Suspended In Dusk (3 page)

With trembling fingers I close Jack’s eyes and fill out the paperwork. Marek will win the bet. His guess was closer even though they were both wrong.

* * *

“I want to tell you why sex is so difficult for me.” Jake’s face is creased with what looks to me like grief.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know, but I want to. We’ve been together a couple of months now and it feels serious. It is, isn’t it?”

I nod vigorously. “Oh, I hope so.” I really do hope so.

Jake draws a deep breath that shudders on the way down. “I never knew my real dad. He left when I was too little to remember.”

I open my mouth to say something, I’m not really sure what, and Jake holds up a hand.

“Let me get this out in one, or I may not make it.”

I nod and he smiles, squeezes my hand across the table.

“I don’t mind not knowing him. My mum was young and irresponsible. She’s always been fucking useless, so I can hardly blame my dad for leaving. It’s what I did, first chance I got. She should have protected me, but she couldn’t even protect herself.” He draws another breath, sips wine. “My mum shacked up with Vic when I was about six years old. She’d knocked around with guys before then but never for long. She did her best by me, even though her best was bloody rubbish. But when Vic came along, everything changed.

“He drank heaps, was always on the edge of violence. Mum told me how much she loved him, but it was clear she was terrified of him too. She said how we needed him to pay the bills and he wasn’t such a bad guy. Even with two black eyes and a split lip she’d tell me how he wasn’t such a bad guy.”

Rage flares in me and Jake can see it in my face.

“Let me finish.” He reaches out, strokes my cheek. “You’re such a good and decent person, the way you care for the dying. You’re so good to me. You couldn’t be less like Vic
fucking
Creswell.” He drinks more wine, his hand shaking. “Anyway, it wasn’t long before Vic started… touching me.”

I let out a soft sound, part growl, part moan of dismay.

A tear breaches Jake’s lashes. “I’m sorry, I need you to know this.”

My knuckles creak as my fists clench in my lap. “I want to hear. You shouldn’t carry this alone.”

Jake nods, sips. “Anyway, he went from fondling and making me do things to him to raping me in very little time.”

“You were six?”

“I was probably eight by the time he started that.”

He says it like that makes it somehow better than if he were six. “What a fucking…”

“He ruled my mum and me, did what he liked to us. My mum should have protected me, but she was trapped too. He would beat her if she tried to intervene. Beat me if I threatened to tell. We lived in terror. When I was fourteen I told mum we had to go, we had to run away. She said we had no money, where would we go?”

“There are shelters,” I start to say and Jake nods again.

“Of course, but that wasn’t the point. You know what she said to me, after years of beatings and sexual assaults?”

I sigh and shake my head. “She told you she loved him.”

“Yep. So I ran away. I have no idea what they’re doing now. He could have killed her for all I know. I haven’t spoken a word to her since I left. I was on the street at first, then in shelters and care. A foster home took me in when I was sixteen and I was a bastard, doing all the things my mum did and worse, acting like her boyfriends, thinking I was different.”

“You’re nothing like that,” I say. “You’re amazing.”

He smiles, but it’s not enough to chase away the melancholy this time. “My foster mother is a lady called Glenda Armstrong and she fixed me up. Wouldn’t take my shit, made me finish school. I was lucky. She gave me direction. I got a job, turned myself around. Twenty-five now, finally feeling like I’ve got it somewhere near together. And then I met you. For the first time I feel something real, instead of just angry fucking because I thought that’s all I deserved.” His tears have stopped and there’s anger in his eyes.

“You should be so proud of where you’ve come, given where you started,” I tell him.

“But I’m scared and you mean a lot to me and that’s why it’s so hard for me to be intimate, emotional. It’s always been an act before, an act of defiance more than anything else, a show of power. But with you, I have no guard and it’s terrifying.”

I stand, move around to hug him and kiss his hair. “I’m honoured,” I whisper. “I’ll never hurt you.”

“I know.”

The shadows of all the people who have died with me mask my vision, make Jake a distant blur. “So many wonderful people die every day, struck down by disease or age,” I say. “And yet fuckers like that Vic get to live.”

Jake nods against my chest. “There’s no justice in the world. We have to hang on to our luck when we find it, because that’s all there is.”

* * *

After nearly a week of no deaths we get two in a day. The darkness wells inside me, that delicious blackness I can’t help but gather. Sometimes I think it’s going to overwhelm me, but there’s always room for more. The journey home is muffled by the circling presence of their passing.

Jake comes around not long after I get home, bag of shopping in hand. “I’m going to make us a great dinner tonight. Special recipe! Something Glenda taught me.”

“Great! I’m glad we’re having a good dinner. I have to go away for a couple of days.”

“That’s sudden.” His brow is creased in concern and it breaks my heart a little.

“There’s a two-day course Claire Moyer was supposed to go on, but she’s come down with something. Someone needs to go. It’s about a new drug administration practice, and they asked if I’d step in. I head off early in the morning to Newcastle. I’ll be away overnight, back by dinnertime the next day. Sorry.”

He smiles. “Don’t apologise. Work is work. Let’s enjoy tonight then, eh? Maybe you can lend me your key when you leave and I can get my own cut? Then I can have something ready for when you get back on Thursday?”

I raise my eyebrows, give him a crooked smile. “Your own key?”

“If you think…”

I sweep him into a hug. “Of course I think. I’d love that.”

* * *

It took a lot of searching to find this place, but hours of free time in a palliative care hospice can be put to good use with a search engine and access to hospital records. Hints from Jake about where he grew up and a keen eye. Plus friends in social services to join the dots. The idea, the realisation, hit me like lightning when Jake told me his story.

There’s a broken down car on the front lawn, leaking oil across the dirt like black blood. The house is peeling. The paint reminds me of the skin of a dying woman’s lips. I knock on the door, heart hammering against my ribs.

A large figure shimmers through the frosted glass panel and the door swings open. A man stands there in shorts and a stained shirt. He’s a tall bastard, muscular, but a beer gut mars anything close to a good physique. He has muddled tattoos on his arms and legs, grey and black stubble across his face like a TV tuned to static. His eyes are dark and mean. “Well, hello, darlin’.”

“Victor Cresswell?” I ask.

His eyes narrow. “What?” He glances to my hands, probably checking for a summons.

“
Vic
Cresswell,” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I hold out my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

His lip curls in a sneer and he takes my hand, squeezing too hard to assert his dominance as he puffs his chest out. “Nice to meet you too, sweetheart. What the fuck is this?”

And I let my darkness out. It rushes through my palm, desperate to escape, and races into him. I feel it gust up his arm, into his chest to nestle in his lungs. It wraps shadowy arms around his liver and coats his gallbladder in an inky embrace. It snakes through his intestines, finds his prostate and slips down into his balls.

A shudder ripples through him as I break our grip and smile, turn away.

“What the fuck was that all about?” he yells as I make my way back to the waiting taxi, a tremor in his voice.

As I tell the taxi to head back to the station Vic stands in the doorway, one hand rubbing absently at his throat. There’s a patina of fear across his face. How much does he suspect? I give him a month at most before the decay begins to set in. Before the tumours start to blossom through his organs. Black, flowering death.

I’m empty inside, somehow hollow but with whiteness swelling into the places where I’ve collected all that dark over the years. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let it all go, should make it last. It’s disconcerting. I’m a little lost without the shadows of the lonely dead inside me. I’ll have to start collecting again. No matter, at least three at work have less than a week left.

I knew I gathered it for a reason. A shame it took me this long to realise what my purpose is. I have a mission now, giving this unfair blackness to bastards truly deserving of it.

I’m going to be busy.

* * *

Jake is watching television and looks up in surprise as I enter the house. I’m glad he decided to stay at my place, not his. When the moment’s right I’m going to ask him to move in.

“I thought you weren’t back until tomorrow,” he says, smiling. It’s genuine happiness on his face and that warms me.

“We got through the training in one day and finished up in time for me to get the last train back. So here I am.” I had taken into account that Vic might be harder to find, maybe not home. It had all been much easier than I anticipated.

“Well, that’s a lovely surprise,” Jake says, gathering me into a hug.

I breathe deeply of the clean smell of his skin. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe there is some justice in this world, after all.”

Taming the Stars

Anna Reith

Michele

There was never a good reason to get in a car with Antoine. I should have known better. Perhaps the heat had fried my brain, turned it to a loose mush that filled my head like cotton wool. Of course, that would have made no difference. I was twenty. Whatever my head was or was not filled with, I still did my thinking with my cock.

* * *

It was so hot that summer that the tarmac melted and over a hundred old people died in Paris, while their relatives escaped into the lavender-scented countryside. If I’d had money I would have done the same. Unfortunately for me, I was too poor for vacations. I lived hand to mouth then—
tirer le diable par la queue
, as my grandmother used to say. Pulling the devil by the tail. I didn’t think I’d ever see the day he’d turn around and bite me.

Antoine found me in a bar on Rue Saint-Denis, a narrow little building chipped out of the dirty limestone that faced much of the third arrondissement. It perched uneasily among the grim, tight-drawn shutters and whitewashed windows of the shops that surrounded it: seedy places that sold porno movies and dirty magazines, and had hookers’ cards wedged under the cash register like so many pieces of forgotten chewing gum.

It was a cheap local workers’ tavern, untouched by pretension or the march of modernity, and neither the old men nor the migrant Arab boys cared about the greasy pinkish reflections the red light district cast over their beer glasses.

I didn’t notice Antoine come in at first. I was drinking a cold beer and thinking sour thoughts about the girl I’d intended to marry, who had been inconsiderate enough to fuck my brother and callous enough not to regret it.

“Michele!” Antoine clapped me between the shoulder blades with his wide, soft hand. He never had done a day’s hard work in his life. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,
mec
.”

Antoine rarely wasted time looking for anyone who didn’t owe him money, so I doubted that. More likely, he was here for the little blonde
morue
who could sometimes be found on the corner, and who—as Antoine put it—not only knew how to enjoy a good cigar, but also swallowed the smoke.

I squinted up at him, my lips still wet from the beer. The place his hand had touched felt sweaty and sticky, and the shirt clung to my back.

“What do you want, Antoine?”

He smiled broadly, but the expression hung off his mouth like a wet, greasy rag. One thing about Antoine: he never saw the point in pretending he wasn’t full of shit. I almost liked that about him.

“I was looking for you,” he repeated, sliding onto the stool beside me and still smiling that flimsy lie of a smile. “I want you to drive a car.”

“A car?” I grimaced as I drew the cool beer bottle from my lips, watching the condensation slide down the dark glass neck, mostly so I wouldn’t have to look at him. “What do you need me to drive a car for,
mec
? I’m no chauffeur.”

Antoine caught the bartender’s attention with a wave of his thick fingers. They always reminded me of andouillettes fresh from the barbecue, brown and blunt-ended, but tipped with rounded, pink nails glimmered as if he’d oiled them. Like me, Antoine’s family had made the trip from North Africa a couple of generations ago—mine from Morocco, his from Algeria—making us both
petits beurs
: French-born melons, instead of the kind grown in the swelter of the Maghreb.