Teddy Bears' Picnic
Friday October 31st
As Christopher manoeuvred his wheelchair across the bare pine boards of the dining room floor he was startled by a sudden jerk as the right wheel passed over some obstruction, which emitted a loud, protesting squeal. He looked down at the tiny furry object. Another bloody bear! he thought and leaned over to pick it up from the floor. It had once had a pink plastic face, but the passage of the wheelchair had dented and cracked it so that it now resembled an aged and dim-witted Pekinese. He squeezed its belly and it bleated loudly.
He didn’t recognise this particular bear but his wife had had so many hundreds of them that it wasn’t really surprising. He made a grimace of disgust. Thought I’d got rid of them all, but they keep turning up!
He flung the bear into the open fireplace and watched the flames from the log fire dance over the nylon fur for a moment until he was satisfied that it was well alight. Somewhat mollified, he resumed his progress towards the telephone in the lounge.
"Cartwright and Olafson, Solicitors" chirped the professionally cheery female voice at the other end of the line.
"Mr Cartwright, please."
"Certainly. Who shall I say is calling?"
"Mr Robbins"
"Just one moment, Mr Robbins ..."
There was a second’s silence before the line was commandeered by a reggae version of "I Fought The Law, But The Law Won". Christopher winced.
"Good morning, Christopher."
"Did you have to do that?" Christopher almost snarled.
"Do what?"
"Choose that particular song to play to the poor bastards you put on hold?"
There was a brief, hurt silence. "I thought it was quite amusing."
"Well, I haven’t phoned you up to discuss your lamentable lack of tact and juvenile sense of humour. I want to know what can be done about my wife’s will."
Christopher sensed a pent-up sigh from the other man. "I’ve already told you that I’ll do all I can, but you must understand that your wife was legally compos mentis at the time she made the will. The fact that the restrictions she made concerning your inheritance are rather onerous is something we can argue in court but these things take time, and I can’t guarantee that we’ll win."
"Onerous? Onerous? I can’t leave this bloody house for more than a week at a time without losing the money! And I hate this hideous, rambling Gothic dump! You know why, don’t you? It was so her bloody teddy bears wouldn’t have to go without company for too long! She thought the bloody things were alive!"
"That may be so, but if those were her reasons she made no mention of them in the will. I’ll do what I can, but in the meantime you must abide by its terms."
Christopher tried to frame some retort but words failed him and in the end he simply snorted and hung up the telephone with a glare into the middle distance. After a while he realised that he wasn’t simply gazing vacantly and viciously into space, but at something. After a few moments he identified it as one of his wife’s twee paintings. Bought at some auction for a ludicrously inflated sum, if his memory served him. At this distance his myopic vision couldn’t focus well enough to see all the details, but he recalled it depicted some vilely winsome brat in a long Edwardian style summer dress treating half a dozen fat stuffed bears to a picnic served on a doll’s tea-set. He hated it. It brought back memories of the scratched and crackly 78 of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ that his wife had played every afternoon for the last 18 years of their marriage.
That painting’s going! he thought. The record, too.
He headed towards the hall and the modern oak-panelled double-doored lift shaft that housed his only means of transporting himself to the upper regions of the house. The motor of his wheel-chair purred contentedly to itself, in perfect counterpoint to his own ill-humour.
***
Later, his mood lightened a little by the bottle of brandy he kept in the drawer of the antique desk that occupied one corner of the sitting room in the small granny flat that he’d made his own after his accident, he reached for a pad and listed the pluses and minuses of his situation.
As he wrote he could dimly hear the roar of a vacuum-cleaner coming from somewhere below. The industrious Mrs Kenny, the lady from the village who ‘did’ for them every weekday afternoon, was clearly hard at work. Christopher liked Mrs Kenny. He admired her busy efficiency, and she had been his sole ally in the long battle against the teddy bear invasion that had eventually led to the claiming of every nook and cranny in the huge old house by cuddly toys. The distant evidence of her presence cheered him.
He looked again at his list. Under the ‘pluses’ he’d written:-
Mary dead.
Bears gone.
And under the minuses:-
The bloody will.
He sighed and inwardly mourned the loss of the woman he’d once loved, and had come over the long years to hate. He’d met her when he was a young and struggling literary agent and she a young and ambitious writer of romantic fiction, and he’d been from the first in awe of her: not of her talent, because she had very little of that, but of her implacable will and the unconcealed cynicism that matched his own. Together they’d forged an alliance that had made her a fortune and him a prisoner of her success. In the end the imprisonment had become almost literal after the car crash that had shattered his spine had confined him to the grounds of this hated bloody house.
In retrospect, he supposed, her decision to buy the place should have been his first warning that she was becoming unhinged. She’d described it as ‘romantic’, a word that when he first knew her she would have been unable to utter without an accompanying sneer. And her decision to sell her London flat and give up the hectic city social life - although welcomed at the time by his own more reclusive nature - was so uncharacteristic that something in him should have reacted with alarm rather than relief.
Oh well, he thought, it’s too late now.
They’d been in the house for two years when the Bears began. During that time they’d been happy enough. She’d continued to write, her books had continued to sell, and he’d even been faintly charmed by the increasingly evident, and previously unsuspected, whimsical side to her nature that had begun to manifest itself.
He’d often wondered over the years just what had caused the Bears. Had it been some smothered maternal instinct doomed forever to unfulfilment first by her own infertility, and later by his own physical paralysis, that had begun her slow retreat into childhood? He’d never know now, he supposed, but in any event she’d returned one afternoon from a trip to her publisher’s offices in London with an old wind-up gramophone, that 78 and a battered old teddy bear she’d rescued from a junk shop somewhere in the East End.
"Isn’t he wonderful, darling?" she’d breathed at him in the little girl voice she’d recently begun to affect, and which grated on his nerves.
He’d muttered something non-committal and she’d retreated to her bedroom (this was before the accident, but they’d begun to sleep apart for no reason that either had ever enunciated but just because it seemed right) to play the record over and over again.
After that, every trip to the city resulted in an armful of teddy bears to add to the growing army which gradually took over every corner, every vacant space, in the house. He’d complained, of course, but she was completely impervious to his arguments and, as she always said at the end of every squabble, after all it was her house. He’d taken in the end to driving to the nearest village every evening, preferring drunken isolation in the saloon bar of the Fox and Ferret to the fruitless angry exchanges and the endless playing of that bloody record. He’d been driving back from the pub after a particularly heavy session one evening when his old, beloved Bentley had skidded in the rain and wrecked itself and him against a vast and gnarled roadside oak.
He sighed and threw the pad aside. He’d go down for a chat with Mrs Kenny.
It was as he was passing his wife’s bedroom on his way to the lift that he noticed that the door was slightly ajar. He paused in momentary puzzlement - the door had remained closed since his wife’s cancerous womb had stopped her breath in there some three months previously (her final words to him had been "Take care of the Bears". He’d certainly done that!) - turned his chair and pushed the door open.
To his left was the large four-poster in which she’d died and ahead of him, through the windows in the opposite wall, he could see the drizzle-sodden ashes from the huge funeral pyre he’d built on the lawn the day after her funeral, where he’d burned every single one of the Bears he could find. In the far corner, beyond the bed, his wife’s computer sat on its work-station, an endless parade of animated teddy bears marching across its screen.
He steered his chair over to the work-station and touched the mouse. The screen-saver flickered and disappeared and was replaced by his wife’s favourite word-processing package. In large letters, centred in the screen, were two lines:-
If you go down to the woods today
You’re sure of a big surprise
Christopher recognised them, of course - from that bloody song he’d heard so often over the last two decades - and he was torn between anger and astonishment. His wife had been working on a novel up until the day she died (a ghost-writer was busily engaged in finishing it from her notes at that very moment. Her publisher expected it to be a major best-seller) but he was sure that the computer had been turned off after some suited ghoul had spent an afternoon diligently transferring files to disks. He shuddered as a cold wind momentarily blew against his soul, turned off the monitor and the CPU, and, rather more rapidly than he could rationally explain, left the room, firmly shutting the door behind him.
***
It was cold and he was naked. His breath formed phantom shapes in the air around his mouth as he walked through the trees. Everywhere he looked the petrified leaves sparkled with bright beads of ice. Around his feet ashes blew and stained his skin black where they touched it. His nostrils and throat were filled with the thick stench of burning hair. He choked and fell, long and lonely, into the darkness.
***
Extracts from the diary of Christopher Robbins, Saturday November 1st
9.00 a.m.
It was bitterly cold when I woke up this morning. The bloody flat’s supposed to have its own heating system - she would never permit anything as ‘unromantic’ as central heating in the main house, of course: open bloody log fires everywhere, Mrs Kenny’s forever moaning about the mess they make - but it breaks down every five minutes. I’ve turned up the thermostat and I’ll have to hope that does the trick, as there’s no chance of getting someone out to the house to fix it at the weekend. I hate weekends. There’s nothing to do until the decent TV comes on in the evening and no company, not even Mrs Kenny. I might get the paper and do the crossword, but that means going down to the front door and for some reason I feel nervous about leaving the flat. Ridiculous. I’ll have some brandy to warm me up and then I’ll go and fetch it.
11.15 a.m.
The door to her room was ajar again. I meant to go straight past it but I could hear a clicking noise coming from inside and so I had to have a look. The computer was on again. When I’d got rid of the teddy bears on the screen it just said ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’. I suppose she’d set the thing up to turn itself on and display a bit of doggerel to her every day. God knows why, or how she did it, but in the end she became as much of a mystery to me as computers are. Strange that she should have been so sympatico with the machines when so much of her life was a retreat into the past. Anyway I unplugged the bloody thing this time. I doubt that there’s any way she could have arranged for it to plug itself in as well as turn itself on! I must get someone in to look at the door.
There was a letter from the solicitor. It would appear that I am - or at least I will be - a millionaire several times over. I’m not sure where all the money came from - it was more than I expected - but of course I stopped being her agent after the accident made me a bloody welfare case. The crossword looks easy today. Pity, I was hoping for something to keep my mind occupied. I feel horribly lonely. I wish I’d let her have a dog now when she mentioned it; it would at least have been some kind of company.
3.00 p.m.
I’ve been watching athletics on the TV. I haven’t done that since the accident, although I used to love sports. Was a goodish cricketer when I was younger, and a fair hand with a squash racquet. Anyway, it just got too painful for me to bear after I got saddled with this bloody wheelchair so I stopped watching it. Stopped thinking about it at all, really. But I need the distraction, so that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s not just an occupying the mind thing, it’s that I want the sound. The funny thing is that earlier I could’ve sworn I heard that bloody Teddy Bears’ Picnic record of hers. But it’s impossible. The wind-up gramophone’s in the conservatory at the back of the house so there’s no way I could’ve heard it from up here. Gave me the willies.
Strange, now I come to think of it I didn’t see the bloody machine yesterday when I was watering the plants in there. Could Mrs Kenny have moved it for some reason? I’ll get rid of the bloody thing anyway.
I can feel cold creeping into the flat from the main house, although the radiators in here are blistering hot. It looks as though it’s going to be a bitter winter.
9.00 p.m.
It won’t stop! That bloody record keeps on playing over and over and I can’t stand it! I’ve been through the entire house looking for the bloody gramophone and I can’t find it, and no matter what room you’re in it always sounds as though it’s coming from somewhere else. Am I going mad? Is this some kind of guilt thing? I’ve never had much faith in all that psychoanalysis stuff, but what’s happening can’t be real so where does that leave me?`
I tried phoning Mary’s mother earlier but the bloody phone isn’t working. Wouldn’t do me much good, anyway. She never liked me. Never liked her daughter either. Cold-hearted bitch. When she came down for the funeral all she wanted to know was when she’d get her share of the money.
The house is like an iceberg. I’m trying to get drunk but I can’t.
12.30 a.m.
It’s stopped. So tired.
***
She wore a long white summer dress drawn in at the waist by a white cotton belt. On her feet were high laced boots and in her hair she wore pink ribbons. She giggled as she poured imaginary tea from a tiny teapot into the tiny cups set in front of each little bear, and chided the smallest one of all who would not sit up straight.
In the trees the summer birds sang brightly but the grass around her was thick with frost. When he looked into her eyes he saw endless fields of snow.
***
Extracts from the diary of Christopher Robbins, Sunday November 2nd
10.40 a.m.
Fell asleep in the bloody wheelchair. Never happened before, always made the bloody struggle to get into bed. It was just too bloody much, all of it.
Saw Mary in the night. Don’t know when. Woke up and she was standing in front of me dressed in some white bloody dress. Never wore white. Said it made her look fat. Looked at me like she used to when I first met her. Hard and bitter, not shit-soft like she got later. Smiled. Hard smile. Gave me the willies. Pissed myself in fact. Should change clothes but I’m so tired.
Bloody record again. Won’t stop. It’s so bloody cold in here.
12.00 p.m.
Got to get out. Cold. It won’t stop. Going mad. Got to get out.
***
The wheelchair moved slowly down the corridor, leaving tracks in the thick frost that covered the carpet. The door to Mary’s room was wide open as he passed it, and he could see the flickering light from the monitor on the ceiling, and hear the blaring brass band that accompanied the march of the teddy bears across the screen. Some small core of sanity assured him it couldn’t be happening, but he was no longer interested in listening to it. He was freezing and he was frightened and he wanted his mummy to comfort him. As he moved down the corridor he sucked the thumb of his left hand for comfort.
The brass button that opened the lift was so cold that shreds of his skin peeled away from his fingers and were left trailing from it like streamers. Inside the lift the military band was muted but The Teddy Bears’ Picnic seemed to swell up from somewhere beneath him and scratched its way into his brain like the insistent claws of an angry cat. And it was icy. The air coalesced on his skin, forming delicate crystals that sparkled in the overhead light.
With a thud the lift came to a halt on the ground floor. With bleeding fingers he prised open the inner doors, thumbed the button that opened the outer doors and ...
... thick, languid heat poured over him. The house was gone and he was surrounded by the dense, sun-dappled trees of a forest. Beneath the wheels of his chair the hard-packed earth of a well-worn path led out into a clearing. The sun shone down from a supernaturally blue, cotton-wool flecked sky as bees droned among the nodding flowers of a drowsy summer afternoon. Nearby a red and white checked tablecloth was spread against the intense green of the grass and on it was laid plates and cutlery, gleaming white cups and saucers and, in the midst of it all, a large yellow picnic hamper. A wind-up gramophone sat in the lazily waving grass, playing ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.
Scattered indolently around the tablecloth were several ... well, they were undoubtedly bears but neither their size nor wicked claws or sharp teeth made them look in the least cute or cuddly. Somehow they sensed his presence and rose as one and he realised, as they began to move towards him, how horribly close they really were. Bizarrely, one of them wore a napkin around its neck and was clutching a teacup in one of its paws.
Christopher frantically tried to turn the wheelchair but the thick undergrowth on either side of the path held it fast. He backed the chair instead, but much too slowly. Just as they reached him he found himself wondering, idiotically, what was in the yellow hamper.
As Christopher manoeuvred his wheelchair across the bare pine boards of the dining room floor he was startled by a sudden jerk as the right wheel passed over some obstruction, which emitted a loud, protesting squeal. He looked down at the tiny furry object. Another bloody bear! he thought and leaned over to pick it up from the floor. It had once had a pink plastic face, but the passage of the wheelchair had dented and cracked it so that it now resembled an aged and dim-witted Pekinese. He squeezed its belly and it bleated loudly.
He didn’t recognise this particular bear but his wife had had so many hundreds of them that it wasn’t really surprising. He made a grimace of disgust. Thought I’d got rid of them all, but they keep turning up!
He flung the bear into the open fireplace and watched the flames from the log fire dance over the nylon fur for a moment until he was satisfied that it was well alight. Somewhat mollified, he resumed his progress towards the telephone in the lounge.
"Cartwright and Olafson, Solicitors" chirped the professionally cheery female voice at the other end of the line.
"Mr Cartwright, please."
"Certainly. Who shall I say is calling?"
"Mr Robbins"
"Just one moment, Mr Robbins ..."
There was a second’s silence before the line was commandeered by a reggae version of "I Fought The Law, But The Law Won". Christopher winced.
"Good morning, Christopher."
"Did you have to do that?" Christopher almost snarled.
"Do what?"
"Choose that particular song to play to the poor bastards you put on hold?"
There was a brief, hurt silence. "I thought it was quite amusing."
"Well, I haven’t phoned you up to discuss your lamentable lack of tact and juvenile sense of humour. I want to know what can be done about my wife’s will."
Christopher sensed a pent-up sigh from the other man. "I’ve already told you that I’ll do all I can, but you must understand that your wife was legally compos mentis at the time she made the will. The fact that the restrictions she made concerning your inheritance are rather onerous is something we can argue in court but these things take time, and I can’t guarantee that we’ll win."
"Onerous? Onerous? I can’t leave this bloody house for more than a week at a time without losing the money! And I hate this hideous, rambling Gothic dump! You know why, don’t you? It was so her bloody teddy bears wouldn’t have to go without company for too long! She thought the bloody things were alive!"
"That may be so, but if those were her reasons she made no mention of them in the will. I’ll do what I can, but in the meantime you must abide by its terms."
Christopher tried to frame some retort but words failed him and in the end he simply snorted and hung up the telephone with a glare into the middle distance. After a while he realised that he wasn’t simply gazing vacantly and viciously into space, but at something. After a few moments he identified it as one of his wife’s twee paintings. Bought at some auction for a ludicrously inflated sum, if his memory served him. At this distance his myopic vision couldn’t focus well enough to see all the details, but he recalled it depicted some vilely winsome brat in a long Edwardian style summer dress treating half a dozen fat stuffed bears to a picnic served on a doll’s tea-set. He hated it. It brought back memories of the scratched and crackly 78 of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ that his wife had played every afternoon for the last 18 years of their marriage.
That painting’s going! he thought. The record, too.
He headed towards the hall and the modern oak-panelled double-doored lift shaft that housed his only means of transporting himself to the upper regions of the house. The motor of his wheel-chair purred contentedly to itself, in perfect counterpoint to his own ill-humour.
***
Later, his mood lightened a little by the bottle of brandy he kept in the drawer of the antique desk that occupied one corner of the sitting room in the small granny flat that he’d made his own after his accident, he reached for a pad and listed the pluses and minuses of his situation.
As he wrote he could dimly hear the roar of a vacuum-cleaner coming from somewhere below. The industrious Mrs Kenny, the lady from the village who ‘did’ for them every weekday afternoon, was clearly hard at work. Christopher liked Mrs Kenny. He admired her busy efficiency, and she had been his sole ally in the long battle against the teddy bear invasion that had eventually led to the claiming of every nook and cranny in the huge old house by cuddly toys. The distant evidence of her presence cheered him.
He looked again at his list. Under the ‘pluses’ he’d written:-
Mary dead.
Bears gone.
And under the minuses:-
The bloody will.
He sighed and inwardly mourned the loss of the woman he’d once loved, and had come over the long years to hate. He’d met her when he was a young and struggling literary agent and she a young and ambitious writer of romantic fiction, and he’d been from the first in awe of her: not of her talent, because she had very little of that, but of her implacable will and the unconcealed cynicism that matched his own. Together they’d forged an alliance that had made her a fortune and him a prisoner of her success. In the end the imprisonment had become almost literal after the car crash that had shattered his spine had confined him to the grounds of this hated bloody house.
In retrospect, he supposed, her decision to buy the place should have been his first warning that she was becoming unhinged. She’d described it as ‘romantic’, a word that when he first knew her she would have been unable to utter without an accompanying sneer. And her decision to sell her London flat and give up the hectic city social life - although welcomed at the time by his own more reclusive nature - was so uncharacteristic that something in him should have reacted with alarm rather than relief.
Oh well, he thought, it’s too late now.
They’d been in the house for two years when the Bears began. During that time they’d been happy enough. She’d continued to write, her books had continued to sell, and he’d even been faintly charmed by the increasingly evident, and previously unsuspected, whimsical side to her nature that had begun to manifest itself.
He’d often wondered over the years just what had caused the Bears. Had it been some smothered maternal instinct doomed forever to unfulfilment first by her own infertility, and later by his own physical paralysis, that had begun her slow retreat into childhood? He’d never know now, he supposed, but in any event she’d returned one afternoon from a trip to her publisher’s offices in London with an old wind-up gramophone, that 78 and a battered old teddy bear she’d rescued from a junk shop somewhere in the East End.
"Isn’t he wonderful, darling?" she’d breathed at him in the little girl voice she’d recently begun to affect, and which grated on his nerves.
He’d muttered something non-committal and she’d retreated to her bedroom (this was before the accident, but they’d begun to sleep apart for no reason that either had ever enunciated but just because it seemed right) to play the record over and over again.
After that, every trip to the city resulted in an armful of teddy bears to add to the growing army which gradually took over every corner, every vacant space, in the house. He’d complained, of course, but she was completely impervious to his arguments and, as she always said at the end of every squabble, after all it was her house. He’d taken in the end to driving to the nearest village every evening, preferring drunken isolation in the saloon bar of the Fox and Ferret to the fruitless angry exchanges and the endless playing of that bloody record. He’d been driving back from the pub after a particularly heavy session one evening when his old, beloved Bentley had skidded in the rain and wrecked itself and him against a vast and gnarled roadside oak.
He sighed and threw the pad aside. He’d go down for a chat with Mrs Kenny.
It was as he was passing his wife’s bedroom on his way to the lift that he noticed that the door was slightly ajar. He paused in momentary puzzlement - the door had remained closed since his wife’s cancerous womb had stopped her breath in there some three months previously (her final words to him had been "Take care of the Bears". He’d certainly done that!) - turned his chair and pushed the door open.
To his left was the large four-poster in which she’d died and ahead of him, through the windows in the opposite wall, he could see the drizzle-sodden ashes from the huge funeral pyre he’d built on the lawn the day after her funeral, where he’d burned every single one of the Bears he could find. In the far corner, beyond the bed, his wife’s computer sat on its work-station, an endless parade of animated teddy bears marching across its screen.
He steered his chair over to the work-station and touched the mouse. The screen-saver flickered and disappeared and was replaced by his wife’s favourite word-processing package. In large letters, centred in the screen, were two lines:-
If you go down to the woods today
You’re sure of a big surprise
Christopher recognised them, of course - from that bloody song he’d heard so often over the last two decades - and he was torn between anger and astonishment. His wife had been working on a novel up until the day she died (a ghost-writer was busily engaged in finishing it from her notes at that very moment. Her publisher expected it to be a major best-seller) but he was sure that the computer had been turned off after some suited ghoul had spent an afternoon diligently transferring files to disks. He shuddered as a cold wind momentarily blew against his soul, turned off the monitor and the CPU, and, rather more rapidly than he could rationally explain, left the room, firmly shutting the door behind him.
***
It was cold and he was naked. His breath formed phantom shapes in the air around his mouth as he walked through the trees. Everywhere he looked the petrified leaves sparkled with bright beads of ice. Around his feet ashes blew and stained his skin black where they touched it. His nostrils and throat were filled with the thick stench of burning hair. He choked and fell, long and lonely, into the darkness.
***
Extracts from the diary of Christopher Robbins, Saturday November 1st
9.00 a.m.
It was bitterly cold when I woke up this morning. The bloody flat’s supposed to have its own heating system - she would never permit anything as ‘unromantic’ as central heating in the main house, of course: open bloody log fires everywhere, Mrs Kenny’s forever moaning about the mess they make - but it breaks down every five minutes. I’ve turned up the thermostat and I’ll have to hope that does the trick, as there’s no chance of getting someone out to the house to fix it at the weekend. I hate weekends. There’s nothing to do until the decent TV comes on in the evening and no company, not even Mrs Kenny. I might get the paper and do the crossword, but that means going down to the front door and for some reason I feel nervous about leaving the flat. Ridiculous. I’ll have some brandy to warm me up and then I’ll go and fetch it.
11.15 a.m.
The door to her room was ajar again. I meant to go straight past it but I could hear a clicking noise coming from inside and so I had to have a look. The computer was on again. When I’d got rid of the teddy bears on the screen it just said ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’. I suppose she’d set the thing up to turn itself on and display a bit of doggerel to her every day. God knows why, or how she did it, but in the end she became as much of a mystery to me as computers are. Strange that she should have been so sympatico with the machines when so much of her life was a retreat into the past. Anyway I unplugged the bloody thing this time. I doubt that there’s any way she could have arranged for it to plug itself in as well as turn itself on! I must get someone in to look at the door.
There was a letter from the solicitor. It would appear that I am - or at least I will be - a millionaire several times over. I’m not sure where all the money came from - it was more than I expected - but of course I stopped being her agent after the accident made me a bloody welfare case. The crossword looks easy today. Pity, I was hoping for something to keep my mind occupied. I feel horribly lonely. I wish I’d let her have a dog now when she mentioned it; it would at least have been some kind of company.
3.00 p.m.
I’ve been watching athletics on the TV. I haven’t done that since the accident, although I used to love sports. Was a goodish cricketer when I was younger, and a fair hand with a squash racquet. Anyway, it just got too painful for me to bear after I got saddled with this bloody wheelchair so I stopped watching it. Stopped thinking about it at all, really. But I need the distraction, so that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s not just an occupying the mind thing, it’s that I want the sound. The funny thing is that earlier I could’ve sworn I heard that bloody Teddy Bears’ Picnic record of hers. But it’s impossible. The wind-up gramophone’s in the conservatory at the back of the house so there’s no way I could’ve heard it from up here. Gave me the willies.
Strange, now I come to think of it I didn’t see the bloody machine yesterday when I was watering the plants in there. Could Mrs Kenny have moved it for some reason? I’ll get rid of the bloody thing anyway.
I can feel cold creeping into the flat from the main house, although the radiators in here are blistering hot. It looks as though it’s going to be a bitter winter.
9.00 p.m.
It won’t stop! That bloody record keeps on playing over and over and I can’t stand it! I’ve been through the entire house looking for the bloody gramophone and I can’t find it, and no matter what room you’re in it always sounds as though it’s coming from somewhere else. Am I going mad? Is this some kind of guilt thing? I’ve never had much faith in all that psychoanalysis stuff, but what’s happening can’t be real so where does that leave me?`
I tried phoning Mary’s mother earlier but the bloody phone isn’t working. Wouldn’t do me much good, anyway. She never liked me. Never liked her daughter either. Cold-hearted bitch. When she came down for the funeral all she wanted to know was when she’d get her share of the money.
The house is like an iceberg. I’m trying to get drunk but I can’t.
12.30 a.m.
It’s stopped. So tired.
***
She wore a long white summer dress drawn in at the waist by a white cotton belt. On her feet were high laced boots and in her hair she wore pink ribbons. She giggled as she poured imaginary tea from a tiny teapot into the tiny cups set in front of each little bear, and chided the smallest one of all who would not sit up straight.
In the trees the summer birds sang brightly but the grass around her was thick with frost. When he looked into her eyes he saw endless fields of snow.
***
Extracts from the diary of Christopher Robbins, Sunday November 2nd
10.40 a.m.
Fell asleep in the bloody wheelchair. Never happened before, always made the bloody struggle to get into bed. It was just too bloody much, all of it.
Saw Mary in the night. Don’t know when. Woke up and she was standing in front of me dressed in some white bloody dress. Never wore white. Said it made her look fat. Looked at me like she used to when I first met her. Hard and bitter, not shit-soft like she got later. Smiled. Hard smile. Gave me the willies. Pissed myself in fact. Should change clothes but I’m so tired.
Bloody record again. Won’t stop. It’s so bloody cold in here.
12.00 p.m.
Got to get out. Cold. It won’t stop. Going mad. Got to get out.
***
The wheelchair moved slowly down the corridor, leaving tracks in the thick frost that covered the carpet. The door to Mary’s room was wide open as he passed it, and he could see the flickering light from the monitor on the ceiling, and hear the blaring brass band that accompanied the march of the teddy bears across the screen. Some small core of sanity assured him it couldn’t be happening, but he was no longer interested in listening to it. He was freezing and he was frightened and he wanted his mummy to comfort him. As he moved down the corridor he sucked the thumb of his left hand for comfort.
The brass button that opened the lift was so cold that shreds of his skin peeled away from his fingers and were left trailing from it like streamers. Inside the lift the military band was muted but The Teddy Bears’ Picnic seemed to swell up from somewhere beneath him and scratched its way into his brain like the insistent claws of an angry cat. And it was icy. The air coalesced on his skin, forming delicate crystals that sparkled in the overhead light.
With a thud the lift came to a halt on the ground floor. With bleeding fingers he prised open the inner doors, thumbed the button that opened the outer doors and ...
... thick, languid heat poured over him. The house was gone and he was surrounded by the dense, sun-dappled trees of a forest. Beneath the wheels of his chair the hard-packed earth of a well-worn path led out into a clearing. The sun shone down from a supernaturally blue, cotton-wool flecked sky as bees droned among the nodding flowers of a drowsy summer afternoon. Nearby a red and white checked tablecloth was spread against the intense green of the grass and on it was laid plates and cutlery, gleaming white cups and saucers and, in the midst of it all, a large yellow picnic hamper. A wind-up gramophone sat in the lazily waving grass, playing ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’.
Scattered indolently around the tablecloth were several ... well, they were undoubtedly bears but neither their size nor wicked claws or sharp teeth made them look in the least cute or cuddly. Somehow they sensed his presence and rose as one and he realised, as they began to move towards him, how horribly close they really were. Bizarrely, one of them wore a napkin around its neck and was clutching a teacup in one of its paws.
Christopher frantically tried to turn the wheelchair but the thick undergrowth on either side of the path held it fast. He backed the chair instead, but much too slowly. Just as they reached him he found himself wondering, idiotically, what was in the yellow hamper.
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