Penny

By Alan Coghlan

You are insignificant! Penny will destroy your family. She’ll take your kids for all they’re worth and it will have meant nothing because she is the living dead and hers is a living hell!

Cliff has to defend his children. It’s just one day till the morning after the horror lasts. They’ve put his wife Jane to torture on the rack. And who are ‘they’? Who are they, Cliff? That’s exactly where Cliff has fallen flat, for in his preoccupation he has failed to realise… Penny is not alone.

There is something worse lurking in the shadows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326305949

Book preview

Penny

PENNY

ALSO BY ALAN COGHLAN

How to Play the Piano – a Novel

PENNY

A NOVEL

ALAN

COGHLAN

Copyright © Alan Coghlan, 2015

All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

The lines in italics on pages 22 & 23 were taken from the children’s book The Story of Humpty Dumpty by Gyles Brandreth; illustrated by Sara Silcock, and published in Great Britain in 1979 as a Carousel Edition by Transworld Publishers Ltd.

First Printing: 2015

ISBN 978-1-326-30594-9

[e-mail]

This book is dedicated to young families that they might have the strength to stick together.

Chapter one

It had dropped.

‘See that; Come on; Pick it up… Not all day – Look!’

Whistle.

That was the only sound Cliff’s kids took any notice of. A short, shrill whistle he could execute with a lick of his lips that had afforded an entire spring to master in his eager adolescence. They had completely phased out all the other frequencies and timbres of his voice. The whistle was Cliff’s last line of command, and he would point it enough to alert his two boys without, at the same time, attracting the unwanted attention of other pedestrians.

‘Put it in your pocket, Max,’ he ordered after his younger son had picked the action figure up from the pavement. Max hid the figure behind his back in a flash and pouted defiantly while he turned to his side to show a shoulder. With a big lower lip, he glared from under his eyebrows and shook his head with such small seriousness.

‘Nobody tells me what to do!’ he announced.

‘Yeah, okay; but if you lose it, you’re going to be wailing.’

Max initiated his stance anew. ‘I’m not losing it,’ he maintained, then closed his eyes and stuck out his lip again.

‘Okay. Just be careful. If it’s lost, it’s gone. You won’t get a new one.’

After a moment of sullen evaluation, Max snapped back staccato-like, ‘Here... you take it,’ and stretched out his little hand.

‘Good.’ Cliff held forward one of the reusable shopping bags he was carrying. ‘You can put it in there.’

Max stepped past the bag, reached up and stuffed the figure into the pocket of his father’s jacket. Cliff sighed at the awkwardness his little kid’s adamant resilience posed. He stepped aside for someone. They could have picked a better place to halt. The street was narrow and busy. ‘Let’s keep moving. Alistair, we’ll go on now… Max – come on, this way.’

So as not to hear, Max chanted ‘Ahyayaya yha yha’ with a loud voice as he bounced forward. He was still in retaliation of the compromise he had been coerced into.

‘Quiet, Max! Let’s just try and get home now. Alistair...’ Cliff nudged Alistair gently in the back with a shopping bag. ‘Max – Not too far off,’ he called. ‘Alistair?’

Alistair looked away from the cars slow and dazed-like as if he was only now beginning to register his here and now.

‘Let’s keep going,’ urged his father.

Cliff despised walking with shopping in two hands, where the only way to steer his kids was with the nagging warnings and directions he repetitiously threw at them. The sound of his voice was just as annoying and monotonous to him as it must have been to his kids. They were dork trappings in which they unwittingly caught their old man captive with their not paying attention and letting him go on and repeat the same thing over and over. Both his kids, in opposite ways, were in worlds of their own. Alistair preserved his with absent, off-ward daydreams and observations and responses that were completely irrelevant to his present circumstances and to what it was he was being told; and Max upheld his behind a firewall of noise and antics.

‘Keep walking. Just stay in a line. Don’t wander. Straight on. Wait. Max – quiet! Alistair, please don’t be stepping in front of him. Come on, pay attention. Watch where you’re going. Just let’s keep it moving. Keep walking. Just stay in a line. Don’t wander.’

Alistair was very quick when it came to pressing the elevator button and had raced on ahead down the lobby to do so as soon as they had all clambered in a heap through the front door of their building. Max trailed behind in futile pursuit. Cliff groaned, ready to settle them when he got there.

They were disappearing inside the elevator as he turned the corner. ‘Wait! Don’t press anything till I’m there.’ He hurried to the lift. ‘Okay, now you can press.’ Max wailed as his brother pressed their button. ‘Alistair, it’s not nice to jump like that on everything first. You have to give Max a chance too, sometimes.’

‘Before, the last time, we had a green car, not a blue one,’ said Alistair, shaking his head illustratively and not listening at all.

‘Alistair, I’m talking about pressing.’

‘But a man took it away now.’

‘Alistair, I want you to give Max a chance sometimes.’

Max was still all tears. Alistair examined the red emergency button, completely unperturbed.

‘Max, you can press next time.’ Cliff continued, then, for his own removed amusement. ‘It’s anyway better. Cause going up we’d only get to the second floor if you pressed, and then we’d have to walk the last two flights; unless it was raining and you owned an umbrella – like the one the dwarf has.’

His kids just looked at him; and Max forgot his plight. He pointed a little finger towards his father and said, ‘Shaddap,’ like he did whenever he heard anything that sounded like blabber.

The elevator stopped and the door opened.

‘We made it,’ said Cliff with a sigh of relief.

‘No saying we made it!’ a small voice protested.

They rushed to the doorbell.

‘I’m going to be first,’ said Alistair as he manoeuvred his way past Max. It seemed like Max was always wailing. Ding dong, ding don, ding do, ding, ding, ding, ding.

‘Once is enough. Now go on in,’ ordered Cliff beside the open door.

Alistair disappeared. Max started pressing. Ding do, ding d, ding, ding, di, di.

‘Okay, enough.’

‘I didn’t do it properly.’

Ding donggg.

Cliff waited a long five seconds as Max stood motionless with ears cocked to hear the bell ring out completely. ‘Okay, it’s over. Go in.’ Max rose on his tippy toes and stole another go, then shot past his father with a gleeful chirrup. Cliff stepped inside and finally got to close the door firmly behind him, effectively sealing his relief.

His boys raced from their dumped jackets and shoes into the living room bags-y-ing their toys.

‘I’m getting the fire engine,’ said Alistair quickly.

‘Baahhh,’ wailed Max. Max didn’t even like the fire engine.

Cliff removed his own shoes and jacket and then tidied up those from his kids and took the shopping bags into the kitchen part of the living room and unpacked them. The nicotine had withdrawn and he was in desperate need of a top-up and a quiet moment alone to shake that unpleasant feeling of bondage the kids and two bags full make that persists in lingering.

‘You can watch something if you want,’ he offered.

Alistair was on it right away and had already said ‘I pick,’ before Max could even process the information; so Max wailed.

‘Hold on. Wait. Who picked last time?’ asked Cliff in the interests of diplomacy. They looked at each other. ‘I think it was you, Max.’

‘Yeah, it was Max,’ interjected Alistair boorishly. Max wailed with renewed vigour.

‘Alright. Today, Alistair can pick, and tomorrow then, Max, it’s your turn again.’

With a total and unforeseen change in dynamic, Alistair suddenly turned to his brother and proceeded to include him in the decision making process by trying to convince him of the merits of his choice, and Max responded and cheered up and was enthused by his brother’s thoughtful inclusion.

It was a relief for Cliff to press play on the DVD player knowing it meant, for him, an hour of peace. He had read sometime recently that men who stay at home are more prone to heart attacks and other stress related illnesses as are women who go to work. His kids sat with their guns in hand, ready to happily shoot at the screen when the action started. ‘Okay, good,’ he said to himself as he turned and went behind the countertop and filled the kettle to make a cup of tea to have with the cigarette. He took the last teabag-on-a-stick from the package and put it in his tea-stained mug. With the stick part of the teabag, he stirred the milk and then threw the stick with the teabag in the bin. Those teabag sticks were a great idea. Stirring with the teabag gave the flavour that extra kick, as did its cylindrical shape.

He glanced over his shoulder at his kids as he made his way out the door with his steaming World’s Greatest Dad mug in one hand and his mobile phone in the other. ‘Pia pia’ was the sound they excitedly made when shooting the cartoon characters. They were hardly recognisable anymore as the annoying things who, not fifteen minutes ago, were buzzing heedlessly behind and ahead of him on the street below. He smiled at their lust for life. ‘Little kids,’ he whispered to himself affectionately.

When he put one foot on the toilet seat for support he was able to sit up on the windowsill and use an ashtray he had secretly stashed in the unused window box on the outside. All the trapped feelings dispersed as he blew the smoke out the open window. He rested his head against the window frame and let it empty as it got slightly dizzy. He blew on his mug and took a sip and put it back on the windowsill beyond his raised knee. It was nice to be able to stop and go limp for a few minutes.

From the bathroom window he could see the backs of other tall residential buildings and their roofs. Most of the roofs had a light green colour. This was the highest up he had ever lived. He dared a lean to take a short look at the ground, a little backyard with a pathetic square of grass, and quickly pulled his head back inside as the vertigo made its presence felt in the pit of his stomach. It had not taken long for the altitude to become an omnipresent part of the apartment and he would often think of it with unease, even if he wasn’t near any of the windows. At least his kids were now at the age where he could leave them a few minutes alone in the sitting room without having to worry about them climbing out a window and awful things like that.

His mobile rang. Jane was calling from work.

‘Hi. How’s it going?’

‘Okay, fine.’

‘I’ll be there in about an hour.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do you want me to pick up something on the way?’

‘No. I got the few things already. Oh wait. Maybe another packet of teabag sticks. I forgot them and they’re all gone.’

‘Okay. It’s very quiet there. What are the kids doing?’

‘They’re watching a cartoon.’

Cliff looked at his cigarette.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m just in the bedroom lying down for a few minutes.’ He held the mobile away from him so his wife wouldn’t hear the quick drag he stole in-between sentences. There was a loud knock on the toilet door.

‘Paa-paa, I need to piss,’ shouted Max.

‘Okay, hang on a second,’ Cliff called out. He looked at his mug, the cigarette and the mobile.

‘I thought you were in the bedroom,’ said Jane.

‘I was. I just had to go to the toilet.’

‘What are you doing in there?’

‘Yeah, I had to shit,’ he answered uncomfortably, scratching his head.

‘And you take the mobile in with you when you shit?’

‘Yeah, I...’

‘I have to go with urgency. It’s coming out!’

‘Hang on, Max; just a minute. Don’t piss in your underwear or anything.’

‘I can’t hold it in.’

‘You can!’ Cliff had spoken it all into the phone so Jane would hear and he had reason enough to hang up and get out of it. ‘I have to go now,’ he said to her.

‘Okay, I’ll see you soon.’

‘Okay, bye.’

Cliff quickly took one last drag and, with reluctance, stubbed the remainder of the cigarette into the ashtray. He got down, sprayed the anti-stink spray, closed the window all but a fraction, picked up his mug, struggled with the toilet trainer in one hand and finally opened the door to his kid who was hopping from one foot to the other and clutching his willy. ‘Hey! Why do you have a cup of tea in the toilet?’

‘Oh nothing – you just piss now.’

Max fell to his feet from the toilet trainer and waddled along the hall as he struggled to pull his underwear and trousers up over his bum on his way to the living room. Cliff took some toilet paper and wiped the few drops of piss from the rim of the trainer and called after him, ‘You have wait till you’re finished pissing before you stand up; and if you don’t flush, it’s gonna stink,’ but had failed to say it all before Max was out of earshot and back in front of the television with his gun. Cliff contemplated another cigarette, but figured it was too close to the time Jane would be home so he went into their bedroom after all.

As Jane came in the front door, Alistair and Max ran to her and wrapped their arms around her long skirt. ‘Mama,’ they exclaimed with all the effect, ‘I missed you – so much!’

‘Ohh, I missed you too.’

Alistair looked demonstratively at Max as he had his hands around Jane and his cheek on her side. Max wailed, ‘Nobody looks at me,’ and buried his face despairingly into the other side of Jane’s brown skirt in a torrent of tears. Jane stroked the back of his head lovingly and pacified his strong need for his own share of Mama.

Cliff waited till the kids’ turn was over and then said hi and kissed Jane on the lips.

‘Was it stressing?’ she asked him.

‘It was the same. How was work?’

‘Oh, okay... I might have to learn Portuguese.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. The company will be expanding to South America next year, and my Boss has offered me a place on the team that will coordinate the project.’

‘Really! So it’s like a promotion?’ Cliff felt a pin prick him as he asked.

‘I suppose. The pay would be considerably better and there will be some travelling involved later.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks. But first I’d have to learn Portuguese. It means I’d have to do a lot more at home in the evenings. And the travelling would mean being away from the kids. I haven’t decided if I should be happy about it, or if I should even do it. It’s a huge undertaking, and with the way things are...’ She gave Cliff a brief look which quickly scanned his facial features, then turned to hang up her coat. ‘...I don’t know.’

Cliff started formulating something in his head that had a lot to do with weighing and counter-weighing. The kids, in their excitement, started shouting incomprehensible details about the cartoons they had been watching.

‘That’s nice,’ answered Jane with a trace of fatigue in her voice, ‘I just want to take off my boots and you can tell me about it then, when we’re in the living room.’

‘Come on, go in and let Mama get undressed,’ interrupted Cliff.

They ran back into the living room. He watched her as she fixed her coat on a hanger. ‘Are you happy about it?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t really digested it yet.’

Neither was Cliff. Rather than digesting, he was going sort of numb locally, but he still knew what to say. ‘You should definitely consider it. It’s a great opportunity. Not one to pass on. And you’ve always wanted to work with languages. This could be one of those things you’ll later regret if you let slide. It’s a real affirmation that you were offered the place.’

‘Thanks. I’ll think about it. It doesn’t have to be decided right away.’

‘It’s great,’ he trailed in reflection. ‘It’s definitely one in the hand. Yeah – a real affirmation.’

The other half of Cliff, his own half, experienced a sensation of dislodgement in its small, stunned space.

‘Oh, I forgot the teabag sticks,’ it had occurred to Jane.

Cliff had forgotten about them too. ‘That’s okay. I can get some during the day tomorrow.’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘Em... do you mind if I go down for a cigarette quickly?’ he asked.

‘If you really have to go right at this moment, you can,’ answered Jane.

Cliff had been counting the minutes for the last half an hour, and he needed the next few even more, now, to collect his wits, so he wasn’t going to pass. ‘Okay, thanks. I really have to. I’ll only be five minutes.’

‘Yeah, okay then.’

Cliff went hurriedly by the white, plaster of Paris renditions of chubby cherubs that bulged the walls of the lobby, and then he pulled open the door to the street. As of late, it had been really feeling good to be outside alone. He certainly noticed the weight from his shoulders lift with this rare freedom of movement.

Theirs was the corner building on a T junction. The junction was to the right as one exits the building. Plotting the two corners of the junction and their corresponding points on the footpath opposite were four raised flowerbeds encased by stone walls about the height of a low stool. Cliff sat on the edge of the flowerbed on their corner and lighted his cigarette – the one he would now smoke in peace. He put one hand in his trouser pocket and let his gaze wander along the street and the opposite footpath. ‘No… It’s really good Jane gets this opportunity,’ he thought to himself. He took another drag. The contemplation of how well she was doing did not come without a certain amount of compunction for the state of his masculinity.

‘Fantastic!’

Cliff cringed.

In front of the building that stood across from their apartment’s living room windows was that senile old biddy again. As usual, she was relaying to and fro like a decrepit pinball with warning lights and bells making remarks to passers-by who made their passing ever more brisk and who, on cue, would deafen their ears to her ranting. On the occasions in-between she would bend down and pick up miniscule bits of dirt and bring them to the litterbin on that side that was opposite to where Cliff was sitting. Cliff looked away down the street as she approached the bin. Up until now she had left him alone, but as she was at the bin, he could feel her stopping and he could feel her stare penetrate and he had a good guess that it was the cigarette end she was gagging for. Whatever would he do with it?

She went back to her own terrain in front of her building, ranting, and scouring the pavement.

Cliff relaxed. He was the only person actually hanging around there for any amount of time, so if there was something to come, he’d be the one to get the full brunt of it. The presumptuousness of old people didn’t rest well with Cliff, nor did their lack of manners.

Her hair was unkempt and she was little more than withered remains – a frail stack of bones that looked as lost in its clothes as it did on the street. She moved quickly for someone her age, which was probably down to the extra adrenaline a certain type of senile dementia will produce.

‘Just stay away from me,’ muttered Cliff under his breath to himself. He tried to enjoy the last of the smoke, ignore her, but he couldn’t help but keep a check on her from the corner of his eye. As if she had heard his mutter, she returned to the litterbin and stood there and once again Cliff felt her stare. ‘Oh, go away,’ he muttered, staring firmly in another direction. This time she crossed the road and walked towards him, a lot slower than she had been previously moving. Cliff muttered to himself again, but to no avail.

She stopped beside him about a half metre away and stared with her hands by her side. Cliff didn’t look in her direction but stubbornly fixed his gaze elsewhere. She stared blatantly, as one does when one has lost the sense of themselves to an existence of complete and utter rejection. Her right hand was bent backwards and it started to bounce metrically against her thigh. The fingers were squeezed at their tips to a pinch.

‘What will be done with your bad habits?’ she said looking straight out ahead of her, as if she was rather reciting something to a faceless audience than formulating a direct question from one person to another. ‘The mess you make! Their filth’s been cleaned – their filth and your filthy habits, and where’ll it go? I’ll have to do it.’

Such liberty with accusations instantly sucked any patience or tolerance Cliff might have been able to muster for the old person. ‘You couldn’t live without your nosy assumptions, could you?’ he answered, referring to all her kind, and turned and looked up at her. ‘I always put my cigarette butt in the bin over there,’ he then said firmly, ‘not that it’s any of your business’; and he pointed so that she might turn around, follow the finger and go away.

He had never seen her at such close range before. She didn’t have the typical look of a pensioner. Her hair still had length to it; and Cliff was taken by surprise to see the woman behind the age, like her frayed edges showed the years yet her core had preserved the features of a young woman – a startling juxtaposition. It had never happened to Cliff before that he’d detected some traces of youth in the face of someone so old. He could imagine her having been once attractive. He could even have pictured himself, in the space of a thought, falling for her, were she still a young woman, but he denounced the thought as soon as it surfaced. To have instinctively responded to this apparition in front of him on that level did not come as a comfort to Cliff. It disgusted him. He disgusted himself. Spiritually, he disgusted himself.

‘You’ll leave a mess, with not a thought for the effort we’ve all taken to clean,’ she said again, subject only to her own version of reality.

In an immediate effort to cut off and block all interaction, both inside and out, Cliff fixed an unimpressed expression on his features, an unimpressed thought in his head, and stood up, looked past her, and went across the narrow road to the bin, into which he threw the last of the cigarette after he had stubbed it out. She followed him with her stare, turning her whole body as she held him in view, and he avoided looking at her to illustrate her interfering had neither been appreciated nor acknowledged.

As Cliff neared the entrance door of his building she shook her head to herself, flapped her arms once and crossed back, all lost and forlorn, to her side of the street in pursuit of more passing pedestrians and scraps of litter.

Cliff closed the apartment door behind him, kicked his shoes off and went to the living room where Jane was tidying some magazines on the coffee table in front of the sofa and the kids were lying on the floor playing with their cars.

‘Did they get food yet?’ asked Jane.

‘I’m going to start it now.’

‘What’s on the menu today?’

‘Pasta.’

‘Again?’ she said. Cliff shrugged his shoulders.

‘Did you remember to wash your hands after you smoked?’

‘Uh, no, I didn’t.’

Cliff went to the bathroom and washed his hands like he was meant to after coming in from a smoke. When he came back to the living room he mentioned the old woman outside.

‘There’s this insane old woman hanging around on the street. She was hassling me the whole time, like I’m going to filthy the place with my cigarette. Talk about a pain in the hole. I’ll tell you: old people are really the worst.’

‘Oh, Mrs Jones was telling me about her; you know Mrs Jones?’

‘Yeah, from across the hall.’

‘Well, apparently, she used to live in the building out there, and I think it might even have been in that apartment directly opposite ours, a long time ago, forty years or thereabouts.’

Jane indicated out the window and Cliff looked out. The space in question had four big rectangular windows. They had no curtains. It was vacant. When the sun shined at a certain height the interior could be faintly made out from where they were, but at this time of the evening it was completely dark inside.

‘Apparently, her daughter had fallen out the window. She was six or seven. Her mother had supposedly locked her in the room as a punishment for misbehaving and the girl had opened the window and, well, either she jumped or she fell.’

‘Oh dear! The poor thing.’ Cliff looked again and walked to the window to look down at the spot. A dreadful fear of loss gripped him as he imagined it. The old woman was nowhere to be seen.

‘After it happened, they took the mother away and threw her in a looney bin. They’ve probably moved her to an old folk’s home now, which would explain why she’s been coming back to the spot lately and hanging there. That’s the story that’s doing the rounds at least.’

‘It’s funny all what the people know.’ Cliff pieced the information together. ‘That’s probably why she’s so nuts about keeping the street clean.’

‘Oh, I’m sure. It was after she saw the