Twice the Speed of Dark Read online

  Worthwhile distraction, a successful career a vital component of the mortar in these walls, allowed them to stand almost always unregarded, for many years. But now the gaps are beginning to show, and the effort of managing the constant mending, though unconscious, weighs heavy on her.

  In retirement, Anna has in part achieved diversion with an endless string of domestic chores and petty errands. She shops, fusses in tetchy boredom about the house, changes cushion covers, taking weeks to decide which colour, pretending she cares. Nothing really changes; the house is much the same as it was when Caitlin died, when Anna’s husband Michael still lived there, but she finds ways to string out the ordinary acts of maintenance.

  She meets with a small group of friends, drinks coffee, drinks wine. She thinks about ways to fill her time. She walks almost daily in the fields and woods near her home. And she writes portraits of dead people she has never met.

  *

  Nine years before, when Ryan was convicted and jailed for causing Caitlin’s death, Anna searched newspapers for a report of the crime and the court case, for signs that the world reflected her fury or had at least marked her loss. She found one short paragraph in the local paper. An explanation: he was of good character, he had snapped, he had caused death by accident; being jilted had provoked him, made him lash out. Provoked. As though it were Caitlin who was responsible, as though she had pushed violent death upon herself. Anna read this and vomited, her skin prickling with heat and cold. This disingenuous framing and the indifference of its bland retelling acted as an accelerant to her wild grief. Caitlin was mentioned only as a component in Ryan’s story. No more than that.

  In the ruined months after the court case, when nothing worked, Anna pored over newspapers and watched news programmes. Could it really mean so little that people died? Could it really be of such little interest? She picked over the news, online and in print, archive and day-to-day, scouring the local and national papers for references to women killed as Caitlin had been, by men who had once claimed to love them. She discovered quickly that there were many of them – the statistics were readily available. But the women were, like Caitlin, as good as invisible. Women murdered in English towns, by exes and husbands, deaths too commonplace to rouse even curiosity. Mothers, sisters, daughters. Complex, beloved lives that, if they appeared at all, were marked only as an administrative round-up of local court activity. Anna’s black focus drove those around her to despair. Let it go, Anna, let it go. We know she mattered; we care.

  Such cajoling tenderness, such love and frustration, such gentle holding down eventually told and Anna became compliant. She turned away from the terrible absences, the reminders of her girl. She quieted herself, externally. The turmoil inside soon could not be seen or heard. But in her quest, she had noticed others. Strangers in distant lands who died in terror attacks and checkpoint shootings. They were not even given a name. Multiple deaths from drone strikes, terrorist bombs, war, passed over as a tally of the activities of one side or the other. Death, it seemed, was only of interest if it excited the morbid thrill of the unusual, the lavish fetishising of television crime dramas. Domestic violence was certainly too drab a crime. Distant strangers were too insignificant to warrant the care of mourning as well as counting.

  As grief slowed and stilled her, pulling her away from reminders of her daughter, she kept quiet attention on these other dead. It was a salve, of sorts. The news, this most ungentle showing of the world as an arena, a place of skirmishing and destroying, provided a strategy that allowed her, with unnoticed subterfuge, to tame her own grief; whilst reading, her anger came out, but as a response to news. The outrage she felt acted both as a reassurance that she remained alive to things outside of herself and as a substitute reason for her fury.

  At first she noticed only that these people were not being noticed. Fifteen people, thirty-seven people, two people. She drew her private attention to their insignificance, to the careless passing over of their lives. She damned up her own anger and poured it by the ladle on their behalf. She felt a true connection, kinship, with their unknown families. Nineteen people were killed today. There has been a bus bombing; reportedly there are twenty-three dead. After a number of slowly becalming years, she went further than simply noticing them. She began to imagine what the people were like, eventually writing portraits for each. Inventing them gave weight to her care.

  She calls them her invented ghosts. They have, in stealth, become a chorus, a quiet crowd, subtle sentinels of her grief and guardians of her homeless love. Over the last six years her collection of portraits has grown. Nine notebooks and journals are now filled with them. The latest one, an old green exercise book found in the attic, is nearly full.

  It began on a morning much like this one, a cold and sunless day six years before and a little deeper into the winter. Christmas, itself a burden, had been passed with relative ease, though the relief of that was tarnished by the anticipation of the greater test to come. The most appalling of anniversaries was looming, a few small squares in the calendar away. Four years since Caitlin’s death, aged just nineteen.

  On this day, not long before the anniversary, she had not answered the phone or gone out. After cleaning already clean cupboards and shining already clear windows, she sat to read the paper. In her habitual, well-rehearsed way, she acknowledged the dead. There had been a bomb in a distant marketplace, one of several that day. A filament snagged and slowed the story down, her habitual soft focus pulled into unexpected sharpness. Somehow that detail caught her; a marketplace, perhaps the most domestic public space there is. People shopping for food, plastic buckets, scarves, aluminium pans. A place providing easy acquisition of the humbler tools of life: domestic wares, phone parts and gaudy cases, vinyl handbags, eggs, cabbages. Mothers buying an evening meal, teenagers shopping for the excitingly new and obligingly affordable. A man buying a bucket so he could clean his house. These ordinary people doing ordinary things, they would be the dead.

  She thought of there being no dinner in some households, because the shopping never came back from the market. A husband whose anxiety makes him fear, as if seeming finally by prophecy rather than grinding habit, that his wife has been killed. A family who wouldn’t know for long hours where their father had gone. Somewhere in a town where death might just as easily come at the hands of a checkpoint soldier, a sniper, a drone. Somewhere in a world where escape from such horror resulted in thousands of drowned bodies day by day, as boats and brutal businessmen cast people to their fate in the deceptive, seductive glint of a blue sea that pretended to show the way to safety.

  Over the next days, the people behind the numbers began to materialise when she picked over stories in the news. As she was standing at a supermarket checkout she was hit by a surge of connection to the others in the queue. They were ugly and beautiful, unkempt, elegant, all mixed. Their banal ordinariness for once caught her attention, linked them to those killed by bombs in markets in Iraq or by roadsides in Afghanistan. The young man with a backpack and scraggly beard, buying four hooped-together cans of lager and some broccoli and biscuits, trousers carelessly rolled above bare brown ankles. The woman with tired eyes and pink plastic earrings, grey showing at the roots of her black hair. The old man with beige slacks and an olive cap, a small brown shopping bag ready for his bread rolls and two bananas, a small shakiness in his hands. Anna felt a tender kind of love and sadness for them, those ordinary people caught there in a tiny moment of complex lives, as those killed were caught in what became the last moment of their lives, when a crude bomb exploded near enough to kill them. Any one of them, all of them, could be one of the bodies, a life behind the numbers. She made her way through the queue and looked intently at the young cashier, haunted by a sudden picture of her, dead amidst the rubble of a faraway town, her mouth open, small teeth exposed to the heat and dust of disaster. She felt the upwell of a sob, an echo that pulsed in her chest, an inappropriate urge to shield the unknown girl from a fate that was not hers, fro
m any fate that meant her harm.

  Later, when she was walking through the woods, she thought about the nameless people killed that morning in a suicide bombing in Baghdad. What did she know about that distant place? Who were the people hidden in that neutral measuring? Her curiosity pulled them to her; she started to fill them out, describing them to herself.

  She imagined first a woman in her early forties; she saw a living body, warm, plump, sensuous. She saw black hair, falling in curves like layers of raven wings. She saw her clothed in stretchy turquoise trousers, a pale-yellow top. She saw the woman asleep in bed at night, lying curled on her side, holding her husband’s muscular brown forearm. Other pictures followed, describing the woman’s busy life. She imagined her escaping briefly from the tumult, quietly sitting on her own, on a stool in her scruffy but beloved garden. Anna picked out these details with ease, with love almost. The woman from Baghdad seemed to appear in her mind, complete in the accumulation of random details. She has stayed within easy reach of Anna’s thoughts ever since, a mute companion. Filigree ghost-patterns of love and grief crept across Anna’s hollowed insides, like lichen, like salt crystals blooming on the innards of a calcified cave.

  She imagined the others – a boy, men, women, a young girl. She saw in them ordinary beauty, a precious banality that at once made their deaths a terrible sadness. She saw curves of cheekbones, the sweep of a jawline, an array of clothing telling its own stories. The wonderful idiosyncrasies of ordinary people. She saw secret passions and hidden dreams, loves and pains, desires and hopes. She saw what was lost when they died. She imagined one of the men wearing corduroy trousers. It occurred to her that she didn’t know if men in a hot place would wear corduroy trousers, but realising how extensive her ignorance of their life was, she accepted a broad interpretation of differences and commonalities, accepted too that her own background would tell in the details more than it should. Her experiment must be one that remained ideally universal, and perhaps pragmatically crude.

  Anna was taken unawares by her experiment – her anger was replaced by tenderness. As the characters came to her she felt a bond with them, and sadness at their death, a confusing mourning of dead people who did not exist. As she walked through the woods, wintery light drifting down through the leafless branches, she saw the people standing amongst the trees, waiting and still, silent in the unexpected cold, caught inexplicably for a moment in this English woodland.

  She continued paying out in words and mental pictures what the numbers alone could not. She began to write them down. It was impossible and too gruelling to be comprehensive. But she kept to a steady, dutiful acknowledgement. Some of them, especially the first woman, she thought of often, in idle moments, enriching the picture she had made, thinking of her sitting calm and content in her garden, adding details to the story that she told for her. What had grown was a hushed but powerful love, a love built from recognition, from accepted kinship. People whose heartbeats and bones matched her own, people whose lives held nothing and everything in common with hers.

  So today, as on many other days, Anna makes coffee then sits at the kitchen table and reads. It is quiet; the only sound comes from the clock on the wall and a faint murmur of wind outside. Amongst today’s stories, seven unnamed people have been killed in a roadside bomb. Holes left everywhere by the sudden absence of people that seconds before lived and breathed, families reaching for each other across craters of loss, a whole that has become less than a half, incomplete. Anna pictures seven people, how they look, what they care about, seven people to stand in for the ones who died in a town with a name she has already forgotten, a name she could not pronounce anyway. They materialise before her, easily and clearly; their lives run like a movie, ordinary and utterly beautiful. And she is hit anew by the terrible tragedy of their deaths.

  She reaches for the latest volume, a worn exercise book, the dull green cover turning up at the corners. The book has been fattened by the dense writing covering most of the pages. She flexes the book in her hands, rolls her thumb across the edge to find the empty pages at the back. Those too will soon be filled; people die at such a rate. And though she cannot mark them all – the bombed, the drowned, the packed bodies suffocating in boat holds and locked lorries – she will keep adding to her tribe of invented ghosts. She writes quickly, stopping to think, finding in her mind’s eye the details that make the person real, real enough to matter, real enough to mourn. The first one she imagines as a plump girl of eight, in a flowered dress, passing by the hidden bomb on her way home, holding onto her aunt’s hand. She picks up her pen and starts to write the dead.

  30 November

  Seven people killed by a roadside bomb.

  She is a girl of eight, warm with puppy fat and pretty dresses. She likes to eat teacakes, picking off the chocolate first with tiny nibbles. She eats all delightful treats this way so they last and last. A life so simple and so sure that a sweet and pretty cake is the greatest joy she can imagine.

  Soft hair on a twelve-year-old boy’s head, the nap pushed into improbable freestyle licks. He has large top teeth, showing slightly whatever he does with his mouth. He walks with a Krazy Kat lope, chattering in the still-high voice of a boy. Every so often he pauses for a small moment, head on one side, teeth on his bottom lip, then resumes his joy-filled commentary.

  This man has sad eyes, dark skin, and short receding hair, still black. He has a large and untidy moustache. He plays the guitar beautifully and sings not very well but with great emotion and commitment. He is in love with a woman who lives on his street, but knows almost nothing about her. He would not wish to impinge on her by finding out. For him, emotions are to be cherished, held, explored and examined. Unrequited love is the prize in his collection.

  Four of seven is a man with a dainty moustache and smart, unattractive clothes. He is plagued by a need for particular neatness in all areas of his life. He clips and tidies, sorts and saves, orders all that he can, keeps the world at bay this way. He would be beautiful if this pernickety, slightly absurd and foolish carapace did not shield him so.

  A young woman, her graceful head tilted to one side like a bird, hair a long sweep, a skein, brushed with early grey at the temple. She is tired, pregnant with a second child. Occasionally, in crowds, her hands sweep gently before her growing belly as she walks, a gesture ready to become one of protection for her child.

  At home, this man’s children are meeting in furtive haste whilst he is out fulfilling errands, to discuss a surprise for his birthday. He has defined himself his entire adult life by the work he does to provide for his family.

  A slight woman, dark and burnished by loss. She has black eyes flattened by the pain of losing her sister, her son, and her uncle to the actions of sky-borne military, another country’s flag glittering on a distant tail fin. She lost her husband subsequently to anger, to revenge. And so the chain stretches out. Her loss to be handed forward to new mourners, new carriers.

  Anna puts down her pen and closes the exercise book. What was the ordinary happiness or boredom that was part of them, those seven, as they walked towards the last place that anybody should have been at that perilous moment? She wonders if they knew they died, if they felt the blast, if they felt fear. She wishes she could conjure them into life, preserve them, now that they are here, from the death that she invented them to enact. She pictures the young pregnant woman, the child she has left behind and the one she will never birth. She wishes she could sit her down here at the table, make her comfortable, then send her back home to her family after tea and a couple of biscuits, intact, unspoilt by death. She imagines going to the fridge, getting two beers, one for her, one for the lovelorn man, and watching him play his guitar, sympathising with his unfulfilled but loving heart as they sipped the beer in wordless companionship.

  *

  It wrecks me. Here I am, propelled, pulled by some arcane plan, or flung, an accidental gift from those strange commanding energies that cause my shape to shift in tune with
their caustic black hum. Here I am, in my old home, the home of childhood and a certainty that I bleed to know again. I bleed nothing. But I yearn. I remember the sickness of yearning. I pull myself in; it takes enormous effort to gather. My mother sits in the same chair she always sits in, the chair she sat in when I was five, when I was doing my homework at fifteen, when the two of us looked at university prospectuses in quiet excitement. When I visited, came home, perhaps hiding a bruise on my hairline. When I died, when I was gone. The same chair, the same place, the same table. She sits there, so known to me. And here I am, so unknown to her.

  Before I am flung into the darkness once more, I pull myself in enough to know her, to see her, to reach out. What I can muster, it cannot be nothing, for I feel the weight of it; I feel the shriek and the pull of it. I am made of voiceless pleading, but to no avail. She is blind to me.

  Her head is full of other ghosts.

  Chapter 2

  A new day. A new uncertain morning. Time itself holds a danger, an anniversary. Christmas a few weeks away; soon after that, the day of her daughter’s death, followed by the day of her birth. Dead on the eve of her twentieth birthday. The wrapped present from Anna and Michael sat on the kitchen table, useless and powerful, until Michael flung it into the woods in a fury of grief.

  A new day. The calendar squares reduce by one again, pulling her closer to a perilous destination. She would set a path that scraped as wide an arc as the radius would allow; she would choose a distant view. She would bind herself to a long, slow curve. But time ropes her to the smallest circle, the closest path, and drags her, keelhauls her round the sun.