Dark Companions (3 page)

My relationship with Kim was short-lived. Like most such teenage experiences, our parting was not romantic and poignant, if partings ever are, but harsh and hysterical. It happened one evening as we made our way to the fair that visited Newsham Park each summer.

Across the lake we could hear shrieks that mingled panic and delight as cars on metal poles swung girls into the air, and the blurred roaring of an ancient pop song, like the voice of an enormous radio. On the Ferris wheel, coloured lights sailed up, painting airborne faces. The twilight shone like a Christmas tree; the lights swam in the pool. That was why Kim said “Let’s sit and look first.”

The only bench was in the shelter. Tangles of letters dripped trails of dried paint, like blood; mutilated faces shrieked soundlessly. Still, I thought I could bear the shelter. Sitting with Kim gave me the chance to touch her breasts, such as they were, through the collapsing deceptively large cups of her bra. Tonight she smelled of newspapers, as though she had been wrapped in them for me to take out; she must have been serving at the counter. Nevertheless I kissed her, and ignored the fact that one corner of the shelter was dark as a spider’s crevice.

But she had noticed; I felt her shrink away from the corner. Had she noticed more than I? Or was it her infectious wariness that made the dark beside us look more solid, about to shuffle towards us along the bench? I was uneasy, but the din and the lights of the fairground were reassuring. I determined to make the most of Kim’s need for protection, but she pushed my hand away. “Don’t,” she said irritably and made to stand up.

At that moment I heard a blurred voice. “Popeye,” it muttered as if to itself; it sounded gleeful. “Popeye.” Was it part of the fair? It might have been a stallholder’s voice, distorted by the uproar, for it said “I’ve got something for you.”

The struggles of Kim’s hand in mine excited me. “Let me go,” she was wailing. Because I managed not to be afraid, I was more pleased than dismayed by her fear—and I was eager to let my imagination flourish, for it was better than reading a ghost story. I peered into the dark corner to see what horrors I could imagine.

Then Kim wrenched herself free and ran around the pool. Disappointed and angry, I pursued her. “Go away,” she cried. “You’re horrible. I never want to speak to you again.” For a while I chased her along the dim paths, but once I began to plead I grew furious with myself. She wasn’t worth the embarrassment. I let her go and returned to the fair, to wander desultorily for a while. When I’d stayed long enough to prevent my parents from wondering why I was home early, I walked home.

I meant to sit in the shelter for a while, to see if anything happened, but someone was already there. I couldn’t make out much about him, and didn’t like to go closer. He must have been wearing spectacles, for his eyes seemed perfectly circular and gleamed like metal, not like eyes at all.

I quickly forgot that glimpse, for I discovered Kim hadn’t been exaggerating: she refused to speak to me. I stalked off to buy fish and chips elsewhere, and decided that I hadn’t liked her anyway. My one lingering disappointment, I found glumly, was that I had nobody with whom to go to the fairground. Eventually, when the fair and the school holidays were approaching their end, I said to Mark “Shall we go to the fair tonight?”

He hesitated, but didn’t seem especially wary. “All right,” he said with the indifference we were beginning to affect about everything.

At sunset the horizon looked like a furnace, and that was how the park felt. Couples rambled sluggishly along the paths; panting dogs splashed in the lake. Between the trees the lights of the fairground shimmered and twinkled, cheap multicoloured stars. As we passed the pool, I noticed that the air was quivering above the footprints in the concrete, and looked darkened, perhaps by dust. Impulsively I said “What did you do to old Willy?”

“Shut up.” I’d never heard Mark so savage or withdrawn. “I wish I hadn’t done it.”

I might have retorted to his rudeness, but instead I let myself be captured by the fairground, by the glade of light amid the balding rutted green. Couples and gangs roamed, harangued a shade half-heartedly by stallholders. Young children hid their faces in pink candy floss. A siren thin as a Christmas party hooter set the Dodgems running. Mark and I rode a tilting bucket above the fuzzy clamour of music, the splashes of glaring light, the cramped crowd. Secretly I felt a little sick, but the ride seemed to help Mark regain his confidence. Shortly, as we were playing a pinball machine with senile flippers, he said “Look, there’s Loma and what’s-her-name.”

It took me a while to be sure, where he was pointing: at a tall bosomy girl, who probably looked several years older than she was, and a girl of about my height and age, her small bright face sketched with makeup. By this time I was following him eagerly.

The tall girl was Lorna; her friend’s name was Carol. We strolled for a while, picking our way over power cables, and Carol and I began to like each other; her scent was sweet, if rather overpowering. As the fair began to close, Mark easily won trinkets at a shooting gallery and presented them to the girls, which helped us persuade them to meet us on Saturday night. By now Mark never looked towards the shelter—I think not from wariness but because it had ceased to worry him, at least for the moment. I glanced across, and could just distinguish someone pacing unevenly round the pool, as if impatient for a delayed meeting.

If Mark had noticed, would it have made any difference? Not in the long run, I try to believe. But however I rationalise, I know that some of the blame was mine.

We were to meet Lorna and Carol on our side of the park in order to take them to the Carlton cinema nearby. We arrived late, having taken our time over sprucing ourselves; we didn’t want to seem too eager to meet them. Beside the police station, at the entrance to the park, a triangular island of pavement large enough to contain a spinney of trees divided the road. The girls were meant to be waiting at the nearest point of the triangle. But the island was deserted except for the caged darkness beneath the trees.

We waited. Shop windows on West Derby Road glared fluorescent green. Behind us trees whispered, creaking. We kept glancing into the park, but the only figure I could distinguish on the dark paths was alone. Eventually, for something to do, we strolled desultorily around the island.

It was I who saw the message first, large letters scrawled on the corner nearest the park. Was it Lorna’s or Carol’s handwriting? It rather shocked me, for it looked semiliterate. But she must have had to use a stone as a pencil, which couldn’t have helped; indeed, some letters had had to be dug out of the moss that coated stretches of the pavement. MARK SEE YOU AT SHELTER, the message said.

I felt him withdraw a little. “Which shelter?” he muttered.
 

“I expect they mean the one near the kiosk,” I said to reassure him.

We hurried along Orphan Drive. Above the lamps, patches of foliage shone harshly. Before we reached the pool we crossed the bridge, from which in daylight manna rained down to the ducks, and entered the park. The fair had gone into hibernation; the paths and the mazes of tree trunks were silent and very dark. Occasional dim movements made me think that we were passing the girls, but the figure that was wandering a nearby path looked far too bulky

The shelter was at the edge of the main green, near the football pitch. Beyond the green, tower blocks loomed in glaring auras. Each of the four sides of the shelter was an alcove housing a bench. As we peered into each, jeers or curses challenged us.

“I know where they’ll be,” Mark said. “In the one by the bowling green. That’s near where they live.”

But we were closer to the shelter by the pool. Nevertheless I followed him onto the park road. As we turned towards the bowling green I glanced towards the pool, but the streetlamps dazzled me. I followed him along a narrow path between hedges to the green, and almost tripped over his ankles as he stopped shortThe shelter was empty, alone with its view of the decaying Georgian houses on the far side of the bowling green.

To my surprise and annoyance, he still didn’t head for the pool. Instead, we made for the disused bandstand hidden in a ring of bushes. Its only tune now was the clink of broken bricks. I was sure that the girls wouldn’t have called it a shelter, and of course it was deserted. Obese dim bushes hemmed us in. “Come on,” I said, “or we’ll miss them. They must be by the pool.”

“They won’t be there,” he said—stupidly, I thought.

Did I realise how nervous he suddenly was? Perhaps, but it only annoyed me. After all, how else could I meet Carol again? I didn’t know her address. “Oh, all right,” I scoffed, “if you want us to miss them.”

I saw him stiffen. Perhaps my contempt hurt him more than Ben’s had; for one thing, he was older. Before I knew what he intended he was striding towards the pool, so rapidly that I would have had to run to keep up with him—which, given the hostility that had flared between us, I refused to do. I strolled after him rather disdainfully. That was how I came to glimpse movement in one of the islands of dimness between the lamps of the park road. I glanced towards it and saw, several hundred yards away, the girls.

After a pause they responded to my waving—somewhat timidly, I thought. “There they are,” I called to Mark. He must have been at the pool by now, but I had difficulty in glimpsing him beyond the glare of the lamps. I was beckoning the girls to hurry when I heard his radio blur into speech.

At first I was reminded of a sailor’s parrot. “Aye aye,” it was croaking. The distorted voice sounded cracked, uneven, almost too old to speak. “You know what I mean, son?” it grated triumphantly. “Aye aye.” I was growing uneasy, for my mind had begun to interpret the words as “Eye eye”—when suddenly, dreadfully, I realised Mark hadn’t brought his radio.

There might be someone in the shelter with a radio. But I was terrified, I wasn’t sure why. I ran towards the pool, calling “Come on, Mark, they’re here!” The lamps dazzled me; everything swayed with my running—which was why I couldn’t be sure what I saw.

I know I saw Mark at the shelter. He stood just within, confronting darkness. Before I could discern whether anyone else was there, Mark staggered out blindly, hands covering his face, and collapsed into the pool.

Did he drag something with him? Certainly by the time I reached the margin of the light he appeared to be tangled in something, and to be struggling feebly. He was drifting, or being dragged, towards the centre of the pool by a half-submerged heap of litter. At the end of the heap nearest Mark’s face was a pale ragged patch in which gleamed two round objects—bottle caps? I could see all this because I was standing helpless, screaming at the girls “Quick, for Christ’s sake! He’s drowning!” He was drowning, and I couldn’t swim.

“Don’t be stupid,” I heard Lorna say. That enraged me so much that I turned from the pool. “What do you mean?” I cried. “What do you mean, you stupid bitch?”

“Oh, be like that,” she said haughtily, and refused to say more. But Carol took pity on my hysteria, and explained “It’s only three feet deep. He’ll never drown in there.”

I wasn’t sure that she knew what she was talking about, but that was no excuse for me not to try to rescue him. When I turned to the pool I gasped miserably, for he had vanished—sunk. I could only wade into the muddy water, which engulfed my legs and closed around my waist like ice, ponderously hindering me.

The floor of the pool was fattened with slimy litter. I slithered, terrified of losing my balance. Intuition urged me to head for the centre of the pool. And it was there 1 found him, as my sluggish kick collided with his ribs.

When I tried to raise him, I discovered that he was pinned down. I had to grope blindly over him in the chill water, feeling how still he was. Something like a swollen cloth bag, very large, lay over his face. I couldn’t bear to touch it again, for its contents felt soft and fat. Instead I seized Mark’s ankles and managed at last to drag him free. Then I struggled towards the edge of the pool, heaving him by his shoulders, lifting his head above water. His weight was dismaying. Eventually the girls waded out to help me.

But we were too late. When we dumped him on the concrete, his face stayed agape with horror; water lay stagnant in his mouth. I could see nothing wrong with his eyes. Carol grew hysterical, and it was Lorna who ran to the hospital, perhaps in order to get away from the sight of him. I only made Carol worse by demanding why they hadn’t waited for us at the shelter; I wanted to feel they were to blame. But she denied they had written the message, and grew more hysterical when I asked why they hadn’t waited at the island. The question, or the memory, seemed to frighten her.

I never saw her again. The few newspapers that bothered to report Mark’s death gave the verdict “by misadventure”. The police took a dislike to me after I insisted that there might be somebody else in the pool, for the draining revealed nobody. At least, I thought, whatever was there had gone away. Perhaps I could take some credit for that, at least.

But perhaps I was too eager for reassurance. The last time I ventured near the shelter was years ago, one winter night on the way home from school. I had caught sight of a gleam in the depths of the shelter. As I went close, nervously watching both the shelter and the pool, I saw two discs glaring at me from the darkness beside the bench. They were Coca-Cola caps, not eyes at all, and it must have been a wind that set the pool slopping and sent the caps scuttling towards me. What frightened me most as I fled through the dark was that I wouldn’t be able to see where I was running if, as I desperately wanted to, I put up my hands to protect my eyes.

Napier Court

Alma Napier sat up in bed. Five minutes ago she’d laid down
Victimes de
Devoir
to cough, then stared round her bedroom heavy-eyed; the partly open door reflected panels of cold October sunlight, which glanced from the flowered wallpaper, glared from the glass-fronted bookcase, but left the metronome on top in shadow and failed to reach the corner where her music stand was standing. She’d thought she had heard footsteps on the stairs. Beyond the brilliant panel she could see the darker landing; she waited for someone to appear. Her clock, displayed within its glass tube, showed 11:03. It must be Maureen. Then she thought: could it be her parents? Had they decided to give up their holiday after all? She had looked forward to being left alone for a fortnight when her cold had confined her to the house; she wanted time to prove herself, to make her own way—she felt a stab of misery as she listened. Couldn’t they leave her alone for two weeks? Didn’t they trust her? The silence thickened; the darkness on the landing seemed to move. “Who’s there? Is that you, Maureen?” she called and coughed. The darkness moved again. Of course it didn’t, she said, willing her hands to unclench. She held up one; the little finger twitched. Don’t be childish, she told herself, where’s your strength? She slid out of the cocoon of warmth, slipped on her slippers and dressing gown, and went downstairs.