This Little Dark Place

by A. S. Hatch

  She met Frank at my father’s wake. It was held at the cricket club. Not that my father played cricket, that was just where every family function – happy or sad – seemed to be held in Wilder. I remember going outside to escape my father’s over-attentive relatives and looking in through a window and seeing my mother at a table with a man sat across from her. I remember her watery smile as he talked and she listened, nodding. I remember his bushy black-and-white beard and the angular protrusion of his glasses as seen from behind. I remember him leaning across the table and taking both of my mother’s hands in his.

  Over the following months I saw much more of Frank. He was forever over fixing things, bringing things, food, utensils, money. I found Christian pamphlets in the kitchen drawer. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. I didn’t like him from the start. One time I said as much. My mother rebuked me for being judgemental. He’s just a kind lonely man, she said, he’s lost someone too, just like us. Eventually, my mother came to rely on Frank for company. And then, suddenly, it ‘made sense’ for him to come and live with us.

  He was clever. He played it perfectly. He introduced new rules into our household, small things at first – like having to wait for him to get home before eating dinner, which was sometimes late, and saying grace at table, which we never did before. Then he started implementing other rules. No soap operas for my mother. They ‘rotted’ her brain. No radio. If there was silence to be filled, it should be filled with contemplation and prayer. He binned my father’s ‘trashy’ novels and replaced them on the shelf with a bible, photographs of his family (whom we never met) and religious ornaments. I’m not sure when exactly he began battering my mother.

  He terrified me. Always dressed, almost clerically, in black. His neck-length salt-and-pepper hair, always dried out and bristly like his beard, made him look, to my child’s eyes, like an evil king from a fairy tale.

  One night, this was about a year after Frank moved in with us, I got out of bed to go to the toilet. I heard whimpering. I had grown used to the sound of my mother’s nocturnal sobbing, and immediately knew that this was different. I tiptoed the length of the bungalow past the bathroom to the source of the sound. The living room door was open. Through the gap between the door and its hinges I saw the back of Frank’s head above the couch, silhouetted by the light of the TV. On the screen a naked man stood over the figure of a naked woman gagged and tied to a wooden table. The man wore a Mexican wrestler’s mask. The woman looked terrified of the man. She thrashed about on the table. Frank removed his glasses and placed them on the coffee table beside the couch, slowly and deliberately. He rose from the couch and moved closer to the screen. He was naked too. Too scared to move, I watched him. When his breathing began to get heavier I took the opportunity to escape back to my room where I remained, unable to sleep, all night. I held on for as long as I could but eventually I wet myself.

  I suppose that was my first experience of sex.

  I never slept much or well after that. Every night I dragged my chest of drawers over to block the bedroom door, as protection. Against what I wasn’t sure, Frank never laid so much as a finger on me. My grades at school dipped. I was always tired. I found everyone irritating, especially teachers. One lunchtime I was hit in the backside by a football. It was an accident, and the kid who came asking for the ball back was younger than me. I picked the ball up and walked over to the kid and kicked it as hard as I could into his face. He fell to the floor. I was sent home. I’d broken the kid’s nose. It was Frank who came to school to pick me up. He didn’t say a word to me, nor I to him. But I sensed rage in the way he slammed the car door. That night at table he lowered his cutlery and said: Tell your mother what you told me before. I didn’t know what he was on about, I said. Don’t lie Daniel, tell her what you said. About how you wished she’d died instead of your dad. His voice was level, he was calm. I looked at my mother. She was white with hurt. I never said those things, I assured her. Frank closed his eyes. But the king shall rejoice in God; every one that sweareth by him shall glory: but the mouth of them that speak lies shall be stopped, he said. Now look at your mother and tell her you’re sorry. I looked at her. Say it. I said I was sorry. What for? I couldn’t say the words. Daniel. What … for? I said I was sorry for wishing she’d died instead of my father. There you go. Wasn’t so hard was it? There may be hope for you yet, he said. Then he picked up his fork and tucked back in to my mother’s shepherd’s pie.

  Then there was the terrible moment in my father’s old garage workshop, when I confronted Frank with a wrench. For a delicious moment the glower in his eyes gave me hope that he just might hit me back, and then my mother might’ve considered kicking him out. Instead he touched his fingers to the tributary of blood that had formed on his cheek, put his glasses back on and told me in a low voice that he was going to teach me a lesson.

  And as the traffic lights turned green and these long-repressed memories flooded over me like the tide and my mother’s tears soaked into the collar of her cardigan, I realised that Frank had made good on his vow, that he had indeed taught me an important lesson.

  Over the next six months Victoria and I carried on trying to conceive. But I was preoccupied with my mother’s decline. It was hard watching her trying to struggle on at home by herself.

  It was around this time that Victoria’s superstitions began. Egged on by the women on the pregnancy forums she started doing strange things. She stopped eating fruit. She threw out all the cleaning products and started using only vinegar and water. She put her feet in water tanks and let tiny fish eat her dead skin. She played ‘songs’ on her iPad that were nothing but silence but that apparently emitted an inaudible frequency that stimulated her ovaries. None of these things bothered me, until she stopped visiting my mother. One Sunday, Vic said she wasn’t feeling well and preferred to stay home. I sensed a lie but didn’t press her on it. She was having a rough time – we’d been trying to conceive for eighteen months then – and I thought perhaps she just needed some time to herself. But when she said she couldn’t come the following Sunday I had to say something.

  ‘I can’t Dan,’ she said.

  ‘It would mean a lot to me if you came.’

  ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Please Dan,’ she said weakly. I could feel myself getting worked up. My fists clenched. I couldn’t help it. I punched the cushion beside her as hard as I could. Victoria flinched, and we stared at each other for a couple of seconds in stunned silence before I stormed out.

  Ivy didn’t ask after Victoria that day. She seemed lost in a different time in history altogether. With just the two of us at the table, I was minded of the immediate aftermath of my father’s death. The clinking of our cutlery was accompanied only by the Sunday drama on the radio.

  When I got home Victoria was upstairs having a bath. She’d left her iPad on the couch. I unlocked it, the passcode was her birthday, and opened Safari. Evidently, she was a very active member on the pregnancy forums. There were various other hare-brained schemes for conceiving that she hadn’t tried. Eating only seafood and spinach. Climbing into an ice bath immediately after sex. Sitting upside-down after sex. The colour orange. The list went on. And then I read something that made my stomach twist inside my body.

  A thread entitled: ‘IF YOU’RE TRYING TO GET PREGNANT – READ THIS!!! By Katrina, a mother of two beautiful boys.’ Katrina used to work in an old persons’ home. She’d been trying to get pregnant for years. She was on the brink of giving up. But then ‘MDH got promoted’ (I discovered MDH meant ‘my darling husband’), meaning she didn’t have to work any more. So she quit and after that she got pregnant straight away. Twins. What a miracle, et cetera. One day, admiring the two babies, it hit her. She knew why she had finally become pregnant. It was because she had taken herself away from death. She was no longer surrounded every day by dying people. That was the only explanation and she urged the women on the forum to ‘avoid death, and pla
ces where death lurks at all costs!!!!’ (this included: doctor’s practices, nursing homes, funerals and graveyards), before adding: ‘If someone you know is sick or dying, you mustn’t see them any more. You mustn’t allow their death to block the new life fighting to blossom within you.’ The post had received hundreds of replies and thousands of likes. Scores of women, all using the same pseudo-religious language and shorthand, thanking her, referring to her as some sort of prophet. For the first time I felt resentful of the whole process, the whole matter. I wanted to barge in on Victoria’s bath and to rage at her stupidity, at her callous, blind stupidity. Instead I went out to the workshop and spent the evening polishing an ash dining table until I was sure she’d gone to bed.

  The following Sunday she said her father was in Ireland on a golf weekend and her mother had asked her to stay over, to keep her company. So on the Saturday I drove her to her parents’ house, but before she got out I stopped her. I told her I knew about Katrina on the forum and why she was avoiding my mother. She said nothing. She just clenched the handles of her overnight bag tightly and pursed her lips. I had begun to feel like I knew her less and less. We sat in silence. Cars whooshed by. Seagulls twitched on the roofs of the houses. In that moment I think I experienced the first desperate pang of regret. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, allowed this phase to pass, just carried on trying to get her pregnant. But I felt her changing. A shell of cynicism and hardness was forming around her. I reached out to her with my hand but she avoided my touch like a cat.

  Victoria announced one night that if by January we hadn’t conceived she would contact the fertility clinic. We were still having sex. Mostly, perfunctory. Occasionally, aggressive. When I climbed into bed with her without a kiss or caress I did so out of love for her. I sensed her love for me was still there too, simply trapped beneath a layer of ice. Sometimes I tried melting it. Sometimes I took a pneumatic drill to it.

  Christmas Day was hard. I sensed it would be my mother’s last. Ivy was now living full-time in the Jerusalem Full-Time Residential Care Home. Scrawny strings of tinsel hung from each corner of the visiting room. The nurses wore elf costumes. Some residents were arranged in a semicircle around the telly watching It’s a Wonderful Life. Ivy didn’t register me when I kissed her forehead and I knew it wasn’t one of her ‘good days’. I wished her a happy Christmas. I told her I loved her. I told her I was thankful for everything she’d done for me. I looked up and saw that her brow was furrowed and I thought for a moment that my words had got through, that I had stirred something deep within her.

  ‘Do you remember too?’ I said. ‘It wasn’t so long ago.’ I squeezed her hand. I felt I had reached her. But she continued to stare straight ahead, right through me. And then I realised her expression hadn’t altered at all in the time I’d been there. I followed her gaze to the window and realised she hadn’t heard a single word I’d said. Her expression, which I had interpreted as recognition, was simply confusion. For it was dark and the nurses had put the lights on in the visiting room and instead of the sea, all Ivy saw was a reflection of herself in the window. Ghostly and see-through. Half there, half gone.

  ***

  We’ve had a heatwave. On my walk this afternoon I got hot and sticky. I miss the Wilder wind. I used to hate it. In winter it made your fingers cold even through thick gloves. But today I longed for a blast of that coastal air. I make sure to go for a walk every day if I can. It helps to order my thoughts. I’m not so near to the sea any more, as you know. But sometimes I see a seagull overhead and it reminds me of Wilder. You must be lost, I’ll say to it, so far from the coast. And I wonder if it will ever find its way back.

  ***

  ‘Zona pellucida,’ Victoria said, reading from her iPad, ‘is the name of the membrane that surrounds the ovum prior to implantation.’ It was a dark afternoon in late January 2015. That morning she’d had her last shot of follicle-stimulating hormone before the fertilised egg was due to be transferred into her uterus the next day. ‘Implantation normally occurs one to five days after the ovum has been transferred.’ Victoria had read on the forums that the chances of successful implantation were increased if she stayed still. So she took a week off work and sat on the couch in orange pyjamas and watched telly. On day five I heard her leave the house and slam the door behind her. I ran to the end of the drive in time to see her turning the corner at the end of the street. I went back inside. Upstairs in the bedroom, her orange pyjamas were strewn on the floor next to the bed. I went to put them inside the laundry basket but only the top was there. I looked around for the bottoms and found them scrunched into a tight ball in the dustbin. I held them up to the light. There it was. Our £5,000 bloodstain.

  When she returned two hours later I met her outside.

  ‘Vic,’ I began. Her orange tracksuit top was tied around her waist and a V of sweat had darkened her singlet underneath. Little wisps of hair stuck to her forehead and neck. ‘Vic, I’m –’

  ‘It’s fine, Dan.’ She looked at me, mouth agape, regaining her breath.

  ‘It isn’t fine. We should talk about this.’

  She began marching on the spot, pumping her arms.

  ‘I said it’s fine.’

  She gave me a smile I had never seen before. It was a receptionist’s smile. A stranger’s. It was chilling. She walked past me into the house and closed the door behind her. We didn’t talk about it. Neither then, nor later. I didn’t dare go near her. I kept picturing that smile.

  That was the beginning of the exercise. She started getting up at five forty to run. A juice machine appeared and at six thirty every morning it would go off. The noise was terrible; like an angle grinder. Sometimes the sound would infiltrate my dreams and I’d picture her downstairs stuffing Alfred into it, filling the air with an explosion of green feathers and blood. We didn’t have sex any more. That was over. She bought more orange clothes. A set of dumbbell weights appeared in the back room – Alfred’s room. An aerobics step. She’d stand the iPad up and do whole routines. This went on for weeks. I felt she was becoming a stranger, that I was living alone. I felt less and less inclined to reach out, less capable.

  ‘The forums say the healthier your body, the greater the chances of successful implantation. Seed and soil concept,’ she said at six twenty-five one morning through a mouthful of raw carrot. ‘In agriculture, fertile soil leads to greater yields. It’s the same in the uterus.’

  She joined a gym. She ran there from work, and after the gym she ran home. She insisted we charge our phones on the landing because the forums advised that LEDs and microwaves hindered recovery. She bought a sleeping mask and began piping birdsong into the bedroom through a gap in the door. In the half light of night I looked at her lying next to me, at her hands folded serenely over her chest. Come back to me, I’d say in my head, repeating the words over and over, Come back to me, hoping the words might somehow leap from my mind into hers. I started having dreams. Variations of the same dream. I was in a hall of mirrors and though I was alone I could immediately sense the panic of needing to locate Victoria and Ivy. I saw them and ran to them but it was never really them, it was their reflections, and I’d smash into a mirror. I turned and one of them would beckon me, gesturing with her hand but never speaking, and I’d run and again smash my face in.

  Victoria arranged for a second round of IVF in May. One morning in March I caught a glimpse of her naked body. I had not seen it for a long time. It had changed so much. She was leaner, wiry. While she cleared a circle in the steamed-up mirror I climbed into the shower. It was such an odd situation; I felt estranged from her yet we conducted our daily lives with the same proximity as before. We were extras in a film. Things to do, but nothing to say. I closed my eyes and let the water pummel my face. I heard Victoria say something.

  ‘What?’ I yelled.

  ‘I said I’m starting with my trainer tonight.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  The only ostensible difference the trainer made was that now Victori
a came home later and more tired. She’d go straight into the kitchen to microwave one of the five identical dinners she’d pre-cooked at the weekend, put her earphones in and watch fitness videos on YouTube while she scooped the food into her mouth.

  May came. Victoria was injected with more hormones. Then they sucked eggs from her body. Then they put one back inside her. After it was done, I guided her across the car park to the Transporter.

  ‘Let’s get you home.’

  ‘I’m not coming home,’ she said. ‘I’m going to my mother’s. The forums all agree, every kilojoule you save after transfer increases the chances of successful implantation. My mother can look after me, bring me things.’

  ‘You planned this? Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve done things for you. I could’ve looked after you.’

  ‘You’ve got work,’ she said feebly. She wouldn’t look at me.

  It would’ve been useless to protest. I dropped her at her parents’ house and went straight to Jerusalem. When I arrived, Ivy wasn’t in the bay window. I was told she was sleeping and was taken to her. The air was stale inside the tiny room. My mother was on her back, her head turned to the side on her pillow. I cracked open the window and looked out down the coast. The sea was crashing against the tide barriers and exploding high into the air like powder.

  A few days went by with no contact from Victoria. On the fourth night as I lay awake in bed, I had what I now know was a panic attack. I was at a loss why. Was it stress? Was I lonely? Was this what loneliness feels like? I had to do something. So I did what anyone of my generation did when trying to solve a problem in their life: I googled it.