December

by Phil Rickman

Prof hefted the box, stood up. 'Tell me something. How did you know about this? How did you know these tapes even existed? How did you know where to find them?'

  'Prof ... Stephen Case touched the vein on his nose. 'You simply don't need to know.'

  He opened the door and waved an arm, as if to waft Prof and the box out of the room, but Prof stood his ground.

  'Hang on, let me get this right - this is the stuff laid down on the night of the Storey calamity. Why did Goff sit on the tapes? Lie on them, in fact. Shit, the fat bastard must've been bonking on them for bloody years.'

  'Let's go, Prof.'

  'And am I correct in thinking that while these tapes, strictly speaking, now belong to TMM, nobody there, apart from you, actually knows they exist? Talking private enterprise, are we?'

  Steve Case didn't reply. Everything inside Prof Levin screamed, leave this alone, but he was curious, now.

  'OK. I'll talk to a man I know.'

  'Super.' Steve said. 'And I'll talk to a man I know in connection with the reclusive Tom. Who won't even talk on the phone, did you know that?'

  Going down the stairs, the box in his arms. Prof said, 'You got any idea why Max Goff should keep this under his bed?'

  They moved around the picture of John Lennon, who was standing in a doorway, looking sardonic. He was the least spooky; the other dead rock stars loomed out at you like

  dummies in a ghost train.

  Prof said, 'Suppose they don't want this stuff released. Suppose it's too painful. Storey, I'm thinking about.'

  Footsteps clack-clacking on the stairs of the deserted building, the torchbeam waving. Tutankhamen's tomb; the pillaging of grave goods.

  'Too bad,' Steve said coldly.

  In Prof's arms, the box felt like the coffin of a child.

  III

  The Hideous Bonnet

  Someone was approaching.

  She arose to look out of the window. No one in sight.

  No one among the flaking autumn trees which lined the track. The three other houses between her and the shore were holiday homes, empty now until the spring, when she'd be gone.

  She listened, and heard only the sound of November on the Isle of Skye: scrabbling wind and seabirds.

  But someone was approaching, and with an awful heavy burden.

  She sat down again on the couch, pulling the guitar on to her knees. She plucked three harsh chords . . I do not... need ...this.

  She stood up, flung the guitar on the couch. It rolled on to the floor, kind of bounced, the way Ovations did, durable instruments. Maybe she should write some more songs. Write it all out of her.

  Dangerously restless, she ran up the uncarpeted stairs, to the smallest bedroom, an untidy cell, where she slumped down angrily at the dresser, sleeves rolled up and roughened elbows in the mess of hairbrushes and make-up, aspirins and chewing-gum wrappers.

  She gazed into the mirror - oval, like her face - and with the fingers of both hands she pushed the heavy hair back from the cold, white skin. Her hands could no longer smooth out the frown fluting her forehead; the frown lived here now.

  And it would soon be December again.

  In the mirror, as her hair fell back into place, she saw the silver-grey ripple re-emerging in what once had been a torrent of black. By the end of the year it maybe would reach her shoulders again.

  Return of the Witchy Woman.

  .Malcolm, her agent, used to call her this. She didn't like it any more. What she should do was discard all her ankle-length black dresses and her drab cloaks and replace them with - dear God - bright fluffy things in soft pastel shades or crisp, efficient blouses and suits, as worn by female executives.

  Moira laughed.

  And then stopped, biting her lip. Hold on there, hen, that was no' a bitter laugh, was it?

  She watched her eyes. She was thirty-eight, some way along the steepening road from maiden to hag.

  And someone was coming with bad news.

  Jan's face was very much like marble: white, shiny with tears and hard as stone.

  No, he thought. No. No. No. Never had he prayed so hard that it had been wrong, a delusion.

  Red-haired Jan was sitting at the work table, a drained coffee cup at her elbow. She was looking out of the window into the street where, in the November twilight, two kids were crashing a football at a metal garage door. When Dave had come in, Jan hadn't looked at him.

  It was a reconditioned eighty-year-old end-of-terrace house in an old South Lancashire pit village, now commutersville. It had an open coal fire. They used to make love in front of it. Dave remembered saying, I bet you lie around and fantasize about the generations of miners who sat here in zinc baths. And Jan, naked, had said, Pass me that bar of soap again, would you?

  Now the fire was out.

  The room was very tidy. Had been completely tidied. He imagined her hoovering viciously, slamming books back on shelves - books on history, sociology, humanist philosophy and political theory. Ramming the CD unit flat to the wall, clacking together the piles of discs - modern classics, some jazz, very little rock.

  Jan said, very precisely, the icy schoolteacher voice, 'I believe that I told you not to come back.'

  He stood in the doorway, fingering the ends of his scarf. Everything he could have said at this point would have sounded trite.

  Can't we talk about this?

  Could I at least try and explain?

  Will you just listen to me for ten minutes without jumping down my throat?

  Yeah, well, pleading would only sicken her. Even sickened him. So he stood in the doorway, playing with his scarf.

  Shit.

  The really heavy, unspoken question related to the results of Sara's latest tests and he was scared to ask.

  Bitterly, she answered it for him. Her voice was also like marble now, gravestone-cold and glassy.

  'She's to have an immediate programme of chemotherapy. Three months. At least. But I didn't need to tell you that, did I?'

  'Oh God.' He'd seen Sara precisely once and couldn't really remember her face, only the thickening black and purple haze around it like a luminous bruise, a hideous bonnet. 'I'm so sorry. You don't ...'

  'Are you? Are you really?'

  'Jesus, Jan ...'

  'Because you'd have looked pretty stupid if it hadn't been inoperable, wouldn't you, Dave? You'd have looked like A, a phoney or B, a serious psychiatric case.'

  'Look,' he said, 'we can't talk here, the atmosphere's like ... Can we go for a drive?'

  'I don't want to talk here,' Jan said. 'Or in the car. Or anywhere. With you.'

  Dave clenched his fists on the woollen scarf, pulling it down right against the back of his neck. He closed his eyes, felt furious and hopeless and ashamed. Sensitive? You could keep it.

  Once - three months ago, in bed - it had been incomprehension, then nervous giggles, then ...

  She's not ill. What makes you think she's ill?

  Just a ... a feeling.

  Well, thank you very much, Doctor Reilly, for that considered diagnosis.

  Then she'd sat up in bed, pulled on the light. Look, what is this?

  I just think she should go and get herself checked over, that's all.

  You're serious, aren't you? What the hell's got into you, Dave?

  The problem was that a grown man who saw fuzzy colours around people's heads went totally against Jan's cheerfully rigid world-view, her cast-iron concept of what was real and acceptable.

  Jan, twice divorced at thirty-four, was a very determined unbeliever. A roving supply-teacher who refused to work at any school where old-style religious instruction was on the menu. Who saw everything in that area, from organised worship to New Age farting about, as not so much the opium as the heroin of the people: addictive and destructive, something that should be fought in the streets and seized at the ports.

  Which was wonderful. She was lovely and carefree and laughed a lot and liked to help people. In fact, the best reason he'd ever found for concluding that,
OK, there were more things in heaven and earth, but who gives a shit?

  The Dave-Jan thing had been nearly four glorious months old when she'd dragged him over to South port and introduced him to her sister. Sara was twenty-eight, the high-flyer of the family, just back from a year's guest-lecturing at the University of Illinois.

  Nice girl.

  Nice, but clearly and horribly sick.

  Was he supposed to keep quiet about it?

  Coincidence! Jan had shrieked at him five weeks later, when Sara had been to her doctor complaining of listlessness and the upshot of that was some consultant ordering a biopsy. An appalling, ghastly coincidence!

  Sure, he'd said, to get them through the night without eyes being torn out. You're right. It's probably a complete coincidence.

  Jan had sat up in a distant corner of the bed, duvet clutched around her chin. But you don't believe that, do you? You don't believe it was a coincidence at all.

  Looked at Dave as if she'd just learned he had a string of convictions for indecent exposure.

  A look which was to become unbearably familiar. His one chance had been for Sara's condition to prove eminently treatable, so that the whole business might, given a respite, turn into something they could laugh about.

  Until the next time.

  For it had been clear enough, after this, that he'd never again be able to tell himself with any confidence that there'd be no more next times.

  Jesus, what was this? Moira was shaking. She went back out to the landing, to the top of the stairs, stared down into the lower room, where the guitar lay supine, a dead guitar.

  The room was like a tiny stone chapel, with a plain hardwood table under the small window. There was also a big brass oil lamp on it, for reading.

  On account of there being no electricity. She'd had the converted croft house unconverted, getting the power disconnected. Don't know why I did that, she'd say. But, of course, she did know. When she'd first arrived - nine ... ten years ago, Jesus, is it as long as that? - she'd been rather less than one hundred per cent rational.

  Now I'm slightly more than fifty per cent irrational.

  And something's coming.

  Without warning, for there was no phone either. The only person she would accept being disturbed by was her mother, and her mother had no need of phones.

  If it was lonely sometimes, she could handle that. If she was lonely, she was safe.

  There was an open fireplace, with buckets of coal standing by; in front of the hearth, a bright orange fleecy rug on which you could sit cross-legged at night in the oil-lamp's placid light, reading or maybe just singing softly to yourself, the guitar in your lap, rearranging traditional songs.

  Idyllic, huh? Renewal. The recharging of the spiritual batteries.

  What a lot of crap. The island's a demanding lover; you don't get to relax, not often. Especially just lately, with the dreams. All those images which your conscious thoughts suppress keep emerging, red-haloed, in your dreams.

  Aw, hey, go make yourself some tea, huh?

  She walked slowly down the stairs, straightening this ludicrously jolly woollen sweater, bright sea-blue with happy seals jumping up for the boobs.

  At the bottom of the stairs, facing the window, a movement in the trees made her stiffen, heart leaping like one of the seals.

  She peered out, to where the mist began.

  One time, not long after she'd bought the place, she'd lain awake in her bed - this was December, always December - and heard a seagull. A seagull in the night. The gull's lonely cry was agony to hear, made her weep.

  Davey?

  It had been a mild night - the worst kind, in December - and she'd done a stupid thing; she'd allowed herself to respond.

  She hadn't seen it come in, but she'd known it was here, she could feel its cry, deep in her breast now. She'd opened her arms to it.

  Davey …

  No sooner had the breath left her lips than she knew it was all wrong, and she leapt up, flapping her arms, shouting, out. out! and slamming the window shut so hard the glass cracked.

  Following morning she'd come down the stairs and out of this same window, the sea mist heavy all around, she'd seen them coming, watched them form out of the dense air, a terrible bedraggled procession: Simon in a monk's robe, barefoot, his feet torn by the stones, blood seeping up between his toes. Behind him lumbered Tom, a hairy caveman in rags, eyes full with fear and bewilderment. And Davey ... was this wee Davey? He kept fading and changing colour, like he didn't know where - who he was. Then came a blast of confusion, sheer cold bewilderment that knocked her back so hard she'd lived with the headache for two days, then started running a temperature, and it had turned into flu, and oh God, never again.

  Hey ... come on. Get your act together. She headed for the kitchen.

  And then screamed a fractured scream as the pounding began on the front door of the croft house.

  She stared for a long time at the little old man in the bright muffler and the beat-up trilby hat.

  'Are y'OK, Moira?'

  They were not there, Tom and Simon and the hazy thing which might have been Dave. Why should she think that? She was a mad woman.

  Moments passed. The image of the wee elderly guy did not waver: brown-faced, in a trilby with a greasy golden cord around crown.

  It was the long wet tongues on her cheeks which brought her out of it. Both dogs, one either side, their front paws on her shoulders. Shivering now in the barbed air from the sea, she hugged the Dobermans and blinked at the wee man.

  'Donald?'

  He smiled. 'Ah widny ha' come, hen ... Ah widny bother ye …'

  A hundred wrinkles had become channels for his tears. His smile started to swim for it.

  She said breathily, unbelieving, 'Hey, Donald ... no?'

  He was nodding gravely. The dogs had moved away and were sitting either side of him, watchful and sorrowful.

  'Hey, come on, will you, Donald,' Moira said, smothering the solemnity of the moment with her anger. 'It's no' possible. I would have known. I would have fucking known!'

  'Wis sudden,' Donald said.

  Moira marched out of the doorway and went and stood in the middle of the little, rough lawn, by the broken sundial. 'Jesus,' she murmured. 'This is no' real.'

  Behind her, one of the dogs whined gently.

  'This morning, hen. Wis a stroke, they reckon. Nae warning. Ah've been on the road since nine.'

  Moira, turning back to the door, said emptily, 'I'm sorry. Please ... come away in.'

  'The dogs?'

  'Sure.'

  Donald put himself shyly on the edge of the sofa. He picked up the guitar and sat it on the cushion next to him, as if it was a holy relic, the Dobermans like temple dogs at his feet.

  Moira crept numbly into the kitchen to make tea, moving crockery, milk, sugar, spoons, oatmeal biscuits on to a tray without thinking, like setting up the pieces on a chessboard, slow and precise and deliberate, laying it down for herself: a not-yet-elderly woman, known, a little irreverently, as the Duchess because of her authority and her wisdom and her grace, this woman had died, suddenly, in her palace on wheels, on a run-down local-authority gypsy caravan site near the west coast.

  And yet this simply was not possible. It was not possible the Duchess would die without telling her. It was not possible the Duchess could die suddenly.

  She carried the tray into the living-room, set it down on the deep window ledge. 'And did no one,' she said grimly, 'think to call the poliss?'

  'Hey, now, come on, hen. We had the doctor. Wis natural. She wis always frail.'

  'Was not at all frail, Donald, you know that ...' Moira dropped a cup, felt her face collapse, the grief finally overcoming the disbelief. 'A damn stroke? My mother spent half her life learning ... learning how to die, you know what I'm saying?'

  'Aye,' Donald said, sighing, knowing there could be no argument. 'Wid ye let me drive you doon tae the site?'

  Moira shook her head. He knew more than he
could say. 'Was good of you to come.'

  'Nae choice in the matter, hen. It wis laid down. If she wis ever ...'

  'But I have to go down alone,' Moira said. 'You know?'

  She bent down to pick up the pieces of broken cup. 'I'll fetch some water,' she said. 'For the dogs.'

  When Dave came down after packing his things, Jan was still in the same position, only it was near-dark outside and the kids with the football had gone home.

  The room was cold, but he knew she wouldn't light the fire until he'd left.

  'Put the light on,' Jan said. 'You'll break something with those cases.'

  He had two suitcases and his guitar case. He put on the wall lights with their Tiffany shades, a soft ambience.

  'The main light,' Jan said sharply.

  The main light was hardly ever used. In its hard, white glare he searched her face for anything salvageable. She held his gaze, with all the insolence of grief, for more than long enough to convince him. Her thick red hair was tied back. She wore no make-up. She'd never looked as beautiful.

  But that was always the case, wasn't it, when you were getting the elbow?

  'Can I call you? I'd like to know. How it works out.'

  'You've done enough,' Jan said. 'We don't need you to know.'

  He started to fed angry. 'I didn't make it happen to her, Jan. I just saw that it had happened. I mean, shit ...'

  Jan took a long breath. She was a professional teacher; she made it all sound very reasonable.

  'Dave, I know very well you didn't make it happen. I know you couldn't make it happen. Of course I don't believe you did anything. I also don't actually believe you saw anything. But it's the thought that you believe you saw something ... Can you understand that?

  'To a point, but ...'

  Jan held up both hands, warding him off.

  'But more than that,' she said, 'it's the thought that one day you might be convinced you saw something around me. Or my parents. Or one of our friends. Now I know there has to be a sound psychological explanation for your appalling behaviour, but it's not my field of study. You've put yourself outside my parameters, Dave, and I want you out of my life. That plain enough for you?'