Darkest Minds

by Bacon, Stephen

  Lord, she’d deteriorated during the last year? It hardly seemed long since she’d been chasing estate agents, guaranteeing a smooth purchase of the cottage, packing and then unpacking her own and Tom’s goods. Her husband hadn’t helped much, just as this morning he sat indoors watching sport on TV. If either of them was set for the knacker’s yard, it was chain-smoking Tom . . . But Emma didn’t want to think about that. More likely her present indisposition was due to the long winter. It had done the same to the earth, which was hard as clay.

  But there was something harder underneath.

  What had she struck with the spade? A rock, no doubt. Once she’d caught her breath, Emma scooped loosened chunks of earth to one side and then peered down. Beneath a scattering of soil was a red object. Emma stooped to settle her plump knees on the lawn. Her afternoon shadow shifting from the hole, she noticed that the red was the blank tin lid of a box. A box in the earth. Whatever could it be?

  Just then, a voice hailed her from behind.

  “Em”! How “bout . . . some food, eh? A fella could . . . starve in “ere.”

  “I have it all in hand, dear,” Emma replied without hesitation. “I’ll be with you in just a few minutes.”

  “But they’re off . . . at Ascot . . . any minute. A man needs . . . sust’nance . . . especially when he’s . . . so many notes . . . on an outsider.”

  The awkwardness with which his voice had made its comments led Emma to turn on her fat-padded haunches. In the cottage’s rear doorway stood a pensionable man, still dressed in his nightgown. He’d only got out of bed for lunch, some mackerel on toasted wholemeal bread. His right hand, the nails sharp, pinched a predictable cigarette and his toothy mouth gasped at fresh air. But smoke emerged in grey coils, concealing a face to which time had not been gentle. Whiskers besmirched his upper-lip, as if compounding his wretchedness.

  “You get yourself back inside, Tom. I’ll just finish off here and then get you your tuna salad.”

  “Christ . . . salad!” He inhaled heftily, and then added, “Bloody salad.”

  Now, you know what the doctor told you, Emma opened her mouth to reiterate for the umpteenth time lately, but then her husband was gone. She heard the hawking rasp that was Tom’s attempt at exhalation, and then there was only the quiet, neighbourless day, birds singing sweetly in the nearby woods.

  Emma switched her scrutiny back to the box in the ground.

  The cottage had once belonged to a middle-aged couple whose daughter had moved from North Yorkshire to London in pursuit of a career. Mum and dad, proud and devoted, had soon followed. After successfully selling their Bradford terrace-house to first-time buyers (a lovely young man and woman eager to start a family), Emma and Tom had avoided a dreaded chain. The only disadvantage had been moving at Christmas, but there was no family to inconvenience them. Today had been Emma’s first foray into the garden.

  Might the box belong to the previous owners? But what would anybody wish to hide? Emma used her hands to paw away restricting soil, and then gripped the tin lid until the unit could be shuffled free. After drawing the box from the earth, she placed it on the grass in front of her aching knees. Her nose twitched automatically.

  The metal was flimsy and its red paint was breaking away in ragged chunks. The box was about the size of one of the hardback, big-print novels Emma had been attempting to read lately. On the front, a piece of paper was attached by a bubbling frame of sticking-tape. Untidy penciled handwriting was scrawled across this label; the words were smeared by dirt and blurred by moisture, and yet still legible.

  HERE LYES MICKEY. A GUD MOUSE WHO

  WAS 2 WHEN HE WENT TO HEVEN. LUCK

  AFTER HIM GOD PLEESE. LUV LUCINDA.

  If only Emma were better at reading. Nevertheless, she immediately recognized the combination of MICKEY and MOUSE; this put her in mind of the Walt Disney films her dad had taken her to see so many years ago. Had LUCINDA, the author of this message, received the same treat? Emma also thought she understood HEVEN and GOD. After her mum and dad had died, the priest had come to their home with these words in his black book. Emma had seen them again, years later in her teens, at her parents’ funeral.

  Was the red box a coffin for a dead pet mouse?

  Emma stood frantically, pressing her find back into its grave and then refilling the hole. Moments later, she cut across the lawn and quickly reached the cottage’s rear doorway. She conceded only one brief glance back before entering the building to prepare the food she’d promised her husband.

  “Bugger me, Em’ . . . you took . . . your time!” Tom said between drags of another cigarette while reading Teletext racing results on TV.

  “I had to boil the potatoes slowly.” Emma nibbled a piece of cheese, choosing her words carefully. “Otherwise you’d complain about them being mushy again.”

  After docking his cigarette in a crowded ashtray, Tom picked at his food with a fork. “The whole stuff’s . . . mush anyway, Em’. How ‘bout something decent . . . like pie and chips?”

  “And have your heart strained like last time? No, Tom.”

  She’d spoken with severity – an uncharacteristic act, but necessary on this occasion. Even her husband sensed it and fell moodily silent. But it wasn’t just certain food that was bad for him. His main problem was bronchitis. But asking Tom to cut down on his smokes was like persuading a bird to stop flying, a fish not to swim, or a cat to cease stalking either. Since his retirement from the security company the previous year, Emma had done all she could to ensure that at least he had a balanced diet . . . Supposing he had another heart-attack, a major one this time? Could she handle that? But she didn’t like considering this possibility.

  “At least eat your tuna. You like that. Don’t you remember the sandwiches I used to make for you for work?”

  “Yeah, but where’s . . . the mayo? It’s bone-bloody-dry, woman!”

  “Oh, we’ve been through all this. You have to avoid fat – remember?”

  “Aye, I remember, Em’. There’s nothing wrong . . . yet with my mind . . . you old dog!”

  He was frustrated because he couldn’t articulate his feelings, that was all. He hadn’t meant to call her that. Nevertheless, when Emma gathered up their plates five minutes later (Tom had barely touched his salad and was now smoking another cigarette), she couldn’t help realising how tetchy Tom had grown while being permanently at home. After filling the kitchen sink, she washed-up and glanced through the window, letting her mind drift slowly away.

  Theirs had been no a classic romance. They’d met in 1956, Emma a week shy of her sixteenth. Tom, a twenty-year-old joiner, had been called out to Emma’s aunt’s house after a break-in requiring a new window. Despite a crippling coyness arising from having been orphaned, Emma had been able to talk to him, and she’d been simultaneously flattered and terrified when he’d asked her for a date. The following weekend, they’d danced and talked long into the night. Tom understood about family difficulties, because his own had little time for him. Then less than a month later, he’d proposed marriage. How could she have refused? He was her one link to a world from which she’d always been so dismayingly detached. Of course she’d agreed immediately to switch her surname from Hawes for Carter.

  By circumstance rather than choice (a lack of finance, mainly), their wedding had been low-key, but married life had proved happily uneventful. Tom had worked hard, a solitary night-shift job that suited his wily temperament, while Emma had kept their hole of a home the way he liked it. Every year, they’d drive to Scotland and holiday in remote locations, savouring its majestic emptiness. On balmy nights, they even made slightly embarrassed love, but never so completely that, in local parlance, a “wee bairn” might result. Tom had decided early on that Mr. and Mrs. Carter were not of parental stripe. The years had ticked by, like the irreversible seconds of a biological clock, and then the fondest of Emma’s dreams had come true. They’d been in a position to move to North Yorkshire, back where she’d lived so many years earl
ier, on a farm with her parents, lonely and untutored, and yet blissfully content.

  “Life is good,” Emma whispered, to nobody at all . . . but when she came back to herself in the cottage, her gaze was fixed on that disturbance of soil out in the garden. She thought of the note the girl – Lucinda, Emma recalled through her haze of illiteracy – had taped to the box. “There’s nothing to fear . . .”

  Just then, Emma heard a violent onset of a coughing-fit from the lounge.

  Despite all the hindrances of advancing age, she hurried through the hallway in seconds. Then, after shunting open the lounge door, she spotted her husband hunched on the couch, clutching his chest with his left hand, a cigarette down to the butt in his right. From his throat he made a sound that put Emma in mind of an animal struggling with fur-balls.

  “Tom! Tom! Are you all right?”

  “Ourse . . . I’m . . . ot . . . you . . . old . . . og!”

  Pulling a veil over her comprehension, Emma paced forwards to assist. She relieved him of the cigarette and then hoisted the stubborn bugger to his feet to expand his chest. Tom gave another whooping burst of nicotine-rejection, and the air nearby took on the stench of an ashtray.

  “I’m going to get you to bed, Tom. You’re not well.”

  “On’t want . . . to o to . . . ed! Ucking ell . . . what a . . . itch!”

  Emma decoded none of this, her mind focused on steering her defenceless husband to the doorway, along the hallway, and finally into the bedroom at the front of the cottage. There she removed his slippers, peeled back a diagonal of duvet, and lowered him in his dressing gown onto the mattress. He still jittered and bucked like a captured cat, but Emma was able to lay him down and tuck him in. A minute passed, and then the fit finally subsided. Now there was near-silence.

  “It’s for your own good, Tom,” Emma explained. But she anticipated squealing protest . . . and got it.

  “Bring . . . me . . . my fags,” her husband demanded, between several strenuous gasps.

  Something heavy rolled against Emma’s heart – fear, she thought. “Oh, Tom, why won’t you understand? You’ve only got one life. You’re going to end up killing yourself.”

  “Worse ways . . . to go.”

  “But what about me, Tom?”

  “Oh, you’ll be . . . all right, Em’. It’s all . . . in the will. And so what . . . are you . . . worried about? Now please . . . ” The latter word was spoken with hissing venom. “. . . if you . . . want me . . . to stay here . . . like a good little . . . scaredy-cat husband . . . will you . . . get me . . . my bloody fags?”

  Emma fled, tears blurring her vision. In the lounge she located the cigarettes and angrily snatched up the packet, squeezing it in one fist. This was quite unlike her. And quite unlike him. Why was Tom behaving this way? They’d been married for over forty years, and he’d never spoken to her with such . . . disrespect.

  Standing there, in the delicately decorated centrepiece of her delightful new home, Emma had a terrible thought. Had her husband always been this way? After all, it was only recently that she’d spent so much time with him. His employment with the security-firm had kept him away six nights in every seven, and he’d slept through much of the days. Had Sundays at home, and the few hours snatched between shifts, been all he could tolerate in his wife’s company? Ditto their infrequent holidays and alcohol-facilitated Christmases? Was that all her husband thought of her?

  “Em’! What the . . . bloody hell . . . d’you think . . . you’re playing at?”

  And almost every time he’d addressed her lately, he’d called her Em’ – a dislike of Emma’s Tom was fully aware of.

  With habitual haste, Emma returned to the bedroom and offered him the cigarettes. A look of curiosity falling from his face, Tom was sitting up in bed, perched crookedly against the headboard.

  “I’ll get you a pillow for your back,” Emma proposed, testing her husband’s attitude.

  “I don’t want . . . a pillow.”

  “You can use mine. It’s plump and fluffy.”

  This was certainly a fine creation; Emma had made it herself. The patchwork pouffe – multi-coloured, lovingly stitched – was on her side of the bed, just beside her husband’s elbow.

  “I don’t . . . want plump, Em’. I don’t . . . want fluffy, Em’. I just want . . . my television, Em’. Switch it . . . on for me . . . would you . . . Em’?”

  At least he’d made a request and not squealed a command. As Emma reached up to activate the wall-mounted television, she sought the button for Channel 4. The racing was being broadcast until six this evening; Tom had told her this yesterday. Just then, she realised how considerate she was. She turned to her husband to observe him lighting another cigarette. Was that the reason for his sudden mellowness, his purring contentment?

  “There. Thank you. I’ll be . . . okay now.”

  He was being nice. She’d clearly been overreacting. With hope, she said, “Call me if you need me, won’t you, dear?”

  “I will.”

  As a racing commentator grew increasingly irascible and the gallop of hooves mimicked the speed of her perplexed heartbeat, she paced out.

  Emma spent the following few hours in the garden. It was cooler now, the evening sun dipping behind a hilly horizon, and she was able to work freely, with only the limitations of her ailing body. But she dug with surprising purpose, suspecting that much of this energy was generated by mixed emotion.

  Tom had been quiet since the episode after tea – almost too quiet, Emma feared. While contemplating his plight, she found herself staring at the patch of earth under which she’d haphazardly replaced that box. This continued to disturb her. What was her stupid mind – it had always been stupid, ever since infancy, as far back as she could remember – attempting to communicate to her?

  The coffins. That was all she’d seen of her parents’ final moments on earth. Then they’d been lowered into it. Her dad had found the body of her mum, and a farmhand had found that of her dad, who’d committed suicide after his wife had suffered a heart attack. From the funeral, all Emma could remember were the mousy hands of her aunt weighing on her shoulders. More recently, in magazines Emma had attempted to read and the few daytime shows she watched now she had access to television, she understood what specialists meant by depression. It was a dumb weight, with nothing you could do to shrug it away. Though her aunt had died in 1964, Emma believed she’d never ever thrown off that imposition. And was its name death?

  The sky had dimmed to a shade of purple, like an unhealed bruise. Again Emma examined the border that possessed such secrets. Should she dig up the box again, and this time, see what horrors it held? The world was so quiet tonight; even birds had murdered their song. A full moon opened its bloody assault on a night that threatened to last forever.

  Emma put her spade into the earth she’d turned over earlier.

  And then hesitated, fighting anxiety.

  But moments later, she was gone, back to the cottage, quickly inside and through the kitchen, down the hallway, and finally into the main bedroom, the one in which Tom lay unmoving in the sheets. There was a strange smell. Emma’s nose, sniffing anxiously, detected this fetid odour at once.

  God, no. Tom! Emma hurried forward almost soundlessly and then crouched to her husband’s side. That was when she noticed what her panic had masked upon entry: the erratic rise and fall of the duvet, the soft, liquid blubbering of Tom’s breathing. The horrid smell was a persistent expulsion of nicotine-laden air. Her husband was asleep. More crucially, he was alive. Thank God.

  Was this the beast that so frightened her? As Emma locked up the cottage, preparing for sleep, she reflected hard upon this question. But even after stripping off her sensible clothing and showering dirt from her small body, she was no nearer a conclusion. Once she’d slipped into a nightdress and climbed into bed, she cuddled her pillow for support, taking comfort from its gentle patches of fabric and imperceptible joints. Just behind her, Tom continued with his rough slu
mber, but Emma knew it wasn’t this that would keep her awake. She had presently so many other concerns to conquer.

  She’d never seen a dead body. Emma sometimes suspected this was why she’d lived without ambition, why her future now seemed so bleak. Could a single fear govern a soul for nearly sixty-one years? Emma was beginning to believe that was true. But what to do about it? She looked at the digital-clock on her bedside table, whose red figures heralded midnight. This was getting ridiculous; it was way beyond her usual wakeful period. She would have to get up and . . . and . . . But although she’d resolved to make herself a mug of hot chocolate, Emma knew exactly what she planned to do.

  Once the drink was gone, she unlocked the back door. She slipped outside in her nightdress, but that was no problem; the air tonight was warm and there were no neighbours in miles. She paced barefoot across a prickly-dry lawn to halt at the spade, which she’d left ramrod in soil at the spot now marked in her mind with an X. Then she burrowed. The box came free with only minimum effort. Moments later, she was on her knees, the moonlight a crystal pool around her, and the treasure laid out in front of her. With an edgy breath, Emma lifted its lid.

  The skeleton of the mouse lay inside, amid a spider-web tangle of withered grass: its final resting place. Alongside the corpse were rotted fragments of a plant stem; enough remained of its thorns to tell Emma that this had been a rose, even though the petals had dissolved into all the mush swimming in the box’s base. Despite such decay, Emma could perceive how charming the coffin was, how quietly dignified. And the cadaver of the mouse? Ordinary, undramatic, harmless . . . Emma looked up into a nothingness of darkness. Was this all she’d been afraid of for such a long, agonizing time?

  That poor girl, Emma thought, her thumbs brushing the paper attached to the front of the box. Then an instinct any TV expert might have called “maternal” swept through Emma. She glanced again into the box she cradled in her parted hands. She pictured the lovely Lucinda – a blessed child, pretty and clever in ways Emma had never been – placing her beloved pet into the earth, sobbing inconsolably. Emma knew this feeling well, the painful and yet silent despair, like a storm in the soul. An emptiness, a loneliness that never went away. She wept.