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Ransom rolls on to his back, yawns, stretches out his legs and farts, luxuriously. He feels good. No. No. Scratch that. He feels great. And he smells coffee. The golfer flares his nostrils and inhales deeply. Coffee! He loves coffee! He wiggles his toes, excitedly, then frowns. His feet appear to be protruding – Alice in Wonderland-style – from the end of his bed. He puts a hand above his head (thinking he might’ve inadvertently slipped down) and his hand smacks into a wooden headboard.
Ow!
He opens a furtive eye and gazes up at the ceiling. He double-blinks. He is in a tiny room. It is a pink room, and it is a smaller room than any room he can ever remember inhabiting previously. A broom cupboard with a window. Yes. And it is pink. And the bed is very small. He is covered with a duvet, a pink duvet, and the duvet has – his sleep-addled eyes struggle to focus – pink ponies on it! Little pink ponies, dancing around! The duvet is tiny – ludicrously small, like a joke. A laughably tiny duvet. A trick duvet. A miniature duvet. He tries to adjust it but he feels like he’s adjusting some kind of baby throw. A dog blanket. When he moves it one way, a different part of his body protrudes on the other side. His body (he is forced to observe) is not looking at its best. His body looks very big. His body looks coarse and capacious in this tiny, dainty, girly, pink room. His body looks hairy. It feels voluminous.
He shuts his eyes again. He suddenly has a headache. He thinks about the coffee. He can definitely smell coffee. He needs a coffee. He opens his eyes, turns his head and peers off to his right. (Might there be a door to this room so that he can eventually get –)
WHAH!
Ransom yelps, startled, snatching at the duvet. Two women – complete strangers! – are standing by the bed and staring down at him, inquisitively. Not two women. No. Not …
A woman and a girl. Yes. But the woman isn’t a woman, she is a priest (in her black shirt and dog collar), and the girl isn’t a girl, she’s … What is she? He inspects the girl, horrified. She’s half a girl. The lower section of her face is … It’s missing. A catastrophe. It’s gone walkabout. Or if not quite missing, exactly, then … uh … a work in progress. A mess of wire and scar and scaffolding.
The girl registers his disquiet and quickly covers her jaw with her hand. Ransom immediately switches his gaze back to the priest again, embarrassed.
‘Thank goodness he’s finally awake,’ the priest murmurs, relieved.
The half-faced girl nods, emphatically. She is wearing a school uniform. Her hair is in two, neat plaits.
‘I don’t recognize him,’ she whispers, from behind her hand. ‘Dad said he was really famous, but I don’t recognize him at all.’
It takes a while for Ransom to fully decipher her jumbled speech, and when he finally succeeds he feels an odd combination of satisfaction and disgruntlement.
‘Ssshh!’ the priest cautions her.
‘Where am I?’ Ransom croaks, trying to lift his head.
‘You’re in my bedroom,’ the girl promptly answers.
‘I left you to lie in for as long as I could,’ the priest tells him (rather brusquely, Ransom feels). ‘Gene left for work several hours ago. But Mallory needs to go to school and I’m scheduled to meet the bishop in Northampton at ten …’ She checks the time. ‘I don’t have the slightest clue where Stan is right now, so …’
She shrugs.
‘Oh.’
Ransom feels overwhelmed by an excess of information.
‘I like your feet.’ The girl chuckles, pointing.
After a short period of deciphering, Ransom peers down at his feet. He can see nothing particularly remarkable or amusing about them.
‘Thanks,’ he says, just the same, and then slips a hand under the duvet to check he’s still decent (he is – just about).
‘Your clothes are folded up on the stool,’ the priest says, pointing to a pile of clothes folded up on a pink stool.
‘I folded them,’ the girl says.
Ransom lightly touches his head. He suddenly feels a little dizzy. And he feels huge. It’s a strange feeling. Because it’s not just his actual, physical size, it’s also his … it’s … it’s …
‘I suddenly feel a bit …’
‘Nauseous?’ the priest fills in, anxiously. ‘There’s a bucket next to the bed if you’re …’
‘If he’s sick in my bed I’ll just die!’ the girl exclaims.
‘… big,’ Ransom finally concludes. ‘I suddenly feel very … very big. Very large.’
He pauses. ‘And conspicuous,’ he adds, ‘and vulnerable.’ He shudders (impressing himself inordinately with how frank and brave and articulate he’s being).
Nobody says anything. They just stare down at him again, silently.
‘I’ve brought you some coffee,’ the woman eventually mutters. She proffers him a cup.
‘If he’s sick in my bed I’ll just die!’ the girl repeats, still more emphatically.
‘I feel like I’m trapped inside this weird, fish-eye lens,’ Ransom continues, holding out his hands in front of his face and wiggling his fingers, ‘like I’m –’
‘There should be a little water left in the boiler,’ the priest interrupts him, ‘enough for a quick shower. You can use the pink towel. It’s clean. And you can help yourself to some cereal, but I’m afraid we’re all out of –’
‘Not the pink towel, Mum!’ Mallory whispers, imploringly. ‘Not my towel!’
‘It’s the only clean towel we’ve got,’ the priest explains. ‘I haven’t had time to do the –’
‘But it’s –’
‘Enough, Mallory!’ the priest reprimands her, pushing the coffee cup into Ransom’s outstretched hands. ‘You’re already late for school. Did you pack up your lunch yet?’
The girl slowly shakes her head.
‘Well hadn’t you better go and do it, then?’
They turn for the door.
‘I won’t use the pink towel,’ Ransom pipes up.
The priest glances over her shoulder at him, irritably.
‘I won’t have a shower,’ Ransom says, intimidated (she is intimidating). ‘I can always have one when I get back to the hotel.’
‘Fine.’ She shrugs. ‘But if you do decide to …’
‘I won’t,’ he insists. ‘So don’t fret,’ he yells after the girl. ‘Your towel is safe.’
He carefully props himself up on to his elbow and takes a quick sip of his coffee, then winces (it’s instant – bad instant).
‘Where am I, exactly?’ he asks, but nobody’s listening. They’ve already left him.
‘Where am I, exactly?’ he asks again, more ruminatively this time, pretending – as a matter of pride – that he was only ever really posing this question – and in a purely metaphysical sense, of course – to himself.
* * *
Gene knocks on the door and then waits. After a few seconds he inspects his watch, grimaces, knocks again, then stares, blankly, at the decorative panes of stained glass inside the door’s three, main panels. In his hands he holds the essential tools of his trade: a small mirror (hidden within a slightly dented metal powder compact, long denuded of its powder), a miniature torch (bottle green in colour, the type a film critic might use) and a clipboard (with his plastic, identification badge pinned on to the front of it).
No answer.
He studies his watch again, frowning. He knocks at the door for a third time, slightly harder, and realizes, as he does so, that the door isn’t actually shut, just loosely pulled to.
He scowls, cocks his head and listens. He thinks he can hear the buzz of an electric razor emerging from inside. He pushes the door ajar and pops his head through the gap.
‘Hello?’ he calls.
No answer. Still the hum of the razor.
‘HELLO?’ Gene repeats, even louder. ‘Is anybody home?’
The razor is turned off for a moment.
‘Upstairs!’ a voice yells back (a female voice, an emphatic voice). ‘In the bathroom!’
Gene frowns. He pushes the door wider. The razor starts up again.
‘HELLO?’
The razor is turned off again (with a sharp tut).
‘The bathroom!’ the voice repeats, even more emphatically. ‘Upstairs!’
The razor is turned on again.
Gene gingerly steps into the hallway. He closes the door behind him. The hallway is long and thin with the original – heavily cracked – blue and brown ceramic tiles on the floor. There are two doors leading off from it (one directly to his left and one at the far end of the corridor, beyond the stairway. Both are currently closed, although the buzz of the razor appears to be emerging from the door that’s further off).
The stairs lie directly ahead of him. Gene hesitates for a moment and then moves towards them. At the foot of the stairs is a small cupboard. He has already visited seven similar properties on this particular road and he knows for a fact that in all seven of the aforementioned properties the electricity meter is comfortably stored inside this neat, custom-made aperture. Gene pauses, stares at the cupboard, then reaches out a tentative hand towards it.
His fingers are just about to grip the handle when –
‘UPSTAIRS!’
The woman yells.
Gene quickly withdraws his hand. He sighs. He shakes his head. He gazes up the stairs, with a measure of foreboding.
‘THE BATHROOM!’ the voice re-emphasizes, quite urgently. ‘QUICK!’
Gene starts climbing the stairs. Sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs is a large, long-haired tabby cat which coolly appraises his grudging ascent. When he reaches the landing it turns and darts off, ears pricked, tail high, jinking a sharp left into an adjacent room which – from the particular quality of the light flowing from it – Gene takes to be the bathroom. Gene follows the cat into this room and then draws to a sharp halt.
The bathroom (his hunch proved correct) is crammed full of cats. Five cats, to be exact. One cat is perched on the windowsill (the window is slightly ajar) and it takes fright on his entering (leaping to its feet, hackles rising, hissing), then squeezes through the gap and promptly disappears. Three others – with rather more sanguine dispositions – are arranged on the worn linoleum in a polite semicircle around the edge of the bath. The fifth cat – and the boldest – is sitting on the corner of the bath itself, closest to the taps.
The bath – an old bath, long and narrow, with heavily chipped enamel – is currently full of water. Next to the bath (and the cats) is an old, metal watering can which Gene inadvertently kicks on first entering. He exclaims as his toe makes contact, but it isn’t so much the can (or his clumsiness) that he’s exclaiming at. He is exclaiming – with a mixture of surprise and consternation – at the rat.
There is a rat in the bath – a large, brown rat – doggy-paddling aimlessly around. Gene bends down and slowly adjusts the watering can, his eyes glued to the rodent.
It is huge – at least twelve inches in length (excluding the tail) – and it is plainly exhausted. As Gene quietly watches, it suddenly stops swimming and tries to stand up, but the water is too deep. It goes under for a second, panics, and then returns to the surface again, spluttering.
Gene is no great fan of rats – or of rodents, in general – yet he can’t help but feel moved by this particular one’s predicament.
‘I suppose I’d better get you out of there, eh?’ he mutters, popping the torch between his teeth, transferring the powder compact into the hand with the clipboard, reaching down and calmly grabbing its tail.
The rat is heavier than he anticipated as it exits the water. He observes (from its prodigious testicles) that it is male. ‘How long’ve you been in there, huh?’ Gene chuckles, through clenched teeth, as it jerks and swings through the air, legs scrabbling, frantic to escape.
The cats all commence padding around below it. Two rise on to their back haunches, paws tentatively raised.
‘Sod off!’ Gene knees a cat out of the way and lifts the rat higher, suddenly rather protective of it. The rat gives up its struggle, relaxes and just hangs there, limply.
‘Very sensible,’ Gene commends it. He peers around the bathroom (to check there’s nothing left in there to detain him), then slowly processes downstairs carrying the rat, gingerly, ahead of him (followed by a furry, feline train).
He pauses for a second in the hallway, unsure of what to do next. He decides (spurred on by the sound of voices) to consult with the opinionated female on this issue – presumably the home-owner – and so pads down the corridor.
It is difficult for him to knock (or to speak, for that matter, with the torch still gripped between his teeth) so he simply bangs on the door with his elbow and shoves it open with his shoulder.
He is not entirely prepared for the sight that greets him. He blinks. The room is cream-coloured – cream walls, cream blinds, imbued with an almost surgical atmosphere – and flooded with artificial light. A crouching woman with red lips and quiffed, auburn hair (tied up, forces’ sweetheart-style, in a neatly knotted, polka-dotted scarf), gasps as he enters. Another woman – dark-haired, semi-naked, her back to him (thank heaven for small mercies!) – propped up on a special, padded bench, is inspecting her own genitals in a small, hand-held mirror, as the first woman (the gasping woman) shines a tiny torch into the requisite area. The rat begins to struggle.
Gene immediately backs out of the room, horrified. The door swings shut on its hinges. He retreats down the corridor, hearing an excitable discussion taking place inside (crowned by several, muttered apologies, then rapid footsteps). The door opens. The auburn-haired woman stands before him. She is wearing a white, plastic, disposable apron and matching disposable gloves. She is still holding the torch. She seems furious, then terrified (on seeing the rat, close at hand) then furious again.
He notices that her auburn hair is quaintly pin-curled underneath the scarf (which reminds him – with a sudden, painful stab of emotion – of his beloved late grandmother, who once used to curl her hair in exactly this manner). The woman is slight but curvaceous (the kind of girl who at one time might’ve been lovingly etched on to the nose of a spitfire) with a sweet, heart-shaped face (he sees a sprinkling of light freckles under her make-up), two perfectly angular, black eyebrows and a pair of wide, dark blue eyes, the top lids of which are painstakingly liquid-linered. Her lips are a deep, poppy red, although her lipstick – he notes, fascinated – is slightly smudged at one corner.
‘Who are you?’ she demands, flapping her hands at him to move him further on down the hallway. ‘What on earth d’you think you’re doing?’
‘I’ve come to read the …’
Gene lifts the clipboard, trying not to trip up over the cats, his speech (through the torch) somewhat slurred. Both parties notice, at the same moment, that their torches are identical.
‘I should probably …’ He lifts the struggling rat.
The woman darts past him (he registers the solid sound of her heels on the tiles), yanks the door open and shoves him outside. Gene drops the rat into the tiny, paved, front garden and it immediately seeks shelter behind a group of bins.
‘I thought you were my brother!’ the woman exclaims.
Gene spits out his torch. ‘I came to read your meter,’ he stutters, ‘but the door was ajar and when I …’
A phone commences ringing in the hallway behind her. It has an old-fashioned ring. It is an old-fashioned phone: black, square, Bakelite, perched on a tall, walnut table, just along from a large aspidistra in a jardinière. Gene frowns. He has no recollection of noticing either the phone or the plant on first entering the hallway a short while earlier.
The woman turns to inspect the phone, then turns back to face him again.
‘Stay there,’ she mutters, glowering. ‘I should answer that.’
She slams the door shut.
Gene waits on the step as a brief conversation takes place inside. He glances around him, looking for the rat. He inspects his watch again. He dries his torch on his shirt-front. The door opens.
