Touching the Dark Read online

  “Your folks paid as much in fees as mine earned in half a year. It was posh school.” She frowned, thinking of what Jack had said. “You didn’t know a Jack Chalmers, did you? I’m trying to think what other local school he might have gone to.”

  Alec slurped at his too hot tea. “Not that I remember,” he said. “What does he...Sorry, old habits.”

  He had been going to ask what Jack looked like. Sometimes it was the little things that were hardest to adapt to. “Ask Simon,” she said. “You know, much as I’m loath to admit it. I do wonder if he’s right, about Jack breaking their relationship. He seemed to...dominate, I suppose.”

  “Could be just trying to protect her?”

  “Could be.”

  “You saw Simon last night. He’s headed for a breakdown. Talk about obsessed.” He sucked at his tea again. “Damn but that’s hot.”

  “Want me to blow on it for you? Alec, how far do you think he’d go. I mean, to get rid of Jack. The way he talked about him last night. For that matter the way he talked about Tally...”

  “Whoa, hold on here. I didn’t say murderous obsession. Just the plain disordered kind.” He paused, thinking. “I don’t know, Nomi. I’m worried about him though. I thought Samuel and Lillian were making a mountain out of it, but now I really do think they have a point. The boy needs counselling at least.”

  “Trouble is,” Naomi reminded him, “he’s not a boy. He’s a so called responsible adult.”

  Alec shuddered, “By far the worst kind, don’t you agree old man.”

  Napoleon, realizing that he was being addresses, scuffled to his feet and ambled over to where Alec was standing.

  “You hungry old man?”

  The dog grumbled plaintively.

  “She not been feeding you?”

  More complaints followed by a hopeful whine.

  “He’s got at least another half hour to go before it’s feeding time.”

  “A whole half hour? You know something, dog, the likes of you and me, we should obey our stomachs. Not the timekeeper. Isn’t that right?”

  “If Napoleon obeyed his stomach, life would consist of one long meal and you’d be no better. Still if that’s a hint, you can help me cook.”

  “A hard taskmaster, your missus,” Alec told the dog. “But I guess it’s the only way you and I’ll get fed.”

  There was little room in Naomi’s kitchen for two adults and a large black dog, but it was a situation they had grown accustomed to and it was a companionable way to do things, Naomi had decided, taking half the space each and passing one another the things that happened to fall in their particular domain. She had found it hard at first, handling knives, dealing with the hob and oven when she couldn’t see and there had been times when she had been reduced to tears as she struggled to cope. Confident now, it was still nice to have someone around, someone who, if the truth was told, burned himself and broke things far more often than she did. So, for a while they put Simon and his problems on the back burner and chatted about nothing, a peace that lasted until they were just about to eat. Then the phone rang and it was Simon.

  Naomi filled him in on the events of the day, some instinct for self-preservation and respect for the cooling trout she had just grilled deciding for her that she did not mention Jack. She would, she thought, have been answering Simon’s questions for the rest of the night if she had let on that Jack had been there. Every word, impression and nuance would have been analysed over and again.

  Instead, she told him they were just about to eat and filled in the plain facts. He was disappointed not to have more.

  “How do you feel?” she asked him at last.

  “Empty,” he told her. “Just all emptied out.” He paused, was silent on the line so long that she wondered if he’d gone away and forgotten to hang up the phone. Finally, when she called his name he said, “I’m going down to London for a couple of days. A friend’s invited me to a late New Year party. He’s even fixed me up with a date, a girl I know from down there. So you see. I am trying, Nomi.”

  “Good, that’s good,” she said. “Simon, try to enjoy it. Is the girl nice?”

  “Yes, she’s nice. Her name’s Clare and she’s a nice girl. But she isn’t Tally.”

  *

  Tally sat alone in her apartment and stared at the photographs that Naomi had returned. She was glad to have them back, realizing belatedly that Simon must have taken them but uncertain how to ask for their return. Tally aged nine and ten. Tally in the Christmas Nativity play, lined up with her class mates for the official photo, riding on the Carousel. Tally, snatched at moments in her life. Snatched and stored and lodged in memory.

  One she was especially glad to have retrieved. Tally at nine years old, taken in her aunt Bee’s garden, standing amid the lilies in her best blue dress on the day her aunt had given her that dreadful gift. Tally smiled, then laughed at her own childish outrage, remembering Tallulah Two Heads and that awful journey home.

  *

  The car had not even pulled away from her aunt’s front door before she had the scarlet cord untied and the bright paper ripped away. Inside was a box covered in images of action women riding horses and driving fast sports cars. They wore glamorous clothes and sipped lord knew what from fancy glasses trimmed with fruit and paper umbrellas.

  “Fashion Charm,” the legend on the box read. “Your true life fashion girl.”

  Tally already owned a Barbie. She stayed, unplayed with, in the bottom of the cupboard, her stylish outfits crammed into a plastic shopping bag and all but forgotten.

  “It’s a doll,” Tally said and her mother must have heard the disappointment because she laughed.

  “Most little girls like dolls.” She twisted around in her seat and peered at Tally over the back of it. “Well you can at least open the box. You never know, this one might be nice.”

  Tally wrestled with the sticky tape that held the lid in place. Pulling at it tore the picture of the smart young woman waiting to board a plane, slicing her body with a knife sharp edge. She eased the tight lid from the box and glared at the doll that lay inside. Blond hair, red suit, high heeled shoes and a little bag clutched in its slender hand.

  “She should fit your Barbie clothes” Tally’s mother said.

  “I suppose.”

  “You don’t have to play with her, you know. Just get her out when auntie Bee comes round to stay, and that isn’t often, is it pet?”

  Tally was about to replace the lid, imprison the unwanted woman doll again when she noticed something else. What she had taken for just cardboard packaging at the end of the box had something more inside. Hopefully, she pulled the thing out, unwrapping the tissue paper with more eager fingers. Then she dropped it with a little cry of shock and disgust.

  “What on earth?” Her mother said, and reached between the seats to pick up the offending thing.

  “She’s got a spare head!” Tally’s mother announced, delighting in the thought. “What an odd idea. One long haired blonde one that you can style and a short brunette for when you want a change.”

  “It’s horrid. I don’t want it mummy.” But her mother only laughed again.

  “Tallulah two heads,” she said, her voice singing with amusement. “You can call her Tallulah two heads.” She gave Tally one of her conspiratorial we-can-make-it-better looks. “I’ll just bet none of your friends has one of these.”

  Then she grew bored, as adults do when they think they’ve solved it all and she turned back to look out through the windscreen, began chatting to Tally’s father who was too busy driving the car to bother passing comment on the hated toy.

  Tallulah Two Heads lay in her coffin box and stared with her two sets of quite unblinking eyes.

  The journey home was longer than it had ever been. She had shut the doll inside its box and tied it tightly with the scarlet cord but even so Tally could feel its eyes staring at her through the shield of coloured card and the remnants of birthday wrapping. Before she had known what lay
inside, the doll had no capacity to harm. No influence and no effect upon Tally’s nine years of chronically active imagination.

  Once opened it was as though the switch had been thrown and the doll breathed the first breaths of life.

  She had always hated dolls. Hated their staring eyes and their bland, calm faces, moulded with the specific purpose of reproaching her. Tally, who was neither bland nor calm, who lived in a world where all experience, however good, was as intense as pain.

  Outside, the summer day had broken and rain fell suddenly in a heavy curtain.

  Her father switched on the headlights and set the wipers to full. They wagged across the glass, clearing a momentary gap in the falling rain.

  “If it gets any worse,” he said, “we’ll have to pull over. That damned wiper blade’s worked loose again.”

  She sat still, listening to the rain and willing it to stop. She was longing to reach home. To be able to thrust this woman doll away with the rest in the bottom of the cupboard. The loose wiper blade began to scrape across the glass, squeaking where it pressed tight, rattling where it was dragged back loose. The sound of it ate into her brain. The aggressive yellow screech setting her teeth on edge and fraying her nerves. And, in her heart, she must have reproached Aunt Bee every mile of the way. She had not let Tally bring the lilies into the car and yet she had given as a gift this hideous thing.

  What could be so wrong with taking the breath of angels on her journey when this horrific doll could be so right.

  So she closed her eyes and sat back in the furthest corner of her seat, the doll box in the other and listened as her parents talked. Their voices little more than a murmur above the noise of the engine and the screech of the windscreen wipers and the tyres spinning on the road and she tried to recall as vividly as she could the scent of lilies in the summer garden. Their hot, golden breath, co-mingled with the smell of scorched earth and the stabbing blue odour of the sky.

  Chapter Nine

  Patrick was supposed to be doing his homework, but as always he was finding everything and anything he could to act as a distraction. Since he and his father, Harry, had moved back to Ingham to be close to Patrick’s grandmother, he had taken to calling at Naomi’s at least a couple of times a week on pretence of getting help with his homework.

  Not that Naomi minded. Patrick was fifteen going on far too adult, was shy and funny and astute beyond his years. He’d had a rough time. His parents’ divorce and the background of a murder in the family that had only just been solved. Naomi had good reason to bless the boy’s common sense and courage and enjoyed his company.

  Tonight’s homework was history. World War One, causes of. It was fair to say that it had not entirely captured Patrick’s interest. Simon’s boxes lay still packed on the floor beneath the dining table and Naomi had heard the odd surreptitious poke and shuffle as Patrick tried hard to see what was inside without actually prying. Finally, curiosity got the better of him.

  “What is all this stuff?”

  “It belongs to a friend,” Naomi told him. “Photos and newspaper clippings mostly, I think. I don’t know, I’ve not been through them.”

  “May be we could...”

  “History, Patrick. First World War, remember.”

  She heard him sigh. “It’s not that I’m not interested,” he said. “I mean, I know it’s important and I know how bad it must have been. We watched this film. It was taken in the trenches of all these soldiers blinded by mustard gas. Did you know that in winter the trenches were half filled with water and soldier’s feet rotted in their boots because they never had a chance to dry out?”

  Naomi nodded. “Yeah, I knew that. So what’s the problem with you writing it?”

  “I can’t exactly write that the causes of World War One were a lot of mad old men who just wanted the excuse to grab more land and get more power, can I?”

  Naomi laughed. “You might need to put it a bit differently.”

  “Or that most men died fighting over a few inches of land. The front line moved less than a foot in about four years. It was nuts, Naomi. Just stupid.”

  “Most wars are, I guess. But you’ve just got to knuckle down and write this, I’m afraid. That’s the way school is.”

  “School’s stupid.”

  He fell back into a sullen silence, but this time Naomi heard the sound of writing as his pen scraped across the page and the occasional muttered complaint as he tried to figure out exactly how a word was spelt. She’s bought him a pocket spellchecker a couple of weeks before and was glad to hear him using it, the keystrokes beeping softly as he typed in the awkward word. His father, Harry was still worried about him. Patrick was bright but still had problems with his spelling and his writing and, for things that did not interest him, the concentration span of the average gnat. Having moved, Harry now had to commute back and forth to work each day and that added to the time he could not be with his son, Naomi knew he had come to count on her as surrogate where supervision regarding homework was concerned.

  Naomi wandered back into the kitchen, filling the kettle and scrubbing potatoes. She wasn’t really surprised when Patrick followed her a few minutes later.

  “What is this?” he demanded. “It’s weird. It must have fallen out of one of those boxes, I found it on the floor.”

  “Fallen out?”

  “Yes, honestly. I wouldn’t take something without asking, would I?”

  No, she had to agree, he probably wouldn’t. He might poke things with the toe of his boot, just to get a better view of something particularly tantalizing, but actually removing an object from the box was something else again. Obviously, though, if something happened to have fallen out...

  She dried her hands. “What is it anyway?”

  “It’s a keyring. And a key. The main keyring looks like silver...yes, it has a hall mark and its shaped like an S. Then there’s this other thing, looks like a doll’s head. Someone’s cut the hair really short and shoved a piece of wire right though, between the ears.”

  “Ugh, sounds a bit macabre.”

  “It’s pretty gross,” he admitted. “But dolls are gross anyway. Here, take a look.” He handed it to her and Naomi traces the curving shape of the elaborate letter S. It was surprisingly heavy, solid feeling, expensive. And then this little head, suspended from a wire fastened to the ring. The old plastic deformed beneath her fingers when she squeezed and the stubble of hair pricked at her skin.

  “What is she, a Barbie head or something?”

  “Something a bit like that, I guess. He eyes are all faded, like the paint’s been rubbed off. It’s weird looking. Why would anyone want to thread a head?” He paused, was obviously considering how to phrase his next question. “Is your friend all right, Naomi. He’s not a bit odd, is he?”

  Naomi laughed. “Most of the time, no,” she told him. But just now, she wasn’t sure she would swear to that.

  Chapter Ten

  Simon was in London in the company of Nat Sullivan once more. Eight weeks and four days had passed since he had last had any proper contact with Tally. He had tried to call her many times in the week that followed their break up, but her mobile had been turned off – permanently, it seemed – and after a dozen or so attempts to call her at home he found that her number had been changed.

  Through the grapevine he learned that Tally was in France. The agency that supplied her with most of her work declined to tell him where but did tell him that it was a last minute thing. She’d been offered the work when the original photographer was forced to drop out through illness. It was short notice and Simon got the impression they had been surprised by her acceptance. Tally who liked time to consider and hated taking second place. But she had gone and Simon was left with nothing but an aching heart, hurt pride and a stack of unanswered questions.

  Nat was much as ever. Behind the party animal lay a sincere and compassionate individual who had seen too much of the world ever to be able to settle in one place. Nat knew this. Never enter
ed into any relationship however brief or casual without making sure that his partner knew it too. One thing Simon had learned about Nat was that friends of friends counted as much the same thing and their parties were definitely crashable. Simon never did work out who the host was, but it didn’t seem to matter. The location was some large Georgian place off Holland Park, packed to the gills with girls in designer clothes and young men being worn by labels. They mixed with the arts and media crowd as Nat called them, though Simon wasn’t sure how you told the two apart. He tried to mingle, but once out of Nat’s exuberant shadow, even with Claire clinging to his arm – and every word – he still felt out of place and conspicuous. He had not yet cultivated that “I belong here” look that the likes of Nat and Tally did so well.

  And then he saw her. Inevitable really considering that she and Nat moved amongst the same kind, but it had not occurred to Simon that she’d be there tonight. Tally stood beside the heavily curtained window on the other side of the room talking to an expensive suit and Simon’s heart just stopped. She was wearing a simple black dress, shoestring straps and bias cut which clung to her, defining without revealing. She wore no jewellery, but some kind of beaded shawl or wrap hung over one arm, the jet ornaments catching the light and the weighted fringe drifting against her body as she moved.

  She saw him, looked at him, looked at Claire standing beside him in low cut red, then deliberately she turned away, her shoulders set and stiff.

  Claire snorted. “Who does she think she is, looking at me like that? I’ve a good mind to...Simon, are you listening to me?”

  She pulled back from him releasing his arm as Simon gazed hungrily after Tally Palmer.

  “Simon!” She sounded hurt and Simon immediately apologised.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a shock seeing her here.”

  For a moment Claire said nothing, then she sighed and told him, “it’s not very flattering, you know. Being with someone who wants someone else. Especially,” she added pointedly, “when she’s nothing like me. Nothing like me at all.”