annashay 
by Alan Beard
I should call an ambulance; I should call the police. Yes, officer, a dead man at the bottom of our stairs.
Step over the body, think about sawing him up. Burying his parts in woods like they do in films after driving around with the body in the boot and nearly being discovered by the police who stop you for a faulty tail light.
Could do, could do.
My husband: look at his noble face, his crumpled lineage showing. Even lying at that angle you can see the parts that went to make the whole, those lips—his lisp—from his mum, his legs and walk—strut—from his dad, his attitudes from his grandad a walking piece of shit (according to his aunt Dot), his views obnoxious and creepy.
A history ending up in him, chance fusion of atoms to make him twist up this way out of his bed out of his seat. Out of his grave, his lying at the foot of the stairs. Step over him tempting an undead hand.
Usually he’d just smile at you from his position in the high-o-sphere.
Never had any idea of him until one night back in the late noughties a friend brought him along to a works party where he cornered me. What was a boring life became less so.
He wanted to go out with me, live with me, walk the streets together, visit Morrisons at the weekend and load the car with groceries, have a brat or two to slap about and call names, only kidding, he said: they’ll slap me about.
He’d got tired of fucking about, he told me on a third or fourth date in some scrunched up pub down a backstreet, his criminal activity burglaries car theft drugs and all his women and decided the simple things would do, Friday nights in the pub; bringing up kids; watching football on TV on Sunday afternoons and documentaries about serial killers in the early hours like every other normal human being.
Which is where I came in. I’d keep him on the straight and narrow with my hair abundant and falling down my back across shoulders—a river of gold and promises, he said. Sometimes he spoke as if singing. He got hold of me, gathering me up like treasure, booty, and wouldn’t let me go.
*
At the beginning there were always freckly women around him, they would turn up at gatherings. His Joanjee his Ellaboos or some such. They’d flex their backs, show their legs.
But soon I relaxed in the arms of his extended family, his lot, having not many on my side, two sisters, but they’re far away, we stopped talking after both parents went. The glue gone. Hardly seen them since. I was pursuing something, warmth, talk, music, company. I’m a classic middle child. Missed out. Is she the milkman’s? My dad had a face on him as if this was true, so I longed to join a family where laughter was about, in-jokes and hugs. And that’s his lot. Out together they danced, didn’t hold back. They loved karaoke, but also had their own songs, words changed, Build me Up, Bar-ba-ra, bab-y, pointing at her, Barbara being always there and bowing to take the attention. It was like a reverse of what I had known, the coin coming down the other way, it carried me away. I had to go somewhere you see, this seemed the way, the only way I could see.
*
Will I miss him, his ship in the night, rocking the waves? The fucking lovely evenings with him amongst the front room furniture?
First months were the usual lust fest, hands all over, hard to let each other go, to be out of sight of each other. His small dimple one side only. Darling days of afternoon drinking. He told me jokes that seemed pieces of wisdom on those red buttoned pub banquettes. The rolled back sleeves, the easiness of it all.
I liked to keep the three wines feel of just on the edge of it all, looking around, enjoying the vibe. Favourite pubs we had. The line of white-haired aunts, cousins, who knows, sets of sisters chorusing from the sidelines in their frocks and cardies. The bellied men exchanging jokes and progress reports on their sons’ football skills.
Round their kitchens, drinking at the table and dancing to Addicted to Love, with a broomstick, with a mop as guitars, three more sisters, his nieces, mirrors of we three, knew all the steps, although short black skirts were replaced with grey trackies and dirty trainers.
All the conversations and dips of noise we had, all those exchanges of words, secrets, bodily fluids…the access given, permission signals, you know. The warmth of him at night, my central heating system I told him. In some ways, smart. He always knew who the killer was by episode two. The lies I told on his behalf, the taking on of each other’s expressions—Bob’s not your uncle; a spliff in time saves nine. The music we listened to, the kids we had, the house we filled with ourselves our stuff our airs and graces and dance abouts. Our quarrels and withdrawals and sulks.
His smile went through you—me—still did, still would if I could resurrect him and get him walking around greeting people, the strangers in the street, flash his eyes at some woman he fancied again, ignoring my presence, as usual, at his side looking on. I would, I would resurrect him, not least to save me all the hassle of the police and the form filling and the explaining to this one to that one in their ties and dresses and trouser suits smiling gently at me like I’m someone who will turn at full moon. Yes, we were drunk, officer. We drank through the night.
I check, put my ear to his nose and mouth. Nothing. He told me he spoke to the dead or they would speak to him but he forgot how to listen, how to record, how to retain their slippery words and revelations, the stories they had to tell him on white whistling nights.
*
I liked him lazy and loopy like his signature, laid back. Horizontal. Like he is now, well a little bent here and there by stairs’ protrusions. Or kicking a ball about in our little yard with Will and Shaz. Will not that good tbh, Shaz might be the next Mary Earps, saving shots from her dad. He was relaxed, a good energy.
Course then time mounts up in piles of underpants and dust on the windowsills and appliances, the big black TV with the soundbar his pride and joy. Floors to wash and children to run after and the inside weather of him not great, not good at all. Like a machine that’s been left on too long and has overheated and broken down.
That’s the angle I’ll take, on the verge of breakdown he was. Mental problems. People will attest, his behaviour in family gatherings lately.
What it is though, where he is, was, losing it, I am gaining, I am coming through. All relationships yo-yo, Dot said to me, back of the pub by the car park waiting for the men to come out, zipping up as they leave the toilets. At the moment it’s you. You the yo. She did a rapper’s gesture, fingers apart.
*
So when he married me he went straight, got a real job, but the nicks and toughening factory work, labouring brings you, the weariness in his bones, he said, made him want only to sit and watch TV, have the kids play around him and bring him his sandwiches his pies his curry and chips. Then after he scoffs 3 Magnums meant for them and goes back the next day to get pummelled and nicked again in the machine dense warehouse. Has the usual conversations with foreman by the glittering piles of swarf in the yard. Talk of women and football and politics—migrants: he tries not to listen, he says, he never joins in he keeps himself to himself now. But something got into him. He tilted he twisted he began talking out of the corner of his mouth.
He became the champion of enoughisenoughism; he was going to start his own political party. He would have followers. You’re good with money, you could be Chancellor. Or maybe Dot, he said. He straightened a non-existent tie.
He put on weight. His dimple left him.
He left that shit job. He could do anything; he could do what he liked; he could get another job. Fireman, architect, thief. At one time he had the idea he would be a talkshow host, nothing to it, just needed to whiten his teeth, heat up his patter, after all everybody liked him, cheered when he came in the pub. If it wasn’t for the continuous reflux acid if it wasn’t for the occasional stutter, the light lisp, the curl of his lip, his colourless eyes, his know nothing brain he’d be there he’d be big time he’d be number one.
He went back to dealing, passing on. That’s what he called it: passing on. And now he’s passed on, lying there like a crazy indoor sunbather.
*
Once he threw me out in the cold yard, a burst ball for company for most of the night for something I’d said or done or not done for being too visible too ugly too pretty too loose too angular too straight too much like his mother not enough like his mother. His sister, comforting me later with prosecco and tut-tuts, said at least he doesn’t beat you.
Ha! I said. That’s coming, I can sense it.
Dot says he should know better now he should have grown up, and become steady like a rock upon the beach, she gets biblical now and then. I could ring her – could I? – for advice.
*
Thinking of the boys I passed by, let go, the blue of them.
*
The thousand-yard stare from him, some cold place he goes; went. Grew a moustache, goatee endlessly petted, something dissatisfied in his strut about the world, standing arms folded in his grey T-shirt squinting at thin Jim next door, shooting the Cotteridge breeze, yeah, anyway.
Taking up space in the street.
His thin white roll up ends smeared with grey fingerprints still in the ashtray. Beer bottles from last night, watched The Exorcist: Believer even though it only got 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, but argued our way through it anyway.
There was some to-ing and fro-ing, occifer.
His feeling of not being properly rewarded. It showed in his body his teeth his blood pressure. He was taking pills for this and that. Made up conditions. He took anything he could find. Some had him twitching, up and down these stairs, full of something trying to get out, grabbing at me; others had him eyes glazed, music eddying around him, kids felt-tipping flowers and hearts among the blue and red of his arm tattoos.
*
Is that all the time is, I thought hours had gone by, sitting on the stairs just above him. Shaz only just finishing her first lesson; Will in double maths: his favourite, not. Send them some emojis. Look after yourselves. Think well of me.
At the end I could taste the salt and crabmeat of his inside cheeks just from looking at him. The cough in his voice, the pain forever melting in his head.
Have to do something I suppose, about his body before someone comes round, before the kids get back. Get them to help, we could dismember him in the kitchen for being a bad dad. But Shaz will cry and ring the police, Will will bring up his playing football, his hide and seeking in the park. They haven’t seen his clenched teeth his digs at you, he hides that from them. He clucks like a mother hen at them.
*
My dad called me his little bint, sat on hard thin legs like sitting on poles, and his alcohol scummed lips crooning. He’d smell my hair. Rough hands on me. I liked him drunk, he’d be kind, shelling out cash and toys, calling us lovely, relaxing at last. We all liked him, us sisters, drunk.
Mum didn’t.
*
Mobile going off in his bulging pocket, light showing through the material. One of his women probably. He never quite gave them all up.
*
At one time—after he’d lost his jobafter he’d pledged to go straight, remember, he’d look for parcels left on doorsteps. Bournville was easy pickings. Amazon, DPD, anything. He’d look behind bins. We had curtains he always promised to put up, chocolates, flowers, loads of books: he tried to sell the fiction in charity shops. He didn’t understand why people would want to read that; ‘fact books’ were his thing. He loved the Guinness Book of Records. He’d store facts to spout when necessary, to impress—number of UFOs spotted last year, by area, a hyena’s top speed, last place Bowie played live.
*
Men have beasts in them, Mum would say, and I would laugh because I know women do too, ferocious, can gnaw you inside, tear you up. Especially if you’ve been up all night, and then leaving the kids to get themselves off to school. Shouting at him to get up, to get off me so I could get out of bed.
*
When your luck is in your friends want a piece of you, want to bite you, wouldn’t mind taking a breast or leg of you home with them. They want your eyes and your smile.
But now, last few years: nothing. Everything has stopped.
I’m like Will, who wants to live in a tree, and why shouldn’t he, why shouldn’t anyone? Some bolt hole somewhere, somewhere with trees that you can shin up like an eleven-year-old. Pop your head out the top, surrounded by foliage.
*
He fish-gasped at the end I heard it from the top of the stairs, looking down on him, like the scene in Psycho when the bald man goes backwards down the steps.
*
Jim next door: can see his spindly profile if I get at an angle to the front window. Nosy individual, and pal of my man. He’s retired and always on the pavement before us washing his car or examining sacks of sand dropped off or some such. Always chatting to husband, on his way out, his way in. Might miss him now, his gruff greeting and chat about football. See the match first thing they say.
That’s him knocking now. His blurred white bearded face pressed to the frosted window, fogging it further.
oOo
Alan Beard has two story collections out, Taking Doreen Out of the Sky (Picador, 1999) and You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal Street Press, 2010). He has had numerous stories and flashes in magazines and anthologies in the UK, USA and Canada including Malahat Review, London Magazine, Warwick Review, Critical Quarterly, and Best British Short Stories. His story “Inside” will be published in ‘Thursday Nights,’ an anthology celebrating forty years the of Tindal Press Fiction Group in December 2023.
Connect at Bluesky @alanbeard.bsky.social and X @AlanBeard4.
