Darkside

Lucy shivered, even though their heating bills were ridiculously high and she had the rug snuggled up to her chin. She thought of the real-life horror that had played out less than a quarter of a mile from where she lay now on the couch. Had Margaret woken before dying? She must have. Even if it was only when the pillow was already over her face. The terror. The helpless terror. Lucy felt compassion overwhelm her. Poor Margaret.

Shamefully hot on the heels of compassion came the usual question: what would she do?

She thought that she would bite an assailant to make him let go of her. Biting was weird, and taboo enough to be unexpected. So, bite him in the face like a pit bull. She imagined the taste of his unshaven cheek and the howl of pain and outrage as his grip loosened … Then she would jerk upwards and sideways to throw him off the bed and on to the floor – like this! – then she would twist, fling the bed covers over his head, stamp on the place where she’d last seen his face and run next door to Mrs Paddon to use the phone.

There!

She was mentally breathless, but drew real strength from her imagined actions, reassured that if anyone ever tried anything like that with her when Jonas wasn’t around, she’d done as much as she could – and more than most people – to prepare herself.

There was a faint rumbling noise, then the sound of the garden gate squeaking and a tentative knock on the door. Lucy changed channels to The Antiques Roadshow and called, ‘Come in, Steven!’

A gangly sixteen-year-old sloped into the room with white earphones in, making only shy eye-contact.

‘I brought your paper, Mrs Holly.’

As if he’d be doing anything else. The DayGlo sack resting on his hip with Exmoor Bugle emblazoned across it was the giveaway, just as the rumble of his skateboard wheels on the road outside the front gate was his weekly herald.

‘Thanks, Steven. How are you?’

Steven Lamb had been delivering their paper since they moved in, and Lucy had watched him change from a boy into a teenager in weekly increments. First he’d been a scrawny thirteen-year-old, small for his age, and so shy that he had reddened and stammered at the mere idea that he might actually come in to deliver the paper instead of push it through the letterbox. Only the five-pound tip Jonas Holly pressed into his hand every month seemed to convince him that the policeman was serious – that he should indeed enter their home and give his wife the paper in person.

‘It’s what people do here,’ Jonas had fibbed to Lucy at the time. ‘Make sure she’s all right and call me if she’s not,’ he’d told Steven privately – just as he’d requested of Will Bishop and Frank Tithecott and Mrs Paddon next door.

It had taken almost a year before Steven had even engaged in conversation beyond a flushed and mumbled ‘Hello,’ but he took his gratuity seriously and, on the occasions when Lucy failed to answer his knock, he would wait and knock again, or go round and check the garden. He never left without finding her, and once had called Jonas to tell him his wife was crying upstairs, and then waited for nearly an hour on the chilly doorstep for him to come home.

Now Steven would come in and say, ‘I brought your paper, Mrs Holly,’ then Lucy would ask him to sit down for five minutes and he would do that – always on the most uncomfortable chair in the room – and he would face the TV and watch with her whatever was on. Sometimes it was Countdown, sometimes it was one of those shows about buying houses or selling antiques, mostly it was a horror movie and they would flinch together in companionable silence. Lucy no longer minded that Steven saw her using her tasselled cushion for protection, and she never mentioned that she often saw him gently shut his eyes in moments of extreme tension.

Steven had eyes that often looked distant, as if something was troubling him. She imagined it must be his homework or girls, but she never asked. She was afraid that if she did, he would shy away from coming again.

And Lucy loved having him there.

She’d been a kindergarten teacher before the disease had taken hold of her, and missed children with a passion – their fresh openness, their honesty and lack of guile. The way they would look to her for comfort, or come in with a joke they’d been saving up for her, give her misshapen lumps of painted clay for her birthday, and the way they didn’t mind being babied if they skinned their shins on the jungle gym.