Only Darkness

5

Tuesday morning, Debbie, who had woken up at about half past five and had been unable to get back to sleep, caught the seven-twenty train and was actually in college by quarter to eight. She had planned to spend an hour catching up on her marking, but as she sat at her desk sipping a cup of bitter coffee, she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to concentrate. Right. Something else then. She had her GCSE English class at nine that morning. They’d been looking at ghost stories – it was a topic Debbie always did at Christmas, and she was trying to get them to write stories of their own. They had trouble with writing horror, because the model from their own experience of books and film was fantasy based and excessively violent. The idea that their own world of the everyday could be far more horrific was alien to them. Debbie decided that today she would show them ghosts.

The Broome building offered an excellent venue for a ghost story. Debbie went roaming, trying to remember the best stories, find the best places. The high-ceilinged corridors were shadowy, brown, grey and black, the brighter colours on the paintwork long since worn off. Ghosts could easily walk here. Debbie went on up the stairs to the top corridor – there was a story here – and began a narrative in her head in which someone was standing where she was standing, her back against the window, watching through the crazed glass in the swing doors, the shadow of something stalking her, knowing she was trapped in a dead end with no way out but the eighty-foot drop through the window behind her.

Footsteps beyond the doors brought her back to earth – the sound was heavy and solid. A man, then. She peered back down the corridor into the shadows, and saw a shape loom against the glass. The door opened, and Les came through, carrying a bunch of keys. He looked at Debbie.

‘Morning,’ he said. Should she explain what she was doing? He didn’t seem curious, but he must have wondered. As he came towards her, she said, ‘I was just looking at those places that you tell the stories about, you know, the ghosts.’

‘Not me.’ Les looked dour. ‘It’ll be one of those young ones telling you a lot of nonsense. I’ve worked here near on forty year, and I’ve never seen any ghosts.’

‘But they’re good stories. I was trying to remember that one that was supposed to have happened one Christmas – I’m sure it was you that told me.’

‘Oh, you mean the footsteps on the long staircase.’ Les seemed reluctant to tell the story at first, but Debbie had remembered it as soon as he mentioned the staircase.

The long staircase was originally a fire escape. It ran in a spiral down the inside of a tower-like structure built at the point where the corridors ended. An external fire escape now served the building. The doors that led on to the long staircase were nailed up and had been since before Debbie started work at the college. The only way on to it now was through the IT resource centre. At the back of the room was the old fire exit with a push-bar handle. Students no longer used the long staircase which led out into the lane behind the college, and now it was mostly used for storage. It was dark even on the sunniest day.

The story that Les was telling was about a caretaker who had gone down the staircase one night to check that the outside door was locked. He went down the stairs and checked the door. He didn’t check anything else, because there was nothing else to check. As he was climbing back up the staircase, slowly, because it was late and he wasn’t a young man, there was a sudden draught, the door above him slammed shut and the light went out. He stopped, because it gave him a shock to be suddenly in the dark, then went on, a bit more quickly now. It was cold and somehow unpleasant, at night, on the stairs, in the dark. Then he stopped again. Down below him, on the stairs he’d just climbed, he could hear something, something that sounded like footsteps coming lightly and quickly up the stairs behind him, from where there had been nothing but an empty staircase and a locked door. He didn’t wait. He ran as quickly as he could in the dark, up the last two flights to the door that was hard to open from the inside. As he struggled with it, he could hear the footsteps getting closer and moving more quickly as they came towards his landing. He managed to get the door open, was through it and had it shut and bolted behind him more quickly than he thought was possible. He was leaning against the door getting his breath when something struck it with such force he was knocked to the ground. But nothing was ever found on the staircase to account for it.

When Debbie had first heard the story of the footsteps that came from nowhere, pursuing their victim in the dark, the hairs had stood up on her arms. That would be an excellent story to tell the students. She could take them on to the stairs, show them.

The double doors were pushed open, making them both jump, and Les fumbled with his key ring as Rob Neave came into view. ‘On the warpath today,’ he muttered.

Neave saw Debbie, and made some attempt to hide his irritation. ‘I want you down with the delivery van,’ he said to Les. ‘Get Dave or someone to open these rooms and for Christ’s sake don’t take all day.’ His face was white and he looked ill, as if he had a serious hangover. Debbie remembered what Louise had told her the other evening.

‘That was my fault,’ she apologized for Les. ‘I was getting him to tell me his ghost story.’

Neave looked at her with a faint smile and shook his head when she asked him if he knew it, so she told him the story she’d just heard from Les. He didn’t seem too impressed. ‘You don’t believe all that, do you?’

‘Of course not, but it’s a good story. Don’t you think so?’

He smiled properly this time, and she felt a small sense of triumph. ‘No, I just see Les coming up the stairs with his head tucked under his arm.’ She laughed, and then he said, ‘I need a word with you. Will you be in your room around five?’

The ghost tour of the Broome building went down very well. Debbie wondered, only half facetiously, if she should suggest it to the college marketing forum as a money spinner. Despite the success of her class, she felt uneasy. That feeling of foreboding was back, and she was glad that the college was bustling with pre-Christmas activity. She felt better in the crowded corridors. As soon as she was on her own she had that feeling of eyes on her, a sense of cold and menace. She cursed Tim, and she cursed herself for thinking about ghost stories – especially college ones.

It didn’t help when, at coffee break, her head of department summoned her to his office to discuss the newspaper article. Peter Davis listened to her explanation, but his concluding, ‘Well, we’ll let it go this time but don’t let it happen again,’ served to fire up her anger. It was hard to pull her mind away from it and concentrate on her class. Anyway, she missed coffee.

At lunchtime there was a union meeting. City College was in trouble. Falling student numbers and financial constraints meant that the college was losing money, and the college management were planning cuts. The union was fighting for its members’ jobs, but the staff were divided and undecided. The meetings were usually acrimonious or inconclusive.

The room was filling up as Debbie arrived. She’d meant to give herself time to buy a sandwich before the meeting started, but she’d stayed behind to talk to two of the students, and had had to come straight along. She saw Tim Godber indicating an empty seat next to him, but ignored him – Why is Tim trying to be friendly again? – and found a seat at the other side of the room. The news was all bad. City College was running more deeply into debt, and the management were looking for savings in the staffing budget. Nervously, Debbie thought about her overdraft and the money she needed each month just to pay the mortgage.

She had to leave before the meeting was over, and go straight to the classroom for her afternoon session with another GCSE group. They were a particularly lively group – standard euphemism, Debbie thought, for difficult and obnoxious – and she didn’t feel up to controlling them through a trip round the building. No ghost tour, then. She decided to read them some ghost stories instead, and try to get them writing that way. They enjoyed the stories and contributed some of their own – mostly plots from videos, but there were one or two local stories that were interesting, and Debbie got them to record those on to audio tape, after they’d giggled and messed about. The students stopped cooperating when it came to writing, though, and dealing with the disruption, the constant demands for attention, requests for pens and paper tried her patience almost to breaking. By the end of the afternoon she had a headache and was too exhausted to feel hungry, even though she hadn’t eaten since she left the house that morning.

When Rob Neave got to the staff room it was gone quarter past five. Debbie was sitting in her chair drinking coffee and eating chocolate. She offered a piece to him. ‘What is it about teachers and chocolate?’ he said, turning her offer down.

‘This’ – she waved the chocolate bar – ‘is because I haven’t had anything since breakfast.’ He still looked tired, she noticed, as if he’d had as little sleep as she’d had these past few nights, but he looked better than he had in the morning, more like himself. She wanted to say something about this, but she couldn’t think of any way to say it that didn’t sound like an intrusion. ‘Have you heard about the cuts?’ she asked instead.

He had but didn’t seem too concerned. ‘I’m not planning a long stay here, anyway.’

Debbie wondered when he planned to leave. The place would be duller without him. ‘You said you wanted to see me about something, didn’t you?’

He seemed unsure of himself, which was unusual. ‘That thing at the station. I’ve been talking to some people,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘and it’s possible you did see something important that night …’ He was watching her closely now. Debbie put down her chocolate bar. She wasn’t hungry any more. ‘It’s a long shot,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to talk to you again, I think. Just – be a bit careful. Don’t use the train on your late nights.’

‘Is this official?’ Debbie tried hard to keep her voice calm.

‘No, it’s just advice. From me, not them.’

‘I need a drink.’ Debbie plucked up her courage. ‘Come and have a beer or something – if you’re free.’

He looked at his watch and hesitated. She thought he was going to refuse, but he said, ‘I’ve just got some stuff to see to in the office. Where are you going? Across the road? I’ll see you in half an hour.’

Suddenly elated, Debbie packed her work into her briefcase and sorted her mail into the out tray. As she was leaving the room, the phone rang, and it was a bit more than half an hour before she was walking through the door of the Grindstone into the smell of beer and old smoke, and saw Neave leaning on the bar, talking to the landlord.

He bought the first round, bringing the drinks over to a table, and dropping a packet of salted peanuts in front of her. ‘You need to get something inside you,’ he said, pushing his chair away from the table as he sat down, and hooking his foot over the rung of another. Debbie felt shy, as though she didn’t know what to say to him in this new context, but he didn’t seem to notice anything, and talked casually about the pub and how it had been the place where the police used to drink, when he was in the force. ‘More crimes got solved at this bar than at the station,’ was how he put it. He seemed more relaxed in this atmosphere, and Debbie asked him a bit about his life in the police force. He made her laugh with some stories of the things he’d seen and the people he’d met, and then he asked her about herself, moving on to her parents, her childhood, her current life and her plans for the future.

Debbie found herself talking about her father, something she didn’t often do. ‘He was a miner,’ she said. ‘It was in the family, kind of thing. His father was a miner as well. He used to spoil me rotten.’ Rob sat there quietly, watching her as she talked. ‘He couldn’t cope when they closed the pits down. He got paid off, but he couldn’t get another job. He used to hate the way the people down at the job centres talked to him.’ She paused. She wasn’t sure about the next bit.

‘What happened?’ He was sitting close to her, listening.

‘He died … It’s some time now.’ But Debbie could remember what it felt like, believing he hadn’t cared enough, thinking that he had chosen to leave them. She still felt angry about it. She wanted to change the subject. She realized that, though they’d been talking for a while, she still knew very little about Rob.

‘You’re not local, are you?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve lived round here for years, but no, I was born in North Shields. Lived in Newcastle while I was growing up.’

‘What brought you to Moreham?’ It seemed a strange place to come, to Debbie.

‘Nothing. I came to Sheffield to work.’ He still seemed relaxed, but Debbie was aware that he was stonewalling her questions, that he didn’t want to talk about himself.

She tried another tack. ‘You said you weren’t planning to stay at City. Where next?’

He was looking round the room, watching the other drinkers at the bar. ‘Nothing planned. But City has only ever been a temporary thing. You ought to be thinking about moving on as well. It’s no place to get stuck.’

‘I like it.’ Debbie recognized his ploy to turn the conversation back to her. ‘I like the students and I like the work. I am looking for something else though – but only because of what’s happening.’ She tried again. ‘Would you go to another college, or what?’

He laughed. ‘No, I’m not planning a career in college security. I don’t know yet, something. Do you want another drink?’

‘My round.’ Debbie reached for her purse and found it contained her travel pass and fifty pence. She went red. ‘Oh, God, I ask you for a drink and I haven’t got a penny on me.’

He thought it was funny. ‘I’ll ask you next time I’m broke. Don’t worry, Deborah. Come on, what do you want. I’m buying.’

‘OK, thanks, I’ll have the same again. But next time …’

When he came back from the bar he smoothly took charge of the conversation again. ‘Your father wasn’t an old man, was he?’

Debbie shook her head. ‘He was fifty-five when he died.’ She thought Rob was watching her, but he was looking across towards the bar, frowning slightly, as though he was thinking something over.

‘What is it that makes you so angry about it?’ His question was so unexpected that she felt winded. The response was forced out of her before she had time to think about his right to ask it.

‘Everything. All of them.’ She felt her face flush. ‘He thought it was his fault, you see. He was a pit deputy and he thought he should have joined the strike.’ She looked at Rob, uncertain whether to go on. ‘It wasn’t his fault. He voted to strike. He was Catholic,’ Debbie explained. ‘His mother’s family were deep-dyed Irish Catholics. So he felt guilty.’ She thought about it again. ‘They just threw them out, made them feel useless. Oh, there was good redundancy, but Dad didn’t want that, he wanted his job, he was proud of it.’

He leant towards her, his arms on the table. ‘And what happened?’

‘Nothing happened. He got cancer. Lung cancer. He’d had a cough for a while. But he wouldn’t do anything about it. We could tell, me and Mum, that he wasn’t well, but he just didn’t seem bothered. By the time they found it he was too far gone.’ She sighed. It had been an awful death.

‘You were his only daughter?’

‘His only child.’ Debbie smiled. ‘He wasn’t a practising Catholic by the time he met Mum. That was something else he felt guilty about.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not something I really understand.’

‘No. It’s not something I know much about.’ That was the first personal comment he’d volunteered.

She told him something about the stories her father used to tell about the priests and nuns, and her Aunt Caitlin’s house in County Cork with its holy pictures and statues.

‘You didn’t get all that?’ he asked.

Debbie shook her head. ‘Like I said, he’d given up Catholicism by the time he met Mum. She wouldn’t have had any truck with it anyway. It was something that happened when he was a teenager. His sister, she was only a baby, she died. She was only about three months old, and she hadn’t been baptized. She’d been ill. My grandmother, apparently she believed that the baby wouldn’t go to heaven because it hadn’t been baptized, and she was just destroyed. My father said that he realized then he didn’t believe a word of it any more.’

He went on watching her after she’d finished, unnervingly silent until she saw that he hadn’t been paying attention, was thinking about something else. His face looked tense, distant. He shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just thought of something.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She felt a stab of disappointment. His glass was empty. He waited while she finished her drink. ‘Are you on the train?’ Debbie nodded. ‘I’ll walk down as far as the bridge with you. I’m going that way. When’s your next train?’

A bit fazed by the sudden change, Debbie scrabbled in her bag and checked her timetable. ‘It’s in ten minutes.’

It was nearly seven as they left the pub, and the town centre was quiet. A cold wind was blowing now, buffeting against the buildings, pulling Debbie’s hair out of its pins and combs and whipping it against her face. They didn’t talk as they walked towards the river. The station lights came into view, and they stopped at the crossing. ‘I go this way,’ he said. He looked over towards the station. There were people going in. It looked quite busy. ‘Will you be OK from here?’

‘Yes, fine.’ Debbie checked her watch. ‘I’m early.’ She had nearly seven minutes before the train arrived, assuming it was running on time. She looked at him. The wind had blown his hair about and he’d turned his collar up against the cold. His face was half in shadow. She shivered.

‘You’re frozen,’ he said. ‘There’s no warmth in that.’ He touched the collar of her mac. ‘Here.’ He unwound the scarf he was wearing from under his coat and wrapped it round her neck. His good humour seemed to be back. He caught hold of one of the tendrils of her hair that had escaped from its confinement and tucked it behind her ear. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then he said, ‘You’d better get that train.’ He waited as she crossed the road, then turned and walked away towards the river. She could hear her train on the line. She hurried to the station entrance, and an hour later she was standing in her kitchen, feeling unaccountably depressed.

She ought to eat something. The two beers she’d had with Rob had gone to her head. She wandered round the kitchen, opening cupboards. Buttercup yarped insistently at her feet. ‘I’ve fed you,’ Debbie told the little cat, and, picking her up, took her to the cat dish. Buttercup spurned the food with a burying motion, and hurried back to the kitchen after Debbie, mewing.

Some pasta, some wizened mushrooms, some eggs and some onions were the results of Debbie’s trawl. A mushroom omelette, then. She put some oil to heat in the frying pan, and stirred the eggs in a dish. She washed the mushrooms and chopped them, deciding to fry them in butter as she deserved a treat. The mushrooms were cooking, and she was just pouring the eggs into the pan when the phone rang. Shit. She was tempted to leave it, but she couldn’t stand a ringing phone. She was always convinced it was something serious on the other end. As soon as she picked it up, it stopped. She banged it down in frustration, and it started again. She picked it up and again it stopped. She waited a moment, then just as she was about to pick up the receiver to try 1471, the phone rang a third time. She grabbed it and waited. A voice she recognized well at the other end said, ‘Debbie?’

‘Mum!’ She was relieved. ‘Are you having phone trouble again?’ Gina Sykes had been supplied with a series of jinxed phones by an increasingly apologetic and baffled phone company. The most recent one had behaved itself until, apparently, now.

‘No. Should I have? After all the trouble I’ve had …’ And she rattled off into the long story about inefficient operators and astronomical phone bills. Then she said, ‘Now, love, I’m phoning about that article in the Standard. Why didn’t you tell me about it? It’s a bit much when I’m terrified for my daughter nearly a week too late.’

Debbie sighed. She’d been hoping, rather unrealistically, that her mother wouldn’t see the article, as she rarely read the local paper. She explained what had happened, and, feeling a bit guilty for not having said anything to her mother about the whole business in the first place, she told her about the interview with the police, and a slightly edited account of Rob Neave’s opinion.

‘Well, you pay heed to that,’ Gina advised her. ‘It’s what your dad would have said as well. Listen, Debbie, I’m going up to the grave on Saturday, taking some flowers. Do you want to come too?’

Of course! It was her father’s birthday on Saturday. Debbie, who never remembered birthdays – sometimes including her own – had always relied on her mother to remind her, so she could send her father a card and a present. Now it seemed she needed to be reminded about anniversaries. She felt guilty. ‘Of course I will,’ she said, trying to remember if she’d made any arrangements for the weekend. ‘Shall I try and make it over on Friday night? If I’m not too busy. I could stay Saturday as well.’ Though her mother was only a few stops up the line, Debbie didn’t see as much of her as either of them would like. Debbie’s work schedule got in the way, and Gina’s job, though part time, occupied irregular hours.

After some more desultory conversation, Debbie rang off, and stood by the phone, looking at the photo on the table, her and her father displaying that trophy so proudly. Had her mother been trying to get through or not? Or was there someone else trying to phone her? A smell of burning brought her back, and she rushed to the kitchen to be confronted by pans full of burnt eggs and blackened mushrooms. She scraped the eggs on to a saucer and offered them to Buttercup, who crouched down intently to eat them. She dumped both pans in a sink full of water, angrily ripped a crust off the end of the loaf and ate it dry. It was stale.

Midnight, and again, Neave couldn’t sleep. He drank some beer, listened to some music, read for a while, but he couldn’t get his head to be still. It was all there, just waiting. The smallest thing brought it back. Angie.