Darkside

He could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what he meant.

‘Here. Just now. Who was it?’

He didn’t want to hear her answer. He had to ask the question, but if he could have, he’d have defied the laws of physics to have missed the man so he would never have to be here now, asking again … ‘Who was he, Lu?’

‘Jonas—’ she started and then stopped and thought hard before going on. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking.’

‘I come in the front door and a strange man runs out the back. What am I thinking?’

She was having an affair. She couldn’t say it. The thought made Jonas unbearably sad. He’d have thought he would be furious, but he wasn’t. He just felt like sobbing.

‘Come and sit down.’ She held out her hand for his but he didn’t give it. Instead he tucked both hands into his armpits, as if the forearms crossed on his chest might protect his heart from the truth.

‘Please, Jonas. Can we sit down?’

He recognized the tone from the few times he had been to pick Lucy up from the kindergarten before they moved. Although then she would be crouching, so she could look into the face of a tearful child.

Now he realized he was close to tears himself, and felt the image was not far removed from reality, despite the fact that she had to look up to meet his eyes. He still saw love in her face, but his heart twisted as he saw pity there too. Pity for him. Pity because she was going to hurt him.

He bit his lip and wished it were already over; that he already knew the worst and didn’t have to go through the sordid shock of hearing it.

Numb with foreboding, Jonas followed her into the front room.

They sat on the sofa, but not as they always had before. This time they sat at either end, prim and upright, half turned towards each other, like insurance salesmen. The room was dark but for the silent television which tonight showed A Nightmare on Elm Street.

‘I’ve been wanting to tell you …’ she started.

He couldn’t look at her. Instead he watched Freddy Krueger’s arms grow impossibly long and chillingly inescapable in a silent nightmare.

‘… I just didn’t know how.’

She was stalling. It was torture. He couldn’t bear it.

‘What’s his name?’

She looked perplexed that he’d ask.

‘Brian Connor.’

‘How long have you been seeing him?’ Every word sounded wrong to Jonas’s ears, all the emphasis, all the syntax, as if the sentence had been cobbled together by robots, syllable by syllable, from sound bites found in some alien archive. He’d had no concept that he would or could ever say them to his wife.

‘I’m not having an affair with him, Jonas.’

Was she going to deny the fact now? Or had he just caught them before anything could happen?

She slid her eyes from his gaze, which made him suspect the latter. Jonas felt himself unwind just a little bit. It was hardly any better, but it was something—

‘He’s run from me twice, Lucy.’

‘He knows who you are. He didn’t want to … get into a conversation.’

I’ll bet, he thought. Some suitably outraged, angry and cuckolded words swirled in his head for a second but never got the energy to make it out of his mouth. He just gave up on them.

‘He’s from Exit, Jonas.’

She glanced at him to see his response, but he looked blank. She cleared her throat and made a gesture with her hands that was half shrug, half pleading.

‘They help … I mean … they support … voluntary euthanasia.’

Jonas made a sound that had never come out of his mouth before. Pain and shock and fury. He stood up as if ejected and stared down at Lucy, whose face was bathed in a pale-blue TV flicker.

‘NO!’ he shouted. ‘NO!’

* * *

Lucy Holly would have been Steven Lamb’s favourite customer even if her husband hadn’t been tipping him ?5 a month to keep watch over her.

He liked the companionship of sitting down with her in her cosy front room where the fire was almost always alight and smelled wonderfully of warmth and winter. He liked the fact that she rarely tried to make conversation. Everybody always wanted to make conversation – to ask him how he was and what he was doing and whether he was all right. Even his best friend Lewis sometimes put out feelers. But Steven always felt that they were tiptoeing around the subject that surrounded him like a moat.

He didn’t like it.

He didn’t like to be reminded.

So sitting in silence with Lucy Holly while fake fear played out on the TV was oddly comforting for Steven. The scenes of horror rarely affected him and when they might he closed his eyes. But the warm silence calmed him and sometimes even made a bit of conversation pop into his own head. Over the years he had shared with Mrs Holly extracts from his life, and learned that he could be of interest to someone outside his family, for reasons other than that he was still alive when – really – he should be dead.

Now, as he struggled up the hill in the snow towards Rose and Honeysuckle cottages, Steven hoped Mrs Holly was watching something good – but not so good that he felt bad about interrupting with a titbit about his little brother, Davey, who had just this morning accidentally swallowed his last remaining baby tooth and who was therefore down to the last fifty-pence piece he was ever likely to earn from their nan for doing absolutely nothing. As Davey had already spent the money at least ten times over in his head, the tragedy was compounded for him, while that only increased the humour of it for Steven.

The snow was shin-deep in the lane and Steven wore wellies and his black waterproof trousers and kept his head down as he trudged uphill, staring at the crystalline surface he was about to break with each step, smooth and pale grey in the fast dark of winter.

He passed the telegraph pole halfway up the hill and heard it creak under the weight of snow and ice on the lines. Creepy.

The DayGlo sack on his shoulder held only junk mail tonight. Frank Tithecott gave him a fiver a week so that he didn’t have to bother stuffing leaflets through letter boxes himself, and Steven kept it for the nights when he collected the newspaper money from his customers. He liked to make Mrs Holly’s his last call of the day so that he knew he could go straight home afterwards and didn’t have to rush.

He finally looked up to see that he had made it to the gate of Honeysuckle Cottage. Mrs Paddon didn’t get a paper delivered. He’d knocked at her door once to see if she would like to order one from him but she had waved him away as if he were a Jehovah’s Witness, and told him, ‘We don’t want that kind of thing here.’ Steven still pondered on what on earth she might have thought she heard come out of his mouth instead of ‘Would you like to order the Western Morning News?’ After all this time, he’d never been able to come up with anything that sounded even remotely unsavoury.

Steven went up the three stone steps to the second gate and fumbled in the dark for the catch. As he did he heard something coming from Rose Cottage. He held his breath so he could hear better.

There it was again. Raised voices.

Steven was surprised. He was used to hearing customers shouting at each other as he opened the letter box on their lives for a brief moment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened the Randalls’ letter box and not heard Neil yelling something at his father.

But he’d never heard raised voices at Rose Cottage.

He stood for a moment, undecided in the cold and dark.

He liked Lucy Holly very much. He liked Mr Holly too – even though he’d splashed about in the moat of Steven’s memory. Steven hadn’t liked that, but he’d understood that it was the policeman’s job to ask. Plus Mr Holly was a source of income for him.

So even though he decided to open the gate and walk the few paces to the porch of Rose Cottage, Steven had not yet made up his mind whose side he should be on when he got there.

* * *