These Darkening Days (Mace & Brindle Book 2) Read online

  First published in 2017 by Moth, an imprint of Mayfly Press, a partnership between New Writing North and Business Education Publishers Limited, Chase House, Rainton Bridge, Tyne and Wear, DH4 5RA

  Copyright Benjamin Myers 2017

  All rights reserved. Benjamin Myers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Courage, UK

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN 9781911356028

  Ebook ISBN 9781911356073

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition.

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  www.mayfly.press

  The mast is dropping within my woods,

  The winter is lurking within my moods,

  And the rustling of the withered leaf

  Is the constant music of my grief.

  – ‘I Am the Autumnal Sun’,

  Henry David Thoreau

  ONE

  A SHAPE, SLUMPED.

  Like the outline of a heap of spilled refuse.

  Detritus dumped.

  But something about it catches his eye as he passes by, his legs willing him in a different direction, his head full of smoke and song. It is the suggestion of movement perhaps. A hint of life. Fleeting animation. The night’s architecture is that of softened angles and streetlight haloes as he stops and looks.

  It is raining. It feels as if it has been raining for weeks, months – maybe even forever, the memory of lush green summer nights long faded from view. He waits, swaying gently like a sea anemone in an ebbing tide, as his centre of gravity, disturbed by intoxicants, finds itself and his senses recalibrate to the unexpected sight. He moves closer, then slowly steps into the deep blue darkness of the ginnel, and as he does it is as if he has just arrived in the moment. Awoken to it.

  He sees that it is a she and that perhaps she too is drunk, that she has gone at it even harder than he has and chased the night all the way to oblivion, is perhaps sleeping off a long day downing the luminous shots that they do for a pound a pop at Attila’s basement bar, and she’ll wake up hiccupping neon blue, her stomach sour with regret. But when he moves closer and sees the way one of her legs is tucked under her at an odd angle and the other sticking out in front of her he knows that something is wrong.

  She is propped against the wall, her head tipped forward. Jaw slack. Face folding into shadows.

  Even then for a second he thinks and hopes that she might not be real, and could just be an art project or a scarecrow or a life-size leftover from the summer’s handmade parade when puppets and effigies of animals and mythical figures marched through the streets, or perhaps a shop-window mannequin dressed and then discarded for a joke – maybe even at his expense. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  He stoops and looks and listens. He detects that life is still there in this lady. Ebbing perhaps, but evident.

  He fumbles for his Zippo, then strikes it and holds it there, and the scene is cast in the flicker of his flame. It becomes real and he is a part of it, and he sees his shaking hand holding the lighter.

  What he thought at first was a shadow is in fact blood. Blood darkening one entire side of her face, the side that is turned away from the lone streetlight whose reach barely stretches into the narrow alley.

  He brings his lighter closer and sees matted hair there, shining slick black as the flame dances patterns across it. The rain is running down the ginnel. His feet are wet and it is pooling around the woman. It is running through her, taking with it the flow of her life. The smell of the lighter fluid is strong as he sees in the vein in her neck that her pulse has been reduced to that of tiny bird that has fallen from its nest. It is slowing down. Her heart is a fading battery.

  He stands, swaying again on unsteady legs. The nice warm buzz that propelled him from the house party is turning into something more malevolent now; something sullen has entered his blurred state, pricked the bubble, and capsized his mind. Time has distorted beyond comprehension; how long he has been huddled here he does not know, and deep in the fog of his judgement doubt is already growing. It is a seed taking root.

  He leans forward and bends over, placing his hands on his thighs with the slow and deliberately overcompensated movements of the intoxicated. Reality comes rushing in and he recoils as he sees her gums and the grimace of gritted teeth through a slit in her face that runs from below her right eye to her jaw line. Her face is a torn mask and she is breathing through the wound rather than her nose or mouth.

  He moves closer.

  A strand of her hair is matted into the blood and she is making a barely audible guttural grunting noise. It sounds adenoidal. A series of swallowed sobs. A blocked breath.

  He steps backwards and looks up and down the street, sees only the light mizzle of the night rain, and then forces himself to lean in closer still. He hears the sigh of her struggling breath pushing through flesh, and bubbling there.

  He should get someone, he thinks. Call an ambulance or something. The police. No – not them. Not the police. An ambulance though. That would be enough.

  He can smell her perfume, strong and astringent like the lemons his mother would boil to neutralise the smell of the rabbit pelts he scraped and dried and hung in the airing cupboard.

  There is a handbag beside her and it is zipped shut, so it does not look like a robbery. He reaches out a hand but flinches and retracts it again.

  Only when he moves does he see it on the ground just beyond her, deeper into the ginnel, lying like a shard of broken moon: a knife.

  After what seems like a prolonged frozen moment of stasis and indecision he carefully leans over her and picks it up. It is only a small penknife with a folding blade. The type of thing anyone might have in their drawer or pocket or glove compartment. He’d had one just like it himself when he was younger; before the accident he used to collect them. He would find them or buy them or steal them or people would give him them, and he had kept a boxful under his bed. Penknives and lock knives and butterfly knives. A flick knife, a Swiss army knife, a whittling knife. And a paring knife too. It was the countryside. There was nothing strange about it. He used them first for whittling and sharpening sticks and then graduated onto the animals he caught.

  But after the accident, when he finally got back from the hospital, his mother had taken them away. When he protested she said that knives weren’t toys even though she’d been fine with them before. She’d even given him one herself, a useless blunt throwing knife that had belonged to a Grandad he’d never met.

  His Black Widow catapult and gat gun were taken away too and all that he was allowed to keep was his fishing rod and tackle, but his coordination had been all to cock, and his hands shook when he tried to bait a hook.

  Now that he is old enough to have his own place and do what he wants he has replenished his collection of anything that can cut or slice, wound or spear. Aside from his hunting gear he has accumulated throwing stars and nunchucks, a blow-gun and all sorts of knives old and new, bought, stolen or gifted.

  And now he has another one.

  He runs a thumb across the blade-edge and feels that it is sharp. There is blood on it. Her blood.

  Then he realises – he is holding it. He is
touching the knife. Idiot. Bloody stupid backward idiot. He throws it down into the darkness and backs out of the alley.

  The blood is on his thumb and without thinking he licks it and it tastes of old pennies, and then he is rubbing it on his jeans. Bloody idiot with your broken brain. He hears the words spoken aloud which is something that happens when he is stressed or deep in concentration, and he looks around in fear but the street is dark and empty and it is night and the light rain is swirling like sparks. Time is losing its focus once again.

  Now he is on it. He is on the knife. His fingerprints and his DNA. He is connected to the knife that is connected to the woman that is connected to a whole lot of trouble.

  The taste of her blood is in his mouth and it tastes of wet rust.

  Consequence, they always said. He lacked the ability to consider consequence, and here he was pissed and stoned, dithering in the darkness with bloodshot eyes, an ounce-pouch of weed in his pocket, and a reputation. No. None of this would look good.

  They’d want to ask questions, of course they would – and they were everyone – and he wouldn’t be able to answer any of their questions, not properly, and they would bend his head and tie him up in knots, and he’d say the wrong thing, or instead of thinking something he’d say it out loud. He’d stammer and blurt. Panic.

  He was not going to be a part of this.

  He leans over her again and carefully picks up the knife and quickly walks to the nearest drain and drops the knife down it.

  There.

  Done.

  Not so bloody stupid after all. Now his fingerprints will be washed away.

  He revisits the woman one more time. He holds his ear close to the cut and hears that desperate sigh again, sees the blood already clotting and drying on her cheek, and then he turns and leaves.

  THE COOL AND muted white light from the blank document on his laptop lights up Roddy Mace’s face. When it shifts to a darkened screensaver he can see his reflection in the tilted screen. Here his features are reduced. His brows sits thicker, his eyes simplified into two dark swirls, his nose gone. He thinks of the Munch painting.

  He looks aged. He looks haunted.

  Beside him on the desk is a pile of papers, several notepads, a cluster of newspaper cuttings held together by an old bulldog clip, three mugs containing varying amounts of cold black coffee, a twisted and half-crushed can of Coke, sweet wrappers, crumbs and, both around and in the keyboard, what he identifies as human matter: chewed curlicues of fingernail, hair, skin, dust.

  A wadded tissue, crusted with something he does not care to identify, sits next to it.

  All of it ballast, the by-products of the work within the Word document that he has jokingly titled Mein Kampf, though the joke doesn’t feel funny any more.

  These are the times when the desire to drink is strongest. In these early still hours, with the rain drumming deranged percussive patterns on the roof and the houseboat bobbing and creaking gently at the full length of its rope tether, is when he craves that flowering of internal warmth, that blossoming of hope that alcohol once gave him.

  He clicks on his web browser and finds his favourite film clip of a roaring log fire. His own has long gone out and is nothing but a pile of ashes in the grate of his wood-burning stove.

  Instead Roddy Mace watches as digital logs crackle and pop in the digital flames.

  He feels the shifting colours on his face, and sees his features contort again in the screen’s reflection, and wonders if anyone walking along the towpath who happened to glance through the gap in his partly drawn curtains would even know that it was a two-dimensional fire he was sitting in front of.

  This thought strikes him as unbearably, almost overwhelmingly, sad. He reaches for the nearest mug but forgets that its contents are cold so he spits it back out. He finds a final cube of cheap chocolate and eats it, then drains the remains from the crushed Coke can.

  All the things that the books and the counsellors and the people at meetings suggested might happen once he dried out have proven to be untrue.

  Roddy Mace has experienced no euphoria, no vitality, no rebirth. There has been no outpouring of previously suppressed emotion; only a sort of agitated flatness. A sense of ennui. Lassitude.

  Stopping smoking meant a double detox and not a day – not an hour – goes by when he doesn’t think about that first morning hit of nicotine: the pleasant swelling sensation in the head, the lightness of feeling, the relaxation of the bowels. Then the first exhalation and, momentarily, all of life’s tensions going with it.

  Now he merely finds himself craving sugar, which has resulted in weight-gain, sleeplessness and teeth that feel as if they are constantly itching.

  This abstemious approach was part of his attempt at reinvention – a new career in a new town, like the Bowie song. Moving here, he no longer needed to be known as a drunken sloppy mess of a man. He had taken the first accommodation he had seen: this shabby floating house made of warped wood and bohemian dreams, moored beyond the limits of town, at the bottom of a valley bank of shale and ivy into which there has been built a ragtag collection of makeshift jetties, wood stores, sheds and patio areas by various floating residents over the years.

  Just as these valley people of the northlands are their own breed, Roddy Mace has come to learn, so too the boat people are their own breed: a combination of romantics, dropouts and life’s escapees.

  He had been shown the place by the caretaker, a corpulent and begrudging man in his fifties who collected mooring fees and oversaw the running of the marina in town, which was really just the smallest of docks that, when dry, was used for repairing dented hulls and sprucing up paintwork, and was barely big enough for a boat to turn around in. Mainly it was monopolised by volatile geese that left small tar-black swirls of their scat around its algae-coated flagstones, and hissed at those tourists who dared to come too close. The marina geese had their own Twitter account.

  The price for the houseboat was half the monthly rent of the cheapest house in the town yet still ate up the remains of the pay-off from the paper. Puffing on an electronic cigarette, the caretaker led Mace down the narrow gangplank into a space that had the air of somewhere recently vacated in haste.

  In the gloom, Mace felt as if he were back in one of the dingier corners of Camden market or a fringe tent at Glastonbury. There was stuff hanging everywhere, and not all of it useful: Navajo dreamcatchers, clutches of found feathers bound by ribbons, animal shapes woven from branches – the head of a fox, a sprinting hare at full stretch – incense holders, a kabuki mask, jars full of marbles and sea shells and dried beans, a bead-work bag, several blue circular Turkish evil-eye stones, a hookah pipe full of stale water that he would never get around to emptying, piles of flyers for gigs and community groups, various pieces of percussion and stringed instruments including a cracked lute and a thumb piano, a postcard of a woman with the slogan NOT FOR SALE written across her torso, and several paisley scarves hanging from windows and draped across lamps. Ethnic tat, thought Mace. Hippy shit.

  It comes as is, said the caretaker. Caveat emptor.

  What’s it called?

  What’s what called?

  The boat. Does it have a name?

  The caretaker looked at him. He sucked on his e-cigarette. The vapours smelled of synthetic cherries. He exhaled.

  Does it matter?

  No, said Roddy Mace. I’m just interested.

  The caretaker turned and stuck his head out of the door and then came back in.

  It’s called The March Hare.

  Why is it called that then?

  The caretaker shrugged.

  I don’t know, and then as an afterthought added: They’ve gone to find themselves in Laos. The owners.

  OK.

  They must be pretty lost because the tenancy’s for a year, minimum. Do you want it or not?

  He puffed on his e-cigarette again and the fruit fumes made Roddy Mace feel nauseous.

  I just wondered why The Ma
rch Hare. It’s an odd name for a boat.

  The caretaker sighed.

  And I told you: I don’t know. They’re lesbians though. And one of them is Scottish. Maybe it’s something to do with that. You’d have to ask them. Look.

  The man pointed to an inscription that was hand-painted along the beam running the length of the boat’s ceiling. Mace followed it with his finger, reading it aloud:

  I shall go intill a hare / With sorrow and such and meikle care / And I shall I go in the Devil’s name / At while I come home again.

  The verse was attributed to ‘Isobel Gowdie, 1662’.

  What does it mean? Mace asked, but the caretaker looked at him in a way that suggested it was best to stop asking questions, so instead he went to take a look at the galley kitchen with its gas stove and tiny fridge, and where mugs hung from hooks and the shelves held more jars containing dried goods, every space utilised.

  It’s a bit gloomy, he said.

  Everywhere is gloomy, said the caretaker. It’s West Yorkshire.

  Mace looked in the bedroom, which was dominated

  by a bed that appeared almost too big for the room to contain it.

  He turned the light on and off.

  The caretaker sucked on his cigarette a third time and exhaled the sickly-sweet simulacrum smoke, then coughed and looked at his watch.

  Look, there’s always the Med if it’s sunshine you’re after. Are you going to take it?

  Do I get to eat some of this food?

  The caretaker shrugged.

  Rather you than me. But pay your mooring fees on time and you can do what you want. You’re not much of a boat person, are you, son?

  No, said Mace.

  Thought not.

  Is there anything I need to know?

  Yeah. Try not to sink.

  Anything else?

  Don’t be a cunt.

  I’ll take it, he said.

  Now in his floating home Roddy Mace watches the screen for a few more seconds. The flashing cursor seems to taunt him as it sits there amongst the pixelated snowstorm of nothingness, a void as deep and complete as his creative block.