Belinda Bauer - Darkside

There it was again. Raised voices.

Steven was surprised. He was used to hearing customers shouting at each other as he opened the letter box on their lives for a brief moment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened the Randalls’ letter box and not heard Neil yelling something at his father.

But he’d never heard raised voices at Rose Cottage.

He stood for a moment, undecided in the cold and dark.

He liked Lucy Holly very much. He liked Mr Holly too – even though he’d splashed about in the moat of Steven’s memory. Steven hadn’t liked that , but he’d understood that it was the policeman’s job to ask. Plus Mr Holly was a source of income for him.

So even though he decided to open the gate and walk the few paces to the porch of Rose Cottage, Steven had not yet made up his mind whose side he should be on when he got there.

Lucy’s bottom lip trembled but she sat up straight and determined.

‘It’s my life, Jonas. It’s my right.’

‘No!’

This was worse than an affair. So much worse! If Jonas had come home to find Brian Connor buried inside his wife, if she had eloped and sent him a postcard from Hawaii, it would not have been one millionth as bad as this . How could she do this to him? How? After the pills? After the tears? After they’d worked so hard and come so far? After they’d held each other and made love and whispered I love you in the bed where his parents had loved each other too? After everything he’d done for her? After he’d protected her…

She still wanted to die.

He shook his head stupidly, seeing horror in his mind the way he’d never seen it in a movie.

Lucy stood up almost straight and spoke quietly.

‘It’s my choice.’

He hit her.

He hit her with a heavy hand on the end of a long arm that swung fast. The blow spun her round and knocked her on to her knees on the couch – her face bouncing off the wall they’d repainted together the week they moved in. Summer Dawn, the colour was called. And as Lucy curled, sobbing, Jonas noticed with detachment the smear of blood that now sullied the horizon above the back of the couch.

He leaned over her, putting one hand on the wall beside the blood, the other on the arm of the couch.

‘No,’ he said again.

‘Stop! ’

Jonas looked around to see Steven Lamb in the hallway.

The boy stood there tightly clutching the strap of the DayGlo sack on his shoulder with both hands, as if it was keeping him from falling from a great height. Even from across the room and in semi-darkness, Jonas could see he was shaking.

‘Just stop !’ he cried again, the words vibrating and cracked with fear.

‘Steven, get out!’ Lucy wept at him from between her hands.

But he didn’t. He just stood there and shook, staring at Jonas.

‘Leave her alone !’

Jonas stood up and Lucy hunched away from him.

He had to go .

Without even looking at her again, he strode across the room.

Steven Lamb backed into the hall table and knocked over the vase of drooping carnations. He watched Jonas coming with a look of resigned terror on his face, then at the last second he stepped aside as he realized he was not coming for him .

Jonas brushed past him without a glance, and closed the front door quietly behind him.

Steven sank slowly to the cold flagstone floor, with his back against the banister, and hugged his knees to his chest.

Lucy looked up from the couch and saw that Jonas was gone and Steven was sitting in the hallway.

She touched her mouth where warm salt leaked from her lip, and tried to stop sobbing.

She backed off the couch awkwardly and dropped to her knees and crawled across the floor, not trusting her legs to carry her across the room. She knelt beside the boy in the hallway and put her arms around him.

‘It’s OK,’ she told them both. ‘It’s OK. Jonas was just upset, sweetheart. He didn’t mean it. He was just very upset and frightened.’

But Steven didn’t respond to her touch or even appear to see her. His eyes were still fixed in the middle distance, a deep frown splitting his forehead. Lucy felt liquid soaking her knees. She looked down and realized it was the water from the flowers. He was sitting in it.

‘Steven,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

He did not respond and Lucy started to worry seriously about something other than herself and Jonas. She shook him by the shoulders and saw him blink, so did it again and raised her voice, making it sharp – her playground-duty voice.

‘Steven! Talk to me, please! What happened? What’s wrong?’

Finally the boy turned his haunted eyes towards her.

His lips trembled as he whispered:

‘Nothing.’

Reynolds laid out his case on the cheap brown bedspread.

He had almost everything he needed.

He could hardly wait until the case here was officially closed so that he could go and see the Chief Super with his damning evidence. The thought of how that interview would unfold consumed Reynolds like porn.

‘Sir, could I speak to you on a matter of some delicacy? ’

He knew there might not be an actual promotion in snitching on his boss, but he was sure there would be some benefits for him somewhere down the line.

He anticipated taking Lucy Holly’s statement with pure pleasure. At last, hearing critical words coming out of a mouth other than his. Around colleagues he’d always been discreet, but every little eye-roll, every murmur of discontent, every sudden cessation of chatter when Marvel walked past, he’d squirrelled away like winter nuts to sustain him whenever he felt he was all alone and that nobody else noticed what was going on. Even now the Senior Investigating Officer was probably knocking it back in the musty farmhouse with Joy Springer. It made Reynolds ashamed to be a policeman.

He hoped Lucy Holly would remember lots more about her confrontation with Marvel when she made her statement. What she had told him on the phone was good enough, but he would draw more from her. Nuances, looks, implied threats. Reynolds wanted them all, like an egg collector wants to shake a rare bird through a tiny hole in a shell.

He put his notes and Lucy’s statement away in their folder, then turned on Mastermind .

Steven sat at the kitchen table with his hands around the first cup of tea he had ever accepted from Lucy Holly.

He was wearing a pair of Jonas’s trousers. She had told him where to find some in the bedroom cupboard. It had been strange opening the Hollys’ wardrobe, but no stranger than opening their front door. He’d tried several pairs before he found some newly washed jeans which were only too big, rather than ridiculous, and rolled them up, then cinched them with his school belt.

He’d put his trousers and underwear in the laundry basket, as she’d told him to, and gone back downstairs to the sound of the kettle whistling.

Now they sat on opposite sides of the table and Steven watched Mrs Holly pretending she was OK. He knew she wasn’t. He’d seen her hands shake while making tea and he’d seen her wince as she put her cup to her broken lip.

He had registered these things but had detached himself from thinking about them too hard. Instead he had become a vague little ball with a shiny shell, so that he could protect himself. He knew now that that was his job, and his alone.

She smiled faintly at him, so he moved his mouth in response.

‘You haven’t drunk your tea,’ she said.

It was no longer hot, but Steven drank it anyway – for her – and saw that this gift made her smile much better.