Sore

Adrian’s front door was always unlocked. Linda pushed it open and called up the steep narrow stairs. She was a tiny bit irritated because he should have been at the door to meet her, but the first thing she had to say would put her in the wrong. 

He had been living in this converted fisherman’s cottage for more than ten years, but was still tentative in his descent of those difficult stairs, so he appeared very gradually, feet first, in front of his impatient friend. The scruffy tennis shoes, the pin-striped trousers of one of his old City suits, and then the baggy cable-knit to keep the breeze out. Linda thought he looked like a drawing from Exquisite Corpse. 

They kissed cheeks. 

—I look like an Exquisite Corpse, he said. She had known he would, but she gave him her sweet smile. 

—We have to pop into the garage to ask about Mr Benton’s car, said Linda. 

—Oh, bugger Benton. Why can’t he phone? It’s a cheek, in your lunch hour. That fellow has no manners. He should give you extra time. 

—He does, Linda said, which was not true, not exactly. He doesn’t like to phone. He thinks they fob you off. 

None of it mattered. Linda could have as long as she liked for lunch, within reason. The visit to the garage would only take five minutes and there would be no one in the pub because it was winter. And Adrian almost certainly had nothing much to do all day. But they liked to bitch about things; it was how they got on. 

There was room, just, for them to walk side by side on the pavement and Linda put her arm through Adrian’s as he stuffed his hands into his pockets. They might have paused by the harbour, looking for a seal or a grebe, if they had not had to call in at the garage, which was very much a family business, a room, really, with space for two cars. Under one of these, Mr. Benton’s silver Hyundai, was a mechanic, his dungareed legs protruding from behind the front wheel. Adrian looked at the legs, looked at Linda and back at the legs. 

—I recognise Tony’s legs, he whispered. 

—Hello Tony, it’s Adrian. Is the governor around? No, don’t slide out, we don’t want to hold you up. 

Adrian crouched down beside the legs and stared emphatically at Tony’s crotch, around which his overalls had rucked up rather tight. He looked up at Linda and pouted. Linda looked away so as not to encourage him, but smirked, undermining that good intention. 

It seemed the governor had gone to lunch. 

—How’s Benton’s car, Tony? When will it be ready? Has it got a problem? Adrian asked. 

Linda couldn’t hear Tony’s replies from under the car. She caught the word problem. 

—Tell me candidly, Tony. Is it a big one? said Adrian, who had not shifted his gaze. Linda really needs to know how big it is. 

Linda shook her head and walked back out into the street. Adrian joined her a moment later. 

—About four o’clock, he said. He admitted it wasn’t that big. 

Linda gave him a little pinch above the elbow, but she was grinning. 

—Impossible, she said. 

He pulled a face, almost as if he were threatening to take her seriously. 

—Now, don’t get sore, she said. 

—That’s an Americanism. And they’re banned. 

They walked towards The Three Jolly Sailors, talking about the Cary Grant film Linda had watched the night before. 

—Was it awful? asked Adrian. They’re usually awful. 

—Oh, yes, said Linda, but there’s a part of me that likes them. 

Yes, thought Adrian. And I know which part. 

They skirted the village hall and crossed the tarmac apron of the huge and almost empty car park. This car park had been built, if that is what you do to car parks, as a speculation. It was so extensive that everyone in the village and all of their friends from round about could have parked there at the same time, but they didn’t, because they could park in the street for free, except for two weeks at the very height of summer. This was the sort of place that Adrian and Linda lived. In another village an enterprising person might have opened a seafood restaurant, or a bistro, or at least a café. Here it had been a car park. This subject and its interpretation were such familiar ground to these two that all that one of them had to do to bring the whole argument freshly back to mind was to say, 

—A car park. 

Or even to simply look around them at the obvious emptiness and half-cock an eyebrow. 

The only villager who got any benefit from the car park was a boy with a skateboard who seemed to spend all of the daylight hours scooting up and down, not particularly quickly. It made a great deal of gravelly noise. Sometimes he executed little skips of the board in which he made it jump two feet off the ground and then he fell over. His expression never changed. This boy, a young man really, had also been exhausted as a topic of conversation. He wore a T-shirt, surely not always the same one, which had something like Spit Car printed on it, maybe a tattoo on his forearm and possibly a blue stud piercing the place between his chin and his lower lip. Adrian and Linda did not like to stare. The boy, whose name they did not know, disregarded them altogether. Adrian did wonder when the boy would simply stop doing this. Then the car park would become definitively useless. 

He opened the door of the pub for Linda, who chose their usual seats, and he went up to the bar to speak to Brian and to get drinks and menus. 

Brian liked Linda and he beamed at her across the almost empty pub. The Three Jolly Sailors was an antiquated place and the bar had been preserved from a time when the pub had been, more or less, a private home selling illegal spirits. Brian sat behind a hatch like a clerk at a railway station ticket office. This was so characteristically his position that it came as a surprise, when he made one of his rare excursions around the lounge picking up empties, to see that he had legs and was not half a man. He was one of those men with little grey teeth. 

There was a real fire in the huge hearth and the two of them sat near it, sipped gin, and wondered which of Brian’s pies they would try today. This was one of the most mutually pleasing of their moments together. They were comfortable. Linda began to tease Adrian about the stains on his jumper. 

—Well, that one’s mustard, he responded. Not today’s mustard either, I’m afraid. That’s paint, certainly. That black stuff could be bile I suppose. I have spent the morning on the telephone speaking to people unaccountably reluctant to do what I want them to do. And that one I really don’t know. Could it be . . . possibly . . .  

He looked to the ceiling as though searching for the word he wanted among its webby beams. 

—. . . myrrh? 

Above the fireplace was an enormous saw, quite four feet long and painted entirely matt black, both blade and handle. 

—You’d think Brian could lay his hands on something with a bit more character than a saw. 

—A sword, perhaps? 

—A halberd, or a rusty breastplate. In a hundred years’ time there will be Black & Decker drills nailed up next to the warming pans. 

This was the kind of talk that amused Linda. They both chose the steak and mushroom. 

Linda used her napkin often and dabbed very tenderly at the corner of her mouth. She often had a patch of dry, peeling skin there, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, red or less so, cracked or almost healed. Adrian watched her dab. He did not spare her embarrassment. Perhaps it was eczema. Psoriasis? Stress or nerves. Some fashionable name for unhappiness. It got on her hands at its worst, on the webs between her fingers. She had tried all sorts of things. She had suffered from it for more than thirty years. Since she was ten. It had always been a plague. She had never gotten used to it. 

—This meat’s a bit tough, he said. 

Adrian waved over the young man who had brought them their meals. 

—Do you think you could reach me down that saw? I’m having a bit of trouble with this pie. 

The young man had no idea what he was getting at and backed away, smiling uncertainly. He assumed it was obvious that Adrian did not really want the saw and which he could not have in any case. 

Adrian turned back to Linda. 

—There’s a lot of pressure on a certain kind of man to be funny, you know. If I don’t say something drôle about every five minutes I’m afraid everyone will realise what a bastard I am. 

*          *          * 

He wanted to call in at the butcher’s and Linda wanted a small loaf of bread, what she called a spinster’s loaf. Approaching the two of them on the narrow footpath was Vlad the Impaler, the most eccentric member of their little community. He carried a cane with a silver knob on one end and a brass ferrule on the other, ticking like clockwork wherever he walked. He wore winged collars. Despite which he was utterly humourless. Adrian’s heart sank a fraction at the sight of him. He was a punchline that could be seen coming from a very long way away. They met at the butcher’s. 

—Afternoon. Surprised to see you out in the daylight. 

Adrian was referring to Vlad’s vampiric pallor and the liquid shadow of his sleek black hair, a reference he knew would not be understood, except by Linda. Vlad gave him a quizzical look, but Adrian did not explain. 

As always, Vlad was dressed all in black apart from a dress shirt of brilliant white. Sometimes he wore an extreme waistcoat, aflame with colour, and looked like an undertaker at the firm’s Christmas party, in Adrian’s opinion. 

It wasn’t clear to anyone how Vlad supported himself, but he occasionally gave advice and sold the odd potion in the alternative medicine line. Linda had consulted him about her eczema. Adrian had persuaded his friend that nothing could be more bogus than this occult pose. Homeopathy, Ouija boards, aromatherapy, Tarot readings, foot massages. They were all the same. 

Both Vlad and Linda unconsciously put a finger to the corners of their mouths, just where Linda’s mouth was sore, as if in a cabbalistic salute. 

Adrian thought Vlad needed cutting down to size. He stared at their three reflections in the shop window. A whole pig’s dimpled carcass hung there from a vicious hook, split from throat to groin and gutted, punctuated with the fat white dots of ribs cut clean through. Adrian noted the tender glisten of the meat and the humiliation of this exposure. Their reflections flickered across the sorry creature. 

—People here must eat an awful lot of pig. 

—I’m a vegetarian, said Vlad. He could not or did not pronounce the letter R. 

Adrian thought this was either astonishingly predictable or exactly the bare-faced lie a bloodsucker like him would come out with. He was a little surprised at the vehemence of his own reaction. He stared into the window and thought of words for Vlad and the way he chose to look, trying them out, trying to be charitable, generous even. 

Magician, connoisseur, mountebank, actor, conductor, writer, madman, vampire, popinjay. 

He wondered if he were not a little jealous. 

Vlad and Linda chatted. Vlad liked Linda. Adrian should not mind that. It was perhaps the comparison between Vlad and himself that piqued him. What was true of Vlad was most likely also true of himself. They both ought to fear a sceptic. Vlad the Impaled into Insignificance. 

He looked again at the fastidious carnage in the window: the strips of flesh, the chops and kidneys sorted and arrayed in their anti-septic trays. One kidney with a vivid neon vein. The liver looked marine, not something vital from a warm inside. It oozed. A thin stream of pinkish blood collected in the reservoir at the leading edge of each tray because the display was tilted. 

—Imagine the mind of a man who would cheerfully eat the cheek of a pig, said Adrian. 

*          *          * 

Adrian and Linda had got into the habit of calling them dates: their lunches, their after-work G&Ts, the very occasional dinner or a walk around the harbour on Sunday morning. Adrian was now thinking it was unfortunate that they had begun calling them dates. He had seen how Brian and Vlad looked at Linda when they saw her with him and he knew they were asking a question. Was Linda asking that question, too? 

*          *          * 

The village fête was an event in everyone’s calendar. A decorous bazaar in the car park, what might once have been the village green, followed by theatricals in the hall. People did a turn, told jokes, sang a song. There was a chamber group. Adrian read several poems. He had slipped in one of his own last year and no one noticed. All for charity. It had become time to discuss it once more. 

Adrian tried to insist on the French pronunciation. Fête. Principally to avoid the inevitable pun, but it was said anyway. Linda said it. 

—Worse than death. 

She was biddable. If he lent her his new Malcolm Arnold CD, she would listen to it. She read the books he gave her and if he invited her to the arts cinema in the neighbouring town she would always accept. But, thrown upon her own resources, Adrian knew she would sit in front of the telly with a stiff drink in one hand and the other stuffed into a box of chocolates, watching soap operas, sitcoms, and old Hollywood movies. He decided that the next time they arranged a date he would simply not go. Linda had stood him up once, but that had been an accident. The poor woman had scratched at her sore mouth and it had bled. She’d been too ashamed to go outside. She had phoned but he had not got the message. This would be different. He would tell her that he had forgotten. He knew that men could be merciless. 

*          *          * 

When Adrian stood Linda up, he had to leave his house in case she came to look for him. He could have just sat there with only the reading-lamp on and the stereo turned down low until she stopped knocking and went away, but he thought he might relent if he put them both through that. Instead, he locked his door and went for a walk right to the furthest end of the quay. They had never walked so far. He saw a seal, its friendly head apparently floating among the buoys and the chopping waves. 

*          *          * 

When they next met, in The Three Jolly Sailors, Adrian was late on purpose. He had been on the phone being viperishly rude to two ultra-polite American academic librarians who could not really understand what he was saying, so he was feeling rather pleased with himself. When he saw Linda’s face, he knew that she knew already. 

She had once told him that he looked a little like Cary Grant, so when she said, almost straightaway, 

—Did you know Cary Grant was gay? 

it was not a neutral thing to ask. 

—Yes, I did know that. He lived for many years with Randolph Scott. The cowboy actor. White hat. 

—You wonder what they talked about. 

—Not films, I would imagine. 

—That news must have disappointed millions of women when it came out. 

—Most of them were probably disappointed already for one reason or another. And it would have pleased a lot of men. Perhaps millions. 

Brian came over to them, excited about the fête. 

—Jeffrey’s going to play his guitar. Spanish or classical. You should hear him; he is ever so good. 

Adrian was annoyed to be interrupted by this fatuous man. 

—Who the fuck is Jeffrey, Brian? 

—Pam’s son. You’ve seen him in the car park with his skateboard. He’s always there. 

Brian wandered off, shocked both by the swearing, which no one ever did, and by the fact that Adrian did not know who Jeffrey was. 

—Brian might have deserved more than that, observed Linda. 

—One always gets less than one has deserved. We should strive to deserve as much as possible in anticipation of that. 

—Ivy Compton-Burnett? 

—At some remove, probably. 

Adrian was still rather pleased with himself. 

*          *          *

After he had been late a couple more times, almost forty minutes the last time for what should have been just an hour in the pub, they had failed to make arrangements to meet again and so it had been as simple as that. 

Their paths crossed, of course. They had cut one another once, each with such determination that it would be hard to say who had made the first move. Then he had seen her talking to Vlad outside the butcher’s, funnily enough. He had stopped and said hello. Linda had seemed embarrassed, which Adrian flattered himself he had not. He made the sign of the Cross behind Vlad’s back, but Linda pretended not to see. 

It was Brian, of course, sitting behind his hatch like a mechanical Turk telling fortunes, who told Adrian that Linda had been seeing Vlad about her skin again. Brian was trying to sound sympathetic, but when Adrian made a joke about Vlad getting his magic wand out—he flourished an imaginary cane at this point—Brian laughed with less than kind amusement. 

—He’s a faith healer, said Brian, as though simply conveying information. 

He’s a charlatan, a layer-on of hands, smearing everything with macrobiotic bullshit. But Adrian did not say this out loud. 

He noticed some rough skin on his own hands. He would get some gloves for washing up. Marigolds, they were called. He thought he was getting old. He was now a confirmed bachelor. He thought of Linda’s skin problem, shuddering to think of being gripped by her scaly fingers. Accidentally kissing the sore at the corner of her mouth. 

*          *          * 

Brian was bubbling like a boiling pot the next time Adrian saw him and then became taciturn and sly when he walked up to him. Adrian stared in mock dismay. 

—You’d better just tell me, Brian. You’ll burst. 

Brian told Adrian that at the fête Vlad and Linda were going to do magic tricks, a conjuring routine. Linda was going to be Vlad’s beautiful assistant. 

—It’s all very mysterious, said Brian, not thinking it was mysterious at all. 

—Knowing Vlad, as I don’t, and his penchant for the dark arts, we should not be surprised by that. 

—It’s got everyone talking, said Brian. 

Adrian sipped his drink and tried to name what it was that was going on inside himself. He was thinking of how monochrome Vlad was. The invention of colour film would have made no difference to him. From Cary Grant to Bela Lugosi. 

—You going to read a couple of your poems, then, Adrian? 

*          *          * 

That night, Adrian dreamed he was watching Vlad and Linda on stage in the village hall, except that this auditorium was a much grander affair. It was Linda who was centre stage, waving her arms while wearing a skimpy, sequinned outfit. Vlad seemed to be at the back, almost literally hovering, his white face a cloudy moon. Linda’s costume had become a species of bikini and there was a violent eczema weal across her belly. Everyone must have been able to see this, but Linda was not at all concerned. Adrian could not turn his head, but he knew there were many people in the audience, the whole village, really, and none of them appeared to notice anything other than what was enchanting about Vlad’s assistant, as though they were mesmerised. On Linda’s face was an expression of contentment that he had never seen on it before. 

He had once seen Linda’s midriff when she had reached down a basket in a shop; he thought he saw a raw-looking rash on her. It could have just been the marks left by an elasticated waistband. He had not looked carefully. 

*          *          * 

It turned out that Vlad’s name was really Roland. Adrian must always have known that. Woland. Roland from Poland. Actually, very obviously, from the Home Counties. 

Adrian had dropped into the village hall to see how things were being set up. To see what it might be like to read there, if that was still to be required of him. He might need a drink or two to get through that. 

Brian was there, pushing around chairs. He nodded Adrian over to the corner of the stage where stood an upright box, a cabinet, seven feet tall. A narrow wardrobe was what it looked like. This was Roland’s apparatus. 

Vanishing lady, thought Adrian. 

It was rather a beautiful object, wooden, of some age, cared for so that the wood had a tawny sheen and a tigerish grain. Adrian wanted to open the door but didn’t dare. It looked like a door that would lead somewhere. He was alarmed then when Jeffrey and another young man almost identical to him whom Adrian had never seen before, or perhaps had, arrived and roughly manoeuvred the box onto its side. He wanted to tell them to be careful. They lifted it onto two trestles. Strong young fellows, unless that box was much less solid than it looked. Perhaps both. 

—It looks like a coffin now, said Adrian. 

Brian could not contradict him. 

—Roland is going to saw Linda in half, said Brian. 

—Of course he is not, replied Adrian. 

Brian laughed. 

Adrian was going to get that drink. Standing at the back of the hall looking at the stage, he recalled seeing Vlad’s hovering moon face, but it looked like a skull to him now, bobbing in the shadows. 

In the pub, Adrian wondered what could have possessed Linda to become involved with this gruesome man. Had she been hypnotised? He had begun to feel a little weird himself. He hoped he was not becoming ill. Who would look after him if he was really sick, if only for a short time? Not Brian. He knew it would be a bad idea to have another drink but he had one anyway. A double. 

He saw Vlad disappear into the hall as he approached, carrying two heavy-looking suitcases. Dressed as usual, of course. Vlad was always dressed for the stage. Adrian wanted to call out to him, but then couldn’t think of his real name and Vlad stuck in his throat. 

He chose his seat carefully, at the end of one of the middle rows. Sitting at the back would look sullen and he knew he had to be brave about how sad he felt. Besides, he would need to get out to do his turn. 

The show began and it was all as dismal and genial as it always was. Brian introduced turns, told jokes evoking polite laughter, polite applause, everything was so polite. Jeffrey played his guitar, quite well given that it was Jeffrey doing it. Adrian thought of Dr Johnson’s joke about a dog walking on its hind legs, but he had no one to repeat it to. He wasn’t really attending in any case. He was thinking about Vlad and about how ill or possibly drunk he had become himself. Vlad seemed so much more sinister now in this atmosphere. He was no longer eccentric: he was grotesque. Adrian detected treachery somewhere but could not name the traitor. 

When Brian introduced Vlad and Linda—using some ghoulish nom de théâtre that Adrian did not quite catch—it became apparent how much the audience had been anticipating this moment. Everyone shuffled forward an inch or two on their seats. They put their hands on their knees. Adrian felt very cold, chilled, then flushes of heat pulsed through him. The names he had secretly called Vlad came back to him: mountebank, madman, murderer. It was then, hearing this voice that could only be his own, that he realised what Vlad was going to do. He was going to saw Linda in half. Of course he was. 

Linda came to the front of the stage and posed with one arm raised. A full-length silver dress, tight-fitting, high-necked, bare-armed. She was glamorous. She was slinky. The audience gave her an appreciative 

—Ooh. 

She did not seem to be at all embarrassed. Or worried. Linda was happy. 

Some grand guignol, circus, carnival music was playing on a tape. The spotlight picked out the terrible box and Linda slipped out of her high heels and, somewhat awkwardly, clambered into it. Vlad closed the lid. Only her head and feet were visible. She flexed her ankles and wriggled her toes. She turned her head and smiled straight at Adrian, or so it seemed to him. 

There was some preamble here. Vlad made something uncanny or banal happen, with handkerchiefs or doves, some kind of hallucination, maybe. Only Adrian seemed troubled, or unconvinced. 

Vlad bowed from the waist and announced his intentions. Adrian knew what he was saying more than that he could hear him. He was telling everyone that he was going to saw their friend in half. 

—Don’t be alarmed, he said. But also, Do be alarmed. 

They laughed. This was the horror of it. It was all done in the open, declared in front of every witness. They were all complicit. 

Vlad now went through his vaudeville rigmarole in which he selected a variety of weapons from his cases, rejecting each of them in turn as not quite right: a ludicrously small knife, a cut-throat razor, a sword which looked like a toy, his cane, an axe, before finally choosing a saw. Not that from The Three Jolly Sailors, but one of similar dimensions, with a bright silver blade. He twanged this. He tested it for sharpness with a fingertip and pretended that he had cut himself. He sucked at his wound. He grimaced and leered into the delighted crowd. 

Vlad laid the blade, with its unforgiving iron teeth, across the middle of the box, across the middle of Linda’s soft belly. She smiled. The hideous music grew to a crescendo. She tapped her toes, dancing in air. This was impossible. 

Now it became clear to Adrian. His belief took hold of him. It was like moving from one element to another, from knowing to really believing, like emerging from the sea into the block of air above it; everything had been so obstructive and dangerous and now it was easy and obvious. It was up to him. Before it was too late. He stood up, queasily. 

—Stop that foul beast. Stop him now. He is going to saw Linda in half! 

The music was switched off and someone turned on the lights. Adrian alone was standing, bathed in his chilly sweat. He was losing heart, but still he managed, 

—He is really going to saw her in half. 

The silence was broken by a snigger—Jeffrey, perhaps, who certainly was grinning—and this grew to a general laughter. Then everyone, the whole village, Mr. Benton, Tony, the waiter from The Three Jolly Sailors, began to applaud. To Adrian, this sound was as waves breaking on the beach, lapping at the harbour wall, but he did not care to look towards the stage. 

ROBERT STONE

Robert Stone was born in Wolverhampton in the UK. He works in a press cuttings agency in London. Before that he was a teacher and then foreman of a London Underground station. A story of his appeared in the 2020 volume of Salt’s Best British Stories. Details of his previous publications can be found at https://robertjstone.weebly.com.