"Oh, can't you? Once you could have. Anyway," she said, gazing at Jimmy's mother, "I'm afraid I insist on choosing who comes into my house."

After a painful silence his father said, "That's it, then, Jimmy. You'll have to do as your granny says."

Jimmy sensed his mother was more disappointed than he was. "Do I have to?"

"There, you see, he won't be told. What he needs is a good thrashing."

"He won't get one from us," his mother said. "And anyone else who touches him will be very sorry."

His grandmother ignored her. "Thrashing never did you any harm."

Jimmy found the idea of her beating his father so disturbing that he ran blindly upstairs. His body seemed to have made the decision to run while he tried not to think. What was he that his grandmother hated so much? He reached the landing and was suddenly afraid to open his door in case there was already someone in his bed. Yes, someone was beyond the door, creeping toward it as Jimmy went helplessly forward. Once the door was open they would be face to face, and what would happen to Jimmy then? He was fighting not to turn the doork.n.o.b, and unable to be sure that it hadn't already begun to turn, when his mother came upstairs. "That's right, Jimmy," she said, suppressing her anger. "Time for bed."

n.o.body was in his room except the face that peered around the edge of the mirror. He could tell it was his own face until he got into bed. His mother seemed anxious to go downstairs-because she wanted to hear what the others were saying, he told himself, not because of anything in his room. "Don't worry, we won't let anyone harm you," she said, but he wasn't sure she knew the nature of the threat.

The night was hot as a heap of quilts. He was nowhere near sleep when his grandmother came up. She tucked in the sheets which he'd kicked off, and shook her head as if someone hadn't done her job. "You must promise me never to go near the furnace again. Do you know what happens to little boys who go near ovens?" She told him the story about the children whom the old witch lured into the gingerbread house, except that when his mother used to read him the story the children had escaped. He tried to make faces at the mirror so that he wouldn't be frightened, but couldn't be sure of the face in the other bed; it seemed to be grinning, which wasn't at all how he felt. He squeezed his eyes shut, and when she left, having given him a withered kiss, he was afraid to open them; he felt he was being watched.

His father was growing short-tempered as one interview after another proved to be fixed in someone else's favor. In the mornings he loitered near the front door until the mail arrived, and Jimmy heard him saying "s.h.i.t" when he opened his letters or when there weren't any. The house felt as if it was waiting for a storm, and it was on the day of the tea party that the nightmare began.

Usually Jimmy managed to avoid these gatherings, but this time his grandmother insisted on showing him to her friends. He stood awkwardly, surrounded by faded ta.s.seled lamps and the smells of age and lavender water, while the old ladies dramatized appreciation of their microscopic sandwiches and grumbled about strikes, crime, Russians, television, prices, bus timetables, teachers, children. "He isn't such a bad boy," his grandmother said, holding his hand while they gazed at him. He was seeing a hairy wart, a hat like a green and purple sea urchin, mouths the color and texture of healing wounds. "He got off to a bad start, but that isn't everything. He just needs proper handling."

Jimmy felt more confused than ever, and escaped as soon as he could. As he stepped onto the sticky road, Emma waved at him from her window. "Everyone's gone out. We can play being mummy and daddy."

He and his parents had often used to wear no clothes in their flat, but now they wouldn't even let him go undressed. Sure enough, Emma suggested they take off their clothes before dressing up, and he was almost naked when Mrs. Tortoisesh.e.l.l saw him. She was holding a plastic bag of ice cubes on top of her head. She stood there aghast, one hand on the bag and the other on her hip, like a caricature of a ballerina. Then she vanished, crying so loudly for his grandmother he could hear her through the two windows.

He felt infested by guilt. Mrs. Tortoisesh.e.l.l must know what he was. He fled into the park, because he couldn't look at Emma, and hid behind a bush. Soon the old ladies emerged, calling "Bye-ee" like a flock of large pale birds, and his grandmother saw him. "James, come here."

She only wanted to show him an old book. That made him think of a witch in one of his comics, except his grandmother's book was for doctors. "Just you leave girls alone," she said, "unless you want this to happen to you." She seemed to be showing him a picture of a decaying log: did she mean his arms and legs would drop off? He was still trying to make it out when his mother came home and saw the picture. "What the Christ do you think you're doing? What are you trying to turn him into?"

"Someone has to take him in hand while you play nursemaid to other people's children. I never thought my son would end up married to a nanny."

Jimmy thought his mother would explode, her face had turned so mottled. Then his father came in. One look at the tableau of them, and he groaned. "What's wrong now?"

"You tell me. Tell me why she's showing him this c.r.a.p if you can."

"Because he was up to no good with the little strumpet next door." When his parents demanded what she meant she said, "I should think you would know only too well."

"Don't be ridiculous. He's seven years old," his father said, and Jimmy felt as if he wasn't there at all.

"That means nothing with all this s.e.x you're teaching them in school."

"I can't teach anybody anything with all the education cuts your b.l.o.o.d.y government is making."

"Oh, is it my fault now that you can't get a job? Well, I shouldn't say this but I will: if it were up to me I wouldn't send you to your interviews looking like a tramp."

It seemed the storm was about to break, when Mrs. Tortoisesh.e.l.l appeared from upstairs in search of her hat. She was still clutching the bag of melted ice to her head, as if it were a hat someone had left in exchange for hers. "I shouldn't have taken it off," she wailed, and Jimmy imagined her wearing her hat on top of the bag. Eventually he found it, a helmet like a pink cake curly with icing. "That's a good boy," his grandmother said, enraging his parents.

The interruption had turned the row into a hostile silence. Jimmy was almost glad when bedtime came. As his mother tucked him in she said, "I don't know what you were doing with Emma but don't do it again, all right? We've enough problems as it is." He wanted to call her back and tell her what had really happened, but instead he huddled beneath the sheets: he'd glimpsed the face in the other bed, the face that looked swollen and patchy, just like the picture his grandmother had shown him. He was afraid to touch his own face in case it felt like that. He could hardly convince himself he was there in his own bed at all.

The morning was cold and wet, and so was the week that followed. He avoided his room as much as he could. It wasn't only that it seemed the darkest place in the house, its walls swarming with ghosts of rain; it was the face that peered around the edge of the mirror whenever he entered the room. He had to step in before he could switch on the light, and in that moment the puffy blackened face grinned out. When he switched on the light his face looked just as it did in any other mirror, but he'd seen in comics how villains could disguise themselves.

The day it stopped raining was the day his grandmother let him know he was a villain. The wet weather must have made her rusty, for whenever she stood up she winced. She gave him a five-pound note to buy liniment at the chemist's. He was feeling grown-up to have charge of so much when she fixed him with her gaze. "Just remember, James, I'm trusting you."

He had never felt guiltier. She expected him to steal. Since she did, he hardly paused when he saw the new red ball in the toyshop by the chemist's. It cost nearly a pound, and the wind was trying to s.n.a.t.c.h the four pound notes out of his fist; he'd only to tell her that one had blown away. Buying the ball made him feel vindicated, and he was almost at the house before he wondered how he could explain the ball.

He must hide it before she could see it. He ran in- she'd left the porch door open for him-and was halfway to the stairs when she came out of the living-room. He threw the ball desperately onto the landing above him. "Who is it?" she cried as it went thud, thud. "Who's up there?"

"I'll go and see," he said at once, and was running upstairs to hide the ball when she said, "My liniment and four pounds ten pence, please."

"I put it there." He pointed at the jar of liniment on the hall table, but she gazed at his clenched fist until he went reluctantly down and opened his hand above hers. "And the other pound, please," she said as the notes unfurled.

"I haven't got it." He realized too late that he should have said so at once. "It blew in the lake."

She made him turn out his pockets. When they proved to be empty except for a clump of sweets, her face grew even stiffer. "Please stay where I can see you," she said as he followed her upstairs.

The ball wasn't on the landing. It must be in one of the rooms, all of which were open except his. As she looked into each and pushed him ahead of her, the sky grew dark, the trees began to hiss and glisten. She pushed him into his room. The figure with the crawling blotchy face stepped forward to meet him, and the ball was at its feet, beneath the wardrobe. Yet Jimmy's grandmother hardly glanced at the ball, and it took him a while to understand she didn't realize it was new.

She said nothing when his mother came home. She was waiting for his father, to tell him Jimmy had stolen from her. "Is that what happened, Jimmy?" his father said.

"No." Jimmy felt as if he were talking to strangers-as if he were a stranger too. "It blew in the lake."

"That sounds more like it to me." When the old lady's pursed lips opened, his father said, "Look, here's a pound, and now let's forget it. I don't want to hear you saying things like that about Jimmy."

Jimmy felt strange. He could no longer recall taking the money. Someone else had stolen it: whoever had the ball. The idea didn't frighten him until he went to bed and lay there dreading the moment when his mother would leave him in the dark. He wasn't frightened of being alone, quite the opposite. "Don't switch off the light," he cried. "I don't want to live here anymore."

"We have to for a little while. Be brave. Your father had an interview that looked promising. We're waiting to hear."

He felt a hint of their old relationship. "Don't go out and leave me all day. I have to stay in with her."

"No you haven't. If it's too wet to play you can go to Emma's. I say you can. Now be a big boy and do without the light or you'll be getting us told off for wasting electricity."

Eventually he slept, praying that the noises at the end of the bed were only the stirrings of the radiator. Rain like maracas woke him in the morning, and so did a surge of delight that he wouldn't have to stay in. Emma was glad to see him, for she had a cold. They played all day, and he didn't go home until he heard his parents.

His grandmother wasn't speaking to them. Whenever she spoke to him, it was a challenge meant for them. He felt as if the burning silence were focused on him, especially when, nearly at the end of the endless dinner, they heard Emma sneezing. His mother felt his p.r.i.c.kling forehead. "You'd better go to bed," she said at once.

He couldn't protest: something had drained that strength from him. As his mother helped him to his room, no doubt thinking it was illness rather than fear that was slowing him down on the stairs, he heard his grandmother. "I hope you're satisfied now. That's how she cares for your child."

His mother put him to bed and gave him a gla.s.s of medicine. All too soon she was at the door. "Leave the light on," he pleaded in a voice he could scarcely hear.

"You certainly can have the light on," she said, loudly enough to be heard downstairs. "Call me if you need anything."

For a while he felt safe, listening to the downpour whipping the window. When his parents came upstairs he thought he would be safer, but then he heard his mother. "You won't stand up to her at all. You as good as admitted he was a thief by giving her that money. I really think you're still afraid of her. Being near her makes you weak." That made Jimmy feel weak himself, made him think of his father being beaten. He buried his head in the pillow, and was trying to decide whether he felt hot or cold when he fell asleep.

When he awoke, the rain had stopped. There was silence except for a faint dull repet.i.tive splashing. Everyone must be in bed. He clawed the sheet away from his face and opened his eyes. He was still in the dark. Someone had switched off the light.

Above his head the window must be streaming, for the wall and the door beyond the foot of the bed were breaking out in glistening patches. The outline of the switch beside the door was crumbling with darkness, it looked ready to fall and leave him with no hope of light, but if he could struggle out of bed it was only a few paces away. Surely he could do that if he closed his eyes, surely he could reach the switch before he saw anything else. But he was already seeing what was in the corner by the window, nearest his face: a small round shape just about the size of his head.

When he saw the blotches breaking out on it he knew it was about to grin-until he saw it was the ball. It had been sent out of the dark to him. He lay staring fearfully, alone but for the m.u.f.fled regular splashing, and tried to believe he could move, could dart out of bed and out of the room. The mirror was further from the door than he was. When he tried to take deep breaths, they and his heart deafened him. He was afraid not to be able to hear.

Or perhaps he was afraid of what he might hear, for the soft dull sound wasn't quite like splashing. To begin with, it was in the room with him. It must be growing louder: he no longer had to strain to hear that it was a thumping, a patting, the sound of squashy objects striking gla.s.s. No, it wasn't at the window. It came from beyond the foot of the bed.

At last he managed to raise his head. He would be able to see without being able to escape. His neck was at an angle-a blazing pain was trying to twitch his head back onto the pillow-but now he could see over the footboard. It was terror, not pain, that made his head fall back. The dim bed in the mirror was empty. A figure covered from head to foot with blotches was standing beyond the bed, pressing its face and hands against the gla.s.s, gazing out at him.

As soon as his head touched the pillow he screamed and threw himself out of bed. A moment later he wouldn't have been able to move. He fled towards the door, but the sheets tripped him. As he fell, he twisted his ankle. The soft thumping recommenced at once, more strongly. It sounded determined to break through the gla.s.s.

He clawed at the floor above his head and hurled the ball without thinking. It was out of his hands when he realized that it was too light to break the mirror. Yet he heard the smash of gla.s.s, fragments splintering on the floorboards. The mirror must have been thin as eggsh.e.l.l, and now he had made it hatch. When he heard the footsteps, which sounded like pats of mud dropped on the floor, he could only shrink into a corner with his hands over his face, and scream.

Though he heard the door opening almost at once, it was some time before the light went on. He dared to look then, and saw his grandmother staring at the broken mirror. "That's the end," she said as his parents pushed past her. "I won't have him in my house."

Jimmy took that as a promise, and wished it could be kept at once, for someone else was at large in the building. It hadn't been his grandmother who had opened his bedroom door. When he heard the crash of gla.s.s downstairs, he began to shiver. His grandmother hurried down, and they heard her cry out. Soon she returned, carrying his father's framed certificate, her treasure, smashed and torn. She looked as if she blamed Jimmy, but he couldn't be sure it was his fault. Perhaps it was.

When his grandmother went away to cry, his mother persuaded him back to bed, but he wouldn't let her leave him or switch off the light. Eventually he dozed. Once he woke, afraid that someone was lying in bed with him, but the impression faded almost at once. His mother was still in her chair by the bed. Surely she wouldn't have let anyone creep into the room.

The morning was cloudless, and everything seemed to have changed. His father had been accepted for a teaching post. Perhaps that was why Jimmy felt as if he hadn't caught Emma's cold after all. Perhaps something else had been draining him.

His grandmother said nothing. Jimmy thought she wished that she hadn't sounded so final last night, hoped they would say something that would let her take it back. But his father had already arranged for them to use a friend's flat while she was in London. Jimmy was so elated that when the removal van arrived he hadn't even parceled up his comics.

In any case, he hadn't said goodbye to Emma. He said he would stay until their friend came back with the van. "I'll stay too if you like," his mother said, but he found her concern irritating. He could look after himself.

As soon as they left, his grandmother went upstairs. He rang Emma's bell, but there was no reply. His grandmother's house was hotter than outside: she'd forgotten to turn off the furnace. He could hear her in her room, weeping as if nothing mattered anymore. He felt rather sorry for her, wanted to tell her he would come and see her sometimes. He didn't mind now, since he was leaving. He ran upstairs.

She must have heard him coming. She was dabbing at her eyes and making up at the dressing-table. He opened his mouth to promise, and heard himself saying, "Granny, there's something wrong with the furnace. I didn't go down, you said not to."

"That's a good boy." She turned to give him a brave moist-eyed smile, and so she couldn't see what he was seeing in the mirror: his face just managing to conceal its grin. For an instant, during which he might have been able to cry out, he saw how another face was hiding beneath his. He remembered the impression he'd had, fading into himself, that someone had crept into bed with him.

"You can come down with me if you like," his grandmother said forgivingly, and he could only follow. He wanted to cry out, so that she or someone else would stop him, but his face was beyond his control. He hurried down the cellar steps behind her, hearing the m.u.f.fled roar of flames in the furnace, grinning.

Beyond Words (1986).

Liverpool's dying of slogans, Ward thinks. Several thousand city council workers are marching through the littered streets under placards and banners and neon signs, Top Man, Burger King, Wimpy Hamburgers, Cascade Amus.e.m.e.nts. Songs that sound like a primer of bad English blare from shops under failing neon that turns words into gibberish. The chants of the marchers and the chattering of signs lodge in Ward's skull, crushing fragments of the story he's trying to complete. He dodges between stalls that have sprung up in Church Street, hawking cheap clothes and toys and towels imprinted like miraculous shrouds with a pop star's face, and into the optician's.

"So you're a writer, Mr. Smith. I don't get many of those in my chair." The optician's round smooth face is a little too large for the rest of him; Ward's reminded of a lifesize seaside photograph with a hole to stick your face through. "You must need eyes in your job. We'll just have these off," the optician says, and deftly removes Ward's spectacles.

Just a few words may be all that he needs, a solution hidden deep in his mind, but the slippery idea seems more distant than ever. Ward imagines the unwritten words turning red, the bank manager frowning and shaking his head, and is terrified that the resolution of the story may be gone forever-terrified of losing the ability to write now that Tina is soon to quit her job to bear their child. He's straining his mind desperately when the optician fits a pair of medievally heavy gla.s.sless spectacles on his nose and slides an eye-patch in front of his left eye, a lens before the other.

As the eye chart lurches into focus, its letters glaring blackly out of the backlit rectangle, Ward reads it all at once, instantly. The words seem a solution to everything, to problems which have yet to arise as well as those he's grappling with. Then he sees that they aren't words at all; what's sounding in his inner ear is the rhythm of the letters, the way he thought their groups should sound. He sets about p.r.o.nouncing the letters, down to the bottom line that's almost as small as his handwriting.

"Well, Mr. Smith, you'll be glad to hear you don't need new gla.s.ses." Seeing that Ward isn't entirely, the optician continues, "I should see your doctor about your headaches or give yourself a holiday from writing."

If I go away the writing comes too, Ward thinks, shivering in the April sunlight at the bus stop. A windblown polystyrene tray squeals along the stained pavement like a nail on slate. The ghost of a giant spinal column fades from the rumbling sky, a fat woman trots delicately past him-a ball trying to grow into a ballerina, Ward thinks, fighting off the crowd of images that clamor to be caught in words. A bus carries him through Toxteth, where youths with bricks are besieging a police station, and into Allerton, shops growing smaller under signs like samples of typefaces. In Penny Lane, where Ward lives, a coachload of Beatles fans is chattering in j.a.panese as he lets himself into the house. He runs up the stairs, whose well is smaller than its echoes pretend, and into the flat overlooking the school.

Tina's lying on the sheepskin rug. Her hands are splayed on the bare floor, her red hair seems to stream across the boards from her pale delicate face. Her four months' pregnancy bulks above her in the flowered mound of her maternity smock. "How are you?" Ward says.

"We're both fine. Listen." She clasps his head gently while he rests one ear against her belly. He thinks the heartbeat he's hearing is his own, racing in an elusively familiar rhythm. "How are you?" Tina murmurs.

"Just eyestrain, he said."

"You shouldn't write so small. No good saving paper if you end up losing your vision. Even I couldn't read that last story."

"Guards against plagiarism," Ward says, then smiles. "You know I don't mean you. We're collaborators. That's our first collaboration swimming round in there."

"I'm glad we'll be together."

She means at the birth, and perhaps she's referring to the way she feels excluded from his work. He can't see how to share a process that takes place in his head and on the blank page. "Publishers called, by the way," she says as if reminded. "It's all written down."

It isn't Ward's publisher. He doesn't recognize the name, not that many people seem to know his or that of his publisher. He calls and finds he's reached a new house. "When can we meet for lunch?" Kendle Holmes demands heartily. "I've a proposition to put to you."

"I could come down to London tomorrow?" Ward asks Tina, who nods.

"I'll see you here at one," Holmes says, and tells him where.

Anxious to round off his story so as to be ready for whatever Holmes may propose, Ward heads for the library. In the story a writer haunts libraries in search of comments readers scribble in his books. He begins to find the same handwriting in the margins of every copy wherever he goes, comments addressed more and more directly to him. He becomes obsessed with catching the culprit, but what happens when he does? Nothing Ward can think of that he finds worth writing. When schoolchildren crowd into the library, disarraying his thoughts and the already jumbled shelves of books, he gives up wandering the aisles in a vague vain quest for his own work and walks home as the shops light up the streets.

Tina's lying on the bed in the main room, a computer manual propped against her belly. Ward makes omelettes in the small not quite upright kitchen before she goes to work. Later he listens to the radio, wincing at abuses of language; he can never shrug off the proliferation of solecisms until he's composed a letter of protest in an attic of his mind, even though he never commits it to paper. He's still listening in the dark when Tina comes home, too tired to make love.

In the morning he goes to London, so early that he's a hundred miles from Liverpool before he feels awake. Trees, irrepressibly green, pirouette intricately in the fields while he listens to the rhythm of the wheels, m.u.f.fled by the vacuum within the panes. Fitting words to the rhythm might lessen his awareness of the sound and let him think what the writer has to confront in the library, but all he can make of the rhythm is WHAT THE WORDS ARE WHAT THE WORDS ARE WHAT THE WORDS ARE ... The rhythm seems almost familiar, but he can't tell what's missing, any more than he can put an ending to his story.

Dozens of black cabs pile down the ramp below Eus-ton; Ward thinks of a coal chute. One carries him up into the sunlit maze of traffic, past pavements laden with pedestrians and words. It's his first experience of London, and the rifeness of streets overwhelms him; so does the cost of the ride. By the time he reaches Greek Court, where Hercules Books have their office, his ears are throbbing rhythmically.

As soon as Ward announces himself to the brisk young woman behind the glossy white horseshoe desk, Holmes strides out of his office like someone who's been waiting impatiently for the doors of a lift to open. He's thinner than he sounded on the phone, and dressed in a green suit. When he sways forward to give Ward a darting handshake Ward thinks of a sapling, bowing.

He sweeps Ward round the corner, into an Italian restaurant where he orders drinks and conveys Ward's order for lunch to the waiter. "Now are you going to be the next Tolkein?"

Ward's at a loss for words. "Well. . ."

"Of course you aren't. You're the first Ward Smith, the voice of modern British fantasy. That's what the public will say when they've heard of you, and I'm saying it now."

"That's very kind."

"Not kind at all. It's true." Holmes blinks his bright blue eyes twice and rubs his long smooth chin. "I really like your one about the scriptwriter who's haunted by the character he created, can't get rid of him because he's forgotten where he got the name from."

"Gnikomson."

"Right, the Swedish detective. I love the ending when the writer's going to light his first cigarette in years until he sees the No Smoking sign reflected in the train window. 'And then, of course, Gnikomson stood on his head and vanished.' How did that collection of yours do?"

"Pretty well for a book of short stories, they tell me," Ward tells him, shaking his head.

"I take it your wife works too."

"Until she has our baby."

"Good, good, but dear, dear. And will Clarion Press have something else by you out by then?"