The Long Dark Road

by P. R. Black

  But she still clutched his hand, and held him fast as the storm broke.

  He had tidied up the rest of his appearance since she’d last seen him – battered old Doc Martens replaced by smarter shoes, and new, at that, going by the glossy sheen. Students’ footwear did not remain unscuffed for long, in Georgia’s experience, even somewhere like Ferngate. Tattered old jeans, embarrassingly frayed in places that you tried not to look at, had been swapped for smarter trousers that actually matched his long, brown corduroy jacket. He looked like what Georgia supposed he was – an arts student with too much money.

  What was more surprising than his subtle metamorphosis from scrubby late teenager to confident, if puffy young man, was a new accessory; the girl who was holding his hand.

  She was short, and if you were unkind, which Georgia tried hard not to be, she was a little thick around the hips. But there was no doubting her beauty; she had shoulder-length hair that you might term lustrous, or describe as a mane, or even, God help us, flowing locks – jet black, probably dyed, and taking an awful lot of work in the mornings in order to appear so thick, and yet be so easily flicked. This was something the girl did quite often, mussing her hair back over her head every few moments. And quite right too. I’d do the same if I had that hair, Georgia thought.

  The face underneath was pale, but complemented the jet-black hair perfectly. She had pale eyes and a long, thin, but strangely elegant nose. They didn’t speak a word to each other as they came down the steps, although they acknowledged one or two people as the class split off into groups.

  Georgia waited until they were further along before she put away the phone she’d been pretending to study, took off her dark glasses, and crossed the street to approach them.

  Digby Street was a long, ancient thoroughfare girt with cobblestones, the curse of many a cyclist and countless high heels wearers through the years. The young man and his girlfriend had emerged from the Crandbury Building, a red-brick addition to the university estate, which still cued a chorus of tuts and a brass section of sucked teeth whenever it was mentioned, more than fifty years after it was constructed.

  In the background rose the spires of St Julian’s and St Enoch’s, gaunt, grey-stoned battlements that clasped the campus to the west and east. The young man and his girl were probably headed for the refectory at the bottom of the road, rather than the great fat loaf of the library building, acting as a bulwark at the very top of the pedestrianised road.

  Georgia stepped in front of them; he noticed her immediately, and stopped.

  ‘Martin,’ she said, holding up a hand.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Georgia. Jesus. Hello, how’s it going?’ She noted his reaction – understandable surprise, though falling far short of shock. He stepped forward, letting go of his girlfriend’s hand. He did not move to shake hands, but rather his hand touched her forearm.

  ‘I’m not bad, Martin. Sorry to just appear in front of you like this. Are you busy at the moment?’

  ‘I’m… well.’ Martin shifted his balance and glanced at his girlfriend. ‘We were just going to grab a coffee, in fact.’

  ‘Finished for the morning?’

  ‘Yep.’ He grinned. ‘Been hard at it – an hour of Wordsworth, perfectly delivered by Mr Bellman. What a way to spend a morning!’

  ‘Worse ways to spend it, that’s for sure.’ Georgia smiled, warmly, at the girl with black hair as she peered at the newcomer from behind her fringe.

  ‘Oh – this is Colette, by the way. Colette, this is Georgia. She’s a friend.’

  ‘Hello there,’ said Colette. North-eastern accent; Durham, perhaps. She took the time to shake hands. Though her hands were small and stubby – which reminded Georgia of moles, and cosiness and warmth – her skin was cold to the touch.

  ‘What brings you to Ferngate?’ Martin asked, cautiously.

  ‘Just back in town for a visit, really. Tying up one or two loose ends.’

  ‘Ah.’ He hesitated, then said: ‘Has there been any more news?’

  ‘Not much – unless you’ve heard anything?’

  Martin grimaced, then said: ‘Nothing. Not a thing. There are posters up, of course, and I held a meeting the other day with the union president, a refresher, you could say…’

  ‘I saw that,’ Georgia said. ‘That was kind of you. Clever, too, mingling it with a drinks promotion night.’

  He tapped his temple. ‘Yeah – best way to get the punters in, I find.’

  ‘You’re something to do with Stephanie Gould,’ Colette said, her eyes growing wider. ‘You’re not her mum, are you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I hope everything’s OK. So far as it can be,’ she added, quickly.

  ‘Everything’s… well. You know. It’s going, I suppose.’

  ‘I feel so… God. I’m so sorry.’ She sounded it, too.

  ‘Well, it’s one of those things that happens. You read about it, you see it on the telly, you hear a story at the top of the news on the radio – and then, one day, it happens to you. Or someone you know.’ The wave threatened to wash her overboard, then. Georgia thought of it as a bow wave, a storm surge, something entirely unexpected that could put her in bed for the rest of the day. Do not cry.

  Fortunately, after two years, she had learned to keep her feet. She held her head up straight, coughed once, allowed her eyes to mist over, and then smiled. ‘One day you’re news. Then one day… you’re not news any more. And it’s another story in the papers, another news bulletin… Someone else’s daughter.’

  Martin laid a hand on her arm again. ‘Georgia… please, if there’s anything I can do… Would you like to come for a cup of tea with us?’

  ‘A cup of tea would be great, Martin – but not right now. I’ve got some business to take care of.’

  ‘Oh – don’t let us hold you back, then.’ He took Colette’s hand again, and she smiled at Georgia, for the first time. Her tiny little mouth had a cute way of cinching together, at the tips – as if her real smile was detained, and threatening to escape across her face.

  ‘But later on, I’d like to speak to you, Martin. Just you, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Of course, any time.’

  ‘Would you mind giving me your number? I didn’t have any contact details for you, you see. Couldn’t see you on social media anywhere.’

  ‘Well… yeah, I’m not too fond of it, in fact.’

  ‘That’s very rare, these days.’ Georgia pulled out her phone; on cue, he recited his phone number. ‘That’s great. I was thinking The Griffony – I take it it’s still open?’

  ‘Sure.’ He grinned. ‘Where good drinkers go to die.’ The crassness of the expression struck home, then, but Georgia spared his blushes.

  ‘That’s brilliant. I’ll see you at eight o’clock, if you’ve nothing pressing?’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘Great. And it was lovely to meet you too, was it… Colette?’

  ‘And you.’ The girl smiled.

  ‘Speak to you soon. Enjoy your coffee.’

  3

  It strikes me that – and you might want to sit down for this – I have Friends. That is a cap F.

  From the diary of Stephanie Healey

  The Griffony hadn’t changed much in the thirty years and more since Georgia had first set foot in it. Its oak panelling bore the scars of decades of graffiti, scratched into the surfaces with penknives, or maybe just pens. The framed photographs that adorned many parts of the walls were strictly unmolested, too – records stretching back to the 1950s, with haircuts running from the Elvis/Teddy boy era to the long hair and loon pants of the flower power era, and then – with a sudden flashbulb shock – colour came into the frame, although Georgia associated the shades and tones on show as matter that she often saw in a clinical capacity – things that had to be washed off or wiped away. Ochre, beige, avocado, clotted browns and burnt purples.

  Brass plates, brass taps, brass railings gleamed in the early evening light of th
e squared bar space that dominated the centre of the pub. Even if the pub wasn’t quite ready to host major surgical procedures, The Griffony ran a tight ship as far as its brasses went – a neat trick, Georgia supposed. As before, a galaxy of single malts lit up the central plinth, back-lit in mellow gold. The bottles looked barely touched; then, as now, students had ignored these drinks, but Georgia had to admit she was tempted.

  In the centre of it all, of course, was Reg the barman. He had seemed unchanged at first, but the closer Georgia got, the more wizened he seemed; the white hair had probably been there when he was in his forties, but the thin, heavily lined features were new. She had always remembered the landlord as a brawny character. Someone who really suited a big heavy Scandinavian jumper, with a savage beard perhaps grown to mask a double chin. The spare flesh and the whiskers were gone, now; Georgia wondered if he had been ill.

  Georgia was slim, a little taller than average with a blonde bob, a reckless flight of fancy by a trusted hairdresser, which had angered her at first, until the compliments started coming in. She wore a Breton shirt that had perhaps seen too many washes, but she liked it and wanted to feel comfortable – ditto the skinny-leg jeans, a little too pale now, but snug. She had considered wearing some heavy boots, before she’d realised what she was doing.

  Lots of people told her she didn’t look as if she was the wrong side of fifty, and she always demurred, but she had supposed it was true – until she came to The Griffony and saw some real young people, their unfathomable hairstyles, the band T-shirts and slogans that might as well have been in Sanskrit. I’m a fish out of water, no doubt about it, she thought – and felt even more so when she ordered a soda water and lime, right after a tall boy surely only just turned eighteen, if he was that, ordered what looked like a prehistoric tar pit in a Perspex pitcher called a Jägerbucket.

  She chose a tight alcove that had only one way in or out. The bench was bolted on to the wall just above a locked-up cabinet filled with ancient medical textbooks. In the corner, just over Georgia’s shoulder, was a lacquered carving of a griffin. It was difficult to gauge whether it had been carved with a sense of irony or not; she could see someone creating it in deadly earnest, which somehow made it funnier. Its chest was puffed out, beak set in a grim line, the shoulders of its forelegs thrown back somewhat imperiously. It had a comically peeved expression on its face – perhaps in response to the tattered striping of sticky tape on one shoulder that someone had been too lazy to peel off after the Christmas decorations came down.

  Martin Duke had gotten changed for her – another jacket that he’d be embarrassed about in a few short years, plum coloured with pale blue silk visible at the cuffs. It wasn’t too warm for this jacket, but he was sweating as he sat down.

  ‘Martin,’ she said. They air-kissed, the warm skin of his cheek making a feather-light connection with hers.

  After they’d gone through the pas-de-deux of who should pay for what drink, he said: ‘You’re looking well. Still doing the running?’

  ‘Just for fun,’ she said. ‘I’m not so fast these days – I feel guilty doing it for charity when I’ve trailed in behind a man in a Loch Ness Monster suit. That actually happened, you know,’ she said, catching his grin.

  ‘Well, at least you’re still doing it.’ He slapped his paunch. ‘Unlike me. You on your holidays?’

  ‘You could call it that.’

  ‘So – any developments?’

  Georgia shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I saw you on the telly.’ He sipped at a pint of flat, warm beer. ‘The T-shirt campaign. It was a good idea – I still see a few of those on the campus.’

  ‘It was just something to try. Maybe a bit silly. She’d hate that, you know – the idea that people had her face printed on a T-shirt.’

  ‘Did you get many tips on the phone line?’

  ‘Mainly abuse.’ She smiled, thinly. ‘Every single call was checked, though. Some of the abusers had a visit from the police.’

  ‘Serves ’em right.’

  ‘I take it you guys came down here a lot?’

  ‘Everyone did. You matriculate, you come down here. It’s a rite of passage.’

  ‘I came down here, too.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know you studied here.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Medical school. Loved it here, I’ll be honest. Every Thursday, we’d all go to The Bus Stop. Snogging, snakebite, the occasional fight.’

  ‘The Bus Stop?’

  ‘You know it as Benjy’s now.’

  ‘Ah – I should have got it from the description.’

  Georgia tapped the edge of the bookcase with her fingernail. ‘But this was the starting point – ground zero. We used to come in here to get started. If I’m telling the truth, I preferred the pub to the club. You could talk to people. They weren’t out of their minds and turned into werewolves, you know that way? Reg was the barman back then, too.’

  ‘No way! He’s even older than I thought!’

  ‘He was a young guy back then. That’s how long ago it was. Well… youngish.’

  ‘Reg has been embalmed, they say – reanimated many times. Served pints for the Romans.’

  ‘Still miserable with it. Sodes Tempus, gentlemen.’ They chuckled at that, and Martin at least looked as if he understood. Then Georgia said: ‘I recommended this place, you know. Truth be told, I pushed Steph to come here. I felt safe here, and I thought she’d be safe. Can you believe that?’

  ‘It’s the classic, isn’t it?’ He gestured towards the oak panelling grid above his head. ‘Classic university town, classic university spire, classic university quadrangle, classic university pub. She told me her grades, you know. One of the first chats we had. She could have studied anything. She wanted to do English Lit. Writer. All those A’s…’

  ‘Oh, don’t I know it,’ Georgia said, a touch sharply. ‘I told her – “brains coming out of your ears, and you want to be a poet!”’

  ‘She was a great poet, mind,’ he said.

  Georgia didn’t like the tense Martin was using. She said: ‘It’s a piece of writing I’m here for, in fact.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll tell you a thing about Steph… She always, always wrote. She had no problem putting letters together even before she started school. We used to call her the Little Prodigy – though never out in public.’

  ‘She had the talent, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Yeah – but she had the skill, too. And all through her school days, she wrote – stories, little comic books. She drew the illustrations herself in felt tip and crayon. I remember them to this day. The adventures of Stephanie Selkie. She had a Scottish granny who told her about selkies, and the name stuck.’

  ‘Selkies? Are they like mermaids, then?’

  ‘Kind of. Though they could turn on you. Stephanie Selkie was a mermaid to start with, a princess who lived under the sea. She had brothers and sisters. I admit this bothered me a lot at the time, as Stephanie didn’t have brothers and sisters. She was the one who looked after them all. She had a magic necklace that I think fired lasers. She could wrestle sharks and killer whales. But as she grew up, Stephanie Selkie turned into a normal girl who could go on land. She had adventures with Lana Lake – her real-life little friend was Lana Price.’

  ‘That’s sort of common, I think. When I was a kid, I used to put myself in these little comic books. Socking baddies on the jaw and all that.’

  ‘Later, she got into writing her own adventures down, in real life.’

  ‘You mean like a diary?’

  ‘Yeah. A secret diary, which she kept hidden. Really, really well.’

  Martin coughed a little on his pint. ‘But not well enough, right?’

  Georgia grinned. ‘Hey, don’t knock the mummy radar. We might be nosy buggers, but it’s usually for the right reason.’

  ‘I remember my mum finding a packet of condoms once, and I just had to applaud her. She should be on the team to find Sh
ergar and Lord Lucan.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t know where to start with my apology for that statement. So many crass things. I’m sorry, Georgia.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Happens more than you’d think.’ Georgia stared at her own drink; soon it would be time for another. Did she dare get a pint for herself? ‘Anyway. It turns out, Stephanie wrote a diary.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yeah. Embarrassingly enough, the police never found it when they searched her old room. She had hidden it behind a loose board in a wardrobe. They took their time, completely renovated it, pulled the place apart. No one wanted to move into that room, as it was. Because of what happened to Steph. They went in with the sledgehammers. That’s when they found the diary. The person who got her room in the halls the next year. There was just enough room to hide a sheaf of notepaper in there. It ran all the way back to school days. The girl who found it passed it on to the cops right away. It’s only just been sent to me. Truth be told, when she was writing it, as a kid… I knew about it. It was mostly school stuff – boys she liked, girls she didn’t like, speculation that her headmistress was a vampire’s familiar.’

  ‘And you read it from cover to cover.’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  ‘You’re dry there – can I get you another drink?’

  Georgia paused. ‘No, I’m fine. Anyway, the diary continued through primary school and then into her teenage years at high school, but she got smarter about hiding it. I missed it in a way, you know? A bit like a TV show you’ve really gotten into.’

  ‘Heh – I bet that was frustrating.’ He drained his glass and set it down on the table. ‘There’s a point coming soon, I suspect.’

  ‘Yeah. The later entries is where it gets interesting. She wrote part of it at our house – Easter holidays, right before she vanished. I remember her being shut in her room for hours on end, with the radio on. I thought she was studying, but loads of it must have been taken up with writing her diary.’

  Now a look came into his eye – not quite discomfort or alarm, but a renewed interest. ‘Was there anything new?’