The Darkening (2 page)

‘My bike?’ he whispered.

The man lifted his chin and peered between the top of his glasses and the brim of his tweed driver’s cap.

‘Pretty well buggered. You know you’re bleeding?’

‘Oh, God! He’s bleeding?!’

Nicholas held up a hand for silence. A click as the other end picked up.

‘Hello?’

Cate. Nicholas’s heart slowed. Relief as warm as sunlight washed through him.

‘Cate.’

‘Hello, bear. What’s up?’

‘Cate.’ He was so happy to hear her. Why? He’d only left her a moment ago . . .

‘Nicky? Where are you? Are you on the road?’ Concern in her voice now. ‘I heard the motorbike and - oh, God, have you had an accident?’

Her voice was growing fainter.

‘I’m fine, nothing. A little bingle. You, though. Are you all right?’

He was so happy. Happy and amazed. She was fine. Why had he worried so?

Evening seemed to be falling fast. The equestrian couple was darkening in shadow, their faces growing as lean and hidden as the evening trees themselves. The rain was a steady hiss.

‘I’m worried about
you
! Where are you? Nicky? Nicholas?’ Her voice was thin and distant, words from the bottom of a well.

‘I’m here . . . but you’re all right!’

‘Nicholas?’

Bump.

A grey pall fell over the world, rapidly making everything dimmer and darker. Grey became black. Evening became night.

‘You’re all right . . .’ he whispered.

Bump.

Bump.

Just a little nudge, stirring a tinkle of ice. Bump. A flick of paper somewhere.

Nicholas opened one eye a fraction. It was night. Well, dark, certainly. And his face was cold and damp; chill hissed down on him. Was it still raining? His vision was swimmy.

Bump.

He opened the other eye, and blinked.

The aircraft cabin was as dark as a cinema. Hard plastic window shades were pulled down. The cool air was loosely laced with body odour and cologne. Passengers lay motionless with blankets drawn to necks, mouths agape, sleeping. Most lights were out, but a few private oases of yellow or blue peppered the gloom, a woman reading here, a man wearing headphones watching a small screen there. Up the aisle, a flight attendant checked on her wards, walking between passengers as silently as a benevolent spirit.

Someone behind Nicholas was drinking: ice ticked on glass. Across the aisle from him, a girl of six or seven sat awake, colouring a picture.

‘Oh, God . . .’

Nicholas turned at the desperate whisper, before realising it was his own. His nose was blocked by mucus. He touched his face. His cheeks were wet and cold under the air hissing from the vent above.

He’d been crying in his sleep.

If I shut my eyes now and go to sleep
, he thought,
I can go back.
Back to the beautiful lie that Cate was on the phone, worried, but alive.

But it was too late. The truth of things rushed through spill-gates, dousing him wide awake. He was alive and leaving Britain. Cate was dead: three utterly dreadful months in the ground. She’d fallen getting down the ladder to answer his telephone call after the motorbike crash, splintering her neck on the bath edge.

The cold weight of the realisation sank Nicholas deeper into his seat. He swallowed back bile and wiped his nose. The little girl across the aisle glanced at him disapprovingly. The flight was an eternity. He angled his watch to catch what little light there was.

‘Are you all right, sir?’

He blinked.

A flight attendant looked down at him, brows drawn in tight concern. Her face was pale but her cheeks were pink and her nose freckled. Young.

‘Excuse me?’

The flight attendant leaned closer, whispered again, ‘Are you all right, sir? You . . . made some noise in your sleep.’ She held a tissue towards him.

‘Oh.’ Not knowing what else to do, he took the tissue. ‘I’m fine.’ A lie to send her on her way.

‘Bad dream?’

‘Yes.’ Another lie. So, now she could go.

But she lingered. The little girl across the aisle had stopped colouring and was sitting upright.

‘That’s no good. We like our passengers to sleep well.’ The flight attendant’s white smile was disconcertingly bright in the darkness.

‘How considerate.’
So, please go.

‘We hate to see our passengers upset.’

The little girl was shaking. Nicholas tried not to look at her. He dragged his eyes back to the woman and forced a smile that must have been horrific.

‘You really don’t have to charm me. I’m already on the plane.’

The woman’s smile faltered, but Nicholas really couldn’t give a toss. The little girl was convulsing now, her legs jack-hammering and her hands clawing at her tiny neck. Her face was sharp red and her mouth was opening and closing like a hooked fish’s.

The flight attendant recovered and cocked a smile at Nicholas - his frown could be turned upside-down. ‘But we’d like you to come back. Another blanket? Pillow?’

He nodded, then shook his head. The little girl was turning blue, her eyes so wide they showed a finger’s width of reddening white around the irises.
Don’t look. Say nothing.
She fell to the floor right at the attendant’s comfortable flats. Invisible fingers tore her top open, exposing her fluttering little chest and ribs.

Nicholas tried not to watch. His voice was a sandy whisper. ‘No, really. I’m awake now.’

The little girl’s back arched, and her head wrenched back at a hideous angle. She jerked mightily, a landed trout flopping with horrible, drowning violence. Then, like a sandcastle undermined by a wave, she collapsed on herself and grew still.

‘Tea? Or coffee?’

The little girl’s dead eyes stared at the cabin ceiling for a long moment . . . then rolled to fix on Nicholas’s.

Nicholas shut his, then opened them on the attendant. ‘What did the little girl die of?’ he whispered.

The woman blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

The girl was suddenly in her seat again. Her blouse was whole. She watched Nicholas, eyes unreadable. Her hands, as if with minds of their own, picked up the colouring book and crayon and recommenced their childish business.

Nicholas knew he should just shut up. But he wanted to wipe the smile off British Airways’ face.

‘A little girl died just here, didn’t she?’

The woman stared at Nicholas, her mouth working as she made some decisions. He knew the look: the how-did-he-know-that-is-he-a-reporter-is-he-mental-is-he-
dangerous
look.

‘How do you—’ Her words were clipped. No politeness now.

He’d managed to strip her smile away. It didn’t cheer him at all.

The little girl was colouring her book with tedious slowness. Her face was in shadow. The passenger beside her rolled in his sleep and put his arm right through her head.

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.

2

T
he 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 déclassé; 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 doppelgänger 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 & 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 résumé 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.