Dark Duets Part 55

When the pain subsided, he picked up the phone again, dialed Holly's number, then cut the call before the connection could be made. He wept for a long time, albeit silently, the tears rolling down his face and dripping off his chin. Then he tried calling her again . . . still couldn't. Perhaps it would be easier to catch a flight to England and talk to her in person.

His tears had made an impressive puddle on the table. He used the newspaper to mop them up, then turned to page seven and scrawled black X's on the monster's impa.s.sive eyes.

TWO DAYS LATER he made the call, not to Holly, but to British Airways reservations. He was going back to England. He was going home.

There was peace in his decision, yet no reprieve from the pain. If anything, the shadow on his soul only grew. He battled through the hours, his fragile body twisted out of shape, cold with sweat. Exhausted, he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep. It was like falling into a box of broken gla.s.s. He awoke with a start to the insipid gloom of evening, a half-packed suitcase on the bed next to him, and his dead son, Thomas, standing in the corner.

Seeing him was nothing new. Allan often spotted him in the shadows, or in the corner of his eye, but his visits had become more frequent since the cancer took hold. His son was as fair and beautiful as he had been in life, but disturbingly, uncharacteristically, the little boy was always silent, his staring eyes shining like cold moonlight reflecting off gla.s.s. Allan had tried speaking to him, even reaching out to him, but had never received even the merest flicker of a response.

There was only one way to make him disappear.

Allan's hip flask-never far away-was on the bedside table. The dying man s.n.a.t.c.hed it up with a spavined, bird's-claw hand and unscrewed the cap. He pressed the collar to the hard spot on his lip and took a full hit as Thomas stared at him.

He closed his eyes . . . waited.

"Though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool."

THERE WAS A time when Allan had been afraid of flying. Back when life meant something, when it seemed too precious to risk. Now the thought of crashing in flames, of being snuffed out as easily as a bug on a windshield, was almost too much to hope for. It was odd how he clung so tenaciously to the grinding misery of his existence, even while constantly wishing that Fate would intervene and absolve him of all responsibility. He had contemplated suicide, of course, but it was precisely that warped sense of responsibility that kept him here. He simply couldn't allow himself the blessed release of ending it all, not when so much remained unfinished. Allan found a bizarre sense of pride in the idea that, whatever he'd been reduced to, he still retained a shred of . . . what? Decency? Humanity?

He barked a laugh, which quickly became a series of rasping coughs that felt as though every tube and pa.s.sage from his esophagus to his bowel was being dredged with meat hooks. Cupping one hand over his mouth, he used the other to scrabble in his trouser and jacket pockets, hoping to unearth an old tissue or screwed-up handkerchief. He knew that to the hale and hearty his sickness was an affront, a crime against life's optimism and vitality. Knew too that the mucus-clotted blood spattering his palm was the incriminating evidence that would excite a level of attention he could do without. Oh, there would be a ripple of concern shown by his fellow pa.s.sengers and the air crew, but mostly there would be revulsion, alarm, fear. Post-9/11, a man coughing up blood in an airplane was not merely ill, he was infected. Over the past year, Allan had grown weary of telling people that he wasn't contagious; even wearier of their dewy-eyed pity when they found out what was really wrong with him-especially when that pity barely masked their relief that the cancer was devouring him, and not them.

He was still rooting through his pockets when he spotted the sick bag between his knees, poking out from the pouch affixed to the back of the seat in front. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it out as the young man beside him-whose bronzed skin and sun-bleached hair gave him the illusion of immortality-asked, "You all right, mate?"

Allan barely nodded before half turning away, his scrawny body shielding his actions from the man's curious gaze. He smeared blood from his palm on the stiff paper, then folded it over and dabbed telltale flecks of red from his lips before scrunching the bag into a ball. His bones felt full of ground gla.s.s as he pushed himself to his feet, but he managed to scurry down the aisle toward the back of the plane without attracting undue attention. Indeed, the majority of his fellow pa.s.sengers were too distracted by trivialities-computer games, in-flight movies, ba.n.a.l interviews with soap stars in gossip magazines-to even afford him a second glance. In recent weeks, as mortality had homed in on him, its great black wings beating ever closer, Allan had felt increasingly like an alien observing the pointless actions of another species from afar. He resented and reviled the way so many people pa.s.sed the time without effect, wiling away their precious lives in increments. But although he felt an urge to rail against their wastefulness, he was aware too of the great tragedy of human existence, which was that death made a mockery of achievement, and that the more a person acc.u.mulated in life, the more he or she was set to lose when their once seemingly endless days were scattered like dust.

Relieved to find one of the four toilet cubicles unoccupied, he pushed open the door and slipped inside. Locking the door behind him was like sealing himself into his very own fortress of solitude, in which he was gloriously immune from all interference and contact. The soft roar of the airplane engines lulled him. Indeed, it was comforting to think of himself as a minute, insignificant speck high above the planet, his pain-racked body both perfectly still and hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour. Still clutching the ball of blood-smeared paper, he lowered the toilet seat and sank slowly down on to it, his joints grinding with hurt as his knees and hips bent at right angles. He closed his eyes and allowed his mind to detach itself from its surroundings. At first it was like tumbling slowly and luxuriously into sleep, and then he became aware that his mind was drifting back through his memories, like a balloon s.n.a.t.c.hed from a child's hand by a capricious wind. Somewhat randomly, the balloon became snagged on the spiny branch of a specific memory in which Allan was fourteen or fifteen. It was a bl.u.s.tery autumn day, and Allan, a keen footballer, had decided to try his luck at the after-school team trials.

There was a girl he liked. Melody? Melanie? His memory of her was vague. She was nothing but a smudged recollection of dark hair, a pretty face. Allan thought she might have been in the year below his.

He wanted to impress this girl-that he remembered. And she must have liked him too, because she was prepared to stand huddled in the cold at the side of the pitch on his behalf, hair blowing in the wind, watching the largely disorganized efforts of twenty-two teenage boys with muddy boots and red-raw legs.

Her presence inspired Allan that day. It lent him the energy, dominance, and determination that he too often lacked. He was a decent footballer, but his dad, who'd been a better one, always maintained that his son was too lazy to achieve his full potential.

Allan wasn't lazy this day, though. For these ninety minutes, he was glorious. He bossed the game from midfield. He ran rings around boys who were generally considered stronger and faster and more skillful than he. Although his memories of Melody/Melanie were a blur, he recalled with utter clarity that his team won 62 that day, and that he scored two of the goals. He scored one of them from the halfway line. Looking up as the ball was pa.s.sed wide to him, he saw that the opposing keeper had advanced to the edge of his penalty area. Striking the ball sweetly, he watched it loop over the hapless keeper's head, bounce on the edge of the six-yard box, and nestle in the back of the net.

Although he didn't know it then, this proved to be the pinnacle of his football career. He made the team, but once there he didn't particularly shine. The other boys in the squad-cool, athletic, cliquey-didn't actively dislike him, but neither did they welcome him into their ranks with open arms. In the end he either stopped getting picked or drifted away of his own accord-he couldn't remember which. As for Melody/Melanie . . . he had no idea what happened to her. Despite his heroics, he didn't think they had ever dated, though he couldn't remember why. He wondered where she was now, how her life had panned out. Was she happy? Was she still alive? He hoped so.

When he opened his eyes, he was shocked to find tears running down his cheeks. He felt a sense of loss so profound it was like a twist of hot pain at the base of his ribs. When someone tapped lightly on the door, he raised his head slowly, his neck seeming to creak like a rusty hinge.

A woman's voice. "h.e.l.lo? Are you all right in there?"

Allan cleared his throat, but his voice was still a rasp. "Fine."

"Only you've been in there for quite a while."

"Sorry. I'll be out in a minute."

He pushed the balled-up sick bag into the slot for used paper towels, and then slowly washed his hands, watching as the water in the circular steel basin turned briefly pink before running clear again. He rinsed out his mouth and splashed his face, dabbing at his eyes and wet cheeks with a clean paper towel. He dried his hands and then, as an afterthought, slipped a number of folded paper towels into the inside pocket of his jacket, next to his hip flask. Finally, he flushed the toilet, unlocked the cubicle door, and pulled it open. Two stewardesses stood in the kitchen area sipping water from paper cups. One of them smirked as she glanced at him, as though trying to conceal a laugh, her eyes as blue and gla.s.sy as a doll's in her immaculately made-up face.

"Sorry," Allan muttered. "I wasn't feeling too well."

The girl's candy red lips curved in a smile. "That's quite all right, sir. We'll be serving dinner soon. I didn't want you to miss it."

Allan gave a curt nod and turned toward the rows of identical seats, above which the backs of heads roosted like variously hued wigs. He looked down the central aisle, and his scrawny body clenched like a fist.

Thomas was standing beside his empty seat.

Allan could see him quite clearly. His son was no illusion, no acc.u.mulation of shadows given wispy form. He was as solid as his surroundings, a small boy in a striped T-shirt and blue shorts, his blond hair reflecting the shine of the reading lights overhead.

He stared blankly at his father, his eyes glazed, his mouth set in a stubborn line. Allan began to tremble. His hand groped in his jacket pocket even as his mind groped for the mantra in his head.

"Though your sins are like scarlet . . ."

His fingers closed around the cold steel of the flask.

" . . . they shall be as white as snow."

He tugged out the flask, fumbling with the cap.

"Though they are red like crimson . . ."

The cap, dislodged, tumbled from his fingers and bounced beneath the seat of a dozing fat woman in a flowery dress, a broken-spined paperback open in her lap.

" . . . they shall be like wool."

As he raised the flask to his calloused lips, trying to hold it steady, he sensed a presence behind him, and heard the gentle clearing of a throat. A soft voice, reasonable, almost apologetic, murmured, "Excuse me, sir, is that alcohol? Because I'm afraid-"

Allan's fear and pain and misery seemed to coalesce, and to transform as they did so into a red flare of anger. Momentarily defying his infirmity, he swung around to confront the air stewardess who had smirked at him seconds before.

"It's morphine, you stupid woman. I have terminal cancer. I've been given special permission to bring this on board. You should have been informed."

He hissed out the words, keeping his voice low, but such was his fury that he was peripherally aware of several heads in the nearest rows of seats swiveling to regard him. The stewardess took a step back, her cheeks reddening, her previously immobile face twisting into a moue of dismayed apology.

"Of course, sir, we were told. My mistake, I . . . I . . ."

"So you don't mind if I make a vain attempt to ease my pain?"

"No, of course not. Please . . . go ahead."

His eyes still fixed on the girl, partly out of anger, though mostly to avoid looking at Thomas, Allan once again raised the flask to his lips. He swallowed, grimaced, felt the morphine shuddering through him, numbing as it went. Without another word to the stewardess he turned and looked along the aisle.

Thomas had gone. But for how long this time? His visits were becoming more frequent.

"Excuse me."

Allan looked to his left. The fat woman was now awake, and looking at him with something like trepidation. She held the cap of his flask between two chubby fingers and a thumb.

"Is this yours?"

Allan took the cap and screwed it back on. The gritty sound it made was like the rasp of his lungs in the silence of night.

"Thank you," he said.

THIS ANCIENT REALM, Allan thought. This Albion.

On the surface, England was drab and crumbling. Gray stone, gray clouds. But beneath its skin he sensed a strangeness, a wildness. He felt it as a vibration in the air, pulsing up from the earth itself and tingling in his veins. It was the deep-rooted energy of battles raged and blood spilled. It was witchcraft and paganism, sacrifice and sorcery, dark secrets and forbidden lore. This haunted island was full of ghosts, and Allan felt more attuned to them than he ever had before. They were all around him-in the way people talked, in the smell of the railway carriage, in the undulating fields and woodland that scrolled past the rain-streaked windows.

Allan felt like a husk after his flight-desiccated, cadaverous, so lacking in substance that if it wasn't for the pain holding him together, he thought he might evaporate. He sat in the window seat of a train rattling toward Meadingham, beside a bearded man in a Queens of the Stone Age T-shirt, whose iPod leaked music that sounded like the frantic scratching of a trapped insect. Across from him, a delicately beautiful girl with strawberry-colored hair scowled at a copy of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, as if every word offended her.

A dark shape in a field snagged Allan's attention. When his eyes jerked instinctively toward the window, it felt as if nerves were being tweaked in the sockets of his skull, causing him to bite back a hiss of pain. He couldn't even make sudden movements now without it hurting. He thought again of the carefree boy who had scored a goal from the halfway line and felt a profound sadness wash over him. He was like a stranger, someone who knew the future but couldn't change it. He fought an urge to cry for that boy, for what he would become, and focused instead on the dark shape in the field. Dusk seeped across the land, so the shape was mostly in silhouette, but he could see that it was a boy, standing there alone, out in the cold.

I'm sorry, he thought and reached for his flask, but even as he did so he realized his mistake.

It wasn't a boy at all, it was a standing stone. Yet as the train sped by and the stone receded into the distance, Allan couldn't shake the notion that it really was a boy-one who was fractured and alone, and rapidly filling with darkness.

HE FOUND A moment of blessed calm after alighting from the train-ten seconds, no more, where the world stopped revolving. n.o.body else on the platform. Not a bird in the sky or a leaf skittering along the tracks. Even the train had shuddered out of earshot. Everything was suspended between then and now. He was alone, and it was divine. He breathed air that was only his and cast his gaze on things only he could see. The platform clock was frozen at 13:36, and maybe it would never tick again. His pain, too, had disappeared-a thing of the past, like every other shadow. Allan looked along the platform, at the slightly crooked sign-MEADINGHAM-affixed to the railings.

Home, he thought, and the first half of his life whirled through his mind like dead flowers in the wind. He looked at the tracks stretching into the distance and felt like taking to them himself . . . riding this static, painless moment until the rails faded from beneath his feet. He took a single step toward the edge of the platform, then the world found its motion: all chatter and agitation, impatience and pain. An automated voice announced over the Tannoy that the next train on platform one was the 13:47 to Liverpool. People spilled around Allan too suddenly. He was b.u.mped and barged without apology, almost knocked to the ground by a youth playing with his smartphone. The pain returned, too, as wide and fast as the 13:47 to Liverpool. It journeyed through Allan to all destinations, a rattling thing. He felt the rea.s.suring shape of the flask in his pocket and hastened from the platform, rolling his luggage behind him.

Three taxis idled outside the station. Allan chose the nearest and slumped across the backseat. He breathed hard and smeared pink spittle from his lips. The driver tossed his luggage into the trunk and slammed it closed. Allan thought of Grayson's victims. Faces in the darkness. Thomas stood at the curb and looked at him. His face was pale and beautiful.

Unscrew. Swallow. Gasp.

" . . . shall be like wool."

Gone.

The driver pushed his belly behind the wheel and wheezed. His bloodshot eyes flicked into the rearview mirror.

"Where you going, mate?"

Allan put the flask away-patted his pocket as if it were his heart. He wiped his mouth and sighed. He had planned to go straight to his old house, where Holly still lived. They'd had discussions, prior to their separation, about moving. A new home, a new beginning, without the weight of memories. But it was these memories that Holly clung to-strands of their former, happy life bunched in her fists, and the reason why she lived there to this day. Twenty-six years since Thomas's death, and Allan wondered if she had changed his bedroom at all. Were his little gray socks still balled up in the top drawer? The same box of toys in the corner? The same posters-Back to the Future and Bananaman-stuck to the walls with the same little blobs of Blu-Tack? Allan shook his head. This is going to be more difficult than I ever feared, he thought.

"The meter's running, mate," the taxi driver said. His eyes, reflected in the mirror, were narrow pink slits. Perhaps he'd noticed, only now, just how sick Allan was.

"Colvin Road," Allan croaked, and wondered if his own eyes were black X's. The taxi pulled away from the station with a jerk, and Allan heard his luggage shift in the trunk-thud against the upholstery. He turned from the mirror and viewed this ancient realm through the rain-blurred window.

HOW COULD HE hope to confront Holly without first confronting himself? Allan had spent the first eighteen years of his life on Colvin Road, in a semidetached council house with cold walls and blind windows. He got out of the taxi, wincing at the pain, and looked at the place he had called home for so long. The windows had been double glazed and its pebble-dash facade covered with a skin of clean brickwork. There was more color in the garden, too-chrysanthemums and peonies that never would have survived in Allan's era. He felt, again, the importance of nurture, and the darkness that can seep in without it.

How dark are you now?

He considered the cancer running through his body, like a thousand children flying a thousand black kites. He closed his eyes and felt the shadow on his soul. It had claws, but no hands. It had teeth, but no mouth. Sometimes he felt it shift inside him, like an eel in dirty water.

The memories were here. Some had never been forgotten, while others were like echoes in a void. He felt again his mother's strong arms, could see the nicotine stains between her fingers and hear the rhythmic tone of her voice. His father, a wiry man with flaming red hair and brown, broken teeth, his hands so work sore he could strike a match off his knuckles. His sisters, Mary and Gail, teaching him to lie and smoke and cheat. Three pets buried in the garden. Eighteen summers. Eighteen birthdays.

How dark are you now?

The rain hitting his bedroom window. The smell of Airfix glue. The damp-stains on the walls. The leering faces in the patterns of the brown-and-yellow curtains. Allan connected each memory to the next, like stars in a constellation, in the hope of determining some shape, however vague.

He recalled a boy and his father. The boy in tears, holding in his palm a watch with a broken strap. Such a small thing, and so easily repaired.

I broke it, Daddy, he said, a dimple set deep in his chin and his little hands shaking. I'm sorry. . .

Rage like a bullet. The father roared, and his hand came down, connecting with the side of the boy's face. The sound was thunder. The boy staggered backward and fell . . . fell forever, it seemed, and still with the watch clasped in his hand.

"How dark?" Allan wheezed.

The house he had grown up in had changed-several cosmetic improvements-but it was nothing compared to his old school, which had fallen in the opposite direction. Its redbrick walls were cracked and sagging, smeared with vulgar graffiti. The doorways were cluttered with empty beer cans, flattened cigarette b.u.t.ts, spent condoms. Yellowed sheets of newspaper gathered in the corners, blown there by the wind, glued to the brick by damp and p.i.s.s. The windows were boarded over with plywood, each tattooed with obscenities. Allan crossed the litter-strewn playground, weeds forcing their way through fissures in the cement, and found a gap between the boards. He peered into a dusky cla.s.sroom-couldn't see much, except a bead of light across the floor, and his dead son standing in the corner. Thomas had never attended Meadingham Secondary; had been killed before he was old enough . . . but here he was anyway.

Allan reeled from the gap in the boards, hand to pocket. He took a shot of morphine and repeated his mantra until the pain had been masked.

Back across the playground, bent against the drizzling rain, wondering what had happened to this place. He'd heard that many schools across England had closed down because of funding cuts, but Meadingham Secondary wasn't just closed-it was infected. No more children. No vigor, or future. It hunched in the rain with its wounds revealed, a pitiful husk.

Allan stopped at the edge of the football field. Just a muddy expanse now. No goalposts or corner flags. It was here, over forty years ago, that he had played the game of his life. Here where, for ninety vibrant minutes, he had been everything he wanted to be: admired, applauded, a healthy teenage boy with the arc of his life ahead of him. He searched for that child now, but saw only a mist of rain. Melody/Melanie was there, though, standing a short distance away. Her dark hair flew in the autumn wind.

"h.e.l.lo," he managed.

She turned his way but looked right through him.

"Where are you now?" Allan wiped drips from his nose. His cracked lips trembled in something like a smile. "What did you become? Are you happy?"

All at once he saw a different destiny: a life with this pretty girl, who grew into a strong and beautiful woman. His ever-loving wife and the mother of his children. Four wonderful boys with broad shoulders and names that began with the same letter. He saw it all in a moment-a flash. This destiny. This could-have-been. And Allan could smile without it hurting. He could exist without the hip flask in his pocket. There was no cancer in this alternate life. No shadows.

He walked back toward the school, wondering if the b.u.t.terfly fluttered its wings in such a fashion. Could one decision-or indecision-cause the ripples to spread in a completely different way? Or was he destined, no matter what, to tread the path he now walked? Was fate so unyielding?

Allan's legs trembled with all the walking, and the rats in his stomach whipped their ropy tails. He sat down on a wall, fished one of the airline's paper towels from his inside jacket pocket, and spat a wad of blood into it. He thought about balling it up and tossing it into a doorway with the old newspapers and crushed beer cans-adding his cancer to its own-but instead folded the towel and pushed it into another pocket. He wiped rain from his eyes and looked toward the football field. No sign of the girl now. No reminder of that possible destiny. He was alone.

Late afternoon, and the daylight-if you could call it that-was quickly fading. Allan thought of Holly. Only three miles separated them now, although the emotional distance was beyond measure. He had come here hoping to build a bridge but was afraid his soul might be lacking the raw materials.

Still, in the time he had left . . . he had to try.

He recalled her voice on the phone, one word-h.e.l.lo-that had set his mind spinning. He hadn't been able to speak to her. Everything inside him had clenched. Would it be any different in person? Would he stutter and walk away, carrying his burden, a coward until the end?

Would she slam the door in his face, or fall into his arms?

Would her hair smell the same?

How dark are you now?

Was her soul filled with the light he needed?

HE COULDN'T FIND a pay phone anywhere; the cla.s.sic red telephone box, which adorned every street when he lived here, appeared to have become a thing of the past. Allan ended up dragging his luggage into a pub, ordering half a bitter (one thing that, blessedly, hadn't changed at all), and having the barman call a taxi on his mobile phone.

The taxi driver was an elderly man who'd lived in Meadingham all his life. He pointed out the many changes as they drove through the town: the Wetherspoon's bar where Woolworths used to be; the multistory car park built on the spot of the old library; a shimmering office block that had replaced several small stores. So many changes-too many for Allan to keep up with. He sat in the back and watched the ghosts whisper along High Street and grunted in agreement every time the driver remarked that the country was going to the dogs.

They followed Cattlestock Lane out of town, the gray buildings and bleak streets giving way to rolling hills and farmland. The driver stopped talking and turned on the radio. The Beatles sang "Yesterday." The windshield wipers left streaks on the gla.s.s.

The barn appeared from behind a clutch of black trees on the left side of the road. With its collapsed roof and blistered boards, it looked exactly-hauntingly-as it had when Thomas's body was discovered there twenty-six years ago. Allan thought it was mental residue-a trick of the memory, attached to his pain. Maybe a sip of morphine would make it disappear. He pulled the flask from his pocket and asked the driver to stop.