Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

The flight attendant straightened her skirt. ‘I have no idea, sir. Information like that is kept by the airline. I must ask you not to talk about. . such things on the flight, sir.’

She glanced once at the empty seat opposite Nicholas, then moved away, ghostly silent and a little too fast, up the dark aisle.

Nicholas looked over. The girl’s hands stopped colouring. Her gaze was on his as she started shaking and turning blue again.

He rolled away from her and closed his eyes.

The air was cold. Yet this chill was light and fragile, ephemeral. Nothing like the entrenched and leaden cold of a British winter.

Nicholas walked across the car park to the rows of white and silver hire cars, reading the space numbers stencilled on the tarmac. He carried just one small suitcase. He found his car, pressed the remote, popped the boot.

Overhead, the sky was salted with tiny lights.

Stars. I’ve come back to a city where you can still see the stars.

He turned slowly, scanning the constellations. There it was: the Southern Cross. He had expected the sight of it after so many years would inject a warm tequila rush of nostalgia or a defibrillating jolt of hope. Instead: nothing. The cold July breeze tugged at his hair. The five stars of the cross seemed unimpressed . We’ve guided campers, warmed lovers, drawn the fingers of fathers and the eyes of nodding children. What have you done? Killed your wife. Top job. Welcome home.

Nicholas got inside and twisted the car alive.

The bones of a city don’t change. Perhaps its skin grows tight or flaccid as suburbs grow fashionable or become declasse; crow’s feet spread from pockets — new streets, new arteries into fresh corpulence. But the skeleton of its founding roads, the blood of its river, the skull of the low mountain that looms over it with its thorny crown of television towers like its own blinking Calvary. . these things hadn’t changed.

It was nearly eleven. Nicholas drove the almost empty streets, amazed to be moving so swiftly and surely: a tardy San Juan Capistrano swallow in a white Hyundai. He had become so conditioned to London crush that to see inner-city streets so quiet made him shiver and wonder if everyone else knew some secret apocalypse was about to occur; some rapture to which he wasn’t privy.

In the seventeen years since he’d last seen it, Coronation Drive had grown an extra couple of lanes and tidal flow traffic signals. But as he glanced across the wide, black waters of the river, the doppelganger lights of factories and apartments winking on its wind-worried surface were so familiar that he could have been a child again, in the back-seat of his mother’s Falcon, little Suzette snoring lightly beside him, tucked inside a pile of brightly coloured sample bags from the Royal National Show.

Parallel with the river drive ran the train line, its pylons winking into occasional view between new glass office towers and nineteenth-century townhouses resurrected as boutique law firms and restaurants. As he passed them, he said aloud the names of the railway stations, the same he’d rattled through each day returning from art college, each one closer to home and a hurried meal followed by hours in the garage riveting together a chair from coffee cans or weaving a fabric wall from speaker wire — ambitious, excited, even then dreaming of designing in London.

But London had proved nothing to be excited about. At the end of the eighties, it had seemed an endless expanse of dour faces pinched above colourful wide-shouldered jackets; a loud and falsely jolly bustle on a hurtling train heading nowhere in particular. No gymnasia back then, but a pub every twenty metres. The endless knock-backs. The bad bosses. The worse bosses. The dull twist of panic every time you looked in your wallet to pay for a shitty Marks amp; Spencer’s sandwich and wondered how the fuck you were going to pay next week’s scandalous rent. Too many Australians. No sunshine. No work.

But he was nothing if not creative. He found a niche and jumped for it like a busker at a twenty. A mate of a mate told him to look into a mob riding the wave of love for all things Eire and building ‘authentic’ Irish pubs across the south-west.

He rode to their sawdusty workshop in Streatham; after a coffee mug interview, a squint at his resume and a test of his handshake, he got the job of decorating the pubs’ interiors. It sounded easy. But it took less than an hour strolling through London’s Davies Street antique shops to realise that if he bought his knick-knacks in the city, he had the budget to dress perhaps one shelf. It was motoring through little villages in the Midlands, Bedfordshire and Sussex that Nicholas discovered he had charmed luck sniffing out old curios, furniture and bric-a-brac. He’d leave London in a hire van on a Monday and potter without a plan, letting the front wheels find their own ways onto increasingly narrow roads flanked by dry-stone walls and watched by edgy sheep and unblinking blackbirds. For the first few months of this unlikely treasure hunting, Nicholas actively appraised the buildings in the villages to calculate which would be most likely to house an elderly soul ready to part with old junk. But experience taught him not to think; simply to let the solid feeling of surety in his midriff tell him which barn, which leaning Tudor, which locked presbytery would yield the rusty lamps, the worn shillelaghs, the dry-wattled accordions and beaten valises that London paid a fortune for. Without fail, he was guided to homes where owners, daughters, new tenants, disgruntled landlords, weary widows and forgetful widowers cheerfully divested themselves of odds and sods they were happy to see the arse-end of.

He would return to London on a Friday, poorly shaved with a sore back and bowels clotted by the stodge of fry-up breakfasts, in a van filled with old crap that cost perhaps three hundred quid yet was worth twenty times that to his employers and customers. He became Nicholas Close, Master of Old Shit. Need some tattered books, a rusty shotgun and decrepit fishing gear with a distinctly Gaelic twist? Call Nicholas Close. He’s shameless, mildly charming, and he’ll find it cheap. Oh, and did you hear? He used to be a designer or something.

London had finally, shyly, revealed her lucrative teat. One job alone had paid the deposit on the flat. And that contract had led to a permanent consultancy with a firm that opened Irish pubs in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and Santiago. Nicholas had been charged with the dubious task of vivifying new spaces with objects whose original owners were long dead. It was tolerable and various, and the travel was good. He intended to get back to design next month, next financial year, after Christmas.

He met and married Cate. The mortgage had been reduced at a good clip. But the amusing collectables, the money, the diminishing loan statements, everything, lost its value the instant he walked into the flat in his wet and scraped motorcycle jacket and found why Cate hadn’t answered his call.

You killed her .

‘Shh,’ he told himself.

Because you just had to take the bike.

‘Shut up.’

There , said the voice in his head, arguing with yourself. The slippery slope to madness. No wonder you couldn’t keep a job.

No. Not true. He was never fired. He quit.

And why was that?

Because the old shit he sought for a living tended to be found in old places. And the older the place, the more chance it had of being. .

He didn’t want to think the word.

Go on. Say it. It doesn’t bite. Not any more.

‘Haunted,’ he whispered.

The word hung in the air like despair in a dying man’s bedroom. It was still hanging, as if it were itself a ghost, when Nicholas sucked it back in with a gasp.