He paused at the end of the stairs and asked me if I could tell him what I knew before we went up to the bedrooms.
I don’t remember the whole thing in sequence, just flashes. But over the years I had managed to piece them together in a linear string. Now I can just about play them through, although the picture is jumpy and the cuts are rough.
It was like making a movie out of a series of photographs, I explained to Ed. All the key moments are there but the connective tissue between them is missing. This memory doesn’t unfold, it flickers.
I woke up in the middle of the night needing to go to the bathroom. I never did normally but I had snuck a can of Club Orange up with me to bed. The door to the room Anna and I shared was closed. I know this not because I can remember that the door was closed, but because I remember that the room was dark. I liked it that way. Anna had a little plug-in nightlight that she would fall asleep with but the first thing I did when I went up to bed every night was unplug it. If the door had been open, the light from the hall would’ve lit up the room and I would have noticed that something was different.
Tiptoeing, I moved from my bedroom to the bathroom. This was a journey of mere seconds; it was the next door along. The main light switch was outside but during the night my parents left a smaller light over the mirror on. I closed the bathroom door behind me as softly as I could. The key was in the lock but I didn’t turn it because it would make a clicking sound, which I knew from experience would be loud at this time of the night when it had no competitors. I didn’t flush the toilet for the same reason.
I had just pulled my underwear back up when I heard a strange noise. My first thought was asthma attack because it reminded me of the sounds a girl in school had made when she had an attack in PE class a few months before, a kind of muffled gasping. I thought Anna must be having a bad dream.
I can remember standing in front of the bathroom door, gripping the handle but not depressing it, when footsteps crossed the landing outside. They were moving away from me, left to right, towards my parents’ bedroom. They had a rhythm and weight to them that was unfamiliar.
I doubt that at that point it crossed my mind that there was anyone in my house except for members of my own family. It was beyond the realm of my own possible realities that a stranger would be in my home.
And yet, something made me stay where I was. A gut instinct. A few moments later, that same feeling made me turn the key in the lock and reach out to pull the string that would turn the light over the mirror off, leaving me hiding in the dark.
There was no screaming or yelling. All I could hear was the low hum of quiet voices and then several minutes, maybe, of a rhythmic whimpering I didn’t understand. This was followed by a series of heavy thumps. At one point I thought I heard my father’s voice saying no, just once, as in please no. There might have also been some scuffling, someone moving around on a carpeted floor.
I had no idea what was happening in my parents’ bedroom but I also had a profound sense that I shouldn’t know, that it was something dark and adult and frightening, and that the best plan was for me to wait it out, to stay exactly where I was, and not alert them to my wakeful state.
I can’t say if I thought about Anna. If I did it was to presume that she was fast asleep.
Minutes passed. The weird sounds died down and I pushed my ear to the gap between the door and frame, straining to hear. I thought I could hear something, muffled and distant, but I didn’t understand what activity could match it and, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t just imagining it, that it wasn’t merely the kind of pattern in the white noise you hear when you try to listen really, really hard. If I was scared, I mistook it for confusion. Maybe I made that mistake on purpose, to protect myself. But whatever I was thinking, feeling or hearing, I know I stayed in the bathroom. Standing with my nose to the back of the door. My hand on the key. Waiting.
Footsteps, suddenly, on the landing. Crossing it quickly, right to left. Towards the stairs.
I thought they must be my father’s. I moved to turn the key.
But then I heard another set of footsteps crossing the landing, and they also sounded like my father’s.
I froze.
Who was out there? What were they doing?
A yelp. Just the slightest sound, the kind of noise you might make if you slipped on ice and thought your legs were about to go from underneath you. This was followed by a series of thumps and bangs, and for some reason I knew exactly what the corresponding action to that soundtrack was: someone had just gone tumbling down the stairs.
There was one loud painful groan, then nothing else.
I don’t know how long I waited for the silence that followed that to end, but when it didn’t, I left the bathroom. I remember turning the key in the lock and wincing because the clicking of it seemed as loud as a siren. I remember opening the door. I remember that it was now dark outside, the ceiling light on the landing having been switched off at some point while I’d been in the bathroom.
But there was a light on downstairs. I moved towards it.
When I reached the top step and looked down, I saw a figure lying crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. The light illuminated him mercilessly but kept everything else in shadow. I remember it like a stage spotlight, even though that couldn’t have been how it was.
My father’s body was spread across the bottom three steps of the stairs. His head was pressed against the wall and his feet seemed tangled in the banisters. Everything seemed strangely angular and broken and wrong. I called out for him but he didn’t respond. I started towards him, descending a step or two, but there was something about the positioning of his body, its stillness … I got too scared. I ran back up and into my parents’ bedroom to wake my mother instead.
The door to the room I shared with Anna was closed now, I think, but I can’t be sure.
The light from downstairs couldn’t reach this corner of the landing so once I crossed the threshold of my parents’ room, I was in the dark and navigating by memory. I walked forward, knowing that in a few steps I would hit my mother’s bedside table and then, a few inches after that, her side of the bed. I think I whispered her name, then said it, then called her. No response. There was a weird smell. Just as I reached the bed, my foot touched something wet and sticky. I started patting the blankets, trying to find an arm to grip and shake, but stopped when my hands felt the same wet and sticky substance. I reached out to my left, slicing the air in search of the bedside lamp. When I found it, I felt for the switch up under the shade. Pushed. In the sudden light I saw that the blanket was pulled right up to the headboard and there was blood everywhere: on the blanket, on the walls, on the lampshade.
I pushed the switch again, plunging the room back into darkness.
That’s it.
After that there’s just flashing lights and my grandmother with her hair loose around her shoulders and wrong rooms, and someone carving out a hollow at the core of me with something rusty and blunt, a void that will remain there for ever.
Jim took his pencil and went back over the last few pages, underlining all the sentences that were inaccurate or untrue. Then he circled the words ‘That’s it’ and wrote, Is it? Where’s the rest??? alongside them.
Did Eve really remember it this way?
Or was this a lie of omission?