Loss of Separation

by Conrad Williams

  I decided to move on past the first floor to the top of the house and start there. Two double bedrooms. One single bedroom. And then the largest bedroom, a private section with its own sizeable bathroom and shower. It boasted the best views too. The previous owners had clearly decided that their own happiness was more important than the premium price they could have demanded for such decadence. There was a bed frame in here but nothing to rest upon. There was a very cheap-looking wardrobe in one of the other rooms too, that looked as if it was still standing, albeit in a vaguely upright position, by dint of wishful thinking. No other furniture. Another shower room that needed totally replacing. I descended to the first floor thinking that the best way to clean the whole place out would be to torch it, but the thought of flames made me feel sick, and I knew that there'd be something else waiting for me in the morning when I got back, no matter the ugly weather. Skeletons came out to dance rain or shine.

  First floor. Four double bedrooms, two en suite. One single bedroom. Wallpaper touching its toes. One shower room. A mirror with a crack in it. A toothbrush lying on the floor, bristles thick with mould. A copy of Mojo magazine partially obscured by dust. A dead beetle.

  A noise from upstairs.

  I've just been up there, I sighed to myself, trying to rationalise it, trying to keep my heart calm. Maybe it was just my physical presence, after months of absence, or empty space, causing a greater-than-normal level of subsidence. Some animal trapped in the attic, making a final bid for freedom.

  I came out on to the landing and stared up into a blackness that my feeble torch could not pierce. Darkness made an oblique across the staircase like the diagonal of a guillotine blade.

  There it was again. It was a kind of slumping noise, as if a heavy person was trying to get comfortable on a bed never known for it. I stood on the landing and felt my heart fraying, bit by bruised, gnarly bit. I didn't know what to do. I had seen nobody up there, but I hadn't exactly stuck my face to the floor to check under that old bed or pulled open the wardrobe door to see if my own private Narnia waited inside for me. I hadn't taken a peek through the loft hatch. I hadn't checked to see what state the fire escape was in, or the flat lower-level roof.

  'Hello?' I called up the stairs, but I couldn't generate much volume. My mouth felt drum dry. The door to the master bedroom creaked. Weird acoustics: I could hear the weather all over the house - especially at the landing window behind my back - but it was shut off from that particular corner as that door closed. And it wasn't a draught closing it. There was a pause, and then it was pressed into the doorway. I heard the click of the latch bolt snap home. I heard a ferocious cry. I had no idea what it was; undercover of the storm it sounded like metal tearing, cats copulating, the lusty railings of a distressed baby.

  Ten minutes later I was in the alleyway outside the house, staring up at the windows and not knowing what it was I was expecting to see. I had gone up to the top floor somehow, found the steel from somewhere. Call it pilot's nerve - maybe that kind of thing does not leave you, really - but I got up there and placed my hand against the door as if I might feel something, some hideous vibration through the flesh to confirm what my ears thought they'd heard. I couldn't bring myself to turn the door handle. The prospect of seeing the room as I had initially left it was far worse, somehow, than any yawning terror my imagination could throw at me.

  Outside, in the rain, I thought I saw the lazy shift of low-spectrum colour from one side of the pane to the other. But my eyes weren't what they were. Nothing was as it was.

  I guessed it to be another three hours till sun-up. The rain was showing no signs of dropping off. It looped and swirled like sheer silver dresses on a washing line. The cold was affecting my movement. It had sunk so deep into my legs that they were shivering even when firmly planted on the ground.

  I was fiddling with my phone, trying to stab some sense out of it in order to find a taxi number, when I saw Amy's number. I checked the time. It was four in the morning. Christ. I couldn't. I couldn't.

  I did.

  She answered on the first ring. She didn't sound tired at all. 'Airman,' she said.

  'You remembered.'

  'I kind of knew you'd call. I just didn't think it would be in the middle of the night.'

  'You weren't sleeping?'

  'I cat nap. During the day, mostly. I prefer not to sleep at night. Psychological. And anyway, I do my best work round about now.'

  'Could I come to you? I'm locked out. Nowhere to go. And I'm freezing my nuts off.'

  'Only if you'll agree to help me,' she said. But she didn't wait for me to agree. She gave me her address; she was renting a flat above a sweet shop in the centre of the village, opposite the main hotel. I shuffled and snuffled for another fifteen minutes and thought, maybe, that the sky was just showing the first dirty green-grey streaks of dawn by the time I reached the triangular lay-out of shops.

  A figure was standing in the narrow ginnel between the sweet shop and the post office. It had to be her, although I was made uneasy by how still she was, like a dressmaker's dummy in a window. That's what damage did for you, I thought. The rest of a life marked out in yards achieved, rather than miles. The moment when life changed for us involved lots of movement, critical movement: my monumental collision with a car; the flail of limbs as she fell seventy feet. More animation than we would ever know again.

  'Inside,' she said. 'I have a hot shower. Something hot to drink.' She flapped a silver cape from out of a bag. It looked like something NASA might use to panel its lunar landers. 'It's for hypothermia,' she said. 'Runners use them all the time. You see them flapping around at the end of marathons. Like a super-hero convention.'

  I'd been out in the cold for two hours, more or less. Being inside the B&B didn't really count; it had been colder in there than on the beach.

  She held my hand as we ascended the stairs. At the top, she got my shoes off and handed me a mug of steaming soup. She watched me spoon it down. It was bad stuff, rehydrated packet 'broth', but the heat of it and the sugars in it instantly perked me up.

  'Better?' she asked.

  I nodded, handing the mug back. The shakes in my hand were lessening.

  'Shower next,' she said. 'Take as long as you want.'

  I made sure the water temperature was tepid to begin with; I didn't want to scald my new flesh. But after I'd grown accustomed to it, and the greyness in my toes and fingers had turned to pink, I whacked the heat up until there were billows of steam obscuring the rest of the bathroom. I stood under the jet, letting the water pound the back of my head, and wondered what help it was that Amy had been referring to. I'd not taken much notice of her flat before shutting myself up in the bathroom, but a single pool of light above a desk had shown me that her life was one disorganised mess of papers.

  She'd left a large, ratty-looking but clean towelling bathrobe for me to wear and I gratefully wrapped myself in it. As soon as it was on, I felt my eyelids droop. Warmth was pressing in from all sides. Like the winter wind, it was almost an assault, but this was one I could live with.

  She was sitting at her desk when I came out, on one of those ergonomic chairs without a back to force your posture erect. A glass of whisky sat by her arm. She flapped her hand at the coffee table behind her without looking around. Another glass for me.

  'Some more cockle-warming material,' she said. 'I won't be a minute.'

  I sat down on the sofa. There were papers not just on her desk but in every available space. On the floor under the windowsill was a rank of grey box-files. Most of the fresher spine labels listed road names - A3, A49, M56 - but there were place names too, punched out on faded and cracked Dymo red tape: Dunblane, Warrington, Morecambe, Hungerford. Other, less recognisable names not readily associated with tragedy. A new file, marked Southwick, lay next to the whisky. My hand brushed against it as I picked up the glass.

  'I've got the accident and disaster and tragedy sites of the last hundred years documented in these folders,' she sai
d. 'Photos of motorway pile-ups. Zeebrugge. Paddington. The rescue operations. Other stuff. The Chinese cocklers. The sky looks fantastic in the background. Air crashes. Manchester. Lockerbie. Kegworth...'

  'But why are you here?'

  'I'm a ghoul. I'm here for the death.'

  'What death?'

  You've got death crawling all over you. I took a stiff pull on the whisky to calm my nerves. Being around this woman set my teeth on edge. She was like tin foil on a filling.

  'That's something I'd like your help with,' she said.

  I wasn't ready to hear it. I asked her if this business of disasters, of geomancy, was how she made her living.

  'Kind of,' she said, 'but it's not, like, officially my real job. My real job involves designing websites for small businesses who've realised the hard way that nobody wants flashy, flash-based pages any more. Just simple stuff. Simple stuff rules. I do it all on my MacBook. It pays for the petrol for my Mini and it means I can be mobile. All I need, wherever I land, is a socket to recharge my gadgets. But I make most of my money sending photographs of disasters - the wreckage, bodies if possible, the aftermath, cleaning up, that kind of thing - to a handful of clients over in the States.'

  'Sounds dodgy,' I said. 'Sounds like you're whoring yourself out to questionable people with unappetising appetites.'

  'It's not like that,' she said. 'These people are researchers.'

  'How long have you been doing it?'

  'Since my accident,' she said.

  'Are the two linked?'

  'I expect so. It's hard to say, because I couldn't be sure if I was able to do what I do before I jumped out of that hotel room.'

  I finished the whisky and put down the glass. 'I'm sorry, you lost me there. Do? Do what? Take photographs of death locations?'

  'No,' she said. 'Remember what I told you about echoes?'

  I did, but I thought I must have dreamed it. 'You hear echoes?'

  'Kind of. Kind of feel them too. Tremors.'

  'Through time.'

  'Through time.'

  'Ever since your accident?'

  'Yep. Maybe, I don't know... maybe a switch was thrown in me because I was so very close to death. Maybe I have an affinity for it, without really knowing what it is. Maybe some deep, unmineable part of me does know, but I won't ever be conscious of it. Not till the moment I check out, I suppose.'

  She was looking at me in a strange way, and this time it wasn't that ferocious cast of her eyebrows, her dark grey eyes, or the scar carving through her forehead.

  'Not me,' I said, twigging. 'I'm sorry, but I don't think so.'

  'Maybe not,' she said. 'Maybe you need to open yourself to it.'

  'To death? I was about as open to it as it's possible to be without actually being dead. I didn't like that place. I don't want to wallow in it, thanks.'

  Books on photography were stacked by her bed: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Eugène Atget. A wide-angle and a telephoto lens sat on a table next to a scuffed Nikon DSLR and an iBook plastered with Finding Nemo stickers. I thought of what might be on the memory card inside the camera and wished I had another drink.

  She reached out a hand and placed it on my own. Her fingers traced the route of the scar tissue. 'The scars are the worst part, for me,' she said. 'I don't mean in any pathetic oh-I've-lost-my-beauty shit. But they bother me more than anything else. More than memories of the fall itself, and trying to make the decision that went before it.'

  'Why?' I asked.

  'I look at myself sometimes, when I'm naked, and I don't recognise myself any more. I know I'm me - I know my eyes have not changed although much around them has, and, bar the new aches and pains, I feel the same, but... I feel like an impostor. I feel like someone came to me while I was in my hospital bed, comatose, and covered the real me with this... this full body mask.'

  'Can I have some more whisky, please?'

  While she refreshed our glasses I tried to think of something to say that might make her feel better. But I understood, and sympathised, with her for what she'd revealed about herself. We were strangers to ourselves. Our shapes had changed. Things were gone. Things were added. It would take a long time to become comfortable with our physicality again, if we ever would.

  I moved, an involuntary shudder. I imagined my skeleton, white, basted in my juices, grinning. Trying out its new moves.

  'I read somewhere that, roughly every seven years, our bodies replace their own skeletons. You know, the equivalent in new calcium. Bones and marrow and so on.'

  'That doesn't exactly help with my identity crisis,' she said, but not without some degree of humour.

  'Maybe it does,' I said. 'If you accept that we're changing all the time anyway. It's not like we're lizards, or anything, but we still shed our skins over time. You're not who you were ten years ago. Mentally, physically. All that remains the same is how you see the world and maybe not even that.'

  'Eyes,' she said, and I had to look down into my glass because she'd said it hungrily, desperately, as if she were anxious for any buoy to hold on to, to keep her afloat.

  'What is it you want me to do?' I asked. 'Why are you here, in Southwick? Is it the baby?'

  She nodded. 'That, and other things. Kieran Love, from Ely. Seven months old. A weekend trip to the seaside with his parents. He was found broken over one of the wooden groynes on the beach. Stiff with cold and rigor. It was as if someone had tried to use him as a hammer to bash the groyne deeper into the sand.'

  'Spare me the details,' I said and took another deep swallow of whisky. 'Jesus. Is it any wonder I never wanted children? How can you want children when there are people out there who will do this to them if they get even a moment's chance?'

  She was watching me, waiting for me. I could almost hear her say it: Go on, get it out of your system. And then we'll crack on. Then we'll get down to business. We have plenty of time.

  'I'm sorry,' I said.

  'It's okay. This is unpleasant stuff. I'm not looking for you to be Mr Ice.'

  'What are you looking for? Why do you need my help anyway?'

  'Because I've been watching you. I've seen you on the beach in the morning, burning those boxes. I've seen you in the bookshop, reading stuff.'

  'You took that pamphlet.'

  'I bought that pamphlet. What I'm interested in is tied up with Winter Bay and the battle that took place there on that one day.'

  'That one day three hundred years ago.'

  'This isn't like a stain on a rug. It doesn't wash out over time.'

  I glanced around me as if I'd see the pamphlet among the pounds of loose paper lying on every available surface. There were maps and charts and grids drawn on tracing paper, broken-backed notebooks stuffed with co-ordinates and colour-coded diagrams and print-outs and clippings from newspapers yellowed with time. Two hefty external hard drives were plugged into the laptop and they blinked acid green colour across her desk, chuckling away softly in the background over the secrets that vibrated inside.

  'You read it?' I asked.

  'I read it, yes.'

  'Someone had defaced it. Scribbled on the pages in pen. Something about children.'

  'Would you like another drink?'

  'I've had enough,' I said. I knew straight away that she hadn't seen what I'd seen. I hoped she'd simply taken no notice of it, or been so wrapped up in the prose that it hadn't even impinged on her consciousness, but it was unlikely. 'Can I show you?'

  'I didn't see the words,' she said.

  'Can I have -'

  'Which doesn't mean that they aren't there,' she said.

  We sat in silence for a short while. We both knew what she meant. She hadn't seen them because there were no words. But she believed that I'd seen them. Which meant that either I was crazy, or she was crazy. The likelihood was that we were both mad, our minds decayed after the long recovery from our respective accidents. Bits of us still lay on the roadside and on the car roof outside that hotel. Molecules shifted, torn away, re-positioned
. The tiniest bits of the roadside were impacted into me. Minuscule flecks of cellulose from the car were under Amy's skin. We were composites. We were not merely of ourselves any more. We were less and more than what we once were.

  God, I was pissed.

  'Show me the pamphlet,' I said.

  She pushed herself out of her chair and picked her way around various reference books on the floor to a box filed with the word CURRENT written on the spine. She extracted the pamphlet and, without checking for herself first, handed it over to me.

  I flipped through the pages, hoping now that she was right, that there were no added words and that the pamphlet was just an ordinary, slightly dry account of a lethal coming together between Dutch and English ships in the North Sea. But there it was again. And my breath caught in my throat because it was written so hard into the paper that the point of the pen had gone through the page. How could she not see this?

  I held it open and showed her, placed my fingernail beneath it.

  'See?' I breathed. 'SUFFER CHILDREN... THEY WERE TAKEN! Can't you see?'

  'It's not there,' she said, and paused, and smiled and said: 'For me, at least.'

  'But I can see it.'

  'You can see it. Have you seen anything else?'

  I told her about the child I'd seen, alone, seemingly naked, at the end of the beach.

  'The spot where you have your little fires?'

  'You think that's significant?'

  'Maybe,' she said. 'What else?'

  I told her about the fishing trip I'd taken with Charlie, and the nasty little haul we'd landed.

  'Where are the skulls now?' she asked.

  'I don't know. Morgue? I don't know what the procedures are. They were old skulls. Hundreds of years old, they said. Maybe they're being carbon dated, or filed away in a museum cupboard.'

  'I doubt it. I'd like to see those skulls.'

  'I wouldn't know how to help you. We could go to the police, but I can't see them happily ushering you through to the room where they keep all the dead things, can you?'