Darkest Place

by Jaye Ford

  ‘You want to talk about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to go somewhere and not talk?’

  ‘No. I want …’ She let the sentence trail away.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Carly shifted her gaze from the window to the man beside her. ‘I want to turn it off.’

  ‘Turn off what?’

  ‘Everything. All of it.’ Every bloodied, bleeding moment that filled her head.

  He didn’t speak for a long moment, his eyes steady on her. She’d said more than she wanted, didn’t want to explain it, was tempted to back away and change the subject. But she saw there was no judgement in his gaze, no She should feel accountable or She needs to get past it. There was nothing in it but recognition.

  ‘It’s part of you,’ he finally said.

  Her skin felt hot, sharp. Her breath was ragged. In front of her, close enough to touch, Nate was motionless. In her space.

  ‘I don’t want it anymore,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It hurts.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It wasn’t his fault but he was telling her to wear it. ‘I’m fucking tired of it hurting.’

  He held her eyes and said nothing more.

  Her heart thumped, blood crashed in her veins. Without thinking, without choosing to, she reached for his hand, interlaced her fingers with his and closed the distance between them.

  He didn’t move, didn’t speak. It wasn’t uncertainty, he was waiting to see what happened next or for her to make the next move, or maybe he thought she was deciding. She didn’t know, didn’t care as she pressed her mouth to his.

  Sensation fired through her like an electric charge. His lips were soft and firm under hers. Hot and salty. And still he didn’t move, as though she might change her mind if he did, his answer coming only from the tilt of his head and his tongue when she parted her lips.

  She leaned into him then, felt the solid muscle of his chest press at her breasts, his belt buckle at her waist, his thighs against hers. Unwinding their fingers, she slid her hand around his back, pulled him closer, kissed deeper. And finally he moved, wrapping his arms around her, enclosing her within his bulk. It felt safe, warm, anchored. The things she’d needed for thirteen years. It felt like her bones were alive, her flesh was on fire, her mind pinned to this moment.

  The glass in her hand fell to the floor. If it broke, she didn’t hear it, her senses consumed with the skin under her fingers as she slipped her hand beneath his jumper. He groaned quietly against her mouth. When she tugged at the hem of his top, he pulled away only enough to form words.

  ‘The windows.’

  She turned her eyes, saw the darkness outside and the reflection of their bodies on the glass, imagined the view from the street and what they were about to do. Holding onto him, not wanting to let go, she pulled him with her, away from the balcony, dragging the jumper over his head as they reached the sofa.

  He released her to throw it off, cocked his chin at the loft. For half a second, she thought about it: climbing the stairs single file, enough time for her to think about what she was doing.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘With the lights off.’ She lifted a hand to his chest, ran her palm across wisps of hair pooled in the centre. ‘Maybe not all the lights.’

  From the glow of a single, soft bulb, Carly watched as he peeled away her layers of clothing, pushed at what remained of his. She drew him down to her, the sofa at her back, his weight on her breasts, his legs between her thighs. He lingered there, drawing out the moment, holding her gaze in the gloom as he slid slowly inside her.

  She closed her eyes, felt only Nate now. Hard inside her. The touch of his tongue as it traced a line from her shoulder to her ear. His hand as it left her breast. Fingers stroking her throat. The gentle pressure below her jaw … and her mind leapt to another dark place.

  Gasping, twisting her face away, she snatched at his fingers. ‘No.’

  Nate lifted his face. He was still inside her, held by her legs around his hips, confusion and concern in his eyes. She wanted to push him away and haul him closer, her body hungry even as her mind tossed back images of another man who’d hovered above her.

  ‘Carly?’

  He lifted his torso from her, the cold of the room suddenly between them. Her gaze flicked to the dark windows, his glass on the coffee table, the bourbon gone. She didn’t want alcohol to numb her or herbal tea to make her sleep. She wanted Nate – around her, inside her, so there was no room for grief or fear.

  ‘Not like that,’ she whispered.

  ‘Tell me what you want.’

  She pulled him upright, kneeled over him. He understood that, kept her close as she rocked. Held her as her breathing grew short and sharp, as he buried his lips in her neck and groaned.

  They ate at the table later, like it was a date. Placemats, cutlery and tinned soup. They talked about nothing that mattered, the sticking plaster above his eye peeling at the corners now. Nate stacked the dishwasher while Carly sat on the kitchen counter in his jumper. He stood in front of her when he was done and ran his hands along her thighs.

  ‘What are the bruises about?’ he asked.

  She slid his hands higher, away from the mass of dark splotches around her knees. ‘Just bruises.’

  ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘What? No. I fell down the stairs.’

  ‘How many times?’ He wasn’t making a joke, it was disbelief.

  What could she say? That it was from crawling on hands and knees, terrified of the ugly, scary things in her mind? She wanted him to stay, not find an excuse to leave. ‘It’s a long way down from the loft.’

  ‘My sister said the same thing once. Tried to tell me she’d walked into a door. Turned out it was a door with a fist.’

  His sister. The one Nate had gone to the police about and ended up being threatened with arrest. Carly could see his concern, but she didn’t want to explain it. Not tonight, anyway. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking. No one comes here and pushes me down the stairs.’

  He nodded a moment. ‘Who put their hand around your throat?’

  A man without a face. ‘It’s not …’

  ‘You were scared.’

  ‘Not of you.’

  Nate took her wrist and turned it over, the four bruises dark under the lights. ‘My sister had these, too. They’re grab marks.’

  Carly wanted to snatch her hand away, but her eyes clung to the bruises, something fearful winding its way into her brain. ‘I have bad dreams,’ she told him. Told herself. ‘I stumble around sometimes. I fell down the stairs. It’s what you hear in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Sleepwalking?’ His tone was doubtful.

  ‘Something like that.’ That was as close as she wanted to get to it before she tried to sleep. ‘Can we not talk about it?’

  He ran his fingertips across them, either weighing up her explanation or wondering how far he should push.

  Carly didn’t let him decide. She pulled him between her legs, slid her hands around him. ‘Exhaust me so I sleep tonight.’

  She took him by the hand, led him up the stairs then paused at the top, suddenly uneasy. Not about Nate but the gloom that shrouded the loft. She didn’t want a black, hooded figure here with them – in her thoughts or slinking around in her subconscious. Taking a detour, she flipped switches and lit up the bedroom, made sure Nate was the only man with her on the bed.

  Afterwards, his arm around her waist as he curled at her back, the climax still humming in her muscles, Nate murmured into her neck, ‘Is it turned off now?’

  Carly thought of the kind of answers that other men had wanted to hear: You’re a good lover, the sex was great, it was exactly what she needed. But she remembered Nate’s face when she’d told him what she wanted, the sense that he’d understood. ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how long?’

  It was a question only someone with experience would ask. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will you
sleep tonight?’

  Whether she did or didn’t, this was better than herbal tea and soft music. ‘I want to.’

  ‘Doesn’t always work that way.’

  ‘No.’

  His hand slid from her waist, explored the curve of her hip, her thigh. ‘Is it better if I stay or go?’

  She didn’t know and she wasn’t sure what she wanted but she was intrigued about him. ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I want to make something better, not worse.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘Anything would be a start.’

  She turned to face him, wondering what he meant. Saw only that his eyes didn’t meet hers. That was fine, she understood about needing to do something right, only … ‘Sleeping here might not be a comfortable experience. I wake a lot. Confused sometimes. Sometimes scared.’ She smiled a little, tried to make light of it. ‘You know, of the dark. Like a kid.’

  ‘And tumble down the stairs?’

  ‘Yes. Once.’

  ‘It’s okay, Carly. I won’t let you fall.’

  Fall. A split second of sensation, of dropping into space, battered by rock, by fear and shame – and then it was over, as though he’d caught her. She reached out, touched a finger to his lips. Who was this guy?

  29

  Nate was awake when Carly got up to shower and ready to leave when she went downstairs. The tape was gone from his eye, the swelling below it barely there now, a thick scab and a purple slash around his eye the only evidence of his beating.

  ‘I’ve got an early appointment,’ he told her.

  She wondered if it was an excuse to leave. What was the protocol when you’d slept with a neighbour who had a shower and change of clothes five metres away? ‘You want coffee first?’

  ‘I should get going.’

  ‘Sure.’ She walked him to the door, shared an awkward smile, not sure how to finish it. A kiss? A friendly embrace?

  ‘I’ll be around later,’ he said and left it at that, open-ended.

  The apartment felt large and quiet with him gone. She ate cereal standing at the windows, watching drizzle fall in a fine mist. The street below was dark with rain, the sky heavy with fat clouds. The kind of weather that would have made Elizabeth ache. Carly shook her head. It was fine for Nate to tell her he wouldn’t let her fall – but he wasn’t here now and she had two hours to fill before class.

  She took her laptop to the sofa, planning to go over some study notes, then found her fingers poised above the keyboard and Nate’s name in her head.

  She typed nathan griffin yacht, pressed Enter and got plenty of hits. Newspaper articles, TV reports, inquest findings and a Wikipedia entry. She glanced over her shoulder at the wall they shared, then clicked on the first item.

  The story was from the online version of a Sydney paper, a detailed piece written three years ago at the end of an inquest into the death of Vivien Clements – it was a woman who drowned in Nate’s boating incident. She was twenty-eight when she died, the same age Carly would have been at the time. According to the article, Vivien Clements’ body was never found after the yacht Flamingo capsized forty nautical miles off the New South Wales coast. Carly skimmed a few paragraphs in search of Nate’s name … and Nathan Griffin, of Newcastle, 31 at the time of the incident, was skipper and survived six hours in the water before being rescued.

  Carly sat back from the screen. Not just an ‘incident’, not just memories of open water and waiting for rescue. Nate had been in charge and a woman had died. Guilt, blame, reliving, second-guessing. Things Carly knew about. She remembered his comment last night: Make something better, not worse. On other nights – I never said it was an accident. I don’t deserve a night off. She got up, paced a bit before reading more.

  Flamingo was a fifteen-metre racing yacht, fresh from the builders’ dock, custom-built for sixty-eight-year-old Gerald Fitzgibbon. He’d commissioned Nate to skipper for him when it was sailed from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland to Lake Macquarie, north of Sydney. Fitzgibbon had organised five crewmembers, one had dropped out at the last minute. Nate asked Vivien Clements, an experienced sailor and Griffin’s girlfriend …

  Carly pulled in a sharp breath. Vivien Clements had been Nate’s girlfriend. And she’d died crewing on a boat that Nate was in charge of. Something burned in Carly’s chest – for Nate, for his words last night, for the pain in his eyes.

  Scrolling quickly through the article, she found a photo of Vivien Clements. A black-and-white shot on a windy dock, her hair blown to one side of her face like a dark flag. Not glamorous in any way, a hint of toughness in the life jacket slung casually over her shoulder, a smile that seemed on the verge of laughter, something easygoing and fun in it. Carly’s gaze flicked across the room to the photo she’d put on the fridge: four fun-loving faces that no longer existed.

  The report talked about weather conditions that were ‘challenging, not extreme’, said there was inexperience in the crew and severe seasickness. The new radio failed late in the afternoon and weather warnings of a deepening low were missed. Around 9 pm, the boat was being hammered with five-metre waves. Fitzgibbon, attached to the boat by a harness, was washed overboard. Vivien went to his aid but she needed Nate and another crewmember, fifty-two-year-old Lucy Sabouni, to drag him back on board. Suffering broken ribs, Fitzgibbon was helped below in considerable pain; Lucy dislocated a finger during the rescue. With two other men badly affected by seasickness at that stage, Nate, Vivien and the injured Lucy were the only crew on deck.

  A single, massive wave flipped the yacht. The sick and injured crew were trapped in an air pocket inside the cabin. Gerald Fitzgibbon was helped to the surface by the other two. On deck, Nate, Vivien and Lucy, attached to Flamingo by harnesses, had been thrown into the sea.

  A hand to her mouth, Carly read the story Nate told the court of the minutes that followed.

  Underwater and following years of boating procedure, Nate unclipped his harness, used a knife from his belt to cut himself free of ropes, followed the upside-down deck to the rail and worked his way to the surface. Coming up on the windward side, he was battered against the hull by waves, gagging on seawater as he shouted for his crew, his voice drowned out by the wind. He fought his way around the stern to the lee side and began shouting again, a single word, ‘One’. Lucy responded quickly with ‘Two’. Fitzgibbon and his friends called Three, Four and Five. Vivien Clements never answered.

  Tears burning her eyes, Carly left the laptop and stood at the windows. Restless clouds jostled and shoved, an umbrella sheltering a pedestrian made a red hole in the grey street. The inquest had determined the faulty radio prevented Nate from making an informed decision about the worsening weather. It recommended no charges be laid. It didn’t matter what the official decision was, Carly thought. Nate had floated on a black ocean, responsible for terrified members of his crew, shouting for his girlfriend and hearing only the howling rush of wind and waves.

  Did you kill them? he’d asked Carly about her friends. There’d been no inquest into the deaths on the cliff ledge, the coroner had decided the fall was an accident. It hadn’t mattered. She knew what happened, that she’d goaded them into going, that they’d drunk too much the night before, that their laughter had rung around the canyon only hours before their screams. She heard again the voices that haunted her dreams. Carly’s own: Come on, it’s fine. Debs’ last words, like an accusation: I’m cold. Adam’s as his hand grew weaker: I wanted to be a dad.

  What did Nate think about when he stood at his windows and remembered? There were no last words from his girlfriend, just an endless silence in the dark. Something else Carly knew about. How did he look at the water and bear it? How did it not screw with his head?

  30

  Sunlight sparked red and gold fireworks behind Carly’s eyelids. The hush of the foyer, the expanse of the atrium above her head, the sense of space around her made sitting on Elizabeth’s bench feel like meditation. Maybe that was why Elizabeth had done it every day. Ca
rly rested her head on the wall at her back, grateful the week had finally ground to its end.

  If lack of sleep and stress were an invitation for the man in black to scare the hell out of her, then he’d missed a prime opportunity: anxiety, guilt, a sadness that had seeped through the warehouse like a gas leak, then yesterday the funeral and wake. Nate had come and gone from Carly’s apartment, had spoken no words of endearment, never kissed her goodbye, just knocked on her door at all the right moments.

  Today, the sun was shining, the sky was gloriously blue and in a couple of hours Dakota would be cutting her hair. She’d have a laugh with her friend, apply some brainpower to her Big Long List, have a few drinks. Be normal and maybe sleep like a normal person tonight.

  ‘Good afternoon, Carly.’

  She opened her eyes. ‘Roland.’ He was returning from the markets too, carrying a shopping bag, wearing a tie and sports coat – a man from a different generation, who’d struggled with his emotions yesterday. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘I’m well, thank you,’ he said formally, like he always did.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Carly told him. ‘It was a long, sad day.’

  ‘Indeed, it was.’

  ‘But the wake under the atrium was lovely. As were the words you spoke about Elizabeth.’

  He sat beside her, said nothing, lips pressed together under his moustache.

  Carly patted his hand. ‘I love your suggestion of a plaque for the bench. I think Elizabeth would be chuffed.’

  He nodded, small movements, more to himself than Carly. ‘Thank you for that.’ He cleared his throat, stood again. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’

  Carly probably should have caught the lift too, put the cheese she’d bought in the fridge, but it was nice here. The vastness, the gentle silence somehow letting her anxiety take a break.

  While she sat, people stopped or just waved as they passed. The personal trainer in a dress instead of leggings. The guy with the scary tatts on his neck, the woman with the angular haircut. Christina, out of breath and still talking as she hurried past. Dietrich. Stuart. Brooke, who propped her crutches against the wall and joined Carly on the bench. Then Dakota.