TWENTY-ONE

'It's not his fault,' someone said, and Rob Wallace had to agree.

Opening his eyes, he was surprised to find himself back in his and Julia's old flat, cluttered but familiar, the place they had always lived together. Perhaps he had dreamed Jackson Leaves? It certainly felt like it. Pounding walls and ghostly visions... not the sort of thing that happened in a real house. Houses were normally pretty reliable places: bricks and mortar, mortgages and electricity bills.

He was thirsty. Stepping into the little open-plan kitchen, he ran his fingers over the jumble of magnets and notes on the fridge door. These were the things of proper houses, he thought, reassuring and colourful, postcards from Spanish beaches, shopping lists filled with loaves of bread and bottles of milk. Julia had bought one of those random 'build-a-poem' magnet sets, a jumble of words that you shuffled around to make new verse. He read her last effort: 'Wander out into the sky / Ask your self the reason why / Clouds that love are full to burst / Open mouth and feel their thirst.' Rob smiled. It wasn't exactly Pam Ayres, but at least it rhymed. He pushed the words 'your' and 'self' closer together, trying to fix her grammar, but the gap remained obvious. He supposed it should be allowed.

He closed his eyes and shuffled the words around with his fingers, lining some up to form a random sentence. He opened his eyes and read what he had made: 'Burst your love feel the sky and thirst.' Very poetic. He closed his eyes again and started dragging other words in from the cool white page of the fridge door: 'Show her no tears / From a man who know / His fears are real / His death will show.' A lucky rhyme, but it was getting rather morbid...

He closed his eyes and shuffled them again. 'Show her a man who love death and tears / Burst the sky and know real fears.' No... he didn't like that game any more. The words kept making him feel as if there was a message in them, something he didn't want to know.

He opened the fridge, and looked for something cool to drink. There was a bottle of fizzy water, Julia's favourite. To him it tasted like pop with the fun taken out, but he was thirsty enough to drink anything, unscrewing the cap and drinking straight from the bottle. There was a bad smell in the fridge, something rotting. He had a poke around but couldn't find anything obviously mouldy, just a lot of different meats, damp and pink, perfectly fresh.

He closed the door and found himself feeling terribly lost in the middle of the kitchen. A ridiculous feeling in such a small space, but at that point he felt smaller. Felt, in fact, as small as one could be, stranded on the cheap black-and-white floor tiles as appliances towered over him – the jagged kettle, the sheer, silver austerity of the toaster, the towering black glass of the oven. He found his breath catch in his chest and reached for the radio, desperate to break the atmosphere with noise. He was momentarily certain that the cooking knives would eviscerate him for such a move, chop away his naughty fingers into little pink rings, but they stayed happily embedded in their wooden block, and the radio hissed into life as he turned the dial.

'Tie him up with that,' said an American voice.

'Tightly,' a woman added.

There was the screeching sound of heavy-duty tape being yanked from the roll.

Some sort of drama, perhaps? Or an advert? He wasn't sure what the sounds of a man being bound would entice him to buy. He tried changing the channel, but there was nothing else but static so he turned it back. He would have preferred music, but this was better than nothing.

'Julia's out of it,' the woman was saying. 'Someone will have to carry her.'

Where is Julia? Rob wondered, reminded of his wife by the characters in this strange programme – she always complained that Julia was such a common name, you heard it everywhere. He'd gone online to look up the name's origin; it was the feminine form of 'Julius' which meant 'man with downy beard'. He'd pulled her leg about that for weeks.

'OK!' the American on the radio shouted. 'Thanks to Alexander, we have a way out and all of you need to take it, now.'

'Oh, shut up, you big bully.' Rob muttered, turning off the radio.

The silence was still uncomfortable, so he made his way out of the kitchen and across their little lounge to the television. There had to be something cheerful and breezy on, something to take the edge off his stupid nerves. At first he could find nothing but static, ghost images, half-shapes and jagged lines. Then, flipping through the channels, he found a picture: people all sat in a roadside café, an old woman talking to a soldier – at least Rob assumed he was a soldier, he was wearing an old uniform, certainly, though clearly he wasn't on duty as his collar was open. At the table next to them, a woman was dripping water all over the table and floor. Ridiculous. Perhaps it was supposed to be a comedy?

The camera moved to a close-up of the old woman, and Rob banged the side of the television, trying to improve the reception. The poor signal made it look like there were things crawling under her skin.

'That's it, Rob,' the old woman said, making him dart back from the screen. 'Hit me.'

Rob stabbed at the remote control with his index finger, desperate to flush the woman from the screen.

'No,' she whispered. 'Not like that... like this!'

She swung her arm, and Rob felt the sting on his cheek as if he had been struck.

'How did you—?'

She hit him again, his cheek glowing hot with it.

The radio suddenly crackled back to life.

'He's completely out of it,' said the voice of the woman he had heard before in the advert about tape.

'I'm not...' he said. 'At least, I don't think I am...'

'You could have fooled us,' said the old woman on his television. 'Dead from the neck up... Isn't that what you are?'

He felt his cheeks turn cold and a pressure building in his sinuses.

'What are you...?' He ran to the bathroom, wanting to see his face in the mirror. It had lost its colour, turned the pale blue-grey of necrotic tissue. He rubbed it with his hands, and it felt thick and damp, like a verruca.

'Is that better?' the old woman asked from the next room. 'Is that what you like?'

Rob wanted to cry but knew that his dead tear ducts had no liquid to shed. He scratched at his cheek – wanting to feel something – and his nails filled with dead skin. He could just feel the touch of his fingers; perhaps his real face was still there, hidden underneath this useless hide? He began to peel, cautiously at first but then – as he realised it didn't hurt – in the biggest chunks he could get hold of. The sink filled with it, like cool, undercooked chicken meat, and soon there was nothing left for him to look at in the mirror but bone. There was no point in continuing to dig. There was nothing left of him.

He was lost.

'Rob?' Julia's voice, coming from the bedroom. 'Where are you, Rob?'

He made his way through to the poky room that was just wide enough to hold the double bed they had made their own. Julia lay on the rumpled duvet in her wedding dress. The gown had certainly known a happier day; now it was falling apart, shedding flakes of taffeta and lace like the peelings of sunburned skin.

'Is that you?' she asked, staring straight up at the ceiling.

'Yes... it's me,' Rob replied, touching the wet bone of his jaw and realising he must be beyond recognition. 'My face... something happened to it.'

'Something always does, doesn't it, Rob?' she chuckled. 'There's always one problem or another, one mistake you'll never make again... Until you do, of course, over and over and over... I don't know why I bother with you.'

'Please...' Rob was confused. Why was she being like this? 'Don't say that. I try so hard... I really want to make everything great... And I will, you wait and see, we'll make a real go of it in the new house...'

And suddenly he was uncertain again, did they even have a new house or was that the one he'd dreamed up? He hated to show his confusion but hated not knowing more.

'We do have a new house, don't we?' he asked her.

She made a scoffing noise in her throat. 'Not any more, you saw to that. So weak...'

'I am not!' Rob scared himself with the ferocity of his shout; he hadn't known it was coming. He had to be careful of his anger, that was something he did remember. It was too strong sometimes.

'You see,' said the voice of the old woman from the television next door, 'that's your problem, always reining in your strength. That's why you lost the house, because you gave in.'

No. Rob began to shiver. He wasn't to let his anger loose. Anger wasn't strength, anger was...

'Turning yourself in circles,' Julia laughed, 'tying yourself in knots, so pathetic... How I hate you...'

'Don't...' Rob felt the anger building.

'... hate you, hate you, hate you, hate you...'

'Please...' Rob's fingers were clenching, his jaw locking, muscles popping as they strained to be flexed.

'... hate you, hate you, hate you, hate you...'

'Pathetic man,' added the woman from the television. 'What are you for?'

'Shut up!' Rob shouted.

And woke up...