The Rift

by Nina Allan

  A soldier of your own, my maid? All the nice girls love a soldier, especially these days.

  Your soldier came, your soldier went, and in the long weeks after his leaving you can still taste his scent, like leather, on your skin and in your clothes. Who was he? You barely knew, and then he was gone, back to the Front and from there – you heard eventually – to his eternal rest. You know the factory foreman will dismiss you if he finds out you’re pregnant. What the fuck are they scared of, these men with their cocks, their cocks that make kids and, apparently, saddle a man forever with a fear of women. You’d hate them and their cocks, if you had the energy, but you’re just too tired. You find someone – a woman with iron fingers and the closed-door, furious face of Marianna – who says she knows how to fix it but God, it hurts, the iron in her fingers as she shoves it into you, this severance of the then from the agonising now. You try to stand and cannot. You wonder if your soldier bled like this when they bayoneted him. Did they hurt your soldier this much? How foul it is to be poor, you think, and without a weapon.

  Back in the factory you are faint and ill. The word hell is not a real word, it’s a book word, yet this is hell nonetheless, the heat, the noise, the nausea, the pain in your cunny. You’re polishing grenades when one of the monstrous, devious objects slips from your hands. It falls in slow motion then rolls across the boards, a round-thing-trundling-on-wood noise, though nobody hears that, it’s too cacophonous, to rambunctious in here, too many people yelling and laughing and working all at once. You stand paralysed, your vision blurring. The grenade strikes the heel of your line-manager, who is everywhere and nowhere suddenly, a hot red mess.

  “An accident. A very bad accident. I fainted. Everything was blue. I saw stars dancing and heard a great rushing in my ears. My dresses were all bloody. All was full of blood.”

  They let you go, but they let you go. You wandered nameless through the streets, seeking asylum. When finally you are sent home again, Marianna says it’s pulling potatoes or you’ll be out on your arse.

  The decision to end it all comes suddenly, one of those mad ideas that can take you over entirely for an hour and then retreat again. What would it be like to die? you wonder. Better than this shit, anyway. As soon as the water takes you, you realise you’re mistaken. For once in your life you’re lucky. A passing policeman, a Sergeant Hallmann, is there to help.

  The best thing about being a princess is that it’s a job in itself. You don’t have to do anything to be a princess, except exist. You can turn your face to the wall and refuse to answer, if you like. You can gaze at the photographs and count your sisters: the bossy one, the sweet one, the dutiful one. And who are you if not the clever one? You always were.

  Did you play with their faces in your mind, as you played with drowning? Their white dresses and winsome smiles, that endless, luminous summer before the war? You never spoke the words ‘I am a princess’ because you didn’t have to. The world needed a miracle, and you, Franziska Czenstkowska, had never been a miracle before.

  1

  Selena had never suffered from nightmares much, not even when she was younger, not even after Julie went missing. Her dreams were mostly boring – small-scale dramas about getting lost in Sainsbury’s or forgetting someone’s birthday. They were anxiety dreams, but the anxiety they invoked was commonplace, easily handled.

  Hearing Julie’s story seemed to change that. Selena’s dreams became charged with panic, filled with voices and landscapes she didn’t recognise. She would wake from these dreams with her heart racing, her limbs bathed in sweat.

  “This isn’t Manchester,” somebody said to her in one of the worst dreams, a woman with narrow features and wispy red hair. They were standing outside some kind of storage facility – an abandoned factory or perhaps a grain silo. Once she was awake, Selena wondered where these images had come from. Films she’d seen, perhaps. Five Easy Pieces. That truck stop at the end. Johnny loved that movie.

  The woman with the red hair turned to her and smiled. A thin smile, not unfriendly exactly, more like a warning.

  “Manchester’s inside,” she said. “It’s small enough to fit now. Don’t you want to go home?”

  She kneeled down in the dirt and began fiddling with something: a small metal grille at the base of the silo, held in place by rivets and a bent-over nail. Some of the rivets were so old and so rusted they looked painted on. Unscrewing them would be impossible, even if you wanted to.

  “Don’t open that,” Selena said. Her mind and body were filled with the same illogical terror that characterised her earlier dreams. A sound was rising up from the grille, a distant, high-pitched keening, like the wind over the Pennines, and Selena remembered how she and Johnny used to drive out to the Peaks at the weekends, awful weather usually but there was always a pub to hole up in. They’d play cribbage sometimes, or just read the papers. It was nice.

  Somewhere behind the keening sound she could hear music playing. She thought it might be The Pogues.

  The red-headed woman straightened up. The grille was still attached to the silo, but the woman’s fingers looked battered and crooked. Their tips were covered in blood, or perhaps it was rust.

  “It’s over,” she said. She looked straight at Selena, the smile still pinned to her lips, her hair hanging in ratty strips about her thin face. “You’ll have to go in. You know that.”

  Selena woke with a start then, which was what always happened. She’d never dreamed any of these dreams through to the end, never found out what happened, or what was going on, although wasn’t that true of all dreams? The dreams you dreamed through to the end you never remembered.

  * * *

  On the night Julie told her story, the only question Selena felt safe in asking was about Steven Jimson. The Jimson part of the story made sense at least, although who was to say that even that was true? There were all the old news reports, for a start. Anyone could look them up, if they were interested. Selena had read them herself. She knew them by heart.

  “Are you sure it was Steven Jimson driving the van?” she said.

  How did you know, was what she wanted to say. How did you know it was Jimson? When did you decide that was the story you were going to tell me – last week, last month or last year? When did you begin researching your own life, Julie?

  “I didn’t know at the time, obviously. I only worked it out afterwards. Recently,” Julie said. Her face was grey with tiredness by then, tiredness and strain, and something else that might have been fear. Fear that she wouldn’t be believed probably, although what did she expect? Selena thought Julie might be angry at her question, but if she was she didn’t show it. She answered in an offhand, distracted manner that was already familiar from all their other meetings: Why are you bothering me with this shit when it’s so not the point? “At the time he was just this guy. I only found out his name when I looked online. There was a photo of him. Several. It was definitely the same man.” She looked down at her lap. “I was in that van for over an hour, Selena. I’d know his face anywhere.”

  They were sitting at a corner table in Dido’s Diner, an insalubrious but seemingly immortal greasy spoon just off Canal Street that had had its signboard graffitied to Dildo’s Diner more times than Selena could remember. She didn’t know why the management didn’t just decide to leave it like that. It would save a lot of time, and money. Everyone called it the Dildo anyway, so what difference did it make? People liked going there because the food was cheap and not too bad and because the place stayed open round the clock. When Selena went to meet Johnny off the plane after his first interview they’d had breakfast in the Dildo at five in the morning.

  For most of the time she was telling her story, Julie had seemed blanked out, in a trance, as if she’d been hypnotised by Derren Brown and then commanded to speak. Afterwards, Selena kept thinking how young she’d looked, as if the intervening years had been cancelled out and here at last was the Julie she remembered, her sister the teenage runaway, lost but now foun
d, the mystery of her disappearance finally revealed.

  Whatever happened, she isn’t the same. She can’t be. She looks like she’s made of glass. Glass and steel wire.

  She wondered why Julie had placed Jimson last in her story, when in fact he was the first thing that happened. It took less than ten minutes to walk from their old house on Sandy Lane to the Spar shop at the end of Pepper Street, but that was all it took sometimes, to step from one world into another. The TV and the Internet were full of such stories, enough of them to make you afraid of leaving the house ever again.

  As for the rest of it, she had no idea. A delusion of some kind maybe, a fugue state, brought on by her experience in the van with Steven Jimson. She could not bring herself to believe that Julie was simply lying to her, that she had concocted this ridiculous story as – as what, exactly? An excuse for what she’d put them all through? An excuse for Dad’s death?

  On the whole, the idea that Julie had gone mad was a lot less painful. Selena was used to madness, and in this situation, whatever this situation was, madness as an explanation seemed to make more sense than anything else. Selena realised she was just sitting there, her head hanging, her capacity for listening exhausted. I want to go to sleep, she thought. She remembered when she and Julie were kids, how they would sometimes sneak into one another’s bedrooms after lights out, how they would chatter and giggle and freak each other out until one of them or both had fallen asleep. This is the same, Selena thought, only now I’m too old. Too old for The X-Files, too old for aliens, too old for this.

  They’d managed to find a taxi somehow. It dropped Julie off first, then Selena. There were no dreams that first night, or none she could recall. Selena awoke the following morning feeling surprisingly refreshed, surprisingly normal. At some point during the morning Julie had phoned her at work and asked if she felt like seeing a film when she clocked off, and Selena said yes. She had spent the rest of the day dreading their meeting – she couldn’t face the thought of rehashing everything – although in the event all they did was watch the film. It was a romcom, something about a washed-up boxer and the manager of the bar he frequented. Selena found it surprisingly entertaining, though she had to make a conscious effort not to fall asleep.

  When the movie was over they had coffee in the cinema café. Julie asked how her day had been, and Selena found herself telling her about a Russian woman who had come into the shop, one of Vasili’s girlfriends, she suspected. Vanja didn’t seem to like her much, anyway.

  “She was demanding all this stuff on account,” Selena said. “She claimed Vasili had put it aside for her. Of course there was no record of it.”

  “What an arsehole,” Julie murmured. Whether she meant Vasili’s girlfriend or Vasili himself, Selena couldn’t tell. They left the café soon afterwards, with nothing more said. That night, Selena had the first of her nightmares. She waited a day, feeling stunned, then called Julie on her mobile and asked if she’d like to come over at the weekend.

  “You haven’t seen the house yet,” she said.

  “I’ll come on Saturday,” Julie said. “You can give me the grand tour.” Selena had thought Julie was being facetious, although she had to admit that Julie did seem curious about the house when she turned up, at first anyway, poking into every corner, taking things down from shelves to look at them, opening cupboards. Selena was surprised how much she minded, though she didn’t say anything.

  “Your garden’s tiny,” Julie said, and it was: a paved yard with an outside toilet, squared in behind high brick walls. Margery was always on at her to have the toilet demolished.

  “You’d double the size of the garden,” she insisted. More than half the households in the row had had their privies torn down, or else converted into garden sheds, but Selena had resisted the idea. It wasn’t just the mess and disruption that put her off – the builders forever traipsing into the kitchen to make cups of tea – but the sense that the house needed the toilet, that it would feel bereft without it. The two had been built together, after all, they were used to one another.

  In any case, Selena didn’t want to double the size of the garden, not particularly, it was fine as it was. The redbrick paving was original – many of the houses on Egerton Terrace had lost their paving along with their privies – and she liked the back wall, with its round-shouldered gate, the kind of gate that looked as if it might lead into Narnia but that actually gave access to the litter-strewn service lane stinking of cats’ piss where the wheelie bins were stored.

  There was just the one flowerbed, dominated by a monster rose bush, the sort that played dead all winter then flowered – voraciously and, Selena suspected, vindictively – right through from March until the end of October. The blooms were enormous, a raucous yellow. Selena sometimes found herself imagining the rosebush had it in for her: Thought I was done for, bitch? Well, I ain’t done yet.

  The house was hers though, which was all that mattered, the one thing she had that counted as what Margery might refer to as something to show for herself. In a strange way her silent stand-off with the monster rose bush was an acknowledgement of that. We’re in this together, bitch, an’ don’ you forget it.

  If Selena sometimes felt her grasp on the material world was ineffectual, the rose bush had tenacity enough for both of them.

  “The yard’s big enough for eating outside,” Selena said. “The road’s quiet, too.”

  Julie looked at her strangely, as if she’d said something surprising, although it was more likely that the subject of the house had ceased to be of interest to her. Julie didn’t care about the house, or where it was. She was too wrapped up in her own stuff – the alien abduction stuff, or whatever Selena was supposed to believe it was.

  [SELENA and JULIE are seated at the table in Selena’s kitchen. Selena has just made tea. There is some tension between them, as if each is waiting for the other to speak first.]

  JULIE: Why don’t you just spit it out, Selena? You’re obviously dying to have a go at me.

  SELENA: I don’t know what to say. What did you expect?

  JULIE: You don’t believe me.

  SELENA: I believe something awful happened to you. Maybe – I don’t know – this whole story about being spirited away to another planet is your way of rationalising it. Things like that do happen. I’ve read up on it.

  JULIE: You’ve read up on it? What am I now, some kind of case history? I don’t need therapy-speak. I need to know what you’re really thinking.

  SELENA: What do you want me to think? You can’t expect me to take it seriously, not all that stuff about aliens or monsters or whatever. And how come everyone on this so-called planet spoke English? It’s like something out of Star Trek.

  JULIE: I’ve thought about that a lot. I think that maybe they weren’t speaking English, but I could understand them anyway. Something happened when I went through the rift. I think I switched over.

  SELENA: Switched over?

  JULIE: To their language. Cally’s and Noah’s.

  SELENA: Cally and Noah. I’m fed up with hearing about them. It’s like you’re asking me to believe in unicorns. Or the Loch Ness Monster.

  JULIE: You used to, once. You loved all that stuff.

  SELENA: That’s completely different and you know it. We were kids.

  JULIE: Adults are just kids who have been brainwashed into forgetting who they are.

  SELENA: It’s called growing up, Julie.

  JULIE: Is that really what you think?

  SELENA: I don’t know. [Beat.] I suppose a part of me feels I’d be letting you down, that’s all.

  JULIE: Letting me down how?

  SELENA: By pretending to believe this rubbish. Maybe it would be better if—

  JULIE: Now you’re going to say you think I should see a doctor. You weren’t like that with Dad.

  SELENA: I was going to say that perhaps you need help, that you should talk to someone. Someone outside the family. Is that so awful? And Dad has nothing to do with thi
s. Dad was different.

  JULIE: Different how?

  SELENA: Because what happened to Dad was real. Believable. There was an explanation. He was so desperate to find out what happened to you he’d have latched on to anything.

  JULIE: You don’t think he really believed then? He just pretended?

  SELENA: How should I know? You have no idea how bad Dad was. You weren’t there. [Beat.] Sorry.

  JULIE: I know they locked him up for asking questions.

  SELENA: No, they locked him up because he was refusing to eat and we were terrified he might commit suicide. Anyway, Dad wasn’t locked up. That’s not what happened.

  JULIE: He sent me another letter, you know. He said he didn’t care how unreasonable my story was, he would believe me, whatever. Impossible things happen every day. That’s what he said. I’ve never forgotten it.

  SELENA: Why did you run away, then? You broke his heart, you know. [Beat.] Look, this is getting us nowhere.

  JULIE: I didn’t run away.

  SELENA: Yes you did. Even if everything happened the way you say, every single thing, you could have come home sooner. Soon enough for Dad, anyway. I don’t understand why you didn’t.

  JULIE: Because of this. What we’re doing now. I couldn’t stand the thought of it.

  SELENA: We can’t go on like this, Julie. This can’t go on, I mean, us hiding in corners and pretending everything’s normal. I want to tell Mum.

  Selena felt surprised at herself for actually saying it – for daring – although the thought had been there in her mind since Dido’s Diner. Julie had come to her for a reason – either because she needed someone to talk to or because she was fed up with being alone. Probably it was both. Her need for privacy was understandable, but it was becoming an imposition. If she kept acceding to Julie’s demands, would she not be at least partly responsible for her sister’s delusions?