Dark Oceans

by Mark Macrossan

  And then it occurred to him. That made twice. Twice in two days.

  He figured that if he didn’t already have a stress disorder, this was as good a way as any of acquiring one.

  5.

  The next one was worse. It happened the following Monday.

  The runaway car incident had happened on the Wednesday, the falling masonry on the Thursday. On the Saturday, Jon moved to his new place in a quiet part of West Kensington. A cul-de-sac, in fact. It was a house this time – a character-filled (true, for once) turn of the century extravagance – and with five bedrooms, a study, a large living room and a gigantic kitchen it was way too big for him, but he was in a hurry and after the emotionally-charged air of the Notting Hill flat, he was treating himself, excited by the idea of space. And anyway, he could afford the rent without too much difficulty, so why not.

  Mind you, West Kensington was no Notting Hill. West Kensington was, for that matter, no Kensington. West Kensington was in fact West Earl’s Court. Because West Earl’s Court was both where it was, and what it was. (Although that wasn’t being completely fair: there were some grand houses and streets in West Kensington, albeit with a jaded, crumbling-Empire feel about them.)

  The house had a name, too: Qui Vive. “Qui vive?” – literally “who lives?” but really “long live who?” or “who goes there?” – was the call of French sentries, and in English, being “on the qui vive” meant being on the lookout. Jon had chuckled to himself about it at the time, when he’d signed the lease. Now though, four days after moving in, he wasn’t finding it all that funny.

  On Monday, Jon caught his usual train to work. His new usual that is, the first time from his new home. It was still an easy trip, much like the last one from Holland Park: a short walk to the tube station, and then just the one District Line train, from West Kensington to Temple. Nine stops, twenty minutes.

  Different line, but otherwise everything much the same as before, much like the old usual. Same uncivilised level of crowdedness. And as usual, Jon staked out his claim to his favourite air pocket: next to the doors, which not only provided him with good light for reading, but also an occasional view of sorts, helping with the mild feelings of claustrophobia. He was actually thinking about the sameness of it all as the train rattled up to top speed between Gloucester Road and South Kensington stations.

  Which was when, without warning, the door he was leaning on sprung open.

  At first it all seemed to happen so quickly – mainly because of the surprise factor – and he had no time to wonder how the doors could do this, or how they could do it so quickly or even how fast the train was going. All he had time for was one desperate lunge for something to hold on to before he disappeared into space.

  And then it all ground down somehow – a common experience in sudden emergencies, everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. His left arm flailed wildly outwards in a desperate arc, but encountered just emptiness and disappointment. His right hand, his last hope, let go of the paper and thrust itself back towards the interior of the carriage and the other passengers. His immediate neighbours though, in this deathly sluggishness, were starting to recede into the distance, partly due to a natural recoil reflex on their part and partly due to Jon’s movement in the opposite direction. He was beginning to lose touch. A pole, a doorway edge, he thought. Anything solid…

  But it was all too far to reach; it was as if the whole train itself was stepping back from him, disowning him, already washing its hands of this particular passenger. This one passenger too many.

  So this is what it’s like, Jon thought. This is what it feels like when the process begins. The process of falling out of a train.

  6.

  His head had begun to turn downwards, towards the blur of sleepers two metres beneath him. It would have been the last thing he ever saw.

  And then a hand, out of nowhere like the hand of God, snapped around his wrist, and before he knew it, he was being pulled back in. Time sped up again, he was back in the carriage, saved by the man with the reflexes. Saved by the guy wearing the uniform of the builder’s labourer: dirt-encrusted shorts and thick, concrete-flecked boots. Besuited city workers with briefcases looked on bemused, almost embarrassed. Some managed, at best, to raise a frown at the open doors, while others just looked away.

  The train thundered into a tunnel, sending a wall of air thudding through the open door into their carriage. A couple of people with iPhones looked up with expressions of annoyance on their faces. And then the door closed again, but slowly, hissing all the way like a furious serpent. As if it knew it’d been beaten. This time.

  Thissss….

  As Jon continued his journey into work, he was already, in his head, penning his letter of complaint to London Transport. But then he thought, what about the falling masonry? And the runaway car? And at once the letter began to look like a waste of time. He clearly had more important things to think about.

  Three in a week, for example. Three near-fatal accidents. Was it just bad luck? Just an unfortunate coincidence? Or was there something more insidious at play? Was it some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy? Was he somehow jinxing himself?

  He decided it was simply a run of so-called bad luck. All you had to do was understand the odds. Just as throwing heads on a coin was unlikely to happen three times in a row, it didn’t mean there was anything sinister behind it if it did. Or to look at it mathematically: one chance in two of throwing heads once; one in four of managing it twice; and one in eight of doing it three times in a row. Not so outlandish, when you thought about it. Strange things happen, unlikely things happen, that was how Life organised itself. Or rather disorganised itself. Things didn’t just happen regularly, according to the odds. They grouped themselves into clumps of good, and clumps of bad. Clusters of the beautiful and the ugly. That was all.

  Still. It felt like he was going to be having to watch his step for a while, however he reasoned it.

  By the time he’d made it to his chambers building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he was feeling rather philosophical about it all. It was pretty funny, really, when you thought about it. And yes, he’d probably send the letter off to London Transport after all. He had a duty, for the protection of others, as much as anything else.

  In the meantime, a gym workout would do him good, clear his head.

  He walked around to High Holborn where his gym was located. The building was a particularly uninspiring example of post-war architecture (and that was saying something, there was a lot of competition): layers of white-grey concrete alternating with layers of brown encasing dark, rectangular windows… A concrete lasagne. Passing a Waitrose, he strode in through the building’s foyer to the row of lifts and pressed the button, which then obediently lit up. Behaving, in other words, as you’d expect it to.

  And why shouldn’t it?

  The lift area gradually filled with a small collection of people, all waiting, like Jon, for the next lift, about half of them kitted out for the gym. A secretarial type in a short leather skirt and high heels clip-clopped her way over to the button and pressed it unnecessarily, as it was already lit. She pressed it rapid-fire as well, an AK-47 to a normal person’s handgun, but she was obviously someone who didn’t mind a bit of attention. Jon was toying with the thought she was on her way back from seeing Greg when another girl walked in, about twenty-eight years old, in neck-to-toe black Lycra, anything but petite, but not an Amazon either: with a body that exuded only tightness – pure meanness – she looked like she was made of steel. Her hair was drawn tightly back, and she was clearly ready for a good workout. She upstaged the secretarial type completely and utterly, immediately stealing whatever lascivious attention was going.

  The lift arrived and began to fill. The secretarial type stepped in first, winning a consolation prize of sorts – the girl in the black Lycra let an old woman go in ahead of her, perhaps out of politeness, or perhaps allowing two young men in suits, who were hot on her heels, a better look. Jon stood
to one side, but it wasn’t courtesy, something else was holding him back, although he wasn’t quite sure what…

  He pushed through this strange moment and was about to step into the lift when some joker (the one you always get in a group) made a crack, at his expense. It was someone he knew although not well, it was another barrister.

  ‘Oh no, not you. Nowhere’s safe!’

  And Jon just stood there. Someone motioned for him to join them, an older woman with a gym bag and too much lipstick, saying there was plenty of room. But he mumbled an “it’s OK thanks” and smiled and backed away. Watched the lift doors close. Watched the indicator show the lift ascend and stop, ascend and stop, all the way to level two and beyond.

  And that was when he knew he was beginning to lose his nerve. Which, as he was soon to find out, was more than justified.

  The next day, Tuesday, the wind was whistling through the cracks around his windows and rattling the panes. It didn’t last long, this gusty little hurricane of angry air, but it hurtled in from Essex like a headlong hens’ party, and created havoc in the city, targeting anything loose and not tied-down. Like me, he thought, with a wry smile. He could see the people down in Lincoln’s Inn Fields below battling its effects – there were miniature wind-tunnels and whirlwinds popping up all over the place. Pieces of paper and other rubbish tore down the street faster than the black BMWs. Even the birds were finding the going tough flying sideways. He wondered if they felt stupid doing that, or just frustrated. Or maybe it was a bit of fun, adding drama to their lives. Or were humans the only animals who liked drama?

  Whatever. It was the wrong moment to be leaving. He couldn’t speak for the birds, but when he watched all the upheaval, it made him nervous. All that turmoil, all that atmospheric discontent.

  Delaying his trip home, he plucked an old New Yorker magazine from the pile of miscellaneous paper items on his desk and flicked through it, casting an eye over the articles, and looking at the cartoons. Found it hard to stay concentrated for any length of time, so the cartoons were perfect. Or should have been: in this week’s edition, most of the cartoons seemed to deal with sudden death in one form or another. Maybe they always did?

  By the time things had started to calm down half an hour or so later, Jon decided he may as well make his move. He’d had no calls, and received no new work – which wasn’t surprising, given he hadn’t been actively seeking any. And he’d finished his New Yorker by then, including skimming through a story about the murderous implosion of the royal family in Nepal. More support for Tolstoy’s much quoted aphorism about unhappy families all being unhappy in their own way.

  He was just about to close the door to his room, when the phone rang on his desk. It was Sabine.

  ‘I found something else of yours,’ she said. Typical Sabine, straight down to business, no time-wasting pleasantries.

  ‘Great.’ There was no point in mentioning the car incident, she wasn’t the sympathetic type. No sense of drama, either: in her book, near-misses were the same as misses, which were the same as never-happened. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The sheets.’

  ‘For the bed?’

  ‘No, for toga parties.’

  Her sarcasm barely registered with him anymore. ‘Haven’t you been sleeping in them?’

  ‘Of course. But I just realised they’re yours.’

  ‘It’s OK, Sabine. You keep them.’

  When he got off the train at West Kensington, it was just after 6pm. It being mid-October, the sun had only just set. The earlier winds had all but disappeared, or moved on, although there were still remnants, roving around causing trouble, and every now and again, there’d be a sudden gust, rustling the upper branches.

  After he left the station – on the crest of the latest wave of commuters – he crossed North End Road, and just as he’d done the previous evening, turned down the first street he came to, in order to escape the bustle and chaos of the high street. And, as previously, he was accompanied by the sound of his and his co-passengers’ collective footsteps fanning out into the surrounding streets. Today though, unlike yesterday, there were leaves and branches everywhere – spread out like a ragged carpet over the road and footpath – and mindful of the nasty events of the previous few days, and in particular, of the possibility of falling masonry, he steered clear of the older buildings, and even crossed the road at one point.

  An hour later, he found himself heading out again, retracing his steps, walking back up towards the station, with the intention of catching a train to South Ken for a quick meal. The wind had not only died down, there wasn’t even a breeze. No air movement whatsoever, it was dead calm. It was dark now too, and the only sound was the sound of his own footsteps, and as he listened to them beating out their steady rhythm in the vacuum of the still night, he gradually became aware of a dull discomfort. Like a rising sense of dread. As if there were someone watching him, someone close…

  And then he heard another sound, strange, unidentifiable, like a sharp click. He stopped walking and held his breath, straining to listen. But there was only silence.

  And then a crack.

  Moments later there was a ground-jolting shock, accompanied by a loud bang and a tumult of branches and leaves.

  A massive branch, the size of a tree trunk, had crashed to the ground five metres away. Indeed it was more than just a branch: a good quarter of the large tree it had come from – a sizable London Plane tree – had split away and slammed into the footpath in front of him.

  Five metres away. One car had really copped it, a black Peugeot, its alarm was going crazy, as if it were crying out in pain. And it wasn’t the only one: a number of other car alarms went off at the same time, seemingly in sympathy, like a flock of birds. Above this cacophony, while Jon was backing away, horror-struck, and beginning to ponder the unsettling mathematics of the equation that presented itself (distance, his speed), he managed to catch the sound of a second set of footsteps vanishing into the night. Or he thought he did. He really didn’t know anymore.

  7.

  On the floor of his chambers, the lift indicator light pinged, and the doors opened, and he stepped out, along with a couple of others – solicitors or clients, arriving for their morning conference, presumably on time. Jon, on the other hand, was running late. Or rather, later than he wanted to be. Did it matter? Yes it did. These days, everything suddenly seemed to matter, and he had no idea why. All he knew was that everything mattered because, somehow, everything was linked. As if the world had been sucked into a black hole and the totality of its contents had been crushed to the size of a pea.

  Christ, he was sounding like a geek, he’d have to slap himself.

  On a brighter note…

  Tiffany was dressed in all white and seemed to bathe her office in a radioactive glow – from her suntan or sunbed tan, Jon wasn’t sure. Or fake tan, but if it was, it was the only thing fake about her. She was what was commonly described as ‘the genuine article’.

  Would he go there, to put it crudely? He’d thought about it more than once, if truth be told, but he was, if he were honest with himself, a little ashamed of the thought, it’d only been three weeks since he’d broken up with Sabine. And yet… how long was the period of mourning supposed to be? He’d never been one to mourn, when it was over it was over. A friend once told him he had a revolving door policy and maybe, unconsciously, he did. So, back to the original question: would he go there? Not a question he should try to answer, was the answer, he knew. And anyway, he needed his clerk. Or to be more accurate, he needed his clerk to be his clerk.

  Her bright eyes smiled at him. Which prompted a second question: should he tell her? About the incidents? He wanted to. She’d always been his confidante – she’d always been his eyes and ears, regarding the various goings-on at the Bar. His eyes and ears, yes, and also, to be blunt about it, his thighs and cleavage too, given Tiffany’s physical assets and her effortless ability to break down defensive barriers (in men, certainly, but also, c
ounter-intuitively perhaps, in women as well). Which was how he learnt for example, before anyone else, about Martin Nevers being the latest hot tip for the Supreme Court.

  And it was a two-way street, he did what he could to keep Tiffany filled-in too – breaching the strictest duty of confidence was no barrier if it was something he thought she needed to know. He could talk to her about almost anything. But even so, if he told her about this latest business… However he framed it, she’d think he was losing it, or at the very least losing his edge – and he very well may be – and that wouldn’t do. Not at all. Clearly, on this issue, he was going to have to confine his discussions to just one person: the Killer.

  ‘Big night?’ she asked, somewhat cheekily, but always in that radiant, wholesome way of hers. And, yes, he’d had better mornings.

  ‘Not big in any good way.’

  ‘Uh-oh.’

  ‘It’s not what you think.’

  She delivered a crumpled, disbelieving grin, before brightening again. ‘Well I just might have another brief for you.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘The Thames Water inquiry.’

  ‘Well that should go forever.’ Inquiries crossed pages out of your diary – in bulk – so they were lucrative. And fun. All facts and no law. They were, basically, a paid holiday without the long-haul flights.

  ‘Exactly. Look, it’s only a long shot at this stage, but… I should know by this afternoon.’

  ‘Great, Tiffany, thanks. Fingers crossed.’

  Tiffany was as optimistic as she was rumoured to be adventurous in bed. In other words, he could forget about the inquiry. And he knew should probably forget about Tiffany too, for the sake of both his practice and his sanity.