Things We Say in the Dark Read online

  The sky is empty of gold now, slipping into dusty blue. The big ones let the little one stay there under the roller coaster, head tilted up, watching the very beginning of the moon appear in a loop of track.

  One of the big ones veers off towards a shadowy building and observes it, thinking. Pale, rain-damaged figures cluster around the lurid signage. Broken multicoloured bulbs flash in the last of the light. The other big one observes the little one for a moment; she goes to take her tiny hand, then thinks better of it. Instead she joins the other big one by the shadowy building.

  Dungeons of Doom

  – Is this a ghost train?

  – I mean, that’s what I’d choose, if it was me. It’s inside, it’s warm, it’s low-lit. Cosy. What do you think?

  – Don, are you seriously fucking telling me that you think a ghost train is a good idea? A clattery cart and tissue-paper ghosts and spooky noises, forever. That’s what you want for her? I despair, I really do.

  – You know what? If you’ve got all the fucking answers then you can just do it yourself. Let me remind you that this was your idea, Scarlet.

  – It might have been my idea, but I didn’t want to actually go through with it. We could still change our minds. We could …

  – We couldn’t. It’s practically done. And we won’t know about it by tomorrow. By tonight, even. By the time the stars come out, okay? We’ll go back under the portcullis and it will all be over. I promise.

  Jousting Knights Dodgems

  They walk on. The little one is tiring now, her dolly dragging in the dirt. They pass the caterpillar ride, the galleon, the jousting arena. The big ones are tiring too, getting emotional, neither wanting to voice their doubts in case the other doesn’t argue them down. The day is fading and they can hardly see their steps.

  A moment of panic: the little one has gone.

  They call for her and find her on the dodgems, curled up in a cart.

  Pendragon’s Plunge

  – I don’t want to walk any more, Daddy. Are we nearly there?

  – Yes, my shadow. Will I carry you?

  – On your shoulders.

  – Last time, okay? You’re too big for this.

  – I’m heavy now, aren’t I?

  – Yes, my silent night, my bunch of stars, my curse. You are the heaviest.

  The Gauntlet

  They’ve looped round the entire empty park – the shattered paths, the dry waterslide, the armless eyeless gormless statues, the silent carousel, the broken chairs, the torn flags, the leaf-choked carts empty and waiting. They’re almost back at the car park now. The little one is almost asleep; the big one’s hands rest on her white buckle shoes, keeping them tight to his chest so she doesn’t tip off his shoulders.

  Before them, the portcullis is all in shadow. Beyond it, the moon glints off the car’s windscreen. The white turrets with their black tips gleam fairytale-pretty. The big ones avoid each other’s eyes. Up the stairs, each step careful. The little one’s head nods asleep.

  In the top turret, he slides her off his shoulders and lays her gently on the ground. He takes off his coat and lays it over her like a blanket. He backs away.

  Don and Scarlet leave their daughter alone in the empty tower and go back to their car.

  Human Cannonball

  – Don, can’t we … shouldn’t we …

  – She’ll be fine. We chose the best place.

  – Was she really that bad? Maybe if we’d tried harder with her. Everyone else manages it.

  – We’re not everyone else. If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?

  – I wish I’d never thought of this.

  – We’re nearly at the portcullis. Soon you’ll never think of it again.

  Kingdom in the Clouds

  They unlock the car and climb in. They’re happy; a day at the theme park would cheer anyone up. They can still feel that leaping, bubbly, post-roller-coaster feeling in their throats. They kiss, and break away with a laugh. What a wonderful day it’s been.

  Don starts the car, then wriggles in his seat. Something is digging into his back. He reaches behind him and pulls out a rag doll. It has yellow wool for hair and a patchwork dress. He sits for a long time staring at it, genuinely confused. Why on earth do they have a rag doll in their car? He holds it up for Scarlet to see, but she only laughs, thinking Don has brought it for some reason, some little in-joke gift for her. Well, never mind. He rolls down the window and throws the doll out. There seem to be a lot of other toys in the car park, for some reason. People are such litterbugs. He turns up the radio and together they drive away, unencumbered, free as a flag in the breeze.

  A tragedy can become a horror if you’re not allowed to deal with it as a tragedy. Imagine you were having an affair with a married work colleague, and that colleague suddenly died. You would only be allowed to mourn that person distantly, appropriate to a work colleague, not as a lover. Or imagine you were the married one, and you were planning to leave, and then your spouse died and you had to mourn them as if you had loved them still. Or imagine you had a miscarriage early on, and couldn’t tell anyone that your child had died, because you hadn’t told anyone there was a child in the first place.

  Such secrets you would need to swallow. Such masks you would need to wear.

  The Only Thing I Can’t Tell You is Why

  There’s a moment, before anyone knows that Thomasin has woken from the anaesthetic, when everything is perfect. The slats of sunlight on the wall. The waltz of silver motes. The promise of her baby, new, born.

  She thinks about the birth and how it was agony, but also awful, in the old sense of the word: awe-ful, making her full of awe. She looked behind the green hanging sheet and saw her own blood, an outflow, so much it was black. Death tapped at her window and she turned from it and made life instead. She is happy, and that happiness opens her eyes.

  The nurses notice her, two or three of them she thinks, but they blend and merge, don’t they, so bright and clean with their quick hands. The nurses bustle into action and wheel a plastic cot over to her. Transparent plastic, with an unrealistically white knitted blanket. She’d never managed to wash anything so white. Thomasin looks inside, and she is excited to see what she has made from nothing, a brand-new life without even having to give up her own, and she presses down the sides of the blanket to see, and there is her baby, and her baby is dead.

  It’s a boy! Well done you. Look at his tiny hands, he’s a wee darling. Shall we try a feed?

  Thomasin lifts her baby from the cot, and as she twists she feels her stitches tug, and her baby is dead. She lays her baby on her breast, and lets the nurse help with the latching on, and her baby is dead. She watches her baby grasp and kick, the pucker of the mouth, and she feels the sharp pull of her milk beginning to flow, and her baby is dead. She lies in the hospital bed. The nurses potter around. There is sunlight on the wall. Her baby is dead.

  The nurses make her take it home. She calls it Phillip, though it’s hard to think of it as anything other than it. It – Phillip – coos and blinks in its Ikea cot, kicks its feet in its little fox-print socks, opens its mouth and screams for her. Thomasin lifts her breast to the gasping mouth. If the nurses say it’s a baby then she supposes it must be.

  The nurses warned her about the baby blues. She repeats the phrases for the feelings she’s been told to expect, lets them sit in her mouth: a persistent sadness, an unspecified anxiety.

  She thinks the phrase ‘baby blues’ as she looks at its eyes, blue as blueberries, as bluebells, as blue jeans. Its eyes roll back in its head as it feeds, ecstatic as a saint. Thomasin looks at the wall until it’s finished.

  Two weeks later, the paternity leave is up and her husband goes back to work. Her baby is dead. When it makes a noise like crying, she feeds it or changes its nappy or burps it or carries it around stroking its sturdy, bendable back that vibrates with each cry and wondering how many decibels of her hearing she’s losing from its screaming right against her ear.
With her free hand she thumb-taps on her phone: how loud is baby cry. A baby’s cry can be about 130 decibels, which is louder than a thunderclap or a chainsaw or a Boeing 737 aircraft at one nautical mile (6076ft) before landing. The internet assures her that a baby’s cry cannot rupture anyone’s eardrums.

  All her clothes reek of old milk. Under her fingernails she can smell vomit no matter how many times she scrubs them. She doesn’t find jokes funny but does find a shrieking laugh bubbling up her throat at inappropriate times.

  She walks around the house in circles. She does not think a responsible mother would put in earplugs to lessen the decibels of a screaming baby, even if it protects her hearing, so she doesn’t. But she wants to.

  In the end, it’s a good thing that her baby is dead, because she’s no mother.

  Her husband comes home after work and heats up a bottle of milk that Thomasin expressed earlier. He walks around the house without seeing anything, so focused is he on his task of feeding. His shoulders and shins bump into walls and tables and he doesn’t seem to feel it. He coos to it – to Phillip – as he walks.

  What a baby booboo, dada loves you, can you say gaga for me, say dada? You booboo looloo love to you-you.

  If her husband says it’s a baby then she supposes it must be. For dinner they have spaghetti hoops on toast and a glass of milk; little-kid food. Her head throbs too much to cook and her husband says it’s a treat. Later in bed they turn away from the cot and have sex. Her baby is dead.

  One day Thomasin goes to the park with Phillip and her mother, because if her mother says it’s a baby then she supposes it must be. At first the park feels like a revelation. Black wings lift from in front of her eyes, the black cloud dissipates. She even feels like she might want to wash her hair when she gets home.

  Because she realises that her baby is not the only one. There, swinging on the swings and sliding down the slide, are other dead children. Not all of them are dead, but some. They’re easy to identify.

  She sidles up to a mother of one of these children and, without thinking about what she’s going to say, all in a rush she asks how she should be a mother to a dead baby. The other mother smiles politely and takes a clear step away from Thomasin before she speaks.

  You must be mistaken. My child is right there. Look, can you see? On the see-saw. She has curly hair and pink overalls. She loves the see-saw.

  Thomasin tries again, desperate for solidarity. But the other mother walks away and scoops up her pink-overalled child, who Thomasin can clearly see is dead, and despite the little girl’s protests the other mother takes her to the other side of the park and gets her an ice cream and shows her how to play hopscotch.

  Thomasin watches all of this. Then after the other mother has left, Thomasin suggests to her mother that they scoop up Phillip and take him to the other side of the park and get him an ice cream and show him how to play hopscotch. Her mother is so pleased that she cries, then smiles through the tears, which somehow makes it worse.

  Thomasin doesn’t know what to do. So she does what everyone tells her to do, what the other mothers do, what it says to do in the books even when the books contradict one another. She does it all right, everything she can.

  Phillip grows bigger, and he starts school, and he finishes school, and he starts university, and he finishes university, and he goes and gets a job and a wife and a house, and Thomasin is there for all of it, wearing her best clothes, her blow-dried hair, her string of pearls, there in the front row and at the top table, there so proud, clapping and happy-crying, experiencing the most joyful moment of her life after the moment she lay in the hospital after the birth looking at the sun on the wall waiting to meet her baby, and through all the years of it she knows, knows without a moment of doubt, that her child is dead.

  I lied to you. I’m sorry.

  There is no baby.

  There was, and now there isn’t.

  It’s nice to think that if you try hard, you’ll be rewarded. It’s nice to think that if you name a fear, it can’t come true. It’s nice to think that even if it does come true, it can’t possibly be as bad as you think.

  But there it is: I feared that we wouldn’t get to have this baby, and my fear came true, and it was even worse than I imagined.

  PART 3: THE PAST

  * * *

  ‘It is so dark inside the wolf.’

  – The Brothers Grimm

  I lied to you about the house and the wife too. I’m sorry.

  There’s no one at home waiting for me. There’s no home.

  I had a house and a wife, and then I didn’t.

  I shouldn’t have lied to you, I know that. It’s just – I’m scared, and it hurts, and I wanted to pretend that things were different. I won’t lie to you again.

  That’s what liars always say, isn’t it? That every lie is the last.

  But this time. I promise.

  One thing I know I can be truthful about is my past. The older I get and the more I lose, the more I cling to this. I want to wander through the lush gardens of my childhood, to get calmly and sweetly and woozily lost in the maze of memory.

  There are things there I have forgotten, and I want to rediscover them. Even when everything else is lost, there’s still somewhere to find comfort.

  I should tell you: I’m still in Iceland. I know it’s been a while, but there doesn’t seem to be any harm in me staying a little longer. I’m in my writing studio. It’s at a distance from the cabin where I sleep, and the walls are lined with windows. I’ve been writing all day, and I forgot to put the lights on. I’ve just noticed how dark it is here.

  I should get up. I should put the lights on. But it’s so nice here in the dark.

  I’ll Eat You Up I Love You So

  First Fear:

  The Callipaed advised Evangeline to avoid looking at bears, lest she have a hairy child; dogs, lest she have a vicious child; and elephants, lest she have a lumpy and misshapen child (this, said the book, was the mistake made by the elephant man Joseph Merrick’s mother). Ideally, Evangeline shouldn’t just avoid these animals in life: she should avoid looking at pictures of all undesirable creatures, or even thinking of them. The link between mother and baby was that strong. This once-popular theory of maternal impression was now considered outdated, worthy only of ridicule. But getting pregnant had cost Evangeline a lot of money and effort, and at her age I was her last chance. Desperate people will risk anything. Even ridicule.

  Evangeline replaced all the pictures in the house – family photos, dull landscapes, bizarre paintings by her old art school friends – with images of insects on vellum. Insects, thought Evangeline, have the power to transform. Larvae to beetles, maggots to flies, caterpillars to butterflies. This was something that Evangeline wanted for me.

  She lay back on her clean sheets, eating fingers of mango from a bowl, and stared hard at her new pictures. She tried to push the images through her brain, down her body, along the umbilical cord and to me. But then she looked at the mango. Did she really want me to have the properties of a mango? Easily bruised and susceptible to powdery mildew? She went into the garden and threw the fruit on the grass. Then she sat very still on the back step until insects started to convene. She let them eat a bit, just to be nice, then she scooped the insects into her bowl and took them inside. Using a cocktail stick, she speared each insect and put it in her mouth. She thought hard about them as she swallowed them; of the insects’ transformations that she wished to absorb and pass on to me.

  It wasn’t enough. She only had one chance to get it right. So she took the insects into her home, her bed, her body. And when I finally came, after all those months of Evangeline eating only insects and sleeping on a bed of insects and speaking only to insects and looking only at insects and allowing insects to crawl on and in her – well, I was exactly as you would expect.

  The other children at school did not like me. They followed me to the toilets and hung over the cubicle, pointing and laughing. They spat on me ou
tside the school gates. They pretended they couldn’t hear or understand me when I spoke, until I began to wonder whether I was actually speaking only in my head, or perhaps accidentally in a foreign language. They stole from me and kicked at me and if I had been tiny like a bug they would have squashed me under their shoes.

  One day they followed me home from school and waited until I was at the empty fields at the edge of town, and among the red dust and sun-faded litter they beat me up quite a lot. When they’d left, I lay there, bleeding into the earth. I’d been there what felt like a long time, but was actually only just past teatime, when the insects emerged.

  At home, Evangeline waited. She knew something terrible had happened to me. I’d told her about the mean boys at school, and she’d had some serious talks with their mothers and the teachers. It had only made things worse. Boys do not like to be told what to do.

  But she didn’t worry about me, not yet. She knew, deep down, that I was already being helped. She could picture it all so clearly: the ants would staple up my wounds with their sharp heads, even though they got decapitated in the process. The earwigs would lie protectively over my bloody parts until they clotted, even though some of the earwigs drowned in the blood. The bees would come next, dropping sweet nectar into my mouth. Insects that usually ate other insects would feed me too, once the nectar had honeyed my throat so they could slip right down. I was one of them – she had made sure of that – so she knew they would help me.

  When dusk came, the moths would take their turn, lying down with their soft wings spread, hundreds of them covering my body entirely. Her little boy would never have known a blanket so soft and living. I would dream of all the insects banding together and chasing after the bad boys who hurt me and making them hurt back. Lots of the moths would be crushed when I rolled over in my sleep, and lots more would freeze in the cold night to keep me warm. It was a nice picture for my mother, wasn’t it? Hundreds of insects sacrificing themselves to save one solitary boy.