Doctor Who_ The Taint - Michael Collier [54]
'Right. Of course.' Roley decided this would be good therapy for himself, as much as for them. 'We'll begin.'
5.1
Russell. Confined Spaces and the Dark [1946-63]
Silence. Russell Waller was at peace.
It was quiet in here, dark, dry and quiet. The blackness was absolute. At the back of his mind Russell dreamily imagined he was under the sea, miles and miles under, floating in a warm bubble that let him breathe. He'd always wanted to go to sea.
He realised he couldn't hear Dr Roley's voice any more, telling him how relaxed he was feeling. He couldn't hear anything; maybe that was because he was underwater. There was no pressure in his ears, not like that time he'd tried to drown himself; maybe it didn't work like that when you were in the bubble. But he was under the water and his hair was floating as if it was wet, even though he was dry. If anything here had eyes that could see through the darkness, they would see his mark, see him tor what he was.
For a second he thought he was going to panic. Roley had told him to relax, that it was safe, but he'd probably told that to Austen too.And if Austen was dead - and he was sure he was, whatever Dr Roley might say -
Old Nobodaddy might need another vessel to house himself in, like those big, scuttling crabs that took discarded shells for their own. In the dark, down here, he might be mistaken for something discarded. He'd tried to throw himself away so many times before, but they'd always found him in time. And he didn't want to do it now. He was earning money, he was starting to talk to people. For the first time, he'd been starting to feel better.
This was a different darkness, but it still reminded him of when he was a kid, before he was marked. The darkness had been his lot, then, familiar to him; unwelcome in the beginning, perhaps, but not threatening. His mum and dad had made him intimate with it.
They'd made out it was a game at first; his mum would tell him they were playing hide-and-seek. Dad didn't want to play many games when he came back from the war, so this was quite special. The first few times they'd said they were going to fetch his friends and see if they could find him. They'd praise him a few hours later, telling him he was so clever not to be found by the other children, and he'd fallen for it, glowing with pride, until his friends made out they'd never gone looking for him, trying to spoil his moment of triumph. By the time he'd believed them, they'd stopped really being his friends.
And his parents started playing the game more often: they would go out and tell him they couldn't trust him to behave himself so he'd have to stay in. And soon the rules of the game had changed. To make it more fun, they found stranger, sillier places to hide him.
And so he'd been left in the dark for hours at a time, sweating, itching, bunched up in a box or a cupboard drawer, or padlocked into a suitcase. It had scared him a little at first, the constricting blackness, but he'd been able to come to an agreement with it. It would keep him safe, welcome him, hide him in return for his company. He'd almost suffocated the first few times, but after a while he'd learned to breathe slowly and shallowly, to slow himself right down. The darkness always helped, it focused him. And the spaces he was squeezed into were always too small to hide anything else except him, so it wasn't really all that scary.
When he was seven, his mum and dad had another baby. They didn't speak to Russell for weeks, kept him in the wardrobe, gave him stuff for tea every night but otherwise ignored him. It was as if the screams of the baby had blocked up their ears. He wondered if it was calling for help .The only time he'd tried that, his dad had beaten him so badly he couldn't sit down for a couple of days. He'd never tried calling for help again. He'd thought the baby very brave to shout and scream like that.
Gradually they'd come to include Russell more. He'd stopped wetting the bed; his dad had said not changing the sheets would 'learn