the tube

by Richard Alured

So, past midnight I alternated between sitting up on my bed and quietly pacing the room. When I got heavy-eyed I propped a book on the shelf and read standing though I didn’t really care for the novel. My inner eye was already downstairs, anticipating our argument (‘OK, Aga, let’s cut the bullshit.’). Still, I needed to wait, to be sure she was sleeping, for her to think I was sleeping.

Seven pages to go; a vehicle I’d have to get out and push.

I gratefully shut the book at the chapter’s end. It was nearly one am and I heard nothing on the landing. Maybe my Agatha was preternaturally quiet. I pushed my door open a crack.

On the other side of the landing her door was ajar. Presumably she didn’t want to disturb me with the latch bolt shifting. Crafty of her. But was she still in there or had she already slipped downstairs?

I crossed the landing and peeked in the slit. She was on her side, facing me, and my room’s light from behind me illuminated some of the lesions on her forehead. Her cheek, as usual, rested on a towel to catch any fugitive blood.

I turned back for my room but, as I passed the cusp of the stairs, she grunted. So, she’d got me. I decided it was better to just accept this and I turned around. She still pretended to sleep but, presumably to provoke me, she’d undone the front button of her pajama top and let a breast roll forward.

I didn’t want to be provoked so I turned back to my room but, again, at the edge of the stairs she grunted. No, I didn’t want to play this game. I looked down at my navy socks, and this is when things took a sudden turn. A line was advancing in my peripheral vision and, I admit, in my surprise I flinched, as if it had been a huge bug or a rat. It slid beside the wall on my left and stretched over the precipice of the stairs. It was some kind of tube and its front end hovered, swayed, turned a right angle and met the wall of the staircase, then descended diagonally, underscoring the handrail, while its back end trailed back into Agatha’s room. I peered back through the crack in her door. She was lying supine with the tube flowing from her torso. Her breast was invisible, replaced by this tube that pulsed and emitted a muffled sound like a swarm of insects behind a wall.

But where was the front end going? That was my first question. I pattered downstairs beside the tube and, when I reached the murk of the dining room, I watched it distend farther into the kitchen, bisecting the floor, a straight dark line. It reached the fridge and, with a tug, unsealed the door and the appliance released its moonlight. The tube, now looking white in the light, entered and returned coiled around a beer can which it clumsily lowered to the floor and, just as clumsily, uncapped with its muzzle.

It struck me that I’d need to prove what I was seeing. I had to catch our thief or get a picture, but I had no phone near. On top of that, the thought of touching it made me recoil: it was an intimate part of the person upstairs, and there was something sacred in that I didn’t wish to violate. So, while the head remained inside the can, oblivious or indifferent to me, I felt along the counter and found a pair of chopsticks, then I crouched and solemnly raised them.

A little backstory. It all started about a week before when I’d stumbled from bed and down to the kitchen and discovered a scene of great negligence: five empty beer cans on the floor, crushed at their centre, dregs refracting on the linoleum, wildness. And disturbing, because Aga had always been clean and spick. No one had ever bamboozled her into any kind of house-proud conventionally feminine role, I think, she just preferred to abide in orderly surroundings. So, after spending an evening de-grossing the sink and de-slobbing the cupboards, to then commit this debauch by night, I was quite shaken.

I delicately called upstairs: ‘Hey! Hey Agatha!’

She appeared in her grey dressing gown at the foot of the staircase.

‘Edwin?’ she baulked. ‘What’s this? What’ve you done to my kitchen?’

She clattered upstairs leaving me standing with my jaw hanging slack. That she’d do that, that she’d impulsively foul up the kitchen, well, I could sympathise with distress but then, but to then treat me like that…

Honest to God, did I? No.

Maybe if I’d blanked out?

But there was no precedent for that.

Off I went to work.

After sunset I got home and found the kitchen floor spotless. Two shopfront mannequins stood flanking the fridge on either side dressed in Aga’s winter clothes. Their legs were in warm woollen leggings, which seemed weird because this October was anomalously hot. To be honest, I wasn’t happy to see the new security detail. They confirmed that I’d not be allowed to forget the morning’s unpleasantness.

Agatha greeted me, fairly icily, and I praised our new security. We spoke slowly, or maybe we spoke at normal speed, but our speech was gappy from all the unsaid bits. After dinner she disappeared to her room. To do some reading, she said, though I knew it was really to gaze in her mirror and lather cream on herself. She spends literal hours in front of her mirror. Aga is an extraordinarily beautiful person. A dream of beauty. But she suffers a totalising skin condition. To see her is like seeing a renaissance painting vandalised. It makes you feel real regret. She preferred to avoid daylight, she said, because the sun aggravated her condition. Which it did. But I think, really, her shyness was more to blame.

I woke the next day, staggered downstairs and, guess what? Fridge and freezer doors hanging open. The floor was fine, and nothing had disappeared, but the ice had softened and probably some of our food had perished. And our security had stood through it all, audaciously unashamed.

It might’ve been an accident.

Off I went to work.

That night I got home and opened the freezer. Restocked. Fridge too including, teasingly, a new six-pack.

‘Hello.’ Her voice startled me from another room.

We silently chewed our dinners. My overtures flopped against the walls of her single word answers, then I started to daydream.

And in the morning, just guess: fridge wide open, in full view of the guards, six cans crushed at their feet.

Well – I’d got her. Now I’d play the big brother part, sympathetic yet resolute.

‘Aga…’ I began.

‘You’re disgusting…’

Off I went to work.

That evening, I came home with our third six-pack of the week. She was in the dining room and looked up from her phone and down at the bag in my fist and pulled a sassy crestfallen face.

Or maybe she’d guessed I was laying a trap and was already scheming her evasions.

‘For Halloween,’ I said, though it was still early in October.

So, that’s what lead up to me there, crouching in the kitchen, in the dark, raising my chopsticks.

And down, I clamped the sticks together around the shaft which turned out to be strikingly soft, the consistency of tofu. It writhed like a thing in torment, and its chirruping voice became shriller and clearer. The head reared from the can opening, curved back, and lashed at me. But it was feeble. It lamely slapped the linoleum. I opened the sticks and found the place I’d pinched utterly flattened. When it moved it cleaved in two, the sections connected only by a pale mucus-y discharge. Next, the two parts leapt up and, in a moment of symmetry, formed a shape like a heart and each end squirted a solution of froth and diluted blood from their wound. The drinking end fell to the floor and shuddered into a kind of spasm, and liquids spilled from its posterior like an overturned bottle. The longer end, conversely, maneuvered with grace, rose just shy of the ceiling and, with the solution of blood and beer spluttering at intervals from its torn front, it curved in on itself, and slewed back up the stairs.

Then the chirping died and the amputated section fell still in the arctic glow of the fridge.

I paused a few seconds to think. I switched on the light. I took a wooden tray from the shelf and, with the same chopsticks but very gently now, teased the languid section onto the wood. Up close it resembled a sea creature with a crinkled teat for a snout, oversized for such a basic looking organism.

I closed the fridge and peeled off my bloody socks, and my soles were red and slippery. The floor was sticky. Great rainbow arches of crimson were lashed over the walls and counter.

I draped the socks over the edge of the sink, and they dripped red corollas into the basin. I rinsed my feet and these whorls dissolved. Then I took the tray, quietly ascended to the landing, and flipped on the light when I reached the top step. Her eyes opened a crack.

‘Hey! Aga… Agatha!’

By now the bloody tube had spiraled. In the way certain dinosaurs die with their necks bent back, maybe the spiral was the resting position of this organ. The chopsticks by its side lent it a culinary aspect.

She murmured: ‘Whose is it?’and rubbed her eyes.

‘It’s yours!’

‘No…no’ She bridled and hoisted herself up on an elbow. ‘No. You had some girl in here, didn’t you?’

‘I’m not playing, Aga. It’s yours!’

She looked down at the tray and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, Edwin. I really don’t.’

She hugged herself, then unhunched and squinted at me.

‘Well, is she OK? Are you going to give it back?’

Her voice was icy.

‘Seriously,’ I hissed. ‘There’s no one here. Wanna check?’

‘Yeah! Think I will!’

She sat and fumbled with her dressing gown.

I headed back to the landing, and she gasped behind me. I looked around and tried to see things the way she’d see them. Yes, it was horrendous, the still weeping crimson on the walls, the dark red pools on the carpet, even the ceiling was stippled with little red stars. I blinked again at the red coil on the tray then looked back. Her mouth was curled down. Her eyes were beads of horror.

I pattered downstairs, flipped on the kitchen light, and called up to her: ‘See? No one here!’

She descended slowly. At the threshold of the kitchen, she covered her mouth and surveyed the red deluge on the lino. And I realized that, despite my washing, I was leaving a trail of dark footprints. I figured it was too late to fix this, so I kept on walking.

I flipped on the living room light: ‘No one here!’

The hall light: ‘Or here!’

The downstairs toilet: ‘Or here!’

‘What about outside?’ she mumbled. She followed slowly as if she were on a bridge and she alone felt it buckling.

‘OK. Let’s check outside!’ I said, smiling reassuringly.

I unlocked the front door and looked into the dark. She tentatively followed and pulled a torch from a cupboard which briefly dazzled me, then she fired the beam outdoors, which conjured the tall, spiked iron of our fence.

The pale light combed bright knots of vegetation, sometimes discovering bright moths. The world after the fence maintained its blackness. At any moment I feared the glare would bring us a tender broken body, clothed in blood, tangled in the weeds or sat dollishly against an iron paling. Maybe Agatha was harrowed with the same visions and, by proximity, was breathing her mental phantasms into me.

We stepped into the grass which scratched and cleansed my feet. Because Aga rarely ventured outside, the garden was all my domain. We turned right into the greater wildness and traipsed a C around the house. Aga oscillated the light side to side, slowly, like a cleaner fretful to leave no space unswept.

Our way ended with a wooden shed. She shone her beam to its left and illuminated sinewy branches and knotweed, rubbish, and torn up vegetation. She shone to the right and found the same. We swapped the tray, and I shone through the window. Inside was an armory of jagged wood and metal.

I pressed the door handle. My light arched across the walls and ceiling. Cobwebs glowed and shadows swung in elongating circles.

On the floor, I found an old rabbit hutch, though I’d never had a rabbit. I shone the torch in and sent a shoal of hexagonal fish through the mesh.

‘We could keep it in this,’ I said, smiling.

She remained with the tray, haunting the entrance.

‘It might have splinters.’

‘We’ll put some newspaper under it.’

Her voice trembled: ‘Don’t you think it’s barbaric? Locking it up in that thing?’

I said we’d sort out a proper home in the days to come.

We hulked the hutch and tray back to the house and rested them on the dining table. Then I surveyed the kitchen. It was worse than I’d feared. Crimson everywhere. Red spanning the whole wall. It would have to be tackled that night. The next day I’d go to work sleepless, no avoiding. The carpet was probably irredeemable, but it was a scratchy discolored carpet anyway.

Soon it was clear that, even after frantic scrubbing, the walls would need repainting. And the wallpaper up the stairs and all the way to Agatha’s room would have to be peeled.

After a night of labour, I crashed and came round in an armchair. Aga was at the dining table with her phone. Mad terra cotta swirls remained on the walls behind her. My foot stains were there on the carpet. Fainter but there. I slouched toward her. Curled strips of wallpaper lay about her. She was scrolling through pictures of transparent cases. She wanted a simple glass tank, she said, like they use for little pirate ships. We could build it quickly and be done with that awful old hutch which, she said, was like something from the dark ages.

So, the next day I came home with five acrylic sheets and a tube of acrylate glue. We spread newspaper on the kitchen floor between the dining table and the mannequins and Agatha sat and tore the protective foil from each sheet. A smile flickered over her face, and I could tell that, really, she was thinking of rapturously peeling away the top layer of her own skin.  

We fitted a rectangle of astroturf over the tank base to give the impression of a more natural habitat and, by dusk, all was perfect. We maneuvered the tube inside, respecting its spiral formation, and Agatha positioned a little porcelain milk jug in one corner. Don’t tell anyone but, secretly, I suspected a beer can would’ve been more fitting.

Then she went upstairs and spent the rest of the day frantically clawing at the wallpaper.

BIO: Richard Alured was born in England but currently lives in Japan. Bits of his fiction have most recently made it into Isele and Bar Bar journals.