Stephen Volk - Whitstable

He’d then found himself, unaware of the passage of intervening time, back at 3 Seaway Cottages, running up and down the stairs repetitively, endlessly, far beyond the point of exhaustion. To an impartial observer this might have given the appearance of madness too, but was anything but. In those moments he’d known exactly what he was doing. He’d ran up, ran down, ran up again and so on in the vain hope of inducing a heart attack so that he might be reunited with her. He may have cursed God too, a little, that night under the stars. God didn’t approve of taking one’s own life, but damn God. He’d wanted to be with Helen and that was all he cared about. Then, racing up and down, up and down, he stopped dead as he realised the cruelty of it all. That, if he did commit suicide, he might find himself in purgatory, or in limbo, and separated from Helen forever. The crushing realisation had hit him that that Hell would be even more unbearable than this, and he crumbled finally, spent.

Helpless, he’d found himself sitting on the stairs gasping for air, wheezing as she had wheezed, his lungs filling like bellows as he wept.

But God, as they say, moves in mysterious ways. And soon afterwards he had found the letter. Heard her voice as he’d read it:

“My Dear Beloved. My life has been the happiest one imaginable… Remember we will meet again when the time is right. Of that I have no doubt whatsoever. But promise me you will not pine… or, most of all, do not be hasty to leave this world…”

He had shivered then at the terrible thought that he might have, stupidly, done something so contrary to her wishes. Helen wanted him to go on, and he would go on. He would do what she wanted. He would do anything for her.

Do not be hasty to leave this world…

That’s what she’d said to him. But the truth is, he thought, I didn’t have the courage then, and I don’t have it now.

Dear Peter, of course you do. Dying isn’t hard. Living without the love of your life is hard. That’s the hardest thing of all.

But now I am feeling more lost than ever… the child, the boy…

You care. That is your greatest strength. People feel it. They see it on the screen.

But this isn’t the screen. This is life.

You will know what to do. You make the right choices, Peter. Just believe in yourself. As I do, my darling. Always…

He remembered, as if being in the audience watching a scene on stage in a drawing-room play, his father telling him, without any note of malice or cruelty, as if it were a statement of fact like the earth revolving round the sun, that he, Peter, was forty and a failure.

Even the memory of the hurt made him take a quick, sharp breath. But he remembered also the way Helen had stood up to the old man and given him a piece of her mind. His father had never been talked to like that, and certainly not by a woman. The fellow hardly knew what had hit him. And afterwards, when the two of them were alone, what had she said to him?

You have to believe in yourself, Peter… Believe in yourself and your abilities and not be brought down by those lesser mortals who for some reason of their own want you not to succeed. God gave you an amazing gift, darling, and God wants it to soar, and so do I. Have faith in your talent. That’s all you need, Peter… Faith, and love…

The stink of bleach burned in his nostrils. It clung to the air and he knew he would not be able to rid the house of it for days. Perversely, he inhaled it deeply, as an act of defiance, determined to breathe in his own house, undaunted.

Faith and love were all he needed. Faith in himself, and the love of Helen, which he knew was immortal. That would be enough to get him through. Even this turmoil. Even this pestilence. He suddenly knew it. He was not weak. He was not pathetic.

With her courage, he could soar.

The floor of the interview room was concrete under his feet, the walls whitewashed, the single window set with bars beyond the glass. An old window. A window with tales to tell. If walls had ears , the saying goes. Indeed so, he thought. He wondered if it had once been an actual cell and how often names, jibes, scrawls, remarks, obscenities had been eradicated with a new coat of paint. As possible lives had been eradicated, set on this path or that, turned, curtailed, saved, doomed, the guilty punished, the innocent punished come to that.

There was nothing on the table in front of him but his hands, so he stood and paced with them clasped behind his back. They were still dry and cold from the walk. The sea, so often heralded as life-giving, ossified them. Made them into a mummy’s hands. Leather-like.

Old man…

He closed his eyes. Inside his skull images of the scene from the night before ran though his brain. Multiplied. He saw them again and again. Take after take. Wait a minute, in that one he’s quite aggressive. That one, more sympathetic. The clapperboard snapped, making his eyes flicker. Close-up. Take eleven. Man steps from the shadows, his lips open in a horizontal grin… No, take twelve, smiling evilly, the hands rubbing together…

He always wondered how editors remembered every nuance, every glance or inflection: now, only twenty-four hours later, he had difficulty doing the same. Now he had trouble remembering if the man had said anything to incriminate himself—anything actual, tangible —or whether his threat and bluster was born out of sheer panic, a bombastic act of frightened self-defence. What did he know for certain? Just that Gledhill had verbally attacked only the person who’d verbally attacked him first, in his absence. Was that inhuman, the behaviour of a cornered animal? Or the all-too-human reaction of an innocent man?

You’re losing your fucking marbles, old man…

He flinched again at the obscenity scrawled on his memory like graffiti on the wall of a public lavatory. Then saw Gledhill’s face again, at the gap in the door.

An old man and a little boy…

The insidious words’ capacity to appal him was undiminished, sickening him to his core. He took a deep breath and dispelled any misgivings. The man was a liar, and had shown his cards. Hadn’t he?

Aware of a slump he normally only affected when ‘old man acting’ was required, he pushed his shoulders back, stretched his spine, scratched his chin, the bristles rasping there. While there was nothing on the walls to see himself in, in the mirror at home before setting out he’d seen a salt-and-pepper beard emerging, starting to give him a look like ‘Dr Terror’ from Milton’s portmanteau extravaganza, though he knew the particular nastiness in this tale he was living was nothing so comfortably outré as ancestral werewolf, voodoo jazz or malignant vine. He wished to goodness it was. He wished he could even be as pragmatic and unflappable as his Inspector Quennell in The Blood Beast Terror when luring a gigantic moth to its inevitable flame. But it was all too easy to face monsters with a screenplay in your hand. Even a bad one.

The previous night he had slept in erratic bursts, but not as sporadically as the night before, and did not dream as he had feared he might after his encounter. The framed photograph of Helen had rested on the pillow at his side and the influence of too many third-hand superstitions from bad scripts made him feel it had fended off evil. He’d allowed the thought to comfort him without analysing it too much. Still sorely sleep-deprived, he had awoken at dawn spiky and brittle but strangely purposeful, and had played Berlioz’s ‘Royal Hunt’ from The Trojans while he dressed, pausing only to turn it up louder. Twice.