The White Darkness Read online

  But Mum was still on the platform, rummaging through her handbag, crouching down to set it on the ground and look with two hands. Uncle Victor was unzipping our single suitcase, sighing patiently, lifting out clothes. “Your mother has left her passport behind,” he said, and managed a martyred smile.

  “No! No, I had it! I know I did!”

  “Calmly, Lillian, calmly. Think on. Calm oils the cogwheels.”

  But though she searched through every pocket, every compartment of her shoulder bag, between every page of her library book and under the cardboard stiffener in the cheap suitcase, there was no sign of either her passport or her calm. “Are you sure I didn’t give it to you to mind, Victor?”

  Victor’s hands padded slowly, methodically, over the luggage. Mum’s darted and flickered in growing panic. “So stupid!”

  “You aren’t stupid, Lillian,” said Uncle Victor, smiling and shaking his head, “but sometimes the things you do are. . . .” Mum didn’t appreciate the distinction—she almost zipped Victor’s hand into the suitcase.

  The clock over the station clicked around. The guard appeared, holding a green paddle. Mum had begun to cry with frustration and annoyance. My stomach swung like a cat flap. “We’ll just have to catch a later train!” I said.

  But apparently the tickets were valid only on the eight-o’clock. When the doors finally closed, Victor and I were on the inside with the suitcase, Mum was on the outside, her arms full of her own freshly ironed clothing. It dangled from her grasp and she stooped awkwardly to stop the silky blouses from slithering to the ground. She looked like a marble Madonna holding someone dead on her lap, head cocked sideways in grief.

  “Back on Saturday,” I mouthed through the window and kissed the glass.

  “It’s a common mistake,” said Uncle Victor, cracking open the newspaper. “Lack of organization. Success comes down to getting organized. Keeping your eye on the ball. Think on, Sym.”

  “Maybe someone pickpocketed her,” I suggested.

  “Say again?”

  “Stole Mum’s passport. Someone. Maybe.”

  “And happen she’ll find it just where she put it, more like. The ladies, eh? God bless ’em.” It was said with a conspiratorial wink—which must mean I’m not really female but an honorary man. A good thing, I think. A compliment.

  “So! We’re off,” said Titus, settling into the seat beside me, stretching out his long legs, opening The Life of Napoleon as Waterloo Station slipped slowly behind us in a flicker of brick and scaffolding.

  And it didn’t matter: Mum hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. And at least I’d have Titus. Now, if he were to rest his head against my shoulder, I would feel the black crispness of his curly hair under my cheekbone, smell the pipe tobacco inside his leather jacket. If I were to shut my eyes and imagine his arm around my shoulders, we could be going anywhere in the whole round world and not just on a three-day, educationally informative trip to Paris.

  “Just you and me, eh, Titus?”

  “Just you and me, ma chère.”

  And Uncle Victor, of course.

  Chapter Two

  Freeze-Frame

  I remember the day Titus arrived in my head—not when I first heard of him, I don’t mean, but the day he arrived, like some distant cousin you’ve heard of but who suddenly comes to visit. I remember. Uncle Victor had given me the box set DVDs for my birthday: The Last Place on Earth—an old TV series made before I was born.

  I had the house to myself, because Dad was bad in the hospital and Mum had gone to see him. So I sat on the sofa with the laptop on my knee, turned the sound all the way up, and watched all the episodes, one after another—six hours—the cellophane wrapping still scrunched up in my hand, my breakfast bowl on the table.

  I knew this story—thought it held no surprises for me. But I was seeing people that I’d read about, so already I felt I knew them. I was like one of those relatives on the dockside waving the men good-bye, minding about whether or not they came home again.

  And then it became real.

  I watched so intently—concentrated so hard—that there was no sofa, and no screen, no chime from the clock, no traffic outside, no whine from the fridge or thump from the central heating. And it became real. So real. So real. So real. So real. So real.

  When one disc came to an end, I suppose I must have put in another, but I don’t remember doing it. I knew this story—it shouldn’t have held any surprises for me. Five men trekked to the South Pole. Because a Norwegian expedition made it ahead of them, they didn’t even have the joy of being first. And then they didn’t quite get home.

  If he had been there, Dad would have said, “What do we want to watch this for? We know how it turns out.”

  Mum would have said, “I wonder where they filmed it? Wasn’t he in something else?”

  Even Uncle Victor would have spotted an inaccuracy in somebody’s cap badge or the rigging on the Terra Nova.

  But me, I didn’t think anything. I let it soak into me like water into salt, until I was invisible, absorbed. It blew me away. That’s what people say, isn’t it? It blew me away—like wind ripping a tent loose of its guy ropes, or the blizzard submerging a man in powdery, edgeless Death.

  And there, at the heart of it, was Captain Oates: so sublimely beautiful that his image passed clean through my retina and scorched itself on my brain. And his voice flowed into me, so sensuous that I was wading across the River Jordan, up to my ears and deeper in milk and honey, toward Paradise on the other side. He was perfect—as I’ve always known he would be if ever the blurred photographs, the expedition portraits, were to come to life. Like everything perfect, he set up a ferocious pain inside me—a flickering, griping sort of pain, because nothing as marvelous as that is ever within reach, is it? Nothing as beautiful can ever last. I was powerless to rewrite the past—to change the outcome of the story, to save Oates from dying—in the film—in real life. . . . The laptop grew hotter and hotter on my knees, so that after Oates got up and went outside into the blizzard and crawled away into the snow to die, his body warmth was still there in my lap, slow to cool. He lingered in my lap.

  And then the phone rang.

  And it was Mum to say that Dad had died.

  I thought there was really bad static on the line, but it was only the cellophane clenched in my hand, crackling by the receiver. And all I could say was “Oh,” because it had been in the cards for weeks. I had been half expecting the call all day. The news held no surprise for me.

  And besides, Dad never liked me.

  Chapter Three

  Swallowing Sim

  Uncle Victor likes me. Uncle Victor is very fond of me. He calls me his “right-hand girl,” his “apprentice,” his “journeyman.” I was a disappointment to Dad, apparently, but Victor could see my potential. The two of them were business partners, in the shot peening line of work. He isn’t a blood relation but he has always been around, so sometime when I was small, Victor Briggs became my “Uncle Victor.” And he’s been as kind as any real uncle—paid for the funeral, did Parents’ Evenings. Suggested Paris.

  The hotel in Paris was . . . odd. It wasn’t quite the sort of place you would expect to book through the Daily Telegraph, with or without coupons. It was in the Algerian quarter—L’Hotel Gide—over a Greek restaurant serving Moroccan food. In the adjoining two-star bedrooms, the sheets had two star-shaped tears in them.

  “Look. Only two singles anyway!” I said.

  “Say again?”

  “Where would Mum have slept?”

  “Ah. Quite. Typical French,” said Victor.

  I looked out the window hoping to see Montmartre—or the Eiffel Tower—or the Moulin Rouge. But there were only some derelict apartment blocks, an overpass, and below, in the yard, a public toilet.

  “Shall we phone Mum?” I asked. “Say we’ve arrived?”

  “Let’s eat first,” said Victor.

  We had a couscous royale for dinner. It sounded better than it tast
ed. There was a Greek mythical fresco on the restaurant wall that one of the waiters must have painted. I worked out it must be Phaeton, careering around the sky in his father’s sun chariot, charring the green places into deserts, dooming both Poles to everlasting cold because he couldn’t control the horses. There was also a TV on the wall over my head, showing a soccer match between France and Morocco, so each time I looked around, everybody in the restaurant was peering my way. The sound was turned full up—I had to switch off my hearing aids—but Uncle Victor didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t seem to notice that it was Wednesday, either, because he was eating protein.

  Normally Victor eats protein on a Monday, carbohydrates on a Tuesday, dairy on a Wednesday, fish on a Thursday, and fruit on a Friday. On Saturdays he only eats food supplements like cod liver oil and selenium, and on Sundays he only drinks things liquidized, with herbs out of the garden. A few years ago I helped him with this experiment to find out if you could get by living only on very high doses of vitamins; but I think Mum must have objected, so we stopped. He worked out a seven-day diet for me last year, but it made me throw up, which was annoying for him because he couldn’t keep an accurate record of my calorie intake.

  “Do you think we could go up the Eiffel Tower tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Say again?”

  “Eiffel Tower. Tomorrow. Can we?”

  “Complete sentences, Sym. Think on. If you can’t speak out plain, at least be thorough.”

  “May I borrow the mobile phone, please? I said I’d phone Mum as soon as we were settled.”

  Overhead, the French scored and someone threw a chunk of French bread at the television set. It landed in my couscous, spraying me with orange food dye. Victor picked up the round roll from his side plate. I thought, in horror, that he was going to retaliate, but he just began hollowing it out with the tines of his fork.

  “Phone. Can I borrow?”

  “Phones,” said Victor with a detached, fretful look. “F*** phones.”

  It was more startling than the baguette splashing down in my dinner. He does hate mobile phones, I know—says they interfere with signals in the brain. But he isn’t usually given to swearing. Grudgingly he passed me the phone and the attachment he’d invented to protect his brain from it—a plastic funnel with the spout cut out. I took them outside into the street to get a signal. The pavement was full of puddles the same color as the splashes on my clothes; also Algerians, watching the game through the restaurant window. They eyed me up and down and one of them said something in French that I wished I did not understand. I thought HOME would be last-number-dialed, but it wasn’t. Victor had made several calls to someone called BROOK.

  The Algerians stared openly while I pinned the plastic funnel against my head with the phone. Victor’s safety device might save your brain cells, but it also stops you from hearing anything. Even after I turned my hearing aids back on, it was all I could do to make out a voice at the other end. I thought it was Mum’s, until I heard the beep of the answering machine. Mum was out. So I told her the hotel was lovely and that we were having a great time. I tried to sound like Nats does on a phone—competent and grown-up—but my voice came out flat and slightly tearful, a jumble of sentences half begun and trailing away. “Give my love to . . .” I began to say, but could think of no one in England who wanted it.

  I’m so clumsy. I’m so awkward. The plastic funnel slipped, fell to the ground, and bounced away down the alleyway. An Algerian boy ran after it and brought it back, pressing it into my hand, his other hand holding mine from underneath, his face leaning close to mine. “Merci. Merci. Merci. Merci beaucoup,” I said, in the hope that he would let go. My cheeks were blazing. My hands were sweating. Falling over the step, graceful as a swan, I fled back into L’Hotel Gide.

  Uncle Victor had finished scooping out the roll and was holding it over the flame of the electric candle on the table, so that the light glowed golden through its crust. “Look at that,” he said. “Hollow!” and “Has Lillian found her passport yet?”

  “I don’t know. She’s out.”

  “People should have to pass an examination to own a passport. Same as a driver’s license. Government should ration travel. Some of these people take three holidays a year, you know? Worse than joyriders.”

  “I’d really like to go up the Eiffel Tower,” I said, hoping that didn’t constitute a frivolous and unnecessary journey.

  “I thought somewhere a bit farther afield. A jaunt. Now that we’re here. What say?” The corners of his mouth twitched with comedy.

  “Jaunt?” Remembering Mum’s ungrateful frown at the mention of Paris, I smiled eagerly, though for some reason the cat flap banged again inside me. “Where?”

  “Well, seeing as you’ve broken free of your mother’s apron strings for once . . . I reckoned we should head down south. Two, three weeks.”

  How had I known—straight off—that he did not mean a tour of the Tuileries or a bus trip to Fontainebleau? How had I known, just from the tilt of his head, that Victor was talking long distances? The boy in the wall painting, driving the badly painted chariot, was losing control. His horses had pulled the reins out of his hands. From the end wall of the restaurant a fat, pink Zeus hurled a thunderbolt at him, trying to stop this reckless joyrider before it was too late.

  “Immortals ought to have a license before they drive flaming chariots,” said Titus in my ear. “Especially if they do it in the buff.”

  France scored another goal, and a fight started up. Victor and I escaped upstairs.

  “Whereabouts, Uncle? What about school? We don’t have the right clothes for sun. There wouldn’t be swimming, would there? I’ve got homework. I’ll have to ask Mum. Mum wouldn’t like . . .” My objections and misgivings soon lay piled on every flat surface in my tiny room.

  But Victor just smiled and packed them neatly away again. “Only real school is the School of Life, lass. Think on.” Hands on his thighs, knees tucked tightly together, bouncing slightly with excitement, he sat on the broken bedroom stool, grinning at me in the dressing-table mirror. “What say we don’t tell Lillian, eh? Let’s keep it our little secret.”

  “What does your mum say?” we asked when Maxine told us about her latest boyfriend.

  “Yeah, right, like I’m gonna tell my mum, durr,” she said, eyes rolling like metal balls around the rim of a dusty bagatelle board.

  “Well, how did you meet him?”

  “Internet.”

  “NO!”

  Maxine’s revelation—that she was going out with a thirty-year-old man she had met over the Internet—triggered a clamor of horrified screams and shrieks. Object achieved, I’d say: Maxine loves to cause an uproar. Nats—who is sensible and motherly and can say these things—started to mention Stranger Danger, but Maxine only writhed like a slug sprinkled with salt.

  “Join the real world, will you? ’S what people do. Leastways anyone with half a brain.”

  “But you ought to tell your mother if you do go out with him,” said Nats. “Tell someone.”

  “Waldron says it’s our little secret,” said Maxine, smoothing one eyebrow with a little finger.

  “Mum would go frantic if she lost track of us,” I told Victor with an apologetic snicker. “I wouldn’t like her to worry. Can we not keep it a secret, please?”

  For a second, Uncle Victor’s features altered as if a cold wind had blown in his face. His lips thinned, his eyes narrowed. “Your father always said you were wanting in the courage department. ‘Spineless shrimp,’ his precise words.” Then his whole expression brightened and he beamed at me, bald head gleaming with irrepressible goodwill. “Righty-ho! Whatever you say. I’ll go right now!” And he sprang to his feet. “I’ll find one of yon cybercafe places. E-mail her. Put her in the picture, right? You wait here.” He was laughing hugely at the thought of someone his age frequenting a cybercafe. Anyway, I thought that was what he was laughing about.

  It was quite a relief. Mum might worry, but not to the
point of calling the police when we didn’t come home. And she would be pleased to get an e-mail, even if she didn’t like what was in it. She and I sit down at the computer every evening, like spiritualists at a séance, and check for messages from friends we don’t have, family we don’t possess. I think she is half hoping Dad will one day e-mail her from beyond the grave. (Wouldn’t e-mail me, that’s for sure.) But tonight there would be an e-mail about how Victor and I were staying away a few days more. Two weeks, maybe. Or three. Telling her just where we were going. Wherever that was.

  Nine o’clock. It was very cold in my bedroom. Children were playing on the stairs—also a draft that made the door thump every so often, as if someone were trying to come in. I climbed into bed fully dressed, thinking I shouldn’t go to sleep until I heard Victor come back safe. “Paris, eh, Titus! How poetical is that?”

  But the only poetry he seemed to want to recite was the periodic table, which I’d learned for the chemistry exam before I knew I was going to miss it. “Hydrogen, helium, lithium . . .”

  His voice has a velvety, musical quality that I can always, always, always hear. Me, I mumble. I must: Victor never hears what I say. But when Titus speaks, I can hear every word. For me, that’s like when the optician slides home the right lens and all the e’s and g’s and o’s and c’s become perfectly clear again and it isn’t a struggle, even to read the bottom-most line.

  “. . . beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen . . .”

  Titus’s voice plaits together strands of tenor and bass into a silk rope that could save you from the highest tower or the deepest dungeon.

  “. . . oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium . . .”

  Every serif, every cross stroke, every flourish; every accent, every aspirate. His voice touches places inside me like someone moving through a house, flicking light switches. . . . No peering into the corners for what’s been said. No struggle to hear. Because he’s on the inside of my eardrums, isn’t he? And even if he were on the far side of glass, his diction is so perfect that I could read his lips! And even if it was dark and there was shellfire or an arctic gale blowing, I’d still be able to understand him, because our thoughts nestle against each other, like pigeons on a wire.