The Dark
Half Chapter 4
By Janet Baldey
ALEC
1953
He
lay on his back in front of the fire. His skin felt hot, but he couldn’t be
bothered to move. Slowly, his lids
closed, and he began to drift. He could
hear the background mumbling chant of his mother droning on and on, boring her
hairdresser into a coma. “Natter, natter, natter”, he thought but, for a
change, she wasn’t irritating him. Nothing
could stop his slow slide into sleep and even as the thought surfaced, it was
snuffed out as he closed his eyes. His lips parted, and his breathing deepened
and he was transported into a technicolour dream-world as he slipped into his
favourite fantasy.
Mouth open, sweat streaming down his
face, his muscular body pounded down the track as his tanned legs flew towards
the finishing line - a narrow strip of luminous white stretching across a
backdrop of brilliant green grass. Beyond the tape, a blur of pastel coloured
shapes leapt in the air.
“Alec…Alec…Alec….” As he drew nearer,
the surf-like roar of the crowd deepened and screwing up his eyes, he caught a
glimpse of his friends pogo-ing with excitement. As quick as a blink of an
eyelid, he turned his head and saw his rival, scarlet faced and desperate, a
hair’s width behind him. “No chance,” Alec thought exultantly and lengthened
his stride. The tape broke against his chest and the crowd surged towards him,
slapping his back and deafening him with congratulations.
A shutter-click later and he was
slicing through the pool, drops of glittering water spraying from his
cartwheeling arms. “One lap to go, one lap to go, one lap to go,” the mantra
ran through his head as he forced himself on. Adrenaline coursed through his
veins and he could almost feel the weight of the heavy gold cup as he raised it
above his head in a salute to the crowd.
A heavy hand shook his shoulder and
in slow motion the image first rocked, shimmered, then disappeared.
“Wake up, son. Yer too near the fire. Yer
clothes are scorching. I can smell ‘em.”
Alec opened his eyes to see his
mother’s fleshy face looming above him. For a moment he lay motionless,
relishing a tidal surge of white-hot hate. Dreams like that didn’t come very
often. Why couldn’t she have left him in peace instead of dragging him back to
his horrible life and this horrible room?
Rolling over, he first levered himself to a
kneeling position then brought his good leg up and grasped the side of a chair,
straightening his body until he was on his feet. Crablike, he dragged himself towards the
window seat.
He took a moment to recover and then
his eyes flicked to the clock. Almost four-thirty. Anna was late. Perhaps she’d
been given another detention. He wriggled with glee as he thought about what
he’d done. Clenching his fists, he pressed them against his lips to hide his
smirk as his imagination played out the scene.
“Anna.”
His sister would have looked up to see her teacher’s crooked finger
beckoning her forward. Miss Tutt’s face was expressionless but there were deep
grooves running from nose to chin and her eyes were cold.
“What’s happened here, Anna? How am I supposed to mark this?” She’d
slapped her hand against the open copybook and Anna would have gasped. The page
was a ruined mess. Her essay, which she’d toiled over for hours, was almost
totally illegible, the ink smeared and blotched as if it’d been dunked in water
and smeared dry with a towel.
“Anybody can have an accident, Anna. But
you can’t turn in work like this. Can you give me a good reason why you didn’t
re-write it?”
Moments passed and Miss Tutt’s face hardened.
“I’m waiting, Anna.”
Alec imagined his sister’s mouth
opening and closing as if she were a fish. Anna was so careless. Her reputation
had followed her from primary school. There were so many times she was late
because of missing plimsolls, library books or pencil cases, all of which she
swore she’d packed in her schoolbag the night before.
“But I did Mum, honest.” The sound of
her whiny, tear clotted voice had always made him feel sick and even the memory
turned his stomach.
Best of all, had been the money. His
face brightened. Somehow, she’d managed to lose the cash for her longed-for
school trip. Mum and Dad had saved up hard for that. Even Dad had been angry with her that day.
He wondered if Anna had guessed why she
was so unlucky? If so, she’d kept very quiet about it. But then that was just
like her, the snob. Always pretending she didn’t care. Well, she would in the
end. He’d make sure of that.
His eyes lit on something and he held his breath, a small figure was
turning the corner heading towards the house.
He watched as it drooped along, shoulders slumped, feet dragging, regretting
every step. He glanced towards his mother, her mouth was still moving, as it
had been for the last hour. She hadn’t even noticed the time. He leant forward
and rapped, three times, on the window with his knuckles, the sounds echoing
like pistol shots through the fug of the room.
The hairdresser started and dropped a
perm curler. His mother slopped tea in her saucer.
“Here she is, Mum. It’s Anna. She’s so
late. I was worried in case she’d had an accident.”
His mother’s head, covered in marching
lines of pink and blue plastic, turned towards the window and then swivelled
towards the clock. Her lips disappeared.
“That young madam had better have a good explanation,” she muttered as
she levered herself out of her chair.
***
The strap of her leather satchel cut
into her shoulder and she paused for a moment, running her finger under it,
trying to lighten her load but the satchel was so heavy a few steps later she
had to stop again. There was extra homework that night, it was part of her
punishment and that meant extra books to carry. Her eyes started to fill and
she blinked rapidly, determined not to cry again. If she went home looking like
a pink-eyed rabbit there’d be no sympathy, just more questions. She licked a
finger and rubbed it around her face to erase any trace of tears and took a
deep and shaky breath.
In a determined effort not to think, she looked
upwards, past the chimney pots with their plumes of smoke coiling into the air. She was searching for Venus the first star of
the evening and at last, she saw it, a tiny speck glittering in the sky. Hurriedly,
she made a wish before any other stars appeared. “Star light, star bright, the
first star I see tonight. I wish I may,
I wish I might, have the wish I make tonight.”
Then closing her eyes and pursing her lips, she blew her prayer
heavenwards despite knowing that it wouldn’t be answered. How could it be when the person she wished
for had died two years before?
To calm
herself, she lowered her head and looked around, but the houses with their trim
front gardens shimmered as her teeth chewed at her bottom lip.
“Oh Gran…” and then she just couldn’t help herself. Sobbing helplessly, she
slumped against a nearby wall and pressed her face against the cold brick that
drained all warmth from her body. She remembered the very last time she’d seen
her Gran. She’d crept into the ward and there
she was, lying in bed, her face almost as white as the starched linen, her hair
spread about her head in a delicate explosion of thistledown. Suddenly, her eyes had opened and found
Anna. The faintest hint of rose had coloured her cheeks and her lips parted in
an echo of her familiar smile.
“My bird…” was all she’d said and Anna
had flown into her arms.
Afterwards, Anna had pulled away and
looked at her. Gran’s flushed cheeks had made her eyes sparkle even, and Anna
was sure she hadn’t imagined it, the one made of glass. Long ago her Gran had
told her how she’d lost her eye.
“In those days, my love, we wore leather boots in the
winter. They reached to well above our ankles and were tightly laced all the
way up. It always used to take ages to
undo the blessed things and one day those dratted laces got into a knot. Try as
I might, I couldn’t unpick it, so I went and got a fork from the kitchen. The
next thing I knew was my mother screaming and passing out and me sitting there
with a fork sticking out of my eye. They tried to save it, but there wasn’t any
penicillin in those days. It got
infected so, in the end, they had to take it out…”
Ever since her Gran had one eye brown
and the other hazel, but Anna still thought she was beautiful and she’d never
looked more so than on that day.
“Oh Gran, you do look pretty,” she’d
said.
Fascinated, she’d watched the wrinkles
melt and caught a glimpse of Gran as a young girl.
A week later she’d opened the front
door to her mother who’d come clumping down the path, her legs moving slowly
like a mechanical toy that needed winding.
“Yer Gran’s dead.” Her face
expressionless, she’d pushed past Anna, dumped her bags in the kitchen and
heaved herself upstairs.
Anna hadn’t been allowed to go to the
funeral. Instead, she’d sat through a geography double period listening to the
dry rasp of Mr Wilkinson’s voice as he recited something about the Continental
drift. The only thing that she ever remembered of that lesson was the hollow
thud of soil landing on wood.
With a determined effort, Anna pushed
herself away from the wall and started to walk. The paving slabs were a maze of
cracks and she remembered happier days when she was little and Dad used to take
her to the sweetie shop at the end of the road for her weekly treat.
“Remember, you turn into a toad if you
step on crack…” Together, they’d hopped from square to square all the way down
the road. She blinked, and felt her lips pull into a watery smile At least, she
still had Dad. He’d never let anything bad happen to her.
As she walked up the path, the front
door opened, and her mother appeared.
Without saying a word, she folded her arms across her chest and a slab
of mottled flesh formed a barrier between them.
“So, what’s yer excuse this time? No, don’t tell me. You got kept in again,
didn’t yer?”
Anna felt her face stiffen as she
locked eyes with her mother. With the slightest movement of her head, she
nodded.
“Well, it’s just not good enough my
girl. What was it this time….gabbing in class was yer?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Anna shrugged.
“Don’t look at me like that, you sulky
little madam. You, my girl, are going to have to pull yer socks up. I don’t
know what yer Dad is going to say.”
Her mother sighed heavily, already
losing interest. She put her hand up and
patted her curlers.
“Well, I can’t waste any more time now.
This neutraliser needs to come off otherwise me perm’ll be ruined. But don’t
think you’ve heard the last of this. I’ll ‘ave a word with yer Dad later. Now
come on, get inside and be nice to your brother. ‘E’s been worried sick about
yer.”
Anna doubted that but obediently
followed her mother’s broad bulk into the house.
As Anna walked into the living room the smell of
ammonia made her eyes water. She blinked
and rubbed them thinking if anyone noticed they were bloodshot, at least she’d
have an excuse. She looked over to where her brother sat with the coiled
stillness of something venomous about to strike. His eyes glowered as they met
hers. He didn’t look worried, she thought. Not one bit. He looked wired. His
skin, always sallow, had a dusky quality as if blood was storming through his
veins and his body was tense. She
thought that if she dared reach out and touch him she’d get an electric
shock.
Suddenly she felt sick as she realised
why he was so agitated. He’d been listening to “The Story” again. She gritted
her teeth until her jaw ached, then opened her eyes and looked around the room,
trying to calm herself. The dull beige wallpaper with its vertical pattern of
identical roses, the veneered teak coffee table, the maroon uncut moquette
sofa, all reminded her of other afternoons just like this. The only thing that
was new was the hairdresser, testing the curl in her mother’s hair by bouncing it
on her palm. Anna had never seen her before. Usually, it was Mavis, a stocky
no-nonsense Brummie, who Anna liked, chiefly because her flat adenoidal voice
steamrollered over her mother’s. Ever since she was little, Mavis had done her
mother’s hair. Anna remembered crayoning on the kitchen table when her feet
couldn’t reach the floor, listening to Mavis in full flow, her flat vowels as
familiar as the wallpaper. She was a part of her childhood. Perhaps she had
retired. This girl was much younger with pale china blue eyes, slightly milky
as if covered by an invisible filter and Anna realised that she’d switched off
and the monotonous chant of her mother’s voice was falling on deaf ears. As the hairdresser’s slim fingers deftly
unclipped another roller and tossed it into a container to join the others,
plastic meeting plastic with a dull clatter. Anna wondered at what point her
sleepy eyes had sharpened as her mother started on “The Story”.
“Course,” she would have said, “my Alec
over there is a twin. His sister’s still at school. She’ll be
home soon.”
“Oh! You’ve got
twins. How lovely. That’s what I always
say to my boyfriend. If we’re gonna
have kids, I want twins. Get it all over and done with in one go.”
“Yeah. Well be careful what you wish
for. I had no idea. Everyone just assumed I was just having the one, even the
doctors. It was a shock to everyone when he appeared.” Anna imagined the sideways gesture
of her head towards Alec.
“Just as I was about to have a cup of
tea and the midwife was packing up, I felt a Gawd Almighty pain down there and
the next minute another brat had popped out.
Mind you, nobody thought he’d survive. Like a skinned rabbit he was. Turns
out me girl had been hogging all the nourishment. She’d grown big and he’d been
half starved. Plus, somehow, he’d got squashed underneath her. That’s why they
didn’t notice ‘im and that’s why he’s like he is. Poor little bugger.”
It would have been then that Alec would
have been caught under the spotlight of the hairdresser’s stare and despite
everything Anna felt a twinge of compassion as she imagined the girl taking in
his withered leg and hunched body.
Anna didn’t dare look at him. She knew
what he was thinking. “But it wasn’t my fault,” she pleaded soundlessly. “It
really wasn’t.”
Copyright Janet Baldey
