Twice the Speed of Dark

by Lulu Allison

  *

  There was a long time after that, feeling uncertain, confused, feeling things I don’t know how to explain. I was glinting coal dust falling down a well, a satin cord that twisted in and out of knots in the grip of another’s hands. I was a tiny area of grey plastic inside a mountainous block of grey plastic. I span, a crowd of me, we span through the dark. We clumped together and were pulled apart slowly. I was a slippery rope, an unwound gut sliding through a lightless slaughterhouse.

  I first noticed the nothingness around me, then the buffeting of strange, unpredictable waves. I began to see the distant stars. Sometimes I came closer to them; they showed the size of a sun. Sometimes since then, I have got closer still. They burn, but how that heat beguiles me. How I want to burn up. But not yet.

  *

  My story is told; I am rid of the taint of my story. I have found myself again. Though other things are still lost or still broken. How I want to repair those breaks.

  I have told what happened to me, but it happened to others too. There is more that I need to reel in. It has been terrible to see a side of my parents that I never expected to share. I wish Dad had been able to help Mum, to give her what he was able to painstakingly and courageously give himself. I wish he had been able to take her with him on those long, brave walks. I wish she could pull from within herself the taint of my death. I wish she could remove those million coiled miles of grief that mummify her, bind her.

  Yes, I have my story, but there is something else I want. For her, from her – how can I tell the difference? She is my mother. I seek her out and, more often now, I find her. Recently I have seen her on a beach. And on a dusty road. I don’t recognise where it is. It can be hard to tell if I am remembering or seeing sometimes. Because memories play out like films, placed before me, waiting patiently for me to understand that I have something to do with them. And what role in all of this for imagination? Perhaps I dream these sightings. But I have seen my mother, walking on a long dusty road, alone. I have seen her on a beach and swimming in the sea. I want to reach her. I want to take back the rope I put on her. The burden that she carries, it is too much, too awful to bear. My beautiful, loving, impatient, kind mother, her deep and generous heart is shrunk, a pond in cracked drought. How I wish I could undo that awful aridity.

  But she doesn’t see me. I can’t reach into her as I do with Dad. No way to keep her company. I wish she could at least see me. Not perhaps as I see her, but somehow just to know I am there. Sometimes I get close, I know it, but she will look away. She always looks away.

  Chapter 17

  It is evening; night falls quickly. Dusk is a brief affair, a mauve curtain pulling swiftly across the interval of a two-act play. Anna has texted Estela and arranged to meet in the square so she can say goodbye. She wishes to thank Estela for her kindness, a care that has stayed with her.

  In the square there are groups of teenagers, smoking. The girls sit in rows on the backs of the benches, orchestrating actions for the boys who push and move around each other, jostling one another, voices uneven and unnecessarily loud. They need to claim their presence with noise and movement; it is their right and their ritual. The warm wind pulls into town off the sea, drawn in, cavorting round them like a pack of playful dogs.

  Anna waits on one of the tiled concrete benches around the edge of the square. She sees Estela coming towards her from the town. She is dressed in narrow jeans, slim turquoise-and-gold sandals and a patterned top that has copper and gold beads threaded on the thin straps over her brown shoulders. Around her neck is a jumble of necklaces, charms and chains, she has silver bracelets on her wrists, and her hair is pinned up loosely with turquoise flowers. She is wearing a small amount of makeup. She tells Anna she is going out with friends for a birthday later in the evening. She looks radiant and lovely. They sit side by side.

  ‘Estela, I wanted to thank you again for being so kind the other night. It meant a lot to me.’

  ‘It’s not a problem at all, I do only a small help.’

  ‘Well, it feels like a big help to me.’ Anna pauses, searching for the next step, the beginning of the next path. ‘It’s been a strange time for me.’

  Estela reacts eventually to Anna’s silence, gently and briefly touching Anna’s arm.

  ‘If you want to tell me, is okay.’

  A breath, a pause. She tells Estela that she has been thinking of her daughter. She tells her that she died. A few months after moving out. Hardly out of her home at all. Not properly gone, but gone forever. Estela asks her when, and Anna thinks Estela is surprised when she tells her it was nearly ten years ago. Her awkwardness with these facts makes it seem a more recent loss, but she is used to this. People don’t understand the constant raw breakage. They don’t understand that not everyone heals. The outer layer has hardened; there is a semblance of repair. Her life is moulded in a thick layer, shaped by it. A mending clay, a cast, a substance of incomplete repair. Enough to get by. A conversation such as this requires a deliberate act of control lest the spoiled liquid underneath leak through and shock them all. There is gentle quiet for a few moments. Suddenly there is a cracking and an oozing, a rush of words. She tells Estela about seeing Ryan, barely managing to explain that he is the one who killed her daughter. She tells of the harrowing pain of knowing his life is ahead of him. She says she feels that what lies ahead for her makes no sense, there is no way for her to understand it. She talks hurriedly, in broken and unfinished sentences, knowing vaguely that it will test Estela’s understanding of English. The words come out, heedless, testing, with their jumble and their unexpected rush, even Anna’s own understanding of what she is saying. Eventually she halts, repeats that her daughter’s killer has come out of prison and she doesn’t know how to be any more.

  ‘I see why you say you didn’t want to go home.’ Anna is surprised by this. She doesn’t know when she said that. She looks at Estela quizzically. ‘When you were sitting on the beach, you said it then.’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t really remember, I… it is not like me to get so drunk, or to cry like that, it…’

  ‘No, is fine, I am sorry that we maybe… come into your life without invitation.’ She stretches to find the right way of expressing herself in English.

  ‘It’s just that it’s nearly ten years since Caitlin died, and her father wants to have a big celebration. I can’t stand the thought of that. There’s nothing to celebrate. I understand his meaning, he wants to celebrate her life, but I can’t, I don’t know how. And now I’ve seen Ryan, I keep imagining him with a new life, with children, with everything. His debt has been paid, apparently, and the world is open for him again. There he is, in our home town. He’s probably celebrating too, his freedom. I just can’t bear it. I know it’s wrong but I wish he, I wish I could… stop him existing.’

  Anna is shocked by these words, which, at last, after so long getting stuck in her throat, catching on her teeth, making a gristle rope into her guts, have surprised her with their easy spilling. She feels an uncertain poise, a lightness, a bird in a town garden expecting a cat. But the cat is gone. She can see it behind an upstairs window. It watches her but cannot pounce.

  She starts again slowly. ‘I am stuck with the emptiness of the last ten years, all that has not happened during them. And now I’ve seen Ryan, of course he is free to do anything he wants with his life. He’s out of prison and can have children, marry, prosper. He can play sodding golf if he wants to, or stay in bed all day watching telly. Caitlin had barely started her life – by now she could have done so much. I know she would have done.’

  ‘This must be very painful. You have other family?’

  ‘No, she was an only child. Like me.’ Anna pauses, awkward and unsure. ‘When she died, our marriage fell to pieces. So, I’m on my own. Though of course I have friends, lovely friends. I don’t know what I would do without them sometimes, though there are occasions when they drive me mad.’ She looks up, and they share a soft, brief smile.

  ‘Wh
at was she like? Your daughter?’ But Anna’s reluctance returns, the brisk nurse of her upkeep appears, reapplying the binding. She smiles, and tells Estela, ‘I would like to tell you. I hope I can tell you some time. I think you and she would have been friends. But do you mind if I don’t just now? It would make me sad, and as it’s my last night, shall we just go and get a beer?’

  They walk together to the bar. Karl is sitting with a group of friends, other healthy sea-creatures, past the time of awkward display on the town square, into the sleek beauty of young adulthood. The sun seems stored in their beautiful faces and radiant smiles. A little bit of light captured on the waves and shared round with the other mere mortals later in the day. Karl waves at them cheerfully. Anna stays for one drink, then prepares to return to her room. She asks Estela to say goodbye to Stefan for her. As they chat awkwardly on the terrace, a goodbye for people who don’t know yet what their connection is, Karl tells them both to stand with their backs to the sea and takes a couple of pictures of them.

  Anna embraces Estela, sorry to say goodbye. As she is about to leave, Estela says, ‘Perhaps, Anna, one day you can tell me about your daughter. I would like to hear about her, if you can, one day. It is sad for you to feel so alone.’ Anna is touched by her words, understands the simple truth that Estela sees in them. But she is certain still that there is no answer to the misfortune that defines her; she feels regretfully that the weight of it pulls her from the reach of new friendships.

  *

  She wakes early on the last day of escape. She goes for a swim before the beach is cluttered, before it is patterned with bodies and their untidy skirts of paraphernalia. The sun is still low, hidden behind buildings but brightening the sky; the day has begun. The waves are small and steady, but the surfers’ loss is her gain. She walks slowly into the water, each inch given with pleasant reluctance to its cool touch. This time she decides to swim out, past the hotel that rises with faux-modernist poise from its rocky promontory. On the other side, at the back of the hotel, is a small patch of sand, a backyard, neglected by holiday makers. She swims round to it. She gets closer to the shore, intending to explore, but stays in the water. Small beaches on the edge of things, next to marinas, on the far side of harbour walls, often have a forbidding quality, unwelcoming, neglected. Like the undersides of some bridges, a little sinister and dark, with stagnant patches that collect the debris of bad thought. She remembers a walk in an unfamiliar town. Under a road bridge, an old mattress that suggested a grim resident. Peculiar rubbish trapped in concrete corners. The debris of furtive acts collected in the hidden recesses. She swims back a little hastily, out to the clear water before the hotel’s sun deck and back round to the sunny sand of holiday life. She floats in the shallows, hands on the sand a gentle anchor as the waves lull over her, barely breaking as they meet the land. She stays for some time. She swims out again, under the water with her eyes open, seeing nothing but blurring of light and dark. Cool and restful under the water. A new breath and sink again, still, still, still, look at the blur of light and dark, try not to imagine shadows, sea-shadows that move slow and quiet, subtle silent threat. Death from below. The welcome sunlight breaks crisply across her eyes in shards as she resurfaces, short of breath; anxiety snags a first lungful of air. Floating in the deeper water, she looks back to the shore. She senses the water’s cool weight below her. At least she imagines she does. On the beach, she sees the burnished boy, the Achilles of the dusty field, eyes burning into the sun. Lying on the sand, parallel to the surf, is the jeweller, black hair curling into the sand like washed-up seaweed. The old gentleman walks with his grandson, who darts back and forth like a sand-hopper, returning with shells and sea mysteries to show him. And there, way down the beach, a shimmer, the lightest hazel strokes, looking straight at her, is Caitlin.

  Chapter 18

  Anna sits in her coat at the kitchen table. Her case is on the floor beside her, her bag and purse on the table. What now? What now, she thinks. Leaving isn’t difficult; it’s the staying gone that is the problem. Out-running the elastic leash that holds her. She sits still, flat, dulled by the knowledge that nothing has, after all, changed. What now? All well and good that in other places in the world all manner of lives are happening, free of the dark weights that oppress her. Just as the news reminds her of the opposite, that in other places in the world people do not enjoy her comfortable certainties. Like her, though, they share the burden of loss. Children lost in rubble and war, or car crash, illness, violence. Parents the world over counting down, since the time of their child’s death, to the moment of their own. Parents the world over not sinking into that malaise. Learning, like Michael, how to live beyond the terrible event.

  Anna sighs, thinks instead about an evening meal – time once again to be on her own in this house. Time to pull it round her and discover whether it feels more like an embrace or a sarcophagus. She takes her case upstairs, finds warmer clothes: woollen socks, a jumper and heavy trousers. Then, picking up her bag from the kitchen table, she goes to her small car for a drive to the nearest supermarket to restock the fridge and the wine cupboard. She has temporarily lost the knack of seeing the day ahead as a series of chores that are a legitimate use of a life. She thinks instead, I must get some food, but what then? A dangerous question.

  *

  Anna sits at the kitchen table in her pyjamas. She twists the handle of a fork; the chink of metal on the plate makes small bounces of sound in the still room. The kitchen clock ticks. What now?

  *

  The evening is whittled down until finally it is time to go to bed. It is good to be in her own bed – she is glad to have found that small pleasure in her return, but it does not soothe away the crinkles, the creases, the knowing. He is there, probably lying in his bed, still enjoying the pleasure of it after nearly ten years in a bed that belongs as much to Anna as it did to him. A bed of state. At least during that time she did not think of him living a life denied to Caitlin. His being in prison provided a useful, though she now knows temporary, stasis.

  It is such torment. He must be there at his parents’ home, his mother secure once more in her blind faith, ready to put this terrible unfairness behind them and welcome her precious son back as blameless as the day he was born. God, how Anna hated them, their willingness to believe it had all been a terrible accident. How she hates to believe they might be happy to have him back.

  Maybe he is out with new friends, friends who, if he ever does tell them about Caitlin, will see it as his blind and foolish parents have chosen to, a terrible accident. Poor Ryan; he was reckless, but what bad luck. God forbid, but these things can happen. She could believe at least that they would have to be new friends. None of Caitlin’s old friends would make room for him now.

  Anna remembers the cards she got in the post over the years from Mel. Greetings, caring questions, her new address when she moved away from the village, a picture of her with a man and baby. They were kind, small connections, but even though Anna deplored it in herself, she resented them. Mel, such a good friend, someone Anna once cared about deeply. Almost as familiar, that straight, pale hair, bent over the kitchen table, as Caitlin’s own. The two girls slamming doors between bursts of energetic pop music as they traded tops and hair decorations, combining and sharing their wardrobes to make perfect going-out ensembles. Before Ryan. Anna clenches her jaw, even less ready for happy memories than she is for sad ones.

  She longs, suddenly, briefly, to see Mel, believing that Mel’s clear certainties, her sense of injustice, would not try to tidy away Anna’s anger. Mel never really liked Ryan, understood the flaw in him before he revealed it himself. But perhaps, like so many others, Mel too has moved on.

  He was likeable enough, she supposes, Ryan. Likeable enough to easily make new friends. She liked him because Caitlin wanted her to. He had good manners, a nice face, though weak. The soft face of a pretty boy never becoming handsome as a grown man. He thought well of himself, but equally he seemed to think very
well of Caitlin. He pursued her with a great zeal that, even then, Anna found uncomfortable in a way she could not place. He wanted so very much to impress Anna, and Anna had reached an age when that was no longer impressive. But she only thought him self-absorbed, too proud of himself, only needy. Not dangerous. She thought he wanted adoration so he could bathe further in the light of his own worth. She thought him a bit of a pillock. But her girl, she was moved by his ardour. She thought it was love. How wretched a love. How he made nothing of that love and all she willingly gave him, of her whole self. He made her nothing. And Anna looked blindly on, no harbour light to guide her daughter home, no fireman’s lift, no rescue. No sixth sense or mother’s intuition. No warning bells. She saw the bruises more than once, but she believed Caitlin’s accounting for them. Her lies. She saw the bruises. They made not a sound, silent as mice behind the scenery flats of her tales. She didn’t hear their truth, didn’t heed the danger.

  Perilous voice. Time for other, louder intrusions that will push away this hideous truth-telling. She switches on the television in the corner of the bedroom and dabs angrily through the options until she can find distraction.