The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (3 page)

“How funny,” she thinks as she watches him struggle with them. Shivering, the driver holds them out, as a single passenger alights. The metal whale then pulls away with a little slide of the wheels, heading back to civilization.

She watches the passenger wrestle with the golf clubs and a little pull-along suitcase. She cannot see clearly; he’s too far away and in the shadows. She holds her breath while he inches toward her. From somewhere she hears:

“Mum.” A voice from the dark.

“I’m nearly there, Dani. So close.”

“Patty.” Jim’s deep voice rattles in her rib cage.

“Please don’t ask me to stop, Jim.”

Patty digs her gnawed fingernails into the skin of her arm—as hard and deep as she can—and the passenger stumbles closer. Face still hidden, snow billowing around him. There is a yellow pool of light and he is almost there … he steps into it, like an actor moving into a spotlight: Duncan Cobhurn.

He’s not tall but he’s stocky. He looks like a rugby player who’s stopped exercising but still enjoys his food and beer. Mostly bald, just a clipped halo above his ears, black flecked with gray. His face is fleshy and pink—a mix of blood pressure and sun. He has a few days’ growth of beard, which is mostly white. He’s dressed in linen, a stylish white suit that might have looked great in Lisbon but is going to get ruined in the snow. He looks frozen already.

“Good,” she thinks. “That will make my job easier.”

The clubs are on his shoulder and swing heavily as he walks. He has to stop every few feet to clear away the little snowmen his case keeps building. As he approaches she slowly draws back into the shadows and slides toward her car.

She opens her eyes. She’s back in the hotel room with Duncan Cobhurn—a sedated and bleeding Duncan Cobhurn. The room is stifling. She misses the clean sterile cold of the afternoon. No snowflakes fall here; instead motes of dust dance. She remembers how Dani, when she was about five, believed they were sugarplum fairies dancing in the moonlight. The imagination of a child … It’s just dirt and decay. This room is filthy. The walls are beige but speckled with greasy spots and chocolate-colored scabs. The
ceiling was probably white once, but is now nicotine beige, and the floor … Christ knows what bodily secretions have seeped into it. There’s a stain, just by the foot of the bed, that she thinks is the spitting image of Gandhi. Now, what would he have done? Forgiven Duncan Cobhurn? She is not Gandhi. She cuts him.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

“Wha—?” Jim Lancing wakes with a start. No idea where, frozen—panic.

“Dad.” Dani is beside him in an instant.

“I’m okay, darling. Go back to your room, I’m fine. It was just a nightmare, just another nightmare.”

“I should stay.”

“No, no really. Please, Dani. I’m okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Please.”

She nods, a little reluctantly, and leaves him.

He lies back down and concentrates on slowing his heart, pulling himself back from wherever his dream had taken him. He pictures a lake in his mind, mountains surrounding it—a calm place. Slowly the fear recedes and he is himself again. He rubs his hand, it hurts. He looks across at his bedside table. Glowing numbers read 3:42.

“Damn.”

He really needs more sleep than this, but he knows that won’t happen. He lies there in the dark. On his tongue there’s the faintest taste, and in the air there seems to be something, tangible and smoky, but he can sense it rather than smell it. He feels sweaty from his nightmare and already the prickles of sweat are turning cold; he realizes what the taste in his mouth is: blood.

He rolls over onto his side and then out of bed and onto the floor. The first few steps are little more than a hobble until his creaking joints and muscles warm up. He walks down the hallway to the loo. This is the biggest show of how age has crept up on him: that he can’t go through the night without the need to pee. And then, once he’s there, he stands longer than ever before. Sometimes he even sits, like a girl. Tonight he sits immediately, knowing he will be in there a long time. After a couple of minutes he takes a newspaper that’s folded under the sink. He looks at the Sudoku.

“I haven’t got a pen,” he calls out.

“Isn’t there one in the medicine cabinet?”

He looks and finds a stubby pencil in with his razor.

“Got it. Thanks,” he shouts to his daughter.

“Okay,” she calls back. “I’ll be downstairs. Waiting for you.”

He finishes the Sudoku and Killer Sudoku while he’s there, then cleans his teeth, trying to remove the taste of blood. He looks at himself in the mirror and isn’t unhappy with the reflection. He’s got pretty terrible bed-head and his eyes look saggier than usual, but generally he’s not too bad for a man of sixty-four, especially at this time of night. Not gone to seed, like many others he could name—he’s pretty lean. He can bend over and touch his toes without too much huffing and puffing. He would be the first to admit that his stomach isn’t flat like it once was; there’s a slight paunch but it’s not bad, just a little loss of muscle tone to show how gravity hates the old. He rinses his mouth and then runs his wet fingers through his hair. It’s still a pretty good crop, even if it has gone stone gray at the temples and the rest, once raven black, is now dusted with gray. He has always thought his features a little too pronounced, his nose
too big and his mouth too wide, but he seems to have grown into them over the years.

He shivers, the chill of the morning creeping into his bones. He runs a shower, nice and hot, and steps into it. The pressure is strong—it pounds and buffets him, releasing knots.

“Jim,” a voice breathes from inside the cascade of water.

“Patty?” He strains to hear—can her voice be in the water?

“Help.”

He feels something deep in his heart—a tug that says something’s wrong with her, his wife. A wife he has barely seen in twelve years. In the churn of the water his nightmare comes back to him.

“Are you coming down yet?” she calls up the stairs.

“Just coming,” he replies, feeling guilty for not going down before now. He knows how much she longs to talk after a sleepless night, how lonely she gets during the long stretch of darkness. But right now he’s too rattled by the images in his head to talk to her. He tries to push them back inside the box and paste a smile on his face.

“You need to get down here,” Dani shouts.

The smile wastes away on his face. He heads downstairs. “Where are you?”

“Hide and seek” is her reply.

He finds her curled up in the big leather armchair in the room they laughingly call his den. When she was a child it had been the family dining room. But he couldn’t remember the last time the house had any actual dining in it. Instead the room had become a sort of den-slash-library-slash-watching-the-world-slide-by room. It’s pretty Spartan: two chairs, a small table and an old fish tank. Once, a long time ago, the tank had been home to Dani’s tropical friends but now has some very creepy-looking cacti in among
multicolored stones. It’s the only room in the house that’s allowed to be a little untidy. Newspapers are on the floor; he only buys the Saturday
Guardian
and Sunday
Observer
each week but they certainly mount up. Books and correspondence are piled on a small coffee table. Every couple of months he forces himself to sit down and catch up with the world; he should probably do that pretty soon, he thinks.

She turns in the big chair to look up at him. Her long dark hair curling over her shoulder, pale skin flawless and her large brown eyes glittering with excitement. It shocks him a little—probably the aftermath of his nightmare—that she still looks so young. He forgets that sometimes … after all that has happened to her.

“You okay?” she asks with a half smile.

He nods a yes.

“Then sit down and buckle up—you are in for a treat.”

She swings back in the chair to face the doors that lead to the garden. Jim sits in the other, less comfortable chair and angles it to match Dani’s view. Outside it’s black but he can just see someth—a light snaps on in the garden next door, bleeding across their lawn, revealing an amazing vista. Huge flakes of snow drift on the wind, buffeted and brawling like bumper cars at the fair.

“Oh my God.” He’s amazed by the sight.

The two of them sit watching the snow until the sensor light turns off.

“It’ll go back on soon.”

They sit in the dark, waiting. Jim suddenly thinks of the animals out there: Willow, Scruffy, George and others—guinea pigs, hamsters, cats and two dogs buried over the years in solemn services. He has never seen their ghosts, which he’s glad about. If Scruffy came back to be stroked, like some zombie Disney cartoon, that would scare the life out of him. But he wonders where they are
now. Is there an animal afterlife? Do they have souls like he does, like Dani does?

The light flips back on—catching a squirrel in mid-scurry—and Jim is once more in awe of the scene before him. The snow swirls like the Milky Way, so close he could reach out and touch it.

“Are you out there, Patty?” he thinks. “Somewhere in the snow?”

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Tom stops to get his bearings. Peering into the dark, he can see the mouth of the bridge stretching over the Thames but by halfway across, it fades to nothing. A wall of blackness with snow rippled through it. The streets are empty but for a second he thinks he sees someone walking toward him across the bridge. It looks like … but then there’s no one. Just snow whipped up by the wind. Who? Something scratches at his thoughts, tugging at strands of memories that just refuse to come. For a second, he knows … but it just fades from his mind.

He looks at his watch, it’s 3:42 a.m. Everybody’s asleep, except him.

He turns back to the path and kicks at the snow. For days he’s been dragging a heavy heart along in a sack but now there’s snow. How can anyone feel depressed when faced with this? He feels like a kid who’s bunked off school to see the circus come to town, “oohing” and “ahhing” as the tufts of candyfloss parachute toward him.

“I love snow,” he tells the world.

He looks over the sluggish water to the park; it could be anywhere, anywhen. The snow is already quite thick, deadening all sound, building banks and drifts. The moon’s fat, nearly full, but half-hidden behind skyscrapers of cloud. He stands for a long time,
a solitary figure in a snow globe, then finally turns toward the ark of glass that juts out over the river and trudges toward home.

He’s left his car outside her house. He’s already thinking he’ll send a constable to collect it in a day or two, in case she’s watching out her window.

“What a mistake,” he tells the snow.

He’d known she was divorced, had two children—and that could have been fine, he’s good with kids. The problem was that he’d not seen how needy she was. They’d had dinner a week ago—she’d drunk a little too much and been a little loud by the end of the evening, but he thought that was nerves. She was at least ten years younger than him, thirty, with long, deep brown hair and tall, long-limbed. That was what had attracted him to her profile. And in her picture she smiled quite beautifully—genuine, unconcerned. Just like
her
smile had been.