Darkside

Jonas made a sound that had never come out of his mouth before. Pain and shock and fury. He stood up as if ejected and stared down at Lucy, whose face was bathed in a pale-blue TV flicker.

‘NO!’ he shouted. ‘NO!’

* * *

Lucy Holly would have been Steven Lamb’s favourite customer even if her husband hadn’t been tipping him £5 a month to keep watch over her.

He liked the companionship of sitting down with her in her cosy front room where the fire was almost always alight and smelled wonderfully of warmth and winter. He liked the fact that she rarely tried to make conversation. Everybody always wanted to make conversation – to ask him how he was and what he was doing and whether he was all right. Even his best friend Lewis sometimes put out feelers. But Steven always felt that they were tiptoeing around the subject that surrounded him like a moat.

He didn’t like it.

He didn’t like to be reminded.

So sitting in silence with Lucy Holly while fake fear played out on the TV was oddly comforting for Steven. The scenes of horror rarely affected him and when they might he closed his eyes. But the warm silence calmed him and sometimes even made a bit of conversation pop into his own head. Over the years he had shared with Mrs Holly extracts from his life, and learned that he could be of interest to someone outside his family, for reasons other than that he was still alive when – really – he should be dead.

Now, as he struggled up the hill in the snow towards Rose and Honeysuckle cottages, Steven hoped Mrs Holly was watching something good – but not so good that he felt bad about interrupting with a titbit about his little brother, Davey, who had just this morning accidentally swallowed his last remaining baby tooth and who was therefore down to the last fifty-pence piece he was ever likely to earn from their nan for doing absolutely nothing. As Davey had already spent the money at least ten times over in his head, the tragedy was compounded for him, while that only increased the humour of it for Steven.

The snow was shin-deep in the lane and Steven wore wellies and his black waterproof trousers and kept his head down as he trudged uphill, staring at the crystalline surface he was about to break with each step, smooth and pale grey in the fast dark of winter.

He passed the telegraph pole halfway up the hill and heard it creak under the weight of snow and ice on the lines. Creepy.

The DayGlo sack on his shoulder held only junk mail tonight. Frank Tithecott gave him a fiver a week so that he didn’t have to bother stuffing leaflets through letter boxes himself, and Steven kept it for the nights when he collected the newspaper money from his customers. He liked to make Mrs Holly’s his last call of the day so that he knew he could go straight home afterwards and didn’t have to rush.

He finally looked up to see that he had made it to the gate of Honeysuckle Cottage. Mrs Paddon didn’t get a paper delivered. He’d knocked at her door once to see if she would like to order one from him but she had waved him away as if he were a Jehovah’s Witness, and told him, ‘We don’t want that kind of thing here.’ Steven still pondered on what on earth she might have thought she heard come out of his mouth instead of ‘Would you like to order the Western Morning News?’ After all this time, he’d never been able to come up with anything that sounded even remotely unsavoury.

Steven went up the three stone steps to the second gate and fumbled in the dark for the catch. As he did he heard something coming from Rose Cottage. He held his breath so he could hear better.

There it was again. Raised voices.

Steven was surprised. He was used to hearing customers shouting at each other as he opened the letter box on their lives for a brief moment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened the Randalls’ letter box and not heard Neil yelling something at his father.

But he’d never heard raised voices at Rose Cottage.

He stood for a moment, undecided in the cold and dark.

He liked Lucy Holly very much. He liked Mr Holly too – even though he’d splashed about in the moat of Steven’s memory. Steven hadn’t liked that, but he’d understood that it was the policeman’s job to ask. Plus Mr Holly was a source of income for him.

So even though he decided to open the gate and walk the few paces to the porch of Rose Cottage, Steven had not yet made up his mind whose side he should be on when he got there.

* * *

Lucy’s bottom lip trembled but she sat up straight and determined.

‘It’s my life, Jonas. It’s my right.’

‘No!’