A noise wakes me. I try to grasp the fading echoes in my dark bedroom. Maybe a car door in the street? A garden gate caught on the breeze? I turn over, swaddled in my sheets, arms folded over my breasts. My bedside alarm clock glows 2:14am. Sleep starts to play back like a comforting song, but then I hear the noise again. Downstairs. The sound of splitting and splintering. A pause. Then again, a sharp series of cracks. It’s something being torn apart. Wood. My door is being levered open, presumably with a crowbar because battering might alert a neighbour. I could call down to the intruder that it doesn’t matter because Betsy next door is deaf, and Pat and Jan on the other side have taken their noisy kids to Butlins and left their Xbox and jewellery behind. Go there and leave me alone!
Maybe it’s not possessions the intruder is after.
I sit up fluidly so the bedsprings don’t sing. Amongst the snaps of wood below are the baritone grunts of a lone man. I wonder what his mother ate when he was being built inside her womb. Not that it always makes a difference. My mother ate pages from Shakespeare, Dickens, Brontë, shredded and slurped up with chopsticks. She swallowed the calculator buttons and shattered microprocessor like aspirin. The mortarboard took her weeks; the felt was oh so chewy she later told me. When I was born, I wasn’t what she or Father expected at all. Azure curls, tuneful tomato nose…bright pink cheeks. She’d pushed hardest when it came to my shoes. They laughed and laughed when they held me.
The intruder’s mother could have swallowed rage throughout her pregnancy, opening wide for the spitting bile from people bearing placards as she marched with them for freedom-this and anti-that. Inhaling the mouthed fuck yous from the guy in traffic on her commute, drinking in the friction in her office. Swallowing hard on the anger her boyfriend punched into the drywall of their rented home when she showed him the positive pregnancy test. All this while the baby grew and burned inside her. Or maybe she ate rainbows and children’s laughter, had her red-faced baby and thought how did this happen?
I hear him inside my house now, the door-splitting open, his trainers scuffing on my kitchen tiles as he kicks bits of wood with shits and fucks. I shed my sheets and get up as he yanks drawers open, clattering cutlery. I open my wardrobe and slip into my favourite two-piece, silk gliding up my limbs, ballooning shoulders and knees, ruffles on the cuffs. I was born to wear it. Is he wearing all black to hide in the shadows, hood up? Perhaps he’s the man from the bus yesterday. He wore blue denim, olive-green headphones, and a t-shirt that said Keep Calm and Leave Me Alone. As the bus drove away, I saw him watch me walk up my path and put the key in my front door. I’ll know when I get downstairs. Or maybe he’ll come upstairs before I’m ready. I’d better get a move on.
Sitting at my vanity table, I hear the squeak of the living room door below, then the clasps on my LP box clicking open. I’d love for him to pick one, drop the needle on some Stevie Wonder, Pharrel Williams, or The Beach Boys. Fill the house with music, man! It is such good medicine. Father put on Lovely Day when I cried black tears. It was because Mother had to go to hospital. She’d tried to make me a sister from homemade brioche dough, kneading the sticky mixture of butter and double the sugar to make her extra sweet. But we smelled burning, and in Mother’s rush to pluck my sister from the oven she forgot the potholders. My sister never came to be. An ambulance took Mother away with her hands in buckets of ice. Father wiped away my black tears and put on Bill Withers. We danced, my hands in his until Mother got back. She joined us, and we held her elbows instead of her tender bandaged palms and fingers. We each tried to finish a daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay in one breath but none of us could do it, laughing after we gasped for air.
Did the intruder’s parents ever make him anything, I wonder? Cookies, a Halloween costume, a fort, bail? Maybe they did. Maybe none of it mattered to him. Maybe thanks scorches his tongue and singes his lips.
Downstairs, he drops the lid on my LP box. No music comes. I dip my sponge into my white makeup and dab quickly at my face. There are thuds in the living room: things dropping to the ground. Possibly the contents of my bag being emptied out. He can keep my juggling balls. I doubt he’ll want my sunglasses – they’re enormous! I’ve finished the shading around my eyes. As I fluff up my azure bedhead, I hear the bottom step creak. Looks like he’ll be the one making the entrance. But he’ll still have a surprise. Creak. Quick, quick, quick! Dab, dab, dab! Fluff, fluff, fluff! Creak. Giddy with adrenaline, I put down the sponge. It’s nearly showtime! Creak.
I remember him going into the cutlery drawer, imagine his fingers closing around the handle of something sharp. Creak. I reach for my flower brooch. Creak. Fasten it carefully, put on my top hat. Creak. Pull on my big, big shoes. Creak. Enter the Gladiators plays in my head. Creak. I check myself in the mirror. Creak. Perfect! The rainbow polka dots on my outfit stand out in the darkness. Creak. I adjust my nose. Creak. And tiptoe to my closed bedroom door. Creak.
He’s on the landing on the other side of my door.
He opens the door slowly. I have one hand on my nose, the other on my brooch. There’s the glint of a blade in his fist. I think about Mother and Father as we danced, her jolly elbows, his joyful smile.
Then I see the intruder. He’s in the same Keep Calm t-shirt he wore on the bus. And as we make eye contact, I honk my horn nose and squirt the water from my flower brooch so that it hits him right in the kisser. He startles and staggers back, feet going out from under him as he falls, the knife spinning freely in the air, and I panic because this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Then I see it: a hint of a toothy smile, sparkling wet from my squirter brooch, his crow’s feet deepening with mirth. And I laugh and laugh, just like my parents did the day I was born.
Rebecca Klassen is fiction editor of The Phare and lives in Gloucestershire. She won the London Independent Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Alpine Fellowship.