The House on Heartbreak Hill

At the top of Heartbreak Hill, there stands a haunted house. A cold wind whistles through the bars on the windows and rushes longingly into the warm summer night outside. A light flickers and thunder rumbles in the bedroom on the second floor, and a long forgotten man in the four poster bed cowers beneath a broken umbrella.

Under the bed, silent and still, Belinda counts sheep in her inanimate head, and she wishes away the days. After years on a shelf in a cold dull warehouse, she was finally released into the outside world and into the arms of inevitable disappointment.

In the bed, Sigmund Boyd lies with the redundant arms that once nervously held her for the first and last time. He couldn’t find the orgasm button, and she told him there wasn’t one. Imagine his surprise when, through stationary lips, she spoke for the first time. He wondered what else she could do, but all she had done for weeks was talk, talk, talk. Her chatter was, increasingly often, harsh and unforgiving - that’s what brought on the storms in the bedroom.

Their singular intimate encounter was accompanied by a death bell tolling deep in the pits of both of their stomachs. She didn’t have a very nice face, and her body was all wrong too - the feeling was mutual. It’s a shame she had to loose her virginity the way she did. He had closed his eyes, then he tried to stick his tongue in her mouth, and she responded with a retching sound. He caressed her tenderly, but her squeaking skin put them both off. He looked for an ear to nibble instead, but there were none, as he couldn’t afford the deluxe model. He filled his mind with images of ex-girlfriends and moulded them into one, desperate to consummate the union.

Then the ghosts floated into the lonely room and gathered around the bed, shining like beacons of despair. He knew each and every face, and none of them had aged a day. Beside them stood loyal companions with their noses in the air and smug glints in their eyes. He tried to not look, but he couldn’t block out the sound of their laughter, as they mocked the fool in the four poster bed, as he attempted to mount the squeaky inflatable woman.

He tried dressing her up and sitting her in various places around the house, in an attempt to get them more acquainted with each other. Sometimes they had breakfast together, sometimes it was lunch. He played her his favourite records and showed her the entire contents of his photo albums, but the ice refused to melt. She didn’t like his taste in music, and she told him his eating habits made her feel sick.

So, he put her under the bed, and that’s when the torment really began. She told him she’d like to drag him across the room and rub his nose in the agonising memories splattered over the bedroom walls. She begged him to send her away to a charity shop, to a recycling plant, to one of his slightly less creepy mates, to anywhere away from him.

Almost a year ago, he had locked all the doors and thrown the keys into the long grass outside. Perplexed delivery people, keen to not chat to the weirdo within, squeezed groceries through the bars once a month. The online supermarket and the Amazon pervert store were his only contact with the outside world, but each day he looked from his prison cell and watched an imaginary postman bring imaginary love letters up the hill to his closed and bolted door.

One day as he sat by his favourite window, a group of young women in skin-tight football kits jogged up the hill and lined up in front of the house. They took off their tops and preceded to perform an erotic workout and Sigmund, pressing his face up to the bars, preceded to dribble onto the tarmac below. Then all at once, they turned and were gone, and he was left alone with Belinda and her noisy thighs.

Under the bed, she whinges and drives him to distraction.

‘When are you going to do that fucking washing? It stinks…You may be able to actually get a girlfriend if you cleaned your act up… All those ghosts did the right thing getting away from you…Can’t you just burn me or something ? I can’t take much more’…

Boyd boils inside, but he doesn’t make a sound.

’If you come near me with that foul little member again you’ll really see how nasty I can be’, she continued.

Sigmund snaps and leans over the side of the bed, grabs her by the nearest tit and pulls her onto the bed.

‘Oh no, not again’, she groans, then in a squeaky American accent she hollers, ‘It’s time for your cold shower honey’.

She says the word “honey” with more disgust than the rest of the sentence, and he is sure she pulls a face. The thought of “doing it” with her disgusts him. He already has enough bad memories from their earlier brief encounter in the sack. He puts his hands around her throat, and she obliges with a choking sound, then he reaches down to the hole between her buttocks and pulls out the plug.

“Prrrrrrrrr”

She releases a rubbery smell into the air and becomes as flat as the day she was manufactured. He grabs her by the feet and throws her across the room. She lands between the bars on the window, straddled over the windowsill, half in and half out of the house.

He hears no more from her through the night, but in her head she sings a medley starting with “Wake up and make love with me” and ending with “Living doll”. Her left leg, her right elbow and both of her super-size breasts hang outside in the warm night, whilst the rest of her hangs limply inside in the perpetual rain.

The next morning Sigmund pulls her from the bars and goes to find his tool box. He lays her head on the chopping board in the kitchen and gets to work with a Stanley knife. He chops her into sixty nine distinct pieces, tucks her away in a cupboard and starts wondering about how to get the keys back. The endless drizzle and rain in the bedroom clears up, and he starts reading in bed each night. Sometimes the sunshine is so glorious he has to wear sun block and shades throughout night.

One evening in mid August, he is sketching an eyeball that he found in one of the kitchen cupboards. He has no recollection of where it came from, until it speaks.

‘I can see you, I can see you’, it announces, in an all-too-familiar voice.

He drops his pencil and then he drops his jaw. Behind him, in the kitchen, come sixty eight voices with fake American accents,

‘Hi there, lover boy, guess what? The terms and conditions you ticked said ’til death do us part.’.

In the bedroom, there is a thunder clap then the sound of pouring rain.

’So how about we put me back together ’n’ go to the bedroom for a quiet night in spittin’ venom at each other. The rain’s headin’ this way anyhow.’

His head falls into his hands but not before he sees the eye on the coffee table wink at him, and the voices in the kitchen cupboard laugh. He never will retrieve those keys.