On the Third Day Read online

  On the Third Day

  Rhys Thomas

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Rhys Thomas

  Part One: The Sadness

  Part Two: Joseph

  Part Three: Of Hope

  Part Four: Miriam

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409094852

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  First published in Great Britain

  in 2010 by Doubleday

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Rhys Thomas 2010

  Rhys Thomas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9780385614733

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  Typeset in 12/14.25pt Bembo by Falcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  To Chris, Rhid, Anna and Rachael

  Also by Rhys Thomas

  The Suicide Club

  PART ONE

  THE SADNESS

  ‘I need to get away from here.’

  He lay on his side and looked at his wife. The bedroom window had been left open all night and the air was cold. The curtain fluttered and beyond it the sound of passing cars came in and out.

  ‘From here?’ she said.

  She leaned in to kiss him, but he did not respond and so she leaned in further and brushed her lips against his forehead.

  ‘Not from here.’ He dropped his hand softly on to the bed. ‘I mean from London.’

  Miriam looked at him. He was lying on his side and his hands were underneath his face, clutching the pillow like two talons. They gripped so hard that his knuckles had lost their colour and she saw the blue lines of tiny veins running between them. He was looking at her but it was through eyes she did not recognize and then she was awake, fully, and something heavy and dangerous stirred inside her. There was something missing from him. Something intrinsic and vital was gone.

  She sat up, the blanket fell away from her leg and a current of cold air crept along her skin.

  ‘What’s wrong, Henry?’

  Henry lay still and blinked slowly and said nothing.

  He looked at her as if he didn’t know who she was, then released the grip on his pillow and rolled away from her.

  Miriam squinted in the morning’s brightness. She tilted her head to one side. This was not like him. Henry was always happy; that was his way. The thin, wintry fingers of the silver birch in the garden clicked against the window.

  She felt sands shifting beneath her. As she looked into Henry’s face she could see the change. It was almost imperceptible, but perceptible enough to know that she should be frightened. Her heart rate quickened with the automatic sense of danger.

  ‘Henry?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  It took her two days to get him to the doctor’s waiting room in which they were now sitting. For most of those days he had lain still and silent in bed. Sometimes he would sit up and go over to the window to look down on to the street and when he did this she would try to speak to him. But Henry would say nothing in reply. He would just stare out of the window with his head pressed against the glass. She would have brought him to the doctor earlier but it was too hard to admit that something was wrong. The news reports seemed so out of range; what they described could not possibly be happening to her family.

  Now she sat next to Henry and held his hand. The waiting room was full. The staff told them they would have to wait longer, just because. Because of what was happening. There were more people like Henry in the room. Some of them were even sitting like him: head leaning forwards, feet tapping the ground. Some of them were sobbing. There was something heavy about them, as if their mass had swelled. She hooked her arm under Henry’s and rested her head on his shoulder.

  Everybody in the room looked scared. A man on the street outside had told them it was the end of the world and they had hurried past him as if he was saying something that was impossible.

  Henry leaned forward. He pulled his arm away from Miriam. She looked at him and then she looked along the line of people.

  ‘Mr Asher,’ a voice said from the loudspeaker on the wall. ‘Dr Eberly will see you now. Room Five.’

  The doctor’s eyes glanced across to Miriam as she lowered Henry into the seat and she saw the nervousness in them right away. He looked so young. An emotion crossed his face as wind across water.

  ‘How long has he been like this?’

  Miriam shifted in her chair. ‘Two days, since Wednesday morning.’

  The doctor turned to Henry. ‘How do you feel, Henry?’

  Henry’s head slumped towards his knees. He ran his hands through his hair and stared at the floor.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  His voice had altered since the change had befallen him. Its modulation was flatter, it was slower, the song in the timbre had gone.

  The doctor looked at Miriam. ‘We just don’t know what it is,’ he said, openly.

  ‘Isn’t there anything you can do?’

  ‘It’s just come out of nowhere.’

  His nervousness disturbed her.

  ‘Aren’t there pills, antidepressants – would they help?’

  The doctor tapped a finger on his notepad and fidgeted in his seat. ‘They tried that. It’s just—’ he stopped. ‘They don’t know what it is.’

  Claustrophobia shrank the room. Henry sat up in his chair and looked at the doctor calmly. There was the quiet of his breath through his nose.

  ‘I feel like I am numb. Like everything has gone cold.’ As he spoke his body seemed to grow, as if being inflated by a new clarity. ‘I woke up and all of the lies I have accumulated over my life, the lies I have drawn down like a veil in front of me to make the world liveable, have been stripped away and I am gazing at a truth.’ Henry’s eyes had sunk into two red depressions. ‘I never realized . . .’ He trailed off and the room quietened.
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  ‘Does he have any history of depression, or of mental illness?’

  ‘No,’ Miriam answered.

  The doctor lifted his pen in his hand but did not write anything down on the blank pad of paper in front of him. ‘Do you work?’ he said to her husband.

  Henry nodded. ‘I work in advertising,’ he said, slowly.

  ‘A good job?’

  Henry nodded again but this time said nothing.

  Miriam listened in silence. Henry had hardly spoken from the time he fell ill until now. An image crossed her mind: of Henry rowing a boat in Regent’s Park. Their baby son, Edward, was in her arms. She remembered how Henry’s face had lit up like a new star when she told him she was pregnant with Mary. But now a silent and creeping dread was settling into her, like a cold fog coming in off the sea.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about this . . . truth, that you mentioned?’

  Henry shrugged. His eyes fell to the thin, grey carpet and he spoke. ‘Life has no meaning, I have no meaning. We are just animals scratching blindly in the dirt.’

  Miriam was afraid now. Henry should not be saying things like this. The man sitting in the chair next to her was not her husband. It was some automaton taking his place.

  ‘Doctor, please,’ she said. She controlled her breath. She closed her eyes tight and put the knuckle of her middle finger to her forehead. ‘Surely there must be something,’ she said through a dry throat.

  Henry’s thick black hair was flecked with grey. The delicate features that made him look so much younger than he was were drooping.

  The doctor rose from his seat and went to the door. Miriam could see into the waiting room. She saw the lines of patients, all of them, sitting in their chairs, hunched over, heads in their hands, like lines of bats hanging upside down in an inverted cave.

  ‘We need to get away from here.’

  Through the radio they had been warned to boil tap water before drinking it. If possible, they said, use bottled water.

  Miriam looked up from her book that she hadn’t been reading. She had been staring at the words, at the incomprehensible black shapes against the grainy, dusty white, and trying not to cry. The children were sitting contentedly at the breakfast bar, drawing pictures with their crayons.

  ‘Henry?’

  His face was drawn. ‘Pack some bags. We’ll go to my father’s.’

  ‘Henry,’ laughed Miriam, nervously. ‘Don’t be silly. We can’t go to Cornwall. I promised my mother I’d take the kids to her tomorrow.’

  Henry shook his head. ‘We can’t stay in London. There are too many people here. It’s dangerous.’

  The children looked up from their drawings. Miriam closed her book and stood up.

  ‘Can I speak to you in the living room, please?’ They left the kitchen and Miriam closed the door. ‘You’re scaring the children.’

  He did not reply.

  ‘Henry, what’s the matter? Can’t you tell me?’

  ‘I can’t . . .’ Suddenly Henry was leaning against the wall, unable to stand without it. ‘I just . . . can’t. You wouldn’t understand.’ He clamped all the fingertips of his right hand together and tapped them to his chest, indicating something on his insides. Breath was coming out of him too fast and he broke into tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he cried. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  They had been together for fifteen years and married for eleven and not once had she seen him like this. She could not stop thinking about the television reports, and dread pierced her body. This was happening all over the world. They had already given it a name.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to Cornwall.’

  Sadness, she thought, and the word turned over in her head, as if it was gloating.

  They drove out of the city. The motorway was quiet for a Friday evening. The sky stretched out in front of them, a huge blueness of void studded with a few grey clouds. Miriam loved the sky when it was big like this. It breathed free. The sky was always so tiny in the city.

  Henry sat in the back with the children. He stared out at the fields that waved gently up, gently down, brown here, green there. Miriam glanced at him occasionally in the rear-view mirror.

  She switched on the radio and listened half-heartedly to the news that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had left the government. Something had happened over in the Olympic development but they didn’t know what. They thought it might be riots but the story was sketchy.

  She called ahead to Henry’s father and told him they would be visiting. He seemed pleased. Miriam could only guess at how lonely he must be without his wife and in that house so far away from other people. The sun was dropping over the horizon, a last line of electric orange the only demarcation between the haze of sky and land. The beauty of it struck her hard in her chest and she gripped the wheel tight, stifling her tears.

  They arrived at the house a little after ten. Henry’s father rushed out to greet them. He crouched and threw his arms around the grandchildren and as their heads disappeared into his shoulders he looked at Miriam as she led Henry from the car to the house. His long face was older in the dim light and Miriam watched his features slump when he saw his son.

  Miriam put the children to bed and went into the garden. It was dark and the sky was clear. The moon reflected off the ocean. The low garden wall was just a hundred feet from the cliff edge. She could hear the surf crashing against the rocks below as pockets of sound exploding in claps. Down the hill to the west was the dark beach and there, on the point beyond it, the disused lighthouse. The stars twinkled so brightly, even on the horizon, that she could see the shape of the tower like a dark paper cut-out.

  To the east was nothing but undulating fields. She felt herself a little like the house, cut off and remote, as if whatever it was that was happening to the world was outside of her little sphere, and Henry wasn’t really suffering from the same thing as all the other people. He was too unique to become one of the horrible statistics that just kept getting larger and larger with every bulletin. Tomorrow they would walk down to the beach and he would remember who he was and everything would be fine. The hope drizzled happily through her but it was a lie because Henry died that night.

  Henry’s father, unused to being woken, found it difficult to orientate himself. The bedroom door sounded again. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and reached for his spectacles. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Yes?’ he called.

  Miriam was crying, a thin silhouette in the doorframe.

  ‘James,’ she said. ‘It’s Henry.’

  Awake now, he rushed to the guest bedroom. His son’s body lay as a lump in the duvet. The old man crossed the room and pulled the blanket down. Henry’s face was white. His father placed the back of his fingers against his cheek but it was cold.

  His son’s eyes were half closed and the moonlight put a small white glow in them. Henry’s father looked frail in his pyjamas, his back was crooked and his legs were bowed, and as he stood over his son’s body his skeleton seemed to deflate. He turned to Miriam and opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. He closed his mouth and blinked, then went to speak again. He looked scared.

  ‘What happened?’ he said.

  Leaning against the doorframe, unable to enter the room, she put her arms across her chest and shook her head. The tears on her cheeks made her face cold.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Henry’s father turned back to his son and Miriam felt as if she wasn’t there. There was a nakedness to Henry’s father as he hunched over the bed and gently shook his son’s body.

  ‘Henry,’ he said, delicately, his voice thin with fear. He shook him again, harder this time, more desperate. ‘Henry.’

  An ambulance came out of the blackness and took Henry away. The sound of it woke the children and Miriam took them into the conservatory at the back of the house. She sat them down and looked at them. She felt as if something had been amputated from her body, a sense of disruption to her balance.
r />   ‘Kids,’ she said.

  Her voice was shaking. She didn’t know how to do this.

  The children shivered in the cold air of the conservatory. Miriam found a shawl that had belonged to her mother-in-law and covered them.

  ‘Your father,’ she said, and stopped. ‘Umm.’ She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and bit her bottom lip. She made her mouth into a small hoop and breathed out the boiling air in her throat. ‘Dad’s . . .’ She stopped again. She used her little finger to scoop out the small tear that had formed in the corner of her eye. ‘Your dad . . .’

  ‘Mum? What’s wrong?’ said Edward. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  She looked at Edward but he was a blur.

  ‘He’s gone with the angels,’ she said.

  The children didn’t say anything at first as the fact crossed to them and then into them, settling slowly, like rain on hard soil. Then she noticed Edward move a tiny bit closer to his younger sister, their mass underneath the shawl shrinking. He lifted his arm and put it around the little girl.

  Henry’s father sat at the window in his favourite chair and looked out into the solitary darkness. An image of Henry running along the beach as a boy, the sand spitting about his feet, the shrill song of his laughter, played in his head.

  Just before the dawn came, he picked up the telephone from the little table next to him and called Henry’s brother. The connection bloomed open and there was no turning back from the realness now. It swelled all around him.

  ‘Joseph, it’s Dad.’

  ‘Dad . . . it’s the middle . . . what’s wrong?’

  Henry’s father closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Joseph, it’s your brother.’

  A delicate silence grew up along the phone line.