amontillado inc
Wednesday, 5.36pm – returned home to find the back door unlocked, all the curtains in the house drawn shut. My bike was off the wall rack and on its back on the kitchen floor. The knives had been rearranged in the block. H was in but she must have slept through it all
Friday, approx 8pm – the microwave doesn’t work. The plate turns and turns but nothing ever gets any warmer. I could have thawed the soup on the hob instead but I didn’t want to turn it on because of what they might have done to the gas
Saturday, 10.06pm to 11.44pm – phone rang six or seven times in a row. One or two rings enough to get my attention then hang up. I was in the bathroom the first time but it drove me out. I sat by the phone and waited for an hour for it to ring again and when it did I picked it up and heard a noise down the line like a broken PC speaker
(spoke to J on the phone. He says my work has a ‘paranoid sensibility’. But this is different from actual paranoia, he explains. It is not in itself dangerous as long as you’re aware of it. Well you are my agent and my friend I say and you are aware of it and your awareness is as good as mine isn’t it? So what is the problem. If you could just ‘frame it with skepticism’ he said. I reminded him that this began after my last post went up. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, I said, That my fears are justified. The evidence is on my side I think you will find. And what is more it is not for me to play the skeptic. It is not about what I feel. It is about what happens)
Sunday, 5.24am – we are woken early by G my dear son of 2.5 years. He climbed onto the desk in our bedroom to look out of the window at something making a loud rumbling and rattling sort of noise in the street. ‘Bot bot,’ he said pointing. I went to the window. The sun not yet wholly risen. There is a very large truck outside of our present lodgings. G and I count nine wheels facing us. It has pulled into a lay-by across the road from the house and is parked with its engine running. The windows are made of the black glass like from films. ‘Bot bot,’ explains G before I take him downstairs for cereal television etc rest of day nothing
Tuesday, 2.23pm – at lunch (sandwich) a man sits next to me on the bench. I don’t mind because this is one of those benches which is split into three single seats by armrests, like on the metro, to stop the homeless and the lovers. This man who sits next to me is eating seafood noodles with a metal knife and fork. When he is finished he wipes the grease from the fork with a red pocket handkerchief and leaves the fork on the far arm of the bench
Wednesday, 12.15am – woken in the night by a loud beeping sound from somewhere in the house. I check all the smoke alarms, turn off the breakers. I cannot find the source. Is irregular. I think it is coming from under the stairs
Thursday, 6.44pm – came home to find the chairs have been moved. Books I don’t recognise on the shelf. Other things are the wrong way around
Friday, approx 5am – the truck is outside again. I go outside in my bathrobe and look at it for a while. I think about saying something but what could I say. This is a public highway. Here we are eight miles from the nearest conurbation. Who do you think you are etc
Saturday/Sunday – nothing that I know of
Monday, 1.40pm – H says she saw somebody in the garden while making G his lunch. A head over the fence? seems unlikely
Wednesday, approx 3am – we are woken by the doorbell ringing over and over. G is awake and crying in the other room. After waiting for a few minutes hoping it will go away (during which there is also knocking and slamming of the letterbox) I get up and answer and find a woman standing outside. She is older than me and small with a pudgy face and a fringe. She looks me up and down and then turns around and walks away down the dark road without a single word. I have no idea what to do about this
6.26am – having not slept since the knocking for once I am awake to see the truck arrive outside. I am resolved to do something about it. I take a knife from the kitchen and hold it with the blade under the sleeve of my robe. I go outside and knock on the door of the truck but there is nothing. I walk along the truck and I see that the trailer door is ajar. I open the door and look inside. It is completely empty but for one thing at the far end of the trailer, furthest from the door. I climbed inside to see what it was. It was G’s toy truck it was missing a wheel
Friday, 4.44pm – a man stops me in the street. He is smiling. ‘Hey you got something on you,’ he says. I thank him and check myself but there is literally nothing on me
Saturday 6.45pm – bought G a new toy truck. He rolls it around the kitchen floor and calls it Bot Bot
Sunday, 8pm – no truck this weekend. No nothing. I have decided to publish the next piece as it stands. Publish and be damned etc
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday – Nothing
Saturday
I left home early to visit the Bureau. My appointment was with [XXXXXX] who was not who I wanted to speak to but would do. When I arrived various other people took me into various other glass-walled offices that bordered an open-plan office where highly diligent oxford shirts performed deeply conscientious tasks and they asked me the same questions again and again. I showed them my notes and my photographs and I told them my stories. I told them I had gone to the police and told them what the police did for me and I told them about H and G and how we must all sleep in the same bed now and even then, even then
I drank several small cups of water and then I would crease and crumple the small cups in my hands and leave them on the table as I left. And then an hour after my appointment was due to begin I was led along a long corridor to the office of [XXXXXX] which was how I always imagined the office of a responsible person to look. A long, rectangular room with a handsome chair at one end standing behind a desk of dark wood and leather, bookshelves on the walls lined with more soft green stuff and a little window to look out of and below all this a carpet so rich and gory with red and blue and purple
I sat on the smaller cheaper chair before the desk. I told [XXXXXX] everything all over again, from the beginning. He did not make notes, only nodded once in a while. When I was finished he asked to be excused, stood up, brushed the creases from himself, and left the room. A key turned in the lock of the door and the whole room began to quiver. The rumble of an engine and the smell of diesel. I was quite sure that the floor beneath me had detached and was in motion. The clouds outside moved faster and faster
