Booranga Writers Centre
Writing - Prize Winning Entries
Nothing Contemplates Nothing by Daniel King
1
The house seemed both new and old, Matt thought, as he dragged the last crate into the lounge. It was new in the sense that he had just moved in; but it was old in the sense that someone had recently died in the house, and death always seemed to him to give things an archaic feel.
He glanced around, catching his breath. He would be happier, he realised, if he had been told exactly where the person had died. But the estate agent hadn't known - or hadn't been prepared to say. All that he had claimed to know was that somewhere in the house the previous tenant - an amateur writer, like himself - had committed suicide, that the body had not been found for nine days, and that two fumigations had been required to clear the house of the stench. Remembering that he had just inhaled deeply, he concentrated, morbidly fascinated by the idea that a trace of the smell might remain. But it was daylight, and the abundance of visual and aural distractions made concentrating on smells difficult. It would probably be different at night, he told himself - and then wished he hadn't.
He glanced around the room again, hating the idea of all the unpacking. Fortunately, rudimentary furnishings - not those belonging to the previous tenant, he had been assured - had been provided; so any exertion would be minimal. In the lounge, which had a low ceiling, the furnishings included blinds of an insipid buff colour; faded armchairs the seams of which were leaking a substance like wood shavings; a futuristic plastic sideboard trimmed with gilt; and a dangling light bulb the shade of which had pale circles suggesting the recent presence of fly-spots. Suddenly overwhelmingly tired, he sat on the floor. He was not superstitious, but the idea of living in a house where someone had died really did worry him. Every time he looked in the bathroom mirror, he knew, he would be half-expecting to see in front of him a face. Further, every time he took a step within the house he would know that his passage bore an exact, mathematical relationship to the last resting-place, wherever it was, of the previous tenant. Not for the first time, he half-wondered whether he was mentally disturbed. He quickly told himself that the problem was not with him but with the house. If only he had a job, he wouldn't have to rely on rented accommodation! But he'd never been able to cope with nine-to-five employment. Whenever he had tried it, his mind had always wandered: sometimes he had felt as though he could actually move back and forth through time. Forgetting things. And as a result of having no job he was poor. The only consolation was that it was summer, and he would not have to worry about heating bills.
Closing his eyes, he began to pull items from the crate closest to him.
2
Later that night, he sat at his typewriter. He stared at the ceiling, and then at the door. Just as in his flat, his last home (the constant interruption of neighbours had driven him out), he couldn't seem to come up with an idea for a story. Noticing to the left of the typewriter his shaving mirror, he moved it out of his line of sight, and then moved it back. The only way he would conquer his apprehension of living in the house, he realised, would be to confront directly his greatest worry: that of suddenly seeing a face in the mirror. He glanced at the mirror. No face was visible, of course.
He still felt uncertain. Soon, it would be time to go to bed; and for all he knew the suicide had taken place in the bedroom itself. And even if it hadn't, tiny traces of the putrefying remains must still be present throughout the house, despite the fumigation. The removal of every atom that had belonged to the body was, after all, scientifically impossible. He remembered reading the statistical reasons for this when he had been researching the article he had hoped to sell to Science Digest. All at once, he wondered why he persisted with his writing. Unless he were to write a best-seller, any financial gain would be slight; and his approach was too whimsical for the really influential journals. Freud, he reflected, had believed that writing was a form of wishfulfilment, but his only conscious wish at present was learning how to cope with living in the house.
Could he write a story that was actually about coming to terms with living in the house? He stared into the distance, suddenly optimistic. He could set down on paper all possibilities, from the far-fetched to the likely: and then he would already have dealt with the worst that could happen to him.
Trying not to be concerned by the fact that Borges's story "The Secret Miracle" had explored a similar idea, he began to write.
3
It was night. He sat up. A smell like that of decayed fish kept wafting into his nose. He glanced at the window, but it was shut. So not only was there no breeze but also the smell was coming from within the house. He tried to tell himself that the kitchen tidy could not have been closed properly, but he knew that that was not the explanation.
He turned on the bedlight, and the fluorescent tube gave out a feeble light: a pale, moon-like aura that often illuminated his dreams. Clearly, the tube was almost spent. He climbed out of bed, reached for the door-handle.
The smell of fish was stronger in the passage. He turned right: and the smell diminished. Reversing his direction, he found that he was approaching the lounge. As he turned into the lounge, he stopped, surprised. The floor had become a kind of grating. . . . Gingerly, he moved closer.
The floor had not become a grating: it was just that a number of floorboards parallel to one another had been prised up. He felt an apprehensive puzzlement. Had someone hidden illegal items - such as drugs - under the floorboards, and had only just had the opportunity to retrieve them?
He narrowed his eyes. There was someone standing beside the hole! Fortunately, he seemed to have his back to him. Apprehensively, he edged behind the figure. No, he was wrong: the figure was in the hole. But why was it swaying? Was it searching for something?
And then he saw the rope, and the tongue swollen and sticking out as if in mindless impertinence.
4
He contemplated the page in front of him, and realised he was dissatisfied. Could anything written about the macabre be anything but stereotyped? But what did 'stereotyped' really mean? That which was stereotyped in literary writing might merely be a convention in horror fiction. He checked the time. He needed some rest: how long had he been working? And was it the first night or the second? As soon as he had thought this, he felt angry with himself. Again, he thought, he lacked concentration, wandering backwards and forwards in his thoughts (if not in time!).
He needed to be realistic. He would write a sensible, realist piece, in which corpses were merely metaphors for his not having succeeded in life. Perhaps he could allude to his nine year relationship with Anne (Anne the indefinite article, he had called her, with half-mocking archness, just before he walked out on her). The moment in their relationship he most often dwelt on was in the middle of their first January, when he had introduced her to astronomy. He had said to himself, I know that you will never leave me, and that I shall never lose you. True, she had never left him; but some years later - no, almost half a decade later! - he had been shocked one morning to notice how much her appearance and personality had changed; and he had realised in despair that he had lost her after all.
So he would be the central character. There would be no ghost. No death. No body.
But there would be dreams.
5
His head was so heavy. . . . Trying to keep his eyes open, he saw that he was standing in his dressing-gown in the passage leading to the lounge. Was everything he had been thinking about Anne and writing just an illusion, and had he - surely not! - really murdered a child and buried it beneath the floorboards? The idea was in his head, certainly, but the source was obscure, indefinite. He shook his head. He was not sure to whom the child belonged, or why he had done whatever he had done to it, or even, in one part of his mind - the rational part? the conscious part? - whether he had done anything at all. But he must have done something and buried the result, for the floorboards were arching slightly: and that meant the corpse's stomach had not been pierced. In the gut there had set in chemical reactions, and the ballooning digestive gases were pressing against the boards, causing them to arch.
He thought vaguely of exhumation. Dig up the rubbery, sticky, stinking mass, cut it up with garden shears, and then incinerate it. It would be a miracle if he were not caught. But now, inexplicably, in another part of his mind there was guilt. How could he atone? Attend the funerals of total strangers? He could see himself bowing his head among the roses and the words of the beautiful solemn sermon, knowing that, below, human tissue was becoming slowly indistinguishable from diarrhoea.
6
Above him the ceiling was like the page he had left in the typewriter. Compared with the white of the moonlight it was absolutely black; but compared with the darkness of the shadows it was quite pale, almost white. So he didn't know what it was. Maybe he couldn't know. Realism would claim to know, but realism had its own limitations and conventions: conventions such as the knowledge that if anything apparently fantastic were to happen in a story it would all turn out to be a dream, or an illusion, or a quirk arising from point of view: the point of view of a lunatic or an eccentric. Henry James, with his ambiguities of time and perspective, had been a master of the device, providing only the certainty that there was no room for another turn of the screw; but he wanted certainty! The certainty of knowing that his life, his writing had worth!
Or even knowing with certainty that they were worth nothing.
7
Kissing the swaying and turning corpse was like bobbing for apples: as soon as he moved forwards to brush against his lips the cold, dry tongue, with its lingering bouquet of rotting meat, it backed away as though in black coquetry. Or perhaps he was the corpse, backing away from it. Certainly he was backing away now, for he was in the passage once more.
8
Perversely enjoying his depression, he opened the drawer and took out his letter opener. All he had to do was press the blade against his wrist and with increasing force draw it slowly back - parallel to his arm, not across it; that was a common misconception - and his life would slowly fade, like a room seen through eyes progressively more tired and filmed with sleep. All that had prevented him from slitting his wrists before was the idea that someone might walk in and revive him, leaving him with only brain damage, a staring vegetable.
Still holding the letter opener, he walked thoughtfully to the lounge. He felt a sudden, strange bond with the corpse. Why, after all, should he be spared what the previous tenant had gone through? Some pain was infinite, but still had to be borne. The human mind knew no limitations in conceiving cruelty: in films, in books, even in poems. And not just the cruelty of pain, the cruelty of rope or razor, but emotional cruelty, the cruelty of the forced excision of eye belonging to wife, mother, lover, child.
And then forced defecation in the shrieking wound. And then forced copulation with the flowing, red and ginger mass. And then forced consumption of the decayed secretions days or even weeks later.
Etc.
He knelt, and twisted the letter-opener between two loose floorboards. They were not full-length - in fact, the floor resembled a jigsaw puzzle of different sized boards - so he was able to prise them up easily. Soon, the floor was a chessboard of wood and darkness, making him think of the grille of some oubliette.
Sick with the knowledge of what he was about to do, of what he before had not allowed himself even to imagine but now knew to be unavoidable, he removed the cord from his dressing-gown, formed a crude noose, attached the other end of the cord to the steel light-fitting, placed the noose around his neck.
And paused.
9
From the crate he saw that he had taken two books: one by O. Henry, the title page of which was illuminated, and one by Beckett: Stories and Texts for Nothing. Both smelt of mould and had been attacked by silverfish.
He wondered why silverfish were considered to be silver. They were really only grey - that is, black or white. Only mirrors were silver - until one stood in front of them, of course, and then they were nothing at all. He went into his room, sat in his chair, and closed his eyes.
