This Little Dark Place

by A. S. Hatch

  ‘Dan.’ I heard Victoria’s voice in the doorway.

  I did not look to her. ‘Have you seen this?’

  ‘Dan,’ she repeated.

  ‘There are times when it is right to ask the people themselves,’ said the prime minister.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ I said.

  ‘Dan, we need to talk.’

  ‘Head, heart and soul. I held nothing back,’ the prime minister insisted.

  ‘What’s going to happen now?’ I said.

  ‘Dan, I’m not coming with you tomorrow.’

  ‘This is not a decision I have taken lightly,’ said the prime minister. I had heard Vic’s words but they were muffled, as though she were in another room.

  ‘I’m leaving you.’

  ‘There’s no need for a precise timetable today,’ said the prime minister.

  ‘I’m going to live with Scott.’ The camera zoomed slowly out to a wider shot to take in the prime minister’s wife. She looked on the verge of breaking down, and it was only the sight of this, of another person’s sadness, that triggered my own emotions. I felt heat building up behind my eyes. I was still staring at the telly. Vic was stood behind me in the doorway. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ The prime minister’s wife reached out towards him. The gesture, the way she held her hand out in the air towards him, like a mother waiting at the school gates for her son, was the same gesture Victoria had made last night. They disappeared into Number Ten, the prime minister rubbing tender circles into the small of his wife’s back. I understood now that Victoria’s touch was ‘goodbye’.

  Rooted to the spot, I watched the horror unfurl on the telly while Vic made repeated trips up and down the stairs to fetch her suitcases and boxes. ‘Dan?’ she said after a time, I have no idea how long, ‘The TV?’ Finally, I looked at her. Why was she asking me about the TV? ‘The TV is mine.’ She gently removed the remote from my grip.

  My trembling fingers stayed open, caged around nothing. She unplugged the telly and then with some difficulty carried it away. I heard the boot of a car close outside. Moments later she came back into the living room. I was still motionless, mouth agape, quite insensible. ‘Are you going to be alright?’ she said. A vision of her appearing from the dancing crowd that first Christmas Eve came back to me. My breaths became shallow and rapid. I closed my eyes and the memory played in reverse; she receded into the crowd. I opened my eyes and watched her remove her house key from the keyring and place it on the coffee table. Then she left and I heard the coupé fire up outside. I don’t remember anything after that. I have no recollection of the rest of that day.

  At ten the next morning – moving day – the landlord came to collect the keys.

  Not long after, I was in the Transporter and driving away, finally, unhappily, from Beryl Avenue with Alfred beside me, his shrouded cage strapped into the passenger seat.

  The traffic into Wilder town centre was unseasonably heavy. It was hot and sticky in the van and I had to crack a window open. I heard the sound of faraway whistles and tooting horns. I looked in my rear-view and noticed that the car behind me was decorated with coloured tinsel and paper. A Union Jack had been tied to the bonnet.

  It was Wilder Heritage Day. I had completely forgotten. The town bustled with people like it never did for the 364 other days of the year. The street was lined from the promenade all the way east towards the edge of town and the marina with gazebos and tables, people serving cakes, orange juice and beer. I could hear a brass band and pounding dance music and both above and beneath them the unintelligible and disorienting sound of three and a half thousand clamouring voices. I rolled slowly along the high street, piercing through the crowd like a boat through thick swampland. People were walking in the road, touching the Transporter with their hands as I passed them. A group of costumed girls danced an Irish jig in front of Poundland. A police horse was being petted on its nose by a group of children and moving backwards in jittery circles while its handler tried to soothe it. A lamppost had been dressed as a maypole and around it a group of men clad in traditional English white pranced and leapt.

  I heard something slam violently into the Transporter. I looked up to see the swaying figure of Max Gray. A half-smoked cigarette hung from his mouth. He was clutching a can of Special Brew in one hand and a blue carrier bag in the other. He held his can aloft like a trophy. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be dancing to some music inside his head. The ash on his cigarette was an inch long. It began to dawn on me that he didn’t recognise me; that he hadn’t slammed my bonnet in salutation but simply because my bonnet was there. Eventually, he staggered off the road and onto the pavement, tripping over the kerb. A pair of lanky boys followed after him. One was wearing a tracksuit, the other jeans and Union Jack T-shirt. The one in the tracksuit, the smaller one, spat on the road in front of the Transporter.

  After Gray I felt shaken. Alfred flapped inside his cage, perhaps in protest at the noise and the heat. The sky shimmered and vibrated with a superabundance of energy. People dabbed their foreheads, the elderly with handkerchiefs and tissues, the young with the bottoms of their T-shirts or their sleeves. The Fire Service had set up an antique fire engine outside the station and were spraying a fine mist over the street. Topless children ran through its rainbow arc squealing. The firewomen and firemen were clad in full uniform but had peeled the top half of them down like bananas.

  I turned left towards the marina. Here the crowd was even thicker. I saw the spot where my father used to park his van and point out the boats as they passed by. The now-defunct RNLI station rose above the marina. On its balcony, as was tradition, an appointed old and snow-bearded man announced each passing vessel. Without exception every boat flew a Union flag. Here’s Reg Turner aboard the Princess of the Sea, said the old man. Reggie has been campaigning against the CFP for decades. Everyone, show your appreciation for good old Reg. Give him a round of applause. The crowd clapped. Then the old man began to shout: No longer will our livelihoods be dictated to by fat cats in Brussels! No longer will the likes of Reggie and his family suffer because of anti-British laws. We told Brussels we want our seas back! And that’s what we’re gonna get! A roar went up around the marina. The people lining the edge of the water produced, almost in unison, little paper Union flags and started waving them hysterically about their heads. This happened for each boat. I had no idea the people of Wilder even cared. But apparently, after all, they did. And they were frenzied in their emotion. They waved their flags and bounced their babies as if we’d just won some glorious victory. I didn’t care like they did. I didn’t feel like they did. In that moment I had no feelings, my nerves had been sanded down and cauterised. I could only gawp at these people as at strange exotic creatures in a zoo. This joy on their faces, this display, this turnout. It was unfathomable to me. These people were inscrutable. I rolled out of town away from the horns and the whistles and the klaxons and the voices, like a loner leaving a party early.

  I was alone in taking the left turn into the country lanes. Everyone else went right.

  The relative silence of the countryside was intense. The trees were lush, the fields pregnant and swaying. The cows kneeled in shade and moved their full mouths in slow circles.

  As I approached the turn-off to Lanes End I spotted a yellow sign by the gate. It said: SAVE OUR COUNTRYSIDE. SAY NO TO FRACKING. I stopped to open the gate. I checked my new mailbox. It was empty. I drove along the lane through the woods and pulled up on the shale. Clutching Alfred’s cage by the handle I went to the front door. The sun was hot on my back. A gust of sea wind flared and the tall trees surrounding the cottage made sounds like conspiratorial whispers.

  ***

  Today was the last day of September. Robbie came back. He just flounced in and switched the telly on. I was slightly overcome at the sight of him. He sat with his back to the wall. Still writing letters? he said, totally deadpan. You’re so old-fashioned. Don’t know why you don’t just pick up the phone. His face was covered in
bruises, cuts, welts. His right eye was swollen shut. It wept constantly. I asked Robbie everything. He did not answer any of my questions. I told him I had been looking for him, that I had been worried about him. He would not engage except when I rose from my chair to announce that I was going to report his assault. He leapt from my bed and pleaded with me not to. He pulled at my sleeves and prevented me from leaving the room. The fear in his eyes reminded me so much of my mother when I was a teenager and she stopped me from going to the police over Frank. It disarmed me and I fell heavily back into my chair. Clearly, he’s suffered a significant trauma and I will have to be patient with him. I promised him I wouldn’t report it. I calmed him, got him to sit back down on the bed. His left eye had wept a shiny trail all down his face. I fetched him some more tissues. He looked so pathetic forming one into a soft point and dabbing it into his eye. Watching him, I was moved. He was like a child.

  I wonder if you have read my first letter.

  Lucy, I am getting now to the bit you must be waiting for and dreading. I promise to leave nothing out. I will simply replay everything in my head and transcribe what I hear. It is time now for bed, I am writing this by moonlight. I will start again tomorrow, in October.

  Affectionately yours

  D

  3

  october

  October 2033

  Dear Lucy

  In four weeks the clocks go back. Spring forward, fall back. That means I have four weeks left of British Summer Time. Four weeks before the nights draw in. And shortly after that, as if emboldened by the darkness, Halloween.

  It was never a significant occasion for me growing up. I remember once, I was six or seven, wandering the streets with a toy joinery set attached to my father’s utility belt: saw, hammer, spirit level, pencil behind my ear. I jangled plastically through our streets knocking on doors. One person came to the door and said ‘trick’ and I didn’t have a clue what to do. I had no tricks. I just walked to the next house bemused.

  Everyone thinks Halloween is a bit of fun: a childish parade. But Ruby took it more seriously than that. Ruby taught me its true meaning. It is actually meant to be the time of year we remember the dead, the saints and the martyrs. Now every Halloween I make sure to remember mine. The dead (little Daniel), the saints (Father), the martyrs (Mother).

  Robbie’s weeping eye seems to be getting worse. I said he should see a doctor. He waved my concern away but he’s begun talking about his great love Maud again, which I take as an encouraging sign. Yesterday, apart from his battered and discoloured appearance, there was something deeply unsettling about his persona, about the way he ignored my questions. He’s hiding something, I’m certain of it.

  ***

  It was sometime in the middle of July before I experienced the conscious thought: this is now my home. I was down by the rock pools, at the bottom of what I had come to think of as the cliff, behind Lanes End. I was wearing the waxed jacket, the one I had found hanging up in the corridor, which I wore now always. I had a pocket full of shells and a pocket full of pebbles. The tide was out. I bent down to look into one of the pools of water and I saw my newly bearded reflection and I thought: this is me, this is my home.

  Sometimes the sea rose all the way up the cliff and when I slept with the bedroom window open I could hear it dashing itself against the rocks. I looked out across the flat wet sand. The sea receded so far from the shore here that I sometimes doubted its return. The peaks of the Lake District, hazy and lilac on the horizon, and the great bay gave me a sense of security, of insulation, but also of melancholy. I came down here often to trawl through these rock pools for shells and pebbles, though I wasn’t sure why. I liked the smell of the rock pools and the way the landscape looked peaceful, deathly quiet as in the aftermath of some great natural disaster or war. In the whole time I’d been living here I had never once seen another person.

  I went back towards the cottage. I climbed barefoot from rock to rock, right and then left, to get back up the cliff. I found my boots, with socks neatly balled inside them, at the top. When I had put them back on I went through the trees and entered the cottage by the back door into the kitchen. Alfred was standing on the kitchen table.

  ‘You’re up,’ I remarked. And then it came to me. ‘Look what I’ve got,’ I said, and showed him a handful of the shells from my left pocket. ‘Come on!’ I went through into the nursery where I had installed his cage and upended my pockets onto the floor in a pile. ‘Look at those!’ Alfred had followed me obediently into the nursery and was inspecting the haul, leaping and stooping around it. He liked to arrange them into displays on the floor. His favourite specimens made it to the floor of his cage, which I left open. He was free to wander around the cottage as he pleased. I had initially opened his cage in a fit of petulant self-destructive pity. ‘Go, like all the rest!’ I urged. ‘Go on! Piss off you murderous little bastard!’ But Alfred never left. I could leave all the windows and doors open and he still never left. Now we were friends.

  Victoria had taken everything with her. I used Constance Lovett’s things now. I owned nothing apart from my tools in the workshop and my clothes, and apart from what I had installed during the renovations (fridge, cooker) there was no technology whatsoever at Lanes End. I lived in an austere and antiquated way surrounded by old-fashioned furniture and using old-fashioned things. The stovetop kettle’s whistle sounded like a train arriving. Constance’s cutlery was basic and slightly stained. Her crockery on the other hand seemed too fine to use on a daily basis and so I took all of my meals from the same blue bowl. I left the rest as they were, wrapped up in newspaper in the plastic cartons in the box room. Those cartons were a trove. A lifeline. They saved me from half a dozen trips to the shops and encounters with people, which I was at pains to avoid. I was content in my isolation. Gray’s eggs and milk surplus carried on appearing. He just left them on the grass by the gate. Sometimes only a couple of eggs, sometimes the full complement. Once or twice just milk. Never an accompanying note. I accepted them happily and without question. I walked up the lane with the waxed jacket over the top of my pyjamas and bent down and hooked them towards me through the slats in the fence, quickly, in case someone should be out there waiting to, God forbid, speak to me.

  I fantasised about Scott dying. I pictured him being crushed beneath his own weights. Arrogantly lifting more than he was able: the bar would descend like a slow-motion guillotine towards his heaving chest. The bar rolled backwards from his crushed ribs – a deadly rolling pin – onto his neck, and his legs would flail and kick like a fly sprayed with insecticide. In my head the scene played out like a snuff film, a grainy YouTube clip. It went viral, it was a sensation.

  One day I discovered a telephone in one of the cartons and plugged it into the wall socket in the criss-crossing corridors. I knew I would have to rejoin the flow of society one day; I couldn’t live like this forever. But as I heard the dialling tone I knew I wasn’t ready yet. Society would have to wait.

  I spent a lot of time outdoors. There was marshland beyond the rock pools and I would head aimlessly into its infinite expanse. If I walked far enough west I could make out Wilder on the horizon. That was the point at which I always turned back. Other times I walked through the woods that surrounded the house. There was no purpose to those walks. I spent a lot of time just wandering about in the waxed jacket. I would go to great lengths to avoid getting in the Transporter and driving to the little shop on the road into Wilder. I found an apple tree and for a whole week ate nothing but stewed apples and sugar for breakfast and scrambled eggs for dinner. I lost weight. I bent over in front of the bathroom mirror once and pinched the folds of my belly skin between my thumb and fingers and felt it disappear as I straightened up. I let my hair and beard grow.

  Ruby’s fiction about Constance’s ex-lover keeping a silent vigil over the cottage kept creeping into my thoughts and preventing sleep. I couldn’t shake the thought that there was someone out there, a man, hiding amongst the trees, at th
e edge of the clearing, between the outbuildings, by the back door. Just standing. Watching. Every night he reappeared in my thoughts. Unable to sleep I would climb out of bed and stare at the trees and the bushes, sometimes for an hour or more. Conditioned by years of alarms I still woke early each day. As a consequence, during those first few months at Lanes End, I slept hardly at all.

  One night I had an accident. There was a powerful storm. I have always been mesmerised by heavy rain. I can watch it for hours. Ever since I was a kid. I went to the bedroom window and stared out across the clearing. I felt an urge to be out there in it. I stamped into my boots and dashed outside, leaving the front door open behind me. My sense of direction was obliterated. It was so loud. I felt like I was stood next to some massive churning machine. A yellow fork lit up the sky and I ran into the trees to await the thunder. After a few seconds it sounded somewhere far off, deep and guttural, like an animal growling a warning. The rain was unrelenting. It seemed an impossible amount of water was falling from the sky. But I could not go back inside yet. I was manic and I went deeper into the narrow band of trees and down towards the cliff and the fields of reeds beyond where I had not yet explored. I pressed on through the darkness skipping from stone to stone, running, pumping my arms. I could see nothing, except when the lightning returned to cast a strobe across the landscape. The terrain was uneven. I was moving too quickly. I snagged my foot on a rock and felt my body twisting, falling. I groped at the air. Right before my body made contact with the ground I experienced the sickening realisation that I was going to hurt myself. Then my body met the ground, and consciousness was shaken from my mind upon impact.