- the first fifty pages in three parts -
chapters 1, 2 & 3
1. IS THIS A
BEGINNING?
Is this a
beginning, treading lightly around the Man with no choice but to follow and no
knowledge of what is to come? Surely it is, because from this moment on there
will be no time for reflection, no point in reminiscing on what came before.
It will, in fact, be sensible to now live as if there had never been any
'before'.
The Man, needless to say, has been here before.
This is not his apartment; he has no key. Nevertheless, when he
decided to re-enter our lives, he did not even have the decency to stop and
knock.
“Checkmate, girl,” he'd said to me as he twisted the handle and
pushed me gently through the doorway. I could feel each individual fingertip
press firmly against my back.
“I have a name,” I'd replied, but he did not so much as pause. He
simply continued to coax me out into the corridor as if I hadn't made a sound.
“Inform the boy,” were the last words I heard before the door
slammed shut behind me.
I stood as still as I could while I considered the consequences of
this new arrangement.
I had no issue with his command, not at that moment. I was already
prepared to go and inform Jonas of what was happening, I just didn’t want to
tell him too soon. I was content to stay here for a while and mull over the possible
consequences of any words I would choose to say, even if it was surely not the
season to be left standing alone on that stone stairway.
I took a deep breath and looked at my watch.
“I’m late, I’m late,” I
sang under my breath, “... for a very
important date.” There was no joy in my voice.
I dragged and slipped my feet as I descended, my fingertips
sliding over the polished surface of the wooden handrail that curved and
dropped down towards to the entryway where it ended in a smooth, spiral knot. I
looked from the doorway to the rows of mailboxes that lined the foyer until I
focused on our own.
“E & J,” I read aloud. Cute.
I regarded myself in the wide, full-length mirror by the door,
examining the girl that had existed only on the surface during these past weeks
and months. She looked exhausted to me. Exhausted and distant and certainly not
the lively, free spirit who painted that mailbox door. But somewhere deep
inside, when I strained my eyes, there was still that tall, beautiful woman
with the olive complexion and the long, straight, shiny blue-black hair, with
facial features feminine and strong, the confidence of a gunslinger who never
missed.
Both of these women disappeared as I turned away to look at that
mailbox once again. “E & J,” I said one more time. That was enough for me.
I briskly climbed back up the stairs, almost running, taking two steps at a
time, and then I banged my fist against our door, three hard knocks.
“Before I do this,” I said to the Man, “before I do this to him, I
need to know. I need to be sure. Tell me who you are!”
“You know exactly who I am, girl!” he replied, looking amused. “My
name is Robert Dark!” And then, as he slowly raised his arms from his sides, he
added, “I am the proprietor of this establishment!”
2. A MAN COMES
AROUND NOW.
I looked down from
the tall, grimy kitchen windows to the cars and mopeds that swarmed through the
wet Parisian streets below and then turned to look at the plastic clock which
hung on the wall next to the refrigerator. It was late in the afternoon, the
hour when the rush of traffic was starting to fill the roads and impatient
pedestrians were beginning to take up all the available space on the pavements.
It was also time to go and meet E.
As much as a random request from her excited me, I didn’t really
want to have to go and meet her at this time of the day. She should have known
that I wouldn’t want to navigate the streets and Metro during rush hour, yet
she had still asked. And that tone she had used, completely undecipherable.
Whatever her reason for wanting to see me was it clearly couldn’t wait until we
were both back at home later tonight.
My journey from the kitchen window to the street below was
interrupted three times, the first interruption being entirely unnecessary. It
came from my telephone, and it was my friend, Ken Hutchinson. Hutch.
“Jonas?”
“Hutch?”
“Where are you?” he demanded.
“I’m over at Pigalle checking in on Norf’s apartment. What’s up?”
“Nothing really. Rachel said something interesting though.”
“Hutch, I’m about to go out into the street. I won’t be able to
hear you. E just asked me to go meet her for coffee and I don’t want to be
late,” I told him, feeling as uncomfortable about telling him this as I had
felt when she had called me. There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Hutch? I need to go. Are you going to tell me what Rachel said?”
“Yes well, listen to this; she says the reason I won’t ever leave
this city is because I am immature and can’t face the realities of the world
outside the peripheral road. She says that’s why you won’t leave either. She
said that living here prevents us from accepting responsibility for events out
there in the real world. Actually, she may have said ‘hiding here’ and not
‘living here.’”
“Don’t listen to her, Hutch. We have everything we need here, all
within that road. That road is important. I don’t care much for what goes on
outside of it anymore. My life is here and now. And anyway,” I said, shaking my
head as I tried to think of something profound to add, “Rachel talks too much.”
“What do you think I should say in response?”
“What? I don’t know! Why don’t you call Stepek and ask him
instead?”
“Stepek? She says that’s why he won’t ever leave either.”
“Maybe she’s right. In fact, just tell her she is right, that’s always
a good approach in these situations. I need to go now Hutch, I’m almost in the
street,” I lied. I could hear him begin a sentence which I knew wasn’t going to
end our conversation and so I snapped the telephone closed and dropped it into
my coat pocket without a second thought.
The second interruption came from Madame Jasmine, the concierge,
who stopped me on the stairway to ask me for at least the third time in recent
weeks if the red, triple-X neon sign on the wall outside the apartment window
was keeping me awake at night. “I try to get them to take it down,” she said to
me as she waved her arms around her head, “but they refuse. You must go talk to
them, Mister Wunderman.”
“I don’t live here, remember?” I yelled, leaning in towards the
side of her head.
As I squeezed past her to continue my descent I did assure her
that I would talk to them sometime soon, even though I had no intention of
doing such a thing, leaving her behind me on the stairs looking just as
confused and angry as ever.
The third and final interruption came almost immediately. My hand
had barely reached out for the handle of the main door when I felt my phone
vibrate once again. I threw my head back and told myself to ignore the damn
thing but of course while this was happening my hand had already dived back
inside my pocket to reach for it. This third interruption was from,
coincidentally, Paul Stepek himself. I looked at his name on the display, and
then, in one slick and well-practised movement, I slid the phone open, snapped
it shut and dropped it back inside my pocket again.
* * *
I reached the café
on time, noticing through the window as I approached the door that E was
already seated inside, waiting. I gave her a goofy wave before I entered. The
café was situated directly across the road from our small apartment on the Île
Saint-Louis in the middle of the city and while I’d always thought that it
looked charming enough from the outside, when I actually took the time to
consider it, it just wasn’t the kind of place I would normally go into. I’d
never heard E so much as mention it before today.
The pleasant exterior gave way to a bare, simple style inside. The
tables were small, the chairs were plastic and looked uncomfortable and the
room itself was cold, but despite this it was packed with people chattering
away to each other over their afternoon drinks.
I crossed the room, weaving enthusiastically between tables before
crashing down into a chair opposite E at the small table she had chosen in the
cosy window alcove.
The moment I looked at her face my mood darkened. It reminded me
of a day I had chosen to forget, a Friday almost two years ago, just a little
less than a week after my friend Mose had died, the day we had gone to visit
his apartment. We had decided to skip the funeral and instead let ourselves
into his room to try and make a true connection with him, but we were still in
a state of shock at his loss, and a little too high, to be facing all of that.
E had not handled that experience well but had thankfully become her usual,
vibrant self soon after we left I seem to recall. Here she was again though,
far away from that place and after all this time, with that same grim, empty
expression on her face.
She looked like she had been crying or, at least, trying not to
cry. Her eyes were red and lined, her nose was red too, probably from being
rubbed with the ball of greying tissue paper she clutched tightly in her left
hand. Her nostrils flared as she breathed deeply, each breath a long,
shuddering sigh. Her skin was paler than usual, pulled tightly across her high
cheekbones, her hair a greasy mess pushed back from her face. Despite being
reasonably sure that she had slept soundly the night before, she looked to me
as if she hadn’t slept a wink. That was the most alarming thing to me about her
appearance; the fact that when I’d left this morning she was still lying in bed
looking, to me at least, completely normal and as naturally amazing as ever.
She had clearly received bad news, so I just sat there dumbly, waiting to hear
it, shamelessly hoping that it wasn’t something that was about to have as bad
an effect on my life as it was clearly having on hers.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
She swallowed but said nothing and continued to look out across
the street.
It had started to rain.
We sat in silence. I was no good at this.
“I was just up at Norf’s place,” I said. “His apartment. I was
just checking everything was okay for him, you know, as me and Hutch promised
to.” No reaction. “I don’t know why he has that place to be honest, he is
hardly ever there, well, he’s never there. I don’t even know if he is in the
country right now. Maybe he went home? I never see him obviously.” I drummed my
fingers on the tabletop. “Maybe he’ll rent it out or something, make some money
from it...” I wondered aloud, shrugging as my voice trailed off. I looked
around the small room. “I’ve never been in here before,” I said, still on the
lookout for a hook of some kind. “Have you?”
The waiter walked over. E was still looking out of the window so I
ordered a hot chocolate for her, knowing that this was probably what she would
have asked for under normal circumstances, and a coffee for myself. My heart
was beginning to race. It was starting to dawn on me that nothing good was
going to come out of this conversation and I began to wish that it was still
yesterday, last week, or even two hours ago. I would have made an excuse not to
come.
I asked her another two or three times how she was but received no
response. I told her that Hutch had phoned to tell me Rachel’s latest theory on
why he won’t leave the city and then I told her that Stepek had called just
after Hutch and that I hadn’t answered, thinking she may approve. I even began
to tell her about Madame Jasmine asking me to go and argue with the men in the
sex shop about their neon sign with the three Xs, but I stopped myself as it
felt stupid and inappropriate to bring that up right now.
I found myself staring at the glasses of wine on the table next to
us.
Finally, and just as I was opening my mouth to ask the question,
“Why are we in here?”, she interrupted me to say, “J, I’m sorry, but you can’t
come up to the apartment tonight.”
I blinked. “What?” I said, my mind scrambling to catch up with
what she was saying. “Our apartment?”
“And before you ask, you can’t come up tomorrow night either. You
just can’t come up anymore. There’s…” she looked out the window up in the
direction of our home, clasping her hands in front of her, twisting and
wringing the remains of the tissue. I hadn’t noticed before then but there was
a light on in the front room even though neither of us were home.
“A man comes around now,” she said looking down at her hands.
The waiter chose that exact moment to dance over with our drinks,
placing them on the table and adding some irritating comment about the hot
chocolate being perfect in this cold weather. I stared across at E as he
dropped the check between our cups, then I placed my hands beneath the table
and slid them between my crossed legs. I sat back in my chair and took a deep
breath, waiting for the next move.
She lifted her cup to her mouth with both hands and said again,
“Just a man. He comes around now,” and then blew into the steamy hot drink.
“What are you talking about? What man? When did he...?”
“Today,” she said, putting her drink back down, looking desperate
and agitated. “J, you must let me go now.”
“Are you serious?” I said. I stared up at our window and then
quickly looked back at her face. “Today? When? You never said anything! Who is
he? Is he there now?” I looked back at the window again, almost standing, ready
to rush up there and cause mayhem. “Is he?”
“Yes.” She looked directly at me for the first time. “J, please
sit down.”
I sat. I was stunned. To illustrate this to her I spread my hands
wide and then slumped in my chair. “And what? You’re leaving me for him?”
She moaned quietly as she looked down into her cup and then
whispered something under her breath, sounding exasperated. I had a feeling that,
as usual, she believed I was failing to grasp the fundamentals of something
huge and obvious, but there was nothing obvious about this situation at all –
not to me anyway. I was utterly confounded. Apart from the occasional and
natural exception, everything between E and I had been, from day one, nothing
short of wonderful. We were partners, friends, and lovers and we had shared
almost everything while allowing each other our secrets and we had always given
each other more space than we saw in every other couple we knew. We held each
other up. This news was shattering everything I had taken for granted for
years. It was breaking me. It was also pissing me off.
“Okay, E, wait a second, please,” I said, holding my hands up in
surrender. “Just tell me what you want me to know. I don’t understand anything
that’s happening right now. Just tell me.”
“He’s just a man. He’s... oh J, you know who I’m talking about,
he’s …”
“I just need the facts,” I interrupted, raising my voice a little
too much for my own liking. “Are you telling me to leave?”
“Jonas, listen to me. He comes around now. He’s there. You
shouldn’t come up again.”
“Since when?” I demanded.
“It may have been last week it started, maybe longer...”
“E, it wasn’t last week! We live in the same place, sleep in the
same bed. There is no man! We are
together every day! You’ve been completely normal until I got here, right now!”
“He was there last night.”
“We had dinner together last night,” I mumbled, lowering my face
into my hands.
“And then this morning, I was making coffee and I broke your
favourite cup. I’m sorry, J. I really am.” She stared away out of the window
and then looked down at her hands which were twisting together again. “He was
there at that moment.”
“E, you’ve had a weird dream or something,” I said. “We were
together last night, don’t you remember?” I thought about the light in the
apartment and looked up again. It was turned off now, the flicker of our TV set
now appeared to be illuminating the room. E followed my stare.
“You see?” she said.
“But E, last night, you were… you were with me!” I said, blinking
rapidly. I was beginning to feel on edge, frantic. I downed my coffee in one
large mouthful.
“But you and I didn’t do anything last night, J. Yet I was quite
sore down there this morning,” she said, looking down to her lap.
I slammed my cup down. That was enough for me. “Jesus E! I’m… I...
Good God can you hear what you are saying?” I snarled at her with no real idea
what I was about to follow it up with. I was utterly lost. This was all wrong.
I felt sick. I felt unable to speak, terrified of saying exactly what I
thought.
“If there is anything you feel that is important to you, then you
should take it. I know you are not materialistic, but maybe a photo or a book.
Maybe you could take something like that,” she said as she pushed her chair
back, stood up and then turned and walked out of the café.
I couldn’t move. I felt frozen. My mouth hung open and my jaw felt
like it was swinging loosely below my face. I could feel a few eyes on me by
this time; we’d been causing a minor scene. I turned to watch through the glass
as E rushed through the rain, staring numbly as she crossed the road and
entered the main door of our building.
3. THE TIDE SURGES
THROUGH
Robert Dark was
not unknown to me. I may have casually forgotten about him, but I had not
forgotten how vulnerable I was, how susceptible I could be to his advances. I
had simply become too comfortable, too complacent, and he had taken advantage
of this. He had timed it well - he saw an opening, and then he returned to my
life suddenly, unexpectedly and with such devastating effect, Robert Dark,
commanding and directing, not allowing me a second of space to catch my breath or
organise my thoughts. He landed upon me with all of his weight, seized me in a
moment of weakness, tightly, with both of his hands, and then he squeezed me
until I suffocated and surrendered. There was no time to cry for help - that is
not how he works. The fall was instantaneous. He had played the long game,
waited for just the right moment and then informed me that he had won. Whether
or not this was true was of no importance. His self-confidence was enough to
convince me that his victory was beyond question.
You cannot hold him back. Something has to give. Cracks form and
the tide surges through.
It started with the simplest of things. I broke a cup - J’s
favourite, not that it mattered at the time, it could just as easily have been
some junk mug that was already in the cupboard when we moved in, but whatever,
it was now broken. While I stared at the pieces my muscles began to tense and a
feeling that I could only describe as black oil pouring over me, through me,
filling me, began to appear like a bad memory. I could feel Him. Those pieces
suddenly meant everything to me; the jagged edges, the tiny traces of dust.
Something is gone, and it’s gone because I didn’t care enough. And this was the
precise instant when the tide finally burst through and consumed me, the moment
when Dark completed his work. He fell on top of me like an avalanche, he opened
his wings and enrobed me, rendered me immobile, caused me to lay down.
This is what it is like to be me.
The momentary and unexpected heartbreak I felt at the sight of J’s
cup tumbling from my hands and hitting the floor may have been Dark’s moment to
strike, but I could see now that the cracks had begun to form long before, way
back on the night that Mose had died. I chided myself over this revelation. In
those months and weeks that led to Dark finally revealing himself, as he
hovered around on the fringes, he had at times been so close that I could have,
had I opened my eyes, called him out.
During the daytime hours I had felt watched. I would tell myself
that this was my imagination at play, that I was adjusting to being in a new
environment, a new country, out of my comfort zone and out of our time zone and
that there really was no one watching me, especially not Him. But sometimes,
during the night, I would feel him tugging at me. I would touch J’s arm as he
slept and snored, but even by grounding myself with this simple action I would
still feel that cold, creeping presence in the air. Robert Dark was tiptoeing
around the edges of my life, circling me while I lay awake in bed, waiting for
the dead of night so that he could take me, infect me, preparing for the
morning to come when he would swallow me whole.
And then, finally, the day arrived. In the morning as I was waking
I felt his weight slip slowly from on top of me as he silently left the bed and
then the room. It was game over.
On my knees, while picking up the pieces of J's cup, I looked up
and saw him standing there in front of me, standing in our kitchen. As simple
as that. J was gone for the day, and there Robert Dark stood, filling the room,
filling my senses. Occupying. This time around his presence was more intrusive,
more complete than ever before.
Having to inform J was the first problem. As much as I loved and
admired him, adored him, I knew it was unlikely that Jonas would truly
understand what I was telling him. Since Mose's death he had become completely
self-absorbed, looking only at the surface of everything else. Plus, there was
the fear that news of this kind would lead him deeper into his own darkness.
“I will be different now,” I wanted to say to him. “You won’t know
me when Dark is around, you won’t enjoy it, you should go.” But I knew that
talk of circumstance, of my feelings, of everything I needed him to understand,
it would all be lost in the air between us. Comprehension was beyond him. He
would never grasp the subtleties, and so in the end I simply told my story in
the easiest, quickest way possible. Anything to get it over with. And then I
left him to deal with it.
I returned here to my place with Robert Dark. Dropping my
rain-soaked jacket on the floor by the door I grabbed a croissant and a glass
of water from the kitchen counter and then sat cross-legged on the couch,
staring at my uninvited guest as he began to go to work on my lifestyle.
He started by taking everything out of the refrigerator and
dumping it on the counter top, then he told me that all the food we had in the
apartment was rotten. He put it in the trash, all of it, and then went he into
the bathroom and began to pee noisily. I couldn’t finish my croissant, it had
taken on a horrid, mouldy taste. I could hardly move, my limbs felt so heavy.
Dark left the bathroom and sat down on the amber-coloured armchair in front of
the television set and read through some papers that had been lying on the
floor, some articles that J had been writing, I believe. Dark seemed to find
them amusing. He laughed at them. They were not supposed to be funny.
I continued to stare blankly at him. He threw the papers down,
yawned and rubbed at his eyes and said he was tired, and then he asked what I
had planned for the evening. Ignoring him, I went over to the kitchen area and
took all the food he had put in the trash and placed it back onto the counter,
but he was right; it was rotten, and it smelled bad.
This is it, I thought. This is the answer to the questions I had
asked myself since I was a little girl. What would happen were he to finally
catch me? How would he proceed?
Robert Dark will lead me to take my own life, I realised, looking
over at the back of his head as he continued to sit. He will lead me to take my
own life, just as... well, just as my selfishness caused Mose to take
his.
*