Sucker
From the moment I saw them, I was obsessed. It was like someone had switched off the light, but suddenly I could see in the dark.
At first I thought they were mother and son. He looked like an Italian model from the 90s, black curls and scooped-out cheekbones and a jaw like the edge of a shelf. She was preserved in the way that rich older women are, silver-blonde hair resting on the big fur collar of her coat.
They were moving into the house opposite, which had been stripped to the bones by the previous owner, who intended to flip it for profit but died of a brain aneurysm before he got the chance. We live in a row of large terraced sandstone houses with faux-Gothic flourishes: turrets, weathervanes, windows with hundreds of tiny panes. The houses used to be split up into poverty flats, a whole family in a single room, all working long shifts at the steelworks, even the children. Then gentrification, and each house expanded, carving bits out of other homes, stealing individual rooms and then swallowing up entire families. Each house now loomed, spider-like, grasping.
I’d been working from home since the pandemic and spent most of my workday in the bay window on the first floor. I should say work nights ; I was a night watchman for a museum. You might not think that’s the sort of thing you can do from home, but it turns out they prefer it: every square foot of the place is covered with cameras, so I can see everything at once, and this way there’s no danger I’ll be injured by an intruder and sue. All have to do is raise the correct alarms if there’s a fire or a break-in. I have money, the sort of inherited wealth people tend not to admit to, which is how I’ve got this house. But being middle-middle class doesn’t get you as far as it used to. I didn’t need this job, but I needed a job, and this one was as good as any. I lived alone and silent, as if asleep. I ate when I felt hungry, slept when I felt tired. There was nothing and no one to arrange my time around, so I lived outside time.
I’d tucked my desk at the window so I’d have my back to the room; as well as my office it was the spare room, and since I didn’t have any friends and my family didn’t speak to me, it had become a graveyard of flattened cardboard boxes and things I never got around to returning to shops. Rather than confront the detritus of my life, I chose to look outwards: at them.
They didn’t have curtains, so I could see right into their rooms. At first I thought it was all temporary, since they were just moving in, but as the weeks went by and nothing changed, I realised it was a choice. Their house was like a movie set: great swathes of white muslin hanging from the ceiling, billowing like clouds; one or two pieces of very old, very expensive furniture in each room; nothing electrical, nothing modern. They kept odd hours, went out dressed up most nights, and played a lot of music: as in, they actually physically played it, she on the piano, he on the violin. I recognised the music; I don’t know the names of classical composers, but they were famous pieces, things I’d heard on adverts and film soundtracks. Even though it was winter, and cold enough to make your teeth hurt, as soon as they started playing I opened my window to hear.
I kept changing my mind about their ages. He could be in his forties but incredibly well preserved, in the way only money can buy; but he had the ease, the insouciance of a man in his early twenties. She was easily sixty, composed and calm, but with a shake in her hands. Her skin was wrinkled and supple like thin paper that had been folded and refolded many times, smoothed over by loving fingers.
And so they made their little world together, and through the glass I watched them. Possessive, controlling mother with her clingy and overachieving son, I thought: but then, one night, when I forgot to put on a light, I saw them lit up like a stage play in their bedroom. He cupped his face in her hands and kissed her mouth. Fervent, possessive. Violent, even. He stroked his hands down her shoulders and she shivered. He took hold of the shoulders of her pale, silky dressing gown and ripped it from her body. Not in a fit of passion, but slowly, deliberately, tearing the fabric to reveal skin just as pale and silky. She didn’t touch him but she also didn’t stop him; it was as if she was following instructions from a director off-screen.
They were right by the window, and I wondered then: did they want me to see? Me, or just anyone? Of course I was curious, but I didn’t like feeling like a bit-part in their drama, so to make a point I switched on my light and left the room to go and make dinner – or supper, or breakfast; I didn’t know the time or what meal was appropriate, but I only had scrambled eggs and liver anyway so it didn’t matter. As I fried the liver in a pan in my dark and stuffy kitchen, the radio burbling in the corner, I thought of their bodies, coming together among the billowing curtain of their stage set, each watching the bright, empty room I had left.
It was around that time that I started to get sick. The details don’t matter; I’ll just say it wasn’t the type of thing that gets better. Once it starts, you can do various things to slow it down, but it just plays out until the end, which is the same end waiting for us all. I suppose no one gets to live outside time, when it comes down to it.
The treatments were unpleasant and tedious. Not painful, but still my body fought against them, shuddering and bilious as if knowing that something was inside my body that shouldn’t be. The treatments also took hours, which gave me plenty of time to daydream – nightdream – about how to get invited into their house. Into their lives.
I could steal a parcel from their step and pretend it was delivered to me accidentally. I could bring round a welcome-to-the-neighbourhood basket of pastries and wine. I could fake a heart attack outside their house, so they’d have to rush out and scoop me up in their arms, both of them holding me close, giving me mouth-to-mouth in turn, his cold full lips and her thin soft ones, both of them pulling me back from the brink, wanting nothing more than for me to go on living.
Once, like a child, I knocked on the door and then ran away. I wanted them to come because I had summoned them; for something to happen because I had made it so, even if it was only opening the door. Usually he was so composed, but I must have taken him unawares; I watched from behind a hedge as he stood there, his chest bare, solid and oddly waxy, his black suit trousers hanging low on his hips, his feet bare. He blinked slowly, as if drunk or pulled from a deep sleep. He stood there for far longer than necessary. The night had iced every surface with diamonds and my feet in my boots were numb, but he appeared unaffected. Finally he closed the door, and it was as if nothing had happened, except for inside me.
The treatments continued, to no apparent purpose. They were always scheduled in the early evening, which at that time of year was as dark as midnight. I took to walking there and back, as the judder and stark lighting of the bus nauseated me. I think I had begun to disconnect a little from reality. I wasn’t sleeping well, and spent much of my time in darkened rooms, watching the house opposite, touching my fingers to the cold glass of my windows.
The city at night felt like a hospital, bleak and unknowable. The lighting was so bright it washed everything antiseptic. None of the signage made sense and the walkways twisted labyrinthine and everything felt plasticky and over-bleached. The bridge across the river had hidden speakers piping out whale song, and in my insomniac detachment I found it made perfect sense, that whales would be singing to one another from a silty city river as they navigated sunken shopping trolleys and families of eels.
After the treatment, during which I thought of the hollows of his hips and the soft notebook of her skin, I walked home in silence under a blank sky. Every house on our street had a security light, each of which flashed on as I passed. Mine didn’t, and neither did the one opposite, which is why I didn’t see him at first.
‘A girl like you,’ he called over to me, ‘shouldn’t be out alone.’ He was leaning against his front gate, exhaling a thin stream of blue smoke up to the sky, something thin and black between his fingers. Of course he was too fancy for it to be a cigarette. A cigar, maybe? I didn’t know exactly what a cigarillo was, but it was probably that.
‘Why’s that?’ I said.
‘Because there are men like me about.’
Not threatening, not seductive, not even particularly friendly. Just stating a fact to help me, like pointing out that my shoelace had come untied. I started to cross over towards him, but stopped halfway, in the middle of the road. If a car came round fast, it would hit me. I found I didn’t care.
‘They’ll kill you,’ I said, nodding to the cigar.
He laughed at that, much longer and more genuinely than my snippy comment warranted. Even though I’d made the joke, I felt like I was missing it.
All that time I’d spent figuring out how to get close to them, and all I needed to do was walk home alone in the dark.
He mashed out the cigar on the gate so it sparked. He put the stub of it into the bin, opening the black plastic lid and dropping it with a thud, and there was something so prosaic, so deeply ordinary about that act. He was just a man who put things in the bin. He ate food and he shat it out. Sometimes he felt awkward, sometimes his knee twinged, sometimes he got an eye infection.
He winked at me and went back into his house without saying another word. I realised then: there was something so childish about him. A little boy playing dress-up.
And I was worried for him. What was she doing with him, this woman twice or three times his age? What did she want from him?
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that, the following day, he invited me to dinner. He did this with his usual theatrics: a thick, creamy, heavy card put through my letter box, the elaborate letters embossed in gold, ‘We would be honoured if …’
I went straight across the road to accept. I didn’t have embossed golden notecards, so I knocked on their door and waited.
‘Yes,’ I said when she opened the door. ‘I would like to come to dinner. Clair would. That’s my name. It wasn’t on the notecard so I didn’t know if you knew. It’s Clair.’
‘Eleanor,’ she said. ‘Eleanor Laluyaux.’
I waited for her to add call me Ellie, call me Nell – but she was neither of these. She was an Eleanor. His name I never learned. I know that sounds strange; I spoke to them often, visited their home, inveigled myself into their lives – yet his name never came up. He loomed so large for both me and Eleanor, we never had to refer to him by name. He was the only ‘he’ we ever spoke about.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I don’t think it’s necessary to narrate every encounter we had. That first dinner was exactly as I expected, a mixture of the surreal (oysters reddened with beetroot, a platter of sweetbreads, tart wine in heavy goblets) and the ordinary (hearing them disagree over the correct method of stacking the dishwasher). It was also the first of many. I continued to observe them, though without the barrier of glass between us in the dark.
They communicated in a way I consistently failed to understand, but envied. Sometimes they spoke in a foreign language, one I didn’t recognise. Sometimes it sounded like Italian, sometimes Romanian, sometimes a soft shush like Icelandic or a series of hissing tongue-to-teeth sounds like Catalan. They listened to one another with a deadly seriousness, but then what appeared to be vital information was dismissed with the wave of a hand and a tut against the teeth.
Often there was no language at all. In response to an unvoiced question, he kept his unblinking gaze on her until she inclined her head slightly with a smile. He raised his eyebrows as if acknowledging an answer. It made something in me ache to see the intimacy they shared.
I wanted them; that will be obvious. I wanted her but I didn’t want to take her from him. And I wanted him but I didn’t want to take him from her. I wanted them both, but not together. I wanted each of them to find me forbidden fruit; to yearn for me in their secret depths, to watch my windows in the night.
I noticed that all the mirrors in the house were hung at his eye level. He checked them often, letting his gaze track as he passed, watching himself in motion. He was at least a foot taller than me or Eleanor, so when I was there I couldn’t see myself at all. I hadn’t realised how used I was to watching myself as I washed my hands in the bathroom; an opportunity to fluff up my lank hair or pull down the lower lids of my eyes to assess their redness. In their bathroom, all I saw was a blank wall and the reflection of the very top of my head.
As the weeks passed, and I began to miss more and more of my hospital treatments, I found myself pulling away from him and focusing more on her. We spoke often, Eleanor and I. Every time he left the house to do whatever mysterious things that men like him did, she called to me. She did this by sitting in her bay window with a white silk scarf at her throat. I responded by fighting my thorny way through the woods behind the house and forcing open the broken window of their large glass conservatory. We met in a room that I struggle to name: a small nook at the centre of the house, probably meant for storage; it had no windows and was very warm, and we sat there on a dusty chaise in the glow of a hurricane lamp, and she told me her story, piece by piece.
There was no real need for this melodrama; she could have phoned me and I could have crossed the road to her front door. But her story seemed to need these throat-clearing theatricals. Without, it was too real, too horrible.
Here is what she told me.
If I sound nostalgic, said Eleanor, it’s not because I was happy in those years. But I feel affection for how I was then. I miss that girl who thought she was in control. Did you know that the term ‘nostalgia’ derives from the Greek words nostos and algos ? Nostos, return. Algos, pain. Nostalgia is the wound we keep reopening.
When I was a child, everything about me was fine. Grades, average. Friends, average. Looks, average. I was shy and a little silly, I doted on my little brother, every Wednesday I stole a penny candy from the local store. I don’t know what it was that set me apart from the other girls. I wish I had known, so I could cut it out of myself.
I met him at the school gates. I assumed he was leaving classes, as I was. We dated a little. My parents were old-fashioned and didn’t want me getting too serious, though they never forbade me from seeing him; they only wanted me to focus on my schoolwork, which I already found a struggle, and this was no problem for me, as although I did like dating him, really I was more interested in going to the cinema with my friends and playing on the hockey team. But he grew convinced that my family were keeping us apart.
He told me we were the only two people in the world. He told me he would make it so.
He killed them in the night and left the bodies for me to find. He sat outside my house with the car running and the passenger door open.
You have to understand about obsession. It’s not how you feel about a band or a movie star or a distant crush. Real obsession has guts, and it has claws, and it makes you bleed, and it leaves scars. It’s not something you can just grow out of or forget about. It has consequences.
In those vaporous days we moved often. When you have no family and no home and no one knows who you are, you’re free. Not free like a bird. Free like you can be taken.
I’ve never had a job or a friend. I’ve never owned anything. Never slept alone in a room. He makes the world, and I live in it. All I know is what he’s told me. All I have is what he’s given me. Is that from the Bible? It feels like it’s from the Bible.
I want you to look at me now. I want you to look, and to listen carefully to this part. I was thirteen when he took me. Now I’m sixty-eight. But he isn’t.
It took a while for him to tell me the truth. He would sometimes say strange things. I was never a child , he would say. I will never grow old. I will never not be this . I think I knew, deep down, before he told me. If he felt me start to drift from him, he would bind me back.
Once, when he thought I had lingered too long over a map in a rest stop, he took me to the animal shelter and ate all the kittens. He didn’t drain them of blood, like you might expect. He unhinged his jaw and ate them whole. Their little bones made his gums bleed, and he liked that.
We saw a flyer for a frat party, and he was so enraged by the thought that I might want to go that he ripped out all their throats. I believe a serial killer was blamed for that one.
I knew for sure what he was the first time he hurt me. I know that sounds ridiculous; as if the deaths of my family didn’t hurt. As if I felt nothing for cats or frat boys. But physically, he was always cautious with me, until the day he wasn’t.
He hurts me very deeply, but never violently. Very slowly, he gouges and he scratches and he carves. He eats morsels. Then, when he’s finished, he feeds me his blood, and I heal without a scratch. I have lived for fifty-five years with a murderer, and there’s not a scar on my entire body.
One day you knocked on our door and ran away, do you remember? You hid behind a hedge and I suppose you thought we couldn’t see you. But the thing is, he can always see you. He can see in the dark, and even if you’re well hidden it doesn’t matter because he can read minds. He always knows. It’s not possible to hide from him. He’s usually so cautious, but that day he opened the door unprepared because he had just finished healing me. He goes tender and dreamy when I drink from him. He becomes drunk, like a glass of water.
How could I be average among all that? Would a girl who was just fine cause a boy to commit mass murder? One girl in a million can push a man that far.
In the early days, he asked me often. He wanted us to stay young together.
But he wants me to come willingly. He will never force me, he says. He’d never force me to do anything. And I suppose he hasn’t. He didn’t force me to go with him. He hasn’t forced me to stay with him. He simply killed everyone who ever cared about me.
I have to hold this one thing back from him. If I choose eternity, then I can only have eternity with him. He will own me forever. And so I get older, and he does not, and every time he asks me I say no, not yet. Not yet.
Saying no to him – saying yes to my inevitable death – is my final act of love.
So there it was. Eleanor’s story. Of course I thought she was a fantasist, or delusional, or playing some strange mind game with me. But her explanation made as much sense as any other, and if I argued with her then I might not be invited back, and then what was there for me? My darkened rooms and the burble of the radio and the bright-lit stage of their house across the road? Besides, it could be true. I had very little life left anyway, and a lot more to gain than lose.
Over those months, while we sat in the low glow of that room in the belly of the house and Eleanor told me her story, my fascination for them both did not diminish. If anything, it grew. Not in size – it was already insurmountable – but in complexity. My fascination became layered and contradictory. It intensified to a heady, dense, stinking knot at the centre of me, like ambergris in a whale.
Imagine, I thought, being loved like that. Whether Eleanor dies tomorrow or lives her whole life again, whatever she says, whatever she does, she is loved more than most people will ever be. If nothing else in Eleanor’s life is true, then she can hold to that one thing: how much he loves her.
But along with that, another realisation: I had disrupted something by coming into their house. I knew that things had changed. I saw it, whether through the window or over the dinner table. I was there, a ghost between them.
I was beginning, by then, to feel a little like a ghost. I often went away. Not to anywhere in particular, or not that I remembered. I had absences. Waiting in queues, walking down the street. I’d completely given up on my treatments by then, and the letters from the hospital had stopped coming. They likely thought I had moved, or died. I suppose I had low blood sugar, or low iron levels. I would just drift away momentarily. I quite liked it. A blurred quiet, a little death.
I rarely saw him alone, but one night I decided to smoke a cigarillo while leaning on my front gate. It pleased me at times to imagine myself as him, and at other times as Eleanor.
It was winter again, and standing there in the dark I realised I still hadn’t fixed the security light on my house. I didn’t notice him until he was in the middle of the road. He started to cross over towards me but stopped halfway. His eyes were black pits with no reflection.
‘I saw you once,’ he said. ‘You’ve changed, but I recognised you instantly.’
‘Is that meant to be a compliment?’ I replied, blowing a long stream of smoke up to the sky. ‘You and Eleanor have only been here a few months. I can’t have aged out of recognition.’
‘You were young. Barely more than a child. I saw your face at a window, just for a moment. I was ashamed to stare, but I couldn’t help it. I thought – how beautiful it would be to live here, and never go away again. Years passed, and I still dreamt of you.’
‘And that’s why you moved back,’ I said, and I winked, though he wasn’t looking at me, but up at the wispy scuds of evening cloud.
‘I had to know,’ he said.
I waited for him to answer his own question. I hated when men did that: goaded you into asking what they meant. It was a kind of neediness.
‘You’re dying,’ he said, and although I had known it was true for a long time, it still gave me a jolt to hear it. ‘But you don’t have to.’
‘Everyone dies,’ I said, and I must have gone away again, because the next thing I knew he was right beside me.
‘Say yes,’ he breathed into my ear. A year ago this would have turned my insides pewter and slick, but now I knew too much. I had seen him stack the dishwasher poorly. I knew he took out the bins every fortnight.
‘You want me,’ I replied. He went to speak, but I wasn’t finished. ‘You want me to come willingly.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then yes,’ I replied. ‘Midnight.’
I knew he would like that, dramatic bitch that he was. In the second before he smiled, a thought came to me. The only way for Eleanor to be safe from him was to be the only one. There it was, the unspoken part of her story; the reason she had told it to me at all. His interest in her was dwindling, and he had fixed on me instead. She’d thought he’d wait forever, but forever is a long time, even if you’re immortal. If there was another option, if she really was average, was only fine, was replaceable, then what was keeping her alive?
I shivered for a different reason then, waiting for her to emerge out of the shadows. Waiting to feel her teeth ripping out my throat.
But, I thought later, after he’d flounced off to wherever he went, while I was scrambling eggs in a pot because whatever was going to happen I thought I’d need some protein, he hadn’t killed my family. He hadn’t kidnapped me and moved me from place to place my entire life. I wasn’t thirteen years old. I didn’t have to live the story he wrote for me.
Just before midnight, I let myself into the house across the road. It was freezing cold; all the windows were open, making the great swathes of white muslin shiver. The piano, which from my window had seemed elegant and perfectly proportioned, looked different close up. It squatted, gleaming, in the centre of the room like an enormous black beetle. Even with my breath held, I couldn’t hear either of them in the house.
Down in the cellar, it didn’t take me long to set up. In my own cellar there was a pit, six foot deep, originally used to store potatoes or work on something mechanical or perhaps to murder men, who knows; all that mattered to me was that there was an identical pit in this cellar. My supplies were cheap and easy to arrange. Zip ties, sawdust, tent pegs, a scalpel with a yellow handle, big plastic bases to stop beach umbrellas tipping over on windy days, which I filled with water from the tap. When full, they were heavy, but I managed to push them into position.
‘Are you there?’ I called up the stairs. A pause, then: ‘Please, I need you,’ I cooed, scalpel in hand, voice high and soft with an edge of desperation, just the way that men like him liked. He came down the stairs like a wisp of black smoke, but he wasn’t smoke, he had a body every bit as solid as mine, and he couldn’t see in the dark after all and he couldn’t read minds after all because he didn’t see it coming, not at all.
He was imprisoned easily. Most of his blood spilled out onto the sawdust I’d tipped into the pit, and what little was left in his body meant his movements were tiny and weak, more like twitches than anything intentional. Even if there hadn’t been a large wooden tent peg in his mouth, he wouldn’t have had the energy to speak. He wasn’t quite dead. I was pushing the last of the heavy umbrella bases over the lip of the pit to hold him down when I heard Eleanor gasp beside me.
It was tempting to really nail it home to her; to tell her that he only had power all those years because she believed he did. But it felt a little cruel at this point. Most likely she’d already reached the same conclusion. And it can’t be easy for her. She must feel a pull towards him. Those hands that held her down and held her close. Those eyes that watched for her through every night. That voice that told her the story of who she was.
So here’s the choice. Make it with me now. Here we are, in that sad little cellar, holding Eleanor’s creased, velvety hand, watching him slowly writhe in the pit. There’s a smell of old blood and sawdust. No one in the world knows any of you are here. He is nothing now; forget about him. He was only ever a tool, a one-time passcode to be instantly discarded. All that matters is you and Eleanor.
Option 1: She can get him to turn her, then she can turn you,
and you can both live together forever. You can live outside time.
The soft kiss of snow that never melts. Dreaming on a slow ship
from one side of the world to the other. Her gentle fingers on the
piano keys, her voice from another room, the dappled sun
coming through the trees: trees that you planted as acorns,
and watched grow.
Or, option 2: You can walk out of this cellar together,
still human, and leave him there, as whatever he is.
You can pool the money and time left to you both, and
have it be enough, and live every second, every penny.
You can grow old together, and die together
when you’ve used up all your time.
You can plant acorns and trust
that someone else will enjoy
the tree when it grows.
You can both go together.
Or you can both stay together.
Or.
There is another option.
You, leaning on the gate, exhaling a thin stream of blue smoke up to the sky.
You’re better at being him than he ever was.
You can own her just like he did.
What a neat space he’s carved out and left empty.
You can fill it, and more. You’re outside with the car running
and the passenger door open.