“We’re simply not getting this,” Mum said, pushing away the advertisement, which Dennis had thrust under her nose.
“But it’s my birthday!” Dennis scowled. In fact, his birthday was still a month away.
“I’d love to get it for you. But I simply can’t. There’s no money in the bank and my credit cards are all over their limit.”
“We can get another credit card.”
“Why do you need a massage chair?” Mum asked.
Dennis rubbed his neck. “Living with the two of you, always criticizing me all the time! You have no idea how stressed I am. If I was more relaxed, I’d be able to concentrate on my business a little more.”
“I’m sorry, Dennis. I’m sure it would be a lovely thing to have. But I’m afraid this time it really is out of the question.”
The massage chair turned up a few days later. It was a monstrous thing that took four men to carry in, and by the time it had been installed in the living room, there was hardly any space for anything else. Dennis wasn’t there when it arrived. He was at the pub, somewhere he’d been spending more and more time recently. After the delivery-men had finished their work and gone, I found Mum in the kitchen. I could tell that she’d been crying.
“Mum!” I went over to her and this time I wasn’t going to hold back. “Why are you putting up with this?” I demanded. “It’s stupid. You should get rid of him. You should kick him out.”
“Shh!” She turned around and for a moment she looked terrified. “You don’t understand, Lucy. I can’t . . .”
“Has he threatened you?”
“No. It’s not like that.”
“Then why?”
I heard the front door open and my heart sank.
“He’s not so bad,” my mum whispered. “And maybe he’ll be happy . . . now that he’s got his chair.”
In fact, Dennis was delighted. He sat in it at once and began to experiment with the programs, trying to find the one that suited him best.
Have you ever seen a massage chair? For something that was meant to be a luxury item, this one was really hideous. The leather was black and highly polished, and even if it was packed with the latest technology, it still looked awkward and old-fashioned. It was also very big, completely enclosing Dennis when he sank into it . . . a bit like a mummy in its sarcophagus. The chair sat on a metal plinth. There were supports for his arms and legs, and when the program started, these gently pressed on both sides of his wrists and ankles, massaging them and at the same time keeping him in the correct position. Cushions also inflated behind his head and around his neck, and hidden rollers moved up and down his spine, under his hips and thighs and even behind his calves. Every inch of his body had been catered for and, just as the advertisement had stated, the massage chair was practically silent with only a faint humming as it went about its work.
I hated that chair. You have to remember that we lived in a small, pretty house, and the chair—with its pistons and rollers and air bags and leg traction—completely spoiled it for me. I could always tell when it was on. I couldn’t hear it, but the walls of my bedroom vibrated. I thought of it as a monster in a cave. If any of our friends had seen it, they would have said it was completely out of place, better suited to an airport lounge or health club. But not many friends visited us anymore. (They didn’t much like Dennis either.)
Dennis had the chair for less than a week before it broke down. He’d used it every evening. He had a set pattern. After dinner, he’d pour himself a glass of expensive wine, light one of his expensive cigars and sit there in his black leather beast with a vague smile on his face, watching TV. Meanwhile, Mum would do the laundry and maybe the ironing before she went to bed and I’d stay in my room, doing my homework, almost afraid to go out.
Well, one evening, just before I went upstairs, he got himself all set up, reached for the remote control, pressed down with his thumb and . . .
Nothing happened.
“Helen? Have you been tampering with this?” he demanded.
“No.” My mum stopped, a pile of clothes in her arms.
He tried again. “It’s not working.”
“Is it plugged in?” Mum asked.
“Of course it’s plugged in, you stupid woman. You can see for yourself. The green light is on.”
“Well, it’s not working.”
“I know it’s not working. I just said that.”
“Maybe it’s blown a fuse,” I suggested, secretly hoping it was something more serious.
“We need to call someone in,” Dennis said.
“I’ll find someone,” my mum said. She was really upset. I don’t suppose she cared about the stupid chair but she didn’t want Dennis to be in a bad mood.
She rang the chair company the following morning, but that was the next crisis. The Silver City ProElite Massage System Deluxe was still under guarantee, but Dennis had lost the paperwork and they said they wouldn’t come to the house without it.
“We can get someone local,” I said. “I bet it’s something simple. Maybe one of those stupid pistons has fallen off or something.”
“Lucy!” My mother rolled her eyes nervously, even though Dennis wasn’t in the house.
“I’ll find a number,” I said.
I went into the kitchen. The Yellow Pages telephone book was lying open on the windowsill next to the sink, and here’s the strange thing. As I walked over to it, there must have been some sort of breeze in the room, because the pages fluttered and turned as if the telephone book were opening itself. Stranger still, by the time I reached it, it had settled in exactly the right place, because an advertisement in a black box in the top corner drew my eye immediately.
THE MECHANIC
General household repairs. Electrical,
plumbing, computer hardware, domestic.
Tel: 00010 005 500
We fix everything.
I showed the advertisement to Mum and she rang the number, although she was a little puzzled by all those zeroes. What sort of phone had a number like that? I’m not sure she was even expecting to get an answer, but she was connected after the first ring. She spoke briefly to someone at the other end of the line, then put the phone down.
“They’re coming on Saturday,” she said.
“Are they expensive?” I asked. I was always worrying about money these days even if it was the one subject we never talked about.
“They didn’t say.” Mum saw the look in my eyes. “However much it is, it’ll be worth it,” she said. “Dennis loves that chair. And it does help keep him calm.”
The mechanic turned up at ten o’clock the following Saturday, exactly when he’d said he would. He came in a white van that reminded me of something. Had I seen it before, the day of the wedding? If so, it was a strange coincidence. At any event, he entered the house carrying a neat metal toolbox. He was a very short man, barely taller than me, dressed in blue overalls with a Biro behind his ear. At first sight, I thought he might not be British. He was dark-skinned, bald, with a mustache that was a little too big for his face. His teeth were a dazzling white. All in all, he didn’t look like a mechanic. He looked like someone who had dressed up as a mechanic.
Dennis had just finished breakfast and followed the mechanic into the living room. The little man was already crouching in front of the chair.
“What a beauty!” he was saying. “The Silver City ProElite Deluxe! Multi air bag system. Twin twenty-six-point shiatsu rollers! I congratulate you, sir, on your good taste. Only the best for you. I can see that!” He straightened up. “I bet you must love sitting on this.”
“It doesn’t work,” Dennis said.
“That’s the trouble with Silver City,” the mechanic agreed. “They’re unreliable. It’s Japanese engineering. Not that I’ve got anything against the Japanese. Great cars. Great TVs. But when it comes to massage chairs, they can be a bit shoddy, a bit slapdash . . .”
“Can you fix it?” Dennis asked.
“I can fix anything. I
t might take an hour. It might take all day. We won’t know that until we’ve got the back panel off and I’ve had a quick scout around inside.“
“How much will it cost?” Mum asked.
“Fifty dollars plus tax, or forty dollars cash.”
I could see Mum was relieved. We’d had plumbers and electricians come to the house and they’d charged double that just to walk through the door.
“Mind you,” the mechanic went on. “Let’s hope the vertical sensors or the spine rotation systems haven’t blown. That could be more expensive. And I might have to take out the motherboard. This Japanese circuitry . . . it can play all sorts of tricks.”
“Just mend it,” Dennis said. “I’m going out.”
Dennis had recently taken up golf. Mum had used her connections at the hotel to get him a cut-price membership at a local club. As soon as he had gone, the mechanic set to work. He opened his toolbox to reveal a gleaming array of spanners on the top shelf with a dozen screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches and tweezers neatly lined up below.
“Would you like some tea?” Mum asked.
“No, thank you, Helen,” the mechanic replied. “But I wouldn’t mind a glass of water. Tap, not mineral. And maybe a slice of lemon?”
“Right . . .” My mum sounded bewildered.
And there was something that puzzled me. I had been there when she had made the telephone call and I was there when the mechanic arrived. Mum had never told him her name. He couldn’t possibly have known it.
But he had called her Helen.
The next time I looked into the living room, the massage chair had been turned inside out. The mechanic had taken off the leather cushions to reveal a metal panel, which he had unscrewed. Now there were about a thousand wires spilling onto the carpet and I could see metal pistons, cogs, wheels and circuit boards packed together inside. The mechanic was whistling cheerfully, but my heart sank. I’d decided that he was a complete fraud. I didn’t believe for a minute that he had the faintest idea what he was doing.
I was wrong. He worked for three hours, occasionally stopping to sip the lemon-flavored tap water that he had requested. When I went back into the room, the chair had been put back together again and looked as good as new. He was just screwing the panel back into place.
“Is it fixed?” I asked. It was the first time I had spoken to him.
“As right as rain, Lucy. Fixed and fastened.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Your stepfather told me.” He slipped another screw into place and began to turn it.
“Do you live in Suffolk?” I asked him.
“No, no, no. Not me.”
“So where do you live?”
“I get around.”
At that moment, my mum came into the room. She took one look at the chair and I could see the relief in her face.
“It was the auxiliary sprocket,” the mechanic told her. “Would you believe that someone had put it in upside down! It short-circuited the main drive. And without the main drive the whole thing was a nonstarter.” He picked up the remote control and pressed a button. The massage chair began to vibrate the way it always had. Music played in the headphones. The back rollers gently pulsated. Everything seemed to be working.
“How much do I owe you?” my mother asked.
“Forty dollars if you don’t mind paying cash,” the mechanic replied.
“But you’ve been here for hours,” Mum said.
“Yes. It took a little longer than expected. But the price I quote is the price you pay. And forty dollars it is!”
“Well . . . thank you very much.”
Mum reached for her handbag and took out two twenty-dollar bills. The mechanic rolled them up like a cigarette and slipped them into his top pocket. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you,” he said. “And a pleasure working on the Silver City ProElite. What a chair! What a great investment! I wish you hours of pleasure. Good day!”
He had already packed up his toolbox. He picked it up and left.
Dennis was in a bad mood when he got back from the golf club, which meant that he had lost. But he brightened up a bit when he saw the massage chair.
“Is it mended?” he asked.
“Yes, Dennis,” my mum said.
“Did that man demonstrate it before he left?”
“He turned it on.”
“Did he run through all the programs?”
“Well, not all of them—”
“You shouldn’t have let him leave without going through all the programs,” Dennis said. “If he’s damaged it . . .”
“It seemed to be working all right.”
“We’ll see!”
Dennis didn’t actually try the chair until after dinner. As Mum and I cleared the table, he lit a cigar, poured himself a glass of wine and ambled into the living room. I heard the squeak of the cushions as he sat down. Then came the faint tish-tish-tish of the music being played through the headphones. A moment later, the chair—and much of the house—began to vibrate.
“Well, that seems to be all right,” my mum said.
“Let me make you a coffee,” I said. Mum was looking exhausted.
“Thank you, Lucy. That would be nice.”
How long did it take for everything to go wrong? I can’t tell you. Even now I find it hard to remember exactly what happened. Maybe I don’t want to. My therapist told me that sometimes, without even trying, we block out things too horrible to recall. Not that I’m seeing a therapist anymore. But she might have been right.
”Helen!” It was Dennis calling my mum. But already there was something in his voice. He didn’t just want another glass of wine or an ashtray for his cigar. It wasn’t just that he’d forgotten his reading glasses. Something had gone wrong.
My mum put down the pan she’d been drying.
“Helen!” His voice was louder, more high-pitched. And there was something else. The sound of the chair had intensified. The walls of the kitchen were vibrating more violently. A plate trembled its way to the edge of the counter, fell to the floor and smashed.
Together, we ran into the living room.
At first, it looked as if Dennis was clutching the massage chair with all his strength, but at once we saw that he was actually trying to escape from it. But he couldn’t. The wrist and ankle pads that were meant to hold him gently in position had overinflated, effectively pinning him down. His fingers were writhing but he couldn’t release his arms. At the same time, his entire body was convulsing as it was pummeled by pistons and rollers that were hopelessly out of control. They were battering him! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was as if the massage chair had become an electric chair in an American jail and we were witnessing a horribly botched-up execution.
“Let me . . . aaaaagh!” Dennis screamed, but we could barely hear him. The headphones were still sitting lopsidedly on his head, but the volume control must have broken because we could actually hear the bass and the drumbeat filling the room, impossibly loud. TISH-TISH-TISH. What it must have been like for Dennis with the speakers clamped over his ears was impossible to imagine—and I didn’t need to imagine it, because a second later one of his eyes exploded like a wet balloon.
My mum screamed, then ran forward and snatched up the remote control. Dennis had dropped it on the carpet. I saw her thumb stab down on the stop button, again and again. But the chair didn’t stop. It hadn’t even begun. Dennis was jerking about like a mad thing, his wrists and ankles still pinned down and his chest and thighs heaving. Blood was pouring out of his nose. His fingers were writhing. And he was still screaming, the words incoherent now. The chair was stretching his face in every direction so that I hardly recognized him.
I had to do something. But what? I was terrified. I didn’t want to go near the massage chair. But I couldn’t just stand there and let it kill him. Suddenly I had an idea. I ran over to the wall and ripped out the plug.
The massage chair picked up speed.
How could that be? Did it have
a secondary power source? Or had it somehow stored up enough energy to continue its hideous destruction? The twenty-six-point shiatsu rollers underneath Dennis’s legs surged forward and I heard his bones break. All of them. They were unable to withstand the pressure. Then it was his ribs, snapping one at a time as the tri-point hydraulic system slammed into him again and again.
“Unplug it!” Mum screamed at me.
“I have!” I screamed back.
It was already too late for Dennis. I’m not even sure he was still conscious. The massage chair was shuddering and shaking as if it were trying to leave the room, and he was being thrown from side to side with all sorts of disgusting fluids splattering across the furniture. And then, finally, it had to happen. The quadruple rollers behind his head, the ones that promised the best spine massage ever, locked together with ferocious strength. Dennis’s neck broke with a snapping sound like a branch of a tree. The machine stopped.
Silence filled the room.
Gently, the air bags deflated, allowing Dennis to slump forward so that now he looked asleep . . . if you could ignore his twisted frame and all the blood oozing out of him. The music had stopped. Smoke was trickling out of his ears. The chair itself looked worn-out, ready for the scrap heap. Somewhere inside it a final spring snapped with a faint twang.
I thought my mum would be in hysterics, but she was surprisingly calm.
“Lucy,” she said. “Leave the room.”
“Yes, Mum.”
“We’ll call an ambulance from the kitchen.”
“Yes, Mum.”
“And the police.”
There’s not very much more to tell.
The police investigated, of course. They were particularly keen to speak to the mechanic, the man who had supposedly fixed the massage chair. It was still unclear how the machinery could have malfunctioned in quite such a remarkable way. The chair was taken apart by forensic scientists. The software and electronics were minutely examined. But no one was left any the wiser.
And the mechanic had disappeared. There was still the number in the telephone book, but when the police tried it, they got no reply. It wasn’t that the number had been disconnected. According to the telephone company, it had never existed in the first place, and for a short while the finger of suspicion pointed at my mum. Could she have deliberately sabotaged the massage chair to murder Dennis? Even the police had to admit the idea was ridiculous. She had no engineering knowledge. And as far as the outside world was concerned, she had no reason to want to kill her husband.