Twice the Speed of Dark Page 16

  But I was afraid, more afraid than I had expected to be. Not as afraid as I had been of violence, not the gut-clenching fear of imminent danger, but the steady, low-grade fear of uncertainty. I had learned that I could forget myself, and that knowledge meant I was slow to find myself again. Having been undone once, so unexpectedly, became a cautionary tale that kept me prisoner in uncertainty and anxiety. I was cautious, and though not vehement in opposition to Ryan’s renewed love, a tentative player. I took once more the path of least resistance, reasoning that time and distance would more safely achieve separation.

  It is hard to remember why I let him have any role in my life at all. But to understand myself, I must try. I castigate myself, then in turn pity the girl I was, feel only tenderness and understanding. I want to shout myself down for a fool. But what would be the use of that? A fool or not, my story ended here in this vast, black emptiness, this geography of speed and arc. I long ago decided I was not to blame for that ending. I was only nineteen. This place has made me so much older than I was when I died.

  So I pull back from calling myself a fool. I must try instead to understand. I took a path of least resistance, hoping that his way and mine would neatly, gently split, peel away as easily as a long leaf from a stem of meadow-grass. I was scared of the fight of parting; who would not be? You cannot be called a fool because you are scared to anger a dangerous person. That specific, special fear, that intimate, orchestrated fear, had gathered other fears into me. Letting the idea of love be present between us kept the most frightening danger at bay. He, sensing he might lose all, tried the strategy that wound me in so effectively the first time. Ryan’s rediscovered care seemed to offer a return to what had helped me feel so secure just a few months before. But I knew as well how extremely things could veer, and I had learned too much about what horrors there were so nearby.

  For many weeks, he did nothing to hurt or upset me. He took great effort to do the opposite. He claimed self-loathing for having been stupid enough to push me away, to let the extremity of his love for me push me away. He told me he was so sorry he had ever done anything to make me doubt him. Even in my fearful uncertainty, I felt such sweet relief at those words. It had not been my fault after all. I was grateful to him for coming to his senses, for no longer being consumed by doubt and jealousy. Grateful. I shudder at the recollection, furious; a frequency thunders out from me so shrieking that it must belong to sound.

  *

  It was a short time from my move to London until my death. Only a few weeks. There is no reason now for me to attempt a good account of myself, only to understand. But I do remember. It is part of me, the cautious joy of feeling that I was nearly free. Part of that joy came from his renewed care.

  One day, a fatal day, he came to visit. We walked side by side across the gentle slopes and sweeps of a park. Dog barks flattened in the slight fog and cold of the day, the breath of runners misting as they passed, lost in the drive of their private music. I talked to him, openly, honestly, and told him how much he had frightened and hurt me. Because we both looked only at the ground before us, not at what such intimacy left bare on our faces, I was able to say what had always been shut off before I had formulated the words. My telling ended as we approached a group of broad and ancient trees. We stood in the dimmed light under the bare branches. I tried to see in his face the effect of my words. He wouldn’t look at me. I saw that he was crying.

  It was a mistake. I thought those tears marked something, meant something healing. If he was sorry after all, if he was even a little ashamed, then the harm was somehow lessened. How much easier to carry on as we were, believing once more in each other. I could stay with Paul and Marie as long as I wanted, they had told me. Ryan had no plans to move to London. We could just start again, in a new and better balance. Things, I thought, go wrong for people because of the circumstances they find themselves in, not because of the people they are. It was a mistake.

  Chapter 15

  Anna wakes early on her second-to-last day. After she has eaten and had coffee in the lounge of the hotel she goes for a walk. There is a headland with a rocky promontory, a small cone-shaped hill. Distance is as uncertain as size, but she aims towards it, a slow walk, time passing under her feet. Towards the edge of the town, she hears her name and turns to see Stefan wave at her from a building on the beachfront. He beckons her over. He is sitting in a wicker chair, at a small folding table in front of a building that looks like a boat shed of some kind. There is a large pot of coffee on the table. He invites her to join him. He pulls up a second, wooden, chair and gestures her to the more comfortable cushioned wicker one, then goes inside, coming back a moment later with a second cup and a carton of milk held against his body.

  Stefan says if she doesn’t mind he will walk with her; there is a small beach on the other side of the promontory they could visit. Anna is pleased to accept his company. He tells her the bay is less populated than this one, often completely empty. There, the wind buffets the shore in jumping eddies, not the long sweeps favoured by surfers. That and the tricky access ensures the bay remains usually unvisited. They finish their coffees and head off. The conversation is easy; they talk the main roads, the basic shapes, the broad strokes. She tells him she has no children. She doesn’t tell him she had a daughter. She doesn’t tell him her daughter is dead. She doesn’t tell him her daughter was killed. She doesn’t tell him that the man who killed her is called Ryan and he goes shopping in her home town.

  They pull away from the shore and upwards, cutting across the landward side of the headland on a track that is not surfaced, two slim, dull snakes moving in parallel curves through stones and shrubs. There is a trail of bottles and cigarette packets at the edge of the track, enough to show that people do come here after all. Probably young people in cars, music hurtling from open windows, chasing down the promise of evening, the thrill of long night. At this time Anna and Stefan are the only people around.

  The conversation stalls as their breath is saved for the walk. The track becomes narrower and steeper, fit for hikers only. Soon they are over the saddle of the promontory, and the path curves inland, around the edge of a small bay. The rocks between the track and shore are jagged and steep. She sees that further along there is a smaller path sneaking through the rocks down to the beach. The descent is steep but passable enough with care. Once on the sand there is a sense of enclosure, and, in spite of the increased volume of the sea as it bounces off the jagged rocks that surround the thin moon of sand, a sense of hush; though it is loud, the sound becomes soothing in its constancy, a blanket over all, a sonic lid keeping out the rest of the world. She walks to the water, kicks off her shoes and stands calf-deep in the sea.

  Moments pass calmly in the rush of sound and wind that thicken the air, filling the curve of the bay, packing the spaces around them. A baffling wool of weather and noise. Stefan lies on the sand, propped up on one elbow, twirling a slim twig through the top layer of sand. His shirt flops around him as if spilled. He looks up occasionally, past her towards the open sea. She crosses slowly back and forth in the lowest reaches of water, looking at the sand by her feet, looking for treasure on the shore. Eventually she joins Stefan and sits too, knees up under her chin, held close in wrapped arms. It feels good to be in the empty space, away from even the sedate chug of vacation life at the hotel.

  Stefan asks her when she is due to go back to England. The strings around her wrists, her waist and thighs pull threateningly tight. Not so gentle a reminder. She is silenced by everything that they mean, a gagging restriction in her throat. Ryan is trying to escape into her words. She swallows. And remembers with dismay that she is due to go back the day after tomorrow. So little has changed. After a pause, she tells Stefan she leaves in two days, apparently revealing something of the despair it causes her, for he looks at her closely and asks if she is all right. She tells him she has a number of problems, trailing off awkwardly. She tells him it is difficult for her to talk about. Stefan does not
push her; her reluctance to talk is clear in the scratchy stringing of words she has managed to drag out. He says that if she wants to talk to him she can (and maybe talk with a relative stranger might help – everyone has told her so. Many, many times). She latches onto this gift, with gratitude that it has been offered, saddened that she won’t accept it. So possessive are we about that which ruins us.

  As they move back to more general conversation, Anna relaxes, and they talk, easy once more in each other’s company. Stefan tells her of his divorce, the bitterness he experienced after losing his hand in a traffic accident. He had been a photographer for newspapers and journals, a successful man with a family and career he’d dreamed of. He tells her that after the accident, self-pity got the better of him, alcohol greased the wheels, and he became, he says, a horrible person. The relationship with his daughter here, and another daughter and son still in Germany, had to be painstakingly rebuilt over the last few years. But he and the children’s mother parted for good. He then set up a business with a partner, sold out to the partner to come here. All these years told in a few moments, told with an ease formed in the softening wisdom of age. She knows this wisdom in others.

  After some time, they pull themselves gingerly up from the sand, slowly and with care for creaking knees and ankles. Their joints are stiffened by sitting on damp sand that is cool in spite of the warm day. Stefan helps steady her as she slowly straightens up. They laugh as he has to jiggle a foot to get rid of pins and needles. The path back up to the track is a challenge for stiff legs, but the climb soon loosens and warms them.

  She and Stefan part company at the same place they met. Anna heads back to the hotel alone. Back in her room, she sits on the balcony with her writing book. She feels grateful for Stefan’s company, enjoyed being with him. For a moment she envies him, for the grandchildren, for the life he lives with his family. For the way he has let his misfortune drift away into the past like an untethered boat on calm water. She pulls away from envy and feels instead gratitude for small acts of friendship, looks forward to meeting Estela later that evening.

  Before going out to meet her, she turns to the news.

  3 January

  Roadside bomb, eighteen killed.

  So many people dying, I can’t catch them all, it’s impossible. Eighteen out of hundreds. And I don’t even have the energy for all eighteen.

  A reserved man, polite and ordered by an old-fashioned courtesy. Sometimes he and his wife will dance together in their front room, re-enacting the formal courtesies of courtship. A postcard sent from their youth. They are solemn but laugh gently at their creaking knees, wrinkled hands resting in imitation of uncertainty on thickened waists.

  Two years old, sweet smile and fat feet. She is shy and curious. She holds out her little dress by the hem so she can look down at the pattern.

  Athletic and agile, like his father. Under his T-shirt he wears a silver chain with a drop-shaped medal that he found in the street. He believes it will spill magic for him one day. He found it in a dusty corner at a precise moment of fervent hoping, a dull glint, a silver promise.

  A languorous, moody girl of twelve. She hardly bothers to speak to her mother. Really, she loves her with a depth that would have lasted many times the short twelve years she has had. But she is moody with the early summer storm of her age. Prickly, tetchy, lazy with the unexpected heat.

  A boy of nineteen who has the grace of a true athlete, an eye, an arc that understands speed and space. He throws, catches, runs, races and seems to glide, a fin that cuts through time and space, a bird’s wing. He has the prowess of Achilles and the gentle grace of all his seven siblings, raised in harmony and careful love by a widowed mother and her two indefatigable sisters.

  A girl who could do cartwheels the length of a football pitch, bark-brown hair sweeping the sparse summer grass, a steady arc of progress, four limbs turning turning turning, as if to keep rolling away through the fields, into the summer sky beyond. A girl with river eyes, an unsettled green, or brown. A girl who felt the injustices of the world as if they happened on her own skin.

  She is there again, a ghost-glimmer on the page, a dusting of memory amidst invention. No secret revelations, no subconscious rising; this is not a leak of steam as pressure builds. This is a deliberate summoning. She tries to look. But only in tiny increments. She tries to look. And quickly the buffers are hit, the barriers lowered, the way halted. Thank God. She turns away. Her own guard dogs turn against her, snarl, quiet but menacing, eyes locked on her, a low growl as they watch her leave.

  But there she was, close enough to see details – a small mole on her cheek, the flecks of green in her eyes. The one who sneaks aboard and quietly insists she is seen, quietly says look at me. How she has missed her girl, banished from thought for the trains of misery that drift in behind her, quiet as her tread but choking and deadly. Woeful veils blocking out happy memories. She is clothed in darkness too impenetrable. So she is banished. Poor girl, she did not dress herself this way; it is Anna who clothes her thus. Poor darling girl pushed away once more. What kind of mother is she to banish the daughter who has already lost so much? What kind of mother is she?

  Chapter 16

  I find myself in that room, looking at the carpet, the place where I died. Bland, utilitarian. An oatmeal backdrop for my cooling body, at once both heavier and less anchored than I ever was in life. Yes, it is where I fell. I can remember it, if I try, if I must. Oatmeal, magnolia, white gloss. The markers of a temporary home. A front door key and domestic utility made cheaply nice. I had spent the hour before my death bleakly mollifying, burdened by the necessity of such a routine. Burdened by the chemistry of panic under my skin. Burdened by the hollow expediency, by now, of my own words. I didn’t quite know then that they weren’t true, so gradually had they become untrue. So confusing and jarring had been the passage of those months that honest interrogation was a luxury. Of course I love you. No, I want to be with you. I’m sorry. And the true words too. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m not seeing anyone, I’m not interested in him, I hardly even know him. It doesn’t need to be like this, Ryan.

  A commonplace. An unnecessary argument between ordinary people. Nothing to gain in taking it so far. It wouldn’t even be in the news. But violence, at least whilst it was happening, satisfied something in Ryan. Maybe just for the uncensored joy of giving in totally to anger, to an animal rage. But nothing to gain. Look at him now: dulled, quieted, less than he was. Those cruel moments of relish changed everything for him as well as for me. For Mum. For Dad. His parents too. So proper and discreet, so proud of their son. How their lives too changed when mine ended.

  I can’t be sure of everything that happened; there had been some snarling moments quickly covered over, buried by him, cast from view by me. I had made some new friends, I remember, on my course in London. I was excited about a project with Matthew and Ben. I liked them both. I think they were a cause of one of the black moods. But he mastered it. I thought it was a good sign. I was very busy anyway, for a number of weeks, and very excited about the new term. I went back home for the weekend to celebrate my twentieth birthday with the family and with Ryan. We were all going to go out for a meal. Ryan had asked that we first spend an evening just the two of us, as it had been so long since we’d spent any time together and he didn’t want to see me only with everyone else there. I was late leaving for my train. I had had a birthday drink I think, with my new friends, and they decided to see me off. My good cheer was boosted by a bottle of cava that Ben had bought to drink on the way to the station. I regretted leaving the joyful time with my new friends for the flat and a tense little duet with Ryan.

  Ryan had also been drinking, a bottle of good red wine that he’d opened without me as I was late. I was late by less than ninety minutes; it seemed unnecessary to take up solo drinking as a protest. But as usual, the pattern of trying to rebuild fell to me. I apologised, often. He was petulant to start with. He gestured to the table; a gift wrapped in
stiff brown paper with a white ribbon sat next to the one clean, one used wine glasses. He said he wanted me to open it now. It was a necklace, curved silver sections with stars cut into it, delicate metal with a hammered finish. It was very pretty. I took off the necklace I wore all the time – a silver daisy on a silver chain, from Mum and Dad on my sixteenth birthday – to try it on.

  I don’t remember how things deteriorated so extremely. I know I had been trying to explain my enjoyment of my new project. I know that Ryan had become angry again, about me being late, about me talking too much about my course. I know that I felt a ghastly sinking of my whole insides that ended with a lurch into terrible fear as the first blow landed in my stomach. I was bewildered, panicked, I was trying to explain, trying to explain, trying to explain. No, you are mistaken. I love you. Those half-true, untrue words spent like a bribe, enriched by the lavish sales pitch of fear. I LOVE you. I pleaded as he punched me again, his face contorted, amplifying the violence with its dislike and contempt. No, Ryan, don’t. Please don’t. He called me a selfish bitch and punched me twice more, I think mainly on my arms, raised over my face. He grabbed the necklace he had just recently helped me fasten, pulled me towards his ugly face and punched round from his shoulder to the side of my head. The necklace broke, hung in his fist. I staggered and fell, hitting the other side of my head on the kitchen units. I fell to the carpet and felt the blackness swirl in like ink dropped into a glass of water.