Coffee Knock Box

LOOKING FOR BILL   by Kieron McFadden

Mary was gone a long time.

They had finished supper at seven and Peter got up, uttered his cheery and habitual post-nosh mantra, “Nice bit o’ fish/lamb/curry/bolognese that, sweetheart. Put the kettle on?” and went to check his emails and phone messages. It was his customary way of avoiding the washing up.

He remembered the time because the antique grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs was in dolorous mid-chime as he crossed the hall from the dining room and he had instinctively checked it against his watch, frowned at it because there was a two-minute discrepancy. The old clock was slow -or his wristwatch was fast -and he was still trying to decide which when he reached the office and sat down at the computer. The tiny detail bothered him: he had a thing about clocks but as “things” went, it was relatively harmless.

Mary had said, “Tea or coffee?” as she gathered up the supper plates, then when he had plumped for tea: “Normal or herbal?” He plumped for herbal, felt like a health freak.

“Raspberry and lemon or nettle and ginger?” asked his wife, like a walking multi-choice questionnaire. Mary did opinion surveys for a national marketing company – the ideal job, considering her “thing,” which Peter had never quite been able to put a name to but after twelve years of marriage it irritated the hell out of him.

“You decide.” He told her, overwhelmed by the pressure of decision-making and beginning to wonder why he had said “herbal” in the first place. He didn’t normally; a moment of madness he supposed, a sudden desire for adventure. It gave him a sense of life being out of kilter. Life had been simple once, back in his parents’ day when all you had to do was pick Typhoo or Liptons. They lived in bewildering times.

“You want it in the office or by the TV?”

Bloody hell. Peter got the hell out of there.

He checked his emails and answered the three out of eighty two that were not spam offering him penis enlargement, Viagra or a Filipino wife; took the call he was expecting from one of his drivers who had taken a rig laden with the Murdoch family’s household possessions up to Glasgow: checked and answered his phone messages. In the background he was distantly aware of the dishes rattling in the kitchen while he was on the emails, and the kettle whistling; but then he became engrossed in his phone calls and did not notice that the familiar background sounds had gone quiet and that the TV in the lounge had not come on as it always did, ritually, straight after the supper dishes were done.

It was seven twenty by the time he finally knocked off for the day and moved on to Facebook, scrolling down the home page in a futile attempt to find a posting by one of his three hundred and eighty two “friends” that did not involve a report that they had just successfully been to the toilet, acquired a duck for Farmville or just become a gang chieftain in Mafia Wars.

It was a bit early in the evening for there to be all that much activity on Facebook anyhow: he would check it later before he went to bed and people were back from the pub or had given up on the TV.

As it happened, there was just one posting that evening, which caught his attention: he almost missed it among the banalities as he scrolled down the page but his attention was caught by his mother-in-law’s familiar profile picture.

“Has anyone seen Bill?” said the post.

It was timed at seven eighteen. Peter checked the time display at the bottom corner of his screen. It said “19:28,” which – he could not help but notice – was exactly one minute slower than his watch and one minute faster than the hall clock.

The message had been posted ten minutes earlier.

“Has anyone seen Bill?” was a strange message, particularly as his mother-in-law hardly ever went on Facebook and when she did it was to post recipes.

Annie Bryant’s “thing” was recipes and her hobby was thinking up her own and then endeavouring, usually in vain, to get people to try them. She spent an inordinate amount of time cooking and Peter had the feeling that if her cooker ever broke down, she would expire very shortly thereafter, her life having lost all purpose.

“Has anyone seen Bill?”

Peter blinked at it. Bill was his father-in-law, the gruff and predictably overweight owner of Bryant Farm (turkeys and small industrial units), a man somewhat weighed down by the insurmountable challenges and defeats life had thrown at him, such as marriage, bank managers and income tax, but not so defeated he could not fight back by taking it out on his long-suffering wife.

Peter wondered what that strange post was all about, what could be up in the Bryant household that lay three miles away on the outskirts of Westerbrook?

He checked and found that Annie was still apparently online, so he clicked the appropriate icon, got the “chat” box, typed her a message: “Hi Abbie, wgat’s up?”

He waited for a reply, frowned at his customary typos and cursed keyboard manufacturers everywhere for maliciously manufacturing keyboards that were too small for large haulage contractors’ fingers.

No reply came back. He guessed Annie must have moved away from her computer, probably to baste something or take something out of the oven or argue with her husband, the latter being the “thing” that filled the spare minutes that were not taken up with her primary “thing,” cooking.

The posted message still glared at him, enigmatically. Has anyone seen Bill? It sounded like the old girl had mislaid her husband. How do you mislay a sixteen stone sixty-two-year-old farmer?

He thought of ringing Bryant Farm to check all was well but then thought better of it.

The danger was that it would be Annie rather than Bill who answered the phone. He liked both his in-laws well enough, an affinity that had been ten years in the making and had finally, reluctantly, emerged after a decade of difficult labour and myriad reasons why it should have been strangled with its own umbilical.

Bill was cantankerous and not very big on the social graces but these were superficialities that overlay an inherent decency, the way a charred pie-crust conceals a savoury filling. His manner was somewhat monosyllabic – except when berating his wife – which was an advantage when he answered the phone because calls tended to be brief. Annie was a different kettle of fish entirely. She liked to talk and would tend not to let you go until the oven mercifully pinged, signaling that something required rescue – by which time usually you were thinking either of suicide or taking out a second mortgage to pay the phone bill.

Better get the missus to call her mum, Peter Wells decided, the way one elects to call the cops rather than tackle the mugger personally. Thinking of Mary, he realised she had been gone quite a while. His tea had not appeared, the TV was still not on and the house was quiet. It was now seven thirty six/seven/eight depending on which time-piece you believed. It was Tuesday evening and Mary’s favourite program, “Celebrity Hair,” started at half-past and Mary, for reasons known only to Blando, the god of Drivel, never missed it.

Something was wrong.

Peter got up and limped through to the kitchen, his left foot having gone to sleep was he was sitting.

Mary was standing at the sink, staring fixedly out of the kitchen window, beyond which dusk was falling upon the yard, parked trucks and outbuildings of what had in a previous incarnation been a farm and was now the “Wells Haulage: A Lovely Mover,” a house-hold removal depot.

Beyond the dark shapes of the sheds and removal trucks lay field and copse, a small lake and the church spire of Westerbrook village, all merging now into the gloaming under a glowering, darkening sky.

Winter was almost on them now, Peter reflected, night was falling early like an impatient curtain upon some jaundiced matinee, the twilight sprinkled already with the scattered lights of desultory candles. The evening’s chill winds and overcast were the first overtures of her grey, dispirited symphony.

“Mary?” Mary did not respond. She might as well have been watching TV for all that she registered his communication. He crossed the tiled floor of the kitchen and, with faint apprehension, touched her on the shoulder.

Mary jumped. Peter jumped because Mary had jumped.

Startlement flashed across her face, gave way to relief as if she was glad to discover him standing there and not a zombie. She touched him on the arm, seeking anchor.

“You frightened the life out of me.” She frowned.

“I came to find out what happened to my cuppa.” He told her lightly, which was not entirely true.

Mary looked down. The tea was made and standing on the work surface, getting cold. “I’ll make you another.” She went to the kettle and switched it on.

“You realise you’re missing What’s my Gerbil?” he said, which was his generic epithet for the inane TV so favoured by his dear wife.

“Oh…” She looked distracted, as if half of her was still focused elsewhere, preoccupied with something. It was faintly creepy.

“What’s up with you? You sick or something?”

“Hmmm?”

“You were staring into space.”

“Was I – ?” she seemed to take a moment to gather her wits, to get re-orientated in her surroundings. “No…. I was…I thought I heard – saw someone…..” She made a slight motion with her head towards the window and the world beyond.

Peter gazed uneasily out at the yard where the removal trucks and sheds crouched like slumbering mastodons in the gloom; beyond them, the fence that skirted their property and then open meadow rolling up to the tree-line that stirred restlessly in the stiffening wind. Rain was pattering against the pane; it was going to be a stormy night.

“I don’t see anything.” He said, relieved that he didn’t. The drivers and crews had long since parked up and gone home along with the yard staff; the sheds and main gates padlocked. The slightly deaf old Rottweiller they used as a watchdog was sitting by his kennel, vigorously licking his testicles. It was quiet out there, normal. Even so, something stirred the hairs on the nape of his neck……

Find the rest of this short story on Freedom Plaza

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