Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 15.3

One night I woke up from a nightmare. I don't remember what it was about, except that I was somewhere dark and cold and I was suffocating. I twisted out from under Sophie's arms and got out of bed. She murmured something and rolled over.

I looked over at my alarm clock on the bedside table. Sophie didn't like the alarm clock, and she'd even asked me to throw it out a couple of times. I think she found it creepy. Fair enough: why would someone keep a broken alarm clock? Pretty retarded when you think about it. I picked it up and looked at it. It occurred to me that Sophie was right – hanging onto it was stupid. It was time to throw it away. And there was only one place to throw things away in Ambrose. The rubbish chute.

I passed Fred's bedroom on the way to the kitchen. His door was half-open. I stopped outside it. I couldn't see him from where I stood – just the end of his bed and the shadows the lamp on his bedside table cast across the room. Fred always slept with the light on.

I went inside. He was twisted up in his bed sheet, his face slack with sleep. I sat down backwards on the wooden chair I'd made for him last year from 300 Projects for the Modern Handyman and hoped it wouldn't collapse under me. I crossed my arms on the backrest and watched him sleep for a while. I had changed my mind about throwing the alarm clock away. I went to put the clock on the shelf above Fred, but then it made a sound, like a bell ringing far away over the hills.

"Whassat?" he said. His voice was thick with sleep and his eyelids were heavy. His voice startled me, and for a moment I couldn't say anything.

"Is it time to get up?" he said.

"No, go back to sleep Freddie-babe."

"That's your watch," he said. Fred called every clock a "watch".

I nodded and handed it to him. He sat up to examine it. He traced a finger over its face. "It's broken."

"Yeh."

He held it up to his ear. "It doesn't work."

"It never did."

He didn't seem disappointed by this. "Did you have it a long way?" he said.

"Yeh, a real long way. But it's yours now. Take good care of it."

"Okay," he said, and reached up to put it on the shelf above his bed. "I had a dream Dad," he said.

"Just now?"

"Ahuh. I dreamed about the Ape." He didn't call it The Yape anymore. "Do you think about him?"

"Sometimes."

"Is Mum going to make a baby soon?"

It was hard to keep up with his conversations.

"No," I said.

"Why?"

"Because she's got you."

"I'm not a baby."

"Of course you're not."

"Did she make me?"

"No."

"Did you make me?" He seemed to understand that it took two people to make a baby. Had he realised that our closed bedroom door had something to do with the making of babies? Perhaps he'd heard sounds in the night.

"No," I said.

"Who made me then?"

"I don't know."

"Was it Alice?" The headstone in the tall grass near his garden had always fascinated him.

"I don't think so," I said. By my reckoning Alice had died long before Fred arrived on the scene.

"Oh," he said. And as far as Fred was concerned that was case closed.

"Give me a kiss," I said.

"Night Dad."

"Night."