Devil's Workshop

Day’s wife, Claire, was under the mistaken impression that she hadn’t been sleeping lately. In fact, she slept fitfully in short bursts that she later couldn’t remember. She tossed and turned and snored and flung her limbs at him, trying to arrange herself comfortably around the mass of her belly. Day often snuck out of bed and went to the parlor, poured himself a brandy, and read until he fell asleep in his big leather chair. Tonight, the moon had beckoned. He had put on his trousers and slipped quietly out of the house, pulling his jacket on over his nightshirt.

His eyes felt bruised and gummy, improperly fitted into their sockets. He blinked, trying to clear them and bring the path into focus, but a soft fog hovered low above the canal. The night seemed filmy and immaterial. He trudged along, sniffing the wet air, passing slowly beneath bridges and low-hanging branches, heavy with dripping leaves, and watched as a long narrow houseboat passed him, unmoored and rudderless, drifting away in the opposite direction, until it disappeared around a bend.

He floated along beside the water and thought about his wife, thrashing about in their bed, generating heat. He felt powerless to help Claire or even to make her more comfortable. She was carrying all the weight of the pregnancy by herself. His helplessness made him anxious, made him want to run. At least as far as the towpath. A brief escape. Alone in the wee hours with the dark scent of canal water in his nose, he felt maybe a bit more free, a little less vulnerable.

He stopped and squinted up at the wall beside him, reached out and brushed his fingers against the cool black stones. Here beside the canal at two o’clock in the morning, with nothing to distract him from the inevitable, he saw that he had no control over his future, no control over Claire’s life or the life of their coming child.

He looked away from the wall at the towpath ahead. A few yards ahead, he could see the bars of a gate gleaming faintly in the moonlight. There were no horses out this late to pull the boats through the water, so someone had closed the gates. He would have to turn back.

He stared at the tops of his slippers, watched them twist slowly around under him, and watched them begin the march along the path in the direction he had come, back up the steps, back to the road.

He paid no attention to the footpaths on either side of him and instead wandered up the middle of Regent’s Park Road, thinking about the baby. That new Day on its way.

He stopped walking and took the slipper off his left foot, fished out a rock, and threw it as far as he could. He watched it disappear in the early-morning mist. He leaned against the trunk of a tree beside the path, steadying himself while he put his slipper back on, and looked up at the moon caught in the branches above. The tree had been there before Day was born and would no doubt be there long after he died. Black vines crept up the sides of it and tiny sprouts nudged through the bark, out into the night air. He wondered whether they would grow to be stout branches and nourish the tree. Or perhaps they were only offshoots of the vine, burrowing under and through the tree’s bark, eventually choking it to death.

He balled up his fist and punched the tree trunk. Immediately, he regretted having done it. His knuckles hurt, and when he held his hand up and moved it in the moonlight he saw blood. He turned and rested his back against the unharmed tree and sank down along it to the ground, sat there. He bit his lip and plucked a blade of grass from the dirt between his legs, reached up and stabbed the moon with its tapered end.

Nine months had given him too long to think about things. His work had helped with that. He had buried himself in an overflowing caseload and ignored his nagging doubts about fatherhood. What did he know about being a father? His own father, Lord knows, had not set a wonderful example. Arthur Day had given Walter no clues as to how one went about the process of becoming a father. Everything-the entire life he saw ahead of him-was a complete mystery. If only things could remain unchanged. A happy life, a fulfilling job, a wonderful wife, and a tidy home.

But of course, it was too late for that.

He tore the blade of grass lengthwise. It separated easily along the grain, but it was useless now and dead. He dropped it back to the ground and felt sorry that he had killed it.

He may have slept then. He didn’t know. His mouth tasted terrible. The moon, at least, appeared to be in the same place in the sky, so if he had slept, it hadn’t been long. He pushed himself back up and patted the trunk of the tree and walked away from it, back up the lane.