Dark Places (39 page)

John's leaving had left no trace on the surface of the house. In his room, his tuba tarnished month by month, and the box of cufflinks, forgotten on the windowsill, gathered dust. Some days I found myself going into the room. I would sit on the side of the bed, watching the gleaming bulges of the tuba. Once I even picked it up and got into its coils, but when I tried to produce a sound, I heard only the wind of my own breath whistling emptily through its pipes.

Naturally, I knew I was alone in the house, and simple commonsense told me that if I made no changes to anything, then nothing would change. And yet, as I wandered from room to room, something in me expected evidence of life: somehow I expected the box of cuff-links to have moved from the windowsill, the tuba to be sitting on a different spot on the floor. But even the wrinkle in the bedspread was unchanged: nothing whatsoever had occurred here since I myself had last sat on the bed and got up again, and nothing ever would.

Lilian's was a sad plundered room, with dust thick on the empty bookshelves, and a dead-leaf sort of smell about it. Only around the door was there any mark of a human having inhabited this space. The fingerprints of my daughter's grubby hands could still be seen around the handle, and down near the skirting-board there was a secret known only to myself and perhaps to her: a smear of ink with her thumbprint visible in it. My eye was often drawn back to that fossil evidence that I had once had a daughter. Down on my knees in front of the skirting-board I watched it at close range. The whorls and concentric rings had no end: they drew a man's eye down and down into themselves like an optical illusion. I had read of mystics staring into patterns like this, and going into ecstasies. I was no mystic, but a man of the scientific age, intent on a matter of scientific interest. I knelt before the marks until my knees locked, but no ecstasy occurred.

It was not that I thought much about Lilian these days. If I found myself in that bare pink room more often than one would have expected, it was only that its windows got the best of the sun, and in a house grown dank, it remained warm. Her pink walls were bland, the empty wardrobe gave nothing away, and under the bed was nothing but fluff and a stiff blue sock. Sitting on that bed, feeling it yield under my weight, I could see out across the bay, could hear the kookaburras cackling among the trees, and at the end of the day I could watch the darkness come up from the water.

But nights were no longer safe, for as I sat over the fire downstairs, the dark rooms around me seemed to multiply. Acres of dark doorways yawned into darker rooms, corner after corner of banister curved upwards into dimness, hall-runner after hall-runner vanished into shadows. I hunched closer over the ticking coals of the fire, feeling a draught on my back, stuck there watching the fire die, not able to take the coal-scuttle in hand and venture downstairs to fill it, and not able simply to walk up to bed either. Finally I would creep up as stealthily as if I myself were the intruder, with my back to the wall all the way up the stairs. When I was at last lying under the covers, my heart pounded and sleep would not come.

I would lie in the dark, listening to the humming of the silence, waiting for the clock downstairs to chime out the next quarter-hour, and I would feel myself shrunken away to the size of a pinhead, quite alone in the dark spaces of eternity. I was a small emptiness within a larger one: in my hollow house, I had never been hollower. There were even moments when all the logic against the existence of God was almost insufficient to keep me from calling out to Him like a child for help. That tiny self, my speck of inner man, was now all that kept me company in those terrible hissing nights of long white emptiness.

Even during the day, the silence around me as I considered my facts was like a personality. There was nothing in the house now but the hum of emptiness and the pressure of all those vacant rooms on the skull. I was deafened, browbeaten, goaded by silence: silence was strangling the life out of me: silence had become something toxic. The breath was sucked out of me by a peculiar effect of vacuum in the rooms and the blood turned sluggish in my veins. I felt I needed to sit down, but sitting down did not seem to improve things.

When I stood up too quickly, the blood rushed to my head: everything went grey, and when colour restored itself to the world there was still a sensation of movement in things, as if my eyes had become sensitive to the life of the very atoms on the surface of the world. A wall seethed if I looked at it too hard, the surface visibly teeming; the glass of the window bellied out and back giddily, the boards of the floor undulated beneath my feet.

In such a frame of mind, I was overwhelmed by a sense of something swirling behind the eyes. I left my study and stood at the top of the stairs, aware of the large sounds of my own breathing, hearing other sounds that stopped as soon as I tried to listen to them. Perhaps all those nosey-parkers were right. Perhaps it was true that the house was a little large for a man on his own.

In my dressing-room there was at least myself, large as life in the cheval-glass, with another one behind me in the dressing-table mirror. There was my splendid head, there was my admirable chin; there were the fine shoulders, the good chest, the hands appearing at the ends of the sleeves, the tubes of pants: there I was, and there I was again from behind as well, but it brought me no comfort.

I lifted my hand to smooth my hair over the skull, and the gesture stuck like a bit of seized machinery. A whistle began in my ear, a small high scream within the skull itself: and now a jerky roaring was starting up in my head, the sound of my frightened blood in tumult within. I stood and watched myself, and could not quite remember how you managed the breathing business. I looked at the waistcoat and the shirtfront moving in and out, and heard a ragged sort of panting, in and out, up and down.
That is all you have to do
, I told myself.
It is really very simple.
One brown shoe advanced towards me in the glass, then the other; the man in the mirror blinked at me rapidly, and the lips twisted under his nose as his mouth formed words I could not hear.

I stood with a bloodless chill around me, as if part of my clothing had fallen away at the back and left me naked to the wind. Here in my own dressing-room, looking at what could only be my own face in the mirror, I was melting away into the void that surrounded me, that hissing whiteness that had always lain at the centre of all things, where there were no voices, no eyes, no reflections: just the void at the heart of self. Loss rose in me like nausea.

Someone else's eyes watched me from the mirror, peering avidly into the transparency that I had become. There he was, Albion Gidley Singer, a man with a splendid head, a man in the finest double-breasted bespoke that money could buy, Albion Gidley Singer, son, brother, father, husband, pillar of the community, leading man of business: there he was, and he had been sucked out of himself like the marrow from a bone. The nothingness within had rushed to join the nothingness without, and the empty husk was collapsing into itself. There it was, Albion Gidley Singer standing hunched under the weight of his own garments, a man in the act of turning into air.