Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

Nicholas strayed to the door of Plough amp; Vine Health Foods. The shop within was dark. A ‘Closed’ sign hung inside the door, with the shop’s hours handwritten on it: ‘10 a.m. — 5.30 p.m.’. He checked his watch. It was five to ten. His eyes slid up to the doorframe. In the friendly light of day, the mark he knew was there under layers of gloss white paint was invisible.

He walked over to the curved galvanised steel handrail that separated the tiles outside the shops from the footpath, and then — with an easy swoop that defied the quarter-century since he’d done it last — he grabbed the rail in an underhand grip and swung to sit underneath it, legs dangling over the concrete buttress. Quietly pleased, he opened the newspaper on his lap.

A lowered sports car buzzed lazily past, chased by its longboat bass drumming. High in shadowed branches, a family of noisy miners quarrelled with a magpie, forcing it to fly beyond the distant rooftops.

Nicholas felt slightly cold and a little light-headed, but his flu symptoms seemed to have eased. He opened the paper and flicked through to the personal advertisements section and scanned for funeral notices. The page was full. Dying, he thought, remained as popular a pastime as ever. He followed his finger to the middle of the first column and found what he was looking for: ‘Gavin Boye. Suddenly passed. Son of Jeanette. Husband of Laine.’

Nicholas blinked. Christ, Gavin had a wife. He read on.

‘Loved and missed. Relatives and friends are respectfully invited. .’ He skipped to the end. The service would be at the local Anglican church the following morning.

A wife, Laine. Could she shed more light on why her grey-faced husband had risen early two mornings ago, grabbed his favourite sawn-off, and gone to the home of his long-dead brother’s best friend to deliver a message. . from whom?

It should have been you .

Was that Gavin’s own wish, that Tristram had lived and Nicholas had been found with his throat opened up like a ziplock bag, almost empty of blood?

No. Those weren’t Gavin’s words. Gavin couldn’t have known about the bird. The day Nicholas told Tristram about the talismanic bird, Tristram never returned home. And after his death, Nicholas never found a way to tell the Boyes about the tiny, mutilated corpse that Tristram had touched just before Winston Teale stepped from his olive sedan and strode like a golem towards them. The only person who could have told Gavin about the bird was the one who’d set the dead thing as a trap.

Nicholas checked his watch. It was after ten. He turned and saw that the sign on the health food shop door had been flipped and now read ‘Open’. He went to door and pushed it inward. As it angled away from the light, the mark fell into relief — a vertical slash with a half-diamond. He felt the soles of his feet tighten vertiginously. He bit down the feeling and stepped inside.

As he looked around, his apprehension dissipated. The shelves were stocked with handmade soaps, cloth trivets stuffed with aromatic herbs, small wooden barrels of seeds with brass scoops stuck in their surfaces like the bows of cheerily sinking ships. The store smelled of mint and cloves and honey.

The pleasantly fragrant air was broken by a silvery crash of tin hitting tiles in the storeroom behind the counter, followed by the ticking skitter of tiny spheres skimming across the floor.

‘Shit!’ A woman’s voice, followed by a stream of breathy words that could only be swearing.

‘Hello?’ called Nicholas.

Silence. Then a head poked out through the storeroom door. Her hair was light brown and her eyes were dark brown. Her eyes and mouth were rounded in three embarrassed Os.

‘Oh, bum,’ she whispered, and disappeared again from sight.

Nicholas set down his bags and picked up a few of the tiny objects that had rolled under the counter. They were wooden beads, not unlike those on the necklace Suzette had given him.

The woman stepped from behind the counter, tucking her hair behind one ear. ‘Such a klutz,’ she said.

Nicholas tried to guess her age. Twenty-five? Thirty? Her skin was milk pale and clear, lips red and pursed as she stooped to collect the errant beads.

‘I fall down stairs,’ he said.

She scooted about energetically, in and out of Nicholas’s sight, picking up beads. ‘Ah, but then you’re only hurting yourself. These, now. .’ She stood and poured them from her hands into the tin. ‘These can trip people very well.’

‘What are they?’

She affected a wise expression as she slyly turned the tin’s label towards herself to read furtively: ‘“Willow-wood beads — for Dreameing, Inspiration and Fertility”. “Dreaming” spelt with an extra “e” for Olde English Effecte.’

Nicholas nodded.

The young woman smiled. It was a pretty smile. She shrugged. ‘People buy them.’

‘I have some myself.’

‘Willow beads?’

‘I think they’re elder wood.’

She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, then shook her head and shrugged again. Nicholas found it an attractive gesture. He was sure men shopped here just to look at her.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Since I can’t trip you, can I help you?’

He thought about it. ‘I don’t think so. No.’

‘Okay,’ she said, frowning. A small, sweet line appeared between her eyes.

‘There’s a mark on your door,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

He nodded at it.

She stepped out from behind the counter. She was slim and nearly his height. Her dress was of an old cut, but snugly fitted. Simple, but flattering to her figure. She kept herself a few steps distant from him as she went to the door. He told her to open it, and pointed to the rune.

She frowned again as she peered at it. ‘You know, I’ve never noticed that. Did you put it there?’ She levelled both eyes at him with startling frankness.

He blinked, off guard. ‘No. There used to be a seamstress here, when I was a kid. She was a bit creepy.’

‘I’ve been here a year,’ the young woman said. ‘Before me was a pool supply guy. The place reeked of chlorine.’ She shrugged again, and cocked her head as if to ask where this was going.

Nicholas realised it was going nowhere. ‘I have a cold,’ he said suddenly, and instantly wondered where the words had come from.

She looked at him for a moment. The frank gaze was strangely erotic — as if she were imagining him undressing, and finding the thought pleasing. Then she nodded to herself and ducked from sight. He could hear the sounds of tins opening and the crunching of slender fingers in dried leaves. She returned with a paper bag, which she sealed with a sticker from beside the till. ‘Sage, ginger, echinacea, garlic. Make a tea with it.’

Nicholas took the bag doubtfully. ‘How will it taste?’

She smiled. ‘Dreadful. Eight dollars fifty.’

As she handed him change for his ten, she asked, ‘Are you a local?’

Nicholas looked at her. This close, he could smell her hair. It smelled like vanilla, clean and good. He thought for a moment. ‘Yes. Home again.’

She nodded approvingly. ‘Next time, I’ll try something much more treacherous than beads.’

‘I look forward to it,’ he said. ‘Sorry about the mark thing. I just thought. . You know.’

‘Strange marks,’ she said.

It was Nicholas’s turn to shrug.

‘Do you think it could be Chinese?’ she asked. ‘They used to have market gardens somewhere around here, I heard. It could be for luck.’

‘Could be. I’m Nicholas.’ He extended his hand.

She looked at it, and took it, and shook it firmly.

‘Rowena.’ She smiled. ‘We’re well met.’

‘We are,’ he agreed.

He found himself thinking about Rowena’s smile on his way home, and so guiltily buried the memory of it.