Twice the Speed of Dark Page 3

  Searching for distraction, she picks up her phone, checks emails and messages. There is a text from Sophie, her dear friend, saying Anna had left behind a cardigan after dinner the evening before. It was a happy gathering, perhaps designed by Sophie to fill these awkward days that loom before Anna. Sophie’s husband, Brian, cooked a wonderful meal, though Anna wished they didn’t need to talk about it quite so much. Over many such evenings, they had all made it clear they admired his prowess in the kitchen, but Brian never got tired of eliciting praise for his latest culinary adventure. Tony and Simon were there as well, full of the joys of a trip to stay with friends in Oslo. Moira, whom Anna had worked with at the university, gave the usual persuasive and enthusiastic chat about Anna writing something. She meant well, Anna knew, but she found it annoying, the way Moira made it sound as if writing a book was a sacred duty, or as if she thought it might save her. Anna had toyed with the idea of turning research into a book perhaps, because she missed working, being involved with something. But she could never find a beginning, and nothing had ever begun.

  Anna replies to Sophie’s message, saying, without a time or date, that she will call in for her cardigan. There are several messages and texts awaiting a response, from Michael, her ex-husband. She knows what he wants because he has been talking about it for a long time. He talks with blunt vigour, persuasive enthusiasm. He talks so as to take up the space that might otherwise be occupied by Anna’s doubt and resistance. He offers up the counterarguments before he stakes out the plans. Because he knows she will be unwilling; he has as much experience of her as she does of him, after all. What he does not know is that for her, his enthusiasm is not a warm persuasion but a bully’s cudgel. His expansiveness sweeps those around him into his own plans without him noticing whether that is where they want to be. He wants to make a celebration of what for her is buried torment – twisted midnight fear and sudden, solitary afternoon panic. He wants to celebrate this impending anniversary; he wants to celebrate a life whose absence Anna has still not learned to calibrate. Her strategy, once more, is avoidance.

  Michael’s emotions open up, pop like crackers, corn firing in a buttery pan. He makes himself bigger, bursts with a thousand tiny breaks, confronts head-on and wails. He breaks himself to be whole again. He seems whole now, and maintains his wholeness by revisiting, re-breaking himself in small ways. He thinks Anna can do the same. She cannot. If he wins the battle to take her with him, she will not be able to skate a wide arc. She will have to get close, a footpad’s gentle creep, Grandmother’s Footsteps across the tarmac that has been laid down over the years. Traversed in any direction it still represents a passage to the same destination. This is no playground game. It is enough that she knows what is there – does she need to tap it on the shoulder so it turns round and once more becomes the wolf? The wolf that, granted, though it may be tamer with age, is still a dark predator loping always just off the path.

  Anna sighs, turning away from the anxiety these thoughts feed. There are three empty pages in her green exercise book, room for a few more, but she will need to buy a new book when she goes shopping later in the afternoon, so she can continue with her accounting.

  2 December

  A boat has capsized, trying to reach Italy. Most of the people were rescued, but no one seems sure how many were not.

  A woman. Her hand aches from writing; she takes a break from marking papers. A break from the words words words, repeated ideas and occasional inspiring shimmers of illuminated thought glinting in the shoals. To one degree or another, she is always tired. But whatever the tiredness of hand and eye, she puts all of her mind into building up her students, constructing them in an act of will, despite their dragging self-deprecation. She hopes to hold them up long enough to inspire, long enough for them to catch sight of themselves, so that her timid, talented girls might say ‘look at me!’ and in a breath, take over from her. For she knows that what she does with wearying determination, they could, by rights and with a flick of will, do with immaculate ease for themselves.

  But, war began, her husband was killed, the girls have stopped coming to learn, there is no longer a school for them to learn in. She has a cousin who married and moved to Hamburg. She hoped she might be able to find her way to her.

  Anna closes the book, now full. She puts on her coat and goes out to the car. The car seat is cold, the steering wheel too. She turns on a stale blast of heat. Prehistoric heat, stolen from the ancient, only source, sun. Heat that fell on different shores millions of years ago, growing bodies and shells, to be spilled from the vents as a quick, uncomfortable blast smelling of plastic. How many tiny translucent bodies grew in the tepid salty shallows, whisker limbs gently probing the tide harvest, to make her warm this cold winter morning? She reverses out onto the lane, as always empty of other traffic. There might occasionally be the odd horse with a briskly effective rider, usually Marjorie with her straight back and empire-era opinions, or one of the athletic girls from the other side of the village. John Farnsworth on his tractor, willing to exchange no more than a wave in all these years of occasional passing. A wave not accompanied by a look – he knows she is there; he doesn’t need to look at her to prove it. They have spoken actual words perhaps three times, in the pub. Michael used to try quite hard to befriend John – he tries subtly to conquer everyone, she thinks, dismissively – but she is satisfied enough with a nod and a wave. She embarrasses John in some way, which does not make a basis for friendship.

  She drives the slender lane down the edge of the chalk hills. At the bottom of the steep escarpment it meets a busier road. The plane stretches out, flat winter fields gradually making way for the city of Oxford. It is early enough to find a central parking space. She drives into the middle of the city, nosing the car down into a small underground car park near the shopping area. She gets out to buy her ticket, looks attentively at a man locking up his car. He is tall, taller than her, well made. She feels a longing that she thought had emigrated. Sourness that she does well to keep outside of her waking mind is there too. It has been an age since longing led anywhere. It has been a long time. She thinks she is happy with that; she thinks that this absence is what she has chosen. She turns abruptly from her thoughts. Town and people pass her by, a new briskness in her step telling her that she is busy, that she has not felt longing for a man in a blue jumper, locking the door of his car in the small car park. She accidentally imagines how his shoulders might feel under the expensive commonplace blue of the jumper, how it might feel to lean into that shoulder. Impatiently she tears up that picture, screws it into a tight ball and briskly returns to her dishonestly busy life.

  In the bookshop she lingers, fingers trail and touch, flip covers to read reviews; all is pauses. Towards the till is a table covered with blank books, empty pages, journals and sketchbooks. One, covered in suede-like fabric, is the colour of bluebells. A picture of woods opens before her, the glory of April, the beautiful freedom of youth. A carpet of bluebells, the bitter sap that stays on fingers in the used-to-be time of gathering huge jars of heavenly blue. A childhood spent in chalk hills and beech woods, when late spring turns the woodland into a vessel of cathedral light. Her fingers smooth across and drop to open the cover. Bookshops invite touch quietly, the gentle ease of opening a book that you might not buy. This one has blank, off-white paper and look-at-me stitching, a book that self-consciously implies the hand that made it. She likes the heavy curve it makes in its soft covers, the petal-smoothness of the pages, the weight of it. She buys it then leaves, feeling the book banging against her hip in the large bag hanging on a long strap over her shoulder.

  Wishing to find a birthday present for Sophie, she heads for a department store. The tasteful goods stand on islands between wide avenues, serene and well-tended. No racks of sale tops, jammed in and bedraggled, dangling from one end of the hanger by a now permanent bump in the cheap jersey shoulder, or garments trailing from skinny satin ribbon loops into puffballs of dust and hair under the disp
lay. Even on the busy days there is room to sweep in a direct line from the row of front doors to any department. She heads to womenswear, fingers a sea-green scarf, languid silk that slips between her fingertips, a colour she knows would suit Sophie. She takes it with her and selects some trousers and a few tops that she decides to try on. Anna likes clothes, enjoys the small tactical act of putting together an outfit that is subtle but distinctive. She has a wardrobe of tailored and stylish clothes – plums, umbers and dove greys, mohair, wool. Rich surfaces cushioning life. A statement necklace of black jet, a tactical proclamation of her individuality and status as a person with style. Something easy for which she feels she has gained much undeserved praise.

  She rustles around somewhat petulantly in the changing room, glad for a solid door with an actual lock, not a too-small curtain that gets bumped open by her skinny behind as she bends to pull up trousers. She buys the trousers and one of the tops, as well as the scarf for Sophie. She leaves the store and walks down the pedestrianised street. The city is quiet. The drizzle that began the day has stopped, the clouds parted. Winter sun skims the tops of golden walls. On a whim, she makes her way up St Aldate’s to the river and walks along the river path for some way. On the way back, she stops at the terrace of a pub, not yet open for the day, where many lively and enjoyable summer evenings were spent, she and Michael and the colleagues at the university who had become friends. Coots glide by in formation, losing their squadron shaping as they string out towards the bank. She sits for some time at one of the puddled empty tables, marking sad memories of happy times, slender echoes from lost summer days. She sits still long enough to catch them as they bounce off the underside of the stone bridge and skim by.

  Anna is angry with herself for succumbing to the past. She turns around to head back towards the town centre and the car park.

  But she is halted mid-step. There he is. All of her blood disappears; she is drained of all connection to now. The world tilts in ugly, unhelpful planes, and she is about to slide off. She sees that he has seen her. He looks startled, a moment of uncertainty, hesitation, and then he goes past her. He hurries past; panic hastens his pace. He is gone. Her blood is gone. She catches a brief glimpse of a grey coat, his back, as the world swings briefly into line. She has to sit. She sits on a bench, a town drinkers’ bench, grimy and wet. Her new purchases drop amongst chewing gum and fag butts and damp. She feels sick. Her blood is replaced by gasoline, a petrol bomb churning in her belly. She feels sick. She feels vertigo, hanging off the world into the endless, endless drop of space. Gravity is skewed, no longer necessarily an ally, no longer connected to her at all perhaps. What is connected to me? What to hold onto in this unchained undoing? She holds the damp wood of the bench. Eventually, all the shards that this moment has become slowly shiver and slant back into place, slowly take a recognisable shape around her. She leans over her knees, begging gravity to hold her tight, pull her closer to the anchoring earth. She recognises the place, but she is lost, like one of the ghosts she sees, slow-blinking, unexplained, in the trees. What has happened to me? Why am I here?

  Time concertinas in and out, sound wavers, sickness rises and falls. Time, squeezed or stretched, passes and soon she reckons the world with customary strategies. She notices that it is cold. She notices that she feels sick and that it is getting darker. Her body is connected once more, via this reckoning, to the world; gravity holds her, winter colds her, though her undoing hangs in the air like the ending chime of a bell, petering out into the far reaches of space. She gets up and walks, feeling the parch of her mouth, the weakness in her legs. Her bag, with keys and money, luckily already slanted across one shoulder by a long strap, accompanies her automatically, the book still bumping against her hip. The store carrier bag is left behind, soaking up the drizzle and the spilled Tennents under the bench. She fumbles for her phone. Who to call? What to say? She doesn’t know what to do. She might be sick. What does she do now? She can’t think of the person who would be able to answer those questions. She pauses, leaning for support on a lamp post. Her phone is dropped back into the bag around her shoulder. She wants to go home.

  Back in the car she is shaky, breathless, uncertain of everything. Her hands in her lap clench the fabric of her clothes. She breathes, rusty-saw breaths that snag. Panic still flutters at the corners of her eyes. Her thoughts stumble, become uncertain, irrational. She is cold with the shock. Eventually she struggles with the car, the ludicrous pillars and turns of the car park. Miraculously she doesn’t catch a cement wall, or bump another car. The car stalls in the traffic, but finally she gets home.

  Home, pulled around her like a parka, like a stone wall and a moat. She sits still, though there is a demolition derby crashing under her skin. Rages skid and screech, making tight turns around her organs. She sits it out. She sits still. Night cools further on the windowpanes. She sits at the kitchen table, makes tea, opts instead for wine. The discarded tea strengthens and cools; an oily slick forms on the surface. She thinks about calling Sophie. Sophie has helped her so often with difficult times. Yet she can’t bear to return to that claustrophobic care. She doesn’t want to be in the middle of a web of others. She already can’t move.

  There is nothing she can do. Nothing at all to end what is real about this. There is no pretend, no alternative, no strategy that will change the flint-hard, flint-sharp truth. He has come back. He is here. And Caitlin is not. Her girl, her beautiful girl, is gone, and in this world there is still him. A shard of that flint shears off and starts carving her out from the inside. She is being hacked empty in small ugly chops by that savage blade.

  The wine is disappearing, from bottle to glass to her. She tries to reason it out. What she wants now more than anything is to not see him. The rage she feels would make that true by securing his death, smash him out of the arena with one of the battered cars that race inside her. Run that fucker down. She grits her teeth and quells the anger, breathes hard through her nose, gritted teeth and flared nostrils. All other hates pale into a cross-stitch hobby compared to this. Every bad thing she has ever felt spins round and down onto that man, tightens around him, a winding sheet of sheer hate. Yet, his nasty surprise today aside, he is untouched, unknowing of the harm she wishes him. He will perhaps be shaken, count himself lucky that she did not manage to do more than stare; he may decide to avoid that part of town again. Then in minutes, he will probably be back to whatever life he has now, whatever brought him back here.

  Maybe he is at his parents’ house, somewhere on an edge of that small town, just a few miles away, that she has scrupulously avoided for years, a blank in her memory, a map of avoidance. Somewhere in that boycotted terrain, a version of family life, for them, has been restored. Perhaps their nightmare is over. Their golden boy restored to them, their darling son, burnished by what he has had to endure to even greater preciousness. His blind, adoring, stupid parents, who stood by him, who did not believe his guilt. And if he has come back for good, how long until he comes back with another girlfriend? A wife? Grandchildren? Have they forgotten Caitlin? Made her no more than an inconvenience, the cause of an awkward gap in his CV? That dim couple who would not see what their son had done.

  She has dreaded seeing them, has always hoped they had moved somewhere else. Her keen eyes looked out for them, a constant low level of anxiety, even as she expected them to have slipped away in shame. But perhaps they felt no shame. Perhaps they hold him faultless still. Anna has spent so much hate on them, and counselled herself out of it, so many times, reminded herself that it was Ryan, not they, who hurt Caitlin. But, tied to him so closely, they were implicated in his acts. They can drown in the turbulence of her hatred for their son for all she cares.

  Are they being supportive, helping him get back on his feet? Will he be eating a nice meal with them, cooking for them? Or praising his mother’s cooking, hearty gusto acted out round the dining table? Will he tell them he has seen Anna? It does not signify, either way. What matters is that he is here; hi
s life, his strategies, his habits be damned. He is here and her girl is dead.

  The drab lumpen alloy of ordinary life is forged, beaten and stretched into a wire; the clinker falls heavy, burning her feet. The long night stretches out, painfully slow and thin, taut with misery. Endless. The wine, a second bottle, is a companion but not a help. Several times she picks up her phone, nearly calls Michael, nearly calls Sophie. Nearly calls the police, because surely it can’t be right. But they have said all there is for them to say. Their part in the story is over – unless she does kill him. She thinks she hasn’t the courage. Though he killed without courage, so perhaps it could be done. But no, she does not have the courage to be a murderer. Can it really be that nothing but her own death will scrape away the knowledge that sits in her now? It sits as easy as a penny on a plate. This fact has no problem with its own weight, meaning or power. It is just there. It is not damaged by its own existence. It is as bland a thing in its own terms as any other fact. The table is made of wood. It is cold outside. This ring belonged to her mother. Caitlin is dead. The man who killed her is alive. She knows because she saw him today.

  She cools her forehead on the window, staring out into the dark of night. She is sour with wine, her head fat, her body hollow. Torment is exhausting. She thinks again of calling Michael, but does not. She has been told so many times that she must leave this behind, that she must stop. That it is harmful, pointless, damaging. But they are wrong. There is nothing else. How can there be another way? How could she know that in spite of best intentions, in spite of ground covered, torments ignored, endless therapeutic conversations and bitter arguments, that she is not, after all, prepared for this? That she is not, after all, able to let it go? She cannot live with the knowledge that he is free, in all likelihood a few miles from here. This life, this land, this piece of the world. She wishes with impotent storm fury that she could prevent it.