Leon Prescod - Issue 37

Leon Prescod spent two decades working as a subtitler for the BBC, before becoming co-director of Vote for Policies, a non-profit helping people make informed decisions around voting. His journalism has been published by openDemocracy, his poetry appeared in the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year anthology, and he has recently begun releasing short stories into the wild. To his surprise, he successfully gained a Diploma in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. He has a wife and two adult sons, and lives in London, England, where he does his best to control his unruly dog. 

---

Frogspawn

The hole reappeared overnight. He peered into the neighbouring garden, all weeds and rubble. The house had been empty for years. It had to be foxes, some scent driving them mad, scrabbling at the mortar. Except he knew by now that was untrue. He picked up the brick and read the maker’s name on the indented top face. No trace of the cement and sand mixture he pasted on a week ago. It was as clean as the day it emerged from the kiln.

“Brick’s out,” he said, entering the kitchen.

Bree looked up from her phone. “Just leave it.”

“It’s spotless.”

Her gaze returned to the screen and he sat opposite her at the dining table. For years, he had felt that his presence in a room made it harder for her to experience joy. Somehow, he embodied her sadness, and there seemed nothing either of them could do about it. Today, there was no prospect of joy, with or without him.

“Did she text?” he asked.

“No.”

“Should we fly out or something?”

“And do what?” She was scrolling defensively, as though the next second would bring up a post offering a way out. 

He shrugged. “Dunno. Be there.”

Bree closed her eyes and breathed deep and long. This was a thing she did since taking up meditation. It was better than the fury, but equally terrifying. The single breath - inhalation, hold, exhalation - took close to twenty seconds. Twenty seconds is a long time to think about what a person is feeling, what they might say or do next, about whether the fault lies with you or with them, or somewhere else entirely.

“We can’t be there,” she said. “We’re here. We were here all along.”

Both children were at university. Their daughter was at Stanford; their son had not left the UK but was more distant than his sister. When their daughter told them the night before, on a video call, that she had been drugged and sexually assaulted by a professor, it was half an hour later that he realised she was describing events from eighteen months ago. Eighteen months. We were here all along.

The first few times the hole appeared, he slid the brick back into position with nothing to secure it. The family next door had a five-year-old. He assumed the kid had scratched out the mortar and was poking the brick out for fun, which was weird and annoying but no big deal. Then the family moved out and the place was empty, but the hole kept coming back. He was not a practical man. First, he shoved folded up pages from the London Review of Books into the gaps around the brick. Next, he tried hammering in small wooden wedges which took him an entire afternoon to craft from a salvaged bookshelf. Since then, he had been through two brands of acrylic polymer products and three ready-mix mortars. Sometimes the hole was there again the next day, sometimes weeks or months later. Once, the wall was intact for almost a year.

Their daughter told them a number of things. She was calm and confident, as usual. After the assault, she thought about coming home, but her American boyfriend convinced her to stay. He proposed to her two months later and she said yes. 

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

For some reason, something to do with residency rules, the marriage would make it harder for her to leave the US for a while, so she really hoped they would come out for the wedding. And they ought to speak to her brother, who she told them was increasingly active in the manosphere. This was how their conversations had been for years. She explained things to them, offered advice, and they pretended to understand. Today, she was defining incels, and promising she was OK about ‘the thing’ with the professor, that the darkness was dark but she had come through and was strong and angry and alive, and fine, really. Bree was not convinced.

“It’s a cancer,” she said, after they waved goodbye to their daughter and her fiance, who was drafted in to bolster the image of recovery and forward thinking. “You cut out what you can. You hope it’s gone. But it sits there waiting to come back and fuck you up.”

He didn’t ask how she knew this. If she had chosen not to tell him, there was probably a good reason, and he would not risk catalysing the regrowth she spoke of.

The CCTV recorded constantly, and it automatically stored footage for forty-eight hours. The man who installed it laughed when he explained why he only needed coverage of a small section of the garden wall.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “It’s just usually people have been burgled, or their neighbour’s dumping rubbish or something. Just the one brick? Well, hope this helps.”

It did not help. They went away for a long bank holiday weekend and returned to find the hole. Rewinding the recording showed the brick had come out more than forty-eight hours ago so there was no footage of the moment. On another occasion, there was a brief power cut, perhaps fifteen minutes when the camera was not functioning. The hole was there afterwards. Then, when foxes chewed through the cabling, he didn’t bother to get the CCTV repaired. 

He knew it wasn’t sex they were talking about; an assault is not sex - he knew that. But some of the mechanics can be the same. Which made it even harder with Bree. The two of them stopped talking about sex over a decade ago. Then they stopped having sex. Except once, three months ago. She came home from a night out with girlfriends, swaying slightly.

“Sharon was talking about porn,” she said. “Do you remember porn?”

“Funnily enough…”

“I remember porn. Do you remember the DVD with the skiing and the girl who kept the furry boots on? I loved that.”

He found the scene online and sat back, amazed at what was taking place, as she clambered onto him, and relieved at how readily his body responded. The next day, he wondered if he had dreamed it.

Two days after the video call from their daughter, Bree announced she was going to visit their son in Edinburgh for the weekend.

“I’m going to nip this in the bud,” she said.

“Is that wise?”

“Yes, it’s wise. We’re still paying for his life. Two years from now we’ll have no leverage. It’s wise.”

“Should I come?”

“Do you want to?”

“Not really.”

“So don’t.” She poured milk onto her muesli before raising her eyes. She watched him while she chewed. “It’s OK,” she said. “It’ll be OK. You’re a good dad. The best.”

“You too,” he said. “Not a dad, obviously, but you know, you too.” He moved to her side and she leaned her head into his midriff.

He went to an actual shop to purchase the sledgehammer. He wanted the wall down before Bree returned.  Covered in brick dust, bleeding blisters on his hands, staring at the absence of a hole, he resolved to phone his daughter later, perhaps after a run, if he could find his trainers. There were one hundred and thirteen million results for ‘London fencing installation’.