Bread and Chocolate Read online

  They went to see the bank who no longer agreed with Gary that capital should be liquid. The thinking in the 1990s was that capital should be secure. They defaulted on the timeshare deal and lost all the money they had put in. Some of the goods they had purchased on loan agreements they could send back. But the expensive curtains and carpets, the luxury kitchen and the studio bathroom were fitted to the house, and could not be reclaimed or returned.

  ‘We’ll sell the house,’ Gary decided. ‘Recoup.’

  But it was not easy to sell. Large houses were coming on the market almost every day. The price they had paid in the booming eighties had been a triumph – a steal. But they had poured money into the improvements and décor. Now people no longer wanted cold empty rooms, they wanted the country look. Potential buyers saw the elegant laboratory-like kitchen and wanted stencilled wood, and Agas. They had to put the house on the market for less than it had cost them, for less than it was worth. In any case they would see none of the money. It would go straight to the mortgage companies and then to the loan companies and to the bank. Gary had seen whole corporations go bankrupt, wiped off the flickering computer screen. He had never thought that his life and his house, and perhaps even his marriage, could be erased by a blinking green cursor into total blackness.

  It was then, in their long evenings of desperate calculations and arguments and bitter regrets, that Gary thought of the ghost. He had read an article about a family who had suffered from a poltergeist, which threw chairs, smashed mirrors, broke glasses. One of the glossy magazines had paid them £50,000 for their story with pictures. ‘It would pull us clear,’ Gary said. ‘Get us liquid.’

  Stella knew how to contact newspapers, how to set up a story, who would buy. Gary set himself to fabricating evidence of a murder so foul that it would give rise to a gruesome – and therefore profitable – haunting.

  ‘Children,’ he said. ‘It has to be children.’

  Stella said nothing. She was working on the copy for an advertisement. She glanced up at him and did not try to hide the irritation in her face. ‘Just do it,’ she said. ‘If you’re so sure. And I can sell the story. But don’t keep interrupting me. This has to be in by tomorrow.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. He was humble these days. He felt he owed her, just as he owed the bank, and the building society, and the loan companies, and the timeshare company. He owed them all.

  He went to the library to research and then he struck lucky. There had been a murder, a particularly nasty murder, of three small children in a house in their street, way back in 1923. The local newspaper did not give the number of the house and Gary was certain that no-one would remember or, if they did, by then the story would be published and the cheque banked.

  He copied down the details. The man, shell-shocked from the trenches, not knowing where he was, had come home from the pub, drunk and angry. The children had been locked in an upstairs room. He had staggered up the stairs and kicked in the door. He had no weapon, he had used his hands, his boots, and in the end his teeth. Even Gary, who was not a squeamish man, battled with nausea as he copied the details into his little notebook. They had called the man the Savage of Steel Crescent, an animal, a monster.

  He brought the story home and Stella read it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can sell this.’

  Gary started work on the house. He treated the walls of the spare bedroom so that stains like blood seemed to be seeping through the subtle cream paper. Together they opened a couple of air vents, hidden in the cupboard, so the room was several degrees colder than the rest of the house. They practised their accounts of hearing the footsteps on the stairs, the cries for help. Stella was particularly good in her description of the creak on the floorboards of a heavy foot, the noise of the man stumbling, and then the heavy crash as he broke into the bedroom where the children were crying in fear.

  They frightened themselves thoroughly with a complete dress rehearsal. ‘It’s perfect,’ Gary said. ‘Tomorrow you ring the papers. It’s irresistible.’

  They went to bed but Stella could not sleep. She felt afraid, her account of the murders had been too vivid, her heart still thudded as she thought of what she had described, so certainly, with such conviction. ‘I suppose it is all right to do,’ she said. ‘It is lying.’

  Gary had the answer. ‘It’s conjuring,’ he said. ‘Like stage magic, like Paul Daniels. Now you see it, now you don’t. Nobody asks: is it true?’

  ‘No,’ she said. But that night she dreamed that she heard a footstep and the strange monstrous snuffle of the man coming up the stairs, dead drunk on his hands and knees, inspired by a savage madness.

  ‘You’ll do it better if you’re really scared,’ Gary said in the morning. He was pale himself, with excitement. ‘Call the newsdesks.’

  They auctioned the story: there were three papers involved at the end, and the last one took the bid up to £80,000. That night Gary bought a bottle of champagne, they had almost forgotten the taste. Next day he signed the sale contract on the house with the buyer. They would clear their debts. They might even show a profit of a couple of thousand pounds. They could rent a little flat, take their furniture, and start again. They were young, no slump lasts forever, Gary would get work, they would rebuild their lives.

  The reporter and the photographer came together, half an hour before they were due. Stella and Gary, wise in such methods, had been ready for the previous hour. They showed the room with the little bloodstained handprints on the wall, at the pitiful low level. They showed the layer upon layer of wallpaper that they had put on to cover the stains, and to cover them again. The reporter shivered at the icy chill of the room. ‘This is really spooky,’ she said.

  But the strongest moment was when Stella, in the kitchen, her eyes wide with real fear, said that she heard the man coming upstairs on his hands and knees, sniffing like a dog, up to the bedroom door, and sniff, sniff, sniff on the threshold, and then his roar as he flung himself up and against it.

  ‘I hear the children cry out – and then I hear a dreadful thing …’

  ‘What?’

  Stella went pale. ‘I hear the murder,’ she said. ‘I hear a crack, a bone breaking, I hear a little scream, a helpless scream, and then I hear an awful sound … an awful sound …’

  She broke off, she could hardly breathe.

  ‘What sound?’ the reporter pressed her. Gary covered Stella’s hand with his own and felt that she was icy cold.

  ‘Steady on …’ he said softly.

  ‘I hear him biting,’ she said. ‘Biting like a dog. A terrible grunt and snap and gobbling sound.’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I know it’s him,’ she whispered. ‘Biting into the baby’s throat, and chest, and little stomach.’

  They took photographs: of the bedroom, of the stairs, of Gary and Stella arm-in-arm at the front door. Stella refused to go into the room itself – a nice touch, Gary thought – but then he saw her white face and thought that she was near to convincing herself. The reporter had brought the cheque. As soon as she were gone he banked it and paid for a rush transfer. They had £80,000 in their account at the close of business, they were in the clear.

  When he got home Stella was having a bath, the door firmly locked. He glanced into the haunted bedroom. In the twilight the little handprints seemed darker, and there seemed more of them. He shook his head. He was spooked by the story, by Stella’s convincing acting, by the horror of the whole fiction.

  He tapped on the bathroom door, and heard her little scream of fright at the sudden noise, quickly repressed. ‘Come down for a drink!’ he called.

  She did not come down. He sat in the kitchen and drank a couple of glasses of brandy. When he went up to bed she was pretending to be asleep and would not speak to him. Gary climbed into bed beside her, stubbornly clinging to his sense of relief that they had pulled a clever scam, a brilliant sting. Their conjuring trick, their once-in-a-lifetime conjuring trick, had saved them.

  He fell asleep. Stella turned on her back,