One day I caught Bain smoking behind the garden shed. A normal response would have been to punish the child, deliver a stern lecture and confiscate the cigarettes. But we were in no normal situation. Instead, I merely sighed and helped myself to a cigarette out of the packet. I leaned against the shed wall and lit up, inhaling smoke into lungs that had not been abused in such a fashion for the better part of fifteen years.
I smiled at Bain. “Don’t tell Mum,” I said.
“I won’t,” he said, smiling back. We finished our smokes in silence and luxuriated in our guilty camaraderie.
***
“I went to see a psychic today,” Mia said one evening. It was the end of a particularly trying week; the children had gone from sly avoidance to open defiance whenever their mother tried to drag them off to some specialist or another, and Mia was angry at me for taking their side.
“And?” I pretended mild indifference, keeping my eyes on the TV screen as I channel surfed without taking any of it in. There was something in her tone that made my hackles rise, and I steeled myself for another confrontation.
“The spirits told her that my intuition has been right all along, and that we have some hereditary disease. Something genetic. It’s rare, she says, and the symptoms haven’t manifested yet, which is why it hasn’t been diagnosed. Apparently, we’re all ticking time bombs. She says I should go back to the doctors and request DNA testing.”
DNA testing . . . panic made me explode. I leapt up from my seat, grabbing her by the shoulders and dragging her to her feet, and shook her until her teeth rattled.
“For fuck’s sake, Mia, this has got to stop! We’re all fine! We don’t need DNA testing, or any other kind of testing! The only one sick around here is you—sick in the head.”
I regretted my words the instant I uttered them. It was what we had all been thinking, or muttering behind Mia’s back, but been afraid to voice for fear of making her worse. I expected her to react with tears or anger, or both, but instead a curious calm came over her. She took a deep breath and shook her head, even giggling a little as she spoke.
“A psychic told me . . . Yeah, I can see how you might think that sounds a little crazy. Maybe I’m just stressed, or overtired. I probably just need a little break. A couple of days away on my own to get a bit of perspective.”
“Yeah, maybe . . .” I drew her into a hug and muttered an apology into her hair. “I’ll book you into a hotel somewhere nice,” I promised. “Somewhere in the country, with a day spa.” She nodded her assent, but the rigidity of her body told me that this was only a temporary truce, and the battle was far from over.
***
For a few months after Mia’s getaway, things in our household were almost normal. She let up on the dietary restrictions, and there were no more unnecessary visits to medical practitioners. The children began to relax a little, although they still held their mother at a slight distance, as if she were a not-quite-tamed animal that could turn on them at any moment.
Then one night I came home from work to a cold, dark and silent house. I thought at first that everyone had gone out, so I jumped, startled, when I switched on a light to find Mia sitting at the kitchen table.
“What’s going on? Where are the kids?”
“I sent them all to their rooms,” she said. Her voice was strained, as if her throat were in the grip of a giant, unseen hand. She stared down at an opened envelope and several sheets of folded A4 paper on the table in front of her, turning the pages over and over reflexively, her face obscured behind a curtain of glossy, black hair. She lifted her head to look at me, her expression held unnaturally still.
“I had DNA testing done on all of us,” she said. “I had to be sure.”
I gripped the back of a chair to stop myself from falling. “How . . . how did you manage to do that without us knowing?”
She waved a hand in dismissal. “Oh, you’d be surprised where you can get DNA samples if you’re trying to be secretive—toothbrushes, nail clippings, snot on a used tissue . . . saliva from cigarette butts . . .” she said, pointedly emphasising the latter. I had visions of her gathering her materials, not to conduct scientific tests, but to create voodoo dolls of us all.
She rose from her chair, suddenly incandescent.
“You knew, didn’t you?” she yelled, punctuating each word by poking me in the chest with a sharp-nailed forefinger and sending me backpedalling into the kitchen bench. “I gave you that box of my mother’s letters, and you must have read them, and you MUST have recognised yourself in that one letter, and you said NOTHING! You let me conceive all those babies, and you . . . you . . .” She stopped, speechless with rage and revulsion.
“I didn’t know for sure,” I protested. “I only suspected . . .” I glanced behind me, checking for any readily accessible weapons, not for myself but to keep them away from her; if she could reach a knife at that moment, she would surely plunge it into my heart.
The children, drawn out by the noise, emerged one by one from their various retreats about the house. They were all graceful and gorgeous, magnificent young creatures as they walked past their mother and came to stand at my side.
“‘Suspected’? Just your suspicion alone should have been enough to end it. You should never have married me. I should have aborted Layla, drowned Bain in the bath and got as far the fuck away from you as possible.” Spittle flew from her mouth and hit me in the face, but I did not wipe it away, my hands being too occupied trying futilely to shield my children’s ears from her obscene rant.
At my shoulder, Bain stiffened. “What are you on about now, Mum?” he said scathingly. Mia looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. There was no rage left in her now, only a bone-deep despair.
“It’s OK,” I murmured to Bain. “I’ll handle this.” Poppy pressed closer to me and chewed on her thumb nail, just like her mother did in times of stress. Just like I had done at the same age.
“Look at them,” I said to Mia, gesturing at our children. Except that with each passing moment they were becoming less our children and more my children. “How can you call them a mistake?”
And she did look, for long moments, assessing the physical and psychic distance between us. “They’re just kids . . .” she muttered to herself, but whether the ‘just’ meant that they had yet to reach maturity or that, being only children, they had little value, I wasn’t sure.
“OK, Andy,” she finally said. “You want them so much? They’re yours. For now. But they will grow up and come to understand what you have done, and then you’ll lose them. Remember this—as soon as they turn eighteen, I will reclaim them.” This last sentence she spoke with vehemence and ritualistic slowness, as if uttering a curse or casting a spell.
Then she turned and walked out of the house. It was the last time any of us saw her alive.
***
Mia had left the house empty-handed except for her car keys. She made no attempt to access bank accounts or contact friends, no witnesses came forward to say they’d seen her anywhere, and no body matching her description was ever found. The only trace of her was the car, which police found abandoned in a semi-industrial area some fifteen kilometres from our home. She had simply vanished off the face of the Earth. I took to visiting the site where they’d found the car in the vain hopes that I would find some hitherto undiscovered evidence there, or that she would reappear as magically as she had disappeared. The urine-soaked and graffiti-splattered alleyway yielded no clues, yet it became something of a weekly pilgrimage for me to go there; it was the closest thing I had to a grave. Sometimes I imagined I could hear her voice whispering at me from the darkest recesses of the alley, but it was only the wind stirring the leaves and the echoes from my memories.
As for the kids, I was at once relieved and disturbed at the ease with which they flowed to fill the space left by their mother. There should at least have been tears or misbehaviour, but instead they acted as if she never existed, as if they had sprung, godlike, directly f
rom my loins. They never asked why she left, and I never volunteered the answer.
In fact, they thrived without her. Mia’s absence seemed to have removed the shackles from their potential; all of them clever young things before she left, they grew tall and gifted, excelling at school and each possessing a particular prodigious talent. Bain was a sports star, Layla a mathematician, Charlize a musician, Sebastian a writer and Poppy an artist. The future for all of them was blindingly bright.
We’d all forgotten Mia’s parting words when, three days after Bain’s eighteenth birthday, a drunk driver steered her car into his, killing him instantly. If I’d had concerns about my children’s lack of emotion when their mother left, I needn’t have worried; the remaining four shed tears aplenty at their brother’s graveside, and continued to grieve extravagantly in the months after his death.
We lost Layla to meningitis, which she contracted whilst on a camping trip with friends. I barely let the remaining three out of my sight after that, not that they wanted to stray far from home anyway in the wake of such tragedies. Charlize in particular became very withdrawn. She slept a lot, and during her waking hours she took to playing one mournful note over and over again on her cello. I put the changes down to depression and grief, but it turned out they were caused by the brain tumour that killed her the day after her eighteenth birthday.
I continued my visits to ‘Mia’s Alley’, as I privately called it. Some days as I stared into the darkness, the darkness stared back, the shadows shifting and coalescing for moments into shapes almost human before dissolving back into meaninglessness. The day before Sebastian turned eighteen, I went to plead my case.
“Please stop, Mia,” I whispered, feeling ridiculous but continuing regardless. “You have three now; leave me Sebastian and Poppy. Or one of them, at least. Surely you can see how much we’ve suffered already.”
The wind moaned in response. Bargain with your own children’s lives, would you? it seemed to mock. Go home, old man. Go home to your grief.
***
We celebrated Sebastian’s birthday by closing the curtains and huddling inside, eating canned food and lighting candles for our fallen which I would blow out within minutes for fear of one toppling and setting fire to the house. Poppy and I took turns standing guard over Sebastian while he slept, and he complained about how creepy it was to have someone staring at him all the damned time.
Nine days later, he was still alive. For the first time since Bain died, I began to feel, if not happy, at least hopeful that Mia’s curse had been broken, or perhaps never existed in the first place. We drew back the curtains and opened the windows to let in some fresh air—which is when a bee flew in the window and landed on Sebastian’s neck. He couldn’t have seen what it was, only felt it brush against his skin. I leapt to stop him but I was too late; he slapped at it, and yelped when it stung him.
He went into anaphylactic shock, and died before the ambulance could arrive. I racked my brain for memories of childhood injuries, but could not recall him, or any of the other children for that matter, ever being stung. This time at least I could be there to see my child take his last tortured breath, to usher him out of my arms and into his mother’s, wherever she might be and in whatever form she had taken.
***
Which left Poppy. My youngest child, my daughter who was so much like Mia in looks, mannerisms and personality that sometimes it hurt to be around her. Poor Poppy, who endured more tragedy in her short life than anyone ought to suffer. And just like her mother, she simply walked out the door one day and never looked back. Unlike her mother, they found her body, splattered at the base of a multi-storey parking building from which she’d jumped; evidently she’d decided that if she had to die young, it would be on her terms. Bystanders who’d witnessed her plummet put her time of death at eighteen years after her birth, to the minute.
I went back to Mia’s Alley one more time, at midnight—the Witching Hour—on the night of a new moon. The lighting was sporadic already in the area, but I took out the two closest street lights with a few carefully aimed rocks. The darkness was near absolute.
I felt rather than saw her at first, a tiny disturbance in the air currents and a sudden, sharp drop in temperature.
“Silly man,” a barely audible whisper tickled my ear, “you didn’t have to come here to find me.” Substance formed around the sound, and there Mia stood. Her hair, her eyes, her spectral clothing that swirled and slid across her body like an unholy mist, were so black, they were somehow visible against the now insipid night.
“Where else would I find you?” I managed to croak.
“Anywhere there is death. Anywhere there is grief.” Behind her, our children—her children now, I reminded myself—took shape, although not as distinctly as Mia; some kind of barrier separated us, insubstantial looking yet impenetrable for one like me whose heart still beat. Their features were just as I remembered them, but their expressions . . . no human could bear such pain and knowledge and live. They now knew the truth of their parentage, I could see it in their eyes, and they condemned me for it. More than that, it looked like they’d been condemned to exhume the bones from every family’s closets and make their beds on them.
Perhaps that’s what death was—the sudden weight of the universe’s most sordid secrets.
My every instinct told me to run, to get far, far away from these ghouls masquerading as my family. But hadn’t I yearned for this moment of reunion, however twisted it might be, for years?
I laughed. The sound echoed dementedly off the concrete buildings around us. “Anywhere there is death and grief? If that were the case, you would have been with me all along.”
Her smile flooded me with yearning and terror, and literally made me buckle at the knees. “I have been,” she said, “you just didn’t know how to see.”
“So will I always see you now?”
“No, Andy,” she replied. “But you’ll see me again, when it’s your turn to join us.” Her children receded into the darkness, leaving her alone to gaze down on me, I thought perhaps in pity. But when her final words came, they were steeped in triumph:
“And that will not be for a long, long time.”
ROOM TO THRIVE
—STEPHEN BACON—
We all die alone, thought Barlow as he listened to Mark’s story. Wasn’t that the Joseph Conrad quotation? He tried to think back to his English literature lessons but all he could recall was larking about with his mates, rather than listening to what was being taught. But Mark’s tale of misery and sorrow was compelling; a depiction of a wasted life, one spent in abject solitude.
They decided to visit the scene of death for themselves.
The macabre nature of Mark’s story had been the prompt - the urge they needed to switch off the PS3 and kill the music. In truth, the party had nearly run its course. The amount of booze they’d consumed had been at a crucial tipping-point—just enough so that the idea of venturing out into the dark seemed like a laugh. But once they stepped through the door it felt like the cosy warmth had been a distant memory and they had been swept into a maelstrom.
Gusts of wind snatched Mark’s words. The rain was coming at them almost horizontally. They shivered inside their coats and hurried along the glistening streets. They were deserted. The occasional car passed. It was nearly ten o’clock; too early for the pubs to be ejecting drunkards onto the pavement, too late for casual passers-by to be out. Thick clouds smothered the moonlight, rendering the city desolate and intimidating.
“So they found this old bloke dead in his flat,” continued Mark, competing with the roar of the wind. “And he’d clearly been dead for a while.” Mark worked for the council, employed in the maintenance department for social-housing. “And this flat was a mess, a real fucking mess.”
Griff nodded enthusiastically, peering out from the shelter of his hood.
“It stunk to high-heaven in there,” said Mark. “It’s a wonder the neighbours waited so long to call the council.
Anyway it looks like he just died and rotted to bits.”
“Rotted?” Jake, the pale young lad swallowed. His eyes were popping out of his skull.
“Yeah, they reckon he’d OD’d and snuffed it, there in his chair. He was all liquefied when they found him. Broken down and shit. There was drug stuff all over the place, mind. Needles and tinfoil and shit like that.”
“What did you do?”
“Well once they scraped him up and took him away, we had the job of cleaning the flat—you know, getting it ready for the next tenant.”
Barlow considered this, inwardly grimacing at the prospect of living where such a grisly event had taken place. He felt queasy. Maybe it was just the booze.
They crossed the deserted precinct. Barlow caught sight of their reflection in the shop windows, reminding him of shop mannequins brought to life. Neon facades trembled in puddles as the wind gusted across the concrete expanse. The housing estate lurked on the other side of the dual carriageway, a labyrinth of grey-brick buildings. They descended some steps into a sodium-bathed subway. It stank of piss. Nevertheless, the brief respite from the wind and rain was welcome.
“So anyway, while we were cleaning this shit-hole up, Bazza found a hatch under the stairs.” Mark’s voice echoed in the underpass, as if he was speaking from both ends of the tunnel at the same time.
“A hatch?”
“Like—a trapdoor in the wall,” Mark explained. “You know, a false wall, like.”
“What? And the shrooms were growing in there?” Jake was constantly licking his lips.
“Yeah. Looked like the old guy grew the fuckers in there.” Mark laughed. “Bazza picked some and had them last Friday night. He was off his tits till Sunday afternoon.”
For The Night Is Dark Page 14
