of forced pleasantness most people display when in new company for the first time. The kind of forced pleasantness Denis could understan
d. He returned the smile with one of his own.

  “Marshall,” the man said by way of introduction, thrusting out one hand.

  “Denis,” Denis replied, whipping both hands behind his back.

  The other man nodded knowingly. He knew. Somehow he knew about Denis. Which meant someone was talking about him. Denis seethed at the thought, but kept his tight outward smile showing.

  “Can I help you, Marshall?” he asked, unclenching his teeth.

  “Just wanted some clarification on something. I know we spoke on the phone the other day, but I wasn’t entirely certain...”

  He was from Denis’s workplace, then. This was bad. Not quite his mother visiting levels of bad, but not much better. They must have been talking about him at work. About how weird he was, about how he was a recluse, how he had no one. He straightened as much as his aching side would allow—he definitely didn’t want to add a deformity to the already outrageous stories about him. What else were they saying? For a moment he hated the young man, brandishing a sheet of paper at him and still babbling. Denis realized with alarm that he had not been listening.

  “Would you like to come in?” he asked, more to cover for the fact that he didn’t know what the man was talking about than out of any real interest in having a guest.

  “Well,” the man replied, clearly shocked. “If you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” Denis lied.

  It was only when the man was in the door that Denis remembered the game of Slide that had been about to begin.

  “You’ll have to mind the water all over the kitchen floor,” he said as pleasantly as he could, thinking fast, “I’ve had a burst pipe under the sink. Been an awful nuisance.”

  “No problem,” Marshall said, trying to look all about the house at once. No doubt he would report back to work on what kind of conditions the weirdo lived in. Denis was determined not to give him anything to work with. They could call him weird if they wanted, but Denis wouldn’t give them any more ammo to fire at him.