Aickman's Heirs

by Simon Strantzas

  In the autumn Jason leaves for college on a baseball scholarship and Samuel goes to work for his uncle, who owns a contracting business. He sees Jason around the holidays, but only then, and soon they lose touch altogether.

  Samuel is twenty-one, twenty-two. Sometimes, at night, he remembers the lake as it was on that night in May with the stars in its folds and the Milky Way on its surface, yawning, joining its reflection to receive him as he fell.

  In dreams he stands on the dam, cold concrete between his toes. He hears his own breathing, strained and whistling, and Nick’s face is in the water below. It shimmers in place, floating on the dark that whirls up from beneath.

  The image stays with him on waking, a trapped melody. One night, late, he staggers out of bed and tiptoes downstairs to his father’s office. He digs the address book out of the desk and flips through it until he finds Nick’s number.

  He takes down the phone from the wall and dials the number. He raises the receiver to his ear, waits for a ringing from the other side. He has no idea what he will say, how he will begin.

  Four beeps in sequence. A woman’s recorded voice.

  The number has been disconnected.

  #

  2012. Samuel is a manager in his uncle’s contracting business, a youth pastor in his father’s church. He teaches Sunday school, arranges field trips to the lake in summertime. He lives alone. His apartment is in the next town but he drives up to the lake on Sundays for dinner with his parents. From them he learns that Jason is engaged. His mother says: “He’s coming home for the wedding. They’re getting married at the lake.”

  He does not expect an invitation, does not receive one. At dusk on the night of the wedding he cruises round the lake at twenty miles per hour, watching for signs. He spies one, slows. Jason + Amanda, it says, the words in green letters on a yellow background. An arrow points up a driveway to a big house overlooking the water. Rented for the occasion, he thinks.

  A tent has been erected on the lawn, tables laid with champagne flutes and electric candles. The wedding, it seems, is over, but the dancing continues, men and women whirling together beneath strings of Christmas lights. They are beautiful, achingly so, wearing their best clothes and dancing, pairing off to music he can’t hear and always the lake behind them, its awful stillness. The water is calm, un-rippled. Purple with the reflection of a sky that isn’t there, not really, and he thinks of his childhood, the years since high school. The surface of his life and the memories it hides. The bruises at Nick’s waist. His father’s black glasses.

  Jason’s voice. Thought I saw something. In the water.

  Samuel backs out into the road. He straightens the wheel and depresses the gas pedal, anxious to be away. Thirty-five, forty. He rounds the northwest corner of the lake just as a pickup truck pulls out from a side-street, cutting him off.

  He slams the brakes. Taps the horn as he approaches, but the truck does not increase its speed. Twenty miles per hour. He is ten feet from the other vehicle, less. The tailgate flaps up, down—groaning, broken—and the truck itself is filthy, half-decrepit.

  Samuel strains his eyes. He leans into the glow of his headlights but cannot discern the color of the pickup for the layers of rust and mud. The license plate is similarly indistinct, a gray rectangle, while the truck’s rear windshield is fogged over, opaque but for a swath where someone has wiped it clear from inside.

  Samuel glimpses movement in the cabin, the flutter of something white. He flashes his high-beams. Glimpses a face at the window, a boy.

  The child’s eyes are black, or appear so, as is the mouth that drops open, crying out, screaming for help while the tailgate bangs up and down.

  Samuel brakes, hard. His car shudders, screeches. Stops.

  The truck drives away.

  Samuel’s mouth is dry. His hands shake as he fumbles for the stick-switch, his brights. He sees it again: that face at the window, an open mouth. Screaming even as the truck vanishes beyond the cone of his headlights, leaving the empty road, the windblown trees. The leaves and the patterns they make like ripples in water.

  He stomps down on the accelerator. The engine responds, pushing up toward forty. The lake drops away to his left, the north shore visible through a lattice of birch-branch and pine, and again the pickup is before him.

  The tailgate falls open, releasing a cloud of dust from the truck-bed. It rears up before him, white and fine where his headlights strike through, illuminating the interior of the cabin. The driver’s head is visible, a shimmering in the truck’s rear-view, but only for a moment before it is gone, eclipsed by a hand at the back windshield: a child’s hand, the fingers spread.

  Samuel slows, his bumper five feet from the truck’s tailgate.

  He turns on his high-beams, flooding the pickup’s interior, revealing the dark stains on the dashboard and headrests, the mold sprouting from the upholstery. The cabin swims with damp, trapped breath whirling like smoke before the light.

  The hand vanishes, reappears.

  It thumps feebly the glass.

  The truck accelerates. The chassis shakes as the driver up-shifts, shedding flecks of paint or rust which spatter Samuel’s windshield and skitter away into the night.

  Samuel speeds up to maintain his distance, punching his horn all the while. He flashes his brights, but the truck will not slow, will not pull over, and together they follow the road as it curves to the south, away from the lake, dark trees yielding to farm-fields, fence-posts.

  He presses down the gas pedal. The speedometer jumps to fifty-five, sixty, bringing him within two car-lengths of the truck. The road ahead of them is clear. He jerks the wheel sharply to the left and pulls into the other lane. He continues to accelerate, draws level with the cabin.

  The driver-side door is rusted out, sealed over. The window is misted with breath, smeared with fingerprints. The windshield, too, is completely obscured, though the truck continues to accelerate, pushing seventy as they approach the straightaway.

  Samuel rolls down his window. He shouts across the seat, but the other driver pays no heed. With the window down, Samuel hears a thudding from the truck and sees the boy’s face at the window. There are bruises about the mouth and neck but the features are familiar, somehow, the eyes, though in this moment, he cannot be sure if it is Nick’s face, or Jason’s, or his own—and then the road is sliding out from under him.

  He hits the ditch. Flips, keeps rolling. Tumbles end-over-end through the hay-fields. The airbag explodes from the steering column and he hears a sound like waters churning, sees the stars come rushing toward him: the Milky Way, its open jaws.

  #

  He survives. A young woman, driving behind him, witnesses the accident and phones for help from her car. Later, in her statement, she says that he was driving erratically: changing lanes, shouting out his window. She makes no mention of a second vehicle.

  He is in the hospital. The days pass and he is discharged, sent home to recover. Home: his parents’ house, where he is treated as a sickly child. His mother hovers by the bedside, reading passages aloud from the Bible or Reader’s Digest. His father kneels by the bed with his hand folded round Samuel’s, offering up prayers for his recovery.

  Some of his Sunday School students come to visit, three boys in tee shirts and swimsuits. They linger in the doorway, their limbs white and hairless. One boy is heavier than the others, the fat forming dimples where it overhangs his knees. They sing songs from church, their faces like masks showing nothing, and afterward, the fat boy says they are going swimming.

  “Off to the beach, then?” Samuel’s father asks.

  “No,” the boy says. “We’ll probably just go up to the dam.”

  The final song is sung—let the lower lights be burning, send a gleam across the wave—and his father ushers them from the room. Samuel listens for their voices as they retreat downstairs, the door closing behind them.

  The boys are gone.

  He heaves himself onto his side, turns his face
to the wall.

  A Change of Scene

  Nina Allan

  “Do say you’ll come,” Phrynne said. “I fancy a change of scene.”

  I’m telling you from the beginning, because it seemed to me even then, before anything had really happened and we were still sitting in Phrynne’s elegant drawing room in Muswell Hill, that there was something odd in her behaviour, something not quite right. There was a hectic red spot at the centre of each cheek, and Phrynne herself seemed full of an unnatural energy, buzzing with it almost, the way a child will, just before it throws a tantrum or bursts into tears.

  I had seen grief before, but not like this. Grief seems mostly to exert a stupefying effect, slowing its victims down, paralysing them with lassitude. Gerald had been dead less than a fortnight, yet Phrynne seemed restless, malcontent, antic. Tension surrounded her, like barbed wire. I was on edge right through the funeral tea, afraid I suppose that Phrynne might do something outrageous, though what that something might be I could not have said.

  As soon as the last guest had departed she whooped with what could only be called delight, poured us each a large sherry from the decanter on the sideboard and asked me—begged me, it seemed like—to go away with her, just for a little while, to take a short holiday.

  What could I say? Phrynne and I had been friends since school. Even if we had inevitably grown apart with the years—her marriage, my marriage, my son, her divorce—I could not forget that there had once been a time when we shared everything. We were closer than sisters, closer in some ways even than lovers. A friendship of that kind is a rare thing. I felt I owed it to her, not just to Phrynne as she was now but to the Phrynne who once swore to me that there was nothing more important to her than our togetherness.

  I felt I owed it to us, in other words. To the idealistic and passionate young people we once had been. I suppose I even hoped that now that we were both widows and free to do as we pleased, some of the old excitement of our friendship might be rekindled. I had other friends, of course, but none like Phrynne.

  If I am honest I think I nurtured a superstitious belief that if I held true to Phrynne now, I might finally, as I had always secretly wanted to, become more like her.

  It wasn’t as if I was short of time, either. People had been insisting I should take a holiday ever since Freddy died.

  “There’s nowhere I want to go,” I would laugh, reassuring them that I was all right, that I was really all right, that my new life without a husband was bearable and my sanity sound.

  “Of course I’ll come,” I said to Phrynne. “It’ll do me good to get away from things for a bit.”

  Phrynne leaned towards me and grabbed my hands, her preoccupied expression dissolving into a smile so radiant and so natural that I felt an immediate rush of satisfaction at being the cause of it. I couldn’t help but recall all the times in our youth when Phrynne had chided me for not being the spontaneous and carefree spirit she seemed honestly to believe I secretly was.

  “You should let your guard down more, Iris,” she would say. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  At least on this occasion I had not disappointed her.

  Our sabbatical was set to begin the following Friday. Phrynne telephoned me on the Wednesday to arrange our rendezvous, at a coffee stand on the concourse of Liverpool Street station. She had told me not to worry about the travel arrangements, that I should leave the practical details to her.

  “I want it to be a surprise,” she said. “Anyway, it’ll give me something to do. You’re always telling me I should be more organised.”

  I could not remember saying anything of the kind, either recently or in the past. Indeed I had always privately ascribed to Phrynne—who prized her casualness as a virtue—a preternatural talent for organising things and people exactly as she wanted them.

  “But how will I know what to pack if you won’t tell me where we’re going?” I protested.

  “Don’t be so boring. This is supposed to be an adventure.”

  I knew from experience that there was no point in arguing with Phrynne once she made up her mind about a thing, and in truth I was happy to fall in with her plans. I could not think of a single occasion on which I had set out on a journey without knowing where I was headed, and the thought of doing so now seemed strange and daring and frivolous all at once.

  “Darling,” Phrynne exclaimed as I moved towards her through the crowd. “We have to hurry. Our train leaves in less than ten minutes. Take these.” She pressed a packet of Danish pastries into my hands then whisked away across the concourse, returning seconds later with a luggage trolley. Laughing, we loaded it up then guided it through the barrier and on to the platform. The train was not too crowded, and we ended up with a compartment to ourselves.

  As the train pulled away from the station I realised I had forgotten to check the departures board for our destination.

  “Where are we going?” I said to Phrynne. “Cambridge?”

  Cambridge seemed likely, now that I thought of it. Gerald had been a Cambridge man. I seemed to remember he had once tried to persuade Phrynne that they should move there. And Cambridge is particularly beautiful on summer evenings.

  “Good Lord, no. All those ghastly colleges stuffed with mummified old men. What would we want to go there for? I can’t think what Gerald saw in the place. We’re off to the seaside.”

  “It sounds like heaven.” I laughed, gazing out of the window as we groaned through London Fields. Phrynne’s mention of Gerald—so soon—had taken me aback rather. Now that Gerald Banfield was safely dead I found it easier to admit to myself what I had always known: Phrynne had never loved her second husband, not even for a day.

  We changed trains at Ipswich, and then again at Norwich. Once we had settled into our new compartment, Phrynne began to rummage in one of the two enormous carpet bags she had brought with her as baggage and produced a bottle of champagne and two crystal goblets.

  “It’s a wonder your luggage isn’t full of broken glass,” I said.

  “Practice, my dear Iris.” She set the glasses on the fold-down table and then drew the cork. There was nothing to stop us, no one to see, and after my initial surprise I found myself entering wholeheartedly into the spirit of the occasion. By the time we reached Salhouse, I was beginning to feel quite lightheaded. London seemed far away, not just in terms of distance but in terms of philosophy. It was as if, somewhere between Norwich and Diss, we had jumped the tracks from one universe into another.

  The landscape through the carriage window was so flat it seemed featureless, until the moment I realised that if I stared at it for long enough its very featurelessness exerted a hypnotic effect. Instead of retreating into the sameness, specific details—a tithe barn, a lone elm tree, a bridge, curved like a sickle, arcing above a river—seemed to leap forward, impressing themselves insistently upon my sight almost like the gem-hued, furiously bright objects in an exhibition of Technicolor photographs I had seen once in a gallery on the outskirts of Tokyo.

  In the end I was forced to stop looking. I turned instead to Phrynne, who was scrutinizing me quizzically, twirling her almost-empty champagne flute between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Have you been to North Norfolk before?” she asked.

  “Once, years ago. Freddy knew some people in Sheringham. We came up for the weekend.” If Phrynne had not put her question I would most likely not have remembered our visit to the Carmichaels. It had occurred at an unhappy time in our marriage, and I suppose I had done my best to mentally erase all trace of it. Had it not been for the champagne, I would probably not have mentioned the trip at all.

  “Oh, Freddy,” Phrynne said. She settled herself more comfortably, resting her head against the seat back and closing her eyes. Her eyelids were coated in a silky-textured, lavender-coloured eye shadow, a modern shade I liked the look of but would never dare try.

  Freddy always hated me to wear makeup.

  “What do you mean, ‘oh Freddy,’” I said
.

  “Nothing.” She poured the dregs of the champagne into her glass. “But don’t you find it a relief? To be free of them, I mean. A little bit, anyway.”

  “Free of them?”

  “The men.” She gulped at her drink, her still-narrow throat expanding and contracting like the vocal apparatus of a lithe and exquisitely marked tree frog. I sat silently, watching her and thinking about Freddy. Freddy and I had been married for almost thirty years. We had a son together—Ian—whom we both adored. I knew friends of ours who would have characterised our marriage as ideal. I never sought to deny this, even though I sometimes wondered if our seeming compatibility had more to do with our separateness—our unspoken agreement never to make undue demands on the other’s privacy—than with what our acquaintances referred to idealistically as true love.

  Not that I didn’t love Freddy—of course I did. But now that he was gone, my life seemed to be carrying on equally well without him. Aside from a few short weeks immediately before our wedding, I can honestly say that Freddy never caused me a day’s pain in his life.

  Even then, during that awful month when I seriously considered calling off our engagement, the doubts were mine, not Freddy’s. It was always a consolation to me, later, that Freddy never had a clue about what I went through. As always at that time, the person I confided in was Phrynne. Phrynne had been against Freddy from the start.

  “You can’t marry him,” she insisted. “It would be like marrying your own father. And the man has a face like a toad. I’d die of repulsion, if it were me. If boredom didn’t kill me first, that is.”

  “He’s a nice man,” I wailed.

  “Nice?” Phrynne flung the word back at me like a soiled tea towel. “Is that really all you want from life, Iris? For it to be nice?”