Darke Read online

  Only four days after its installation, the doorbell rang. I ignored it. Either it was someone who didn’t matter or, much worse, someone who did. I cannot say what time it was. I have renounced my watch, drawn the curtains. It is dark amid the blaze of noon, a total eclipse without hope of day. I am become a thing of darkness.

  I do not follow the news, hardly turn on the telly or wireless. My computer wants to tell me the time and date, but after some searching I turn off that function. The house is still, timeless. Eternal in its way.

  I drift off in my chair, resolve to drink my way through the wine cellar, nibble smoked oysters on cracked wheat biscuits. The oysters are delivered (on Thursdays) from Scotland. They do not come in tins. Anything that is tinned, tastes tinny: baked beans, tuna in oil, white asparagus, all similarly contaminated. No, my oysters are plump, recently smoked, and come in plastic packaging that hardly affects their taste.

  I eat grapes, though it is hard to source decent ones. But if I eat too many, or drink too much, I am sick, sick at heart, vomiting, bereft. The nausea rises out of me like a metaphysical force. It is in the walls, it is everywhere around me, it is the air that I cannot breathe. But I carry on with my grapes, both liquid and solid. I don’t wish to die of scurvy. I don’t wish to die at all, not yet.

  I feel as if the house is under surveillance, staked out, as I am staked out within it. Crucified. But behind its blank façade, there are few signs of life, as I have few signs of life behind mine.

  The only vulnerability is on Thursdays. If you were a weary gumshoe slumped over your steering wheel, eyes propped open, in need of a shave and a toothbrush after a sleepless Wednesday night, in the morning you might observe someone walk up the path confidently, open the door and go in. You might try to confront them, or more likely advise your employer to do so.

  When the doorbell rang again a few days later – just once, that was a good idea – I snuck into the hallway, my footsteps muffled by the thickness of the carpet, and surely imperceptible outside the door. I looked through the peephole. It was just as I had anticipated, and feared. I retreated upstairs, my restless heart threatening its cavity, and a few moments later the knocking started, first a regular rapping, followed soon by a robust banging, less loud than burly James Fenimore had produced, but surprisingly vigorous nonetheless. I closed the door to my study.

  It happened again the next day, the hammering, and a more protracted and furious banging. When I opened the door a few hours later, having ensured that the 200-degree coast was clear, there was an envelope taped to it, obviously with a letter inside it. Perhaps four or five pages thick. I took it inside, tore it up without opening it, and threw the many pieces into the bin.

  From the outside, with the curtains closed, the house might well have looked uninhabited. The only tell-tale sign, ironically, was the change to the door. Why would someone who had left a house for a protracted period feel a need to reinforce its entrance in such a way? No, the unwelcoming black door signalled that someone was inside, who would not welcome the presence of an intruder. I steeled myself – not a cliché, just the right metaphor – to expect further visits, further knocks, further entreaties. I will ignore them, steely in my resolve.

  The air is stifling, humid, it feels as if I could drown in it.

  Here I lie where I need to be

  I am the sailor home from the sea

  I choose the darkness because I hate it, and I loathe the sea, it’s so bloody insistent: whoosh whoosh, drown. No, my adventures are over. Save this one, which I am writing.

  If – God forbid – I had to go outside now, I would wear a sign. I could print it on the computer, on heavy gauge paper in Gils Sans typeface, and attach it with a string around my neck:

  Do not talk to me, or come near me.

  I am not interested in your opinions.

  Thinking this gives me a warm feeling. I can no longer bear to be in the presence of my fellow man, even to dismiss them. I will not go out, though sometimes of a morning I fold my towel and lean against the door, peeping at my fellows on their daily rounds. The sight of them fills me with hatred, disgust and contempt. This feeling comes upon me with the buffeting terror of a tsunami. I am swept away, hardly able to breathe, in danger of extinction. The thought of wandering into the streets, bumped and jostled by these acrid creatures, makes me retch.

  I have lost my capacity to avert my eyes, or my nose. They stay open, however much I blink and flinch and turn away. I keep thinking those thoughts which, if we can only cast them aside, allow us to live tolerable, satisfied and self-satisfied existences. To make do. Reality punches you, pummels you into bruised submission, except that there is no way in which you can throw in the towel, wave a white flag, mutter ‘No más’ like that poor boxer once did, and retreat to the safety of your corner.

  Or perhaps to your house? Reality: out there. Aversion: in here? If only it were so simple. If only it worked. How can we bear to be ourselves? How can we bear our children, whose lives begin in pain and terminate in agony? Enough. Too much.

  O dark dark dark. They all go intothe dark.

  Fucking T.S. Eliot. All of them? Damned? Surely somebody gets to go into the light, don’t Christians think like that? The source, the beginning, the brightness at the end of the tunnel, the soft fading dribble of final consciousness, the ethereal infinite. In his end is his beginning, like a snake with its arse up its head. Welcomed by the heavenly hosts and hostesses. Pearly gates, genial chat with St Peter, try not to push in the queue, get your individual destination. Not very efficient. More sensible to suppose some quick transformation from person to angel. The soul leaves the poor just-dead remains and Swoosh! like that sound mobile phones make when they send a text (better than Quack! Quack!). The soul shoots away and finds itself in the clouds.

  What do you do up there? What are you going to do tomorrow? Next year? Next millennium? What sustains and nourishes them, the angels of the dead? In pictorial accounts they are corporeal in some faded, washed-out way, like threadbare cotton nighties left to dry in the sun, softly flapping, drained of essence.

  Yet they have human features. Faces, chests, wavy hair, noses, arms (wings, anyway), something sort of leggy. In heaven there are no signs or vestiges of what got you there. No swollen tumours, no bullet holes or crushed skulls, no filled lungs or ruptured appendixes. No shrunken cadavers. Every body filled up and filled in. Reformed, reformulated, returned, retuned, resurrected. Good as new. Better.

  Does this celestial self retain its humanity? Does it get cystitis or haemorrhoids? There is no testimony that it gorges and disgorges, excretes or sodomises. Do angels have arseholes?

  Do they examine themselves, these freshly minted angels, wonder at this shimmering new essence, this new freedom from weight and care? Might they, before they morph into pure angeltude, do an anxious inventory of what is, astonishingly, missing, as if they had survived some terrible bomb blast, and in a hectic, final shocked moment checked to see what was left of themselves? Lips? Check. Legs? Hard to tell. Eyes? Functioning. Ears. Nothing to hear. No viscera at all at all. No stomach: nothing to eat. No lungs: no air to breathe. No blood: no menstruating angels, no cut fingers. It’s enough to make you scream with laughter. Dead and not dead. Body and not body. It makes me hysterical.

  Angels are the riddles of heaven: dead things with feathers. Only the damned remain fully alive, cursing and writhing, bleeding and bruising, smelling and excreting, in agony and despair. Bit like life really.

  Later in his dreadful poem, Mr Eliot assures us – can you fucking believe it? – that you are damned according to your profession. The Great and the Good go to Hell, along with the usual haul of cowards, narcissists and murderers. Plenty of arseholes in Hell. Mr Eliot includes himself amongst the damned. I like that in a poet.

  Heavenly reward is only for the meek, the humble, the unostentatiously kindly: dinner ladies, scout masters, carers, primary schoolteachers, nurses, cleaners, rubbish collectors, gardeners, college scouts,
curates and handymen. The worthies who, in their finest hour, are offered an MBE by the Queen, and are charmingly and naively delighted. And after that they become angels!

  And here we have him, ladies and gentlemen! T.S. Eliot: classicist in literature, royalist in politics, the most pompous form of the Jamesian American ex-pat. Worse yet: as from his religious conversion, a Believer! It horrified his friends, his erstwhile friends. That frigid snitbag Virginia Woolf was so distressed that she virtually sat shiva with her husband Lenny the Jew to signal the passing of poor Tom, no longer a member of the atheist tribe.

  Unlike Leonard’s, her nose hooked up, not down, it sniffed, she was a great sniffer, a terrific bitch. Her letters and diaries are fastidious, superior, deadly. So much more enjoyable than all those girly hyper-sensitive novels. Mrs Shalloway. To the Shitehouse. Beyond reprieve or comprehension, poor Tom, sighed Virginia, ‘may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He believes in God and immortality, and goes to church . . .’

  Of a sudden, he’s all public pious, intellectual, and – how ghastly, how utterly uncongenial – a seeker after wisdom. We are told his poems have spiritual quality. What an oxymoron. Worse! He would be an imparter of wisdom, another failed-priest poet. Like them all.

  Like that dreadful gasbag Kahlil Gibran, the archetypal fakir, whose platitudes informed the weddings of a whole generation. Lucy produced two of his ‘poems’ at her ceremony: one read with doleful earnestness by her soon-to-be husband Sam the other intoned by herself:

  Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

  Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

  Christ! This ghastly humbuggery was enough to make me yearn for Mr Eliot. Perched in the front row on a hideous plastic chair wrapped in a floppy gentrifying serviette, I suffered mightily, and (I gather) let out a discernible groan. Lucy glared at me. She was still angry from our disastrous conversation two days before.

  I’d thought I was helping, like a signalman on the tracks diverting a runaway train. She’d been at the house, sitting on the bed doing something with a pile of clothes. She and Suzy had been assembling her ‘going-away outfit’ – which I gather is what your change of clothes after the wedding is called – and Suzy had announced she was popping out to buy some suitable garment or other. Lucy was turned away from me, her shoulders hunched, shaking gently and regularly.

  ‘Lucy, love, are you all right?’

  ‘It’s Mummy, she’s driving me crazy. This whole bloody farce is down to her. Just because she had to endure a big wedding, she’s inflicting it on me. She says it’s one of a woman’s rites of passage, like childbirth, you just have to bear it.’

  I hate weddings, especially this one, for which I had to pay. Why does the bride’s family have to shell out? Though we would have had to anyway, for Sam’s worthy parents didn’t have two beans to rub together. Though if they’d had them, they would have.

  Give me a good funeral any day: some happy memories and encomia rather than fatuous hopes for a dodgy future. No drunken rowdies, no idiotic dancing till early morning, no ill-dressed maids of honour losing theirs with best men desperate to shuck their formal clothing and get on the job.

  Lucy’s eyes drifted downwards again, and she selected a cream blouse, pressed it against her chest, looked into the mirror, put it back down. She tested another blouse, rejected it, frowning. Her displeasure was directed more at the activity than the various garments. There were only two days until the wedding, and (as Suzy insisted) choices have to be made.

  Lucy had been suborned into compliance. Left to her own devices, she’d have put on a frock, gathered a couple of friends as witnesses – not her parents, nor Sam’s – trotted off to the local registry office, had a celebratory nosh-up with some pals, then gone back to work the next day, a wife.

  ‘Lucy? I’ve been thinking . . . Can I say something?’

  She put down yet another blouse, and sat on the bed. ‘Sure. What?’

  ‘I just wanted to say, you know, while there’s still time . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t have to do this, you know.’

  She nodded her head in agreement. ‘I know I don’t! But I got hassled into it by Mummy, and somehow once you agree to a proper wedding you end up with all sorts of stuff that you don’t need or want.’ She leant sideways and began to flick through various items of clothing.

  I was determined to persevere, though I had nothing to fall back on emotionally. Suzy told me I needed to ‘work on my relationship’ with Lucy, but I never thought we had one, not quite, which was rather a relief. She was unaccountable to me, and I cannot recall many sustained personal conversations between us. I was rarely alone with her adult incarnation, and vaguely ill at ease when I was. She had made, it seemed to me, a set of uninspired choices, the consequences of which – work at a desk in some down-at-heel centre of worthiness – were no doubt admirable in some abstract way. Sam was another, and far more dangerous, example of her bad judgement.

  ‘No, love. I’m sorry. Do come over here and sit for a moment.’

  Lucy looked up, puzzled by my request for enhanced proximity, and came to sit beside me in the twin armchairs in the alcove by the window, her body turned slightly away, as if shielding herself from unaccustomed intimacy. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘I just want to have a little chat, you know, before the day.’

  ‘Day? What day? You’re being awfully mysterious.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, I’m not very good at this. Your wedding day, of course. Saturday.’

  She turned to face me squarely. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, I was wondering, perhaps you might be getting cold feet? You seem on edge. And I just wanted to say it isn’t too late if you want to reconsider. I – Mummy and I – would quite understand . . .’

  ‘Let me get this straight. Are you asking me if I have cold feet, or advising me to have them? Because if you are . . .’

  I knew there was some risk involved, but was determined to pursue the thought. ‘It’s just that people often marry in spite of the fact that they have misgivings. They just get carried along with the flow, and are too timid to say “hold on a minute, I’m not sure I’m ready for this”.’

  She stood up from her chair, until she was only a few feet away from where I was sitting, and I was looking up at her angry face.

  ‘How dare you! First Mummy hassling me about clothes and stupid fucking details, now my father is trying to call the whole thing off! That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you want!’

  ‘No, love, not at all. It’s just that – ’

  ‘You’ve never liked Sam. You never gave him a chance, did you? You never met him halfway, sat down and talked and tried to get to know him?’

  That was true enough. From our first acquaintance, when he came to dinner to meet the parents, uncomfortable in a new jacket and tie, I’d spotted him as the sort of earnest working-class Northern boy who would have benefited from a decent education, had his sharp edges and broad vowels polished and regularised.

  She was leaning down now, her face close to mine. ‘And you know what is sad? You don’t get it at all. Sam is his own man, and he has wonderful qualities, you just can’t see them.’

  ‘Tell me what you mean.’

  ‘It’s hardly worth bothering,’ she said, standing straight and backing away, making a curiously operatic gesture with her hands. ‘You’d find it hard to recognise his virtues.’

  ‘Oh yes? Tell me about them. I’m genuinely interested.’

  ‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘And integrity.’

  ‘I’m glad you feel that way.’

  ‘I do. I only wish you did too. And I do want to marry him with all my heart. It’s the only thing in this whole ghastly mess that I’m certain about.’

  I stood up to comfort her, though reassuring cuddles are well outside my normal repertoire.

  She turned away. ‘Let
’s leave it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘perhaps it was ham-fisted of me. But I meant well.’

  ‘Did you now?’ she said.

  This always seems to happen when I try to be fatherly.

  Lucy’s stare, as I perched on my plastic, was a rich amalgam of triumph and warning, and I turned away, unforgiven. I stifled myself, clenched my cheeks.

  Suzy elbowed my ribs, then clasped my hand firmly in tacit reassurance. The sleeve of her silk blouse, that we’d bought in a market in Rajasthan fourteen months before, made a shocking contrast with the pallor of her wrist, where the veins traced their purple trails in a manner that should have felt ominous. The royal blue of the silk shimmered, startlingly lit by a tribe of crimson parrots, beaks slightly agape, dangerous and moronic, yearning to squawk or to nip.

  She’d been uncertain, in that stifling market smelling of turmeric and petrol, cooking curries and cow dung, urine and the waft of human shit. I gagged with humid disgust. She held the blouse in the air to inspect it, then placed it across her chest.

  ‘Very nice lady! Very nice! Parrot most lucky bird. I give you good price!’

  A tiny boy and his smaller sister, dressed in rags, had followed us around the market, importuning, holding onto Suzy’s skirt and attempting to grab hold of my trouser leg. A quick slap put paid to that. The little boy pointed to his slim but by no means distended stomach, and groaned piteously. The little girl looked up – at Suzy – beseechingly. At first glance – I didn’t take a second – the lower half of her face was composed entirely of snot.

  ‘Hungry, sah!’ He put his hand out, and his tiny sister mimicked the gesture. Suzy patted them on the head kindly, already thinking of a way to slip them a few rupees without causing an urchin storm. She took out a piece of Kleenex, wiped the girl’s nose, and threw the tissue into the dirt with the other detritus. I shuddered. I know nothing of caste systems, but these children were verily untouchable.

  ‘For pity’s sake,’ I said, ‘just buy the damn thing! How much can it cost? You can always give it to Lucy if it doesn’t suit you. Let’s go!’