Twice the Speed of Dark

by Lulu Allison

  Three people were killed this morning at a road checkpoint. Civilians. Twelve killed in a bus crash. Anna wonders how it came to be them. What chose that awful fate, what accident, what design? When the woman from the Baghdad garden died, when any of them died, the bomb was there to cause as much death as possible. It was designed to kill passers-by, shoppers, people going to work or strolling for pleasure. It was a deliberate act causing death by accident. If the woman had spent five minutes longer than she did before leaving for the marketplace, perhaps in her garden, the accident of it being her might not have happened. Anna pictures the scene: the house is empty; her children and husband are busy with their days. She has cleared her house a little, enjoyed a moment of quiet in a recently busy kitchen. She gets ready to go, her bag and purse waiting on the table, scarf hanging on the back of a chair. While she is running through what she needs to buy, she gazes out of the window. She tuts as she sees a plant that irritates her with petty regularity, its weedy efforts an annoyance, its ungainly shape, the way that even in its feebleness it interferes with a prettier neighbour. It irritates too that she has been noticing it for weeks and has not done anything about it. She decides to go and pull it out now, instead of being annoyed by it again later. She goes outside, picks up a small trowel kept on the outside kitchen windowsill, digs enough to disturb the roots, then easily pulls the plant out of the light soil. She looks at the new gap with satisfaction, thinking about what might grow well, something compact and pretty, in its place. Then she washes and dries her hands, picks up her jacket and scarf and goes to the market as planned. And is frightened, because she can’t shop; there has been a bomb and several people have died.

  The man who was buying flowers, for his beloved wife, for a beloved new grandchild. He didn’t stop to talk to his old friend from the bag stall because when he passed his friend was busy behind the wall of bags hanging at the back of the stall, trying to find some stock he wanted to put on display, a buried box of green tartan and patent black bags, a gold clasp that could be Chanel. So the man went straight past to the bookshop, picked up the book he had ordered and returned home to his wife, smiling behind the flowers he bought to celebrate their joy. Later he would hear of the deaths, and worry for his friend working in the market.

  The old man walking with his grandson. He lost his spectacles as they were about to leave and their walk to the boy’s house, back to his dimpled, smiling mother, was delayed long enough to miss being in that horrid circle, delayed even longer because they were caught up in the frightening chaos of the aftermath. The mother stops smiling when she hears of their walk. That evening the boy and his two brothers are clutched in a tight embrace by their father, tears hidden in their sleek heads; they are confused by his burst of emotion. The old man spends the night with his daughter and grandchildren, suddenly immeasurably frailer, too upset to return home.

  All of these accidents were possible.

  When she walks through the woods, along familiar paths, she is swirling amongst the imagined dead. Every time she walks in these woods she sees them standing, confused and slowed as if all is underwater, clear up to the heavens. What can she do for them? There seems to be nothing. She can barely do for herself, after all. She holds onto them, makes an alliance. She has brought them into her world and must have some obligation towards them. Perhaps she is to tell what she sees, stop the wedding guest, interrupt the stranger, bring the dead before them. Do you hear me? Do you see these dead, these unhappy legions, these lost beloveds? No? Then let me tell you of them.

  Later, in her kitchen, rage strikes and she breaks a mug, thrown hard against the wall. That fucker, how dare he be here, barely even looking older, still with that stupid blond fringe? Still with his shabby, easy charm, no doubt. Still, she bets, with that stupid, glib swagger some pretty men have. Not beautiful, but pretty enough to feel a little easy power in the world. Not handsome. He used that charm so heavy-handedly that she didn’t even like him at his most likeable. He auditioned for them all, convinced he was going to get the part. All undimmed, his stupid light. Undimmed and uncontaminated by the darkness that he wrought. His aim was small; he wanted small harm, small but brutal harm. Yet he caused a vast circle of destruction. That man, that feeble coward with his floppy blond hair and his easy charm and his politics degree and his pretentious books and his fucking good manners. You would have thought she’d be done with being haunted by such a nothing, such a pretty-boy wastrel as him. You would have thought she might have wrung that haunting dry. But she amplified it, added her own destruction, battered herself again and again. The storm she made nearly destroyed her, yet he was untouched. Not a bruise. She sees, with glorious spite, a bruise billowing across his face. It could be true; she could make it true. She clings to that.

  *

  It is not easy, finding these memories of the love that started my decline. Not just because of the betrayal of it, but because I cringe to think of how I was at that time. Bold as brass I was, abandoned; impervious to any sense of danger. Love is like that. I was unaware of the need to protect myself. I no more considered his harming me than I considered myself harming him. Even as mistrust, then spite, crept into our vocabulary, violence seemed as unlikely as hate. Love was a miasma that prevented understanding, clouded truth. For those first months of summer, happiness and good fortune and love all combined. Alloys in a chain of strength and durability, linking me to all I thought I could want.

  We did argue – how could we not? Love is like that too. I learned he could be jealous, and sometimes that jealousy became mistrust. But love explained that. He loved me so much he was afraid to lose me. What could be more logical than that, when he could later chide himself and exalt me once more as blameless? But piece by piece, in those arguments and insecurities, the story changed; there was always something to prove. Moving to London to study became a thing I was doing to him, not for me. He talked about travelling in the new year, saving up some money and taking off. He talked about me moving in with him. He talked, in short, about me giving up my dreams and joining him in his. There’s another thread that makes my story. I gather it in. I wind the threads together.

  He was so full of possibilities, an infinite variety of possibilities; day by day they changed. He made the shapes of them, spoke them. I thought his carelessness was bravery. But it was avoidance of the troublesome need to do as well as to say. He seemed so confident that I came to see my own care-filled progress as weakly predictable and boringly anxious. In the light of Ryan’s grand pronouncements, my wish to create bridges from steel and cement became a dull plod to safety, an easy option. He said I was not adventurous like him, that I wanted an ordinary life. In that casual, self-serving criticism, I lost sight of the path that led into my dream. It had been the best adventure I could imagine – to defy gravity, to know how to create magnificent grace in defiance of crude materials. He made it seem dowdy, predictable.

  He persuaded me into a new shape. He said in so many words that I didn’t need me. I had we. We could do anything together; it didn’t matter what. Planning was for the unlucky, the ones who didn’t have our freedom, our potential. I put my plans aside, still cherished but seen only at the edge of my eye. Here I see so much, though I have no more eyes than I have fingers. Oh, how I would love my body, a repository for all this new knowing. A place to hold it, to unravel, to make sense of what I grasp at. Wrapped in gravity’s cloak, to look down at my hands and feet and remember in a continuous line. I could write the words down then, pin them one at a time onto paper. There they are, I’d say, those words that tell my story. Being alive, it is so neat.

  But it is coming back to me. Piece by piece I see how it happened. I recall now my rapt, upturned face, unwelcome enough but such a part of my story that I won’t turn away. The face of love, spilling first its own light. But soon, lit only from without. Soon enough, lit not at all.

  My eyes were fatally primed to see in him a glorious spectrum, a nimbus, a halo. So bright a light shone before
me that older flames were consumed and became invisible. But that was carefully crafted by him. By design, not fate. I was dimmed. Slowly, a new plan emerged. A ‘we’ plan. Slowly, almost without me noticing. A plan not for me but for us. London, learning, it’s just, do you really? Can’t we, instead? If you loved me as much as I love you. Of course, of course I do! Disgust, almost, is what I find with that remembering. I don’t want to dwell. But so strong, in this place of such primitive strength is the telling wish, the story – finding wish. Perhaps my story trails behind, around me, and I remake myself by pulling it in. Perhaps I find my mass, my surfaces, as I reel in the tumbled, tangled skeins, bundle them up into me. Ravel a new self. Knit myself up from threads of remembering.

  Chapter 9

  The flight is busy and cramped, but Anna is content. Sitting in a window seat, she takes pleasure in watching wintery England recede. She has always enjoyed flying and travelling on her own. She stares restfully out of the oval window, the pattern of fields below becoming smaller and more intricate as the plane rises into the cold blue sky. She feels anxiety recede too, feels it reduce, become granular, like the fields below. A background pattern rather than a set of obstacles. She is finally elevated enough not to be overwhelmed.

  But like the fields of England, her anxieties are not removed, they are deferred for another time. They are still waiting for her. During the short flight, she relaxes, allows herself the feeling that she has temporarily escaped. Ryan will not be seen, Michael has been mollified, Christmas will be ignored. She may this year evade the stealthy slide show of nineteen Christmases with her girl, tricked into life by every glint of decorations, every gaudy gift, every Christmas carol. Pictures she doesn’t want to see projected suddenly onto a special-occasion damask tablecloth or reflected in a shiny bauble. Pictures that mean Christmas is a time of choking back and endurance. Surely these pictures will be at least muted, sun-bleached in the heat of an unfamiliar place. She stares restfully into the cold blue of the sky as the plane heads south.

  On arrival at Tenerife airport, the sky is no longer cold; the sun burns high. She is glad she chose a destination that so quickly marked its difference to home. The airport is busy with happy and slightly frayed travellers, dark, warm clothes draped over suitcases, mostly pale skins glowing vulnerably in the warmth. It is not overwhelmingly hot, but the contrast magnifies the heat. She collects her case and takes a taxi to the hotel.

  Her room is on the first floor. It has two neatly prim single beds, a small dressing table or desk, windows with both shutters and gauzy curtains, and a balcony overlooking a wide sweep of bay. The sea is a little choppy, the expanse of dark turquoise dotted with curls of sail and kite in lurid, factory colours. Anna opens the balcony doors and lies on the bed. Little of the day remains. She reads, dozes a little, eats from the room service menu, then reads some more until she falls asleep.

  *

  Even at the beginning, during those happy times, I was subtly moulding myself, and he was even more subtly moulding me. It seemed easy to wait for the future I had imagined, easy to let him persuade me that after all there was no rush. He played, I see now (and did, in some secret, well – hidden eye, see then) with a swagger to his hand. I knew even then that there was an element of lavish bluff to disguise the value of the cards he held, but I chose to believe him. I chose to invest him with the careless mastery he claimed was his. The bluff, the buff and shine of the thinnest foils of gold.

  As the months passed, I saw that the kind of waiting Ryan favoured was the lifetime variety. He didn’t want me to leave him. To better him. To be successful. To fly. In short, he didn’t want me to fulfil my own dreams; he wanted me to augment his own. It took a long time to understand this. Who can accept immediately, whilst tightly held within its embrace, that love may contain such severe reprisals? Secretly then and clearly now, I have learned to stop seeing Ryan’s actions towards me as love and recognise them instead as husbandry. For to understand him fully, I was a beast, of greatest value when broken entirely into the obedient servitude of a passive dairy cow or farrowing sow.

  From this distant view, I can see the details that I wish now had been more apparent, less ignored at the time. I had feelings I did not wish to acknowledge, an unwelcome draught at my back. Even then they caused a shiver of something I would have called alarm if I had been able to slander my love with such harsh terms. The colour changed from gentle love to bitter accusation by one chromatic drop of pigment a day, a seamless blend that, being unable to track, I also could not master. It is only now that I fully see the deliberate smoothness, the entrapping, determined guile of that progression. He taught me how to mollify him. He taught me how to undermine my own understanding of events. He taught me how to say to myself ‘it’s because he loves me’.

  So, if he played his hand with an empty bluff, I played mine with my own sleight. Ryan would have been gratified if only he could have seen how close our aims were. I too wanted to elevate him. Our future together had come to exclude my long-cherished dreams of grand buildings. So, like the bridges I had dreamed of, I wanted to see the strength and grace in the base material. I wanted him to be as grand as my dreams had been. Perhaps he led me to the table, perhaps love seduced me into taking the first bite, but once seated, I heartily ate of my own accord.

  Young love is mightily powerful. Self-fuelling, its biggest sustenance is its own wonderful grandeur. It is often destined, if a new, more enduring source of energy cannot be found, to burn out. But in that glorious moment of the stars aligning, gilded by the combined light of all those billion stars, such a prospect is too ghastly to contemplate. We may find precious parts of ourselves willingly sacrificed as fuel to keep the fire burning.

  Those stars, I have a different view of their light and their power now. Their might is scalding without the softening protection of the sky. Still, I hope one arc, one mighty ellipse, will fire me into the heart of one of them, ending this vagabond journey. But let it not be just yet.

  I deferred the start of university for a year and moved into the flat in Oxford with Ryan. It seemed a small step. Just a step through a doorway, almost. But one step can be as great a distance as any.

  Dad drove me over one evening, several boxes of books on the back seat of the car, a case with a few important objects and most of my clothes, spilling over into laundry bags. I took a small desk from my room to put in the corner of the living room. A mirror, a bag of shoes, some bright new kitchen things that Mum had bought for me. When we got there, Ryan was happy, nervous in his willingness to get it right. He had put flowers in a glass vase on the table. It was welcoming and orderly. There was music playing quietly. He had emptied more than half the drawers for my things. He’d bought a laundry basket because I had jokingly complained about his smelly socks lying on the bedroom floor like dead rats. There was a new light next to the bed so I could read before sleeping. Dad was cheerful and helpful, offering to go back for some things I had forgotten, but when he left – leaving us to it, as he heartily said – he and I were both sad.

  After the brief sadness of goodbye, that was a very happy evening for Ryan and me. And so was the next one. I spent my days as I had done for much of that summer, lazily waiting, strolling the city, being at our new home when Ryan arrived back from work.

  Chapter 10

  She wakes feeling groggy, a heavy weariness, a hangover from the tension of the last weeks. A hangover that, in being built over a number of weeks, is likely to take more than a morning to dispel. Now, in the refreshing newness of her surroundings, Anna feels even more grimy than she did in the rumpled anxiety of home.

  Empty out her head, the baggy old bag. Tip it all out into a handy bin, a turquoise plastic basket under the hotel room desk. Let it overflow. Kick it into a neat pile and go out until it has been taken away by the nice young woman who cleans the rooms. Yesterday, Anna slept. Today, her second day here, she starts early. She wants to run along the beach, let the sea wind blow her clean. Shake her head l
ike a galloping horse, shake out staleness and confusion as epic music soars, thrilling at her freedom. Speed along the beach with the top down, throwing out the rubbish, a litter lout in a fast car. Instead, she walks. She walks down paths, along roads, round the curves of the bay, onto the uncivilised part of the shore. For the odd second, the wind lets her feel as if she is running, that its movement is actually her own.

  She has got to the edge of the small town, away from the beach. She walks past low buildings along a new-looking road that is empty except for the occasional passing car or airport taxi. There are not many trees, as the town thins out not much shelter at all. The edge of town has an unresolved quality, petering out rather than ending at a clear boundary. There are odd piles of building material, destroyed buildings, unfinished buildings, a trailing-off of endeavour, an uncertainty. Near the road, advertising hoardings stand sentinel on the hill, clocking the visitors in and out and reminding them to spend some money while they are here. Signs for restaurants, resorts and night-time entertainments. After about half a mile and with the town now gone, she walks away from the pavement-less road, sits to rest on a concrete block with rusted metal tendons poking out from one end. Her head aches a little; her feet hurt. She rests forwards, leaning on her bent knees, gazing across the uninhabited land, with a three-quarters view of a gaudy billboard for a supermarket, a smiling woman, her mouth big enough to eat Anna whole. Perhaps not a nutritious meal. She feels empty. She is full of garbage, yet empty. A small interior voice asks, ‘What is at the core of me?’ She is a collection of feelings and strategies so habitual, so well worn, that she does not know if there is anything authentic left underneath. She doesn’t know what she is. She is not even a grieving mother any more, the last role she fulfilled with any certainty, so long ago that the meaning is petrified within her somewhere. She is built on the fossil bones of her grief and the carved-out, meagre understanding of a state she didn’t choose and never mastered. An empty structure built around that grieving mother. Is she still in there? Is she still her? She feels exposed, if only under her own gaze. The sun warms her, the wind strokes. There is a self that feels these sensations, these gentle strokes and rays, but where has she really gone? She recognises that for many years, her only certainty has been that she does not want to disrupt the fragile architecture she has built with those fossil bones.