Jay, Lizzie and the Tale of the Stairs
By G J Lee
Copyright 2011 G J Lee
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Chapter 1
There's Something Under My Bed
With a clatter of knives and forks my Dad tossed his cutlery onto his empty dinner plate. Then he folded his arms, leant back and stared at me.
“What the hell do you mean ‘there’s something under my bed?”
I didn’t answer straight away. The words just wouldn’t come. While Dad waited he impatiently uncrossed then re-crossed his arms, somehow managing to tip up his plate in the process, his knife and fork skittering across the table. With a grunt Dad shoved everything aside. Somewhere in the kitchen a clock ticked and outside the bin men were shouting to one another.
“On Tuesday night," I told him sheepishly, “I got up for a glass of milk.”
Dad was unimpressed. He shrugged, looked at me blankly. I had to get on with it.
“Well, I got up because something frightened me.”
I could see Dad wasn't impressed. “Frightened you?”
“Yes. It really did.”
“Now tell me, Jay Webber,” he asked me quietly, “what could possibly frighten a young adult at three in the morning?”
Dad was being sarcastic. I had to get to the point. I had to tell him the truth.
“Well…” I was a little embarrassed, “…it’s been going on now for weeks, but on Tuesday night, it was the only time…you know…the only time it really frightened me.”
“I understand that, but what, exactly, is it that’s frightening?”
I picked some rice crispies off of the table-top and placed them back into my cereal bowl. “Well, I’ve started hearing people shouting.”
“Shouting?”
“Yes.”
“But from underneath your bed.”
“Yes.”
“Mmmm.”
“There are!” I insisted. I had to try harder to convince Dad. I was losing him. “It’s been going on for a while now, lots of people shouting lots of things. It’s all mixed up and not very pleasant and, like I said, these voices are coming from underneath my bed, but it wasn’t that bad because they seemed far away. But then, on Tuesday night, I was just lying there and listening to these voices, when suddenly…” I looked at Dad. He had his arms folded again and was frowning. But he was still listening so I carried on. “Suddenly they got really close and then this one voice…one voice…seemed right beside me, you know, up close, and it whispered…it whispered…” I stared down at the cereal bowl in front of me with its handful of remaining rice crispies. Isn’t it funny how the snap, crackle and pop eventually stops. But I was avoiding telling him again. I had to get it done. Now! “It whispered…help me.”
There was a long silence. I needed Dad to say something.
“Is that all it said?”
“Well, yes.”
Then, with a scrape of his chair, Dad got up and turned to look out the kitchen window. It took him a while to answer. When he did he kept his eyes firmly on our back garden.
“Jay, I’ll go and take a look. OK?”
“Now?”
“In a minute, Jay. Just give me a second.”
Something told me that Dad needed a bit of space.
“I’ll just go and watch some telly, Dad, OK?
“Yes. Fine. I’ll call you when I need you.”
“OK.”
Chapter 2
“I’ll go and check!”
We seem to forget how important stairs are. I mean, most buildings have at least one and they can lead, well, just about anywhere. Soon we were stood looking up at our own set of stairs. And Dad had brought a bread knife.
“You’ve gotta be prepared,” he said with a smile. I just thought he was being sarcastic again. He must have been because he left it on the bottom of the stairs when he realised there was an unopened letter on the Welcome mat just inside the front door. I waited for Dad to toss the letter onto the hall table then I let him start climbing the stairs. I remember thinking how odd it was that I’d been playing and messing about in my bedroom like any normal Saturday morning. Until I told my Dad about the voices and noises, that is. Now my bedroom and the bed in it had become a monster’s lair and I was scared. What would we find when we moved the bed? I know there was stuff under there, like my old transformers, socks and PC games, but what would we find when we moved all that? Dad didn’t seem bothered though. He pushed open my bedroom door and made a comment on the state of it.
“Look at the state of it,” he said and kicked a cushion that was lying quietly, minding its own business, on the floor. A cushion that was meant to be on the swivel chair by my desk. It was a bean-type thing and it whispered through the air and shushed against my bookcase, a bookcase that didn’t have any books on it, just some comics, football magazines and more PC games.
Dad stood over my bed and put his hands on his hips. “When did we last change this bed?
I shrugged. “Can’t remember.”
“Well, we’d better do it soon or it’ll eat you a…” Dad stopped and looked at me. He was smiling from one corner of his mouth like he knew he had said the wrong thing.
“Alive?” I filled-in for him.
“Well, who knows.” He reached under the bed, grabbed its metal frame and pulled. The bed was heavy and the green carpet didn’t help. So I grabbed the frame too and helped Dad pull the bed away from the wall towards the opposite wall. The bed left a trail of odds and ends. Things stuffed under there long forgotten. I knew that Dad was going to have a go at me.
“Look at it, Jay,” he whined, “it’s a tip under there. That’s probably what the noise is. There’s people trying to get out. Where is Kyle anyway?” Dad pretended to look around. “I haven’t seen him lately.”
Kyle is my best friend.
“Shut up, Dad!”
We made sure there was enough room to move around then Dad asked me to clear all the stuff off of the floor and put it on the bed. Then he went to fetch one of the old boxes from the garage. I picked up two wheels joined by an axel from an old skateboard I used to have and placed them on my bed with other stuff. Then I stopped. I picked them up again, studied them closely. Once they were red but because they had been used a lot they had become grey from concrete and tarmac. There were tiny little stones in the plastic. As I turned them in my hands the wheels clinked. One of them span smoothly.
It was then I thought of Mum and my eighth birthday. My birthday’s in August so it was the summer holidays. It was raining. I remember not sleeping very well and being awake long before Dad came in to wake me up. He was frying some bacon and the smell burst in when Dad opened the door.
“Happy birthday, Jay! C’mon, I’m cooking some bacon.”
I ran out to the kitchen still in my blue patterned piranhas (pyjamas – Dad calls them piranhas). The word 'presents' must have been written all over my face because Dad, holding the pan with the frying bacon, nodded towards the front room. I doubled back pretty smartly and shot into our lounge.
And there, on the mat in front of the fireplace, were three parcels. One was wrapped in last year’s leftover Christmas paper. The other two were blue. One had a skateboard inside. I could tell.
I poked and prodded at the wrapping paper that snapped and crackled back. It took Mum and Dad ages to get themselves organised and get to the front room. When they eventually arrived I had a quick slurp of tea and then tore into my presents. I had another new PC game, a big wooden chess set…and a skateboard! The skateboard was black with cool words on it and it had the red wheels that I’d been talking about. I got up excitedly and
was about to climb aboard but Dad said I’d ‘ruin the carpet’ and ‘get outside’. But when I looked I realised that the rain was worse. I remembered that I couldn’t use my skateboard until tea-time, when bits of sunshine reflected off the wet pavements like a huge torch. I didn’t want to get my new skateboard too wet and dirty so I got on it outside our front door. I flapped my arms about to try and keep my balance and I quickly realised that skateboarding isn’t easy. But I’d had a go and was pleased with going up our pavement a short distance, then back again. After a few trips I wiped the skateboard down with the sleeve of my jumper and took it carefully up to my room. I leant it beside my wardrobe, where it would live and where I could see it and keep an eye on it.
Brilliant. At last I had a skateboard. I would be so cool at school.
That was a good memory.
My Mum’s in St Mary’s hospital. She’s not well.
I miss my Mum.
Then Dad came back with the box and began stuffing things in it and didn’t seem bothered that there wasn’t anything horrible under the bed. At one point I was sure I heard a distant crackle and a hiss like a hidden snake. But I couldn’t be sure.
When we finished I looked at the bit of green carpet that had recently been under my bed. It was brighter and less worn than the carpet elsewhere in my bedroom. But I was disappointed. There would be no adventures with monsters this Saturday morning.
Dad came and stood beside me. “That carpet needs a good hoover. I’ll change your sheets while I’m at it.” Then he lifted the box from my bed and squeezed,’ oohing’ and ‘aahing’, out of my bedroom door and I was left alone with the new patch of green carpet thinking of Mum. I thought of how pretty she is, how she’s got really long brown hair that always smells sweet and dark eyes that Dad says turn to cats’ eyes whenever she's angry. My Mum is very slim despite having had a big fat baby. I think they mean me. Dad always says to people that I was ‘nine pound odd, which is cheap for a baby.” Yeah, Mum is pretty. I remember when they used to talk about the evening they met. Mum always says Dad was lucky to have met her but Dad always replies that his luck ran out of the pub door and came back in as Mum.
Later Dad took me for burger and chips and on the way back he said he’d book a doctor’s appointment for me. I said I was fine but he insisted. He said that I might be dreaming the voices because of Mum and that I might need some tablets. That made me unhappy. I know that I didn’t imagine the noises and voices. They were real. Still, I said that I’d go. Just to make Dad happy.