Knock Knock, Who's There?

A short story

This is a short story I wrote for Robyn Skyrme’s excellent reading series “Crisis Crystal” last night. There are many more readings to come. They’re free, a perfect way to spend a quiet Sunday evening at home instead of scrolling instagram, and full of exciting writers. If you want to watch, you can sign up for the link here. Please note that this story contains a mention of suicide, so if you don’t want to read about that, do sit this one out. On with the show.

Knock Knock, Who’s There?

The first knock at the door came when he was making a cup of tea. On the little two-ring gas stove that sat wedged, ill-fitting, into the old Victorian fireplace, the whistle of the kettle rattled in the spout, a sure fire sign that it was about to release its ear-splitting roar. The knock gave Robert a start. Not now, he thought. The kettle is about to boil. He turned off the hob and went to the window. Looking out of his flat, everything had the appearance of normality. His street was as still and flat as a tarn on a quiet day. The sky was grey. In the houses across the road, the sparkling white nets were crisp and pressed and unmoving. A gentleman in a battered mac waited patiently for his dog to relieve himself on one of the trees. The belisha beacon blinked. All was well with the world. The urge to draw across his curtains was almost too strong, even though it was only 9:30. Two hours seemed like a long enough day for Robert. Still, he resisted, and peered down to the porch. Strange, nobody at the door, but he could have sworn he had heard the bell ring. Perhaps Mrs Postlethwaite downstairs had got to it. No, it’s Wednesday morning, she’ll be at the WI setting up. He rubbed his eyes. He was expecting something. Back at the stove, he struck another long match and held it to the hob, waiting for the pop.

With the tea brewing, he went to the back of the flat. There was the lovely old mirror that had been left here by the last occupant when he moved in, five years ago. He could afford a nicer place, what with the success he’d enjoyed in the past decade or two, but why bother, he thought? Better to save up a few bob, just in case. He adjusted his tie, then took a good look into his own eyes. Good lord. Had he always looked like this? He put his fingers to his face, and pulled down the sagging skin beneath his eyes. Not even a hangover, really. Yet still, all the regret one might have expected had he been hungover. He noticed in the mirror’s frame the first tell-tale signs of woodworm. It would have to be thrown out too, along with the rest of the stuff left by the previous tenant, Mr Tavener. He had discarded the bed as soon as he’d moved in. It had been in perfect working order. In fact, it was more comfortable than the new one he’d bought, from that little showroom up on the Finchley Road. He could have gotten a better one, the salesman had told him, but it would have taken a week or two to be delivered. That was too long; he didn’t want to spend a single night in a dead man’s bed. A deathbed, in fact. New mattress or not, the thought of Tavener laying in it, a bottle of pills strewn across the floor, choking on his own vomit: that was too much.

Perhaps if it had been a stranger, it would have been different, but he had known Tavener. Not well, but enough. He had first seen him on stage at the Prince of Wales, at some point in the twenties. He had been handsome then, in his way, but off-stage and out-of-character he was the sort of presence that, in a bad mood, would have Robert leave a club he had just walked into. A quean, a sex-case, a pain in the arse. And he hadn’t aged well. He bumped into him once during the Blitz, just after the all-clear had sounded and close to midnight, on Of Alley, just off the Charing Cross. He was skulking out of the lavvies with a grin like the Cheshire Cat, and that lascivious grin, with the cream no doubt, was enough to take the shine off Robert’s plan. They didn’t acknowledge each other. It struck him that to other men, young men perhaps, he might look the same. He paused for a moment at the door and out walked a man buttoning up his flies. It looked enormous, but even that couldn’t put him back in the mood, and with that, he walked straight past the gents and caught the bus home. It was grotesque, and quite right too, Tavener indeed the flat unraised spirit that had dared on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object. There wasn’t much he could thank his mother for, but he was grateful for the shame at least. Otherwise he too might be a powdered poof on his way to the Crem. Had he turned off the hob? Poor Tavener.

It couldn’t be a hangover. He had had a couple of sherries in the green room last night, and a pint of mild after the show, but nonetheless he felt like death. There was a scratch he couldn’t itch at the back of his mind; almost like he had forgotten something, and the thing he had forgotten was dreadful. Such moods were terrible, much worse than the abject misery he had felt as a younger man. Back in the kitchenette, he poured the tea, added a drop of milk and two teaspoons of sugar. That’s when the knock came - was it a knock? He left his tea and scuttled back into the living room. A red double decker idled at the bus stop a few doors down, but nobody was at his door. A prank, or a visitation? He was expecting a knock, but then, if one could say anything for Robert, it was the extent of his prodigious imagination. That seemed to be the consensus last night, at the small reception following his reading at the Conway Hall. Robert, where do you get your ideas from? Such a prodigious imagination! They would say, and he would nod generously, as though he appreciated adulation. But really, what a question - from where do I get my ideas? Reading! Education! Contemplation of the little iniquities and cruelties of this world, considered and processed and encapsulated in narrative form, as contemporary fables fit for a world still riven and half insane with the modern delusion of collectivism, with stupidity, with conformity, with socialism, national or international or otherwise! An independent spirit lit some fifty years ago and stubbornly refusing to be extinguished by the adoration of you, my audience! But even that, even that, would not be true. My stories, he thought, are little more than earworms, the page simply a good place to kill them.

He wondered whether the knock would be firm or soft. A soft knock might announce the telegram he had been forewarned of, the official invitation to the Palace. A hard knock could be something more fearful, although perhaps just as humiliating and public. The public, he thought, a wretched sphere, crammed within this wooden O, affrighting the air at Marylebone tube. His success was no succour to him. He enjoyed the dark days, before it had arrived. He thought less of his readers for their enjoyment of his little stories, which we far below what his talent might well have delivered. And he thought less still of his stories, knowing they were so enjoyed by the man on the Clapham Omnibus. His imagination brought him little but misery. His fantasies led him to dangerous places, and more dangerous they would become once his name was in the paper, perhaps a small photo of his holding up his gong to the camera. No, he preferred the darker days, before the war, when no-one felt the need to knock upon his door. The war even, when the only alert he need worry for was the air-raid siren, when people were too busy minding their own damned business to care a jot for him and his.

Last night, after the reception, he had stopped off at a small lavatory near the top of Carnaby Street. It was a Tuesday night, quiet but for a rather peculiar looking national serviceman smoking foul smelling hand rolled cigarettes around the entrance, all teeth and ears. He knew it was a silly risk. The soldier, loitering, would attract all the wrong sort of attention. But he wanted to get the taste of his audience out of his mouth, the rather sickly sherry, the compliments, the nudges and winks from the people, from his publishers who had been given the prior warning of his upcoming honour. He didn’t want honour, didn’t want plaudits. What he wanted, he might find against the cool ceramic, in a place dark enough that he could barely make out his hand before his face, two of the three lightbulbs having been broken by his fellow criminals to add a little atmosphere to proceedings, to obscure the facts. That dark heaven would be a kingdom for a stage, complete with both princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene.

That was a knock. For sure that was a knock, one or two, or even three, a rat-a-tat-tat! Perhaps that was Alfie, that was who it would be. Alfie, or at least, that’s the name he had given him, after the deed had been consummated, as they stood by the doorway smelling the soldier’s fumes blowing down and waiting to climb the stairs. I’m Alfie. What’s your name, cock? He had said, and for some reason, some unknown reason, he had replied with the truth. I’m Robert. It wasn’t an unknown reason to him, of course. A stupid, reckless reason, yes, but he knew all too well what it was. In that moment, he reasoned that he could live a life of pure privacy again, his inner thoughts not known, not put onto paper, and what he did would be his own time, his own thoughts, unencumbered by grief and worry, and if he lived in that world, then Alfie would be there too, smoking a fag in his shirtsleeves and making a pot of tea at dawn and pulling up potatoes in his back garden. Although the back garden wasn’t his, it was Mrs Postlethwaite’s.

It was that moment of utopia that led him to being here, waiting for the knock on the door, because he had given Alfie his address. Written it in his pocketbook, in fact, and ripped out the page. The proof was waiting for him this morning when he opened it, and saw the torn leaf, the stub of a cheque he knew would bounce the moment it was cashed. That rapid little thud, rat-a-tat-tat, would be the police. Or worse, would be Alfie, Alfie and his mates, ready to blackmail or rob or worse, worse, ready to kill. He could see them now, the gang of them, hair brylcreemed to their heads, muscles and sinew and spit, steaming through the nose, chomping at the bit, just ready to push through, past him, over him, to charge into his neat living room, and his story would be the same as Taveners, another sad queer dead in his sad little flat. Why did Mrs Postlethwaite take them in, people would ask. They only repay her kindness in tragedy. He could see his head crushed beneath their feet even now. Think, and he thought, Think when we talk of horses, that you see them, printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth, and he saw them.

And what if it were Alfie, just Alfie, in his shirtsleeves and overcoat, brandishing only a smile and a little paper bag from the bakery at the corner. That might be even worse. His breaths deep, his tie knotted too tight, Robert walked to the window again. Looking down, the path was empty, the porch still, but on the windowsill a little bluetit in spasm. It must have hit the window and broken its wing, he realised. It fluttered and flapped in distress, grazing its beak against the stonework as it tried in vain to right itself. As it rocked back and forth, it seemed to be causing itself more mischief, bending its broken limb until it was about to crack, some little rivulets of red beginning to bloom against its breast. Robert looked upon it, then, in one swift motion, he drew the curtains shut. As he walked back to his bed, the bird’s insistent little knocking continuing, he passed the stove, and checked one more time, to see if the gas was still off.

Thank you to all my subscribers, paid or otherwise. I’m aware I haven’t posted much in recent months. After many years writing this substack, I’m aware there can be an ebb and flow of productivity and sometimes I feel a bit blocked, or busy trying to pay the rent. To those who pay, I can’t thank you enough for sticking with that process, and I hope it’s worth it. I try to think of my own subscriptions less as paying for a regular product, and more as a micro-patronage for writers, musicians and artists whose work I like, because sometimes the downtime is a necessary part of the creative process. One thing I’ve been thinking recently is to make this substack a bit more of a conversation; for example, if someone has a subject they’d like to write about, or a book or film to review, please do let me know.

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