by Lulu Allison
She bangs her forehead gently on the cold glass pane, rehearsing her arguments with the people she will not summon. She does not want to add anger with them to what she is struggling to negotiate now. She does not want to be shepherded and cajoled into a way of thinking that they make for her, a badly tailored coat that sits uncomfortable and restricting on her eventually passive shoulders. She does not want to be told that she is unreasonable, or that time will help, or that wishing him dead helps no one. She does not want to be told what is good for her. Move on – to what? There is no ‘on’. There is no forwards or next step or smart move.
It is as if the remnants of Caitlin are being pulled from her. She has not learned a way to think of her daughter that is not framed by the disaster of her death. She is haunted to her core by that. But do not attempt to take it from her, because in that haunting is the ghost of the person she loves most in all of the world. Shreds of her beautiful, beautiful girl. She holds them tight and, though she cannot look at them, though she hides them, do not try to take them from her.
The evening spins out and on, wraps tight around her, stretches back out. She drinks more. The house is overly hot. She must have turned up the heating. She is sitting on the floor, awkward in an odd gap next to an armchair. The curve of the armrest is in the wrong place for her head, so she lies down, an unfamiliar spot in the shadow of lamplight. There are at least seven places to sit and she is on the floor in a wedged corner. She pulls a cushion down and under her head, clasps her hands loosely in front of her face, touching on the skirting board and the bridge of her nose. She wonders if she might see a mouse. She is in the mouse’s territory after all, not her own. There is something comforting about being in the wrong place when all that is inside is wrong too. She feels the chair at her back, pictures her bumpy spine against the nap of rich brown fabric, the recently fashionable colour of hot chocolate, milky mauve-brown. Her thoughts are scratchy enough for pointless observations to mix in with the messy heartache. And she is quite drunk too. She imagines a mouse looking at the back of her head from around one of the fat chrome chair legs, enough animal intuition to understand she cannot possibly be a threat. But curious; if she were a mouse, she thinks she would be curious. The woman from Baghdad is there, sitting in the chair, trailing her arm over the edge and resting her hand on Anna’s shoulder. She sits, Anna lies, drifts away.
‘We are both lost,’ the woman says. The mouse sighs, and says, ‘It seems so.’
*
One time ago, I saw him. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I hadn’t grasped all my story, his fatal role, though I knew fear and fury; I knew all the things that face meant to me. But I didn’t know what I saw, and as I pulled it behind me, my trailing tail of shredded story, I didn’t know when I had seen it. I had a new memory: me, suddenly painfully full of my old self, tucked alone in the corner of a room of men, including the one who killed me. The feelings pulsed through me, iterations of new and remembered fear fanning outwards to the far reaches, to be kept forever in the waxy record of waveforms etched through the blackness. For me, the room pulsed with it, as if I had after all found myself on a sand dune and the sun’s heat was making sight shimmer. I felt myself move with it; now such dances work through me always. But the men in the room, though they moved before me, were steady within themselves. Movement started inside them, did not land from afar or from the memory of harm. The old man with a hand that shook and a head that nodded as he sat before his tray, even he was subject to movement that originated, though from the betrayal of disease, from within himself.
I rode the seasick waves, the soul-sick fear, until I could accommodate them. I watched Ryan. He looked the same, though he was more contained. Moderated. It was as if he had tidied himself away and was trying to hold the cupboard door shut from the inside. He was wary, watchful. He was tidying away inside too – fear lurked squashed and hidden, forced into a small dark space as though not to see it would lessen its horrible power. Though adeptly he had created fear in me, he had learned nothing of its effect until now. Fear had flown out from his fists, released too quickly to be understood. But there he was, sitting at a table of six other men, learning the opposite of what his instincts thus far had prompted – learning not to be seen. Learning the love of the commonplace, unremarkable ordinariness. When we met, I thought he shone, but here he was, his gold transmuted in reverse, to beige, then the subtle grey of humble woodland creatures not troubled by the desire to shine.
This memory, of course, came from the time after my death, the time of his imprisonment. It took me a while to understand it. So many little fragments. But I am starting to join them up.
I have been back since. Another of those times when I sensed that my anger had pulled me in an arc back towards the Earth. I knew with a tremendous thrill that my thoughts had worked on my trajectory; I was, unaccountably at my own behest, heading toward s an encounter with my past. In a delicious rush of anger I swooped towards him again.
The rush stopped abruptly. I pooled once more in a frustrating manner, as if drugged, conscious of what was around but unable to direct my gaze or order thoughts. He was there on a narrow bed. I could hear his thoughts, his memories – mutterings, anyway. How he muttered his dissatisfactions, his fears and worries, how he tried to tidy it all away, to stop thinking of how afraid he was of this or that man. Bigger, bolder men than him. Men whose violence worked its way out on other men. Men who understood violence without the certainty of weakness in another. How I tried to swim through the seas of his fear, to stir up the waves, make a storm of fear to savour as I watched him cower. But I do not know if I stirred even the cobwebs in his cell.
*
Anna wakes, slumped in the corner, feeling as though her bones have been turned upside down. A badly fitting skeleton. She is confused, then thinks, with the horror of fresh news, that Caitlin is dead. The thought batters her, and she panics. Slowly she realises that she has known this for ten years. She wrangles the misery back into the soles of her feet, or the points of her elbows. Back to the place to which it had been banished. All the lights in the house are still on, it is dark outside, and the curtains are open. She feels so very exposed. She eases herself awkwardly up from the floor, the house warm but no longer warm enough. She closes the curtains against the black slides of night. She pulls a warm shawl around her aching shoulders, sinks into the sofa. What is she to do?
She is to do what she always does. She is to wind down and banish, hide within her the ragged wreck of her true self. So she gets up, runs a hot bath. She forces the dullness of the regime back into command. She soaks away the physical pain with hot water and ibuprofen. She sets her jaw. It is early enough to call night-time, late enough to be a new day. The bath is refilled with hot water several times. Even in this unhappy state, she relishes the delicious curl of heat from the new water. It pacifies, aids the process of restoration. She reminds herself that the only thing new is that she has seen that man, she has seen Ryan. She knew, had known, that in theory it was possible, but she never allowed herself close enough to make preparations. Knowing, incontrovertibly, that he was free was devastating. It destroyed a decade of heavily constructed strategies, rough-hewn and massy, relentlessly applied. When the strategies fell, they tore her open. And in the middle she found the thing she could not hide, the thing she thought that, against the odds, she had hidden – the absence of her girl. Still, she does not want to see that tenderness, the obscene, unviable frailty, tender as a featherless baby bird on a pavement.
If I could only stay still.
Understanding shivers, glimpsed briefly between slanted, slippery planes, then slides away. Understanding skids, finding no purchase on memories so faintly grasped. Understandings are slender and slippery, fine satin ribbons that slide through my fingerless hands. Just as part of the story seems about to shimmer into place, I am let go again. Upside downside, inside outside – it is any way round in death.
Gravity has disowned me. I had not gra
sped what refuge she gave. I had not understood her subtle care. I have not been able to hold on as she let go. It takes enormous will to hold back the blackness when gravity is no longer your ally. She let go her embrace, and I am pulled away to tumble, inchoate, through the eternal dark.
Gravity is the child of older powers. Those ancient parents, they have relieved their daughter of her duty to care for me. She no longer intercedes to keep me whole, to hold me. They are my guardians now. I hurtle and shift in this new vastness, an expression of direction rather than form. I see the patterns I describe without understanding the design. Sometimes, in the shimmer and the shift, I start to see the patterns of my own longed-for story, threading through the ancient blackness of my new and prehistoric path.
If I am lucky I graze the Earth, with her soft cushion of sky. Gravity holds me briefly once more, her love not after all gone.
When I can hold onto the Earth for a little while, I am full of nostalgic longing to stretch out my feeling body, to match her surfaces with my own. The ground is still a memory even as I am close enough to lie on it. I miss my body. I miss the body of the Earth. The soft moisture of grass over the muddy squelch of winter. Or to lie in the sticks and leaves of summer woodland. To have the skin that would be marked by sticks and leaves, marked with gentle indents. The ground scratchy and dry above a layer of secret damp. The runnels of bark under a pressed palm. A cool slab of porcelain at my back, still warming in a newly run bath. I remember sensations, surface memories. I try to find the memories of mind, turn the threads into something that my fingerless hands, my imaginary hands, can hold. A story that my spooling soul can reel in and tell.
I see them, now and then, my loved ones. I see that they get older; it is the only mark I have of the passing of time. I see my family. And him. I see from the marking of time on them that I spent what must have been years in a chaotic, fragmented dream, glittering here and there in the dark. For years, a dark tumbling glimmer, fine soot dust down a chimney, or harsh shards of smashed smoked glass.
As I flounder in these timeless fields, I gather chaffs of memory, try to find in the slender harvest an understanding of why Ryan did what he did. What made him able? What made his harm? I can’t be sure I know why I died, but I want that story. I want to tell it. Why did he kill me ? Why did I let him? How did I come to let myself be orchestrated by him so fatally? How did I come to be killed in a way that would have seemed risible, impossible, were someone to predict it ? I was a girl who knew this right from that wrong, a girl who had a clear way forward s. I was not lacking in self-belief or self-determination. I was a girl who, laughing with my friend, could not believe the flip-flopping foolishness undertaken by others in the name, apparently, of love. Now I understand – there is another kind of strength in losing oneself . A different strength is required for that self-abandonment. But it is not a strength worth cultivating.
I became a girl who told lies to herself, learned them so deeply and secretly that it has taken the unrave l ling intrusion of the blackness to find them out. I don’t share blame for my death, no I don’t. But I became part of what let me die. He is the one who did that. Implicating me in my own death. That shame I put on him too.
I need to find the story, to find what brought me here. I think I have enough to start.
Chapter 3
For two days Anna stays at home, ignores the phone. Ignores the voice that, like a concerned friend, suggests she call someone. Anna dismisses this friend and does not call others. She pulls curtains across the short days of winter, exhausts herself with afternoon and late-night drinking. The clatter of television and the taut thrum of a headache distract her as she writes in the bluebell-coloured book or gazes in mute distraction out of the window. She avoids the fatal impact of her thoughts by breaking them into small pieces, a burying, weighty gravel of fragments. If only she could block out the world, achieve some form of oblivion. The seedy realm of daily drug use promises a reliable form of unconsciousness, absence from here. That strategy provides a good thick and grimy wall between all of this and all of that, no details too distinguishable. Tempting maybe – but who is she kidding? The occasional heavy hand on the whisky pour, as evidenced by the last few days’ headache, is as far as she has ever ventured in that direction. She is too conventional, too afraid of death and too fearful of breaking laws, putting this reliable form of oblivion beyond her reach. Her imagination offers a retreat of sorts, a world where the sorrows of others require her notice and her compassion. She finds relief in offering them that small care, in wandering the now-familiar paths she has made, walking the woods, telling and retelling herself their lives. She retreats into the world of her shades, imagines how their lives would be if she had invented them as living people, not markers of the dead. There is at least space and calm in that sad realm. She ventures out to the woods, kept safe in their company from being haunted by her own memories.
The day is crisp and cold. The air is brittle, frozen thin, the tree trunks like metal. Victorian cast-iron pillars holding up a shelterless trellised roof. Christmas is nearly here again. Oh God, she wishes there were a hotel underground somewhere. No phone signal, no eyes to meet, no friendly enquiries about well-being and plans for the day. Just reclusive efficiency and a decent restaurant. Just a place to hide. Last year, the card from Michael’s grandchildren (step-grandchildren, though he does not recognise the offset), she struggled not to burn it. What was he thinking? She doesn’t think she has even met them.
She pulls away, sets her jaw again. Clenches her teeth and walks faster. There is a tart silence in the woods in this cold, broken only by small snaps of twig and freeze-dried leaves underfoot. Nothing, as she stops walking to examine her ankle, turned on a stone. There is pain but no damage. She walks on; leaves break again, small snaps under each step. She fills her thoughts with the people she will write in the new book later in the day. Twenty-nine killed by a suicide bomber. It is too many for her, too gruelling. She knows the limitations of her own accounting. But she sees some of them.
A girl, slender as willow, about twelve years old, hair that clouds around a face not yet firmed for adulthood. Now she is dressed for school, hair braided and tucked away, neat schoolwork tucked in her bag. She is a diligent worker, when unscripted dreams don’t pull her away out of the classroom window to fly, storyless, with the birds.
An old man, bent and fragile, curved like the corner of old paper. He walks each day, a slow shuffle through his now-tiny world. One of his grandchildren, a boy of eleven, walking in patient companionship with the beloved old man. He had been showing him a new knife, that most prized of possessions for a young boy. His knife will be picked up and vehemently cherished by one of the men who tries and forever fails to make sense of what was left in this broken arena.
A happy man, energetic and sprightly. He chats cheerily with the various food sellers, many he knows by name. He is on his way to a bookshop to collect an order, and plans to get flowers for his wife on the way home, to celebrate the birth of another grandchild. He tells the vendors of his good fortune. A girl with her dark hair neatly held under a pearl-grey headscarf. Her young and secret heart, her loves and friendships, her talent for maths. The girl stands in the cold, silent and afraid, framed by gateposts of beech. Anna tells her not to worry, she will be all right. She wishes she knew it to be true. A man whose life spins out before him, a mosaic of impenetrable design. A colourful, senseless, perhaps beautiful pattern. Fragments and tiles arranged, it seems to him, by another, mightier hand. He too is dead, his patterns dark forever.
A young woman, nineteen. There she is; she tries to sneak in, disguised a little here and there. But she is too familiar, too close. Her long limbs, her eyes the indeterminate colour of a river. She bubbles up through the dead before Anna’s eyes.
Anna stops, too close to summoning from memory rather than imagination. The shock of seeing Ryan has taken a sledgehammer to her defences. Damage has been done, walls are breached, doors cracked. Caitlin
flits through the smallest chink, a wraith, a twist of pain.
Anna leans on a broad trunk, glad of its steadying girth. She focuses on the tree beneath her suddenly feeble hand. The tree has decades of practice in not losing its place, its place right there, that piece of earth and that piece of sky, roots and canopy held together by the steady trunk. She leans in, borrowing its expertise in being still, solid, placed, marshalling her evasions. She swallows, waiting until her mind is clear of trespassing memory, concentrating on the solid print of bark under her hand, pressing hard for more steadying contact. After a small while she peels her gloved palm from the kind tree and once more resumes her communion with the dead of her own reckoning.
*
I sift the ribbons, follow – feel along them. I try to find the one that links the beginning to the end. I imagine the change of colour, the loss of lustre, the fray and warp and pull. It started so well. Golden. I have never felt happier than during that golden summer infused with the blessing of love, overwhelmed with it. Gilded months of clarity and certainty, crystalline, languid and plentiful. I still long for that. Not for the love of Ryan. For the love of love. I could still stroke that soft, golden streamer for the beauty of it, even knowing how knotted and ugly it became. But he made it so. He was the stain and the fray. Love is not a destiny that fulfils itself; it is a gift to be born and cherished. Love was given to me and Ryan as a gift. He beat it into a curse. Perhaps it is only us, the cursed, who serve out death in this spinning, chaotic reel through the blackness. Maybe death for others is a serene, wholesome arc. Sleepily adrift, they disappear in bliss. Perhaps.
