The Darkening Hour (32 page)

I wouldn’t have needed a maid again. I should have learned the first time round that they are nothing but trouble.

I was right that night of the funeral, when I predicted that my siblings were all changing for the worse now Mummy was dead. I have a sudden overwhelming desire to hear our mother’s calm,
rational voice. Compromising. Helping us all to see right from wrong. None of them knows what’s good and right since she died. They’ve all lost their moral compasses.

If only I hadn’t had to be the Selfless One, taking care of everything, sorting everything out. You do your best and everyone takes advantage; they take and take and belittle you until you
are invisible to your own lover.

The shadow creeps up the steps ahead of its owner.

My body acts as if it is quite separate from me, gripping Mummy’s stone head, giving it an almighty shove, putting all my rage and hurt into the motion. The bust rocks for a second, then
crashes down.

It lands hard on the head that is appearing at my feet.

I don’t know if there was much noise while this was happening, whether there was a cry, whether the body made a scrunching sound as it collapsed at the bottom of the
steps, where its head is now bent up against the doorjamb at an odd angle. Where, I can’t help noticing, a bare thigh lies uppermost, a slice of light falling across it highlighting the
hamstring, just there, the sinewy area of flesh Max was so obsessed with, that it drove him to cheat on me with my domestic worker.

But suddenly the world falls silent, with the kind of silence one only notices once an incessant background noise stops.

And whittling through this silence comes the thin, sweet sound of a blackbird’s song.

I stare at the body. It’s so still. Why doesn’t it move?

I run down the steps. This is all wrong. It was Mona coming out of the flat. I saw the shadow of her overall. Impossible! To my horror I realise the shadow must have been made by the
dressing-gown that Max is wearing.

‘Max!’ I cry. I kneel down next to him. Kiss his neck, his chest, his thigh.

‘Max!’

I sit down on the icy ground next to him and cradle his head in my lap.

But where is Mona?

There’s no sound from the flat. She must be hiding in there, afraid I’m about to discover her. As well she might be. I will let her cower, let her suffer, knowing what’s to
come. For now I need to give my full attention to Max.

He’s gone a funny colour in the yellow lamplight spilling from Daddy’s flat. Is it just the cold? I take off my coat and lay it over him, to warm him.

And I stay there with him for I don’t know how long.

It’s still dark, but a less weighty dark when a voice stirs me out of my stupor.

‘What happened?’

I turn, confused. Above me, at the top of the steps, silhouetted against the moon, is Mona, her headscarf lit by the streetlamp in the alley, turning both it and her face an amber colour, the
way the angels along the street turn orange at night. For a second I feel as if I’m looking at one of the statues Max and I met beneath early on – the beautiful girl who stands demurely
on the top of the Palace Theatre wearing only a headscarf. Benign, innocent. But alluring.

I stare at her for a few minutes, hardly believing she’s real. The real Mona is hiding somewhere in Daddy’s flat where she’s just had sex on Daddy’s sitting-room carpet
with my lover.

‘What is it? What happened?’ she asks again.

‘What are you doing there? You were meant to be in with Daddy.’

Her face is crumpled, she is frightened. She moves down the steps, one at a time, holding the wall at the side, her eyes deep, dark sockets. As she gets to the bottom she begins to whimper.

‘Stop that – that’s not going to help!’ I tell her. ‘Where were you? Why was Max down here?’

‘He went to Charles,’ she says. ‘Charles was ill. Not breathing. Coughing. I came up to find Doctor Max. He told me to go to bed. He said he would stay with Charles, check he
was OK.’

In spite of the cold night, I have broken out in an unpleasant sweat. It veils my forehead and is dribbling down behind my ears. My thighs, too, feel sticky and unpleasant.

‘You were upstairs, in the house?’

‘Yes. Max came down to help Charles. He told me to go to bed in the house.’

I look back down at the man whose head lies in my lap.

Max, you fool. You bloody fool, I think. Mona was sleeping in Daddy’s flat so she could take care of him. It was her job to look after him. So that she wouldn’t interfere with our
night together. It was so we could be alone.

And you tell her to go upstairs!

You think you’re the one who has to look after Daddy? It’s what I’ve employed the woman for. You should have left her to it. You shouldn’t spoil these people, Max.

It doesn’t do to be too kind. Too trusting. They’ll take advantage if you’re friendly
.

‘Max must have fallen,’ I tell Mona. ‘He must have come up the steps, they are slippery – look, you see? There’s a frost. He obviously lost his balance. He was near
the top, put out his hand, grabbed the statue, but the statue came with him as he fell. Backwards . . .’

‘So we must call a doctor? Or an ambulance?’

Yes, I think. This is what we should do. Call a doctor, call an ambulance. Let them take him. There may still be something they can do.

I’m trembling. It’s with the cold, I think. My arms and legs twitch as I try to make sense of the situation. I must instruct my body in what to do. I tell it to move, up the steps,
back to the house, to the kitchen, to the phone, where I must pick up and dial. Dial who? The ambulance? The police? A doctor?

Then what?

Max isn’t moving. I shake him gently, but he doesn’t respond. I press my thumb against his wrist. I can’t feel a pulse. Does this mean he’s dead? Can’t they
resuscitate people these days? Can’t they do something with their chests, bring them back to life?

I need to ask Max.

But this
is
Max.

And that’s when I begin to wail.

‘I’ll call an ambulance,’ Mona says. ‘What’s the number? The doctor’s number I called for Charles is too slow.’

She steps over Max. She steps over Mummy’s head, lying on its side, staring sadly into Daddy’s flat.

Mona makes for the phone. She is thinking more clearly than I am, though she is still whimpering, crying, as if this were her problem, not mine.

Then I do begin to think – with a terrible clarity.

As if a light has gone on in my brain.

‘Wait, Mona!’

She turns.

When they find he’s unconscious, in a coma, or God forbid, if he’s dead – they will want to inform his wife, his kids that he’s here, in a basement in south-east London.
That he was spending the night with me, a woman they’ve never heard of. And if he is dead . . . I look again at him, feel his wrist, try to find a pulse, try and try again.
Come back to
life, Max. Come on, pulse, let me feel you
. I put my ear to his chest . . . he can’t be. It isn’t possible.

‘Max!’ I cry. ‘Max!’

No response. If he’s dead they’ll do a post-mortem to check how he died, and they will ask why, if he fell, is there this blow to the skull, just here, where this terrible dark stain
is spreading down from Max’s hairline to his eye. It cannot have been caused by a fall, it is too acute; it’s obviously the result of assault.

This thought is so vibrant in my head, I am startled to find another equally bright one move in.

If I am found guilty of assault, manslaughter, whatever charge this kind of accident brings with it – what will become of the new programme Mona said they’d phoned about earlier? I
was to be reinstated, after all, as Theodora Gentleman, running a new cookery programme. On air again, with the following I’ve always enjoyed, maybe more so.

Max never told his wife about me. No one will know where he’s gone.

He will be an unsolved disappearance.

No one knows he came here.

Except Mona.

‘Mona,’ Dora says.

She holds out her hand, she tugs me down. We sit side by side on the bottom step. She turns my face towards hers.

‘Max never came. Do you understand? No one must know.’

I nod, and she lets go of my chin. ‘I understand,’ I say. There’s something wrong here. Something I should object to. But Dora can do what she likes. She has my passport. My
lifeline. I’m not in a position to argue.

‘And so, Mona, I need you to help me move him. You are my maid, and you must do as I tell you. And I’m telling you to help me. We need to take Max away in my car somewhere. We need
to get rid of him.’

I know not to ask questions. I must do exactly as she says. I shut off all thought. Do as I am told.

I know where they put the bodies when they are in too much of a hurry to bury them. I know from stories about the conflicts Ali was always so interested in. Conflicts in our neighbouring
countries, during what they now call the Arab Spring. Ali told me how his Berber cousins had fled violence and conflict between rebels and government forces, how many had attempted to escape on
boats to Europe. Those who didn’t survive, he told me, his blue eyes flashing in anger, were simply tossed overboard into the sea. But where else is there to put a body that would otherwise
begin to rot and smell and attract disease?

And so, because I have no choice, because I can guess what she will do to me if I don’t help her, I tell Dora, ‘We must put him in the river.’

‘I can’t bear to look at him,’ Dora says, and I follow her gaze and see that Max’s head, which I thought had simply bled a little, has in fact caved in at the top. There
is stuff leaking from the gash – not just blood, other matter. I flinch with horror at the thought that it must be his brains.

I wretch, fighting back the urge to be sick, but I can’t look away. I stare at the material oozing from the open wound, the black parting in his fine hair filling with froth. I visualise
the thoughts that this very matter must have contained, until he slipped so violently on the steps and his poor head shattered under the weight of the statue. Intelligent, kind thoughts. Thoughts
that were going to help me. Where are they going? Are they leaking out with the offal that is bubbling up like the sputum at the edge of the sea, vanishing as they meet the air?

Dora must have moved in these few seconds, for she emerges now from Charles’s flat, holding a bundle of fabric in her hands. She squats and dabs at the blood with a towel and, when the
towel is saturated, she lifts Max’s messy head and slips some more fabric – one of the overalls she bought me, the one I left on the floor when I got into bed last night – beneath
his head and then draws it tightly around and around his face, until his whole head is wrapped up. She fastens the overall by tying the sleeve in a tight knot, so that the fabric is bundled around
his face, shrouding it.

‘At least now I won’t have to look at this ghastly mess,’ she mutters. ‘We’ll cover his body with a blanket. Fetch the one from your bed. Mona. Quickly! And while
you’re there’ – she tosses me the bloodied towel – ‘stuff this in Daddy’s bin. We’ll sort it out later.’

In the silent flat, I glance into Charles’s room. He is sleeping soundly on his side. Whatever Max gave him earlier to calm him must have had a sedative effect. I push the towel into the
bin and pull the blanket from my makeshift bed.

Dora is shivering as she takes her coat off Max and slips her own arms back into it. Together, Dora and I wrap Max in the blanket, until he resembles no more than a heap of bedding or dirty
laundry that we are bringing out of the flat.

‘Now, you take his feet, Mona, and I’ll take his shoulders.’ She puts her hands under his arms and hoists him up, his bound head against her chest, and I lift his feet.
It’s impossible to get a grip on the blanket, so I push it out of the way and pull his bare legs up on either side of me, the way I sometimes carry Leila.

As we begin to climb the steps, trying not to slip on the ice, Max’s white feet dangling out of the bundle to either side of me, my throat fills with an acrid scent that I mistake first
for a mixture of frost and diesel fumes. It is the smell of blood. It’s dripping on the steps as we go, leaving a dark trail in the frost.

At the top of the steps, the weight grows too much for me. My arms are going to give way.

‘Please, Dora. Can we rest for a moment?’ I gasp, and she, in relief, lowers his blue head to the ground. We stand for a moment in the icy night, panting. Already one side of the
overall tied around his head is saturated, dark with the blood that has seeped out on our way up.

‘We can’t be long,’ Dora pants. ‘We’ve left Daddy all alone in his flat.’

‘He was sleeping soundly. Max . . .’ My voice falters. ‘Max gave him something to relax him.’

‘I need my car keys,’ Dora gasps, and she darts across the garden, leaving me alone with the body. The only light comes from the streetlamp in the alley, which just misses
Max’s shrouded form. It occurs to me in that moment that I could just run. Run as fast as I could away from all of this. Disappear.

I look about me. I have nothing: no money, no papers. And where would I go? And how soon before Dora alerted the police that her undocumented maid had disappeared just as her lover had died
violently in the night? My heart begins to hammer against my chest.

‘Mona, we need to move.’ Dora’s back. ‘Lift him. Come on, we haven’t time to lose.’

Can this really be happening? Is she really determined to take Max’s body to the river without seeking help from the police or a doctor?

Why? Can it be due to her fear of what his wife will say when she learns of his affair? There must be something else, something that Dora wants to hide. But if I ask, Dora has the power to make
it look as though I had something to do with the death of the doctor. And so I say nothing.

After this we don’t speak again. We work silently together. And, because I am thinking more clearly than Dora is, she lets me take charge.

She does exactly as I tell her.