The Mistletoe Bride(9)

‘All right, Jim? Time for your medication.’

I let my eyes slip away, warning him not to say anything in front of them. Not to admit to anything. It’s not murder if you don’t mean to kill someone. Turner or Mrs Nash, not his fault. Checking he’s quiet now. And he is. He’s sitting silent as the dead in the corner of the room, not saying a word. I put my finger to my lips just in case. They can’t see him. They don’t know he’s here.

‘Yes, I’m all right,’ I say.

‘Here you go then.’

I hold out my hand obediently. The quicker it’s done, the quicker they’ll go and we can get back to business. Tweedledee drops two yellow pills into my palm. Sickly yellow. I take the paper cup and swallow, drain the water and hand the cup back. Tweedledum ticks something on his list, then they are wheeling the trolley out of the room again.

‘Someone be round with supper soon,’ he says.

I put my hands over my nose, keen for them to be gone so we can resume our conversation. I can’t believe they can’t smell it. The rotting fish, the seaweed. Just like before. I want them to go. We’re at the interesting part now. The reason we’re here.

‘See you tomorrow,’ says Tweedledee.

‘Tomorrow it is,’ I say.

I wait for the bolt again and the key again, then I turn round.

‘Thought they’d never go,’ I say. ‘Now, where were we?’

But he’s gone. I’m on my own. Pity. A pity.

I lie back on the bed. It doesn’t matter though. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Start again. Get to the bottom of things tomorrow. I must ask them to do something about the smell. The rotting fish, the seaweed. Someone’s going to notice soon. Someone’s bound to notice. I look around for the box, but that’s gone too.

He’s taken it. Perhaps he’s already taken it down to the cellar.

‘Tomorrow it is then,’ I murmur. ‘Never a truer word spoken. All right for some, all right for some.’



Author’s Note



When I started ‘Duet’, I had in my mind to write a doppelgänger story. Literally meaning ‘double walker’ in German, a doppelgänger is a shadow self – a living ghost – supposed to be someone’s double. In traditional ghost stories, it is only the owner of the doppelgänger who can see this phantom self and is often – usually – a harbinger of death. In stories of bilocation, a person can either spontaneously or willingly project his or her double, known as a ‘wraith’, to a remote location. This double is indistinguishable from the real person and can interact with others just as the real person would.

However, during the writing process, things went their own way and it became a story about conscience. Like Lady Macbeth being unable to wash her hands clean of Duncan’s blood or the murderer in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ – who imagines he can hear the heart of the old man he’s killed beating under the floor and so gives himself away – guilt exacts a heavy price.

The story also seemed to belong in the 1960s, an era of landladies and oddball misfits living in a seaside town where events might go unnoticed for some time.



RED LETTER DAY



Montségur, the French Pyrenees

March 2001





Red Letter Day





And Something’s odd – within –

That person that I was –

And this One – do not feel the same –

Could it be Madness – this?





Poem 410

EMILY DICKINSON

It was a mistake to take the mountain road into the Pyrenees. On the map it had looked more direct and, having made up her mind, Claire wanted to take the quickest route, before her courage deserted her and she conjured up an excuse not to go. To put it off again.

This journey had been more than three years in the making. Claire didn’t want to cause any more distress and upset to those friends and family who’d done their best to look after her and help her get through things. It would get better, they told her. She’d never forget him, but it wouldn’t always feel this bad. Perhaps she’d have another child. Time, they said, was a great healer.

If anything, the passing of one year to the next had made her grief more acute, her sense of loss more profound. Memories of the tiny, lifeless body in his cot, the weight of her son in her arms, the look of him. She knew things would never get better. Her heart would never heal and nor did she want it to.

With that acceptance had come relief, then a sense of purpose. All she wanted was not to feel anything, not to think anything, to close her eyes and see only white space. There was no point going on.

The decision made things easier. The place had been harder to choose. Claire wanted it be somewhere away from her everyday life, so as not to burden her family and friends, and somewhere remote.