Don't Let Me In Read online

  Don’t Let Me In

  Phil Kurthausen

  Contents

  1. Coffee and Death Threats

  2. Podcast 3

  3. Fucking Zen

  4. When

  5. Hornets

  6. The Waterline

  7. Marigold

  8. Faith

  9. Shiver

  10. Podcast 5

  11. Fatbergs

  12. The Gates

  13. This is a Call

  14. The Hunt

  15. Who is he?

  16. 10

  17. Garden

  18. Podcast 6

  19. Knocks Once

  20. Silk

  21. Say Cheese

  22. Poems

  23. Lost

  24. Cathy Come Home

  25. Monkey Say

  26. Monkey Doe

  27. Podcast 7

  28. Triumph

  29. The Runes

  30. Out

  31. Run

  32. Breach

  33. Free and Bound

  34. Plans

  35. Behind the Door

  36. Sisters

  37. Henry

  A Note from Bloodhound Books

  Copyright © 2018 Phil Kurtahusen

  The right of Phil Kurtahusen to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2018 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  To My Wife

  1

  Coffee and Death Threats

  I wake, as I do most mornings, to a death threat.

  It’s on Twitter, from a man I presume, although it’s from an anonymous account in the name of “Frenchie”. It’s an oeuvre I’ve become almost amused by, one that I call “red face”, as I can almost see the bursting blood vessels, like a map of Mars, on the fat face (I admit this may be unfair, and I’m not linking being overweight with violent misogyny, but it’s the way I see them so suck it up) of some impotent, lonely man, with a beer and a box of Kleenex by the side of his keyboard as he types.

  In this case, it’s an almost text book example of the many emails, tweets, phone calls and even letters – what a misplaced joy it was to receive a letter that first time; there wasn’t even any green ink to warn me of what may be inside, just nice normal blue with a handwriting style that spoke of a good education – that I’ve received since I began. The contents of that first letter were pretty much a longer treatise on the subject matter dealt with in the Twitter-enforced brevity of this morning’s message delivered to the mobile phone lying peacefully on the bedside table. I read it again:

  Hope he rots – fucking bitch fucking race traitor. I’d rape you before I slice your throat if you weren’t such a fat ugly pig.

  It’s been re-tweeted thirty-two times by the time I read it. I block Frenchie but I don’t bother reporting it. I know from experience that the police will do nothing save offer warm words and a crime number.

  I place the phone on the bedside table. The most important part of the day has begun and I’ve made a promise to myself never to miss it unless something really important comes up and death threats don’t even come close. But I can’t help myself and pick the phone back up and drop a quick Instagram post, a picture of a smiling Henry with Finn on his shoulders riding piggyback as they walk along Fistral Beach. It’s over a year old, of course, but people never notice these sorts of things. I caption it “lovely weekend at the beach”. Take that Frenchie.

  I pause at the top of the stairs and listen – no, I drink in the sounds from the kitchen below, letting it wash through me as though it will refresh and cleanse every cell in my body. The radio is the background beat, serious men and women talking about serious things, but the syncopated clanging of Henry and Finn as they attack their cereal bowls, in a way that confirms their shared genes more than any blood test ever could, is pure joy. This is the highlight of my day and I am acutely aware of it.

  As I stand there listening, Lil’Bitch slyly appears from under the linen basket and rubs herself against my leg. I carefully push her away with my leg and then make my way downstairs.

  When I enter the kitchen, Henry doesn’t look up from his bowl or The Guardian, which is held down on the kitchen table like a battle map with pots of jam, marmalade and a tub of coconut butter standing in for toy soldiers and flags. Finn on the other hand gives me a big smile and in the same moment, the act of transitioning his mind from food to his mother causes the trajectory of his spoon of milk and cereal to change, sending bits of what I can see are the sugary ‘o’s of the cereal I’ve told Henry not to give him all over his face.

  Henry turns and starts to move towards the sink to grab a cloth, his first instinct as always to fix things.

  Finn and I both burst out laughing and for a second things are like they used to be. Then Henry is wiping the mess away from Finn’s face with what I can see is a wet, dirty tea towel.

  “Eww! Get off Dad!”

  Henry backs off. Finn has been the boss of Henry since he learned to talk.

  “Here, let me.” I take the tea towel from Henry, “Use a clean one from the drawer honey,” I say to Finn.

  “Morning sweets, situation normal, all fuck–”

  “Don’t!” I cut Henry off before he finishes. I know many parents see and treat their kids as friends but I want Finn to be protected for as long as possible. The darkness will be along soon enough.

  I turn the radio off and the world and all its problems fall silent.

  Henry nods and raises his dark eyebrows. “He’s heard worse at school and as for the Internet, that is Sodom and bloody Gomorrah.”

  I smile. “I know, but not at home.”

  Finn wipes his face with the clean tea towel. “Why are we going to Sodom tomorrow, Sarah?”

  I try not to show him that I hate him calling me “Sarah” instead of “Mum” or “Mummy” as I know that this will just encourage him. Hannah says it’s just a phase and her daughter went through it as well, but she was a teenager and Finn is an eight-year-old. I resolve to Google the arse out of it later.

  “It’s a Bible thing honey; Daddy will tell you all about it on the way to school.”

  Henry, a lifelong atheist, gives me a scowl that say’s “thanks for that”.

  “Which is happening now, buddy. I have a staff meeting at nine so shake a leg.”

  Finn jumps down from his chair and heads for the hall with the weary resignation of a death row prisoner on the march to the gallows.

  “Will you be late tonight?” I ask Henry.

  He rolls his eyes and throws his palms upwards.

  “Who knows? I hope not. Are you recording the show today?”

  I nod and follow him out to the hallway where Finn is leaning against the wall by the front door. Before he can take evasive manoeuvres I grab him and give him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Geroff!”

  He wriggles away and begins to unlock the door. For a moment I think about kissing Henry but it doesn’t feel right and then, to my embarrassment, I find I’m patting my husband on the shoulder like he’s a pet dog. Luckily, he’s too busy hurrying Finn through the door to notice.

  “I’ll text if I’m going to be late.”

  “Bye honey!”
>
  Finn tramps down the path, head down, and just raises an arm by way of goodbye, but he doesn’t look back. As soon as they both reach the gate I slam the door shut.

  One by one, I turn the keys in the two mortice five-levered deadlocks, then latch the Yale lock, and finally I slide home the two heavy bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom of the reinforced frame, with a satisfying clunk of steel on steel, and then I turn and head back into the now quiet of my home.

  After clearing up the breakfast dishes I make myself a strong coffee and sit at the kitchen table. I move Henry’s Guardian and underneath is a piece of paper with a picture on it that Finn must have drawn. It’s of a cartoon-type spaceship with a small astronaut figure in the cockpit. It’s blasting off from a house and heading for a planet with Saturn-like rings. I pick it up and use a fridge magnet to stick it to the large silvery chrome of the fridge door. Our old fridge used to be plastered with pictures that Finn had drawn but when we got this new one they disappeared into a box somewhere, which is now either in a dark corner of the attic or more likely forms part of a sludge mountain on a landfill site.

  Seeing the picture on the fridge makes me feel happy and sad at the same time. I know that Finn will probably rip it off the moment he sees it on his return from school.

  I finish my coffee whilst looking out at the garden through the French doors. I know it’s the time of year, but the garden looks empty and desolate, everything hunkering down waiting for the cold to pass. I tell myself that we are lucky just to have a small patch of garden in this part of London, but still I look away and as I do so I catch a glimpse of my image caught between the panes of the double-glazing. I look thin and pale. Maybe I should eat more, perhaps I’m ill? It’s probably just the lack of sleep but I know myself well enough to know that before the day is out I will have Googled my symptoms. It will be cancer of course. Pale, thin and tired – cancer for sure. It’s always cancer.

  Recognising the trigger danger in this nascent thought I dump the coffee mug in the dishwasher and head downstairs to the basement.

  It’s time to put my game face on. I have an innocent man’s life to save.

  2

  Podcast 3

  “Basement” doesn’t do the room justice. After the incident Henry went into full-fixing mode and when I told him I needed a place I could work from at home, he was on it, throwing all the energy he couldn’t target elsewhere into architect’s plans, design, materials, and three months later we had a state-of-the-art recording studio, warm, soundproof and secure.

  It’s bright down here, everything illuminated by fluorescent strip lighting, white walls, a pale wood floor. The paleness is only livened by the shocking yellow sofa and the framed magazine covers and awards on the wall nearest the stairs. Henry wanted it bright. I would have objected, this not being to my taste – it’s like the inside of a Scandinavian designer’s wet dream in its unremitting minimalism and whiteness and I prefer more homely furnishings – but Henry wanted to build a cocoon of his own design for me and I let him.

  Once I’ve shut the basement door behind me, I turn on a small floor lamp near my desk, turn off the main lights and work in a little cone of light and the blue whiteness cast by the computer screen with the microphone in front of me. I almost feel like Philip Marlowe once the lights are dimmed. Bit too early for bourbon, though, but not too early for its replacement, work.

  My chair is a brown leather Eames office chair and it’s the only thing I took from my father’s house after he died. It’s not exactly comfortable and it causes me to shift position regularly as my backside rubs against the well-worn ridges and creases caused by the years of him sitting there, smoking cigarettes, drinking whisky and writing. I entertain sentimental notions that when I sit in it I am somehow closer to him. Nonsense of course but it’s how I feel and sometimes that’s more important than cold, hard reality and its disappointments.

  The wall behind the desk is covered with a corkboard and is stuck with photographs, yellow sticky notes and a map of the Wirral, a place in the north that I’ve never visited.

  On the desk in front of me are my laptop and a letter. I’ve read the letter already. It contained one line only, “I’m sorry”, and was unsigned. I’ve been receiving one a week for the last twelve months and they always say the same thing, are always unsigned, but I know who sends them and I just don’t care so I screw the letter up and throw it in the bin by the side of the desk.

  I suck in my bottom lip, hold it between my teeth and take a deep breath, and then I flip open the lid of my laptop and open a new Word document.

  I stare at the whiteness for a long moment and then I begin to dictate into the microphone, the words appearing as though by magic on the blank page almost as soon as I’ve said them and simultaneously recorded as a WAV file for later transmission – an old word for a new technology. I focus on the screen and then think the following three words: “engaging”, “intimate”, “confident”, and close my eyes, and when I open them again, even if I don’t feel those things I begin to talk into the microphone.

  Podcast Episode 3 – by Sarah Kelly 1/11/2018

  Can you remember what you were doing last Friday at 3pm? It’s a struggle, hey? Now, I want you to tell me what you were doing three months ago last Friday at 3pm? Who did you speak to? Who did you call? What did you have for lunch?

  Now imagine you have to recall what happened Friday six weeks ago – oh, just to add a little pressure, if you get the timings wrong you go to prison for life. Feeling a little stressed yet?

  Let’s recap. Here’s what we know. Lauren Grey was one of those girls that everyone loved even if, and hey we’re all human, you were a little envious of her. On the surface she had everything. Intelligent, she had been admitted to Oxford University to study Law, popular, she had a large circle of friends, and I’m not just talking Facebook friends here (though she never got around to joining Facebook of course), but real friends, the kind who organise a surprise birthday party (her seventeenth and last), tell you everything, and who you can tell everything to, and a boyfriend who was the captain of the school cricket team. And did I mention she was also beautiful? But the phrase that crops up again and again was that she was “adored by everybody”.

  But hey, things couldn’t all be that good. Who has a life like that? Certainly not Lauren Grey. Her mother was a single parent and suffers with debilitating multiple sclerosis, and the reality is that Lauren, and I’ve checked it’s okay with her mother to say this, had been helping out more and more as her mother’s illness progressed. Getting home from school, doing the cleaning, making the tea for her mother and little brother. And like so many girls she also suffered with crippling anorexia and, though her friends say she was mostly cured, you can see in her photographs she was still very thin, and anorexia, hell, it’s like being an alcoholic, it’s always with you. Take it from someone who knows.

  Did she have any bad habits? Of course she did. She smoked cigarettes, roll-ups her friends tell me, could occasionally lose her temper and chew a friend out and she had a secret tattoo of a penguin on her right butt cheek that her mum didn’t know she had until she read about it in the autopsy report.

  Lauren Grey was killed by the manual compression of her larynx, causing the fracture of her hyoid bones and asphyxia, on the 9 July 2006 in the front seat of her Volkswagen Golf Beetle. The car had been parked in a small car park surrounded by trees on a stretch of country park coastline along the River Dee. You can Street View the car park and if you do you’ll see it’s a pretty place in the daytime, as it was when caught by the Google photographers. A small tarmac patch hidden amongst a copse of birch, maple and oak trees, and beyond that a stretch of dark sand that leads to the water of the River Dee and across the river to the slate-grey hills of the Clwydian Range. A single narrow lane leads into the copse and the picture taken on one of those rare sparklingly blue winter days makes it look like somewhere you would be happy to be. But you know that at night the place would l
ook very different: it would be darker, cast in shadow by the trees. There is only one old, lonely streetlight that leans over the neck of the lane where it meets the opening of the car park, and in the unlikely event that it was working, and more of this later, it would cast only a small cone of sickly yellow light over less than half the car park space.

  It’s the type of place that had on occasion been popular with “doggers” and definitely was popular with kids who wanted somewhere to park up and smoke weed. The local police had twigged to this and drove by every couple of hours to deter the appearance of the smoke-filled cars that used to be seen there a lot more, before they began this routine at the insistence of the local residents who lived near the car park.

  You see, although this car park, nestled in the copse, looks remote in Google Street View, if you spin the camera round, and back out of the car park up the lane, you start to notice gaps in the hedgerows every hundred yards or so. Some are marked by concave mirrors on the opposite side of the road to the gaps. You can’t see it on Street View as these gaps mark the limit of Google’s surveillance powers, but these spaces are the start of driveways that lead to large houses with river views, the kind that only the wealthy can afford. If you want to get a better view, and last time I mentioned this I got a solicitor’s letter but hey you know my view on that, then click on satellite view and you’ll get a good idea of the size of these properties and, more crucially, their gardens. So, what we have is the appearance of isolation without the reality. This is important.