Twice the Speed of Dark Read online

  The same chair at her kitchen table, the place she sits, almost daily, with a newspaper, or with a book, with a pile of admin, her laptop, a large mug of tea or coffee. She sits where she always sits when she is working something out. The gas bill, a crossword puzzle, a Christmas list, a good read. She is here for calming, measuring and containing, ungrinding gears back to neutral.

  There is nothing she needs to do, but knowing, on the all-knowing, blind side of mind, that calm is a pretence, she searches for distraction lest she should get wise to having once more thinly fooled herself. She picks up last Sunday’s colour supplement, forages through articles about diverting, uninteresting things. She is diverted; she is uninterested. She reads the papers, repelled and held by the unbroken rampage of events. Anger that began in the most intimate, personal sphere is transformed into restless dissatisfaction with what is universal. Anna searches once more for the hidden people, tucked behind the print, unknown and unseen, faceless people piteously and impotently watching their children starve to death, or demented with anxiety because they don’t know where their father has been taken. She is furious because somebody glibly gathers ever more wealth at the snapped-twig cost that others can no longer live with health and pedestrian dignity. The spillage, the messy debris of our human failing, is overwhelming, yet presently easier for Anna to confront than the twisting and leeching of emotions that belong only to her.

  19 December

  Today, a drone strike killed five in a village compound. I am frightened by drone strikes; the audacity is breathtaking. The hideous logic too. How angry I would be to have someone wield that advantage over my head, in my sky, onto my rooftop. How do they determine who is an enemy? A visiting uncle, trapped under the same falling roof as a military leader. A sister still living at home. A teenage daughter and her friend. How can any good come of this?

  A woman with long hair with grey streaks at the front. Her hair is long enough to spill outwards, in the quiet evenings, down over narrow shoulders and broad hips. A black, glossy waterfall, curls flick turbulent at the ends, grey threads fall like foam each side of her neat face.

  Her second-oldest son, as passionate and as learned as he is ever able to be. He has taught himself to speak four different languages, and dreams of a time when the babel of voices will come together once more into a world of one understanding.

  His aunt, constant companion of the house. A woman bowed under the grief of having lost a daughter and grandson in an attack eight months previously. Her husband, injured in this strike, will have yet more to bear.

  A proud and angry man, tall, broad-shouldered, willing to bear any discomfort or burden in his restless desire to deliver a better life, a fairer life, for those he loves. Those he does not love are barely even seen.

  A girl with eyes of green or brown, not yet twenty. In reflective moods, she twists a silver bracelet round a slim wrist, an action that soothes her as she puzzles over the injustices of an unbalanced world.

  Chapter 7

  Sometimes the black has a thickness like wax. With a little more substance I might leave scratches on it as I pass. I bare my imaginary teeth, pull them through, make a track, a groove. The darkness of space could be played like a record. The needle of the gods, a diamond the size of a skyscraper, so clear as to be almost invisibly black, lowered gently to read the roar of our passing. Black like thick wax, scraped, I want to believe, by the tumbling speed that I do not choose but cannot resist. At least allow me to imagine I leave a mark. I remember black wax, black wax thickly and laboriously layered, coloured in by hand. Underneath, another layer of colour. A bright pattern, equally carefully laid down, a handstroke at a time, the width of a crayon – tip at a time. Filling the page like embroidery, long bright stitches made by my patient child’s hand. Sitting next to my friend Toby. His hair curled up at the back, like brandy snaps. The rest of his hair had lost the curls of babyhood. I reach back in time, run my imaginary finger down the back of his round, remembered head, pull down the curl, let it spring up around my finger. Delicious softness of young heads and hair. Sitting next to him, filling the paper with carefully bordered shapes of colour, his pattern a full page of bold, diagonal stripes. I liked the order of his design compared to my freestyle shapes, but I was glad that mine was neater. I was proud of my colouring-in when I was seven years old. The satisfaction of contained edges and ordered arrangement. I am not well suited to the smoky spillage of my new form. The first coloured layer then covered with the second layer of black.

  Finally, the magic part – scratch through the top layer. Beautiful drawings of Denny’s car, Mark’s robot with a big gun, Lizzie, Kate and Helen’s princesses. Toby did an aeroplane in the sky with clouds and the sun. Remembering the arduous labour of preparation made the choice an anxious one for me. I wanted so much to make the right picture. I wanted to make it so nice that I could give it to Daddy for his birthday, which was going to be soon. I scratched the lines to show my daddy waving. It was magical to see colours appear, the lines having a special quality from being scratched, an image created by removal rather than addition. I was happy with my picture, bright lines that made a daddy in the blackness, filling the night sky, a stellar companion of Orion. The fingers on the round hand tipped with yellow as if starlit, his hand raised in greeting to me.

  If only I could scrape back and find that colour now. If only I could find my daddy, heroic as in childhood, walking with the gods and me, a companion in this endless night. How I miss him.

  I have been with Dad since I died. I have seen him with the woman he loves and the girls he now cares for, the grandchildren he loves with all of his generous heart. I know he still misses me; sometimes he is sad when I see him on his own. It is a vast and bleak sadness. He walks it as if it is a moor, undeterred by the scour of its emptiness. He has let himself learn its ways. He has made room for sadness, accepts its place in the geography of his heart. His heart has grown bigger in making room. I feel there is room for me in that desolate scape. Walking there affords a strange kind of comfort for both of us.

  Love was never something he found hard to make room for. He will share his sadness with those he loves, I know, pull their caring around him in return. I try to share too, to hold him, to insinuate myself so he is holding me. I feel the space within him where I can curl in safety, a lair. I am often now as scared as when I was little. I am all things in one trajectory. All selves coexist within me. I am made only of memories, all of them. There is no present. I am made of the wisdom I would, given time, have come to learn. The ancient parents have seeped into me. Lent their eternal eye. As their hands pushed me off into the darkness, they gave me understanding as a parting gift. I feel I know so much; it is thrilling, tantalising. I know the taste of darkness. I have been scattered into new paths by the hissing wake of burning stars. I have touched, been touched by, been invaded by stardust other than that which made me. But the loneliness is terrible.

  Each time I have found myself on the Earth, each time I have seen him, he has been happier. Now I can make sense of what I have seen, I know that he is whole, even with the break in his heart put there by my death. Soon after I died, he was as fractured as I was, inside the body that held him together. He did not believe that happiness existed for him any more.

  I found myself one time, slowed and without agency, at the edge of our garden. I was passive, held in the air, like bonfire smoke at still, summer dusk. Dad came into the garden holding something in each hand. His shoulders pulled up, his back bent. He was unshaven, grey stubble and tired lines untidying his handsome face. His dark hair lank, greyer than I remembered. He moved with strange unpurposeful steps, wrongly weighted steps. He put down the two things in his hands. They were my beautiful lace-up tan leather boots, soft and tough as expensive saddlery, pinpricks of brogue styling on the neat toe. A summer’s work bought that expensive treat. Dad had taken to polishing them for me when he polished his own shoes. He took hearty pleasure in lining up the neat pairs. I had not g
ot around to taking them when I moved out; so much of my stuff was still at home. I think he must have found them in the cupboard under the stairs. He placed the boots on the edge of the terrace, a small step down to the grass. He positioned them neatly, as when he had polished them, then sat down next to them, staring past me. Past everything. He seemed to lose himself, as much lost in that bleak moment as I felt in the new rules that governed my being. I could not bear to see him so lost. Moments or hours pierced with steel stabs, a grid of sorrow. He put his hands onto his face, then slid them round to the back of his head, pulling his head down into the shelter behind his bent knees. He wept so deeply, so uncontrollably, and yet he tried to quiet it, to muffle the piteous sound. Through the window at the back of the house, I could see my mother, standing on the other side of the room. Completely still. Still enough not to have been noticed by me. The picture windows gave a broad view into the house. She did not move. I did not know how long she had already been there, immobile. My father sat on the step, his hands grasping at the nothing of his thoughts, sifting through his hair, searching his skull. Shoulders trembling and shaking from the sobs he tried to contain. My mother stood as still as the furniture in the empty house.

  I remember happier times too. I witnessed them.

  I remember worse.

  Dad went back to one of my favourite places recently. A picture of a place, a memory, by a river. I was there with him; he was walking along the small road that bends round a corner and over a bridge. I know it. Yes, I have two memories, one from before and one from after death. The bridge is built of stone and is curved, a twist in two directions. Across the bridge is a small path that leads down to the bank of the little river. I had made a drawing of the bridge from this bank before I died, some years before, for a school project. Dad framed my drawing later; it hangs now in his new house, in the room where he has a desk. It used to be in the kitchen of our house, tacked to the wall above the telephone. But Dad took it with him when he left. Both of us left the house. My death made new homes for us both.

  The sky, in my memory – picture, in this place, was that hushed grey, the neutralising flatness that holds England so steady. The land, too, was steady, held here in an ancient balance between the using of man and the shaping of nature, an ancient compact, one edging into the other until the blend is seamless. The river bent away, the arced curved across it, and magically, in the solid stone of that bridge, the two intersecting curves were held in perpetual and unmoveable solidity. Time had been caught in those two slow-moving curves. Shapes made by walkers and water, a path and a stream. Shapes that make and remake themselves, shifting over decades like the slowest snakes. These shifts had been corralled by the hands of a stonemason and a builder so that their meeting point became fixed. Though still a young girl, I was seduced by that magic. And though my death was not far beyond the time of that drawing, I am older, so much older now.

  Along the bank is a bench, a gift from someone, I think, with a memory attached, a small brass plaque with the name of a lost beloved. It was where Dad and I sat so I could do my drawing of the bridge. Dad sat down there, on my dead visit, alone. He traced a finger over the letters on the plaque, and I felt the shudder of his heart contracting as he thought of me. It squeezed me, unhappily. We both felt squeezed by sadness once more. But soon placid calm reasserted hold, and Dad sat quietly. I heard snatches of his memory mingle with my own. The day together, helping at home to mount the picture on card to take into school, the easy happiness of the passing of time when you have no notion of endings.

  I think that drawing made a choice; it became a choice for me. I discovered an abstract, sculptural passion for form, and my curiosity wished to understand its emergence into being. Which decisions had been made first? Which part of the bridge was built first? What were the limits and how were they combined? What other bridges could those men, with different limits, have built? An exercise of imagination became a purpose for me. It became a dream the future held.

  Sometimes in the longer stretches, my old dreams comfort me. I feel wonder at what is around me. I imagine I have the power to intervene, to create on an epic scale what I did not have the time to make on Earth. Space is all direction, span and arc. I imagine glittering black highways curving beautifully, forever. A ring road for paradise. A motorway slicing like the deft sweep of a scythe through Stygian fields. Satan promised that his gate to hell would be easily found. A regeneration road of the most epic, dastardly intent. Imagine the thrilling cambers and seductive speeds on that road. Imagine the bridges, cantilevered off unnamed, unseen distant planets. Gateposts that would rise beyond the view of a mill-pond lens, a lens the size of an arena. It is pointless, I can tell you, to attempt a lens to see to the ends of the blackness. Pointless too, to fashion a tool that would let us see the limits of Satan’s ambitions for hell – forgive me if I disappoint, but I have not seen hell, nor have I seen heaven. Though the tar – richness of the black, the sonic boom of dark emptiness bisected, scratched eternally by unalloyed speed, do make hell easy to imagine. But this place, it is not punishment. It is too unfathomable to be punishment. It is frightening. Unresolved. Lonely. But I do not believe it is punishment.

  I hope that it is not eternal.

  And the love that brought me here, I once hoped that might be eternal. I did not know what a perilous wish that was. I did not understand the unkind way it would come true.

  I did not understand eternal, and he did not understand love.

  Chapter 8

  The remaining days before Anna leaves are wiled away doing ordinary things. She makes herself busy with lacklustre chores. Time is spent in a trickle. She is suspended somehow, so determined to hang onto this leaving-behind, still resolute that the shock of seeing Ryan need not be healed, or even absorbed properly, until she gets away. In that getting-away she has invested all the possibilities and likelihoods of a remedy. When she is on holiday the chance of a further meeting is impossible, and thus she can contemplate repair. For now, aside from the first night’s drunken stumble through the wreck, and the occasional irrepressible burst of anger, she simply hasn’t looked.

  She fills her thoughts instead with her legion, her tailor-made ghosts. They sadden her, yet she is beholden to them, her dead, her ghosts, her numbered souls. Stuck between invented life and real death, a no-man’s land of water and wood and dusty city. She dreads the news but scours it for further numbers to be added to her book. She looks up points of information: life in Baghdad, life in Syria, life in Somalia. She looks up whether women have businesses there, whether houses have glass in the windows. How does an ordinary man live in Northern Pakistan? The first results for that question give information on drone strikes. So her guess is an ordinary man in Northern Pakistan lives at least some of the time in fear. It tells her too that his life is of interest only in certain narrow, elliptical ways that relate to her own.

  How much does the structure of life inform the person? A frightened man is a frightened man in any corner of the world. A disappointed woman, a shy child, a beautiful youth. A hungry soul, a beaten wretch, a pompous fool – they live in every corner. A loving heart, a soothing hand, a graceful arm. An aching back, thinning hair, a generous smile, the beauty of a child’s profile. These things are not changed by whether church is on Sunday or prayers are on Friday or if God has no claim on any day of the week. It makes no difference if houses are wooden or built of stone, if skies are cloudy or the ground too hot for bare feet. These things would exist if the body were clothed in floor-length gowns or denim shorts. These things existed in the times of powdered wigs and of mammoth hides. They will exist forever. We and the dead are the same, she thinks. She would know them. She does know them.

  But Anna also knows that she knows nothing. She doesn’t know anyone who has even been to a city such as Mogadishu. If she has met anyone from there she did not ask them what it was like, more interested in what they are like here, in her context, more interested in that which was before her ow
n eyes, contributing to her own world. She doesn’t know if the men in Iraq wear cord trousers, or if all the women wear scarves, if the children play roaming on their own or stay close to home. She doesn’t know if the food is shared at one table or eaten hurriedly between work and other duties, or, like here, a mixture of all those things. How different would the fundamental acts of living have to be to make the lives of others unrecognisable to her? We all eat. How different a way of eating does it need to be to make it a different thing? We live in families or alone across the whole world. How is life for women like her in Aleppo? How does a single woman like her, sometimes sharp and sour, live in Homs? Even without the rigours of war to contend with, she doesn’t know for sure whether she would be herself in other places. She may not live alone in a big house, but there is still room to rattle in a small one. She would perhaps love the languid stretch of a range of brown, shrubby hills as much as she loves the ancient curve of chalk. She might love a dense jungle crept through with furtive paths like she loves the spacious tank of a beech wood. How much of love, then, is habit?

  She wonders what the legions risking their lives in rickety boats and suffocating lorries think about home and habit. She wonders what they, or the woman from Baghdad, would make of Anna’s home, her bored prosperity and secret hate. This well-appointed country house with its spic and span furniture, its stuffy heating and comfortable abundance meant for one sole inhabitant. The quiet woods that Anna herself has populated with ghosts, where she creeps in fear of elusive, loping wolves. How would it compare to the havoc-worn city of their home? A city rudely disjointed by checkpoints and acts of destruction. The wolves and the witches still roam, though in hordes; they roam in town squares, in car parks, in market places. No need to go down to the woods today.