Dark Room

The Dark Room

by Minette Walters

And we forget because we must

And not because we will.

'Absence', Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

The idea of the False Self was put forward by R. D. Laing, adapting some theories of Jean-Paul Sartre. The false self was an artificially created self-image designed to concur with expectations, while the true self remained hidden and protected.

Killing for Company, Brian Masters

prologue

With her sharp little face set in lines of dissatisfaction, the twelve-year-old girl sat up and searched for her knickers among the forest leaves. It had finally begun to dawn on her that sex with Bobby Franklyn wasn't all it could be. She put on her shoes and kicked him hard. 'Get up, Bobby,' she snapped. 'It's your turn to find the bloody dog.'

He rolled over onto his back. 'In a minute,' he muttered sleepily.

'No, now. Mum'll skin me alive if Rex gets home before me again. She's not stupid, you know.' She stood up and dug the heel of her shoe into his naked thigh, twisting it back and forth in a childish desire to hurt. 'Get up.'

'Okay, okay.' He rose sulkily to his feet, tugging at his trousers. 'But this is pissing me off, you know. It's hardly worth doing if we have to go looking for the dog every time.'

She moved away from him. 'It's not Rex that makes it hardly worth doing.' There were tears of angry humiliation in her eyes. 'I should have listened to Mum. She always says it takes a real man to do it properly.'

'Yeah, well,' he said, zipping his fly, 'it'd be a damn sight easier if I didn't have to pretend you were Julia Roberts. What would your sodding mum know about it, anyway? It's years since anyone gave her a good shagging.' He had few feelings for these girls beyond the purely animal, but he grew to hate them very quickly when they gave him lip about his performance. The urge to smash their jeering little faces in was becoming irresistible.

The girl started to walk away. 'I hate you, Bobby. I really hate you, and I'm going to tell on you.' She tapped her watch. 'Three minutes. That's as long as you can keep it up. Three lousy minutes. Is that what you call a good shagging?' She gave a triumphant glance over her shoulder, saw something in his face that alerted her to the danger she was in, and took to her heels in sudden fear. 'REX!' she screamed. 'RE-EX! You BEAST, Bobby! He'll KILL you if you touch me,' she sobbed out, her small wiry body darting through the trees.

But it was Bobby who was going to do the killing. His anger was out of control. He threw himself at her back and brought her crashing to the ground, breathing heavily as he tried to get astride her thrashing legs. 'Bitch!' he grunted. 'Bloody bitch!'

Fear lent her strength. She scrambled away from him, crying for her dog, slithering and sliding in a flurry of decomposing leaves into a broad ditch that scored the forest bed. She landed on her feet, only yards away from the huge Alsatian, who stood hackles up and growling. 'I'll set him on you, and he'll rip you to pieces. And I won't care, and I won't stop him.' She saw with satisfaction that Bobby had turned white to the gills. 'You're such a CREEP!' she yelled.

And then she saw that Rex was growling at her and not at Bobby, and that what had drained the color from her boyfriend's face was not his fear of the dog but stunned horror at what the dog was guarding. She had a glimpse of something half unearthed and repulsively human, before panic drove her up the slope again in sobbing, wide-eyed terror.

*1*

She clung to sleep tenaciously, wrapped in beguiling dreams. It was explained to her afterwards that they weren't dreams at all, only reality breaking through the days of confusion as she rose from deep unconsciousness to full awareness, but she found that difficult to accept. Reality was too depressing to give birth to such contentment. Her awakening was painful. They propped her on pillows and she caught glimpses of herself from time to time in the dressing table mirror, a waxen-faced effigy with shaven head and bandaged eye-hardly recognizable-and she had an instinctive desire to withdraw from it and leave it to play its part alone. It wasn't her. A huge bear of a man with close-cropped hair and close-cropped beard leaned over her and told her she'd been in a car accident. But he didn't tell her where or when. You're a lucky young woman, he said. She remembered that. Forgot everything else. She had a sense of time passing, of people talking to her, but she preferred to drowse in sleep where dreams beguiled.

She was aware. She saw. She heard. And she felt safe with the pleasant female voices that smoothed and soothed and petted. She answered them in her head but never out loud, for she clung to the spurious protection of intellectual absence. 'Are you with us today?' the nurses asked, pressing their faces up to hers. I've been with you all along. 'Here's your mother to see you, dear.' I don't have a mother. I have a stepmother. 'Come on, love, your eye is open. We know you can hear us, so when are you going to talk to us?' When I'm ready ... when I'm ready ... when I want to remember...

Road Traffic Accident: Reported 21.45 approx, 13.6.94 PCs Gregg & Hardy on scene at 22.04. Location: Unused airfield, Stoney Bassett, Hants One vehicle involved. Black Rover Cabriolet automatic Reg No: JIN IX- vehicle written off Driver: Miss Jane Imogen Nicola Kingsley unconscious & in need of emergency