Twice the Speed of Dark Read online

  I brush past another sometimes, but they spin like me. I cannot gather enough of myself in to ask them what they know. I don’t even know, were I to find the mouth to speak, the lungs and throat to make the sounds, if sound is possible. Perhaps there are ways, new ways I will learn after millennia of spinning silently, new ways to make communion with another. Perhaps there will be things shared again. I sense them; we mingle, combine, rush through each other as we spin out alone to yet another far reach or dark and distant corner. Who knows if we yet have the option to communicate.

  I feel my fingerless way along the knotted snags, the gnarled and stained bandage, gruesome tapes that loop round and lead backwards from my ugly death. Ribbons threaded through wooden hearts. Crime scenes. I find my way backwards so that I may tell forwards. Memories can be hard to find; stories and understandings shiver, slide into view and are lost again. I know it is all there, and I will find my tale. Though it is a labour, a stagger up black, vacuum-formed mountains, pulling hand over hand through gullies carved into the cosmos, harsh channels sharper and more lacerating than any earthbound stone. I pull against the blackness that would once more fling me out past the centurion path of comets, further than the spacebound eyes of man can reach. I don’t want to disappoint, but there is nothing to tell. There is more of the same. There is still no place in which I may claim to be. I don’t want to disappoint, but I have seen nothing that seems to be a heaven. Only Earth, with her kind sky and her care-giving cradle of gravity and her beautiful sun. How blessed I am when I find her again. How hard I cling.

  I will try to tell it all, how it all happened. But you will have to be patient. I cannot say which bits I will be able to find, which will be torn again from my grasp before I can account for them, which I will miss altogether. We may have to wait for the giddy carousel to swoop round once more. I will try to make my remembered fingers grasp the streamer, pull it out of the blackness for you to see.

  Chapter 4

  Anna’s occupation with the shock of seeing Ryan, the narrowing and souring of view that his reappearance initiated, excludes other concerns entirely. For a couple of days she thinks of nothing outside of her home, nothing connected to the rest of her everyday life. She completely forgets about a meeting in London until a reminder on her phone triggers a jolting return to the concerns of the present rather than the enormous abstract legacies of the past. The meeting was arranged some weeks ago, not in deference to her own empty days but to suit the busy diary of Eva. They were meeting to discuss an offer made to Anna by a former colleague, Callum. Anna and Callum worked together at the university for over a decade. He moved into another role as the director of a small public gallery some years ago. Soon after she retired last year, Callum approached her casually regarding the possibility of her working alongside Eva as a trustee of the gallery. Two months ago he called her with a concrete proposal. Anna liked Callum but found him irritating. She was flattered by the offer and felt herself to be in need of worthwhile occupation. She knew she needed purpose, and though she was ambivalent, lacking her once clear interest in the art world, a world she had occupied her whole professional life, she was prepared to go along with meeting Eva, whom she admired.

  Though the weary anxiety of the last few days drove the meeting from her mind, she thinks hopefully that perhaps this is a worthwhile endeavour after all, a reinvigoration of old passions, a chance to invest in a new purpose. She tries to lift herself from the muddiness of the last week, going to bed early, with cocoa instead of whisky.

  After a brisk breakfast she dresses in clothes that help her define a sense of her own clear outline and she leaves for London. She turns out of the lane and heads for the motorway. First, she will catch up with her old friend Kay, who lives in Chiswick, where Anna can park and leave the car. Kay greets her warmly. They drink weak coffee, chat about what they remember of their time as students and as fledgling professionals. They fill out some of the details of what they do with themselves since they last were together, the shapes of lives; they spin the telling out for two pale cups. Kay is affectionate and welcoming, invites Anna to stay, to come whenever she likes, have dinner later. But she is accidentally intrusive. She talks of a time when they were closer, when Anna was happy, with a young family and an exciting job in a small commercial gallery. She knows that things changed for Anna and is warm and caring, but she talks of Caitlin too easily, perhaps thinking that Anna will enjoy her recollections. The two women have become distant enough for Kay not to have understood Anna’s dark reticence. It makes her seem crass and insensitive, when really compassion and kindness are in her words. Anna tells her if she has time after her meeting she will return for an evening meal, but she knows as she says this that she will invent an excuse that requires her to get back home, send a guilty text from the car, slink away without knocking on Kay’s door. Anna is glad she is parked a short walk away.

  Trampled wet leaves on the quiet London streets pattern the pavement like a grey-and-brown guesthouse carpet. She walks to the station and takes a train to the middle of the city. She walks across the river towards the Tate, a chimney, a box, a busy hulk. She has some time to kill so traipses dutifully through the collection. It looks tired, more tired than her, even. Twentieth-century art; it should be in a museum, she thinks. She is depressed by it. It does not bode well, she realises, for the prospect of working at a different, smaller gallery. She sees in that moment that her passion for art has gone; what remains are the habits of a working lifetime. For a long time, she has hidden this by railing angrily about the problems with art. Like a failing marriage, she has disguised her own lack of love by finding fault in the other, imagining that her criticism is a form of love, imagining that she attacks because she loves, not because she no longer does.

  But she goes to the members’ room for her meeting with the trustee, Eva, a woman whose passion remains vibrant and expansive. When Anna first met her, she used to make quite beautiful paintings, small and entrapping. Now she puts her considerable energy into working with Callum and concurrently running a valiant arts organisation, its many tentacles reaching out to prove that art does not belong in the elitist cul-de-sac it seems to have exerted so much effort to achieve. A good address, exclusive decor, crumbling foundations. Anna is no longer beguiled by the thick cream layer of pseudo-intellect, the slap, the greasy cover-all of invented meaning. For Eva, if you scrape that back, scrape it off, there is a vibrant, animate being, an expressive face underneath. For Anna, now, in her less forgiving years, if that greasy layer is scraped away, all she finds underneath is a plastic pot. Yet she used to love it. She used to believe. Anna feels depressed by her own indifference, feels further trapped by it. She likes Eva very much. She feels momentarily that perhaps she could follow her, let Eva’s spark relight her own ashy fire. But she does not feel that she can stand next to her and match her. Let me watch, not contribute. She tries, out of a sense of duty to some kind of action in life, to keep her options open. But they are done, and she will say no. She is glad to leave.

  It rains, small drops that seem to arrive rather than fall, lightly slicking the surfaces, enough to make the dark pavements shine in the street and shop lights. She travels the weary Underground, back to the car, sends her furtive text and leaves with thousands of others, clotting the huge roads out of the city. A slow procession home.

  Thoughts drift to the ongoing struggle of finding a way to fill her time. There was hope in the morning that this meeting would signal the beginning of a new phase, time once again filled with worthwhile, distracting work, a mind occupied with problems to be solved and ideas to be made manifest. But she could not summon any enthusiasm. She feels herself to be emptying out, leaving infinite space for further emptiness.

  The mantras of remaining occupied, finding things to be interested in, have fallen from the lips of anyone who ever tried to offer solace in the years of Anna’s struggle with grief. She knows that a stoic determination to help her students at the university accomplis
h their goals provided her with a kind of relief. She knows it would be better for her to find something engaging, exciting even, to occupy her thoughts. At the very least achieving the compensation of feeling useful. She harasses herself half-heartedly about what the possibilities are. A question of filling up time or of being valuable. A matter of not crumbling to dust with brittle boredom. But she does not attack the problem with any vigour, accepting bleakly that useful may no longer be a thing that she will feel. She feels suddenly very lonely.

  The heat of recent anger is cooled to turgid bitterness. She didn’t choose this parched and wasted life. It is the subplot of another story. Small acts of authorship tumbling outwards, unfolding relentlessly and becoming historic, sweeping harms. So much havoc wreaked by such a weak, callow man. And he has paid, what, less than a quarter of the life he had already been given; the rest, the future, comes free. He paid so little it amounts to nothing. The bitterness is poison. She swallows it back down once again, a repeat dose, an endless self-administered prescription.

  Traffic slowly snakes along the shiny black road. The rain persists, scattering taillights in red bursts. Wipers whining across the screen labour relentlessly to pull the lights, for brief seconds, back into shape. The traffic creaks, a heavy chain dragged through the country. It is slow but still frenetic.

  Anna’s thoughts turn, in a swift move of self-preservation, onto a familiar bypass. The woman from Baghdad with the turquoise trousers and yellow top might be sitting in her garden now, calm under a warm sun, enjoying a moment of quiet. Where is eternity spent otherwise? A calm garden is as good as anywhere. Anna wishes she could join her there. She pictures the house behind her, filled out in idle moments over recent months. She presumes it was most often busy with the noisy love and tumble of family, and that the pleasure of quiet in an empty house is cherished. She regrets knowing nothing about the life of an ordinary, happy, harried woman sitting in a garden in Baghdad. She doesn’t know whether the dangers make ordinary life, ordinary happiness, impossible.

  Imaginary friends were not one of Anna’s childhood strategies. She had always been content in her own company; if real friends were not available she did not substitute an invention. A tall girl, self-contained and clever-clogs sharp, in the slipstream of schoolyard life she made durable friendships and sometimes bound less self-possessed girls to her in a way she found quite thrilling. Not a gang that had tangible status in the playground hierarchy of that bare-kneed world, but a small principality, usually ignored, occasionally strategically useful to those more involved with the statecraft games of dominance and triumph. A small principality of which she was definitely the prince. She had no swish or swagger but was forthright, and unafraid of the girls who did. And as so often is the case, these brash and needy girls, unable to manipulate her by invoking fear or envy, were enfeebled and, perhaps, privately somewhat afraid themselves.

  The playground consisted of a patch of tarmac next to a Victorian red-brick school building, a patch of grass and a small, ungainly tribe of countryside children with brutal haircuts and noses red from cold. She was a child on her own at home, a child who learned her survival strategies at school. Her sense of outrage and fearlessness served her well, though it was years before she accorded her relatively unscathed school years to those qualities. She just knew that she could set her jaw, withstand people, defy them until they were no longer a threat. She liked that. Though to say she was fearless is an exaggeration. She had the will to force herself to confront wrong and was confident enough to believe she knew when wrong was being done. Where is that Anna now? Packed in the loft with the old blankets and interminable school-years diaries.

  She has friends now whom she values and loves, kind people, clever, interesting and valuable people. She has more social life than she knows what to do with. But it is not enough; there is a chasm that they cannot fill. As though to compensate, she is inexorably, greedily drawn to reach for people she has invented. She reaches out as if she wishes to be friends with them. And strangely, these invented people have been accorded most of the power.

  Though this woman may not be real, she stands for a real person, someone who was beloved, someone who slept, ate, stretched in the morning, someone who rubbed tired calves, or maybe rolled tired shoulders. A person whose life ended when they were shopping or walking in a market. A person whose life, in the middle of its most ordinary enactment, was taken by somebody who believed they had a right to make that choice. And what of them, the ones who did choose? The cyphers, the fools, the lost-soul assassins who walk into the midst of people like themselves and share out death.

  A queasy anxiety laces these thoughts. It is a private affair, death. Not something for casual public consumption. She devoured them, these people, these deaths, for a thought experiment, then finds they have stuck in her, a sickly marzipan weight lying in her belly long after the cake has gone. She has more in common with the politicians who ripped into that country and made a hole big enough for such violence to thrive. Being from the same place, she can make a pretty good guess as to the layout of their gardens, the type of clothes they would wear. Does she have the right to disown that connection and claim affinity with a woman – dark, lovely, a mother and wife – who died in the bombing of a market place?

  She feels bound to people whom she invented at the precise moment of their dying, hobbled by a tangled yarn, thickened with complicating knots. It is not, perhaps, so much wanting to become a friend, more that she is compelled to delve, to unravel, to try to understand the meaning of their death. It is uncomfortably presumptuous. She feels the guilt of her Englishness heavy on her shoulders. That young girl in the playground, now a woman, the inheritor, the beneficiary of Empire. A land that she loves and a history of which she is often ashamed.

  It is curious, she thinks, the impetus to build empires. The playground games made large, the will to satiate the nag of inadequacy by demonstrating splendid power and dominion. Pared back, greed too is of course revealed. Or, more rarely, need. Need without trade, need without negotiation. Greed without care. The desire to own more than is necessary, more than you have. Does such greed come from a cold climate? Perhaps greed is a harshly rational friend in climates that set by stores for winter. Who can be cavalier about what is modestly enough when they do not know how long the cold will strangle the ground? None of us are such canny storemen that we can lay by exactly what we need. Weather soothsayer, seaweed and sixth sense, predict the winter and measure it in jars of jam and frost-cellar spuds. Excess may be canny in a land with wintertime that will not sustain more than the ounces of sparrows and robins. But the harrowing greed of conquest outstrips any demands of provisioning.

  Yes, winter can last longer than you think. Longer than you thought, Anna. What should be carefully packed in the storeroom to ride out a winter such as this? Carefully wrapped, perhaps in a bit of those old spare-room sheets, the faded easy-care remnants of her marriage acting finally as a layer of protection. Somewhere in the garage, or attic, placed on a safe shelf. What is the thing that she should retrieve to sustain her through this long winter stretch? It would need to be a generous, giving thing. A sled, pulled by sapphire-eyed huskies, glorious vitality written by their bark and breath on the cold air, ready to pull her away away away. Away to the dry heat of a Baghdad garden where cold is not numbered amongst the many perils. She would arrive in Baghdad on her husky-pulled sled, the remnants of Arctic frost burning up, giving way to the smoke and dust of fallen buildings. Find that quiet garden, where nothing will go wrong; she will insist on it being safe – the power to control the world exists after all, in the imagination. Sit quietly and ask this woman: what was your life like? What ended when you became one of my ghosts? A chance to question, to uncover the value of a life, not revel in the death of it. And perhaps to be pulled away, distracted from the thin inadequacy of her own existence.

  What relief it would be to escape, by hacksaw or key, walk free of the shackles that lead back to Ryan. If she
is caught by him she cannot think that he wanted to catch her. They are caught together; the irons of their shared story are not ready to give all their weight to the ground. What act or magic can break such ill-favoured bonds?

  That answer must be found another day. The chain of traffic drags across the land, stretches out and eases; she gets slowly closer to home. Eventually the road leaves the street lights behind, narrows between hedges. She shares the journey with fewer and fewer cars, and turns finally onto the quiet little lane towards her house. At home, she tries to ease the journey from her shoulders, tiredly, with a few shrugs. She pulls the curtains across the black windows, a small barrier against the fathomless squares of dark. Fine rain is still softening the night. It is a gentle visitor compared to the frost.

  Gathering into herself, curled up on the sofa, adrift, she resumes refuge, thinking again about the woman in Baghdad. She pictures her in the garden, still and calm, a warm hand resting on each thigh. Anna worries that she is intruding. She wants to reach out, but she is nervous. She doesn’t know if she has a right to be here. She wants to say she is sorry.

  *

  Sometimes I have felt Mum’s grief pulling me, pulling me into her. I am on the end of a rope; she is the post to which I am tied. She is so firmly set, so deeply anchored in that place that however far I am, I start to circle, circle, circle, at first with a carelessness that seems to have no direction or destination, but as the circle winds in, as the rope shortens, I speed up, I feel the pull, I feel the reducing arc of my movement. I feel the dizzying rush as I am pulled and pulled until I move so fast and so tightly pulled that even without weight or body I am eviscerated by it. I become lost in a tunnel, a funnel, a wind-sucked shrinking spin that ends suddenly at my mother’s feet. I look up and see that she is as still as rock. Bound tight from head to foot by a million miles of grief.