Night

She sits up and the duvet glides across her torso, only covering her body waist down, the humid chill within the room penetrating through her exposed right shoulder where her husband’s T-shirt, which she dons as nightwear, hangs loose. She can’t see clearly because the moon’s a crescent, and it barely lets light into the narrow corridor leading from the walk-in closet to the part of the room that contains their bed, but she can hear her husband breathing; the calm exhalation of air at odds with the arduous inhalation, indicative that his nose is clogged. She squints ahead at the chair that stands at the foot of their bed; she can just about see the black leather corner of its seat and the buckle of the belt she’s hanged across its back, silver and glistening in the dark. Her eyes are sticky and as she blinks, they threaten to weld and she thinks about why she’s awake. She can feel her brain in her skull, heavy and encompassed by a thick, impassable fog. She digs her palms into the mattress and pulls herself up, so that her upper back rests against the wooden bed board, its embossed flower decorations pressing into her spine.  And then she knows why she’s awake. Through the wall behind her rises a light melody like a stroll through pine trees on a spring day, and then it loudens, before it’s a full-on concert, The wall vibrates rhythmically, then the bed board and finally the discs in her spine, rise and fall, quivering and rattling. The shadows on the ceiling, an extension of the curtains, dance, and then her husband throws his arm up and over onto her lap, his hand slapping against the only sliver of bare thigh that has escaped the duvet, before his breathing regulates, and he opens an eye.

His hand is warm against her thigh, and his fingers contort into the gnarly ones of a witch, his nails digging into her tender and soft freshly shaved skin. He gazes up at her, the vibrations still rhythmic and constant, and he grabs the corner of his pillow and rises, pulling it up with him so it rests against his back.

“What is that?” he whispers.

She opens her mouth to answer, but can barely think because the sound is shaking her body and is loud in her brain, dispersing through its every surface, constricting any bout of reason, any intelligent thought she might have had. A car drives past and lights up the room, and for a moment, she sees their reflection in the TV hanging up on the wall in front of them, their dishevelled physical beings, staring back.

“It’s music,” he says, and hurls the duvet off to reveal his long, thick legs, covered with curly wisps of hair. “They’re playing music? What time is it?” He waits for a few seconds and when she doesn’t answer, leans over and picks up his phone from the bedside table, and presses down on the side button, releasing a harsh white light into the room. It’s 02.14 Saturday 21^st March, 9 degrees centigrade in Famagusta where they live. Holding the phone, he heaves his body off the bed, and the light from his screen casts a large rectangular shadow on the wall, before reflecting off the silver handles of the wardrobe, causing a wave of twinkling, before it’s complete darkness again.

“It’s the new neighbours,” he says. “Does everyone have to be an asshole these days?”

Her brain hurts and her eyes are heavy. She wipes away the drip of water gliding out of her eye, down her cheek, and listens to her husband’s footsteps as he makes his way down, the pattering of his feet faint because he’s not wearing his slippers again, and she imagines the shiny marble floors, gathering the clam of his soles, footprints imprinted on every step, contemplating that she’ll need to wipe them in the morning after she’s drunk her cup of water and her mug of coffee—black with no sugar.

The music continues to blare, and the bass pierces through her body, and she swears she can feel her heart vibrating in her chest, her cheeks quivering as she sits there still, waiting for silence, whilst also listening to any noises out in the hallway, curious about the whereabouts of her husband. She hears the lock of the front door click, then a thud as the doorknob hits against the wall because the doorstopper is broken and her husband hasn’t fixed it yet. She leans over and tugs at the curtain so she can see the porch and the pavement leading to the house next door, and she doesn’t see him but she does spot the stray brown dog, Randy, lying down, his chin placed on his paw, sleeping, his name a homage to his daily habit of barking at early dawn, waking up the dogs in the distance who retaliate with howls, long and melancholy as if they are parted by force and miss each other’s company.

She sees her husband walk past, a solid shadow in human form, strolling, arms stiffly by his side at first before he lifts one up and sweeps away his hair that has fallen over his face in thick curly strands. He disappears from view but then is back almost immediately and she hears the front door close, the dog now risen looks towards the sound, ears lifted. Has he already spoken to them? she thinks to herself. She listens to the noises within the house but cannot hear anything from the booming of the music, each bam, simultaneous punches to either side of her face. She takes a long breath, her torso rising, and then exhales bloating out her tummy, until it gurgles and she pulls it back in. She knows her husband will get things under control, like he always does, when he unbreaks the broken—like the fridge he awoke from its deep slumber, with just a few slaps, when it stopped cooling—calms the uncalm—in any situation involving his parents who away from the comfort of their home, in a restaurant let’s say, always acted out and he demanded they not and so they didn’t, and now to quiet the unquiet—this was his chance.

Out in the hallway she can hear him breathing and wonders how she did not hear him climb the stairs, but then shrugs, because it’s the middle of the night, when time slows down or speeds up, when minutes feel like milliseconds or hours. He calls out to her before he emerges at the doorway, and she can see his silhouette filling out the space, and then a glisten where his teeth are as he opens his mouth to speak.

“I went out to speak to them,” he says.

“But you didn’t. Did you?” she mumbles. “You turned back immediately.”

It’s hot all of a sudden, her temples throb, her veins pulse, and her flesh sizzles as if she is being pricked by a thousand needles all at once.

“He was standing on the threshold,” he says.

His ring clatters against the doorframe as he grabs it and then he exhales a burst of air.

“So why didn’t you just talk to him?” she asks.

“He didn’t even realise I was there, even though I was standing just five steps away from him.” He sits on the edge of the bed, and the springs creak under him. She stretches out her leg, and the tips of her toes touch his thigh which is cold and damp. “He was just looking over my head and at something in the distance. Not moving at all. Just staring.” Dragging his bulk closer toward her, he makes it to the middle of the bed, and he puts his palm over her calf and then wraps his fingers around it until she can feel her pulse, pumping to the rhythm of the music, skipping beats every time the loud blare on the other side of the wall momentarily comes to a halt.

“What did he look like?” she asks.

Pulling her legs up to her chin, she leans forward, her tender breasts pressing against her thighs, but she ignores them, instead she looks intently at her husband’s face, trying to make out the feeling in it, the glisten in his eyes changing form as another car drives past at full speed, its lights ricocheting off the TV and dispersing across the room. Another car drives past then, its engine rattling as if it might fall out any moment, and its dim lights pour a soft glow into the room, just enough to reveal the books in her bookcase for a moment, and she notices “Alice in Wonderland”, a cheap Collins edition, with its half-black-half-white spine cracked  from the countless times she’s opened the book, reading a single paragraph each time, because nausea enwraps her body from the growing and the diminishing in size, the uncontrollable falls into secret holes, the hypnotic dialogue, the anthropomorphic animals and flowers that sing and make conversation, bothering poor Alice and bothering her too.  Not remembering whether he’s answered her question, she taps him on the thigh and repeats: “What did he look like?”

“He looked pale in the dark,” he says. “With a sort of light hair, maybe brown, maybe blonde. He had good skin, shiny like porcelain. But I couldn’t see his eyes, because he was looking up into the distance, over my head, somewhere behind me.”

“You seem to have gotten a good look at him,” she says. “In such short a time.”

They hear laughter beyond the wall, a man and a woman, or a boy and a girl, laughing at the same time, before it’s just the man’s, a chuckle in bursts as if he’s mocking her. The music still pumps in the background, but it’s quietened a little or so they think or maybe they’ve become accustomed to it.

“Let’s just get some sleep now,” he says, rubbing at his eyelids. “And we’ll move the bed into your office tomorrow and swap things around.”

She leans forward and rubs his back for comfort and then gently pulls at his arm, guiding him up and into the length of the bed, and when he’s lying down, she yanks at the covers and makes sure they are both tucked in.

But as soon as they rest their heads on their pillows, the ground vibrates again below them, causing the bed to tremble, the wooden bed board hitting against the wall, thud, thud, thud, to the beat of their hearts which pumps hastily in frustration. The wind picks up outside and she hears litter twisting and turning along the gravelled road, and she gets up, sits on the edge of the bed for a few seconds, and stands up just as her husband speaks to her: “What are you doing?”

She slides open the balcony door, pulls aside the mosquito screen, then steps out, spotting a plastic bottle clattering along down the street until it is concealed under a dark spot, where the streetlights fail to reach, and she glances down at the next-door neighbour’s house and sees the unmoving figure, standing tall, with his arms by his side, his feet facing opposite directions, his hair slicked back, perfectly in place, not a strand gone array. Whilst staring her anxiety grows, as she contemplates whether standing that still is possible and whether one can look at the plain white wall of the house opposite, blemished with patches of dew, so intently.  She tugs at her earlobes; her earrings are still attached because she’s forgotten to take them off as she usually does on those days when she comes home from outside on Friday evenings, filled with the saturated fat of the pizzas her husband likes to eat on a routine weekly basis.

The right side of the figure’s face is illuminated by the warm yellow light seeping from within the house into the street. Before she can stop herself, she whispers a “hi”, her veins bubbling with hot blood, her eyes wide open, shocked at her own bravery. But the figure does not move and so she does instead, taking a step forward, leaning her waist against the metal rail surrounding the balcony and glancing down, and upon a closer look, she notices that his skin is porcelain smooth, not a blemish in sight, not a pore, nor a spot, his hair rigidly in place, not a strand out of place, no strands at all, in fact, but darker lines that suggest waves. She leans in further and sees that the hair doesn’t move even though wind rushes across the street, continuing to blow litter and leaves down the road into the darkness. He is wearing nothing on top, his left shoulder, the only one within her line of vision, is perfectly rounded and hairless, as smooth as the skin on his face. When another car drives past at full speed, lighting up the street for a second, she sees him for what he is, a mannequin, standing in the doorway, guarding the house from anyone rude enough to complain about the music.