For The Night Is Dark Read online

  “Dad, we need a spare.”

  He hauls himself out of his armchair. “Well, you ain’t gettin’ one. Fuck off, the lot of you.” He looks at me then, his still awake eye getting wider. “What’s she done?”

  I hear the louder hiss of Mum’s oxygen cylinder when she turns it up; I can imagine the rise of the bobbing red ball inside its gauge. “She was . . . stealing food . . . for the . . . Martins.”

  “I wasn’t!” My hands are angry fists until Dad starts coming towards me; I have to let them go so that I can try to get away. “I wasn’t. Dad, I wasn’t!”

  His shadow makes me cringe and I stop trying to get up. He’s too drunk to hit me right, but he still gets that soft spot just below my temple and my teeth rattle together, trapping my tongue. I make a stupid sound, like a dog that’s been kicked in the ribs, and then I put my hands up in time to protect myself from the next punch. Dad’s lost interest anyway; he backs up, staggering again on his way back to his armchair.

  I cough, spit and it comes out red.

  “Ugh,” Wendy says, still not really looking.

  When no one else says anything at all, I get up and run out the front room, around the narrow bend of hall and then into the bathroom. I lean over the sink and spit red again before rinsing out my mouth. I’m examining my tongue in the mirror, trying to find the bite that I’ve made, when Mick comes in. He looks at my reflection and winks. Grins.

  “Seems a shame to waste the opportunity.”

  I elbow him in the chest when he tries to touch me; when his cold hands grab at my waist, when his fingers pinch at my nipples.

  “C’mon, Suse, don’t be a bitch about it.”

  His hands slide up inside my T-shirt. I bite down on my swollen tongue again. Our faces look ugly in the mirror, so I stop looking. I try to push him off, try to reach the door, but he follows too fast, never letting go of my shirt, pushing me back against the tiles. His breath is hot, the bristles of his stubble spiky, his tongue hard, erect.

  “You taste good.”

  I taste of blood.

  He yanks down my jeans without undoing them and then my knickers, kicking my feet apart, making me grab hold of him for balance. He thrusts one finger inside me, then two.

  “God, you’re always so ready.” He says it like the idea revolts him, but he’s still smiling. Still grinning. He starts moving his fingers in and out, fast then faster. “You like that, don’t you, bitch?”

  I don’t want to, but I do. I don’t want to like the words he uses and the way he always uses them, but I do. Maybe it’s because I’ve watched him for years from my bedroom window, washing down cars in the street, his shirt tucked into his back pocket, his tattoo black against the white of his skin. It’s more than that, I know. It’s because he’s with my sister.

  The tiles are cold, cold against my shoulder blades and back as he shoves into me. He never uses a condom, and I never ask him to. I try not to cry out; I try not to wonder where everyone else thinks he’s gone. I try not to listen to the filth that he hisses into my ear.

  He never waits for me to come. Maybe he doesn’t want me to. If it’s a consideration at all. And maybe I’d like myself a little more if I didn’t. But I do. Almost every time.

  Mr Ingles sometimes lends me books on the sly. He says I’m the only one in any of his classes that could make it out of this town. They’re not the books the school makes us read. They’re just as old, just as hard to read, but the difference is I want to. Some of them are pretty dirty, but the people in those books don’t have pricks or cocks or gashes or cunts. They don’t come, or worse cum. They spend. It’s a far better word for it. As if every one of my ugly and violent orgasms has cost me something.

  This time it doesn’t cost me anything at all. Or Mick. Because the lights go out.

  He lets me go straightaway, swearing when he pulls out of me, still swearing when he zips up his jeans. I try to do the same but I’m shivering in the sudden cold, sweat drying to an itch.

  “C’mon, Suse! You decent?”

  I don’t answer him. I can already hear Wendy shouting his name.

  “C’mon to fuck, Suse. Right, I’m goin’ first, alright?” He pushes me back against the tiles. “Wait a few minutes, alright? Alright?”

  “Alright.”

  I hear him swear a bit more as he feels his way towards the door; hear the lock pop, the door creak open, letting in no new light at all, and then close again behind him. I stand shivering in the dark, the tiles still cold against my back, but while they’re still there I know where I am. I start counting in my head but soon give up. I can hear them all still in the front room, swearing, shouting. No one is shouting for me.

  I don’t like the dark. I’ve never liked the dark. Wendy loves it, maybe because it was her right hand man when we were kids. But even when she was torturing me she never really got it. It’s not what’s hiding in the dark that scares me. It’s just the dark. It makes everything small. It’s heavy and thick and it’s all you can see, all you can breathe. It makes a bathroom feel like a coffin.

  I run out into the hall too quick and bounce off the corner of the front room wall, banging my head, my left shoulder. It hurts, but not enough to make me stop. The hall feels as small as the bathroom. Smaller. I grope my way along the wall, following the sounds of my furious family. When my fingernails stick inside the hinge of the front room door, I hiss, bringing them up to my sore mouth, and then I stumble in, nearly crying with relief.

  Wendy is still standing in the middle of the room. She’s holding up a fake Zippo that blows left and right in hidden draughts, pulling ugly at her face. Dad’s swearing so much I don’t need to see him to know that he’s still in his beat up armchair.

  “Think the lights are out on the whole street,” Mick says, and I hear the squeak of his arm against the window. “Which ones still got folk in ‘em, Jimmy?”

  Dad belches and swears some more. Not many, is the answer. The Old Lion pub across from us was torched nearly three years ago because of all the drug dealing. Dad hates junkies and flash gits like Mick, but he hated losing his local more. Now he has to go to The Mermaid, which is nearly on the front. More than half of the houses on our street are boarded shut with graffitied steel; half again are as burnt out as the Lion; of the remaining three, only one is anywhere near to us. I don’t know what happened to most of our neighbours — where they went before or after their houses were destroyed. They just go. People do that all the time. They just up and go.

  “Fat Bob’s is two houses left,” I say.

  Another squeak. “Can’t fuckin’ see. Might be out too.”

  “Christ, Mick,” Wendy snaps. “Why d’you have to get a fucking flat? I hate this place!” The last part comes out as a screech, which only stops when we all hear the nasty creak of Dad’s armchair.

  “Well fuck off then, gel. Fuck right off. No one here’ll be stoppin’ you.”

  Wendy doesn’t move, but she looks over at me. I wonder what she sees. To me, she looks like a tall-booted mannequin glowing orange. I’m probably just a shadow.

  “Think I can see lights out on Breckfield,” Mick says. “Nothin’ closer.”

  We’ve never had pavements or street lights on Brooklands, but we’re luckier than most. The council stopped repairing a lot of the roads a few years back and they’re either narrow dirt tracks or potholed and cracked tarmac. Some of the chalets out on the Flats don’t even have mains sewerage.

  Mick chuckles, his voice getting closer. “You pay the electric, Jimmy?”

  “We’re on a fuckin’ meter, wise guy,” Dad says, and if I was Wendy I’d have shut my lighter, because his voice is turning back into the one that wants to hit someone.

  No one says anything for a bit. I think about trying to phone Julie even though the signal’s always crap, but then remember I’ve no credit. We don’t have a landline either; kids kept chucking tied trainers over the wires, and when that got dull, they just knocked the poles down. Dad said he’d rath
er spend the line rental down the pub.

  When no one says anything for even longer, it gets a little spooky. I’m dead aware of the dark of the hall pushing at my back, so I creep into the front room a bit more, even if that means I don’t have anything to hold onto anymore. I can hear Wendy and Dad and Mick breathing; I can hear Mum trying to. The hiss of her oxygen cylinder is the loudest of all.

  I jump when Mick says: “You got any candles, Jeanie?” So does Dad, I think, because I hear a thud in his corner and then a curse.

  “No . . . candles.”

  “Right well, we can’t just sit in the fuckin’ dark. What about makin’ a fire? You still got that old barbecue out back, Jimmy?”

  I don’t want Mick to go out back. Don’t want that at all. I start feeling my way closer to his voice, but it’s harder to follow than I thought it would be.

  “You ain’t makin’ no fire in my fuckin’ house, Mick.”

  “Right, so what, we do just all sit in the fuckin’ dark then? You know no cunt’s goin’ to jump in their van and nip down here to fix whatever the fuck’s gone wrong, right?”

  “We could . . . go . . . to bed.”

  “It’s dinner-fucking-time!” Mick bellows, and I’m surprised to remember that he’s right. It doesn’t feel like dinner-fucking-time. The dark is so absolute it might as well be the middle of the night.

  I’m still shuffling towards Mick’s voice—it’s easier now he’s shouting—when Wendy sparks up her lighter again, so close to my face that I can feel its heat enough to shriek.

  “What the fuck’re you doing?” She’s looking at me now, but even though she’s the only thing I can see, I don’t look back.

  “Trying to sit down.”

  She waves the fake Zippo high enough to expose the angry shadow of Mick near to the far end of the sofa. I grope for the closer edge of it and sit down. I hear rather than feel Mick doing the same; we’re too far away.

  “This is the third fuckin’ world right here,” he mutters, but maybe not loud enough for Dad to hear him.

  If this was one of those crap TV movies Mum watches on Channel Five every afternoon, we’d be minutes away from huddling close around Wendy’s fake Zippo; Mum and Dad sharing forgotten memories from our childhoods; Mick proposing to Wendy or professing undying love for me like in Mr Ingles’ books; all of us realising one way or another that we love each other really. I’m not holding my breath, and Mum couldn’t even if she wanted to.

  It’s just so quiet, that’s what I don’t like the most. Worse than even the dark. Maybe. Usually the lights and those quiz shows hide the outside enough I forget it’s there. The real outside, I mean. I forget we’re nearly on our own now.

  The worst day was the one when I realised Old Western had gone. He’d lived next door to us all my life. Even Dad liked him. On the last Friday of every month he’d bring Mum daisies and Wendy and me sweeties and Dad a bottle of white rum that they’d both drink out back or in the front room depending on the weather. He used to own the whelk and jellied eel shop on the promenade, and when he lost that he sold them door to door instead. Dad said he got good rates from the shore boats and he was a stand up fella because he always passed them on. Unlike Mick, Old Western really had been a fisherman once.

  His house didn’t get torched. A few days after he’d gone, some men in a white van came and put in the steel shutters and doors instead. A few days after that a letter came through the back door addressed to me. I stuffed it in my bag and waited to get to school to read it. I went into the toilets at morning break. There was nothing inside the envelope except a crumpled up bit of paper. In printed black letters:

  19 Brooklands: next to Chappels, opposite the burnt out Red Lion

  And then underneath that, in Old Western’s scribble: Careful of the Dark Susie x

  After I’d read it, I flushed it and the envelope down the toilet because I was still angry that he’d gone. Or probably that he could. They got stuck; I could still see the black print even when the toilet started filling up to the top, spilling dirty water onto the tiles.

  A few days after that the graffiti started. Everyone knew Old Western, so his was a popular spot. Dad went out on a Sunday and spent two hours cleaning a big red-painted PEEDO off Old Western’s porch, because he said it was the only one that wasn’t true.

  When Wendy suddenly shrieks, I nearly shriek myself. I nearly stand up; I nearly lunge towards Mick.

  “What the fuck, Wends?” Mick growls.

  “Mick?”

  I can hear her moving and moving quick. I feel the cool whisper of her body as it passes near to me; hear the gassy burst of her fake Zippo. I still flinch from the light and her lunging face.

  “What is your problem, Suse? What —”

  “Jesus H Christ,” Dad mutters, and I can tell by his voice he’s been sleeping.

  “You think it’s fucking funny, Suse?” Wendy’s face throws even uglier shadows. “You think it’s funny to creep up behind me in the dark, tryin’ to fucking scare the shit out of me?”

  Like she used to, I think. But I can tell from her face that she knows it wasn’t me. I haven’t moved since I sat down.

  She looks back over both shoulders, but doesn’t move the flame from my face. “If it wasn’t Mick it was you!”

  I wonder why she thought it was Mick before she thought it was me, and then I see her free hand and forearm clamped hard across her breasts. We both hear movement in the corner where Mum sits at the same time. Wendy spins around, shooting out her lighter arm towards it.

  “There’s . . . someone . . . here.”

  None of us move. I can hear Mum’s breathing getting faster, wheezier. I can hear the loud hiss of her oxygen because no one else is making any kind of noise at all now.

  “There’s someone here . . . someone here someone —”

  Her oxygen cuts out like she’s shut off the valve. That only ever happens when the district nurse needs to change an empty cylinder for a new one. The weird silence frightens me even then—now it stands up the hairs on the back of my neck and scalp in bunches.

  Mum doesn’t try to say anything else, which is worse. I stare at Wendy’s drunk flame, and then I try to stare past it towards Mum’s dark corner. I think I hear something—a muffled something—and even though I keep trying to hear whatever it is, I want Dad or Mick or Wendy to start shouting and swearing so I can give it up.

  Finally, it stops. That muffled nothing becomes complete nothing. I can’t hear anything at all.

  “Jeanie?” Dad. The creak of his beat up armchair. “Jean?”

  I screw my eyes shut black. Open them. Black.

  Wendy shrieks again when something thuds without echo on the carpet. I watch her flame drop down to the floor, exposing her scuffed leather boots. Exposing the thrown armchair cushion less than two feet away from them. She doesn’t move; the fake Zippo doesn’t move. The cushion was a Christmas present to Mum. I made it in Home Ec. three years ago. Wendy’s light shakes over the little stone cottage next to a silver rope of river.

  And then I can’t see either anymore. Only dark. Wendy shrieks again and her fake Zippo flies in a feeble arc: up and then down. It goes out.

  I hear a little thud, a whimper. The creak of Dad’s beat up armchair again, his curse—but it’s pitched high and alien—and then Mick’s better one and the feel of moving air, maybe his fist. Another thud. I’m still on the sofa, but I’ve started trying to climb up towards the back of it, my sore fingers gripping at its spine.

  Someone taps hard on the shoulder that I banged into the wall. It sends shocks down my arm and into my fingers. I let go my right hand and my body spins round. I stare up into the dark. All I see is the dark.

  I get up. My thighs are shaking. When I step away from the sofa, I immediately forget where I am. Where the door is. A hand drops onto my good shoulder. It’s heavy. I feel the weight of someone behind me, though they don’t make any kind of sound at all. They walk me forwards a few feet. Another hand drop
s onto my bad shoulder. Both start pressing down hard and I drop to my knees before I get that I’m supposed to. I hear another too close sound—a whimper—and then realise that it’s me. The hands disappear.

  I’m breathing so hard that it takes a while for me to realise that I’m not the only one doing it. I reach out—flail out—and hit Wendy’s leather jacket on my left; Mick’s bare arm on my right. I can smell Dad dead ahead: lager, sweat, chilli and the cold. And something else—something he’s never smelled of before.

  I whimper. Wendy whimpers. Mick and Dad make no sound at all. I don’t need light to see us kneeling on the front room floor, facing one another inside a tight square. I can feel the heavy air behind us move, pressing us closer. I can feel it pace around us like a restless lion. Black inside black.

  Minutes pass like this. None of us move; none of us speak. The owner of the hands paces faster, even though I can’t see him, can’t hear him.

  Finally Dad clears his throat. “You got the wrong house.”

  Silence.

  I hear him shift his knees; I smell his sour breath. “I own this shithole outright, fellas, so if you’re them come lookin’ for back rent, you got the wrong fuckin’ house.”

  It’s not fellas though; I can tell Dad knows that as well as me. It’s not even fella.

  There’s a sudden scuffle where Dad is. I hear him start to curse and then his voice doesn’t so much stop as run out. It gurgles. Wendy screams; I hear the slap of skin against skin and only realise it’s her palm against her mouth when her scream muffles, chokes. There’s a new smell. It’s like the pork sides Dad sometimes brings back from The Mermaid. Another thud —a big one. I only realise that my hand is covering my mouth too when I try to breathe and can’t.

  I need to get up. My crotch is still damp. My knickers are twisted inside my jeans, cutting into my groin hard enough to give my left leg pins and needles. “Mick?” I whisper, looking right. “Wendy?” Left.

  They don’t answer. I know they’re there: I can hear them, feel them, but they’re too afraid to answer me, even if they know that it doesn’t matter; even if they know that the someone in here with us knows exactly where we are. Where he put us.