A Room With No Natural Light

by Douglas Lindsay

  ‘Thank you, that’s ever so kind.’

  The two women stared at each other. Mrs Cromwell did not move, standing still long enough that Mitchell raised an enquiring eyebrow, wondering what else she could want.

  ‘One other thing,’ said Mrs Cromwell in reply. ‘If you could tell the girl... tell her that it was Mr Pitt who brought the food. That’ll mean so much to her. He would’ve come, but he has too much to do on the vines first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Mrs Cromwell smiled. She’d already got further than expected, but being a harmless old woman could get you a long way.

  ‘Thank you very much, officer. Good morning.’

  She nodded, letting the smile drift naturally from her face, and then turned away from the front desk and walked slowly out the door.

  As soon as she was gone, Mitchell rolled her eyes and put the small box to one side. She had paperwork to finish first; the drunk teenager languishing in cell two, whose friend had been sleeping in the waiting room most of the night.

  Shortly afterwards, she sighed heavily. Couldn’t concentrate. She picked up the box. It felt very light. She glanced over at the scanner on the far side of the small office space, gave the box another little weigh in her hands, and decided that it wasn’t worthwhile cranking the scanner up at seven in the morning.

  *

  The door to the cell opened, and Yuan Ju looked up; she was sitting with her back straight, legs together. For a brief moment she had the feeling of anticipation she had come to love when sitting in the cellar, and the door had opened to reveal Pitt with something new to make her life more comfortable.

  ‘You had a visitor,’ said PC Mitchell. ‘You want some food?’

  She looked expectantly at Ju. She had spoken loudly and slowly, assuming that Ju did not understand; and that speaking loudly and slowly would ease the process.

  Ju nodded, very slightly. She recognised the box that Mitchell was holding as having come from the kitchen. Was Pitt outside? Why didn’t he come in?

  Mitchell walked forward, handed the box to Ju.

  ‘It’s from Mr Pitt,’ she said.

  As she said it, she was aware that the words sounded false, but then it was possible that the girl didn’t even understand, so what did it matter?

  Yuan Ju seemed to smile. She reached out and accepted the box from Mitchell. Their fingers briefly touched.

  52

  Ju laid the fruit to the side. She had only ever eaten grapes in the company of Pitt, and that’s how it would remain. She had thought it might happen again, and that in future Pitt could tell her about the varieties of grapes and the qualities that each possessed. That hope had come and gone several times throughout the night.

  Now he had come to bring her food, but had not been allowed to see her. He was still thinking about her, at least there was that. She could believe again. He had not forgotten.

  She chided herself, as she’d repeatedly had to do each time her head dropped. He had killed three people for her; he was not going to give her up so easily.

  She removed the clingfilm from the small bowl of rice. She hadn’t been thinking about food, but now that it was in front of her, and that it had come from Pitt, she realised that she was starving.

  She dug her thumb and forefinger into the rice. Immediately, her thumb caught something sharp, and she withdrew it, a prick of blood already appearing.

  She put the end of her thumb in her mouth and looked down at the rice. Of all the moments of horror that had befallen her in the previous few months, none were as great as this. Right there, in that instant, her world collapsed.

  She looked down at the rice for a long time, taking only a quick glance up at the door. Eventually she put her fingers back into the rice and began to poke around very carefully.

  It was a small bowl, and even the most cursory examination revealed what was hidden within. The cursory examination that PC Mitchell had failed to make.

  Yuan Ju worked the small razor blade free, then left it lying on the top of the rice. She swallowed, and, in that instant – that moment of confirmation of what was hidden in the rice – her world ended.

  Pitt had not brought the food to save her. He had known there was no way out and he had come to help her do the honourable thing. Help her do the only thing that was possible.

  A tear fell and landed on the razor. A safety razor with three blades. Safe, right enough, but still capable of cutting a wrist.

  But they would know, the police would know when they found her, that Pitt had provided her with the means to kill herself. He would be in trouble.

  Suddenly, she wondered if she was part of some great tragedy. Pitt was out there, out in the world, at this very moment, with his own razor blade, waiting to kill himself too. The thought came and went in an instant. Her life was no romantic tragedy. Her life was nothing, and that was what Pitt was telling her. It would cause everyone a lot less trouble if she ended it.

  Yet, she still had to protect him.

  She looked over at the old toilet in the corner of the cell. No seat. The remnants of a roll of paper on the wall. An overhead cistern with a long chain hanging down.

  She would wrap the razor in paper and flush it down the toilet. That was what Pitt would have intended.

  He was doing what was best for her. She could not stay in the UK, she could not return home in shame. Perhaps this had not been his original intention, but at the last he was doing all he could to help her.

  She pressed the rice back down in the bowl to make it look as though it hadn’t been touched, re-covered it with the clingfilm, and then put everything back in the small lunch box.

  She sat in silence, the razor waiting on her thigh. Her grandmother had understood. She had known what it would be like for Ju travelling to a new world. Her grandmother had not shared the same vision for Ju as her father. Her father had wanted Ju to escape China from the day she was born. It had never seemed to matter how it would happen or where she would go; his vision for his daughter had been that she would escape.

  Yet, from the moment she had left, all she’d wanted to do was return. She had clung to her grandmother’s book, which she’d finally had to leave at the house; ancient Chinese poetry, which eulogised and mythologised her home. In the middle, on a page that her grandmother had marked with a small pressed flower, was the tale of a beautiful princess, trapped far away from home. The first time she had read it, it had made her weep.

  Now she knew what her grandmother had known. That the time was right to follow the same course as the mythical, ancient and beautiful princess, trapped so far from home.

  53

  Pitt sat at breakfast. Cereal, a cup of coffee. Daisy was there, although neither of them had spoken. Mrs Cromwell was not present, which could have allowed them to talk, but their lack of contact in the night, when it had been needed, had driven them apart once more. Their time together was short.

  Pitt could not shake the uncomfortable feeling, although he tried not to give in to it. He was too pragmatic a man to believe in a sixth sense. The mind was capable of all sorts of things in the night; too many mornings he’d awoken recently feeling uneasy.

  He looked at the clock. 8:27. Jenkins would already be out amongst the vines, he was sure. He had to find him, check on whether or not the passport was likely to pass close scrutiny, grab his bag and head down to the police station.

  An hour from now, he hoped he would be leaving with Yuan Ju. If not, then he would sit and wait, preparing to do anything that was required to secure her release.

  There was the possibility that the passport would be taken away for checking, it depended how seriously the police wanted to take the matter. He had sensed Malcolm’s disinterest, however.

  He found Jenkins at the winery, tasting the cuvée. Pitt never tasted before twelve in the morning. Jenkins had been at work for over four hours already. He nodded at Pitt’s approach. Already there was a new assurance about him that Pitt was happy to
see. There was nothing in his demeanour to suggest that he might fear Pitt having changed his mind.

  ‘The passport?’ asked Pitt.

  ‘It could get her into MI6,’ said Jenkins.

  Pitt stared blankly at him. He did not work in metaphor or humour.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ said Jenkins. ‘It’s a British passport, same as yours or mine. She’s part of the system.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Pitt.

  He began to turn away, immediately stopped. This was the last time he was going to see Jenkins, and even Pitt was not immune. He hesitated, imagined that he probably ought to say more than he was about to.

  The uneasy sense of apprehension would not leave him.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Another moment. Pitt was walking away from the last person that he might reasonably have called a friend. He lifted his eyes, stared at Jenkins.

  ‘I should go,’ he said, and with that he turned and began to walk back down to the farmhouse.

  ‘You too,’ said Jenkins to his back.

  Pitt stopped and looked round.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Jenkins.

  Pitt nodded, lowered his eyes. Nothing else to say.

  He returned to the farmhouse and went to the bedroom. Collected his bag, made sure everything was in order. A last look at the bedroom. A bright room. Windows on two walls so that the sun shone in all day. The window was open, and it was then, standing there in silence, that he realised what was wrong.

  The silence. The birds were gone again.

  Down the stairs at a run, into the kitchen. Daisy was at the table. Still no sign of Mrs Cromwell. He wondered if she was still in bed, and another moment of realisation; that every time he thought of her, the nagging doubt increased. The birds were gone, and so was Mrs Cromwell.

  Daisy was flicking though a magazine, a cup of tea in her hands. She looked over the top of the cup.

  He stopped. Did he have anything to say to Daisy, even if he could find the words? Leaving Daisy was not like leaving Jenkins. Leaving Daisy was setting himself free. Leaving Daisy was casting off the burden.

  He had nothing. He walked to the back door, stopped once more. Lying beside the phone was Yuan Ju’s book. The only one that any of them had ever seen her read. The one she had held in her lap throughout her short time in the cellar. She must have had to leave it behind in the kitchen the previous day, and now Daisy had placed it out for him. She had kept it for his moment of departure. As if there was any doubt about the choice he was making.

  ‘That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?’ said Daisy from behind. ‘Me or her. What does it say about the way you feel about me if you’re going for her, when all you’ll be getting is a closed book?’

  A closed book. He almost smiled. She’d thought that line through. Nevertheless, it meant little to him.

  He paused only briefly, then he lifted the book, neither turned nor spoke, opened the door and left the kitchen for the final time.

  Outside, the silence seemed even more thunderous.

  As he sat in his car, a taxi approached up the driveway and stopped by the back door. He watched Mrs Cromwell lean over and pay the driver, and then get out and walk to the door. As she wrapped her spindly fingers around the handle she turned and looked in Pitt’s direction. Her eyes met his.

  She was thirty yards away, yet Pitt could see to the very depths of her malevolent corruption. She opened the door and walked into the kitchen.

  54

  conversations with hardyman

  Hardyman was no less talkative, but he was lacking his usual ebullience. The words flowed, but they were tired. Pitt hadn’t seen Hardyman like this before and did not know how to drag him out of the mood. Instead, he slumped into it with him. The two men dark and brooding, expecting the worst.

  ‘It’s not like things were actually better sixty years ago,’ said Hardyman. ‘Just because everyone on the BBC spoke like the Queen, didn’t mean that the human race wasn’t as God-awful as it is now.’

  It’s supposed to be me who thinks like that, thought Pitt. In the face of Hardyman’s gloom, Pitt was talking even less than normal. Said nothing.

  ‘The new technologies, all this shit,’ said Hardyman. ‘Sometimes, it just gets too much. Sometimes, I think how great it would be if it was the 1950s. They were a reasonably civilised society, but without so much of the crap we have to put up with now. Then you realise that that kind of thinking is delusional. People got murdered back then, people were selfish. We, you know, people, we all hark back to old times, as if things were automatically better then. The Victorians, for instance. We imagine manners and decent behaviour, and people who knew how to hold a fork. But everywhere smelled of shit, women were treated like shit, the roads were shit, the people were shit, and the government were happily slaughtering indigenous peoples around the world in our name. It really pisses me off when people go on about how shit society is at the moment. It’s always been shit.’

  Pitt could have laughed, but Hardyman’s mood somehow dictated that his incoherent diatribe was completely devoid of humour.

  ‘But just because it’s always been shit, doesn’t mean that it’s not shit now, and doesn’t mean that it’s all right that it’s shit. We can’t say, well, sure it’s shit, but you know what, it was shit sixty years ago ‘n’ all, so what do you expect? We’re supposed to evolve. Not just, you know, species, it’s not just physiologically that we’re supposed to evolve, but as a society. But what have we become? A collective of fat, politically correct, incoherent, fame junkies. You’re right not to go for the TV documentary thing. Holy crap, but that’s what we’ve become. There’s this incredible universe out there, a world and a galaxy filled with the most remarkable and interesting things, and we spend our lives reading the Daily Express and watching absurd reality TV shows, and voting on which stupid young girl can sing better than the next stupid young girl, and using phrases like corporate responsibility and strategic solutions. Life hasn’t become style over substance, because that implies some level of substance. It’s all style, and a horrible style at that, and what people think, and selfishness. And when did it become all right to cry all the time? You turn on the TV and some bastard’s sobbing dramatically because their carrots haven’t come on the way they were hoping. Why is that all right? Why is it that people want to watch that? Why do you want to watch people crying because their soufflé didn’t rise? What is that all about?’

  Pitt didn’t have the answers to any of these questions. He’d had thoughts like this years and years earlier. It had seemed a long time ago that he had become so disillusioned by society; a long time since he had switched off and retreated into his own world. So he did not know that people cried daily on television over the most absurdly trivial nonsense. He had some idea that the newspapers still reported bad news with glee, intent on making their readers as miserable as possible, intent on drumming into them how bad their lives were, but not the full horror of the daily discourse on gloom. And he didn’t know that you could get a life coach or that there were no problems only solutions. Pitt had retreated from life so long ago, and had missed so much. A blissful ignorance.

  ‘Misery memoirs!’ said Hardyman, smiling in a bemused fashion.

  ‘What?’

  ‘People write them. I mean, that’s fair enough. You’ve had a miserable life. You got locked in the cellar by your mum or you got shagged by your dad, fair enough. Write about it, exorcise your ghost. But who, in the name of God, wants to read that shit? But you go into a bookshop, and there are sections, there are whole bloody sections devoted to this stuff. It says it at the top of the shelf: “Misery Memoirs”, or “Books By People Who Are Miserable For People Who Are Miserable”. Why is that?’

  Pitt lifted his glass to his lips and shook his head with an imperceptible movement. It was like looking in the mirror. Except Pitt rarely expressed these feelings of disillusion with society. They were
obvious to anyone that spent any time with him, obvious that he had turned his back on society and retreated within, but his retreat had been quiet and insular; there had been no scorched earth laid against the detritus of human life around him. He had walked away and buried his head in the sand of his own life.

  It was peculiar and uncomfortable to watch Hardyman so unexpectedly rage against humanity, peculiar and uncomfortable for Pitt to feel himself unable to talk to him about it, to try and get to the bottom of this new anti-social attitude.

  Pitt left that lunchtime hoping that, the next time they met, Hardyman would be returned to normal, laughing at the world, enjoying Pitt’s annoyance at it; and, if Hardyman had not changed back to his old self, Pitt determined that he would get to the bottom of his friend’s abrupt mood swing and descent into the oblivion of ill-humour at the world.

  He never saw Hardyman again.

  55

  There was an ambulance outside the police station. Pitt knew, as soon as he saw it, that he’d been too late. He shouldn’t have slept in, he shouldn’t have taken so long around the house. Why had he fought the uneasy feeling, rather than reacting to it?

  He parked the car across the road and sat for a second. He was in the eternal moment. It was not impossible that the ambulance was for someone else. An ambulance at a police station need not be a rarity. Or something had happened to Ju, but the ambulance had arrived in time. And while he sat in the car, before he had entered the station, anything was possible. Yuan Ju was still inside, waiting to be released, waiting for him to rescue her.

  How long could he live in this moment, without facing the truth? A moment when Ju was still alive, a moment when he was about to take her away from the station, a moment when they would be travelling later that day to France.

  He wound down the car window. A perfect summer morning. Perfect to start a new life. Perfect to end one.

  The finality of the summer rested heavily upon him. It was not quite August, but this summer was over. However long he lived – and at no time in the past thirty years had longevity ever been a consideration for him – this would be the summer when his life changed, this would be the moment after which nothing would ever be the same. And the summer, the great changing, was over.