The Fear

The earliest memory I have of The Fear was when I was 9 years old and watching The Sound of Music on TV. It was the scene where they all have dinner, and the Von Trapp children place a pinecone on Maria’s chair, and she goes to sit down on it and then shrieks and jumps up, and there’s a shot of the pinecone, a dark and sinister object, full of openings and edges, idling on the chair, just waiting to hurt Maria.

That was how The Fear started, because after that I became completely terrified of pinecones. I loathed their shape, their smell, their texture as you ran your finger along their spines. Just seeing one of them made me want to die. It made me want to die and be cremated, and for my ashes to be scattered, perhaps in a desert somewhere. A place far away from any forests, any pinecones.

I grew up in a city, so there weren’t many trees around, and consequently very few pinecones. There were just concrete tower blocks, flickering underpasses, and canals that were sluggish with sewage and discarded hypodermic syringes. Even the playgrounds had no grass in them, they were just grey, cement squares with lines painted in them to indicate football fields and tennis courts. I was happy, because I felt safe from nature and the terrible pinecones that I knew resided there. But then when I was 13 years old the worst thing happened: my father announced that we were moving out of the city, to a village in the middle of a forest. I cried for weeks, inconsolably, from the moment our house was put up for sale to the moment I left my school for the last time. My parents thought I was sad because we were moving far away from my friends, but I didn’t care much about that at all, I was simply miserable because I knew that, in the forest, I’d be surrounded by pinecones. I was convinced that if I picked one up, or even so much as allowed one to touch my flesh in any way, a portal would open up in time, and I’d get dragged through it to some strange and frightening place, a place of endless pain and torment, a place like hell.

When we got there, it was even worse than I’d feared. Our house wasn’t even in the village at all, but about a mile from the main road, down a forest path that led through the trees. When I went to school I would run as fast as I could along that path, to avoid catching sight of anything that could be positively identified as a pinecone. I wore long sleeves and gloves and 120 denier tights under my school skirt, even in the height of summer, in case one should fall from overhead and glance off me on its way down to the floor. The thought of such a thing happening made me feel physically sick.

I didn’t have much of a social life, because most of the other teenagers’ idea of fun was to find a spot in the forest somewhere and sit around in a circle and smoke cigarettes and drink massive, 2-litre bottles of cheap cider, and maybe, if there were couples, they would go off among the trees and have sex. But I couldn’t do it, not knowing there were so many pinecones around, and that if I accidentally stepped on one then the world would end, the atmosphere would be replaced with poisonous gas, the tectonic plates would melt back into lava and we would all be killed. I used to just stay in my room and make the dolls’ houses, because it was about that time that I started making the dolls’ houses, or maybe my one friend Billy would come over and we would chat.

My parents were foolish, they thought Billy was my boyfriend, and they made me keep the door to my bedroom ajar whenever we were both in there together. But actually, Billy was gay, and all he ever talked about was gay sex. He would describe, in detail, the strange and varied things he had put into his anus: different types of vegetables; kitchen appliances; the carved handle of an antique walking stick his grandfather owned. He had myopia, and acne prone skin, and even though we were only teenagers his hair was already thin and brittle like spun sugar. But he thought every man he ever met fancied him, and he used to always say things like:

‘I know Mr Phelps wants to fuck me,’ – about our chemistry teacher – ‘I saw him touching the front of his lab coat the other day, rubbing himself, while he was watching me light a Bunsen burner. I mean, what a pervert.’

‘Pass me that dresser,’ I said, gesturing for it. I was completing a dolls’ house, packing all the furniture into its tiny, Dutch-style rooms. 

‘I bet he’d like to stick that Bunsen burner in me,’ said Billy, flicking his wisps of hair. He passed me the dresser.  ‘I bet he fantasises about it and wanks over it when he’s alone in the chemistry lab. Isn’t that disgusting? A Bunsen burner.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘What a weirdo.’

‘Do you think maybe, I should try to seduce him? It would be easy. He’s so old. I bet he hasn’t had sex in years. I bet he’s gagging for it.’

‘I don’t know. Yes?’

‘I think I’m going to do it. I think I’m going to seduce Mr Phelps.’

‘Alright then.’

Billy lay back on the bed. ‘Can I open the window?’ he said, touching the patches of sweat under his arms. ‘It’s boiling in here.’

‘No,’ I said. It was summer, and hot, but I didn’t like the idea of all the pinecones outside releasing tiny spores into the air, so they might float through the window and into my mouth while I slept. It made me feel nauseous and frightened. ‘It’s stuck anyway,’ I said. I busied myself with the dolls’ house, rearranged the bedrooms, assembled the pantry. There were tiny, tiny silver dishes with doll sized foods on them, apples and cakes and a pork chops. I wished I could live in that sweet, indoor world, a house within a house, like Russian dolls, protecting me from the pinecones outside and all the evil they exuded.

‘Stuck?’ said Billy. ‘I’ll fix it.’ He was still wearing his shoes, but stood up on the bed and reached for the window latch, leaving a brown streak of dirt on the duvet cover.

‘Billy, no,’ I said, getting up from my chair.

Billy’s hand closed around the window latch. He started to turn it; it was turning quite easily before my eyes. I thought I might defecate from fear. I screamed, and my mother came running.

‘What is it?’ she said, when she came into the room. She looked at Billy. Billy was still standing on the bed, looking at me with an alarmed expression. His hand remained on the window latch, but mercifully, it was closed. ‘What’s going on?’ said my mother.

‘Nothing,’ said Billy. ‘I was opening the window.’

‘Heather?’ said my mother, looking at me. 

My heart was beating very hard. I felt faint. ‘Nothing,’ I said. I’d never told her, or my father, about The Fear, about the pinecones. I was afraid that even speaking about it would cause some calamity – a tidal wave, perhaps, or a nuclear meltdown. It was totally off-limits.

‘Alright,’ said my mother, although she still sounded suspicious. She looked at Billy, at the dirty streak his shoe had left on the duvet. ‘Billy, come down from there,’ she said.

*

Soon after that, my parents sent me to see a child psychologist, a woman named Tina who carried a silver whistle on a chain around her throat. At the beginning of our meeting, she gestured to the whistle and said: ‘I want you to be comfortable in this room, Heather. You can tell me anything, there needn’t be any fear or boundaries. But if you attack me in any way, if you try to strangle me or gouge my eyes, then I will blow on this whistle – don’t think I won’t – and an armed security guard will come and restrain you.’

I nodded, and talked, and she listened and sipped on her herbal tea, only she didn’t call it herbal tea, she called it her tincture. ‘Let me just have a sip of my tincture,’ she kept saying, every time there was a pause in conversation. I didn’t mention The Fear. She never asked how I felt about pinecones. But she did ask why I liked the dolls’ houses so much, and I felt uncomfortable, and didn’t know what to say, so I made up an answer.

‘Because they’re miniature. Because they’re fun. Because they’re perfect,’ I said.

‘Mmhmm,’ said Tina. ‘Do you think your interest in perfection is a response to the ontological onslaught you face when confronted with the fundamentally chaotic nature of the universe and all of its many-faceted ambiguities?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think I just like them.’

‘As a quasi-fictive object, the dolls’ house may represent a certain inner psychological space,’ said Tina. ‘A place of play, certainly, but also of punishment. What fantasies are unleashed in this space, Heather? What boundaries are transgressed? Do you, for example, engage with the socio-political connotations of the doll as a female-coded artefact?’

‘I don’t play with dolls,’ I said. ‘I just like dolls’ houses.’

‘I see,’ said Tina. ‘So the house becomes, so to speak, a site of potentiality, a blank canvas onto which an infinite number of scenarios may be projected, if not directly performed? Is that it, Heather? You can tell me. Where’s my tincture? Oh, there it is.’

This went on for about an hour or so, and at the end of it, Tina made me sit in the waiting room outside her office while she talked to my parents. They were with each other in there for a long time. When my parents came out, they looked grave, and on the way home we stopped at a pharmacy and my mother got out of the car. When she returned, she handed me a box of pills.

‘Tina says you have to take one of these, twice a day,’ she said.

I took the box from her and rattled it. For the rest of the car ride, I considered my life, and what it would be like to be a “medicated” person. I thought of all the times I’d be able to leave an awkward situation with the words: “Sorry, it’s time for me to take my tablet”. It made me feel special, and serious. But when we got home, I read the information leaflet in the box and discovered there were a whole host of potential side effects to the drugs – rashes, night sweats, sudden and unexplained death. One of them was sleepwalking, and I didn’t want to risk wandering out into the forest while I was dreaming and potentially come into contact with a pinecone, so I took all the tablets out of their plastic blisters and flushed them down the toilet. Whenever it was time for me to take a pill, I ate a breath mint instead. Nobody ever noticed.

*

Summer passed; autumn came. It was always a very bad time for me, being, essentially, the pinecone season, and I couldn’t leave the house without catching sight of them, lying on the grass, or on the front step, spiky and predatory and weird. I was glad when school started, because it meant I could spend my days locked safely in a classroom, with my eyes focused strictly ahead, focusing on whatever the teacher was writing on the blackboard. They thought I was studious, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t like looking out of the window, because it made me think of pinecones. At lunchtime, Billy and I would hang out in a corner of the library where nobody ever went. We were unpopular, I suppose, and although I didn’t really mind, Billy was really bothered by it. He took a lot of pictures of us on his phone, sitting on the floor of the library, and then posted them to social media, hoping people would see and maybe mistake us for cool and like them. They didn’t. One day, I was waiting for him in that corner, looking at a book about dolls’ houses, when he came around the corner and sat down next to me.

‘Samantha’s having a party this weekend,’ he said, adjusting his glasses. ‘Her parents are away – she has the place to herself.’

‘So?’ I said. I turned the page of the book, and admired a photograph of a traditional Japanese-style dolls’ house, complete with sliding paper screen doors and straw mats on the floors.

‘We should go,’ said Billy. ‘It’s going to be massive. Everyone will be there; it’ll be weird if we’re not.’

‘Don’t you need an invitation to go to a party?’

Billy rolled his eyes. ‘Come on, Heather, we aren’t ten any more. People don’t give out invitations to these things. You just turn up, believe me.’

Samantha was the most popular girl in our year, which meant that she was one of the stupidest and meanest pupils in our cohort. ‘We don’t even talk to Samantha,’ I said. ‘She probably doesn’t even know who we are.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Billy. ‘It’ll look worse if we aren’t there. People will think we didn’t even know about the party. And what if something happens? What if there’s gossip? We’ll look so stupid on Monday if everybody else comes in already talking about it and we haven’t even heard. And I don’t want to look stupid. Do you want to look stupid?’

‘I suppose not,’ I said, closing the book. Actually, I didn’t really care about looking stupid, but it occurred to me that, if I just stayed in my room all the time and kept on making the dolls’ houses, my parents might start worrying again, and send me back to Tina, and then she might trick me into telling her about The Fear, about the pinecones. So I agreed to go to the party, and Billy was happy about that, and he became increasingly excited about it as we got closer to the weekend. He talked about it a lot, and not so much about gay sex, apart from one time to tell me he’d experimented with putting a string of rosary beads inside himself. ‘They were kind of awkward,’ he said, stoically, ‘And sure, they were a challenge. But I’m glad I tried it.’  When he came to pick me up on Saturday night, he was wearing very skinny jeans, and he’d parted his thinning hair in a severe line that ran along the left side of his head, so I could see the flaking, dandruffy skin of his scalp. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he’d blotted his acne with face powder in an effort to conceal the scars, but all it did was collect in the craters and mix with the pus to form a kind of paste. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

We walked along the forest path that led from my house to the main road. I was frightened that I might tread on a pinecone in the dark, and I made every step as cautiously as though I was about to put my foot down on a nail, but eventually we made it to the gate, and the velvety ribbon of the tarmac. There was an old bus shelter there that looked like a little chapel, and it reminded me a bit of the dolls’ houses, and we sat in it and waited. The night was cool – I was wearing my coat, but Billy was in a short-sleeved shirt that was too tight on him, and the skin on his upper arms was bumpy with gooseflesh.

‘Do I look good?’ he said, touching his powdered face.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It’s going to be amazing, Heather,’ he said, rubbing at his arms. ‘Everyone’s been talking about it. Do you think people will be taking photos? They will, won’t they? I should have brought a mirror. I’m so stupid. You know I shaved off all my bodily hair for this? I just want to feel comfortable.’

The bus came and we got on. It smelt of cigarettes and poo, and it was empty apart from a man eating a sandwich. We sat down at the back, and I looked at my face in the black glass of the window as we wound our way along the lanes, through the forest. Then I turned to Billy beside me. Even though it was cold, he had sweated, and the streaks of it left rivulets through the powder on his face. His breathing was shallow; I reached down and held his hand. I imagined we were travelling together through the vast emptiness of space, heading towards an unknown, alien world. I reached into my coat pocket and took out my breath mints. ‘Do you want one?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Billy, and he took a mint. Then he reached out and dinged the bell. The bus stopped; we got off.

I had never been to Samantha’s house before, but it was in an area much like any other around there – surrounded by forest, the tall trees looming up on every side, dark even against the night sky, which was deep blue and clear. The moonlight fell on a gravel path and we walked up it, and then turned a corner and there was the house, with the porch lit up and sounds of people inside, laughing, and the muffled drumming of pop music. For a minute, we both stood before the front door.  Then Billy plucked at the door knocker and let it fall against the wood with a tap. I saw, with horror, that it was shaped like a pinecone, and all at once I wanted to go home.

‘It doesn’t sound like anyone’s in,’ I said, but even as I said it, I knew it was ridiculous.

Billy turned and looked at me. ‘Heather,’ he said. ‘We belong here.’

We turned back to look at the pinecone knocker, and then, after a while, the door opened. Samantha stood before us – she was a tall, blonde girl, and she was wearing a lot of makeup and a pink top that showed her midriff. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Can I help?’

‘Hey Samantha,’ said Billy, as he stepped towards her. I wanted to grab him and pull him back from that pinecone door knocker. It seemed, to me, a portent of something dreadful. But Billy didn’t mind. ‘We’re here for the party.’

‘Party?’ said Samantha. She shifted in the doorframe, as if taken aback. ‘Um,’ she said. ‘Who are you, sorry?’

‘I’m Billy,’ said Billy. ‘We have History together? And this is Heather.’ He gestured to me with one hand.

‘Heather?’ said Samantha. She peered at me in the gloom. ‘Oh, right, new girl.’

At this point I’d been at the school for over two years, but some people, people like Samantha, still called me new girl, even to my face. ‘Hello Samantha,’ I said, and nothing else. I felt paralysed by fear over that pinecone door knocker, watching our exchange like a hideous goblin. The blood banged in my ears.

‘Okay,’ said Samantha. She made a diplomatic face. ‘Well, I’m sorry guys,’ she said. ‘But it’s guestlist only tonight.’

‘Guestlist?’ said Billy. Inside, I felt myself crumpling, crumpling. I wanted to die, and from the expression on Billy’s face it looked like he wanted to die as well, but he tried to hide it.

‘Yeah,’ said Samantha, leaning against the door frame. ‘Like, it’s for friends only. No randoms. Sorry.’

‘Right,’ said Billy. Samantha shrugged, and she went to close the door, but then a boy came up behind her, reached around under her arms and rested his hands on her boobs. His name was Dan, and even though he was short, and had braces on his teeth, he was good at P.E., and so he was popular like Samantha. I supposed, given how he rested his hands on her boobs, that he was actually her boyfriend. 

‘Who is it?’ said Dan.

‘Uh, nobody,’ said Samantha. ‘Billy and Heather?’

‘Lol, what the fuck,’ said Dan. ‘Were they even invited?’

‘No,’ said Samantha vehemently.

‘Who’s Heather? Let Heather in. There are too many guys here and not enough girls.’

‘Oh my god Dan, gross,’ said Samantha.

‘Lol,’ said Dan.

I grabbed Billy’s hand. I wanted to pull him with me, and for us to run away back down the gravel path, back into the empty night where we didn’t exist. But as I started pulling him, Samantha said my name. ‘You can come in,’ she said. She looked at Billy. ‘Sorry, not you Billy.’

I thought that Billy would want us both to leave, but he stayed where he was. ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ he said. ‘I’ve got somewhere to be anyway.’

Dan snorted. Billy turned to look at me. ‘See you, Heather,’ he said, cheerfully. He leaned in close, so only I could hear him. ‘It’s better that at least one of us goes in.’

‘No,’ I said, pulling his wrist. I didn’t want to go into that house with the pinecone door knocker; I knew that, whatever was happening inside, I would hate it. But Billy pulled my hand off his arm.

‘Just go in for a bit then,’ he said. ‘Half an hour, and I’ll wait here.’

I paused. I imagined, somewhere in the forest, a pine tree falling, crashing to the ground, and a million pinecones rolling everywhere in the undergrowth like grenades. ‘Half an hour?’

‘Yeah,’ said Billy.

‘Oh my god,’ said Samantha, ‘Are you coming in or what?’

I felt Billy’s touch leave me, and I sort of floated over to the door. I thought I was going to throw up, passing that door knocker. And then I saw Billy, out on the driveway, looking sad, and the door closed and I was in the house.

‘What a weirdo,’ said Samantha, showing me into the living room. The lights were all off in there apart from a lamp in the corner, and people were standing around and shouting to each other over the music. ‘There’s drinks on the table over there,’ Samantha said, nodding. She went off and joined some other people, and I went and stood in the corner.

I was comfortable there only because I kind of melted into the darkness. People ignored me; I was relieved about that. Dan took his t-shirt off and started dancing so everyone was watching, swinging his hips around with his hands behind his head. His underarms were furnished with a nauseatingly thick bush of armpit hair. I saw, in an instant, Dan as a middle-aged man, wandering about in a beer garden in summer in just a pair of shorts and flipflops, laughing too loud, purple faced and ashy kneed. It was only a matter of time.

I thought about leaving. I thought about Billy, outside, in the cold. I thought about that pinecone door knocker and the prison I was now trapped in. Dan was still dancing, and then he looked at me and started drawing his hands back and forth towards him, as though he was pulling on a rope. ‘Come and dance with me, Heather,’ he said.

Everyone turned to look at me. I shook my head.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Dan. Across the room, Samantha folded her arms across her chest. Someone pushed me towards Dan, who was writhing about before me, dancing, trying to be sexy (which he was not) or maybe comical (which he was also not). Up close, I could smell his breath – it smelt like crisps and beer. I thought I might gag. He grabbed hold of my wrists and made me dance with him, although all he did was move my arms about, because my feet were fixed rigidly to the floor. Samantha looked as though she wanted to stab me. My eyes rolled back in my head, and as they did, I caught sight of the ceiling rose, which was directly above us. Coils of briars unfurled around a central, floral motif, a kind of thistle, with leaves around it and, terrifyingly, six large plaster pinecones, arranged in a ring like circling vultures. 

At once, The Fear hit me. I thought I heard the voice of Satan. I thought I heard him call my name, and I felt his claws touching the back of my neck. I thought I heard, somewhere, a huge shelf of snow come loose from the side of a mountain and fall, as an avalanche, and bury a city in the valley below. I thought I heard planes everywhere tumbling out of the sky in huge balls of fire and smashing into the sea, killing everyone on board. I had visions of blood, and death; cities in dust, corpses piled up and burning. I had never known The Fear like that – as a thing that vaporises you, that makes you feel hopeless, as though it will never go away, so that you will live all the rest of your life, every second of it, in misery and distress. I heard myself screaming. Dan let go of my wrists in fright. I pushed him back, then ran out of the room and along the corridor to the front door. When I opened it, I saw that Billy was still out there, sitting on the front step. He stood up.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘Run, Billy,’ I shouted, as I went past him.

‘What?’ he said, and I heard him start to run behind me. I couldn’t explain it; I just knew I had to get away from that awful place. We crunched down the gravel path, but then, instead of following it back to the road, I ran off into the woods, with Billy still behind me. ‘Wait,’ I heard him say. ‘Heather, I’m tired. I can’t run in these jeans. My thighs are chafing.’

I kept going. In the forest, everything was quiet, there was just the sound of our panting as we ran. I tried not to think about the pinecones that probably lay in every direction, releasing their poisonous, menacing energy into the universe. It didn’t matter anyway. The Fear was already there, right in front of me, colossal, inescapable.

‘Heather, wait,’ said Billy. He grabbed at my coat, and I stopped. Both of us were out of breath. I went up to a tree and leant my forehead against it. The rough bark hurt my skin. The veins in my body pulsated with the beating of my heart. I was alive. Billy put his arms around me. Both of us stood like that for a minute. ‘It wasn’t fun then, the party?’ said Billy.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Fair enough,’ said Billy. We were silent again, for a long time. His arms were still around me, his head resting on my shoulder. I could hear the breath whistling in his nostrils as he inhaled. Then, after a while, he drew back. ‘I bet loads of guys come here to have sex,’ he said. ‘Closeted guys, gross old men with wives and kids. It’s that kind of spot. I bet there are used condoms all over the place – we just can’t see them because it’s nighttime.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, coming away from the tree. We started walking together through the woodland. I felt calmer, and our eyes had adjusted to the dark, so we could both see the black silhouette of the canopy overhead, and the moonlight falling in beams on the leaves and branches around us. Eventually, we came to a low fence. 

‘Look,’ said Billy, pointing. On the other side of the fence was a model village, a tourist thing, a tiny town made of cute, doll sized buildings, cottages and a church and a water mill by a fake, trickling river, with a café on the far side and a gift shop, although of course they were all shut up for the night. We climbed over the fence and walked around the village, two giants in a sleeping, miniature world. They seemed like babies, those little buildings, like young, although the forest around us was old, old. We were nothing to it.

At the centre of the village was a town square, a Christmas scene with market stalls positioned around a bonsai fir tree. It was decorated with little silver bells, strings of tinsel, and tiny, tiny, ceramic pinecones, painted in gold lustre, although, in the moonlight, they looked blue and glassy. Billy bent down and took one of the mini pinecones from the tree. ‘Here,’ he said, holding it out to me.

At first I was afraid, and then I reached out and took it. A wash of something came over me, and then passed. Billy took one of the silver bells for himself, straightened up, and rang it. He looked into my eyes. His face was unreadable then, although later, when he put the bell inside himself, I would understand completely. Somewhere in the forest, I heard the sound of a night bird, calling.