Twice the Speed of Dark

  About the Author

  Lulu Allison has spent most of her life as a visual artist. She attended Central Saint Martin’s School of Art before spending a number of years travelling and living abroad. Among the bartending and cleaning jobs, highlights of those years included: in New Zealand, playing drums for King Loser and bass for Dimmer; in Germany, making spectacle hinges in a small factory; in Amsterdam, painting a landmark mural on a four-storey squat and nearly designing the new Smurfs; in Fiji and California, teaching scuba diving.

  After a decade of wandering, she returned to the UK, where she had two children and focused on art. She completed a fine art MA and exhibited her lens-based work and site-specific installations in group and solo shows.

  In 2013, what began as an art project took her into writing, and she unexpectedly discovered what she should have been doing all along.

  Twice the Speed of Dark is her first book. She is currently writing a second, called Wetlands.

  Twice the Speed of Dark

  Lulu Allison

  Unbound

  This edition first published in 2017

  Unbound

  6th Floor Mutual House, 70 Conduit Street, London W1S 2GF

  www.unbound.com

  All rights reserved

  © Lulu Allison, 2017

  The right of Lulu Allison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1911586456

  ISBN (Paperback): 978-1911586449

  Design by Mecob

  Cover images :

  © Shutterstock.com / ArtYouAre (trees)

  © Shutterstock.com / Elenamiv (sky)

  © Shutterstock.com / pzAxe (newspaper)

  © Shutterstock.com / peresanz (stars)

  © Shutterstock.com / Katyau (writing)

  Textures.com (background)

  This book is dedicated to the strangers, the shades – the two women a week and the nameless dead.

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.

  Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type TWICESPEED17 in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  Super Patrons

  Amy Allison

  Thea Allison

  Jem, Sol & Maisie Allison

  Sarah Allison

  Joe & Sallie Allison

  Philip Allison

  Olive Allison

  Robert Allison

  Bruce Amos

  William Amos

  Stephanie Amos

  Johanna Berger

  Clive Boorman

  Alex Bowen

  Samantha Brown

  Jane Carr

  Paul Clarke

  Barry Cottle

  Thurstan Crockett

  Mike Crump

  Phoebe Deans Allison

  Lilian Deans Allison

  Nansi Diamond

  Sophie Dissanayake

  Catharine Faithfull

  Alex Fenton

  Alastair Galbraith

  Zoe Glover

  Tommy Graml

  Liz Hale

  Pierre Halé

  Amanda Hallay

  Suzanne Harrington

  Brendan Hoffman

  Jenny Hunt

  Simon Jerrome

  Michi Kern

  Dan Kieran

  Katrina Luker

  Nik Maroney

  Andrew McCabe

  Josephine McGhie

  John Mitchinson

  Stephanie Monk

  Lee Oliver

  Tina Pepler

  Donna Pillai

  Justin Pollard

  Suzie Poyntz

  Mike & Chris Raab

  Matt Redman

  Jill Richter

  Kathy Roper

  Fay Rutherford

  Mike Shreeve

  Damion Silcock

  Katie Simpson

  Andrea Slater

  Uli Springer

  David Sutherland

  Caroline Sutherland

  Siobhan Taylor

  Sally Toosey

  Jane Toosey

  Debbie Walsh

  Matthew Ward

  Fiona Winterflood

  David Wolfe

  With special thanks to my dear father, Philip Allison.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Dear Reader Letter

  Super Patrons

  Frontispiece

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  Patrons

  Sometimes I am hooked by a stray wisp of gravity and pulled back to the body of the Earth. Soft grass, hot dust, a sharp stone – for drifting moments I remember how they felt underfoot. I remember how it felt to have a place. Gravity is once more my friend, my engine. The breeze on my ghost skin brushes memories of life into shimmering being.

  In this endless black emptiness, this vacuum field of bright spilled beads, I yearn for form, a body. I long for a chance to face the eternal dark of death once more.

  Did I die because by chance I met a boy? Or did my destiny shape me in some way, to meet him, to become a component in his acts? No, it cannot be so. I died because he chose it. That shivers through me. The memory of it. How he could betray love so completely. He played himself so fully that he knew no boundary to his self-expression. Perhaps he didn’t choose to kill me, but he chose not to prevent himself causing fat
al harm. He chose not to censor himself. He chose to hurt. It is puzzling, such a choice. There is so little to gain. And it hurt so much. The thud of my heart trying to hold that hurt still echoes in the blackness. This blackness is a rich enough medium to hold such waves.

  Other waves, records of love, also echo through me and the blackness. Minute, telling imprints, tiny waves. A disc, a furrowed dish. A plate of love spinning out from the warm beat of a body. The blackness holds thin echoes of those waves. So does my memory. The soft denim of my father’s shirtsleeve, the solid warmth of his shoulder beneath as I leaned my head against it. The two of us in profound and mundane harmony, sitting on the sofa, watching a film. Toast and jam cut into nine small squares. My mother sitting on my bed until I slept, because I was scared. Hours and weeks and years of familial love. And sunny days of friendship – happy girls, bright with the fun of going out, high-heel–and–lip-gloss happy. I died young, but I am ancient now. The light can’t find me any more to make me bright. I have no surface.

  I am part of this blackness, subject to it anyway, riding the waves of its vast echo, being ridden by the jags and troughs of its monstrous silent beat. It hurls me in ferocious arcs. Sometimes, I am thrown back to the softer realms of Earth, and how I try to cling, to form within myself a holding–on. To anchor in the calm blue orb of Earth.

  I often found myself, at the beginning, for long enough to gather, in the fields. I had memories of the clods of clay soil. When I lived, I was there often; it was so familiar. Many hours in these home lands. Pockets of countryside, fields and copses. Small ranges, but enough, when you look inwards for much of the time, as I did, to get lost for days. Stopping to stroke the skull dome of a chalky hunk of flint, the grey underside sheared smooth and cold as a blade. Tickling my palm with the fringed field edges – long grasses and cow parsley. A tingling memory of those sensations. I looked up at the sheltering sky for as long as I could, trying to consume, trying to become. Trying to breathe it, trying to make a new body, trying once more to become something out of nothing. But that trick belongs to a secret order. The seeds of something out of nothing are scattered liberally; it is a daily, hourly miracle. But not one we are able to perform for ourselves. I have learned for certain that you can only be given a body, not make one. You can only be gifted a place in gravity’s purlieu.

  To start with, when I was first dead, I was confused, caught between memory and experience, between memories from before and those since. I had pictures and knew faces, but I did not know if I had seen them through my living or my dead eyes. Because I see them still, those I loved, but they don’t see me, I don’t think. Sometimes I feel something, a tremor, and wonder if they do feel my presence, or think of me. But these visits, they became part of the kaleidoscope jangle of what I drag with me. I don’t always know where the pictures belong – sight or memory, living or dead eyes. I hang onto each one, to sort and join together, to find its place and knit my story stronger for the telling.

  Chapter 1

  A winter dream. She drifts across the field towards the woods. She feels sharpness underfoot and the bite of cold air in her lungs. She watches herself move clumsily across the stubbly field. She is naked, cold, her hair fallen out, her skull fragile, exposed. She recognises her body – the dry of winter sits on her; her tall shape clings forlornly to long bones. She is mad, a scream frozen, sharpening the air around her as the frost has sharpened the ground under her feet. She is bone-pale, brittle; cold, screaming frost. If she were to die naked in these woods she would lie unseen by dog walkers and children for months, hidden perfectly in the frost-hollowed waste of winter on the forest floor. Sticks and lichen. She experiments with the idea of death in the cold leaves of winter. Cold for her, cold for her dead body, but warm and sheltering for the tiny lives of hibernating insects scurrying through pockets below the surface of the Earth. They would eventually find a home below the surface of her too, making pockets in her, making loops and channels, making her hiding place ever more complete. Though in life, this would be no hiding place; her breath would give her away. In life, she is clothed in enough of autumn’s quiet pulse to be seen by others – a naked woman, bony, pale, lying stupidly on the ground in the woods. Pitifully reduced but not yet part of eternal winter. In life, she is not yet brittle enough to disappear so easily. There is a slow thrum behind her skin, the stately movement of cinnabar liquid through a time-worn muslin bag, a steady flow that will set to make jewel jars of sharp jam. Autumnal, slow, but definitely living. She turns in her bed, casts out dreams until the morning, a heavy fall into the pictureless, wordless depths of deep sleep.

  Anna wakes cold, sick-feeling. Dread has leaked from her thoughts into the soft folds of her pillow. She pulls back into herself, waiting for a different voice, the trained voice of her waking mind, to assert itself. Neutralising is the first act of every dull and waking morning. And so day turns over, the usual kind of day. There is much to do, nothing to remember. Most days will not be remembered, a tick and tock of time. She complies; she holds herself steady, flattened into lustreless, manageable boredom.

  She gets up from the tangled bed and goes to shower. The water streams down her body and the shower tiles, gently bashing sound into her ears, a pleasant, blocking roar. She scrapes hands down her skin, paring down, containing, shriving in the hot water. The escaped remnants of dread that cling, whimpering, in the crooks of her elbows are washed down the plughole before she has a chance to notice. But dread is not a finite resource; she has not lessened the load, rather removed it from sight. Capped off within, hosed off without.

  After showering, wrapped in thick towels she sits at her dressing table, looks for the thing that will drag her from indolent torpor and, though she tries to keep it from herself, knows that there is nothing. She could sit there for days if she wished.

  She turns to the window and the view across the field leading to the woods, the distant end of the nearest row of houses in the village. She has sat here so many times, noted seasons, watched small birds, caught glimpses of red jumpers and green coats in distant gardens, heard children play. She has watched each year as the hedge at the field’s boundary grows and recedes, is cut, and grows once more. It is a beautiful thing, a hedge, but a thing confined, restricted, pressed into service against its natural habits. Made to contain, made by forced containment.

  Content and languid becomes chilled and restless. A cape of cold drapes her shoulders between the towel wrapping her body and the one wrapping her hair. Her bones creak silently as she stands to dress. She pulls on warm clothes, runs fingers through her short hair, then goes down to the kitchen.

  She lives on the edge of a village, in a large, well-appointed house on a lane that pulls away like a loose thread and trails through the woods, eventually looping back onto a busier road. Though she has not always been the only occupant, and in spite of bouts of loneliness, she has developed a protective care for her privacy and cherishes the isolation. People don’t drop in.

  She lives on a generous pension since retiring sooner than the university wanted her to from a successful career as an art history lecturer and specialist in mediaeval female artists. But a busy working life did more for her than secure the pension. She should not have retired, she has recently realised, whilst still relatively young, whilst her position in the university was so secure and her status there was in the ascendency, but she had known for many years that she was performing her role out of habit. She had lost the feeling that she cared whether her students did well in life and whether they understood the world they had chosen to make their own. She thought an end to the professional performance would bring relief, but the removal of the distraction of a demanding career gave her too much time for other thoughts. Cracks began to appear in the walls she had built within herself, the internal prison cell that held her grief.

  Her daughter, Caitlin, has been dead for nearly ten years. Killed, apparently manslaughter – so slaughtered, then – aged nineteen years old, by her boyfri
end, Ryan.

  Caitlin’s death caused a split, a warp that skewed Anna so she no longer fit the smooth planes of her life. She was changed by her loss. But so was everything. Grief shone a different spectrum of light; it revealed the well-formed, polished facets of normality as flawed, treacherous, deceitful. The world did not respond in a way that made sense. Her daughter had been killed, and no one beyond a small circle of family and close friends seemed to care. Where once life had run on guidelines of tolerance, understanding and certainty, now misery and hatred set the rules. She had never known such hate before. For Ryan, for the parents that raised him and stood by him, for the jury who believed his explanation of an accident. For a world that didn’t find it a tale that was worth telling. Hate reshaped her.

  In the long-ago months immediately after Caitlin’s death and the court case that followed, Anna blasted out her sorrow with an exhausting frenzy that was at least a partial distraction from the greater pain of loss.

  This early rage was further fuelled by the response of the criminal justice system. She had not been able to accept the conclusion of the court and the men and women of the jury, whom she had particularly relied upon to understand the terrible loss of her girl. They decided that Caitlin was dead by accident, that a man who violated her body with kicks and punches, demonstrably over time, hadn’t meant it. This bewildering blunting of his crime almost killed Anna. Those men and women had decided that Caitlin wasn’t supposed to die. She was just supposed to be cowed, controlled by the pain Ryan caused, frightened enough to do his bidding. And this somehow lessened the gravity of the offence.

  Slowly, time passed and the abstract, animal efficiency of the will to survive overcame and then subdued Anna’s flailing strategies. Memories of her daughter became distant, fleeting, irregular. She gradually twisted grief away. The only direction for such a motion to take was inwards. Burning anger and the parched, agonising cold of sorrow were bound together and banished to the deep dark space inside, the emptiness created by her loss. All that she felt was screwed up tight, a dense pebble of cold and heat lodged at her core, baulked and buttressed with the betraying forms of normality. For long stretches of time she felt only the pernicious and pallid warmth of the blended extremes.