Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

Nicholas felt his throat twist and tighten. His wide eyes stung.

She looked so small. This was how he had found her the afternoon of the crash: sprawled as if exhausted, painfully arched, eyes open to nothing.

Then her eyes rolled towards his. Just for a moment. It was a look that could mean a million things or nothing. A look as empty as a dusty glass found forgotten on a window sill. Then she was back up the invisible ladder, floating, sanding, about to die again, and again, and again.

Nicholas stayed until midnight, watching her fall and die, until his eyes were so red and his throat so wretched he could hardly see or breathe. He willed his heart to burst and fail, but it kept squeezing, disconnected from his grief. Then he closed the bathroom door, locked the flat, and drove very slowly away.

He stayed in bed for three days.

The third and last person he told about his visions worked out of a small shop off High Street in between a discount luggage store and a bakery. A hinged shingle proclaimed ‘Madam Sydel — Readings, Seeings’.

She was a wizened lady, brown and twisted as the trunk of some hardy Mediterranean tree, her wildly dyed hair sown with glazed beads. When she reached under her scalp and scratched purposefully, Nicholas realised it was a wig. Still scratching, she led him into a parlour lined with tasselled silks and smelling of incense and burnt hair. She sat him down and took his hand.

He jumped straight into business: ‘I see ghosts.’

‘Oh? How much do you charge?’

Nicholas went home, picked up the phone, and bought his airline ticket out of Britain.

The day before he stepped in the cab for Heathrow, he had woken to a rain as light as steam drifting from the sky. By mid-morning, when he reached the cemetery in Newham, the sun was having a tug-of-war with the clouds and was creating small diamonds on the roses and willows.

Nicholas sat heavily beside Cate’s grave.

He looked at her headstone and a felt a swirl of guilt. It was black and angular and Cate would have hated it. ‘Like something by Albert Speer,’ she’d have said. Her parents had done the choosing. Nicholas remembered the typed, formally worded letter asking him for nine thousand pounds for the funeral, grave lease and a ‘lovely service where the council plants spring and summer flowers on the grave’. He read the gold-lettered epitaph for the hundredth time.

In God’s loving arms .

Was it true? There was no sense of her here. No feeling that she lay below him. No feeling that she watched from above. The air was cool for summer, and, with the rain drying, felt empty and fleeting. Was she trapped in the silent playback going on and on in the echoing little bathroom in Ealing? Was she gone completely, the spark in her brain extinguished and her with it?

In God’s loving arms.

‘I’m going,’ he whispered.

He waited. For a sign. For a whisper of wind. For anything that said she heard him and wanted him to stay.

The willows held themselves silent. A car with a sports muffler rutted past on the North Boundary Road. Nothing.

Nicholas got to his feet and left.

Three days later, a hemisphere away, he lay on his little sister’s childhood bed, listening to rain crash down in an endless, dark wave.

And now he was home.

But home with what? A ring wedding him to a dead woman. A few thousand pounds. A couple of niceish Ben Sherman shirts.

Seventeen years. Nothing.

And his mother, what had happened there? No new man. Same house. Twenty new teapots. Nothing.

Rain. Faces. The dead. Trees.

DANG DONG.

The doorbell: a bakelite mechanical thing that rang two tuneless notes, one as you pressed in the smooth worn button, the other as you released it.

Nicholas blinked and picked up his watch from the pink bedside table. It was nearly two in the morning.

DANG DONG.

‘Mum?’ he called.

He swung his legs out of bed, sat up.

DANG DONG.

‘Coming!’

As he passed his mother’s bedroom door, he heard hefty snores befitting a circus strong man.

‘Why don’t I get it?’ he suggested to no one.

Down the hall. By old habit his fingers found and clicked the switch for the outside light. He swung open the front door.

Two police officers in slicks waited on the stoop. One was big and dark-haired and stood closest to do the talking. The other, bigger and with fair hair, waited behind, ready to bend the cast-iron handrail or uproot a tree to prevent escape.

‘Good evening, sir,’ said the dark-haired officer. Nicholas dubbed him ‘Fossey’ in his mind. ‘Sorry to disturb your sleep. We’re going door to door seeking information about a young boy who’s gone missing.’

On cue, gorilla-man behind held up a laminated colour photocopy of a blond seven year old beaming at the camera. Nicholas jolted.

It’s Tristram. But Tristram’s been dead twenty-five years.

He leaned in to look more closely.

The photograph was recent. In the background was an LCD TV. The boy wore a Spiderman 3 T-shirt. Nevertheless, he looked eerily similar to Nicholas’s childhood friend.

Who was murdered , Nicholas reminded himself.

His heart was pumping hard. He shook his head. ‘No.’

But the officers had seen the frisson of recognition. They exchanged a glance, then returned their steady gazes to Nicholas.

‘Are you sure, sir?’ asked Fossey.

‘Yep. Really. I just got in from overseas tonight.’

‘Tonight, sir? What time was that?’

‘Half past ten or so.’

Nicholas licked his lips. The police weren’t moving.

‘Did you come straight home, sir?’

‘Yep.’

‘Did you stop anywhere?’ asked gorilla-man.

Yes , thought Nicholas. The woods. He’d stopped at the woods, amazed to see them still as potent and thick as ever. He’d walked halfway to their edge. Had been drawn to them. But why? He couldn’t explain that to himself, let alone the police. Randomly scoping out dark woods in the middle of the rainy night when a boy happens to go missing? God, you’re acting like a guilty man! They don’t need to know that. Snap out of it!

‘No.’

Officer Fossey reached for his notebook. Gorilla-man’s right hand casually slipped down to hang straight beside his leg, closer to his service pistol.

‘What’s your name, sir?’

‘Nicholas Close. Look-’

The officer wrote in his notebook, asked, ‘C–L-O-S-E?’

‘What’s going on, Nicky?’ Katharine arrived silently behind her son, fumbling with her dressing gown’s sash.

The policemen exchanged a glance.

‘A young boy has been reported missing, ma’am.’

Silverback held the picture up for Katharine.

‘Oh dear.’ Nicholas, who knew her voice so well, could just detect a quiver. ‘Local boy?’

‘Yes, ma’am. This gentleman told us he returned from overseas tonight?’

Nicholas saw his mother’s eyes narrow just the slightest margin.

‘My son. That’s right.’

‘What time did he arrive?’

‘Just after eleven thirty. His flight touched down at nine fifty, which means he made excellent time getting through customs, hiring a car and getting home here.’ Her words came clipped and fast, the shake replaced by something harder. ‘We talked in our kitchen till quarter past twelve and both went to bed, and it certainly is tragic that a boy’s got himself lost in this rain but I’m not sure I quite understand where this is going.’

The two big men shifted back an almost imperceptible amount. Nicholas sagged a little. He was in his mid-thirties and still needed his mother to keep him out of trouble.

‘Ma’am, we’re just asking questions,’ said Fossey.