Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  She could see the house now, the last one on the street. There was a light in the downstairs front, she could see it through the chinks in the cloth that was hung in front of the window. A young man lived in that room, a young man who kept erratic hours, going out late at night, coming home in the early hours of the morning. There were no other lights.

  If the young man was in his room, he would be playing music. That would help, would obscure the sounds of Anna opening the door and climbing the stairs. She craned her neck, looking up towards the top of the house, the dormer window where she had her attic room. She almost expected to see a light up there, a flickering, moving light…But the window was a dark square, the skeleton rail of the old fire escape silhouetted against the night sky. She moved closer. There was a streetlight just in front of the house. She couldn’t avoid it. She kept her head down and stepped into the circle of light. A sudden movement to her right made her jump and look up. A cat ran along the wall. She hunched her shoulders, hurrying through the gate. The cloth over the window trembled slightly as she ran silently up the steps.

  She had her key in her hand, and was inside with the door shut behind her before she had time to think. Then she stood for a moment, catching her breath, listening. Silence. Not even the music that the young man always played. Just the distant drone of the traffic. The stairs in front of her were dark. She wanted to run away, but she knew if she did that, she wouldn’t come back here again. She pressed the switch on the wall, and a dim light came on above her. She moved cautiously now, on to the first landing. The light went out and the staircase was in darkness. She listened. Nothing. A creak. A whispering sound in the pipes. Her eyes strained into the shadows until she saw shapes and patterns moving. She pushed the switch again, poised to leap down the stairs, to run. The empty corridor lay in front her.

  She moved on to the next flight, the curved flight that led to the attic rooms. She pressed her shoulders against the wall as she slid up the stairs, trying to see to the top, to see round the corner. The light went out. Her breath was coming in gasps and she stumbled as she reached the top of the stairs. It was black night on the tiny landing, and she had lost her bearings. She reached her hands out for the switch, feeling the wall, the slight give of the paper. Something cold and hard made her recoil. The pipes. The wall vanished, and she stumbled forward, her hands hitting against a door with a solid thud. She froze.

  Now the silence had a waiting feel. She couldn’t find the switch, couldn’t find her door. Run, run, a voice was saying in her head. She had to get the papers. She had paid all her money for them, the papers that would let her stay, let her get money, let her work. Her hands blundered against the second attic door, and suddenly she knew where she was. Her hand found the switch and pressed it, and she was on her familiar small landing. She listened again.

  Footsteps downstairs. A door opened and shut. Silence. She waited, listening. Nothing. The last hurdle. She slid her key into the door, and pushed it open, closing it silently behind her. The moon shone through the window, casting a square of light on to the floor and the shadow of the wooden cat on the sill that was like the one Anna used to have at home. It was the only thing, the only non-essential thing, she had used her wages to buy. She didn’t dare turn the light on, so she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

  Slowly, the familiar shapes of the room formed in front of her. The bed in the moonlight, the chair over by the wall, the wardrobe that leaned slightly on the uneven floor. Its door was hanging open. She listened again. Silence. No one could come up the attic stairs without her hearing the characteristic creak. Her ears were open and alert for it. She pulled the chair in front of the wardrobe and stood on it, reaching up on to the top for the box where she had hidden the papers. Her hands felt behind the ornate front, skimmed across the dusty surface. Nothing. Frantically, she felt round, felt each corner, ran her hands across the wall behind the heavy cupboard. Her eyes, growing more accustomed to the dark, could see now. Nothing. The box was gone.

  She jumped off the chair and knelt down, feeling under the wardrobe with her hands, telling herself that the box had fallen off, was lying on the floor. It wasn’t there. There was nowhere else to look. That was all she had: the bed, the wardrobe, the chair. She looked in the wardrobe, and saw, noticing it for the first time, the disorder. Her things, her toothbrush, her soap, all her personal things, were scattered across the bottom and spilling out on to the floor. Her clothes, the few that she had, were thrown on the bed where someone had pulled them out.

  She sat on the bed, cold with shock. The passport with the visa, the papers that would allow her to move on, to work, to live, the papers she’d spent the rest of the money on, the papers she’d waited six months for, were gone. She covered her face with her hands. There was nothing else to do. She wanted to stop, to give up, to lie down and sleep. Anna…Anna…before it’s too late…

  She braced herself and looked round. She found two carrier bags, and stuffed her remaining possessions inside. Her movements were slow and clumsy. She stood for a moment, still listening, but the sense of urgency had gone. She heard a door below her, the front door she thought, slam.

  The moonlight had moved and was shining on to the bed and up the wall. She could see the pattern of the window, the shadow shape that was the wooden cat on the sill. She would have to take the cat with her. She couldn’t leave that behind. The air seemed thick and heavy now, the pipes knocked and whispered, and something breathed in the darkness behind her.

  There was a metallic sound, the clunk of something knocking against iron. Something moved across the shadow on the bed, obliterating the shape of the cat and she watched with the frozen immobility of shock as the shadow formed, the shadow of someone on the fire escape, outside the window, hands feeling around the frame.

  Sheffield

  Roz knew better than to look at the photographs. They weren’t preserved in an album, or tucked safely in frames, just stowed away in a box that she kept on a shelf. Since she had left Bristol, she had put them away, put them out of her mind, got on with her life. It was pointless to brood over memorabilia. She avoided the camera these days, except for the unavoidable occasions: her passport, her university card, once at a departmental celebration, her face half turned away as she realized the camera was on her, once at a friend’s wedding, a stiff and formal smile on her face. But the box of photographs had nagged at her eye, and in the end she had succumbed. Now they were spread out on the table in front of her, making a story she no longer thought about, no longer told herself. There, from twelve years ago, Roz and a group of undergraduate friends struck elegant, Jane Austen poses, a Bath terrace in the background. Another showed a group on an anti-nuclear protest – Roz could see herself in the middle, determined, banner waving. Chernobyl, just a couple of years before, had galvanized her anti-nuclear politics.

  And here, two people, Roz and Nathan, at the students’ union bar. They had their arms round each other and were holding their glasses up to the camera. Another one, this time just Nathan, a photograph that had always been one of her favourites. He was smiling at the camera, the laughter lines already by his eyes, turning on what she always thought of as his aw shucks charm.

  She remembered how she used to see him in the bar, her first year at university, with one girl or another, never the same one, or with a group: one of those people who naturally drew your eye. She’d talked to him a time or two, found him friendly and fun. He was a post-graduate working for his doctorate, teaching part-time, and she’d been slightly intimidated by his status.

  She remembered the party when he’d sought her out and they’d spent the night walking the streets of Bristol hand in hand, talking into the small hours, coming back to her lodgings as the sun was rising; he’d broken a flower off a shrub, a piece of forsythia, and tucked it in her hair. She’d kept that flower for years.

  She remembered the time when they’d first spent the night together. He’d forgotten about his students the next morning,
and they’d run to the university in guilty panic to be met by the irate secretary. She’d watched him charm the woman into smiles and forgiveness. ‘You’re shameless,’ she’d told him as they walked towards the library. He’d grinned at her. ‘Works, though,’ he’d said, his smile, and the way he’d run his fingers lightly up her arm, a reminder of the night before. If there be truth in sight…Oh, Nathan.

  And now she was paying the price for a moment of sentimental nostalgia. She could feel the tears running down her face and groped round for a tissue. She mopped her eyes and blew her nose. The photographs were the past. They should stay sealed in their box and forgotten. She had more immediate things to think about.

  It was raining. She could hear it spattering against the window, drumming on the ground. She drew the curtains against the night and looked at her watch. It was almost nine. Maybe she should just write the evening off. She could have a glass of wine – but in her present mood, alcohol would be dangerous. She could have a bath and an early night, except she wasn’t tired. She was standing in frustrated indecision when she heard the knock at the door.

  It was late for people to be dropping in, and she opened it on the chain. Luke was on the doorstep, hunched inside his jacket, his hair dripping. She pushed the door shut and released the chain. He came in, shaking the wet off himself as best he could. ‘Who were you expecting, Bishop?’ he said irritably. ‘Hannibal Lecter?’ She saw, with exasperation, that he was wearing jeans and a light jacket. He looked as if he was soaked to the skin. He was shivering.

  ‘Christ, Luke,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’ She steered him into the kitchen and stood him in front of the range. ‘Here.’ She passed him a towel and watched him as he rubbed his dripping hair.

  He made a face that was somewhere between a grimace and a smile, fished in the pocket of his jacket and brought out a bottle of wine. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘I put the bike round the back of the house. Is that OK? There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. And I needed some company.’ He frowned slightly as he looked at her. ‘You look as if you could do with some yourself.’

  Her nose and eyes would still be red from crying, she thought with resignation. She smiled at Luke and realized that her eyes were filling again. She sniffed and groped futilely in her pockets for a tissue.

  ‘Here,’ he said helpfully, offering his sleeve, and then they were both laughing, and though there was an edge of hysteria to her laughter, Roz felt better.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, using the towel to wipe her nose and eyes. ‘Wine is the best idea. Come through where it’s comfortable.’ She took him into the study, scooped the photographs off the table into the box, and crammed the box on to a shelf. She looked round for a corkscrew.

  Luke sat at the table. ‘I’ll soak your armchairs,’ he explained. He picked something up. ‘This your husband?’ he said.

  She turned round. He was looking at a photograph that she must have missed in her sweep. It was just a snap, her and Nathan on Clifton Downs near the Avon Gorge, one of their favourite walking places. ‘Yes,’ she said, turning away from him. The mirror gleamed above the table.

  ‘You’ve never talked about him, Roz.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘There was a time when you should have talked to me about him, you know that.’ She still couldn’t say anything. ‘You’ve been apart from him for more than two years. It happens, Roz. People get ill, they grow old, they die. In the end, you have to move on.’

  She stood in the centre of the room, watching herself in the deep mirror, like a portrait from centuries before, watching out of the darkness, lost in the shadows while the words whispered around her. If there be truth in sight…my Rosalind. She thought of the thread of memory you reach for each morning as you wake from sleep. She thought about that thread breaking, leaving you cast off, circling round in an eternal now. There is no truth in sight, Nathan. Not any more.

  Nathan’s illness had been sudden, severe, life-threatening. One day he had been well, the next day, pale, uncharacteristically irritable, complaining of fatigue and headaches. She had joked with him about hangovers and people who wanted to get out of going on holiday. That night, he had been taken into hospital, sunk into the coma that held him for four long days and nights. ‘It’s a virus,’ the neurologist had told her. ‘It’s affecting his brain.’ Then he’d murmured something about ‘bilateral involvement’, and left her listening to the hiss of the ventilator, holding Nathan’s unresponsive hand. They thought he might die. They thought he would die.

  Then there were the signs of recovery, the morning when he squeezed her hand, the eye movement in response to voices and questions, the signs of returning consciousness that told her that she and Nathan had been lucky, that they had been challenged, lived through it, faced it down and survived. She had slept that night for the first time in almost a fortnight, slept until the midday sun had woken her, and felt a surge of new-born energy run right through her. Then there had been the few frustrating days of slow progress as Nathan, confused with drugs and illness, began the long crawl to recovery.

  She could remember the day she phoned the hospital, and the ward sister, one who had shared her vigils with her, told her that Nathan was awake, was talking. Nathan awake, Nathan back. She had pulled her clothes on anyhow in her hurry to get there, and then stopped to look in the mirror, brush her hair, as if they were meeting again after a separation.

  She remembered walking into the hospital ward, and seeing him there, pale and tired, in his dressing gown, but in a chair, awake, and the wash of relief when she realized that what they had told her was right and could be trusted. ‘He’s pulling through, Mrs Bishop, I think we’re winning.’ And just twelve days before, they had been planning a holiday, a trip to Amsterdam, a celebration of Nathan’s new job and her PhD. He stood up when he saw her, pale and shaky, but there, awake, aware, his face lighting up with the same relief she felt. ‘Roz!’ He put his arms round her. ‘God, it’s been so long! I’m so glad…’ and his voice had broken. So long. It had seemed like an eternity, those four days while his life hung in the balance, the slow creep of time as he moved towards recovery. Over his shoulder, she saw the ward sister standing in the doorway looking at her. They hadn’t been expecting her just yet.

  Nathan was talking again. ‘I’ve been ill, I’ve been, god, it’s been awful, but I’m feeling much better. Roz, I’ve missed you. It’s so good to see you again. Where have you been?’

  There was something wrong, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She heard the nurse behind her. ‘Hello, Nathan, who’s this?’

  And there was that tone in her voice that Roz recognized, the tone of talking to a child – and she looked at Nathan and saw him frown with bewilderment. It was a stupid question. This nurse knew exactly who Roz was.

  ‘This is my wife,’ he said. ‘Roz.’

  The nurse smiled at Roz and said, ‘Would you like a drink? I’ve got some tea in…’

  ‘I’ll get a coffee,’ Roz said quickly. She looked at Nathan. ‘Do you want some?’ He was looking at her as though something was puzzling him, and she went to the machine with a sense of escaping from a situation that she didn’t understand. She saw the sister waiting outside the office as she came back with the flimsy cup that was slopping scalding coffee over her fingertips. She didn’t want a nurse-and-relative confab that excluded Nathan. She had hated standing by his bed while the medics talked about him to her. She hated Nathan being ‘he’ and ‘the patient’ and ‘your husband’, when he was there in the bed, and his eyes were open, but blank and empty, and for a time a machine breathed for him – she could still hear, even today, the regular hiss of the machine as it kept Nathan’s unresponsive lungs working. Nathan wasn’t ‘he’ or ‘the patient’ or ‘your husband’. He was ‘you’ and ‘Nathan’, and he was her love.

  She veered round the nurse’s, ‘Oh, Mrs Bishop, Roz –’ and carried her coffee triumphantly to Nathan. ‘I’m back,’ she said.
>
  He was looking out of the window, and he turned round at her voice, his expression of bewilderment changing into one of surprise and relief. ‘Roz! I’m so glad…God, it’s been so long!’ He stood up again, the weakness in his legs apparent in the way he staggered slightly. He looked over her shoulder and she could see that same expression of confusion on his face. She turned her head, and saw the nurse hurrying towards them. His eyes went to the window again, and he looked out, frowning slightly. Then he looked round the room, his face puzzled and lost. When his eyes came back to Roz, that same surprise and relief spread across his face. ‘Roz! You’re back! It’s been ages…’

  The coffee cup dropped from her hand and the hot liquid splashed down the front of her dress.

  ‘It’s called Korsakov’s Syndrome,’ she said. ‘Memory loss.’ Luke started to say something and she said quickly, ‘I don’t mean that he couldn’t remember who he was or that kind of thing. I mean he lost his memory. It’s as if his life began and ended in the last two minutes. The whole world just collapses into blankness behind him, all the time. It’s like…’ She saw incomprehension on his face, and struggled to explain what she had seen and had barely been able to grasp herself.

  She remembered how she hadn’t been able to understand, at first, what they were telling her. She’d taken Nathan home, briefly, and watched him tumble through the frenzied abyss of panic, an abyss that would be renewed again and again as he went through the litany: ‘I’ve been ill, Roz, it’s been so long…’ He had lost the thread that anchored him to the world, lost the narrative that was Nathan. There had been hope in those early days. ‘There is a real chance of improvement,’ the neurologist had told her. But Nathan had been one of the unlucky ones. He’d had a series of fits that had wiped more and more of his story from his mind. In a matter of weeks, he had lost their marriage, their relationship, even their friendship. His memory stopped about a year before they had met.