Helen

Something jolts the woman out of her sleep. The room is in utter darkness; no crack of light shows at the window; no street light’s flare seeps around the edges of the curtains. The woman is alone with the silence and whatever it was that jolted her awake.

Her heart pounds in her chest, and she holds her body still, the better to scour the air for a sound or a sign of what it was that woke her. All she can hear, though, is the blood swooshing through her ears and in her veins; the pressure of it making its own sticky, coagulating rhythm in her head.

The woman sits upright in her bed, not even leaning back against the headboard. Upright, straight and rigid, all muscles in her body tense, her jaw clenched.

It becomes clear that there is no sound anywhere in the house. There is nothing that could have woken her. It must have been her body twitching, muscles going into spasm, shaking her as though a hand had grabbed her by the shoulder.

She lies down, flat on her back; she holds her arms straight by her side; her legs are stretched out straight and flat upon the bed. Her eyes are fixed on the ceiling above her, even though it is too dark for them to see anything. She keeps her eyes wide open. Now she is awake, she is resistant again to sleep.

Gradually, her muscles relax and, without realising it, as though she has been given an anaesthetic, she drifts off, tumbling slowly down into sleep.

Seconds later, she jolts awake again. In her mind, the image of a hand gripping her arm and shaking her is burned. It appears in sepia relief, its shades and tones all wrong, like some badly exposed or deteriorating Kodacolor print from the ‘70s. Sitting up again, she touches her arm where she imagines the hand has been, and feels a tenderness to the flesh.

She clicks on the bedside light and looks at her arm. A rose tattoo is blossoming there; a mark left behind by a hand bigger and stronger than her own. The hand that imprinted itself on her mind.

The silence makes her feel as though she has gone deaf. The bedroom seems smaller in the light from the side lamp. The woman recognises the hand, but doesn’t remember why. The bedside light dips; a power surge somewhere else, no doubt.

Four fingers to the outside, the thumb on the inside, digging into the softest part of her arm. This is where the tenderness is. There will be a bruise in the morning, she is sure of it.

The woman lies down on her side and clicks the light off. She remains on her side and waits for sleep to catch up with her again. Her breathing slows and deepens, and her eyes slowly close.

In the morning, she feels slightly confused. It is hard to tell whether she dreamed the things that happened in the night, or whether her arm really did bear the marks of someone else’s hand.

She rubs sleep from her eyes and adjusts her vision to the sun shining on the back of the curtains, haunting the room with the promise of daylight. She yawns and stretches like a cat.

She rises from the bed and goes into the bathroom. In the glare of the spotlights bearing down on her from the ceiling, the woman regards herself in the mirror. She stands and stares, immobile, for an age of desperate minutes before she opens the mouth that should be there and tries to scream.

“Helen? Helen? Wake up!”

He is shaking her by the shoulder. Helen hears herself moaning slightly, somewhere in the distance. She swims up from the depths of sleep, surfacing to find his concerned face peering at her over her shoulder.

She feels damp. His hand releases her shoulder, stops shaking her now that he is certain she’s awake. His same hand brushes her damp hair away from her face.

“I had the dream again,” she says. Her voice comes out a whisper. His hand, intending to soothe, is almost more than she can bear, and she clenches her jaw to contain the growing irritation. His fingers are barely grazing her temple, but the rhythm of his stroking and the way he continues to brush away hair that is no longer there is enough to make her want to scream.

“The same one?” he asks, his voice hushed and packed tight with concern.

Helen turns her face away from him and nods. He takes his hand away and lies back down beside her. She knows from the pitch and roll of his movement that he has landed staring up at the ceiling. They lie there, side by side, not speaking.

Eventually, he gets up and goes downstairs to the kitchen. She hears him moving pots around, filling and boiling the kettle, making morning noises. Saturdays are always like this. In twenty minutes, he will have drunk a small coffee, pulled on his jogging bottoms and his trainers, unlocked the back door and set off for the newsagents. Helen knows the ritual.

He comes back with the day’s paper, makes more coffee, some toast, puts it all on a tray and brings it up to her. The sections of the paper are shared out according to preference, and they sit and read and eat in companionable silence.

Every so often, he reads aloud something that has caught hold of his attention. Something funny, something silly, something that stokes his ire and makes him outraged. Helen is expected to respond in the correct way; with laughter, with a giggle, with pursed lipped disapproval.

Something in her has turned to stone, though. Today she is unable to raise the response he requires from her as his audience. She drinks her coffee, draining the horrifically bright and cheerful oversized teacup, and sits beside him, feeling the weight of the cup in her hand.

He snorts and sniggers at something he has found amusing, and Helen considers how it would feel to smash this giant cup into his face. She considers the damage she could do, if she were to smash the cup against the edge of her bedside table and use one of the shards to carve his face into ribbons of bloody flesh.

She looks long and hard at the cup, and quiet voices sing inside her head.

Images flash into her mind. A man, grabbing at her, gripping her arm. Her eyes moving from his face, to where his hand is, and back to his face again. He is falling in front of her, pleading. Something warm and sticky has landed against her cheek. The man’s hand has released her, and she sees the mark his fingers have left behind. She looks down at him, at the place where his left eye used to be, at the hole and the ragged edges and the blood. She lifts her hand to her cheek and pulls away the lump of flesh that she finds there. She shakes it free of her fingers and watches as it falls to the ground.

Everyone around her is falling to the ground. In the distance, Helen can hear screams and loud male voices shouting. They sound like barks, harsh and sharp and jarring to her ears. Only Helen is still standing, looking down at the man who has fallen to the ground in front of her, looking around at the rest of the commuters on their way home like her.

Someone grabs her arms, pinning them to her sides, and lifts her bodily away from where she stands. It seems to Helen as though she is suddenly airborne, flying gently through the air, and coming to land in one of the connecting tunnels between platforms.

They ask her questions over the days and weeks that follow. All kinds of people, in all kinds of rooms. She is unharmed physically. Some bruising where both men gripped her arms; the man who died and the officer who removed her from the platform.

She moves along the surface of her life, knowing that nothing matters any more. Helen can’t find a way to let things matter now. She talks and laughs and drinks and eats. She pulls together a disguise for herself to wear.

She dreams of waking and having no face. She dreams of a man’s hand, gripping her arm. She dreams of waking and still seeing the rose tattoo.

She wakes, and she is with him, going through the motions. If they could kill the one man in front of her, why can’t she kill the one now beside her? This is a puzzle Helen knows she will never unravel.

She puts down the cup, moves her legs from under the duvet and the newspaper sections that sit on top of it, and walks from the bedroom.

From an old shoe box in the cupboard under the stairs, Helen takes the gun she bought weeks ago. She places the barrel in her mouth and pulls the trigger.

Skull, hair, brains and blood form a Rorschach inkblot on the wall behind her. The world disappears from Helen’s view and, upstairs in the bedroom, falls into slow motion for Jonathan.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006