This Little Dark Place

by A. S. Hatch

  When we left Jerusalem I felt some kind of peace. Victoria looked like a person who had shed a great burden. She walked ahead of me to the Transporter. As in childhood I felt drawn to the seafront. I wanted to watch the retreat of the clouds. My mother and I used to yell at the sky after a storm had passed: Go away clouds! You’re not welcome! In the north the outline of the Lake District’s peaks began to show, and to the west the oil rig at the outer reaches of Wilder Bay. Victoria joined me, and we stood side by side in silence, just looking out.

  Ivy died four days later, on Christmas Eve.

  The funeral took place on New Year’s Eve. Victoria didn’t come. She went the night before to stay at her parents’ house and sent me a text on the day saying:

  I CAN’T FACE IT. SORRY.

  I wasn’t sure she’d ever come back. As the casket moved slowly, mechanically, towards the hatch, I pictured Daniel’s sad little box. It’s OK, the vicar had said, God will name him. Emotion came like a wave now and I was shaken by grief, deep and strong. The injustice was too great. Nobody else here knew about him. I was alone in my sadness. I kept turning around, hoping Victoria had changed her mind and slipped into the back of the church. I noticed a few of Frank’s family had turned up. The sight of them made me sick.

  Following the ceremony there was a buffet laid on at the cricket club.

  Throughout the afternoon various people approached to shake my hand, to offer perfunctory condolences, and, more pertinently, to inform me they had to leave to get to their New Year’s Eve parties and that they didn’t want to hit traffic and so on. I didn’t care. I wanted them gone. At one point Frank’s sister, a crusty, overly made-up old woman, came over. She said she thought it was losing Frank that’d killed my mother, that she must’ve begun to die of a broken heart when he passed.

  Once everyone had left I returned to the crematorium to collect the ashes. There was nobody there to greet me, but the outer door to the chapel was open and I went inside to find my mother’s urn on a leaflet-covered table. There was a note from the vicar:

  Daniel,

  I had to leave to make my New Year’s Eve engagements.

  Please do take your mother’s remains.

  Yours with faith, love and best wishes for the New Year.

  I placed the urn on the passenger seat and drove home. Though it was still early, parties were already in full swing. Fireworks going off, girls walking arm in arm through the windy streets clutching bottles of cheap prosecco.

  Victoria used to keep a bottle of ‘emergency’ champagne under the kitchen sink so we’d be ready if ever there was cause for a sudden celebration. I poured myself a warm glass and shoved the bottle in the fridge. I hadn’t eaten all day and the champagne went instantly to my head. Grimacing, I poured another glass and went through to the living room to watch telly.

  A whole bottle of champagne later, bored and listless, I turned my laptop on. I went to my email inbox and saw an unread message at the top, with the subject

  NEW YEAR’S EVE – It’s not a party for everyone

  It was from Inbox Inmate. Dear Daniel, it said, tonight is a time for celebration, remembrance and looking to a brighter future. But for inmates, it can be a time of desperate loneliness and despair. Some may feel they have no future. Tonight, more than on any other night, they need you. Write to a prisoner now! You could save someone’s life.

  How ironic, I thought, that I was being asked to save somebody’s life, when I was sat here tallying up the ways in which my own had been destroyed.

  Click here to send a message.

  ***

  I have arrived at a critical juncture. I can’t really go any further without a little commentary about the trial.

  They took our letters. My letters to her and hers to me. Both sides; the prosecution and defence both believing they’d find something within them that would shine the requisite light onto the dock. Character constructing. Or destructing. They took Victoria’s iPad and smartphone and my old Nokia. But it was the letters we sent through Inbox Inmate that they really wanted, and that the press wanted (and somehow acquired).

  Some of them were read aloud in court. The papers printed some choice lines but they didn’t print the letters in their entirety. Like the prosecuting barrister, they needed a villain and a victim and it didn’t serve their ends to provide the public with the whole story. She was the apple of the press’s eye for a time. Beautiful and dangerous and with a tragic backstory.

  If you’ve been mining the web for ‘facts’ you might have seen the letters yourself. I have copies of them all here. If the press hadn’t got hold of them they would’ve been lost to me, behind a wall of legality. The Freedom of Information Act is a wonderful thing. But the thick black blocks of ink through the redacted places and names give the letters an air of secrecy and criminality that wasn’t present before, when they were written. They were simply the missives of two damaged souls, reaching out for a connection.

  ***

  Here is what I wrote that New Year’s Eve:

  Dear Prisoner,

  Today I cremated my mother. She’s been ill for a long time. Dementia. I have her remains here with me as I type. Ivy. That was her name.

  Vic didn’t show up.

  I have no idea who I am writing to. Forgive me.

  I am suddenly very tired.

  Happy New Year.

  Dan

  I hit ‘send’ and fell asleep on the couch.

  When I woke up, 2016 was six hours old, and my first act of the New Year was to run upstairs and dry-heave over the toilet.

  In the living room my laptop was open on the floor. No more messages had arrived. There were no missed calls or texts on my Nokia. Nobody wanted to wish me a Happy New Year.

  The next day I had an appointment with the solicitor about my mother’s will. BAINBRIDGE & SON, the sign outside read, though the son had long since left Wilder and never returned. Bainbridge’s ‘office’ was the converted garage of his semi-detached house. My father had done the conversion.

  ‘This won’t take long Daniel,’ he began. ‘Let’s begin with your mother’s financial assets.’

  Bainbridge then informed me that my mother’s life savings – that is, the money she still had left from her inheritance from Frank (roughly thirty-six thousand pounds), who had been, besides an abuser and a domestic tyrant, a relatively successful property developer and landlord – was being donated to the Bowland Forest Shelter for Battered Wives. Bainbridge winced as he told me this, as though bracing himself for an angry reaction.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘OK then. Moving on to her physical assets.’

  ‘What physical assets?’

  ‘Your mother owned a small property, Daniel, in the country. Bequeathed by her late partner. You didn’t know?’

  ***

  Forgive me this interlude Lucy, but there is something bothering me and I can’t concentrate.

  I have this neighbour, Robbie. Robbie the Widower. He likes to come over to sit on my bed and watch my telly. He talks a lot. Asks a lot of questions. He comes over semi-regularly to sit and watch my telly. I barely watch the telly myself any more but I don’t mind him watching it. He just likes to have some company and he isn’t doing any harm. I just get on with my writing. The last time he came over he was very interested in your photograph. Who’s the dish, he asked. I thumped him in the arm. His life hasn’t gone the way he wanted it to either. He’s hunched and scrawny and shrivelled up. But he is a sweet guy. And I like his company. But he does ask a hell of a lot of questions. What was I writing? I told him. Who’s Lucy? I told him who you are. You’re a dark horse, he said. Who’s Ruby, he asked. I didn’t answer that one. I moved the completed pages into the drawer. She your girlfriend? I closed my eyes and breathed and reminded myself that Robbie is lonely, that he is very lonely and this is just his way. Every visit of his ends with some sad comment about his departed wife. Today’s was: My Maud used to have her secrets too.

  T
he reason I’m bringing him up is that it has just struck me that I haven’t seen him now in over a week, which is very odd. It didn’t occur to me until I was down in the workshop this afternoon. It was the silence. After running the arris off a particularly sticky joint, I stepped back to admire my work and it suddenly hit me. I’ve got used to Robbie’s presence. His company. I’ve come to value it as I thought he did mine.

  Tomorrow I will seek out Gordon and ask him. If anyone is likely to know what’s happened to Robbie it will be him. I hope he’s all right.

  ***

  So, I was finally a homeowner. I left Bainbridge’s office with the deeds to Frank’s cottage. In the Transporter I read the address on the front page. There was no street name or suburb, just a postcode and a name: Lanes End. I put the documents back inside the envelope and drove home. When I put my key in the front door I knew instinctively that Victoria was back. I found her downing a glass of water at the kitchen sink. I put the keys and deeds down on the worktop. She was still dressing exclusively in orange. I wondered if this was simply through habit or whether she hadn’t yet truly given up on having a baby.

  ‘These are the keys to my mother’s cottage. It’s mine now. She left it to me in her will.’

  ‘What? No way! Just like that?’ She snatched the keys up and inspected them closely as if to verify that they were real. I nodded. A smile spread across her face as she picked up and began flicking excitedly through the deeds. ’What will you do with it?

  On the drive back from Bainbridge’s I had thought that I would sell it or rent it out, but seeing Victoria’s happy reaction gave me an idea.

  The next morning we drove to Lanes End. We drove through the centre of Wilder. Past key cutters, gold pawners and pound shops. We drove out past the empty marina, the lighthouse and the North Point Hotel, once visited, according to Wild’ un lore, by Queen Victoria in 1900. We drove over the disused level crossing, out of the town and into farmland. Through lanes and lanes we drove and never once saw a single other vehicle. We got lost and turned back on ourselves numerous times and eventually – using Victoria’s intermittent 4G signal – we identified the entrance to the property.

  The cottage itself sat at the far end of a large grassy clearing surrounded on three sides by dense dark woods. To the right of the cottage were a couple of outbuildings. I parked the Transporter in a shale-covered space, a courtyard of sorts, between the outbuildings and the cottage. There was a large shed at the farthest end of the clearing.

  We went in the cottage’s side door. It was dim and cool. An old wax jacket hung from a peg on the wall. I reached what appeared to be the centre of the cottage: the point at which two corridors crossed. A half-open door beckoned me into a large bedroom. I walked to its bay window, which overlooked the clearing out front, and listened. It was so quiet.

  There was a sitting room with a hearth, and a kitchen in which I found the half-rotted, blackened corpse of a mouse, stuck fast to the floor, and some letters addressed to a Ms Constance Lovett. She must’ve been the tenant Mr Bainbridge told me about, who had died here alone, the last of her family. Holding her unopened mail in my hands I wondered how she’d died. Where. The shelves were bare except for a single plate commemorating the wedding of Charles and Diana. There was no power. It must’ve been cut ages ago. ‘Imagine living in this little dark place by yourself,’ Victoria said, wandering in. She went to take the plate down from the shelf but fumbled it to the floor. Bits of it went everywhere. ‘Shit!’ she hissed. I found a shovel leaning against a corner and used it to scoop up the fragments of Charles’s broken face and the mouse’s body and threw them into a dustbin outside the back door. Outside I took a few crunching steps across the shale towards the pines. I could hear the sea. When I returned to the kitchen I saw that the mouse had left a stain on the red tile; an imprint of its bones. I scraped at it with my boot but it seemed indelible. It would require chemicals.

  Victoria had disappeared. I called to her and followed her voice to a tiny bedroom. ‘Look at all this stuff,’ she said as I entered, indicating the stack of plastic storage cartons in the corner. I pushed the door open wider, flooding the room with dim grey light. One of the cartons lay open on the bare single bed beside her. ‘It’s someone’s old things. It’s creepy. And there’s no power. And there’s dust and leaves everywhere.’ I left her and entered the only room I hadn’t been in yet. Though it was identical in dimensions to the box room adjoining it, it felt bigger thanks to a large south-facing window. I walked across the room and pressed my forehead to the glass.

  ‘Oh,’ I heard Victoria say behind me. I turned and saw her standing in the doorway, a hand raised to her mouth. I followed her gaze to the back corner of the room, to a wooden swinging cot. She walked to it and touched it. The cot swung stiffly on its hinge.

  ‘You really see us living here,’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll do it up.’

  ‘There’s barely any furniture.’

  ‘I’ll make furniture. And I’ll fix the electrics and the water and everything else. Vic,’ I said, moving closer to the cot, ‘I really think this place could be our fresh start.’

  ‘I don’t know, Dan.’

  ‘I thought if we moved here, maybe we could try again.’ I let this hang in the air between us. She placed both her hands on the rim of the cot and stared down into it.

  Beryl Avenue was draining the life from us. But I had a mission now: I would make Lanes End into a home and get us out of that place. I felt invigorated, giddied by a new sense of purpose. I saw weeks and weeks laid out before me. It was a race against time, against the sinking of the ship. I would have to work all the hours available to me.

  When we arrived back at Beryl Avenue, Victoria paused with a hand on her seatbelt buckle. She seemed about to say something to me but then changed her mind and went inside. Dressed all in orange, she disappeared into the dark hallway like a lantern into the night sky.

  That evening while Victoria was at Battle Ropes class, I received an email from Inbox Inmate. It took me right back to New Year’s Eve. How petulant and foolish I’d been to write anything at all that night. Mortified – and curious – I opened it. What crazy, tattooed convict had responded to me? How would he react to the drunken missive I’d fired off after my mother’s funeral? I scanned the message top to bottom and noticed something strange. A woman’s name? Surely, that must be a mistake.

  Ruby.

  Reading her name for the first time I felt, as you feel fine dust settle on your arm if you sit very still, a tiny speck of danger attach itself to my life.

  ***

  Lucy, forgive me.

  A little over a month ago you so kindly wrote to me and have had nothing by means of reply from me since. I could not blame you for wondering if everything you’ve heard about me were true after all. I daresay you’ve had to endure a few I told you so’s.

  At times over the past month it has felt like you were here in this little room with me. This sensation has made it so much easier for me to set things down on paper; to imagine I am not writing these words for you to read (or ignore) in the future but that I am simply speaking them to you.

  I’ve been at such pains to paint you the fullest picture possible that I lost my grip on time. I realised, as I wrote her name just now, with a right hand that aches and closes in on itself like a claw, that to continue writing this as one letter would only lengthen my silence. I feel myself rushing these sentences. But Ruby is not a topic I can rush. So I’ve decided to drop the curtain here and insert an intermission.

  Please don’t feel the need to respond to this first letter, though of course I should be very glad if you did. It’s late now, I will sleep and begin again in the morning.

  Affectionately yours,

  D

  2

  RUBY

  September 2033

  Dear Lucy,

  I’m sick.

  Three nights ago I went to sleep thinking happily of waking and picking up where I left off
, picturing a full and peaceful morning’s writing here at my desk with the sun shining down on your photo. But I awoke with a woozy head and haven’t written a word since. When I place my foot on the ground I feel like I am trying to step from a moving train.

  Your half-finished gift lies untouched down in the workshop. But this pencil in my hand feels like a crowbar; I can’t imagine lifting an actual tool in my current state.

  It is now the third day of September and I haven’t spoken to another person for nearly two weeks.

  Yesterday I was completely wiped out. I felt hot then cold then hot and I had a muddled brain and I couldn’t focus on anything without feeling a terrible strain at the back of my head. I spent the day sleeping or half-sleeping and nibbling dry crackers under my sheet. In the middle of the night (or was it day?) I thought I heard a sound outside my window. Rustling, like something moving through the grass. I hauled myself to the window to investigate. I couldn’t see anything out there. But once my eyes adjusted, the black trees caught my attention. Propped against the wall I watched them gently sway. To my mind, which had begun to play tricks on itself, it was like a giant wave hello. A smaller black thing, a figure, entered my field of vision, scurrying and skulking like an animal, fast, towards the trees. But it wasn’t an animal, it moved on two legs. I tried to focus on it but my head stung and I had to squint and then turn away as a cold wave of nausea washed over my body. When I looked again, the figure was gone.

  I am writing this after a very strange visit from Gordon. He called this afternoon out of the blue. I let him in, sat down on the bed – which is where I have lived now for four days – and offered him the chair. Straight away I could tell something wasn’t right with him. He was oddly stiff. He made me nervous. I fidgeted with the bed sheets, started pulling them around me. Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook was on the telly. I switched it off. The chef’s strident laughter was hell.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked. Gordon sat at my desk slowly, wearily. Still he did not speak. He looked for a moment at your photo and then opened the desk drawer. I hadn’t the strength to protest.