Darkness, I

by Tanith Lee

  Perhaps she need not answer. Usually they went away then. Only the Jehovah’s Witnesses were always persistent, ringing over and over on Sunday morning, as Sharon lay alone in the double bed under the duvet, eating Smarties. The duvet had not been changed for six weeks, perhaps longer. It had chocolate on it. It smelled of chocolate. That helped.

  But this was a week day, was it? And early afternoon. And the doorbell went off again, for the fifth time.

  You had to do what people wanted. You even had to open your door, if they were really insistent. You had to say, ‘No, thank you. I’m sorry. I don’t believe in God.’ But they only went when you cried and said, ‘I’ve lost my little boy.’ And then, too, one had started forward, talking about the consolation of Jesus. But the old woman had abruptly laid her hand on his arm, and they drew back. Until the following Sunday.

  Sharon went, barefoot, to the door. And opened it.

  ‘Oh. Good afternoon. Is Mrs Ferris in?’

  Sharon said, because you had to be truthful, ‘I’m Mrs Ferris.’

  ‘Oh! Oh, Mrs Ferris. Well.’

  And all at once Sharon knew who this was.

  It was revealed to Sharon, since never before had she seen this person look so utterly taken aback. It was the family doctor. The one Wayne had fancied. Slim and blossomy, with auburn hair, in a smart, tight-belted coat.

  ‘Doctor,’ said Sharon. She did not ask the doctor in. It was not strength or bad manners, simply that Sharon was, and had been for some while, somewhere else.

  ‘My goodness, Mrs Ferris. Well I remember I put you on a diet. A diet, Mrs Ferris. I didn’t mean you were supposed to starve yourself.’

  Sharon thought about this, vaguely. It was strange, because she could just recall the diet, which had lasted less than a month, and had not worked, and she had starved.

  ‘Any way, congratulations, Mrs Ferris. Yes.’

  Sharon stared at the doctor.

  The doctor said, ‘But that’s not why I’m here. May I come in?’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  Sharon stood aside, and the doctor moved gracefully forward into the house. Her unpowdered, shineless, poreless nose wrinkled briefly. The Ferris home smelled. Unwashed dishes, unemptied bins, dust on radiator heat turned up too high.

  They went into Sharon’s living room. Some dead flowers stood in a vase, adding to the odours. Everywhere lay tights in balls, Kleenex packets, crisp wrappers on the unwood table, a plate with congealed sauce. Bits and pieces of life, as if life had broken.

  The doctor did not comment. She sat in an armchair where some toys were sitting before her. She squashed them, and Sharon said, ‘Don’t sit there. Sorry. Could you sit on the other chair.’

  So the doctor got up, with a look, and sat on the other chair that had only an old newspaper in it, and two empty bottles of lemonade by its side.

  ‘You’ve let things go, Sharon,’ said the doctor, adopting Sharon’s name as if this made things nicer.

  ‘Yes, I have a bit.’

  ‘Well that’s not the way, you know.’

  Sharon glanced at her, and off again. Sharon sat down on the couch, and opened a box of Matchmakers. She offered it to the doctor, and the doctor shook her head sternly.

  ‘You shouldn’t eat those, Sharon. You’ll put all your weight back on.’

  Sharon slipped three mint chocolates into her mouth. The familiar gentleness came up into her brain, down into her solar plexus. She introduced another three.

  The doctor said, ‘I know some bad things have happened, Sharon. But you have to think of what you’ve got. There are so many terrible things in the world. You have your health and strength. What about the unfortunates who haven’t? What, Sharon, about your husband?’

  ‘Wayne?’

  ‘Yes, Sharon.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sharon.

  ‘I’m afraid, Sharon, you’ve behaved very, very badly. In fact, I’ve been asked to talk to you about it.’

  Sharon lay back, and held the Matchmakers to her full but proportionate bosom. She attended as the doctor went on, and on. It was a far-away noise.

  Sharon’s hair had grown to her shoulders. She had not washed it for a long while. Perhaps she had not washed it since—since that week. If the colour had been visible, it would have been rich, like lemon curd.

  The weight had fallen from her like a series of clown’s coats. Like a trick.

  It was months ago, that day Andrew disappeared in Tesco’s and no one could find him.

  The police had done their best. She had sensed them losing interest. Wayne had shouted at her over and over, but all that was a sort of illusion that continued on a kind of screen. Like the TV she watched, not taking in very much. Colours and sounds, sometimes too bright or loud.

  She still cooked Wayne’s dinners, she could recall doing that, but he hardly ever came in for them. He preferred the company of other women all the time now. Andrew’s loss was her fault. His son. She was a useless fucking stupid mare.

  When Wayne did not come, Sharon ate both dinners. She ate all the time. Beef pies and waffles, eggs and chips with lashings of brown sauce, jam tarts, buns and eclairs, and Cadbury’s chocolate, seven or eight bars a day, fudge, marshmallows, and at night she had Ovaltine, all night long, because she only slept now and then.

  She lay and thought of Andrew, her mouth full of sweetness, her belly soothed and full.

  And the fat streamed off Sharon. Something had changed in her. She grew slim as the models in the magazines which once she had bought and worriedly studied, seeing beings from another planet. She grew slim and then slight. Little pearly bones showed at her hips and her face was like a sculpture.

  But the police stopped calling on her, asking her things, they stopped telling her to hope.

  She had stopped any way. No, she had never started.

  One hot evening, when she was cooking shepherd’s pie, with a raspberry cheesecake defrosting on the worktop, a policeman did come.

  He was one she had never seen before, and just behind him was a policewoman. Both had frowns of sorrow.

  They were afraid it was her husband.

  She looked at them. Her husband was Wayne. What had happened, had he finally left her, and for some reason the police had to come and tell her so?

  It turned out not to be that.

  Wayne had that morning been repairing the TV of a well-off, attractive brunette in a flat by the park, when something blew up and threw Wayne ten foot across the room into a tastefully papered wall.

  The brunette, who had gone to make coffee, came running, and there was Wayne, cross-eyed and dribbling on her Axminster.

  The current had fused something in the television, and also, more permanently, in the brain of Wayne Ferris.

  They took Sharon directly to the hospital, and just before they had, Sharon did something silly. She took up one of her son’s small bears, and put it in her bag. She realized presently this was a mistake, for it was not Andrew she was going to see.

  Wayne was out of intensive care, and he was having a lot of tests. He lay washed, and already unshaven, cross-eyed on a bank of hard white pillows. The room smelled of industrial disinfectant, and wee. So did Wayne.

  Sharon looked at him. He meant nothing.

  Presently she was summoned to somebody’s office, and here the somebody was, a handsome Indian doctor, who told her that, unfortunately, there was not much chance that Wayne would ever be any better than he was today. He could breathe, and sleep and swallow, but, although he could also urinate and defecate, this would have to be with assistance, and sometimes it would occur spontaneously. He would need feeding, washing. He was like a baby.

  Sharon did not think Wayne was at all like a baby. She thought he was like a grown man who had never done much for himself, and now had to be helped even to take a crap. She did not use quite those words, even in her own head. She did not really think anything much about it.

  But she went to the Ladies, and there in a cubicle she took out and ki
ssed Andrew’s bear. Then they went home.

  Weeks after, during which time many sorties had been made on Sharon by many people, Wayne’s mother took Wayne into her semi, and installed him in the guest room. Here he lay in bed all day, spontaneously shitting and pissing, watching TV.

  Wayne’s mother’s husband had left her two years before, for a woman in Brighton. But now she had Wayne.

  She made extended furious phone calls to Sharon. Wayne’s mother told Sharon she was an evil, wicked wretch.

  Sharon went to bed and drank Oval tine and ate Galaxy. She too watched TV.

  She had always known she would never see Andrew again. Now perhaps she would not have to see Wayne.

  But here was the doctor woman. She was making elegant, controlled little gestures. She did not say Sharon was a fucking useless mare, or a wicked and evil parasite. But she did say Sharon had a responsibility.

  ‘I’ve told Mrs Ferris,’ said the doctor confusingly, ‘that you’ll go to see her today. This evening. Now you will, won’t you, Sharon?’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  Sharon had always done what the strong-minded told her to do.

  She looked across at the panda and the bears and the dragon in the other chair. They were composed. It struck Sharon that if Wayne’s mother was ‘Mrs Ferris’, then who was Sharon? And she recollected her unmarried name, Timberlake. She had always liked it. Sharon Timberlake. Sharon and Andrew Timberlake. She sighed.

  ‘And you’ll go tonight? Perhaps now, Sharon. I can give you a lift. Perhaps you should comb your hair first.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sharon.

  Mrs Ferris’s house was on a corner. The day was dark already, and under the umber sky, the Ferris front window was a raw-yolk yellow.

  She let them in at once, as if she had been lying in wait behind the door, but the doctor would not stay.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to get on to surgery. But I’m sure you can both sort this out.’ Two grown women, the doctor implied, from the high place of her excellence. She had never shirked a duty—but then, she liked the power that duty gave her, over others. No inner searching had ever disturbed her health or her skin. She left, and there they were.

  In the front room everything was as Sharon remembered. The pus-coloured curtains with brown flowers, the brown and red walls, carpet and sofa, all with differing patterns. There were glass gazelles and ashtrays not for use, and over the gas fire a plate showing a painted little boy in an engine-driver’s outfit too big for him. Mrs Ferris liked little boys. She had liked Andrew, although she had sometimes been bothered he was not boisterous enough.

  There were photographs of Andrew everywhere, and of Wayne, too, as a child. Pushed behind a vase of regularly dusted artificial flowers was a picture of Wayne’s wedding day, Sharon in her bursting dress and Mr Ferris Senior in his suit, obscured for ever by two large blowsy daffodils.

  ‘Well. At last,’ said Mrs Ferris. ‘You’d better come up and see him.’

  Sharon did not want to, but she could not be that truthful. So she followed Mrs Ferris upstairs to the spare room.

  This was pink, and in the doll bed sat Wayne.

  His eyes had uncrossed. He was gawping at a children’s programme on the small TV set.

  ‘I keep him clean,’ said Mrs Ferris, as if she were offering Wayne for sale. ‘I feed him regular. You won’t find nothing wrong.’

  ‘No,’ said Sharon.

  ‘So when are you going to take him on, Sharon, eh? It’s high time. I know you had the shock over Andy, but you’ve got to pull yourself together. I can’t deal with all this at my time of life, and with his rotten father leaving me. I tell you now, I’m sick and tired as well of paying your mortgage from the insurance money. You’ve got to take charge of it, Sharon, and the bills.’

  Sharon watched Wayne.

  A sudden sick, fruity smell oozed from the bed.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Mrs Ferris. ‘Oh my God. What I’ve had to put up with.’

  Sharon went out while Mrs Ferris saw to Wayne, even though Mrs Ferris screamed down the stairs at her.

  Back in the lounge, Sharon tried not to look at the photos of Andrew. She had put all her own away.

  When Mrs Ferris came down, she was pale and angry, bristling like some stinging insect.

  ‘I won’t have no more of it,’ she said. ‘A great strapping girl like you. You’ll have to see to him.’

  Sharon said, ‘He didn’t like me.’ She was not sure why she said this obvious and irrelevant thing. Wayne had not liked his mother either.

  ‘Didn’t like you? Should have left him alone then, shouldn’t you, you little tart. Getting yourself in the family way and forcing him into marriage. Not that Andy wasn’t lovely. But you couldn’t even keep hold of him, could you.’

  In Mrs Ferris’s world, little boys were all right. They could not do without you. But Andrew had escaped.

  Sharon took a Mars bar out of her bag. She offered it to Mrs Ferris.

  ‘My God, look at you. You’re a chockyhollic. You’re mad.’

  Mrs Ferris strode to a mirror and began to powder her face unevenly, and scratch a brush through her short grey hair.

  ‘Any way, madam, I’m going out now. I’m going to the late shops. So you can just stay here and see to your husband. And when I come back, we’ll sort it out. When you’re having him. Do I make myself plain?’

  She had made herself very plain, with the brush and powder at least.

  Sharon said, ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘And don’t call me that. You’ve got no right now. You’ve got a mother of your own, even if she is a useless fool.’

  Sharon thought, dimly, of her mother. Her mother had not approved of Sharon’s pregnancy. She had sat through the wedding as if she was in pain, and soon after Andrew was born, Sharon’s mother moved away to Yorkshire.

  She had spoken to her mother, last Christmas, on the phone, and Andrew had spoken too. But Sharon’s mother did not like children.

  Sharon said, ‘Sorry.’ She put the Mars wrapper into her bag, and wished she had brought one of Andrew’s toys, but the doctor would have seen.

  Presently Mrs Ferris put on her coat and took her shopper, and slammed out.

  Sharon stood under the yolk of light.

  Andrew was dead.

  It was as if she had only just begun to know.

  She did not cry. She had stopped crying after the first two months. She felt as if the world was far away. She went to Mrs Ferris’s kitchen, and in the white Jiffed fridge was a packet of bake well tarts. Sharon ate only one.

  Then she climbed up again to her husband.

  He had not altered in twenty minutes. Yet what a change there had been. And he, who had smelled of the perfumes of other women, stank now of faeces and the disinfectant used in open graves.

  Sharon regarded him, as if he might abruptly rouse, turn to her, and tell her how thick she was, how badly she ran his house, that she had lost his son. But Wayne only went on watching TV.

  So Sharon crossed to the TV and pushed in the button of a vacant channel, and the picture vanished, and there instead was a white and blue world of falling snow.

  Then she went down the house and let herself out of the front door.

  During the evening, as Sharon packed, the phone sometimes insistently rang.

  She did not answer it, and at last she took the receiver off and left it hanging there. The phone whined like a mosquito. And grew silent. Was it always so simple?

  There was not much to put into the big blue bag.

  Most of her clothes did not fit. She selected a few loose T-shirts and jumpers, a skirt that had been hers before Andrew’s birth and which, for some reason, had been overlooked when Wayne threw out all her slimmer clothes and told her to take them to Oxfam.

  She had already, somewhere, bought two smaller bras, and some cotton pants, and some tights.

  There was almost nothing from the house she wanted, except Andrew’s CDs, which she had let him buy with Wa
yne’s money. She had never listened to them, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky—the very names astonished her. But there. And she took all his toy animals. The four bears, the panda, the dragon, the snake, the mouse and the chicken. She arranged them carefully on her clothes, so they would be comfortable.

  She packed chocolate too.

  She put in her sponge bag, which she had employed on holidays, and this made her think a little of the bath and of her hair, but she was not primed for them.

  She went to bed, and after her first Ovaltine, she slept.

  In the morning there was some post on the mat. Normally she did not bother with it, particularly the brown, official-looking envelopes, another of which was now there.

  However, through the door had been thrust also a selection of gifts. A new try-out chocolate bar, a sample of herbal shampoo, a tiny card of scent.

  Sharon went into the bathroom, eating the bar, and next showered, and washed her hair with the shampoo. And then she rubbed the scent on to herself.

  In the bedroom, clad in baggy jeans and floppy jumper, she made up her face, as she had long ago.

  Now she had eyes again, and a mouth.

  Who was she?

  She was Sharon Timberlake.

  Sharon Timberlake knew of the English seaside. Wayne had never wanted to go there. He had liked Spain, the hot beaches where she had not wished to show her fat body. But Sharon had in her heart little towns along the shore, ripe budding fields (they had always gone late in the year, her father’s job, while he was alive). They had curious cranky names, and in her memory she found and chose one.

  It would be another place now. But never mind.

  Sharon stepped over the official letter—some demand for something—and went out.

  She did not remember to close the door.

  On the mat, the letter waited. It waited a great while.

  It was from an imposing company, and a title that sounded impressive. Someone had heard of Sharon’s loss of her son. Someone commiserated. He could do nothing. And yet, he would like her to have, gratis, some money. If it would help. She must not be insulted. He felt for her so much.

  Other letters like this had gone... here and there.