White Light

  WHITE LIGHT

  ALEX MARKS

  ISBN 978-1523284641

  Copyright © 2016 Alex Marks

  All rights reserved.

  To you, from me, forever

  Ouroboros

  I lifted the gun and turned, seeing her expression morph from startled to alarmed, and then the trigger pulled and her head snapped backwards in a red cloud of blood. There was no sound. I turned to him, and he made a step towards me but the bullet caught him in the upper chest and he folded backwards almost elegantly, hitting the side of the worktop and collapsing onto the dark green lino.

  I could hear gasping, but I think that was me. I took a step forward to look him in the eye as he lay bleeding on the floor. I pointed the gun at his forehead but he suddenly lashed out with one leg, and I fell beside him, the rucksack spilling heavily from my shoulder and twirling across the floor. He was grabbing and clawing at my back, but I could see the timer start to make its final ten second countdown so I shoved viciously, knocking him onto his back, giving me the space to turn and fire the gun again and again until he'd stopped moving.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Wednesday, 11 March 2015. 11.30

  The funeral began promptly at half past eleven. Dave, my closest friend from the lab, had got himself a dark suit from somewhere and was standing close by, watching me anxiously. Stupidly, it was a beautiful spring day: the air was soft and the trees were full of blossom. This was Sarah’s favourite season; the birds sang, and the sun shone, and I wanted to destroy the world.

  Yesterday I'd stood in the rain in a street in Oxford, looking at the place that she had died. It was a nowhere spot, in a forgotten side-street in Headington, a dull corner next to a tatty, tree-lined recreation ground filled with litter and dog shit.

  'This is where she hit,' the sergeant in charge of the investigation had said, indicating a stretch of new metal fence where all traces of Sarah's crashed car had been carefully removed. He turned, collar up against the drizzle, and swept an arm across the narrow street. 'She was travelling at over 50, way above the speed limit for this road, and seemed to lose control of the car here.' New grass was springing up in the verge, where the heavy gouges of the wheels were still faintly visible, but the tarmac was clean and whole, no sign of glass or blood.

  Sergeant Underwood cut his eyes to me, sympathy on his face. 'We've tracked her on CCTV, coming across from Summertown.'

  'Her parents.'

  'Yeah,' an unreadable look crossed his face. 'They weren't very forthcoming about her visit, any idea why?'

  'No idea. They're –' I paused, 'they don't often feel the need to explain themselves. And I was in Den Haag at the conference, so I don't know why Sarah was visiting them.'

  We stood side by side and regarded the fence, a tall rangy hedge behind it, and the large horse-chestnut tree that had taken the brunt of the impact. Its greyish bark showed deep scores, cuts from the metal and the glass.

  'If it had been a wall,' said Underwood finally, 'rather than a tree, then she might have been alright. A wall would collapse.' He ran his narrow dark hand over the damaged trunk. 'But a tree just flexes, forces the energy of the crash back into the car.'

  I nodded. I was a physicist, I understood energy. It had ripped through my wife's body and torn it physically apart. I turned away and walked back to the car.

  'We did find scrapes on your wife's vehicle, which might be transfer from another car.' He pressed the remote lock on his liveried Astra and we climbed in out of the rain.

  'Like she'd pranged someone, or someone had crashed into her?'

  'Either. I'm having them checked against the database, but to be honest no-one has come forward to admit to being involved and that might not take us anywhere.'

  I sat and watched the rain streaming down the windscreen. The curb-side and the tree were blurred and remote. After a second the policeman turned on the engine and the wipers swept across, revealing everything again like a particularly cruel piece of theatre.

  'Sarah also had a bruise on her cheek,' he pulled out into the road, and glanced over at me. I stared at him. 'Pathologist thinks it's not from the crash, but from a little while before.'

  'What?' I couldn't compute this. 'From a – fall, or something?'

  'Maybe.' He looked over at me again. 'Or an argument?' We sat in silence for a minute until he managed to pull out onto the main route through Headington and turned the car towards the Ring road. 'Did she get on well with her parents?'

  'You think they hit her?' My voice, high pitched with shock and confusion, sounded unnatural in my ears. Darren shook his head.

  'I don't know what to think.' We drove on for a few minutes. 'What was she like, your wife?' he suddenly asked.

  I thought for a moment. 'She was everything.'

  Friends came up to me, and I shook their hands, and then they moved gratefully away into the body of the church. A few cousins from Sarah’s side, our neighbours, and then finally a large black Mercedes delivered them: her parents.

  Richard Holland was tall and impressive, and in his black suit seemed to absorb light like a man made out of Dark Matter. He walked calmly up to me and grasped my hand, and actually smiled down at me with a convincing parody of grief and sympathy. Maggie, thin and elegant in her black jacket and skirt, crushed her withered lips against my cheek and blinked back genuine tears with her manicured lashes.

  ‘Adam,’ intoned Richard, in his deep news-reader voice, his smile the smile of a politician or hack TV evangelist. ‘We are so terribly sorry. How are you coping?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ My teeth were clenched so hard I could hardly speak.

  ‘Darling,’ breathed Maggie, clutching at my hand, ‘you must come and stay with us. That house must be so empty without –'

  I shook my head, ‘No, no, it’s fine.’ My hand shook as I pushed her gently towards the church door. ‘Please go in, I’ll be with you in a minute.’ They nodded, and moved into the church at the centre of an approving little crowd.

  ‘Alright, Adam?’ asked Dave, looking sideways at me as I stood and clenched my fists and tried very hard not to scream and punch and kick and uproot gravestones.

  I'd called them last night. Standing in the dark kitchen, I'd heard their phone ring and ring until eventually Maggie had picked up.

  'Why was Sarah visiting you the night she died?' I asked bluntly.

  There was a pause. 'Adam, is that you? Are you alright?'

  'I'm fine,' such a lie. 'Why, Maggie? You've never said.'

  Another pause. 'Does it matter now?'

  'Did you argue?' Silence. 'The police tell me she had a fresh bruise on her cheek...'

  'From the crash, surely -'

  'No, from before the accident. Where did she get that, Maggie? Did she have it already when she visited you?'

  'They can't tell, Adam, whatever they say, it must be from the crash. She was so cut about, so damaged, there's...'

  I took the phone from my ear and hung up.

  The inside of the church was cool and gloomy, with the slightly abandoned feeling of the Church of England. I have a vague memory of standing and sitting, of bowing my head, and even of singing the hymns that I had been helped to choose by the vicar.

  I got up to deliver the eulogy, and God only knows what I said. Later, at the graveside, I could hardly hear the vicar as she spoke the familiar words describing the entire pointlessness of human existence. Richard and Maggie stood like sentinels, radiating righteousness and grief. I stared at the gravedigger’s spade that was leaning against a nearby tree and I imagined myself swinging it hard into their disgusting, hypocritical faces. At the appropriate time I threw a loud handful of dirt onto her coffin (my poor darling Sarah!) and I wondered where Sarah’s sister, Helen, was buried. I knew she'd d
ied in childhood, run away and vanished, leaving only blurred family photos behind. Perhaps they were reunited in death, as the vicar believed we all would be.

  I could hardly stand the wake, which we held in our local pub, ‘The Fleece’. Nick and Sal, the landlord and landlady who knew us well, had laid on a good spread of sandwiches. Sal squeezed my arm kindly and Nick mutely handed me a treble scotch.

  I lasted about an hour and then I found my feet propelling me out of the door. I’d parked just by the pub, and in seconds I was in my battered old Ford and gunning the engine down the lane towards our house. We only lived about five minutes away, and as I rounded the corner and saw the tatty old detached cottage that we had been slowly doing-up for the past five years, I gulped and sobbed. There should have been another car in the drive, but Sarah’s Renault was just a cube of crushed metal now, its usual parking space a blank of weeds. I drew up in a crunch of gravel and sat in the car with my head resting on the steering wheel, and after a while our large ginger cat came and sat on the bonnet – more out of comfort from the warm engine than sympathy. Eventually I pulled myself together enough to get out and into the house. It was such an empty house, filled only with bitter little reminders of the person who was no longer there: a roller left in cling-film on top of a pot of paint, a hairbrush, a bag knocked over by the cat and spilling the usual detritus of everyday life.

  'Are you sure about this colour?' I'd asked, stepping back and regarding the back wall dubiously. 'Isn't it a bit dark?'

  Sarah had skipped over to me, happiness radiating from her despite her paint-speckled face and her tired eyes. She had twisted her hair up into a knot, and secured it with a rubber band, I remembered. She adopted cartoon poses of consideration, hands on hips, then rubbing her chin. 'It's fine,' she said, and smiled at me, and I smiled too, reaching down to her waist and kissing her. She laughed, arching back and rollering a wide stripe of paint down my face.

  'Hey!' I said, making a grab for her as she darted away, slender and agile, eventually clambering up the step ladder and making little jabs at me with the roller. I raised my arms, zombie style, and made feeble grabs until she was laughing so much she nearly fell off. Then I stood up straighter and swept my arms around her, and carried her away to the bedroom, feeling her laughter through my shoulder all the way up the stairs.

  The dark and the silence was like a slap in the face. I turned, plodded deliberately into the spare room, and ripped off the black suit and tie to change into my usual T-shirt, jeans and trainers. I slammed the wardrobe door and saw myself for a second as someone else: average height, light brown hair needing a cut, eyes red-rimmed and haunted. I turned and ran back downstairs. In the kitchen, I tried to ignore the lipsticked coffee cup that I couldn’t bear to wash up, and fished a not-very-dirty glass out of the sink. I went into the dining room and opened the cupboard that contained the whisky collection Sarah and I had been building for years. We’d always planned to buy a barrel direct from the distillers as an investment – something else we’d never do now. There didn’t seem any point in saving any of this stuff, so I grabbed a bottle of Glenlivet and retreated into the garden.

  My head was absolutely bursting and I paced round and round, muttering to myself like a madman. I kept thinking of poor Sarah dying before she could be cut out of the car, and I wondered what she had thought. Had she thought of me? I thought about her when we got married, when we’d argued about the name of the cat, when we’d moved into our tatty

  old house.

  A vision rose in my mind of my parents-in-law at the graveside: imposing, respectable. My face twisted in disgust at these lies, this mask of correctness, while underneath...

  The first time I'd ever met them, coming down from University as an anxious nineteen year old, I'd been taken in too by their obvious wealth and success. The big house, the posh car, they'd all seemed enormous and weighty to me, and having no family of my own had made even their existence as parents imposing. Richard was taller than me, and handsome like an actor, and he'd behaved with a stagey bonhomie that was vaguely unnerving. We moved through the rituals of a weekend, shopping, TV, washing the car, and on the Sunday morning I'd found myself in his study, trying to pretend that the heavy crystal glass of whisky in my hand wasn't my first one ever, and listening to him pontificating about the stock market or something equally remote and incomprehensible. Next door, Sarah and her mother were confined to the kitchen, preparing the Sunday lunch. I wondered if Sarah was ok, and when it would be permissible for me to put down the tumbler and go and see if they needed a hand with the carrots or whatever.

  'Was she a virgin?' Richard's deep voice cut through my innocent wool-gathering. The words hung, heavy, in the air along with his scents of tobacco and Old Spice.

  'What?' I managed to say, feeling my face start to blush. He smiled, and it was not a nice smile.

  'Sarah, when you first had sex. Was she a virgin?' He paused, and put his head on one side. 'Were you a virgin, Adam? Really? I find that hard to believe.' That smile again, and I felt my cheeks prickle with the blood rushing into them. Richard stood up and went to the window, looking out at the immaculate lawn.

  'I don't expect it was her first time, though, was it? Sarah's always been – popular. But how nice for you to be in experienced hands. Was it full sex, or just a blow job to get you started?'

  I remember concentrating on breathing, gulping in the air, and gripping the heavy glass in my hands until my knuckles went white. Mortifyingly I felt tears threatening. A thousand thoughts surged through my teenage brain: should I say something? Shout? Throw a punch? My mind stuttered on these options, and then the door opened and Sarah's lovely face appeared.

  'Lunch in five minutes, you boys!' she smiled at me, full of happiness, and I felt my face smile back automatically.

  'I'll help you set the table,' I said, slamming the whisky down on the desk and following her out of the door without a look back at the tall figure by the window.

  Nothing more was said between Richard and I, and we never spoke of the conversation again, but over the years I'd caught him with that little smile on his face and I'd had to work hard not to plant my fist on it. Maggie I’d found to be vicious and vacuous in equal measure, depending on what mood she was in, and obsessed by what people thought of her.

  Their obvious wealth, spawned from my father-in-law's job in the City, helped them maintain an annoying bemusement as I continued my research from PhD to post-doc and into a junior research fellowship at Oxford University.

  ‘Still at that microscope?’ Richard would quip, handing me the glass of Christmas or Easter or Bank Holiday cheer. I’d just smile, biting back the reply that I was a bloody physicist for God's sake. As for his daughter’s occupation as a fundraiser in a local charity, well that didn’t rate at all on the Richard Holland scale of success.

  ‘All that education,’ he’d sigh, as if he had had to scrimp to pay for it.

  As I'd got older and that bloom of innocence had worn away, I'd been tempted many a time to tell my father-in-law to shut the fuck up. Sarah had been surprisingly upset at the thought of us falling out, though, no matter how much he'd belittled, or snarked, or been just rude to her, and overall I'd tried not to upset her any further by 'beating my chest', as she'd described it.

  The closest I'd ever got was last summer when we'd been forced to attend the Holland's annual barbeque, eating charred sausages amongst their well-heeled North Oxford neighbours. Sarah was looking stunning in a strappy summer dress, and we were laughing with an elderly couple about some nonsense in the news when Richard had come striding into the group and cut her out of it, pulling her away to one side and delivering a tirade in a low voice that I couldn't hear from across the lawn. Conversation faltered around me, as we all watched this scene for a second, then I stepped across and put my arm around her, shocked to find her actually trembling.

  'What's the problem, Richard?' His face, I saw, was purple with fury. A dispassionate part of my brain wonder
ed what the hell had happened, but most of me was filling with an empowering rage. My father-in-law turned his head and glared at me.

  'Why did you let her come to our party dressed like that?' I blinked. 'Get her to cover herself, she looks like a fucking slut.'

  The garden, the evening, even Sarah, seemed to fall away as I stepped forward and pushed Sarah's father in the middle of the chest, throwing him two paces back. He stared at me, as if he couldn't believe I'd done it, and I moved towards him with my fists clenching. Then Sarah was pulling my arm, and saying something through tears about wanting to go home, let's just go home, and I allowed myself to be towed away, through the now-silent guests, and we drove off, Sarah sobbing and inconsolable, clutching her arms around herself as if she were nude, and not able to hear me trying to tell her how beautiful she was and how much I loved her.

  Remembering all this made me want to scream. The short spring day was fading, and a cold breeze was lifting from the shadows. I shivered, and glanced at the house which stared back at me with its darkened windows. At a run, I crashed back into the kitchen and pelted through the building turning on the lights. When every light was burning I flung myself down in a kitchen chair and rested my head on the table.

  Sarah and I hadn’t had more than a night or two apart in years. Ironically, I'd been away on one of those rare overnight stays when she'd died: presenting a paper at a conference in the Netherlands. It had seemed such a big deal at the time - now it looked like what it was, an ego trip, a pathetic waste of human activity. It had meant I hadn't been there when she'd needed me. Maybe I could have gone and collected her, then she wouldn't have been driving...

  I sat up and slammed the tumbler across the room and into the sink, where it smashed with a satisfying explosion of glass and dirty crockery. The empty bottle of whisky followed, triggering a cull of the available breakables, and I was dimly aware of the cat screeching off upstairs in alarm. The crashing and the destruction felt good, and I lurched into the hall looking for other things to smash. Pictures, books, CDs, I don’t know what else, everything was swept onto the floor and kicked and dropped and I screamed and yelled at the top of my voice.