The Unexpected Morning

The Unexpected Morning

by Rick Kennett

Rick Kennett is a life long resident of Melbourne, Australia. While a bounder and a cad to the populace in general he is nevertheless a good friend to next door’s white Tom who, in a fit of originality, he calls Cat. Rick was recently published in the Canadian magazine Weird Horror, and a reissue of his co-authored Carnacki the Ghost Finder pastiches, 472 Cheyne Walk, will be issued soon from Cathaven Press. “The Unexpected Morning” has a lot more reality in it than he cares to admit. Including a real ghost.

 

More TTTV Stories by Rick Kennett

 

His words seemed to hang in the air, cold and inexplicable. Ben looked again at his parents, then at the image on the laptop screen.

Ten years earlier little Benny had been four, riding in the child’s safety seat in the back of his mum’s red Mazda two-door as they pulled into the familiar driveway.

“Nana Chloe!” he burbled joyfully and smiling his infant’s smile, recognising the weatherboard house of his great grandmother, the rose bushes, the white picket fence.

Turning off the motor Ronda glanced up at Benny reflected in the rear view mirror. “After taking you to child care Mummy is taking Nana to the doctors.”

“Nana Chloe sig?”

“Sick,” Mother corrected him “Um … a little bit. The doctor is going to give Nana medicine to make her better.” Not quite true, but explaining an arrhythmic heartbeat consultation to a toddler, she was aware, would be pointless. “I’m going in to get Nana now. I’ll only be a minute.”

With the slamming of the door Benny was left alone in the car. He watched Mother walk down the rose bush path to Nana’s front door, before turning and stretching himself up in his seat to see the dashboard clock. He sort of knew that a minute had something to do with that fast hand circling the clock face and coming back to the top. When it reached that point he looked around, but still no Mother. With patience uncommon to a four year old he watched it circle again and … was that Mummy coming back?

He turned to look.

#

Ronda found her grandmother sitting on her bed, staring out through the open venetian blinds. Her hair was done up in a neat grey bun, she had on her print dress and her toiletries dilly-bag was beside her. She appeared ready to go but instead of tilting her head for a kiss on the cheek as Ronda leaned in she just stared ahead and in a tone slightly nervous, slightly puzzled, said, “There’s been someone dancing up and down in front of the house all morning.”

Her granddaughter stepped to the window and peered through the venetian blinds. “There’s no one outside, Nana.”

“No. Not now. But someone’s been dancing up and down out there all morning. I saw a shadow flicking on the blinds and thought someone must be on the veranda. But there was no one there, though I was sure there was someone out in the street. Couldn’t see him properly through the bushes but he was jigging back and forth the way you do when you’re anticipating good news.”

Ronda had another look, and though she still saw nothing she was overcome by a vague feeling of apprehension. Benny was out in the car by himself …

“You’re going doo-lacky, Nana,” she gently chided, knowing she said it to cover her own ill-defined qualms. “Unless it’s one of the old boys you talk to at the gate every day. Maybe you’ve won a heart and don’t know it.”

“Your grandfather was the only heart I wanted to win,” said Nana, a little testy.

Ronda hesitated then said, “What about Henry?”

Nana snapped her head around, facing Ronda with a frown. “You should be grateful he died when he did so that I could marry your grandfather. You wouldn’t have wanted that detestable man as your grandparent. I wasn’t married long before I realized I didn’t want him for my husband. Lucky for me … lucky for all of us in the end that he died so young.”

“Heart attack at twenty-eight,” said Ronda, pondering the oddity, and not for the first time, imagining Henry gasping out his last somewhere in this house. She’d heard the ancient gossip too, of Henry dying in his sleep, his young wife watching, waiting, then dressing the corpse and pushing it out the back door to make it appear he’d been on his way to work, so allowing a claim on employee insurance.

And there’d been still darker whispers …

Ronda shook herself from such thoughts, unworthy of her and unworthy of her loving grandmother. “Do you have your medications? The doctor will want to know what you’ve been taking.”

Nana tapped the cloth dilly bag beside her, tied with a draw string and said she had all her pills, powders and dark medicine bottles. Taking the proffered arm she made her way into the passage. Here Nana stopped to check she had her house keys, rummaging in her bag past pills and medicine bottles. “No, I’m not going doo-lacky, dear, but these days I am getting a little forgetful.”

Suddenly, standing there in the passage, Ronda felt the impulse to hurry her grandmother along without quite knowing why. There was Benny to drop at child care, sure, but the consultation was still an hour away, and being in a busy city hospital there was bound to be extra waiting. Benny was all right in the car and there was nobody dancing outside the house.

It was then she realized the real cause of her concern. She had her back to the back kitchen window.

She turned, looking down the passage and into the living room dark with shadows. Against the rear wall stood the TV and above it the broad window looking into the dim back kitchen. That part of the house back there had been her mother’s until she’d died, barely thirty-three. It felt haunted, Ronda half believed. By who or by what she didn’t want to think, but she was always uneasy with her back to it. The rear of the house had louvre windows looking into the yard. They often caught the wind and softly keened like a mellow banshee. In contrast, the front of the house was warm and welcoming. And this despite it being where her grandfather had died five years ago, leaving Nana separated from him after fifty inseparable years. The back kitchen, an enclosed and converted back veranda with rooms added when her mother had married, was full of childhood memories of domestic abuse. It was where mother had died of a sudden brain haemorrhage, where father had dumped her after running out on his now ex in-laws still grieving their only child …

When she’d lived here, raised by her grandparents, Ronda sometimes felt she was being watched when she had her back to those windows, and when facing them she risked seeing those watching eyes. More than once she’d glimpsed stick figure faces pull back behind its frame, several times the spring-hinged fibro door leading into the back of the house had opened at her approach, while the wind in the louvres soft-keened secret songs to her. The sketchy faces and the gentle singing could’ve been childish imagination, and the opening door might’ve been air currents, though she’d always said “Thank you” just in case. However, the knocking on the back kitchen window heard while watching TV alone late one night would not be explained away. As a terrified eight year old she’d peered through that window into the kitchen beyond and had seen only darkness.

Was that you, Mother?

Sometimes she thought so. And sometimes she thought it was someone else, too weak to make themselves known.

Nana’s returning grip on her arm brought her back to her responsibilities in the here and now. A moment more they were out the door, Nana locking it while Ronda, almost anxiously, glanced across to the driveway. Benny was staring over his shoulder out the Mazda’s passenger side window. She could see his mouth moving, plainly babbling to himself … something, she now reflected, she’d never seen him do before.

“Hello, dear,” said Nana as she carefully levered herself into the car.

“Nana Chloe!” Benny gurgled, his little hands moving in happy excitement. He looked behind him then looked back and said something else in his childish slur which his great-grandmother didn’t catch, too busy organizing herself and fiddling with the safety belt.

Now Mother was in the driver’s seat and starting the engine, much to little Benny’s glee – “Brrrm! Brrrm!” Glancing into the rear view mirror Ronda began to reverse out the driveway and in the seat beside her Nana began to die.

With her mind on backing out, the first short, sharp gasp didn’t quite register till she heard Benny give a frightened cry, and with the cry Nana’s rasped breathing came again, shallow and rapid.

Ronda stood on the brake, jerking the car to a halt, and stared at her grandmother whose head lolled to the side, mouth agape and slack, beginning to dribble, bubbling with the shallow, rapid breathing.

Under sudden acceleration the Mazda slewed backwards, then slammed forward, charging down the street, Mrs Middle Class Suburbia gunning the engine like a demented rally driver, leaving black tyre marks on the road, trailing exhaust fumes. Beside her Nana’s head nodded lopsidedly as if approving her granddaughter’s manic driving. Her breathing continued in truncated rasps while in the back seat Benny’s small, scared voice repeated, “I don’t like this … I don’t like this …”

Ronda took the corner at speed and sheer disregard, wrenching the wheel, the tyres squealing. The next street? Yes, it had to be the next street – an urban medical practice she was dimly aware of. She was sure it was up there – no, she was hoping it was up there.

Wheel wrenched again, fishtailing, squealing around the corner, into that street. The tyres, the engine, the irregular rasping, the child’s jumbled voice, “I don’t like this …”

As if in a dream of deliverance there suddenly was the medical centre, a converted double-fronted brick house, signage and wheelchair access. Skidding askew into the driveway, Ronda jumped out, ran to the entrance and burst into the waiting area amid the coughs and colds and mothers with croupy babies, shouting, “Help me, please! My grandmother’s dying!”

The nurse in her clean white uniform at reception jerked her head up and stared, first in surprise then with annoyance at this sudden interruption by another psychotic off her meds. But now this ‘psychotic’ with the wide, frightened eyes was in her face, pleading again in utter desperation, help and grandmother and dying.

The routine of Medibank cards and patient appointments instantly forgotten, realization and training kicked in. Hitting the alarm buzzer on her desk, the nurse jumped from her chair and rushed out, following the distraught woman.

Wrenching the car door open Ronda was immediately aware that the ragged rasping had ceased, that all was still and silent inside now. With the nurse’s help she lifted her grandmother out of the car and onto the ground. The nurse started administering CPR, pushing rhythmically with the heels of both hands into Nana’s chest. Ronda began to explain what had happened, but it was coming out as disconnected semi-incoherencies. The nurse, probably not even listening, continued with the heart compressions, pushing down in rapid rhythm.

Anxiously watching, Ronda remembered the presence of her son in the back seat. At once she wanted to take him away, to shield him from seeing all this, then realized with some relief that from his child seat at the back he couldn’t what was happening at ground level. Besides, Benny was not really trying to see what was happening but rather twisting in his seat and staring out the side window. As the nurse pounded and pounded and Nana failed to respond it came to Ronda in a distant sort of way that Benny was looking at something that had caught his attention behind him.

“What’s so interesting back there,” she thought in a distracted, ragged way, “when your great grandmother is dying?”

But now here were other medical staff filing out of the clinic to take over CPR, to check for heartbeat and breathing, and to give injections and fold a hissing oxygen mask over the now relaxed face of Nana Chloe. To all the compressions and the injections there was no response. By the time the ambulance sirened up from the busy city hospital Ronda had already told them to stop.

After all the forms were signed and formalities gone through she drove home, consumed by a feeling of unreality, as if all this had happened to someone else. Yet she was acutely aware it had happened to her, Mrs Middle Class Suburbia, who had brought eruptions of high drama into the lives of strangers, trying with such desperate histrionics to save her dying grandmother, and failing.

Benny too was quiet most of the trip home, his silence broken twice by soft murmurs of Nana Chloe and, as they turned into their driveway, he said aloud Kwumwit-mersh-biz three times.

Ronda didn’t question him. She wasn’t in the mood. As it happened, Benny didn’t say Kwumwit-mersh-biz again for ten years.

#

“You looking at porn?”

Ronda had minimized the laptop’s screen the second she realized Ben was standing in the dining room doorway, and now she and her husband Alex were turning guilty faces to their son, with Alex side-long whispered to his wife, “He gets his smart mouth from your side of the family, you know.”

Ronda, about to retort that she agreed with him because there was nothing smart about his side of the family, thought better and instead snapped at Ben with, “What are you doing home so early? Are you skipping classes?” Answer difficult questions with an unconnected accusation, a tactic she’d heard her deadbeat father had been adept at.

“Last period geography got cancelled. Think our teacher got lost.” He smirked at his own joke as parents and .child stared at each other across the generation gap. Then Ben narrowed his eyes as he began to wonder if his smart-mouth quip about porn might have some truth after all. He gestured at the laptop on the dining room table, its screensaver showing a blue sky dotted with drifting, innocent clouds. “Why did you like snap it down? What are you looking at?”

Alex said, “Show him, Ron. The boy’s fourteen now, not four. He wasn’t traumatized back then and he never had nightmares.”

“It’s an ancestry page,” Ronda told her son. “We’re looking into our family tree.”

Ben’s expression brightened. “Have we got serial killer rellos? Is that what you’re hiding? Cool!”

Ronda maxed the screen. “We’d just Googled this image when you came in and we … I thought it might upset you. But like your father said, you’re a big boy now.”

Ben stepped closer, unable to think what the forbidden image might be. Despite having seen some questionable things on the net in unsupervised moments, all the same he leaned in with foreboding.

A photograph of a young man in a boring brown suit and straw boater hat standing beside a young woman in a dull print dress and floral hat, their arms linked, unsmiling eyes cast at each. Rose bushes to one side, a weatherboard house front behind.

“It’s your Nana Chloe,” said his father, “when she was married to her first husband.”

“Yes,” said Ben blankly, memories replaying in his mind like old time home movies — the sudden seizure and rasping, the panicked drive through the streets, the smiling man stepping to the car window, the nurse in white pounding on Nana Chloe’s chest … He pointed to the man in the photo. “That’s Henry.”

“That’s right,” said his mother, then doing a doubletake added, “How do you know that? He died very early in the marriage and this is the only photo we’ve ever been able to find of him.”

For an instant a dreamy expression came over the teen as if he were trying to grasp an elusive thought. He blinked and the moment seemed to pass. “It’s what Nana Chloe said when he came to the window. She said ’Henry’ like she was all scared and stuff.” Ben looked again at the image on the laptop screen, the young couple of so long ago with arms linked in dubious feelings.

“Who came to the window?” said Ronda. “What window?”

“The car window, mum. When you ran in to get the nurse Nana Chloe stopped breathing and he –” Ben pointed to the man with the straw boater hat in the photo “– came to the window, smiling like he knows a dirty secret and Nana Chloe says.’Henry’ like she’s ready to freak it. And he was like smiling that dirty secret smile and he said …” The boy paused, then recalling a memory of long ago said, “’Kwumwit-mersh-biz.’” He shook his head and repeated it, slower and without the childish slurring, “’Come with me, murdering bitch’” Ben eyes grew large as he realized what he’d just said and about who. “And they just, like, walked away.”

His words hung in the air, cold and inexplicable. All three looked at each other, then at the laptop image, a young couple of the long ago, arm in arm and already beginning to hate each other.