Ken Foxe                                                                                           

Whistling in the Dark

A man I don’t know broke into my house last night. He took my handgun from a safe using an eight-digit combination that only I knew. Then, standing on the Afghan rug in my living room, he shot himself in the side of his head. In the inside pocket of his Paul Smith suit, there was a love letter to him – in what certainly looked like my handwriting. How could I write to a man I did not know? How could I love a man who I had never set eyes upon?

My wife and twin children were in Galway with their grandparents. That is what might be called a small mercy even though all it offered was solitude in which to panic. I had seen dead bodies before, but serene corpses, surrounded by family and friends in funeral homes and master bedrooms. Not with a hole above their ear, their blood already drying into the wool of an antique woven carpet.

There is an instinct that tells us to flee when confronted with human fatality. But it was another one that took hold of me – one that left me standing there, eyes blinking, feet anchored like the roots of a swaying tree. Even as my body seemed suspended, my mind scampered but could not escape the fact that I knew why this was happening.

I broke from immobility at last, pulling down the blinds of the bay window at the front of my semi-detached house so that light could only creep in around the edges.

‘Hold yourself together Tommy,’ I whispered. ‘Get yourself together.’

But it was hard because I never had a dead body in my living room before. I asked myself what a calm person would do and commanded myself to sit down. Flopping into the cushions of our old Chesterfield couch, I felt like I was falling. I pushed myself back up, so that I perched on the sofa’s edge and worried I might tumble forward instead.

The corpse lay, head tilted towards me, eyes so still they seemed synthetic. He was brown-skinned with a goatee beard, a few days overgrown. I thought perhaps he was from North Africa or the Middle East but how could I know for sure? As I looked at him, I noticed that beneath his tailored jacket, he was wearing a cheap blue shirt, which had a fraying collar. His shoes, too, were scuffed beneath the dark blue trousers, soles worn bare.

‘Keep composed,’ I said.

I got down on my knees so that I could examine him. As I got closer, there was a distinct smell of body odour like he hadn’t washed, or been allowed to wash, recently. There was a faint marking around his neck, like something had been looped around it. I leaned over his face, so close I could have kissed him. It was uncanny to be so near to someone and not feel their warmth or hear their breath.

Even though I was on all fours, I was careful not to touch him, as if a stray hair or flake of skin would incriminate me any more than having a cadaver lying unexplained on my rug. It was then that I noticed the envelope in his pocket, a corner of it jutting out from beneath his lapel. Using the tips of my fingernails, I removed it without touching the fabric. My name ‘Thomas McMenamin’ was written all in capitals in black marker on the front.

“Dear Khaled,” it said, its distinctive ‘a’ like that of a typewriter and just as I would handwrite it. “We can see each other no more. I will always love you, but I cannot bear to live without my children. I wish that it were different, but I know you will find somebody else. My life, it has been, and will remain, a lie. I have at last made peace with that. I wish you every happiness and you must know that I will never forget you, and how you made me feel. Yours, Tommy.”

This thing I know I did not write, but the ink on the page tells another story. It is written in print just like my handwriting. In school, they taught me how to join the letters, but I could never stand how ugly it looked. I reverted to the chirography of my early childhood.

As I read the letter, I could see each slant, the pen-pressure, letter-spacing, and strokes, all correct in every way. It was perfect; the work, it seemed, of a master forger. Perhaps an expert could prove it was not mine, but I couldn’t see how. Beneath three lovelorn X marks and an illustrated cleaved heart was the date – the 17th of November. I knew what that meant.

That thought was interrupted as the camera doorbell app began to beep on my phone. If it was not a Sunday morning, I would have assumed it was the postman. I tried to think if we were expecting any other callers. I opened it up on the screen and could see on the video stream that it was two uniformed police, the collars of their fluorescent garda jackets pushed up to protect them from the heavy rain that was falling.

I thought if I ignored them, they might just go away. The bell chimed on my mobile phone again and I wondered if it was loud enough for them to hear. Then, the sound of the door knocker thumping, tchh-tchh, against the brass strike plate three times. They knew I was there; there was no point pretending otherwise.

“What have you done?” I murmured, remembering that November evening and the moment I chose to download those files to a USB key. I had taken every care; the journalist had a ‘cybersecurity expert’ to guide me. He told me each step I should take to ensure it would not be traced. ‘A near zero risk,’ they insisted. The information had not even been made public, yet the Department of Integration had already found out.

I undid the mortice lock of our front door, opened the latch and eased it back towards me. I was half-expecting it to come crashing in, or for a heavy duty-boot to fall upon the travertine hallway floor.

“Very sorry to disturb you Sir,” one of the gardaí said, his voice cordial but with a hint of devilment.

“What’s the trouble?” I asked.

His female colleague answered: “We’ve had a report of a disturbance. Right here in this property.”

“Have you?” I said, and it surprised me how calm my tone was.

“Yessir,” the male garda said. “Non-national. From an illegal encampment no doubt.”

“It’s been quiet here all morning.”

“Mr McMenamin? Isn’t it?” the female officer asked. “Are you alone in the house?”

“My wife and kids are gone for the weekend. It’s only me here.”

“Well, you take care Sir,” the male garda said. “Keep these open,” he said, theatrically pulling the skin of his cheeks and forehead with his thumb and fingers so that I could see the patchwork of veins in his eyeballs. “These illegal aliens; you could find them creeping and lurking anywhere these days.”

He gave a broad smile before whispering something to his partner. They turned and walked back down the gravel driveway towards their patrol car, kicking gravel as they went. I closed the front door as softly as my anxiety would allow. And on the cold limestone tiles, I sat down and began to weep.

I took out my iPhone and thought of calling my wife, Edel. I so needed her reassurance, to hear my two children Aoibhe and Matthew, how the sound of their voices could soothe like the first warming sunlight of spring. But Edel would know something was wrong; I had never been much good at hiding things from her.

Sitting cross-legged and holding the mobile in front of me, I instead opened the ‘secure’ messaging app I first used to contact the journalist Fitzhenry. What was I thinking? His account was ‘inactive’ now; it hadn’t been the last time I looked. This reporter had a good reputation, once went to jail for six days rather than reveal a source. I was finding it hard not to blame him even as I knew the fault was mine alone.

When I dragged myself from the ground, I pulled over the door of the living room, as if that might somehow make the corpse disappear. I had this transient fantasy that ‘Khaled’, if that was his name, might yet wake up. That he would come strolling into my kitchen wondering where he was. Instead, the imperfect silence of the house dangled like a noose.

Two wood pigeons grazed in the grass beneath the sycamore tree in our back garden. How often had I seen those two birds and paid no heed? I began to take it all in, the colonies of buttercups and daisies, a female blackbird sitting on the wood fence chit-chatting with a hidden companion, the ivy growing over the shed window. My immediate future was laid out in cinderblock and concrete.

At the front of the house, I heard a siren. We all grow accustomed to ambulances and fire engines whizzing past us and their passing lamentations. It was however peculiar that this sound remained stationary. I would not dare open the front door and went back into the living room. With the body on the rug behind me, I tried to peek around the narrow edge of the blinds.

There was another squad car idling across the way, its blue light flickering and siren shrieking. They must have seen me because the driver began to rev the engine then sped away so that plumes of smoke rose from burning rubber. The curtain of a neighbour’s house twitched, but there was no chance of help or friendly callers coming. Everybody knew the New-Conservative police were apt to do strange things these days; but people kept their distance for fear those strange things might happen to them.

‘Khaled’ lay stiffening. The colour of his skin was not happenstance. Heat along the tropics was no longer just intolerable but often unsurvivable. So many people were coming to Ireland on airplanes, dinghies, and in the back of freight trucks. We had agreed to take our share but reneged on those promises. The application forms of the asylum seekers would still smudge your hands even as the hopeful refugees were being corralled, hooded, and flown to West Africa. The Department of Integration called it PEER, the Programme of Expediency for Enforced Removals. What had possessed me? To blow the whistle? With all I had to lose in this New Era of Nativism?

There is a movie mythos moment where the soldier steps on a landmine and hears the click. Another move and he will become steaks of meat and shattered bone. Thoughts scurried through my mind of deep freezers, bath-tub dismemberments, drums of acid, or a body rolled cigar-like in an Afghan rug. Was there a friend I could call upon who would drive with me to the Wicklow Mountains with two shovels and a wrapped cadaver in the boot? Just as quickly, those thoughts would scuttle off like the hopeless delusions they were.

Amid the unyielding panic, there was a resignation too. I had been ‘caught’. My next home would be Mountjoy or the prison camp up at Thornton Hall. I won’t pretend I didn’t think of the sleeping tablets in the medicine cabinet. How many were there left, enough that I might never wake up? But then, my thoughts would twirl back, to the precious voices of Aoibhe and Matthew – that I might one day hear them again.

The knocker hammered three times. I approached the front door, wondering if this time they were coming with handcuffs or cable ties, a burlap sack for my head. As I pulled it open, I saw a man, head covered, striding back down the driveway away from me. I felt a sharp pinch in my neck then, like a vaccination roughly administered. My hand rose instinctively, and I cannot say for certain what happened next.

It was three, perhaps four, hours later. My sense of time and self was fractured that day and has never been recast. I awoke, shivering, unsure of where I was. The ache in my head was like every hangover I ever had stirred in a cauldron and served in a single bowl. It took me a minute to get my bearings as my eyes slowly began to refocus. The cornices in the ceiling, the glass chandelier, the Chesterfield sofa, the wool raw on my skin – the floor of my own living room.

‘Khaled’ was gone, and I lay naked on the ground in his place. My clothes were neatly folded and had been placed on the couch as if by a chambermaid. There was something around my neck, a shoelace, and as I began to pull at it, I realised there was a plastic whistle attached. It was odd to feel so exposed in my own home, and as I grabbed my clothes, a photograph fluttered to the floor. It was me, my wife and children. A short sentence scrawled across it: “Be careful of the company you keep.”

Even fully dressed, I could not shake the cold, so I made myself a steaming mug of chicken soup and lit a fire. I dangled the family photo above the flames, dropped it, and watched the paper disappear. I was still sitting on the couch, a blanket wrapped around me, when I heard the door knock again. This time, it was gentler. Next, soft familiar voices.

“Daddy, daddy,” I could hear. “Let us in.”

I went to the front door. The kids hugged me on the leg and darted towards the kitchen to root out snacks and turn on the TV.

My wife Edel came walking from the car carrying two weekend bags and the children’s coats over her arms. I kissed her as she walked down the hallway.

“A fire?” she said. “You never light a fire.”

“Thought it would be nice for you to come home to.”

“Had you a nice relaxing weekend without the kids around to torment you?” she said, smiling.

“Very nice,” I replied.

END

Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He is the author of two non-fiction books based on his journalism and a member of the Horror Writers Association. You can find him on Instagram (@kenfoxe) and Twitter/X (@kenfoxe). www.kenfoxe.com/short-stories/