December (8 page)

Jan's face was very much
like marble: white, shiny with tears and hard as stone.

      
No, he thought. No. No. No. Never had he prayed so hard that
it had been wrong, a delusion.

      
Red-haired Jan was sitting at the work table, a drained coffee
cup at her elbow. She was looking out of the window into the street where, in the
November twilight, two kids were crashing a football at a metal garage door.
When Dave had come in, Jan hadn't looked at him.

      
It was a reconditioned eighty-year-old end-of-terrace house in
an old South Lancashire pit village, now commutersville. It had an open coal
fire. They used to make love in front of it. Dave remembered saying
, I bet you lie around and fantasize about
the generations of miners who sat here in zinc baths.
And Jan, naked, had
said,
Pass me that bar of soap again,
would you?

      
Now the fire was out.

      
The room was very tidy. Had been completely tidied. He
imagined her hoovering viciously, slamming books back on shelves - books on
history, sociology, humanist philosophy and political theory. Ramming the CD
unit flat to the wall, clacking together the piles of discs - modern classics,
some jazz, very little rock.

      
Jan said, very precisely, the icy schoolteacher voice, 'I believe
that I told you not to come back.'

      
He stood in the doorway, fingering the ends of his scarf.
Everything he could have said at this point would have sounded trite.

      
Can't we talk about
this?
      
Could I at least try and explain?

      
Will
you just listen to me for ten minutes without jumping down my throat?

      
Yeah, well, pleading would only sicken her. Even sickened him.
So he stood in the doorway, playing with his scarf.
      
Shit.

      
The really heavy, unspoken question related to the results of Sara's
latest tests and he was scared to ask.

      
Bitterly, she answered it for him. Her voice was also like marble
now, gravestone-cold and glassy.

      
'She's to have an immediate programme of chemotherapy. Three
months. At least. But I didn't need to tell you that, did I?'

      
'Oh God.' He'd seen Sara precisely once and couldn't really remember
her face, only the thickening black and purple haze around it like a luminous
bruise, a hideous bonnet. 'I'm so sorry. You don't ...'

      
'Are you? Are you really?'

      
'Jesus, Jan ...'

      
'Because you'd have looked pretty stupid if it
hadn't
been inoperable, wouldn't you, Dave?
You'd have looked like A, a phoney or B, a serious psychiatric case.'

      
'Look,' he said, 'we can't talk here, the atmosphere's like ...
Can we go for a drive?'

      
'I don't want to talk here,' Jan said. 'Or in the car. Or anywhere.
With you.'

      
Dave clenched his fists on the woollen scarf, pulling it down right
against the back of his neck. He closed his eyes, felt furious and hopeless and
ashamed. Sensitive? You could keep it.

      
Once - three months ago, in bed - it had been incomprehension,
then nervous giggles, then ...

      
She's
not ill. What makes you think she's ill?

      
Just a ...
a feeling.

      
Well,
thank you very much, Doctor Reilly, for that considered diagnosis.

      
Then she'd sat up in bed, pulled on the light.
Look, what is this?

      
I just think she should
go and get herself checked over, that's all.

      
You're
serious, aren't you? What the hell's got into you, Dave?

      
The problem was that a grown man who saw fuzzy colours around
people's heads went totally against Jan's cheerfully rigid world-view, her
cast-iron concept of what was real and acceptable.

      
Jan, twice divorced at thirty-four, was a very determined
unbeliever. A roving supply-teacher who refused to work at any school where
old-style religious instruction was on the menu. Who saw everything in that
area, from organised worship to New Age farting about, as not so much the opium
as the
heroin
of the people:
addictive and destructive, something that should be fought in the streets and
seized at the ports.

      
Which was wonderful. She was lovely and carefree and laughed a
lot and liked to help people. In fact, the best reason he'd ever found for concluding
that, OK, there were more things in heaven and earth, but who gives a shit?

      
The Dave-Jan thing had been nearly four glorious months old
when she'd dragged him over to South port and introduced him to her sister.
Sara was twenty-eight, the high-flyer of the family, just back from a year's guest-lecturing
at the University of Illinois.

      
Nice girl.

      
Nice, but clearly and horribly sick.

      
Was he supposed to keep quiet about it?

      
Coincidence
! Jan had
shrieked at him five weeks later, when Sara had been to her doctor complaining
of listlessness and the upshot of that was some consultant ordering a biopsy.
An appalling, ghastly coincidence!

      
Sure,
he'd said, to
get them through the night without eyes being torn out.
You're right. It's probably a complete coincidence
.

      
Jan had sat up in a distant corner of the bed, duvet clutched around
her chin.
But you don't believe that, do
you? You don't believe it was a coincidence at all.

      
Looked at Dave as if she'd just learned he had a string of convictions
for indecent exposure.

      
A look which was to become unbearably familiar. His one chance
had been for Sara's condition to prove eminently treatable, so that the whole
business might, given a respite, turn into something they could laugh about.

      
Until the next time.

      
For it had been clear enough, after this, that he'd never
again be able to tell himself with any confidence that there'd be no more next
times.

Jesus, what
was
this? Moira was shaking. She went
back out to the landing, to the top of the stairs, stared down into the lower room,
where the guitar lay supine, a dead guitar.

      
The room was like a tiny stone chapel, with a plain hardwood
table under the small window. There was also a big brass oil lamp on it, for
reading.

      
On account of there being no electricity. She'd had the converted
croft house
un
converted, getting the
power disconnected. Don't know why I did that, she'd say. But, of course, she
did know. When she'd first arrived - nine ...
ten
years ago, Jesus, is it as long as that? - she'd been rather
less than one hundred per cent rational.

      
Now I'm slightly more than fifty per cent irrational.

      
And something's coming.

      
Without warning, for there was no phone either. The only
person she would accept being disturbed by was her mother, and her mother had
no need of phones.

      
If it was lonely sometimes, she could handle that. If she was
lonely, she was safe.

      
There was an open fireplace, with buckets of coal standing by;
in front of the hearth, a bright orange fleecy rug on which you could sit
cross-legged at night in the oil-lamp's placid light, reading or maybe just
singing softly to yourself, the guitar in your lap, rearranging traditional
songs.

      
Idyllic, huh? Renewal. The recharging of the spiritual batteries.

      
What a lot of crap. The island's a demanding lover; you
don't
get to relax, not often. Especially
just lately, with the dreams. All those images which your conscious thoughts
suppress keep emerging, red-haloed, in your dreams.

      
Aw, hey, go make yourself some tea, huh?

      
She walked slowly down the stairs, straightening this
ludicrously jolly woollen sweater, bright sea-blue with happy seals jumping up
for the boobs.

      
At the bottom of the stairs, facing the window, a movement in
the trees made her stiffen, heart leaping like one of the seals.

      
She peered out, to where the mist began.

      
One time, not long after she'd bought the place, she'd lain
awake in her bed - this was December, always December - and heard a seagull. A
seagull in the night. The gull's lonely cry was agony to hear, made her weep.

      
Davey?

      
It had been a mild night - the worst kind, in December - and
she'd done a stupid thing; she'd allowed herself to respond.

      
She hadn't seen it come in, but she'd known it was here, she
could feel its cry, deep in her breast now. She'd opened her arms to it.

      
Davey …

      
No sooner had the breath left her lips than she knew it was
all wrong, and she leapt up, flapping her arms, shouting,
out.
out!
and slamming
the window shut so hard the glass cracked.

      
Following morning she'd come down the stairs and out of this
same window, the sea mist heavy all around, she'd seen them coming, watched
them form out of the dense air, a terrible bedraggled procession: Simon in a
monk's robe, barefoot, his feet torn by the stones, blood seeping up between
his toes. Behind him lumbered Tom, a hairy caveman in rags, eyes full with fear
and bewilderment. And Davey ... was this wee Davey? He kept fading and changing
colour, like he didn't know where - who he was. Then came a blast of confusion,
sheer cold bewilderment that knocked her back so hard she'd lived with the headache
for two days, then started running a temperature, and it had turned into flu,
and oh God, never again.

      
Hey ... come on. Get your act together. She headed for the kitchen.

      
And then screamed a fractured scream as the pounding began on
the front door of the croft house.

She stared for a long time
at the little old man in the bright muffler and the beat-up trilby hat.

      
'Are y'OK, Moira?'
      
They were not there, Tom and Simon
and the hazy thing which might have been Dave. Why should she think that? She was
a mad woman.

      
Moments passed. The image of the wee elderly guy did not
waver: brown-faced, in a trilby with a greasy golden cord around crown.

      
It was the long wet tongues on her cheeks which brought her
out of it. Both dogs, one either side, their front paws on her shoulders.
Shivering now in the barbed air from the sea, she hugged the Dobermans and
blinked at the wee man.
      
'Donald?'

      
He smiled. 'Ah widny ha' come, hen ... Ah widny bother ye …'

      
A hundred wrinkles had become channels for his tears. His smile
started to swim for it.

      
She said breathily, unbelieving, 'Hey, Donald ... no?'

      
He was nodding gravely. The dogs had moved away and were
sitting either side of him, watchful and sorrowful.

      
'Hey, come on, will you, Donald,' Moira said, smothering the
solemnity of the moment with her anger. 'It's no' possible. I would have known.
I would have fucking known!'

      
'Wis sudden,' Donald said.

      
Moira marched out of the doorway and went and stood in the
middle of the little, rough lawn, by the broken sundial. 'Jesus,' she murmured.
'This is no' real.'

      
Behind her, one of the dogs whined gently.

      
'This morning, hen. Wis a stroke, they reckon. Nae warning. Ah've
been on the road since nine.'

      
Moira, turning back to the door, said emptily, 'I'm sorry. Please
... come away in.'