Belinda Bauer - Darkside

He looked around. The cramped unit was dingy and dirty. He didn’t think he could work in a place like this. There was a calendar on the wall that was four years out of date. Four years ago, Lu could have walked upstairs on her hands. Four years ago, Jonas was following another path to another place. Four years ago would do him nicely, thank you very much, so he let his mind linger there instead of here, where Lucy was dying, Danny was dead, and DCI Marvel was being a prick.

‘… to him? Holly! ’

Jonas came back, blinking. ‘What?’

‘What did you say to him?’

‘Say to who?’

‘Whom,’ said Reynolds. ‘Sorry.’

They both ignored him.

‘To Danny Marsh. When he was dying. Rice says you said something to him.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Bollocks. Again.’

Marvel pushed his chair away from Jonas and went over to the fridge. He opened it and took out a can of cola. Generic cola.

‘I think I said, “Thank you.”’

‘Why?’

Jonas frowned. ‘I don’t know.’

It was the truth. He had no idea. He’d taken his lips from Danny’s mouth and slid them round to his ear without any thought of why or of what he was going to say when he got there. There was just something inside him that had to be said. Had to be said. And when he’d said it, it had felt right .

Jonas!

The voice at the gate had been Danny Marsh, he was sure.

He’d wanted to talk to him.

Had Danny left him the note?

If so, what was the job Danny wanted him to do?

The dead eye of the pony. The prickle of hay against his cheek. The woman’s face at the dusty window…

Pfffftt! Marvel opened the cola and Jonas came back with a start to find him and Reynolds regarding him with interest.

‘He’s dead, Holly. You can’t protect him. Not if you call yourself a policeman.’

Jonas couldn’t breathe.

Call yourself a policeman?

How did he know? How did Marvel know? He’d never told him what the first note said!

Jonas sat there, staring wide-eyed at Marvel while his mind screamed at him, Don’t stare! Don’t look at him! He’ll know that you spotted the slip! But he couldn’t move – even his eyes.

‘Get out,’ Marvel said. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’

Lucy Holly was sitting halfway up the stairs when she felt death approaching.

She had known for a while that she was dying. Every new symptom was a reminder of the fact that she wasn’t going to just snap out of it one day; that this thing inside her had come to stay and planned to kill her, like a psycho in the spare room. That craziness had become routine.

But she had never felt like this before.

She did not often go up and down stairs during the day. It was a chore that could take half an hour sometimes. Jonas had plumbed a toilet into the little shed outside the back door of the old cottage, which she used in all but the coldest weather. But she had woken at 5am to find Jonas was not beside her. Immediately, she knew she would not get back to sleep, so she edged downstairs in the darkness to make tea and to get her book and then decided to take both back to bed with her.

On the bottom step she’d put the luggage for her journey – the cup of tea, her book, a new tube of toothpaste, and the knife Jonas had made her promise to keep with her, even though she felt like a neurotic New Yorker every time she touched it. The thought of having to answer the door to somebody while holding it filled her with English embarrassment. But she’d promised Jonas, and mostly remembered to carry it from room to room with her, even though she thought there was more chance of falling off her crutches on to the knife than there was of it being of any use in repelling an invader.

She’d leaned her downstairs sticks against the banisters, lowered herself to the third step and started her little adventure, moving each item up a step before she levered herself on to the next tread. She got into a nice rhythm – almost laughing at how silly it was to feel that way about inching upstairs on your backside. She had good days like this, where her arms and legs felt stronger, and it always made her happy. Ever the competitor, Lucy got faster and faster, moving, hoisting, sipping tea, moving, hoisting, sipping tea… until suddenly she slipped, lurching sideways and banging her arm and her head painfully into the wall. She’d put the heel of her hand on Fate Dictates , which had skidded off the stair and now lay open and face-down in the hallway.

‘Shit! ’ Lucy bit her lip while her funny bone grinningly punished her for being careless. She’d dropped the knife down a few treads too, and knocked her mug so that some tea had dotted the carpet.

Lucy had slipped before; she had fallen before; she had hurt herself worse than she was hurt now.

But this time… This time she understood death.

With the house wrapped in the cocoon of snow that made it quiet as a tomb, Lucy became aware that her own breathing was the only sound that demarcated her living from her dying .

She held it.

She sat halfway up the stairs and held her breath and let the silence assault her ears.

This was what it would be like.

Underneath the dirt.

Lying still and silent and helpless in a box waiting for nature to worm its way into her so that it could reclaim her for the greater good.

Lucy Holly was not stupid. She understood the cessation of consciousness that comes with death. She understood that if she were aware of anything it would be in a spiritual sense, and that her body was just meat. Meat rotting on young bones.

But this vivid preview was new. This feeling that she was lying in this house with her wedding ring on and a posy on her chest, and that death had finally arrived with the snow and was even now pressed against the windows, testing the chinks made by the mice and the sparrows, trying to slither inside to get at her while she sat halfway up the stairs without even Jonas’s knife to protect herself with. This was all new.

Before – before the pills – death had been an abstract notion, a way to be relieved of the pain. The relief of pain had been the goal – and she’d barely thought about the death that would facilitate that. Now she knew she’d turned a corner. She didn’t only know it was coming, she knew how it would feel when it did. How it would look . How it would taste .

It was overwhelming. And inconsequential.

She’d thought she would cry, but instead she got calm, calm, calm, as if someone had drugged her tea. She wished they had. She wished suddenly and fiercely that someone had drugged her tea and that she would fall asleep here on the stair that always creaked, and that they would come and kill her softly so she’d never have to bother with the rest of the stairs. They were a struggle and she was sick of them.

Her bum started to ache and she looked at her watch to see she had sat here for more than an hour. No wonder she was so cold and desperate for the loo.

She would go outside.

Lucy left the toothpaste and the mug of cold tea on the stairs.

She picked up the knife as she slid back down past it and, when she got to the bottom, she closed Fate Dictates and never opened it again.

Jonas walked home in a daze just before 6am.

He’d felt as if he were floating ever since Danny died in his arms. Like a spacewalking astronaut whose tether has been severed, Jonas felt himself drifting slowly away from everything, and off towards nothing.

How did Marvel know?