A minute later, she was in Suzette’s bedroom, watching her children close the front gate behind them. They walked down towards Myrtle Street, just as they used to twenty-five years ago — her daughter, still with the mop of brown hair she’d had as a child, and her son, tall and fair but with a crane frame so familiar that Katharine could swear it was Donald walking away. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She had a sudden urge to fling open the window and shout to her little girl, ‘Get away from him! He’ll get himself killed and you with him!’
She smoothed her dress to wipe the stupid thought away, then went to the lounge room and turned the TV on loud.
Nasturtiums blazed cold orange fire on the sloping banks that led down to the train tracks. Two pairs of silver rails curved like giant calligraphy around a far bend. They’d come from the nearby 7-Eleven and let themselves under a rusted chain-link fence to sit on mossy rocks at the top of the bank. From here they could look along to Tallong railway station and its sixty-year-old wooden walkway that crossed above the tracks. Beyond, red roofs and green roofs were peppered among the trees, marching up the suburb’s hills. They reminded Nicholas of pieces in a Monopoly set, playthings in some larger game. He chewed fruit pastilles. Suzette ate caramel corn from a brightly coloured bag. Overhead, clouds the colour of pigeon wings tumbled in loose ranks. Evening was coming.
The small talk was done. Nicholas had asked after Bryan (he was well, recovering from a cold), about the kids’ teachers (capable, but a bit soft with such wilful little blisters), about Suzette’s work as an investment advisor (going very nicely, thank you: two new corporate clients this month). As he finished his last sweet, the conversation fell into quiet and he braced himself for the turn of the tide. Suzette would start asking about him. She’d ask how he was holding up. She’d see if he’d visited a counsellor. She’d tell him it was okay to cry.
But Suzette remained silent. She simply sat beside him, licking her fingers and retrieving the last sugary crumbs from the bottom of the popcorn bag. She seemed content to do so for another hour.
‘I don’t like your hair that colour,’ he said to break the silence.
She licked her fingers. ‘Fuck you. Bryan does.’
She looked at him. Her eyes were a steely blue, her gaze as solid as granite. He could see why her financial planning business went so well — her clients would be too scared not to believe her if she said ‘buy now’.
‘I heard a boy went missing,’ she said.
Nicholas nodded.
‘They found him in the river. .’ He nodded to the north-east. ‘Couple of clicks.’
Suzette kept her eyes on him. ‘Mum said he was murdered, too.’
Murdered, too. He knew what she was thinking. Murdered, like Tristram.
He nodded again.
A stainless-steel train whummed past, sighing as it slowed to stop at the platform. Men in shirts and ties and women in sensible black skirts alighted and started up the wooden stairs of the crossover, heading home.
He saw Suzette was frowning. It was the same concentrated scowl she used to wear solving fractions at the dinner table and correlating statistical charts on her bedroom desk. We don’t change, do we? The patterns we slide into in childhood fit us for life.
‘What?’ he asked.
She shook her head — nothing.
He looked back at the train station. There was just one person left on the crossover now: a girl in a yellow anorak. From this distance her face was a blur, her hair a dark pistil atop a fluffed golden bloom.
‘I’m waiting for you to tell me that I couldn’t have done anything to stop Cate dying.’
Suzette crumpled the empty popcorn bag and shoved it in her pocket. ‘That it was an accident?’ she asked.
‘Or some similar shit, yes.’
Suzette nodded. ‘Well. I don’t really believe in accidents.’
Nicholas looked at her again.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m not saying it was your fault.’ She met his gaze. ‘But. . nothing happens without a reason.’
He felt a warm knot form in his gut.
‘Don’t give me any God Wanted Her Home in Heaven bullshit, Suze. I saw her-’
He bit his tongue. He’d been about to say how he’d seen Cate falling from that invisible ladder time and again, over and over, her dead eyes staring at nothing, then rolling to him, blank as slate, without a trace of the person he’d loved and married. That wasn’t heaven. That was hell. He felt Suzette watching him.
‘If God is eternal, if time means nothing to him, I reckon he could have waited a few more years for her,’ he finished.
On the pedestrian overpass, the girl in the yellow anorak pulled up her sleeve. To check her watch, Nicholas guessed. Someone was late meeting her. But then she climbed onto the crossover’s rails, balanced for just a second, then stepped into space.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Nicholas leapt to his feet and his breath jagged in his throat like a hook.
The girl lay motionless on the track a moment. Her arm lifted a little as she tried to sit. . then her anorak seemed to fly apart. She became a small, violent storm of feathers and red as an invisible train tore over her body, dragging pink flesh and one leg and shards of yellow thirty metres up the track. Then she was gone.
‘You okay?’ asked Suzette. ‘Nicky?’
Nicholas saw his traitorous hand pointing at the track and willed it to fall by his side.
Suzette looked down at the train line, squinting. ‘What is it?’
Nicholas looked around. And there, a flash of daffodil two hundred metres away. The girl in yellow was slowly making her way down the steep slope of Battenberg Terrace, her body whole, her face a smudged thumbprint.
Nicholas’s heart was kicking in his chest.
‘Nothing.’
Suzette frowned sceptically. ‘Uh-huh. .’
Nicholas put his hands in his pockets. He’d only been out of London a few days and he had already lost his poker face. The sun was now resting on roof ridges in the west, and here in the shadows the air had grown cold. The ground beneath the round lily leaves of the nasturtiums was black. He turned his back to the railway station. He didn’t want to see that again.
‘We should go home,’ he suggested.
Suzette’s careful eyes slid between him and the tracks. Then she cocked her head and fixed Nicholas with a hard look.
‘I was in love with him, you know.’
‘Who?’
‘Tristram.’
Nicholas blinked, disoriented by the change of subject. ‘I didn’t know.’ He thought a moment. ‘That’s ridiculous. How old were you? Nine?’
‘Eight.’ She took a breath. ‘I saw him a couple of times.’
‘You saw him more than that. He was over every time his bloody parents wanted a nap.’
Suzette’s eyes were still fixed on him. ‘No. I saw him after he died.’
Nicholas suddenly felt the air grow tight around him. His heart thudded slow, long beats as if his blood had suddenly taken on the consistency of arctic sea-water, just a degree away from becoming ice.
‘Where?’ he whispered.
Suzette looked him in the eye. ‘Running into the woods.’
She got to her feet, dusted off the back of her jeans.
‘Let’s walk.’
They climbed back through the rusty fence and down onto the road. The sky in the west lost the last of its furnace glow and grew purple and dark. Birds hurried to find shelter before the last light was gone. A cold breeze stiffened.
A month or so after Tristram was found murdered, she’d defied their mother and walked down to Carmichael Road. There, on the gravel path through the grass verge, she’d seen Tristram kneeling, picking something up, then running away into the trees. The sight had scared her senseless.
‘I reckon I felt how you just looked,’ she said, smiling thinly. ‘Like you just saw a ghost.’
She watched her brother. His dark eyes were fixed on the
cracked footpath. He was motionless. Finally, he spoke.
‘Do you still see them?’ he asked. ‘Ghosts?’
She shook her head. ‘I saw him twice more. I snuck down one afternoon when you were sick, and another time when Mum went to work or something. He did the same thing. Picked something off the path, backed away, ran into the woods.’ She shrugged. ‘But after that, I never saw him again. Or any others.’
She watched him nod slowly. He let out a long breath. He was working up to telling her something.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Some books say that puberty either enhances or drowns clairvoyance and second sight, but it wasn’t that with me. Maybe I just had a. . a flash. Either that, or maybe Tristram had reached his proper time.’
‘Proper time? To what?’
‘Die.’ She could see her brother’s face tense as he digested this. ‘That’s what ghosts are, I think,’ she continued. ‘Spirits of people who are killed, or take their own lives, before their. . you know, appointed time to die.’
Nicholas’s eyes were shadowed shells beneath a grim frown.
‘Ghosts,’ he said so softly it was barely a whisper. ‘Can I tell you about ghosts, Suze?’
The words made her heart start to trip.
She nodded.
He took a breath, and then he spoke for a long time.
He told her about the motorcycle crash, and borrowing the phone from the horse-faced couple he hit. About hurrying home to find Cate crooked like a broken exclamation mark, head bent too far backwards over the tub, her open eyes unable to blink out the dust that coated them. About the Yerwood boy with the corduroy jacket and screwdriver. About all the ghosts that silently conspired to send him home. He told her that there were ghosts here, too, including the suicide in the yellow anorak. The sun had sunk below the hills, and lights glowed orange in the houses they passed. The air was faintly spiced with scents of frying meat and onions. He finished by telling her how he’d chased the Thomas boy into the woods two days ago, and lost him at the same place he’d lost Tristram — the shotgun tunnels under the tall, rusted water pipe.
‘Those tunnels full of spiders,’ she said.
Nicholas looked at her, shocked.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘Do you think I never went in there?’
He shook his head.
‘More fool you then,’ she said.
She stopped them outside a blue Besser-block fence, where fading graffiti demanded ‘Free East Papua’ and exclaimed that ‘Fellatio Sucks’. She pushed the back of his head. ‘Here. Let’s have a look.’
She stood behind him and lifted his hair, finding the scar on his scalp. He’d never seen it of course, but he’d felt it. The edge of the concrete step of the Ealing flat had left a lumpy scar a thumb’s length across.
‘You think that’s why I’m seeing ghosts?’ he asked. ‘A clout on the head?’
‘Something started your seeing these things. Maybe it was the shock of losing Cate. Maybe that nasty bump just cleared the plumbing.’ She rapped his head with her knuckle and grinned. ‘When’s my birthday?’
‘My memory’s fine, bloody hell-’
‘When?’
Nicholas rolled his eyes. ‘October thirty-first. Halloween girl.’
She sent him a dark smile. ‘Yes and no. Yes, correct date — and by the way you owe me a present from last year. But, no, not a Halloween girl. Halloween’s different down here. All Hallows Eve. The Celts called it Samhain.’ She pronounced it sah-wen. ‘For us in the south, the end of October is Beltane, the return of summer. Our Halloween is six months opposite.’
She watched Nicholas do a quick calculation in his head. ‘April thirtieth.’
She nodded.
‘My birthday,’ he said quietly.
She nodded again, and bumped his shoulder with her own.
‘You’re the Halloween child. And a child born on Samhain is said to have second sight.’
As they walked, Nicholas felt a lightness in his chest. What did this mean? Was his sister just telling him what he wanted to hear? That they both had some gift — or some curse — to see the dead?
Or are visual delusions wired into our faulty genes?
He felt her eyes on his face, as if she could sense his doubt.
‘You used to have inklings,’ she said. ‘I remember. Like the time you told me not to use the toaster. Mum ignored you and plugged it in, and it sparked and gave her a shock. You just knew, didn’t you?’
‘I’d forgotten about that.’
She quizzed him. That wasn’t the only time he’d had a notion, a gut feeling, scraps of information of things, places, people that really he couldn’t have known.
It was true, though Nicholas had never given it thought. Throughout his life, every few weeks or months, he had uninvited, inexplicable feelings that something wasn’t quite right or that someone was ill or this thing was broken or that thing wasn’t lost but in a mislabelled cardboard box under the house.
During a year nine school excursion to the state art gallery, he and four classmates had been about to cross the street to the footpath opposite when Nicholas had the strongest feeling that walking on the other side would be a bad idea. He convinced his classmates to remain where they were by saying there was, he was sure, a milk bar on this side not far along where they could chip in and buy cigarettes. Not a minute later, a speeding taxi mounted the opposite kerb and came to a shatterglass stop against a power pole. The cab driver had suffered a mild stroke and lost control of the cab. Had Nicholas and his fellow students crossed the road, they’d all be in hospital — in a ward or in a steel drawer.
At seventeen, taking his driving test, he’d disobeyed the transport officer and refused to take a right turn down a Rosalie side street. He failed the test, but saw on the news that night that an unapproved LPG cylinder on a caravan parked in suburban Rosalie had freakishly exploded, destroying the caravan and sending shrapnel shards of metal into the street that was, mercifully, empty of traffic — the very road Nicholas had refused to turn down.
And he recalled one night in London when he sat curled on his couch, miserable with a heavy head cold, only half-hearing his flatmate Martin’s invitation to ‘get off your lardy white arse’ and come to a party off Portland Road. Nicholas felt lousy — it would have been a tight bet whether there was more mucus in his lungs or his stomach — but the moment Farty Marty mentioned the party he knew he had to go. Two hours later, sniffing like a coke addict but dressed in the best clothes he owned, he met Cate.
And, of course, there’d been his work around London. He’d always seemed to know which village house would yield the fading valises and old carved bookends he was hunting.
Yes, he’d had inklings. Notions. Gut feelings. Until now, he’d thought everyone had them.
‘What does it mean?’ he asked.
Suzette smiled. He could barely see it in the dusk. ‘It means I don’t think you’re crazy.’
The evening sky was gunmetal grey. Shadows were blue and amorphous. Headlights were diamonds. Her brother’s profile was all dark angles. Finally, he looked at her.
‘You’re a financial advisor, Suze. How do you know all this stuff?’
‘You see the dead. How do you not?’
‘Well, I do go to phone Psychic Hotline but always end up dialling Lesbian Nurses Chat-’
‘Do you have to make fun of everything? It’s bitter.’
Overhead, a carpet of flying foxes flew west from their mangrove riverbank havens, an armada of black cuneiforms against the cloudless evening heavens, their leather wings eerily silent. The air was crisp, faintly spiced with car fumes and potato vine.
She took a breath. ‘Well, of course it started with Dad’s books.’
Nicholas looked at her. ‘What books?’
She blinked, amazed. ‘His books? In the garage?’
He was still staring at her. Finally, he guessed, ‘In the suitcases?’
‘Yes,
in the suitcases! Jesus! Are you saying you never looked in them?’
She remembered the way her mother would tell her to go fetch Nicholas for dinner. She’d find him, a thin boy with a shock of straw hair, standing in the middle of the tiny, dark garage, staring. She knew he felt their father’s death much more keenly than she did. Sometimes, he’d be staring overhead; stacked on planks strung through the trusses up there were three small cardboard suitcases. Their mother had never forbidden them touching the cases, nor had she ever encouraged it. They were just there, the only reminder at 68 Lambeth of a man that Suzette couldn’t remember.
But, clearly, Nicholas could.
‘I didn’t want to touch them.’ He spoke slowly, carefully. ‘I figured he left them because he was coming back. Then when he was dead, I didn’t want to touch them ’cause. .’ He shrugged. ‘That would have meant he definitely wasn’t coming back. But you. . you had a look?’
More than a look. On weekends, when Mum was busy cursing her new potter’s wheel and Nicholas was away at the library, she’d unfold the creaking wooden stepladder and pull down the suitcases. One was a pale olive green, the other two a beige and black herringbone. They weren’t heavy — there wasn’t much in them. One held a grey cardigan, patched trousers and half a dozen Dr Pat tobacco tins containing sinkers, spinners, hooks and fishing line. The other two cases contained what Suzette kept coming back for.
Books.
Some were cheap, flimsy things with titles like Master Book of Candle Burning and Coptic Grimoires. One book was thick with black and white plates showing turn-of-the-twentieth-century spiritualists pulling ectoplasm from their noses and ears. There was Beowulf, The Sixth Book of Moses, A Pocket Guide to the Supernatural. And the two books that Suzette had spirited into her own room to hide among her Susan Cooper novels: Roots, Herbs and Oils and Signs and Protections.
She explained all this to Nicholas. His face was shadowed, but she could see his eyes were bright; she wasn’t sure if he was smiling or furious.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Mum hates that shit. Any time there was a show with Doris Stokes or some spoon-bending freak, she’d turn it off.’
The Darkening Page 8