This Little Dark Place

by A. S. Hatch

  I knocked again at his door earlier and got no answer. Until I can safely dispose of the note I will hide it where Gordon will not find it should he come around snooping again.

  ***

  Throughout the rest of February and March 2016, Victoria and I settled into a curious new routine: an intricately woven dual schedule designed so we would hardly ever see each other. It was like a ballet; a scene where two lovers, soloing at opposite ends of the stage, cross paths again and again and very nearly but never quite touch. She began spending more time at her parents’, often staying the night. But in her absence, I slept like a baby. I spreadeagled in the big bed and because she was not there beside me physically, she faded from my mind.

  On one of these nights I wrote again to Ruby. I kept the laptop in the bedroom now. Peculiarly, knowing now what Ruby looked like, having an image of her in my head made the task of writing to her feel somehow different. I found it difficult to start. I typed out half a dozen first lines and discarded them all. I was hesitant, nervous even. But why? I knew what I wanted to say in the letter, roughly what I wanted to convey, but whereas before I could type with abandon now I found myself taking pains over the wording, measuring my language. Was I trying to sound clever? Was I, in crafting my letter, being less honest? Writing to her in bed felt intimate. Victoria was gone. And here with me, in a sense in her place, was Ruby.

  Here is what I wrote:

  1 March 2016

  Dear Ruby

  I am humbled that you decided to share your story with me. Do you know where Lee is now? Has he ever tried to contact you in prison?

  I once knew a man like Lee. My mother’s second husband Frank. He lived with us throughout my adolescence until he died. He used to abuse her. Night after night. Systematically. I saw the marks on her calves, her thighs and arms, her wrists where he’d tied her up.

  Frank was a religious man. He talked about Jesus a lot. About Jesus’ suffering. The crucifixion. On the day he moved in with us he hung a cross in every room. He went into my father’s workshop, grabbed a claw hammer and a box of nails and went around the whole house. The cross in the bathroom was on the back of the door so when you were sat on the toilet you had no choice but to stare at it. My father was devoutly secular. I have hated the idea of religion ever since Frank entered our lives with his prayers that went on for ages at the dinner table, with his King James Bible that he quoted from all the time, with his insistence that Christmas morning was spent at church and not at home with marmalade and best butter on toast opening presents in our pyjamas.

  I was just a boy, afraid of him too. Once I told my mother I was going to call someone. She begged me not to, made me promise to say nothing. I had never seen fear like that in a person before.

  She used to be so energetic, so bright. She’d throw parties, barbecues in the summer, and my father’s family would come to spend a weekend at the seaside with us. Always a glass of wine in her hand. Always a smile. She changed so much when she was with Frank. He shut off her oxygen, her sunlight, and she withered away. To see the person she’d become by the end, a sort of faded photocopy of my mother, holding his hand dutifully at his bedside in hospital, made me so much angrier than the beatings themselves ever did.

  Over the years following Frank’s death she gradually regained some of her lost colour. But Frank’s reign still cast a shadow. She’d jump at the slightest thing, a toilet flushing, a letter being pushed through the letter slot, a car horn. Frank’s bruises had long since disappeared but the psychological marks he left never faded.

  The cottage was Frank’s. He left it to my mother and she left it to me. But as far as I know she never set foot inside. So there is nothing associated with her inside. No memories, good or painful.

  In a sense my mother’s dementia was a relief. I liked to believe that she was now living in a world in which Frank didn’t exist, the world before they met. I liked to believe that she was – in her head – with my father again. Probably, I thought this to soothe my own guilt.

  Dan

  PS This town has gone referendum mad. A gazebo has gone up in town and a bunch of old former trawlermen sit on plastic chairs and yell Let’s take back our seas! Let’s take back our livelihoods! through a megaphone and thrust leaflets into people’s hands. I don’t think I’ll vote. I’ve enough to occupy my mind. At any rate the outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion.

  One evening I drove to Vic’s parents’ house. I parked the Transporter out of sight around the corner and crouched behind a bush where I had a clear view into their living room. At around ten o’clock, she walked into the living room wearing pyjamas clutching her iPad. Her mother and father, whom I had watched watching telly for two hours, both turned to her. They exchanged some words and then Vic leant down to kiss each of them on the cheek. Then she yawned and left the living room. Seeing her like this allowed me to see her for what she was: a woman in pain. I wanted to rush into the house, to barge upstairs and take her in my arms. To say such nice things to her, to tell her everything would be all right now, that I’d come to my senses and I was sorry and I loved her. But I did not. I could not. Instead I crossed the road, slipped quietly up their driveway and into the back garden. The gate squeaked just as I remembered. I settled myself in a bush at the rear of the lawn and looked up at Vic’s bedroom window. The curtains were drawn but there was a light on. At some point, I lost track of the exact time, I saw, through the conservatory windows, Vic’s mother go into the kitchen, fix herself a glass of water and plod upstairs to bed. For a while my heart would not stop pounding. But it felt good to watch over Vic like this. Even if she didn’t realise I was there, I always was.

  I stayed until I was satisfied the whole family was in bed then I walked back to the Transporter and drove slowly home. A terrible sickness swirled in my stomach.

  Over the next couple of months Ruby and I wrote to each other many more times. At the height of our correspondence we were writing every other day. After the intensity of our early letters, they became lighter in tone. Long rambling notes. Some a dozen pages long. We talked about everything, and nothing. She told me about her childhood in Stoke. She told me about her patients including a Syrian refugee, a gifted artist, who went on to make a living selling paintings. I told her about my own childhood, my friends, what I was into as a kid. I told her about the time I found a bike wrapped up downstairs on Christmas Eve and how I took it for a spin through the empty streets and how a patrolling policeman found me and drove me home and how my father couldn’t hide his pride and amusement. Sometimes whole chunks of text were greyed out, censored, and I wondered what it was she’d tried to say to me, what details had been rubbed out like dirty secrets. I wondered also which parts of my own letters had been redacted and whether these omissions might in some way have skewed the picture she’d assembled of me. She said writing to me made her feel good. I told her the same.

  Throughout this time Victoria began contributing to Scott’s YouTube channel, silently demonstrating exercises while he explained. She lunges and holds the lunge and Scott crouches beside her and runs his finger in the air along the perpendicular lines of her thigh and shin. This is the angle you want, he says. She lies on her back with her hands behind her head and touches an elbow to her bent knee. When you reach this point, squeeze.

  Ruby’s letters were like a drug. I began checking my emails obsessively, refreshing the page over and over. Brazenly, I wrote to her even when Victoria was around. Vic didn’t notice. Invariably, she was either in the kitchen filming herself cooking dinner or doing burpees in the back garden. Ruby’s outlook, I noticed, was changing. She started talking less about the past and more about the future. She made jokes. She wrote haikus:

  Building a new home,

  Danny, with a heart of gold,

  I want to see it.

  Danny, by the sea,

  Free and breezy like a bird,

  Floating on a draught.

  She asked me to describe myself. She painted
me but she would not send the portrait unless I OK’d it. Disclosing my personal address was forbidden by Inbox Inmate, for obvious reasons, but there was a safe way through the programme that inmates could convey physical objects to their correspondents if both parties agreed. I wanted badly to see the painting, to see how she imagined me, and considered getting her to send it. But having our relationship cross over from the virtual to the physical felt like a step too far. Inside my computer Ruby was safely contained. Having something in my hands that she had touched would have felt somehow illicit.

  Or was I simply afraid of what Vic might do if she ever found it?

  By late May, Lanes End was liveable. One day I found a piece of the smashed Charles and Diana plate on the kitchen floor. Diana’s head had broken off cleanly. I stood her up on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. After a bit of minor surgery the grandfather clock began to work again. Its ticking gave the cottage a pulse. I put it in the sitting room opposite Diana. The cottage now had a head and a heart.

  I officially converted the smaller of the two outbuildings into my new workshop, meaning I now never worked at Beryl Avenue. It felt good to work at Lanes End, I had more room and more light. Its four square windows looked out onto the clearing, which filled with sunlight like a bowl every afternoon. I worked with the door open and I could hear the wind in the pines and the tide at the bottom of the rocks beyond the pines and occasionally the distant blaring of a foghorn out in Wilder Bay.

  One evening, as I was enjoying the peace and the blood-coloured evening sunlight, I realised I still hadn’t been inside the shed at the end of the clearing. I grabbed my torch and went over. A broken padlock hung uselessly from the latch. Inside was dark and cool. As I moved I kicked something metallic. I shone the torch at the ground. It was an empty tuna can. I ran my torch in a circle around my feet. More empty cans. Beer bottles. A tattered sheet of tarpaulin hung from four pins in the ceiling. There was a newspaper on the floor. The headline: FIVE MORE DAMNED YEARS. The date: 8 May 2015. Over a year old but too recent to have been Constance Lovett’s. Was someone using the shed for shelter? Lanes End was miles from town; why would a vagrant come all the way out here? The cottage was surrounded on three sides by woodland and on the other by the sea. There weren’t any villages or settlements anywhere near Lanes End that I was aware of. It would’ve taken ages to get here from town on foot. Where are they now? I thought, sensing suddenly that I was being watched. Hiding somewhere out of sight in the woods? I moved swiftly outside and stood in the sun scanning the dark trees, looking intently in every direction, wanting and also not wanting to see something, someone move. But I saw nothing, heard nothing. Warily, with one eye on the treeline, I closed the shed and replaced the padlock.

  I told Ruby about the shed. She thought it was ‘exciting’. She made up this whole back story about an old man who’d once lived in the cottage as Constance’s lover, who’d been thrown out when he had an affair and then, unable to let go, lived in the woods for years keeping watch over her, suffering the pain of seeing other men enter and leave her life, and moving on only after she died a lonely old woman in an unkempt house with overgrown grass.

  I decided I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of anyone being on my property, not even the postman. So I built a letter box and installed a new gate at the turn-off from the road, farther from the cottage than the original gate. I was busy securing a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign to the gate when I heard a vehicle pull up on the road behind me. Muffled soft rock blared inside it. Then I heard the engine switch off and a door open and slam shut. I turned around and saw the back of a man wearing a waxed jacket and flat cap taking a leak into the bushes beside a muddied old Land Rover. He was still zipping his fly when he turned to face me. He had an inhospitable face, a resting grimace that became even less hospitable when he broke into a smile. I did not return his smile. With a wave he began to approach me, crossing the narrow road without looking. There was no need to look; there were never any cars.

  ‘Howdy!’ he called, removing his cap and running his fingers through greasy hair. He came and stood on the patch of grass beside my new letter box. He put his cap back on and leant casually against it.

  ‘Afternoon.’

  ‘So you’re the new owner eh?’ He reeked of booze. I nodded. He looked down the lane behind me. ‘Lot of land.’ I did not respond to his observation. ‘I’m sorry, where are my manners? I’m Max. Gray. Allow me to welcome you to the neighbourhood,’ he said with a grand sweep of his right arm. He offered me a filthy hand.

  ‘Dan,’ I said.

  ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance.’ His handshake was limp. His fingers collapsed in my grip like a bundle of flower stems. The repulsive shock of a limp handshake always makes me feel seasick. I relinquished my grip and his hand slithered from mine. ‘Did you know Ms Lovett?’ he asked. The question completely threw me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘My boys used to bring her farm surplus. Eggs. Milk. Suppose you’ll be wanting the same?’

  ‘I’ll have to talk to the missus.’

  ‘You local?’

  ‘I’m a Wild’ un. Lived here all my life.’ He nodded approvingly. Then, after another pause he said, ‘Well, I was just driving by and thought I’d pull over and say howdy.’

  ‘It was nice to meet you.’

  Gray flashed his small sharp teeth at me, rapped his knuckles against the letter box and walked away. He was halfway across the road when he turned sharply on his heels, holding a finger in the air, and called, ‘I almost forgot!’ He went to his Land Rover and opened the boot. He climbed fully in and, after some frantic rummaging, came out wielding a long wooden post. A square sign was secured to one end of the post. He dragged it across the road upside down. ‘Here you go,’ he said, flipping the sign around and holding it up beside him. In large white lettering on a red background it said: LET’S TAKE BACK CONTROL. VOTE LEAVE. ‘What do you think? It’d be good here,’ he said indicating a spot next to the letter box. He passed the sign to me, removed his cap and began running his grubby fingers through his hair again. ‘Private property eh?’ he said, looking at my new sign. ‘You talk to your missus alright?’ Then he got in his Land Rover and drove away.

  ***

  Yesterday I was in the workshop trying to work on your gift. Usually, work carries my mind away. But today all I could see was the note ‘Don’t trust G’ and Gordon’s suspicious fingers in my video player and the black figure running towards the woods. What does it all mean? I don’t want to know. I don’t want to be involved. I’m tired of mystery.

  Perhaps my ultimate weakness is that I care too deeply about others. I assume their pain, like Ruby did. I wring my hands. I get too close. I allowed Ruby to get too close and I have allowed Robbie to do the same. It exposes me. The note is gone now of course, disposed of, but since it arrived I feel like I’m walking through thick fog. I can sense around every corner someone waiting to attack me. And so today, though the bright outdoors beckons, I have not left this room. I have sat here reading Ruby’s old letters and feeling the old feelings creep slowly up my body like vines, wrapping around me, squeezing me.

  Sleep last night was difficult. But there’s a man down the way who makes his own booze. I tried it once. It’s disgusting but it’s strong. I think I’ll pay him a visit.

  ***

  There were only two weeks left on our lease at Beryl Avenue.

  Victoria hadn’t seen Lanes End since January. One evening, I reminded her as much. She was sat on the couch looking pensively down at her iPad at a photo of herself which she’d spent half an hour altering in various ways; cinching her arms and smoothing her skin until she resembled a grotesque alternate version of herself.

  ‘It’s totally different now,’ I said. She had begun working on the gap between her thighs, widening it somehow so that more of the light from behind her shone through.

  ‘When does our lease run out again?’ She carried on zooming in and zooming out, tapping and pinching, removing,
sanding, reducing, editing her true self from the picture.

  ‘The twenty-sixth. We’re moving in on Heritage Day, Saturday the twenty-fifth.’

  ‘You can take me that week.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘If it means you’ll stop nagging me about it.’

  That night a new letter arrived from Ruby. I could see immediately that this letter was different from the ones she’d sent recently. It was a lot shorter for starters, to such an extent that I assumed it had been truncated by some computer glitch. I scrolled to the very bottom, to where it says ‘Click here to reply to your Inbox Inmate,’ and I caught a glimpse of the last line of the letter, ‘… please don’t hate me’ and I knew something was up. I sensed the tectonics of my relationship with Ruby were about to shift. How had I become so perceptive about a woman I’d never met, but lost all sense of connection with Vic?

  I have copied out her letter in full below:

  6 June 2016

  Dear Dan

  I’ve been lying to you.

  The version of me that you’ve been reading in these letters hasn’t been entirely true. When we started writing six months ago, I was in a terrible place. I don’t cope with life in here as well as I make out. Friendship doesn’t exist here, love doesn’t exist. No one makes eye contact. Everyone is so guarded. I hoped every morning that I would wake to some calamity, a riot, a suicide, a fire, anything that would break the pattern of petty cruelties, of loneliness. New Year’s Eve was particularly hard on me. Jade was meant to visit but couldn’t come because of some delay on the motorway. I woke up on the first of January feeling nothing of the renewal of a new year. I felt only a renewed hopelessness. So when I got your angry little letter it jolted me, made me realise that there was still a world out there. Made me realise how I’d slid into despair. So I engaged. I told you stories about my past, about the reason I’m in here. They weren’t lies. Where I have been less honest is in my feelings. I feel we’ve become so close over these past months. You’ve told me your darkest secrets. I have told you mine. Without your letters I don’t know how I would have survived. In my head we are the only two people in this world who are awake, just like Winston and Julia! I feel I can call you my true friend.