Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

‘He did pay for our hotel.’

‘-and he’s back for. . I don’t know, for good, I guess. So. .’ Bryan shrugged. ‘Why have you got to leave us?’

Suzette looked at him. He was like a panda bear, and she felt a sudden wave of love for him. She put her hands around his waist and kissed the spot on his chest just below his neck.

‘I’m going because he’s come back,’ she explained. ‘Mum’s not going to be much of a comfort, they’re like dogs and cats those two.’

‘I like your mum.’

‘Well, you’re a member of an elite minority. Nicholas. .’

Suzette pulled away from her husband. How could she explain this? She looked up into his glum, handsome face.

‘I just think Nicholas is going to need a bit of an eye on him. Just for a couple of days.’

Bryan took in a long, slow breath, then nodded. He kissed the top of her head.

‘Quincy’s going to miss you. You were going to make apple pancakes Sunday.’

‘You can make them.’

‘I really can’t.’

They smiled at each other.

‘You’ll be fine,’ said Suzette. She paddled his bum with the dryer. ‘Now, go get me the blue suitcase.’

The rain on the roof grew louder until it was as steady and manic as applause at a rock concert.

Nicholas lay staring at the ceiling boards. This had been Suzette’s bedroom — lying in his own old room would have made the image of a failed artist too complete.

His mother was wrong. No one had regarded Cate’s death as an accident. Certainly, Cate’s brother, her parents, her friends, their mutual friends, even his own London friends, had all said the word ‘accident’ aloud, but the silences that followed debased its currency. An undertow of quiet blame dragged the time along whenever he met his in-laws. They knew he could have taken the car, if only he’d bothered to speak with the neighbour. They knew he’d already dropped his bike once in the rain, on a roundabout in Wembley. They knew that he knew Cate would be up the ladder when he telephoned. Their daughter’s death may have been an accident, but it had been an avoidable one. Cate’s had been a cruelly swift ending, and the blame for it would roost forever darkly on Nicholas’s shoulders.

The Nicholas Close ‘Welcome to Widowerhood’ freeze-out had been choreographed with a subtlety that was a credit to London society. It began with a dwindling of phone calls, ratcheted to a sharp decline in dinner invitations, and climaxed complete as a solid, glacial wall of quiet.

Nicholas had tried to keep working. But it was hard to be productive and persuasive when one kept seeing things that, logically, shouldn’t be there.

The motorcycle accident had left him almost unscratched but not without injury. After the crash, headaches came as unbidden and unwelcome as evening crows. After hitting the car and sailing through brisk London air, the bolt-of-pain landing had rammed his teeth together (slicing out a nice chunk of inside cheek) and jarred his brain like stewed tomatoes in a tin thrown against a brick wall. His growing panic that Cate wasn’t answering the phone shoved the bright headache to the wings. The gutting despair and the hollow business of the funeral preparations kept the nagging pain in the background, but as sad days spun out to sad weeks, he was forced to acknowledge that headaches had made permanent nests for themselves in the dark eaves of his skull.

The decision to sell the Ealing flat was the only easy one he took in those lead-lined weeks. He listed it with a tall and jolly estate agent, found a room to rent in nearby Greenford, and began excising his life from the rooms he’d planned to share for years with Cate.

The one mercy was that Cate’s brother and his girlfriend had volunteered to box up Cate’s and Nicholas’s belongings. Nicholas knew this wasn’t to spare him more grief, but rather so that almost everything of Cate’s could be taken back to the family home in Winchmore Hill without the need for a scene. He didn’t argue. The idea of packing make-up brushes that would never again touch Cate’s skin and dresses he would never again pull from her shoulders had been filling his chest with a cold and stultifying mud, so he was grateful to find the small hillock of boxes marked ‘N’ packed in the front hallway.

He’d been carrying a last and cumbersome pile of boxes, topped with a framed photograph of him and Cate on their honeymoon in the Orkneys, down the front outside stairs when he stepped on a discarded Boots carrier bag. His feet snapped out from under him. He felt a brief and quite lovely sensation of weightlessness before the concrete steps seemed to fly up and hit him brutally hard in the small of his back and the rear of his skull. The world skipped forward a few seconds — moments lost in an inverted lightning flash of darkness.

When his eyes fluttered open, his headache was gone.

True, it had been supplanted by a severe slug of hurt between his hipbones and a burning gravel-rash throb on his scalp, but the black worms inside his skull had suddenly been exorcised. He lay motionless staring at the slate sky, enjoying the sensation of feeling — at least for a moment — that pain for once was all on the outside. The sky was as grey as an old headstone, and a small flock of starlings hurried across it.

Then a young man in a stained corduroy jacket stepped into his vision.

Nicholas realised he must look like a drunkard, and hoped this might grant him licence to remain lying there a while longer. ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

The boy looked down at him, unblinking. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and his skin was as pale as herring scales. His hands fidgeted like spring moles in his pockets.

Shit , Nicholas thought. Maybe I’m not making sense. He reluctantly rose to his feet, wincing in anticipation of the flurry of black claws into his brain. But the headache stayed away.

‘I slipped,’ he said.

The boy pulled his hand from his jacket pocket. It held a screwdriver. Nicholas’s brain just had time to register it was a Phillips head when the boy shoved the chromed shaft hard into Nicholas’s chest. Nicholas jerked reflexively, waiting for the wave of agony that was sure to come. The boy withdrew the screwdriver, then shoved it in a sweeping underhand into Nicholas’s stomach.

Nicholas braced himself. But no pain came.

The boy watched him, jaw tight, red eyes glistening with tears. Then he took one step back, another. .

Nicholas looked down at his chest and stomach. His T-shirt was unmarked. No punctures. No blood. No pain.

The boy took a step backwards off the gutter onto the road. A blue Vauxhall was racing towards him, only twenty, fifteen, ten metres away.

‘You’re going to-’

The car sped right into the boy, sending him flying. It kept going, accelerating.

‘Jesus, Jesus!’

Nicholas took one, two, three jerky strides down the stairs and across the footpath. The boy lay prone on the road, a twisted swastika. Christ , he thought. The car didn’t even slow.

He stared.

In fact, you didn’t even hear it hit him . .

Then the boy was up. He was walking on the weedy footpath towards the flats. As he passed, he rolled his gloomy eyes to Nicholas. Hands in pockets, he climbed the flat’s front stairs to the buzzer panel, pressed it, waited, pulled the screwdriver from his pocket and stabbed an invisible victim twice, then retreated back, back, back and onto the road again before being struck by an invisible car and flying through the air, landing once more in a crippled heap. Then he vanished from the road, was walking on the footpath, and did it all again.

Nicholas was rooted to the spot, transfixed by the macabre loop. A woman with a blue anodised aluminium walking frame trundled right through the boy as he backed across the footpath. She didn’t see him.