Dark Currents Read online

  My heart beat fast. Panic swelled up my throat. I gulped at the cold air. “The sky is closer. The sea is closer. The light is going out.” When I said this to Toby on the street called Rue du Sous-Lieutenant de Loitière, he smiled with no warmth and too many teeth. I desperately wanted reassurance, but he was delighted by my discomfort.

  Our relationship had always been an unbalanced thing. I amused Toby, and took care of the practical matters he required to make these journeys. I think they were the only reasons he tolerated my fretting anxious presence at his side. Like an old relative, or servant, deferring to someone younger and more powerful and spoilt and knowing: that’s how he made me feel. I despised him.

  “It’s good shit.” He was referring to the contents of the little brown glass bottle he kept inside the breast pocket of his tatty Gore-Tex waterproof. I had barely touched it; earlier that day, in our room at the guest house, I had taken a sip of the bitter syrup before we began exploring Bayeux at noon. But Toby had filled his mouth with it, until his teeth were filmed with the old blood colour of neat iodine. Which is why his eyes were still glassy, and why he had lain down in the wet overgrown grass of the War Cemetery beneath the abandoned Musée Mémorial de la Bataille De Normandie and stared at the dismal grey sky, all afternoon, in silence. He was content to lie among the unkempt graves of five thousand dead soldiers; who no one has the energy to honour after all that had happened so quickly in this world.

  Toby had no interest in recording the experiences anymore; or of talking about them; or relaying them to me; or making sense of them. He was content merely to have them, in silence, over and over again. He said nothing to me besides, “But are they willing to be forgotten? That is the question, my dear.” And he had giggled like an infant after tempting the fallen so brazenly.

  And as was its wont, close to the shore in Arromanches, my fear pulled things in at me on that vacant street; and all at once too. My gaze was drawn to the grey stone walls bordering the weed-wretched gardens at the rear of the once grand hotels on our right. Then my vision groped to the windows above, set within bricks seared by salt and lashed by wet winds for centuries. And in the second storey window of the building neighbouring the derelict church I saw a figure.

  I stopped suddenly. Inhaled so sharply I unleashed a tiny scream that turned and fled back down my throat.

  The figure’s scrutiny had alerted me to its presence; it had been watching me and then suddenly turned away the moment I looked in that direction. It had not vanished but merely turned its back to me. Which I could still see, robed in something long and smooth and pale; keeping with the chalky-white-grey light the Impressionists adored here once, so long ago. The head of the figure was cowled. And upon the hooded face both hands clutched so that I would not see its expression.

  “Jesus,” I said, and the word trembled before leaving my mouth.

  “What?” Toby said, looking at me and frowning with a tired indifference.

  I swallowed, unable to speak; was clenched into the cold paralysis of a short and powerful shock.

  Toby turned and followed my eyes. “What?” he said again.

  I pointed at the window. “There.”

  He shrugged. I stepped up beside him. “There!” I jabbed my finger toward the window in which the figure still stood, exposing itself and yet pleading with us not to stare, not to see it in such grief. This was not mourning, this was desolation; I knew so at once.

  “What am I looking…? Oh, yeah. But what?”

  “It moved when I saw it. Turned away. Covered its face.”

  “Let’s go look,” Toby said as he strode across the road to the garden wall.

  “No. No,” I cried out, and I marvelled at his complete insensitivity. This figure at the window required a respectful distance; was to be looked at quickly and then moved away from. I knew this instinctively. But Toby was so brash. With the feelings of others, if I am to be honest, he was a vandal and a trespasser. His incessant seeking of sensation, of the esoteric, of the weird, of visceral experience delivered in full glare, of risk and danger, troubled me at that moment on that road more than anything else I had watched him do in all of the twenty-three years I had known him. But I could not rationally account for why his leering intrusion here shocked me sick. This involved no swallowing of unidentified pills, no deliberate losing of oneself in strange places, no camping in extreme landscapes with unsuitable gear, no going in through dark windows, or provoking the unstable with alcohol and rude cleverness; his intrusion here would carry a heavier penalty. To impose and interfere would be sacrilegious. How I knew this I cannot tell you exactly. Suffice to say this was a place in which a multitde died so horribly in a forgotten war. And as Toby and I have seen in those places where so many ended their days through violence in great swathes, their desire to remain can invest where they fell. Because they reach, I tell you; and they clutch forever at where they sense the light once was. I have warned Toby of this realm that is only ever sensed or glimpsed in certain places at certain times. But sometimes this region, which I suggest is a kind of parallel non-existence, is thrown wide open. Like here. Which accounted for my extraordinary nervousness since we had alighted from the one ferry each week that still ends its line on this abandoned Normandy coastline.

  Of course, that is precisely why Toby had wanted to come here, with me as his guide. He had heard things about the place. And I was a golden Labrador to a blind man. I took him across things. I led him around obstacles. He would have walked directly past the figure in the window had I not been at his side suffering an anxiety attack; the very peak of my seizure resulting in the drawing out of… of what, I do not know.

  “Statue,” he said, his voice dropping with disappointment, and contempt for me as if I had failed to entertain him enough with the sighting. Then, his tone buoyant with excitement, he added, “But it’s still pretty amazing.”

  I felt some relief that it was only a statue, but not for long. This carving in stone of a women wretched with grief, turning inward and away from the world, covering her features and clasping her terror and despair right back upon her own face, made me wither before it; shrink before all it symbolised in this dark and dying place. And I bowed my head and closed my eyes at the mere thought of who the sculptor had modelled this figure upon, or from what the weary yet untiring yearning from beneath the waves had invested into stone. I wanted to scream at Toby again, that 1807 bodies eviscerated within the salty shallows and between the neat hedgerows had still not been found. That we had to tread lightly and soundlessly, and keep our eyes and our voices down. What we had stirred up out of the derelict trenches at Vimy Ridge Memorial the previous year had made him vomit on to his own shoes. And I had fainted.

  But Toby had no such concerns here, no such interpretation, as he stood before these cold, wet and mostly abandoned buildings of scoured stone, only yards away from the ghastly sea that slapped down upon the shingle and drowned the light.

  The sea. Vast. Senseless. Monotonous. Dreadful. Nullifying, like the expanding freezing abyss above us, indifferent to this blue grain of life we stood upon. Specks upon a speck. The sea and the sky were almost touching here; could he not feel it? Here was extinction.

  The sudden roaring of my imagination nearly put out its own light with a hiss. I squeezed my nails into the palms of my hands and said the words; the invocation. Said the words over and over again to evoke myself back into myself. Then I relaxed my shoulders, exhausted.

  Toby stood at the wall, staring, enthralled by the distant stone figure behind glass. The room around the figure was completely lightless. Not a single feature suggested itself from out of that space. And then he spoke without any emotion, but his words made my bones ache with cold, and the skin around these bones prickled. “There are others. Look.”

  I joined him at the old wall. And I looked into the neighbouring house. A similar figure stood alone, cowled and robed with the head turned away from the world, the face clutched. This one stood immobile too,
a sentinel at a second storey window. On the other side of the church, a third stone figure filled a side window in a miserable concrete building, the blue metal roof peeling. It must once have been a garage.

  “Wonder why they are there?” Toby asked, his query sincere.

  To me, the figures seemed to be sealing the empty buildings, or marking them as condemned, or as unstable, as invested. It was a way for the dead to rise as the living made room: they invested into things, into places. “Let’s get back.”

  “This is so cool.”

  There have been times in our companionship when I dearly wished to destroy him, physically; this was another of them.

  As soon as we were back inside our room at the guest house, he stretched out on his bed. Still wearing his coat and his muddy boots, which were soiling the bottom of the bedspread that the withered and yellowing old lady who owned the pension would have to scrub, he closed his eyes and was snoring within a minute.

  Hunger, sitting in the cold cemetery watching him all afternoon, and the recent episode in the street, had weakened me. Quietly, I made my way over to the little table upon which we had placed the remainder of our lunch for the car journey down from La Havre. Inside the plastic container, I made the discovery that he had eaten, without my knowledge, the last two sandwiches, the last bag of crisps and my uneaten chocolate bar. I looked across at the tray that bore the kettle and hot drink materials that came with the room. I remembered seeing two small packets of complimentary shortbread biscuits. These too he had eaten. The plastic wrappers were discarded beside the little broken television. He had not even put the wrappers into the bin.

  When I realised I was risking a broken tooth from grinding my teeth, I unclenched my jaw and rubbed it. I looked at him on the bed; his snoring vibrated through the walls and filled the chilly air. His thin face was pale, his pinched mouth open. His curly white hair seemed too youthful for his face. An old man in a girl’s wig. I wanted to kick him off the bed and stamp and stamp and stamp on his curly-bitch head.

  I looked away. Beyond the window the sea and the sky were black, as if existence had ended outside the glass. The sudden intense heat in my body abated and left my head aching. There was still some tea and coffee in sachets, but boiling the kettle might wake him.

  I cursed myself for such an act of consideration; a human instinct he knew nothing of, because he had never displayed it once in our long friendship. Toby immediately placated any impulsive appetite he experienced with no regard for anyone else’s needs. He was a snatcher, a grabber; or he expected everything he needed to be provided everywhere, all of the time. He was entitled. And his contempt for me was reaching epidemic proportions. Though now I knew exactly why; now it all made sense. Now, he made sense. But, even worse than his revelation in the car about his family background, was the fact that we cannot change our natures.

  In the dark, I sat my drained and tired body down upon the end of my bed. It had gone eight.

  I thought of what he had said to me in such an offhand way in the car. It had numbed me to the core. And I had been poor company thereafter. In the passenger seat, he had read my shock and merely adopted a half-smile upon his face that had lasted for the remainder of the day. I had been too proud to lose my temper; and had been too upset to speak anyway. I was betrayed, and betrayal is a powerful emotion that shuts down most of the mind besides the ability to sustain misery, at least until rage takes over. And this was no lover’s tiff, because we were not lovers. But we had shared a bond that only lovers share. Or rather I realised, with a cold trickle of terror and shame in equal amounts, that what we had shared for twenty-three years was the devotion of a dog to its master; a master that considered his own needs as superior to those of the dog, and was soon to abandon the trusting hound too.

  In that dim and fusty room in a boarding house on the shore of a relentless tide, I could not bring myself to list all of the things I had sacrificed and missed in life, due to my misguided attachment to this man, this friend. But the listing of my grievances would come in time. There was always time for the listing of grievances in these long dark days. Toby would soon return to a comfortable world full of potential and opportunity and promise that I had known nothing of in the last two decades. A world he had deliberately kept hidden from me and had retreated to during his enigmatic disappearances over the years.

  This was to be our last journey together: without a trace of remorse, he had informed me of such in the car on the French side of the channel. After the trip’s conclusion in two days, I would be left with so many silent hours of contemplation on wasted time and youth. And the memory of him and his deception, that would become viler in my mind, would always be there to accompany me as I sank back into directionless, debilitating, and wretched poverty. He did not state this, but we both knew it to be true.

  What did any of it now mean: these uncanny experiences of ours, in the abandoned and derelict corners of Great Britain that had hurtled backwards to the social inequality of Queen Victoria’s reign? And so quick was the regression it had taken everyone by surprise and gone even further back to feudalism, and now was becoming the new dark ages with a population to match. It was even worse in France, because even the French were but a fraction of the sparse population in their own countryside, and only the dead of ages now remained behind en masse.

  Toby and I had thought ourselves unique and above the disintegrating world. But what music or poems or writing or films or art had our collaborations in the esoteric, and our explorations of psychic geography in a dying world, ever produced? Those creative ventures we had planned and incessantly talked of, through the long hours in the squats and grim flats we had shared together, smoked in together, in which we had withdrawn from the fallen world together, had degenerated into recreational drug use and a perpetual staring into space. We had become degenerate. Hopeless, like most of what remained of the world.

  I thought of those inexplicable stone figures in this town with their faces turned away. Without Toby their fate would become mine: cold as stone, an installation planted in isolation, paralysed with despair, waiting for the darkness to finally take everything away, to drown it with aeons that have been drowning futility for aeons.

  But if I protested too much, he would shrug and smirk and merely tell me that I was being ‘dramatic’. And then he would be gone forever into the light of comfort, into a grazing of pale female flesh, into vast warm rooms, and into so much money it would only cause anxiety at the prospect of it being shared. And I would be left behind, in a place like this: a dead corner. My existence beyond whatever tiny grim space I occupied would amount to nothing more than him saying, ‘I knew a chap once…’ That would be my epitaph, lost in the fragrant air of some noisy party in Paris, or South Kensington, or Edinburgh, where the privileged congratulate themselves on still being privileged despite all that has happened.

  Better for me, and for all those he and his kind have exploited, if I had smothered him right then in that guest house. With one of the musty pillows as he lay snoring like some sated king upon the faded candlewick bedspread. Over his thin pointy face I should have pressed down hard until his vigour was stoppered.

  Instead of murder most just, I abandoned the unlit room; leaving the curtains open to the darkness, to the immensity that made an even greater mockery of my foolish trust and my pathetic hopes. I went down and through the silent fusty house and into the cold night roaring with ocean.

  Some place, somewhere in this dim town, must have still been serving food. Maybe hot food would make me feel better for a little while. But I would bring nothing back for him; I would sate my own hunger. For was I just to wait for him to awake from his drugged stupor and then set about finding him nourishment, as I had always done? As he would doubtless expect me to do, and at my own expense. He was entitled to what I could do for him. That was the foundation of our relationship. And what one group of people can do for another has been revealed as the foundation of civilisation now that all illusion
s of fairness have been doused. Now that nearly everything is in ruins. Perhaps it is the very foundation of our species and always has been.

  I walked down Quai du Canada and avoided looking out at the great imploring sea, idiotic in its surging. I did not want to be pulled into it. To my left, the long line of empty hotels and bars had unlit windows, many covered from the inside with blankets nailed to sash frames or old newspapers taped to the glass. Before I turned inland, I saw another stone figure at a window. It had drawn itself further back inside the room, but, in the ambient glow of one of the last working street lamps, it still showed the black ocean its stone head, covered with a cowl and clutching white fingers.

  I walked along Rue du Mézeray and Route de Ryes. Here too everything was closed, shuttered, derelict. But in the weak yellow light of the lamps and the occasional lit window above street level, I caught glimpses of stone figures in the distant gloom of the empty gift shops, or crouching in despair behind the dirty glass of bankrupt estate agents, cafés, and shops. Each of the figures made me start, and I made sure not to stare for too long, in case my appalled scrutiny would draw me inside an empty shop front, to stand in horror in the darkness, in the dust with them, among the litter of fliers advertising pizza restaurants long gone.

  I walked along the wider thoroughfare of Rue Marie-Rose Thonnard and saw not a soul. The restaurants were shuttered against an indifference sustained by time for long enough to fade their hoardings and signage; the coaches had long departed and left no trace; the shuffling tourists were less than a memory of a distant time when holidays were taken by any but the few. The darkness came in from the sea and filled the places in which human antics had once occurred.