This Little Dark Place

by A. S. Hatch

  Back at Lanes End I asked Ruby to open the Mini’s petrol cap so I could pour the unleaded petrol in. She gave me the keys and said to do it myself as she had to make a phone call. I opened the driver’s side door and pulled the lever to open the petrol cap. I was tempted to have a look in the glove compartment but it was impossible; she was right there in plain view. Once I’d filled up the car, the jerry can was useless to me as I drove a diesel, so I opened the boot of the Mini to put it in. To my surprise there was one already there – and it was filled with petrol. I turned around to look at Ruby: she was walking mindless circles in the middle of the clearing with her Nokia to her ear. She was smirking and giggling, almost coquettishly, in the way women with secrets sometimes did, I thought, recalling Victoria’s face whenever she received a text. Who was she talking to? I put the empty jerry can next to the full jerry can and closed the boot.

  She was finishing her phone call and looking very pleased with herself as she walked back towards me, a dreamy sort of expression on her face.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. That was Jade. She was expecting me back last night so I thought I’d better check in with her. She knew I was coming to meet you. She thought I was crazy reckless for coming. You might have been a complete nutter.’

  There was a long pause as we stood before one another fiddling with our hands.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be off then?’ I said eventually, miserably. She nodded and pressed her lips together in a non-smile.

  There was so much to doubt about her, so much to fear. So why did I feel so wretched about her leaving? An aeroplane passed overhead. I felt heavy, drained of all energy. She made a move then towards the driver’s door.

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ I blurted suddenly. ‘I mean, I want you to stay. For a bit.’

  ‘A bit?’

  ‘Yes. Or more. If you want.’

  ‘Why?’ she said, walking closer to me.

  ‘I’m thinking of redecorating.’ I could think of nothing else. ‘You could help. You could paint.’

  ‘You want me to stay so I can help paint your house?’ I nodded, crossing my arms, trying and failing to conceal the grin that was emerging on my face. ‘And just how long do you plan to have me here?’

  ‘I don’t know. Until it’s finished?’ Or until I figure out who you really are, I added in my head.

  She turned away slowly, making a show of considering my proposition. ‘I’ll stay. But only because your cottage is so depressing.’ She marched past me towards the cottage, clearly enjoying herself. I followed her.

  ‘I thought you liked it? You said it was beautiful.’

  ‘I said the clock was beautiful. I think the word I used to describe the house was traditional. It’s just a bit … gloomy. It needs some colour.’

  ‘See, this is why I need you to stay.’

  ‘Oh yes, you need my artistic vision, sure. I understand.’

  If this all seems terribly impulsive, Lucy, it’s because it was. What Ruby had said about following our instincts rang true, and you have to remember where we’d come from, what we’d suffered, respectively. Yes, there was a voice inside telling me to be wary, reminding me of the things about her that didn’t add up, but my instinct spoke louder and it was telling me to explore this dangerous attraction that I felt. I know she felt this too because – why else would she have stayed?

  Ruby went from room to room scribbling things in a pad that she wouldn’t let me see. Let me work, she said when I tried to grab it. Later we drove to the big Tesco and bought a rotisserie chicken and a baguette and sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine. We talked about her time inside. We talked about my time alone here. We talked about our mothers. Our fathers. Our childhoods. Our letters. The conversation came so easily and I wondered when I had ever talked so much in my life. It was like a great balloon of words had been pierced within and I could feel them rushing up and out of me. It got dark and we said goodnight in the corridor and this time I went to bed and did not barricade the door.

  The next morning she was gone. I had half expected it.

  In the kitchen our wine glasses were still out on the side. The outline of her lips was misty in the morning light. I stood for a time in the doorway of the box room staring at the space she’d occupied in the bed. I went in and straightened the sheets. There was nothing of hers left behind. She’d left no trace except for a single red hair on the pillow. I put it in my pocket. The cartons that she’d knocked over two nights before were still in a mess on the floor. I tidied their contents back inside the cartons and reassembled them into a more solid stack. As I worked I spotted something gleaming under the bed. I lay on my belly and stretched to reach it. It was a steak knife. I turned it over in my hand. Had it spilt from one of the cartons, or had Ruby had this in her handbag? It certainly didn’t match the rest of Constance’s cutlery. It was too modern, too unused. I put it in the kitchen drawer.

  All through the cottage a deep quiet reigned. Alfred was listless. We were alone again. In the bathroom I looked intently at my reflection. I had allowed the outline of my chin to darken. How could I have been so negligent? I grabbed my razor and with shaking hands scraped the stubble off immediately. In my haste I cut myself: a perfectly straight laceration an inch long just above my chin on the right side. I watched it bleed. A red shape, like a tattered sail, painted itself on my chin.

  I went into the workshop and watched the video of Victoria a few times and then felt very low indeed. And then, almost unbidden, the image of Ruby’s sister’s driving licence came into my head. And the full jerry can. And the steak knife under her bed. And then I was opening a new tab and frantically googling. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was just following my nose. I remembered that they were identical twins. I brought up Jade’s social media pages. Jade Holland. Her Facebook page had been used sparingly in the last few years, there was only a handful of very recently uploaded photos. But there were hundreds of photos of her from years before. Christmas pics. Holiday snaps. In one she is standing by a swimming pool somewhere sunny. How she resembled Ruby! And then I looked Ruby up on Facebook too. Ruby Holland. Under ‘Friends’ only one person: Jade. Only one photo uploaded: of Jade. Caption: ‘Twinny!’ The account looked brand new. Granted, she’d just come out of prison, but there was something off about it. I began flicking through Jade’s photos again. Eventually, I found one of Ruby uploaded a couple of weeks earlier. A selfie. She is wearing a bobble hat and you cannot see her hair. Caption: ‘Ruby. My villainous twin.’

  I found no photos of them together.

  Around half-three, drinking tea at the kitchen table, I heard the crunching of wheels on the shale and went outside to investigate. It was the Mini.

  ‘This project is going to take time. A girl needs her bits,’ she said, padding past me into the cottage, a couple of Tesco carrier bags in each hand. I followed her inside to the box room. ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘Oh,’ my hand rose to my chin. ‘I cut it shaving.’

  ‘Jesus, be careful.’ She set the carrier bags down on the little bed, blew out her cheeks. ‘I could murder a brew,’ she said, smiling inscrutably.

  Later, we drove to B&Q. Ruby threw cans of paint into the trolley with abandon. Yellows, reds, purples, blues, greens. Lots of different shades of green. Two very large vats of white. Brushes of all breadths, all types. Rollers. When we got back to the cottage we put everything down in the corridor and stood back looking at the haul, our hands on our hips.

  ‘I’m going to start in there,’ she said, indicating the nursery.

  Over the next few days we established a kind of routine. In the morning one of us would fetch the eggs and milk from the gate (we took it in turns), we’d have breakfast in the kitchen (together), shower (separately), then Ruby would work in the nursery and I’d lock myself in the workshop. After a few hours we’d meet in the kitchen for lunch. Mostly we made sandwiches out of whatever was to hand. One tim
e Ruby cooked soup and we ate it with stale bread made good again in the oven. There seemed always to be a bottle of wine open, always a few empties clustered on the work surface. I found her more and more attractive.

  Ruby would not let me into the nursery. She hung a sheet in the window so I couldn’t peek from the courtyard.

  Sometimes Ruby disappeared for an hour or so. I never knew where she went. She said she went for walks – little wanderings, she called them – down to the sea, the marshland, to watch the birds and the boats way off in Wilder Bay, or into the woods to listen to the trees. Sometimes at night. It was a ‘grounding technique’, she said. A way of getting out of her head – away from the dark memories of prison within, about which she never offered any detail – and focusing instead on something in the present, something tangible. A sound, a smell, a texture.

  Though I kept the latch on the inside of the workshop door, Ruby never once came knocking while I worked. I respected her wanderings and she in turn seemed to respect my workspace. Which was just as well I suppose except this emboldened me to watch Vic’s video constantly. Indeed I kept it on its usual loop while I whittled and measured and hammered and sawed, the volume down low. It was a compulsion.

  Sometimes I used this private time to do more digging into Ruby’s past. I felt guilty doing it but I just couldn’t rid myself of the sense that something was off here, a feeling like I had forgotten or misplaced something. I had never spoken to Jade, but I had seen Ruby out on the clearing supposedly on the phone to her many times. Was it really Jade on the phone? Was the real Ruby Holland still behind bars somehow directing the play? Or was I being paranoid? Ever since I first looked up Jade’s Facebook page my suspicion had only grown. I found the local newspaper coverage of Ruby’s trial and zoomed in on the picture. The caption said: 7 years: Ms Holland. No first name. How had I missed that? Was it important? I hadn’t looked at the picture in all this time. But now that I was looking at it again I sensed I had also seen it somewhere else. I stared at the portrait, at her tired eyes, at her sad smiling mouth. The newspaper credited the photo to Facebook. Frantically, and with an ear to the latched door, I clicked through the dozens and dozens of photos on Jade’s Facebook page until I found it. The very same picture. Jade, in the park. Jade, with a man next to her, cropped out by the newspaper. No caption. Date: 2013. Before the prison term. Was this it then? Proof? Of what? That Ruby was lying to me? That she was Jade posing as Ruby? Or simply that a journalist had been lazy, or sloppy, when they lifted the picture? The story was so short, probably a junior’s work, and in the absence of any social media presence of Ruby’s own, perhaps the reporter simply stole a photo of the identical twin. And who would ever know? Who would ever look closely enough to realise? Who would ever care? But just because there was a possible explanation it didn’t mean my first hunch wasn’t right. It wasn’t yet possible to draw a reliable conclusion. But what I began to grow increasingly certain of was that, one way or another, something strange was happening.

  A week passed. It became time for Ruby to travel back to Stoke for her weekly meeting with her Offender Manager. It was early in the morning and the October sun gave off little warmth. Ruby came at me with a tea towel intended as a blindfold. Her cold fingers fluttered against the back of my neck as she tied a knot. She led me by the small of my back into the nursery.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘OK. Here we go.’ She pulled the tea towel from my eyes. This is what I saw. Plants. Tendrils. Leaves. A forest. I looked up at the ceiling: a canopy of trees. I looked down; dense undergrowth of mushrooms and plants and animals. It was alive. And everything green. Yellow-green. Black-green. Blue-green. Red-green. Not a spot of wall or ceiling had been missed by her brush. Violent colour everywhere. A supersaturation of colour. ‘Look,’ she said, and pointed down at a corner, ‘ivy.’ She traced her pointed finger over a long meandering snake of ivy leaves. It ran behind things, in front of things, twined around things, across every wall, unbroken. ‘I want there to be ivy running through the entire house. I want it everywhere.’ The back of my throat began to harden.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much. It’s …’ I could not articulate myself.

  ‘It was my pleasure.’ She rubbed gentle circles into my back.

  I watched the red Mini disappear around the bend into the woods and instantly I felt loneliness creep forward to the edge of the trees, its nostrils flaring. I went back inside the cottage and did not come out again, not to work, not to watch the video, not for anything.

  I needed to occupy myself, my hands, my thoughts. So I went through the cottage tidying, cleaning. Ruby was messy, and quite content to let me straighten things up after her. I smiled at the little piles of female paraphernalia which I had once been so familiar with, that had begun to amass in little clusters in the box room, the bathroom. Tissues, cotton buds, bobbles. Tubes and pots of cream, lotion and serum the use for all of which men can only guess at. I found a few hairclips lying on the bathroom floor and dropped them into the top drawer of the bedside table in the box room. Something within caught my eye. A box of tablets. I picked it up. There was a sticker on the side.

  SEROQUEL TABS 400mg.

  Take with or just after food. Warning: read the additional information given with this medicine.

  I looked inside. There were no tablets left. I put the box in my pocket.

  That night, now I was alone again, the old fears returned. Lanes End was once again a house of terrors. I tried to pick up Nineteen Eighty-Four again but it was a mistake. I drank but it wasn’t the same alone. I fidgeted and tidied and stood in the nursery for a long time running my gaze over every miraculous detail of Ruby’s mural. The weather was cold now and getting colder each day. I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat on the bed in the box room and read and reread the page in Wuthering Heights that Ruby had saved with a fold; the scene where Heathcliff hangs the dog. I fell asleep there.

  The next morning I went into the workshop with the empty box of tablets and googled Seroquel. It was an anti-psychosis medication. In smaller doses, up to 400mg per day, they were prescribed as antidepressants, used to manage symptoms of anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder. But in larger daily doses, up to 800mg, they were used to manage symptoms of mania and schizophrenia. I looked down at the empty box next to the laptop. These tablets were 400mg each. How many she had been taking each day I had no way of knowing. I rummaged my fingers inside the box, hoping to find an information slip, a prescription, an advisory note, anything that might shed some light. But there were just the two empty tablet trays. I felt nervous jitters taking hold and needed to find something to do. So I closed the laptop, put the empty Seroquel box in a drawer and set about hanging Ruby’s painting. I found a deep, three-tiered well frame, walnut, among the antiques and hung my father’s portrait in the sitting room above the fire, above his books. Now he and Diana ruled the room together.

  The rest of the day I worked on the trunks. When the sun went down I scurried across the shale into the cottage and locked the door behind me. Ruby had awakened something within me that was good, but clearly she’d stirred another part of me too. When I looked at her I didn’t know who I was seeing.

  A few days earlier I had posed as a reporter and written to Inbox Inmate and asked what their policy was when it came to protecting the identity of inmates. That is, did inmates have to use fake names or were they obligated to use their own? Their response gave me no peace. Inmates were protected by the same laws as those on the outside, it said. That is, they might use a pseudonym if they chose or their real name. Exasperated, I broke cover and called their telephone support line from my Nokia, cupping my mouth so the sound wouldn’t travel, to ask specifically about the supposedly recently released Ruby Holland and was politely informed that the Data Protection Act 1998 precluded the sharing of that information.

  That night I dreamt again of motorcycles. Again just the sound. No accompanying imagery. No devi
ls, no monsters, no trapdoors. Just the sound of motorcycle engines distantly revving. In the morning I pulled back the curtains and peered up at the sky. It was cloudy and threatening rain. Ominous weather. But nothing had befallen me in the night. No one had come for me. Not Ruby. Not even Jade.

  When I went to get the eggs and milk something out on the clearing caught my eye. I walked across the grass towards it. The clearing was soft and marshy underfoot. The thing was an empty milk bottle. It was just lying there on its side in the middle of the clearing. Holding it in my hand I looked up and saw now that the shed door was open. As I squelched over to it I wondered how I’d slept through a storm strong enough to force it open. I went to close it but noticed that there was a great puddle of milk on the ground inside. Painted violently across the back wall a dozen yellow splodges; the exploded yolks of twelve eggs. Orange-yellow tendrils had oozed down the wall and mingled with the milk (far too much to have come from just one bottle) and woodchip mulch on the ground. Shards of broken glass bobbed like tiny icebergs in the obscene mixture. I dropped the empty bottle on the ground and ran back across the clearing. I slipped on a slick bit of ground. I stopped and looked down and saw a tyre mark in the grass. It was unmistakably a motorcycle’s. I ran for the cottage, bolts of pain zapping up my body from my bad knee, and into the kitchen. I downed a glass of water and closed my eyes, feeling the cold morning air move fast and rough through my chest. Alfred came fluttering in as though sensing my distress and perched on the windowsill. Did this mean I hadn’t imagined the motorcycle engines? Were they actually out there, riding by night across the countryside?

  Ruby pulled up in the Mini just before sunset. The light was rapidly fading and the trees were losing their colour and individuality, becoming a black spiky mass. I went out to meet her. She turned off the engine and fidgeted a while with something on her lap. As I watched her I began to feel anxious. She’d been away longer than I anticipated and I couldn’t help feeling suspicious about the timing of her return – was it too convenient that she’d been absent the night of the shed incident?