Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

‘Okay!’

All this brightness. Pleasant voices and biscuits and tea. No wonder Nicholas was a mess. This was how they’d been taught to deal with grief and heartache: a cup of tea, then back to the washing or into work or on to the bills. Keep busy, don’t worry others, the world’s got enough problems of its own without yours. That was the Lambeth Street motto. Totally fucked.

‘Oy!’ called Nicholas.

‘Coming! Christ. .’

Maybe it wasn’t too late. She was here, wasn’t she? She must have sensed something was wrong, because. .

She pulled from her suitcase a small parcel wrapped in tissue paper. This might help. She slipped it into her pocket.

‘I don’t have sugar any more!’ she yelled sunnily, and hurried down the hall.

Katharine let her children wash up the dishes, casting her ear into their conversation like an angler who doesn’t really care if he catches a bite. Nicholas asked about his nephew and niece. Nelson was fine. His sixth birthday had a pirate theme and he got too many presents so Suze and Bryan returned half to the stores. Quincy was enjoying her pre-school and had taken to looking through Bryan’s old telescope at the moon, which pleased Suzette for some reason.

Katharine went and folded laundry. Her family was together again. Well, as much as it could be.

What was she supposed to do now? She was out of practice. Was she supposed to be wise? Was she supposed to explain how she’d coped when Don left? Was it time to tell them how her heart had risen to her throat when she saw two policemen at the door a few nights ago; that she’d had the helpless feeling of being wrenched back through time to a night thirty-odd years ago when two policemen knocked at the same door to tell her that there’d been a car accident and Don had been at the wheel? Was she supposed to make things right?

She folded the last towel, smoothing down a sharp crease. No. Her grief was her own, and Nicholas’s was his. He’d have to cope.

And the dead boy? A child goes missing the night Nicholas returns. What does that mean? Nicholas had lost a father, a friend, a wife. . and now he was back and more death. What sort of a grim harbinger was he? She remembered the night he was born. It was a Sunday. Don’s smiles were peppered with frowns. ‘Funny day,’ he kept saying. Was it her bad luck passed on to him? Was it Don’s? Or was there something darker still?

‘Hey.’

Katharine jumped at Suzette’s voice at her shoulder.

‘Hay makes the bull fat,’ she replied, trying to disguise her racing heart. What had she been thinking? Such nonsense. Old wives’ tales and rubbish. ‘What are you up to?’

‘We’re going for a walk. Need anything?’

Katharine nearly blurted, I need you to stay here . She bit her tongue. Where had that come from? ‘Can you pick up some milk?’

A minute later, she was in Suzette’s bedroom, watching her children close the front gate behind them. They walked down towards Myrtle Street, just as they used to twenty-five years ago — her daughter, still with the mop of brown hair she’d had as a child, and her son, tall and fair but with a crane frame so familiar that Katharine could swear it was Donald walking away. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She had a sudden urge to fling open the window and shout to her little girl, ‘Get away from him! He’ll get himself killed and you with him!’

She smoothed her dress to wipe the stupid thought away, then went to the lounge room and turned the TV on loud.

Nasturtiums blazed cold orange fire on the sloping banks that led down to the train tracks. Two pairs of silver rails curved like giant calligraphy around a far bend. They’d come from the nearby 7-Eleven and let themselves under a rusted chain-link fence to sit on mossy rocks at the top of the bank. From here they could look along to Tallong railway station and its sixty-year-old wooden walkway that crossed above the tracks. Beyond, red roofs and green roofs were peppered among the trees, marching up the suburb’s hills. They reminded Nicholas of pieces in a Monopoly set, playthings in some larger game. He chewed fruit pastilles. Suzette ate caramel corn from a brightly coloured bag. Overhead, clouds the colour of pigeon wings tumbled in loose ranks. Evening was coming.

The small talk was done. Nicholas had asked after Bryan (he was well, recovering from a cold), about the kids’ teachers (capable, but a bit soft with such wilful little blisters), about Suzette’s work as an investment advisor (going very nicely, thank you: two new corporate clients this month). As he finished his last sweet, the conversation fell into quiet and he braced himself for the turn of the tide. Suzette would start asking about him. She’d ask how he was holding up. She’d see if he’d visited a counsellor. She’d tell him it was okay to cry.

But Suzette remained silent. She simply sat beside him, licking her fingers and retrieving the last sugary crumbs from the bottom of the popcorn bag. She seemed content to do so for another hour.

‘I don’t like your hair that colour,’ he said to break the silence.

She licked her fingers. ‘Fuck you. Bryan does.’

She looked at him. Her eyes were a steely blue, her gaze as solid as granite. He could see why her financial planning business went so well — her clients would be too scared not to believe her if she said ‘buy now’.

‘I heard a boy went missing,’ she said.

Nicholas nodded.

‘They found him in the river. .’ He nodded to the north-east. ‘Couple of clicks.’

Suzette kept her eyes on him. ‘Mum said he was murdered, too.’

Murdered, too . He knew what she was thinking. Murdered, like Tristram.

He nodded again.

A stainless-steel train whummed past, sighing as it slowed to stop at the platform. Men in shirts and ties and women in sensible black skirts alighted and started up the wooden stairs of the crossover, heading home.

He saw Suzette was frowning. It was the same concentrated scowl she used to wear solving fractions at the dinner table and correlating statistical charts on her bedroom desk. We don’t change, do we? The patterns we slide into in childhood fit us for life.

‘What?’ he asked.

She shook her head — nothing.

He looked back at the train station. There was just one person left on the crossover now: a girl in a yellow anorak. From this distance her face was a blur, her hair a dark pistil atop a fluffed golden bloom.

‘I’m waiting for you to tell me that I couldn’t have done anything to stop Cate dying.’

Suzette crumpled the empty popcorn bag and shoved it in her pocket. ‘That it was an accident?’ she asked.

‘Or some similar shit, yes.’

Suzette nodded. ‘Well. I don’t really believe in accidents.’

Nicholas looked at her again.

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m not saying it was your fault.’ She met his gaze. ‘But. . nothing happens without a reason.’

He felt a warm knot form in his gut.

‘Don’t give me any God Wanted Her Home in Heaven bullshit, Suze. I saw her-’

He bit his tongue. He’d been about to say how he’d seen Cate falling from that invisible ladder time and again, over and over, her dead eyes staring at nothing, then rolling to him, blank as slate, without a trace of the person he’d loved and married. That wasn’t heaven. That was hell. He felt Suzette watching him.

‘If God is eternal, if time means nothing to him, I reckon he could have waited a few more years for her,’ he finished.

On the pedestrian overpass, the girl in the yellow anorak pulled up her sleeve. To check her watch, Nicholas guessed. Someone was late meeting her. But then she climbed onto the crossover’s rails, balanced for just a second, then stepped into space.