'I know you're dead,’ I whispered lovingly, ‘but we can still be together. It doesn't matter about the little girl—I understand, I really do. I know you didn't mean to do it. I've been with the owls, Gil. I can take care of Maldureve. You can help me. You can help me destroy him, and then the owls will begin to teach you wisdom. They'll teach you everything they taught me, and more. Don't be afraid, Gil. Don't be afraid of anything—not even of being dead. We can still be together. We can still love one another.'
'Anne,’ he said, plaintively, ‘you don't understand ...'
'I do understand,’ I insisted. ‘I'm the one who does understand, because I'm the one who's been with the owls. I didn't understand before, when I helped Maldureve come out of the borderlands, but I understand now. First, I have to destroy Maldureve, if I can. Then it'll be just you and me. Just you and me, Gil, for ever and ever. You won't have to live in the shadows for ever, Gil. The owls can teach you how to live in the light. Don't be afraid, Gil. You don't ever have to be afraid again.'
'It's in the lab book,’ he said, anxiously. ‘There's a lot of other stuff in there with it, but the truth's there, if only he'll look at it with an open mind. You have to persuade him to take it seriously, Anne. You can do it, if you try. I'll help you. I'll tell you what to say, how to hook him. You can do it, if you go about it in the right way. You need his help, Anne. You really do.'
'Don't be afraid, Gil,’ I told him. ‘I've been with the owls. They can do anything. They can help you. I'll do what I can to bring you out of the borderlands. I did it with Maldureve, and I can do it with you. It's not the end, Gil. It's not even the beginning of the end. It's just the beginning.'
The shadows stirred in agitation. They moved behind and around and within him, reaching out to claim him again. He was fading into them, but I didn't try to hold on to him. I knew well enough that these things take time. I knew that this was just the first phase. I knew that I could give him substance and solidity. One day soon, he'd be able to make love to me again, and it would be better than before.
It would be far better than before.
'Anne,’ he said, desperately, ‘you're not listening to me ...'
'I'm listening,’ I crooned, as gently as if he were a babe in arms. ‘I'm listening. I understand. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid ...'
I kept repeating it, like a mantra, while he dissolved into the tumultuous darkness, losing his all too fragile grasp on presence. He was just a phantom; there was no matter in him at all. I felt a slight prick of sorrow when he disappeared, but I knew that it didn't matter. I knew that I'd see him again. I knew that I could help him come out of the shadows again and again and again, just as I had once helped Maldureve. This time, it would be the right thing to do. This time, it would all work out for the best.
This time, I was in control.
6
In the end, the doctors had to let me discharge myself, because they needed the bed and they couldn't find anything sufficiently wrong with me to justify keeping me in. It felt wonderful to be out of hospital again: to be free; to be myself. It had been hot in the ward—far too hot—and the slow, cold December wind bit deliciously into my flesh, and made me feel more alive than I'd ever felt before.
There were two reporters waiting outside when the three of us left, but Mum went to talk to them. She told them what I thought and felt with a calm authority and total conviction born of years of practice. She was unexpectedly good at seeming friendly and open but actually saying next to nothing—another skill, I supposed, cultivated over the long, laborious years and made into a habit.
Mum and Sharon came back with me to Brennan Hall to help me ‘settle in', but there really wasn't much settling to be done and the actual effect of their presence was all in the other direction. I'd worked hard and long at the task of persuading them that I'd be all right, and that I had to restore my routines before running for the cover of my old home; they were both ready to accept it. It helped that they were homesick themselves. They didn't have any other routines.
Later, I went to the station with them. I had dutifully made all the ritual promises. Yes, Mum, I'll phone every night; yes, Mum, I'll be careful; yes, Mum, I'll make sure I get plenty to eat; yes, Mum, I'll wrap up warm; no, Sharon, I won't let the bastards grind me down. While we waited for the train to come in Mum kept looking around at all the people on the platform, as if she were searching for a pair of dirty woollen gloves. She couldn't quite get it out of her mind that the man who had attacked me was still loose. It didn't matter how improbable it was that he'd start following me around, waiting for a chance to finish what he'd started; she couldn't shake the fear.
'I wish you'd come home with us,’ she said, one more time. She said it forlornly, almost as if she were the child/victim and I the parent/reassurer.
'I have to carry on with my life,’ I told her. ‘If I don't do that, I will have been raped, in a way.’ It was a terrible cliché, but I meant it. If I'd gone scurrying home, I would have been violated. The man with the gloves had cut me, but I couldn't let him sever the thread of my ambition, the emerging skein of my destiny.
'It's a terrible world,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘Sometimes, I think I was wrong to bring children into it.'
'It's okay, Mum,’ I said. ‘Everything's going to be okay. I'll see you in ten days’ time. I'll be home for Christmas. We'll all be together then.'
What present would she buy me, I wondered? What do you give a girl who's grown up in the space of a single autumn, changed into something you hardly recognize? She didn't ask me what I wanted. She never did. Sharon always told everybody what she wanted, and everybody knew that there'd be hell to pay if she didn't get it, but I never had. Even if someone did ask, I always said that I didn't mind, that I liked surprises. I didn't really like surprises, because they were never as pleasant as I hoped they might be, but I always said it anyway, innocently gambling on the possibility that some day...
This year, like Scrooge, I'd probably be visited by ghosts. One ghost, at least.
I waited on the platform while the train pulled out, so that I could wave to them until they were lost to sight. It was expected of me. Afterwards, I walked back to the bus stop. The world seemed to be in unusually sharp focus. The December sunlight was pale but bright. I felt fine. I was still full of energy and the excitement of simply being alive. The owls had done that for me. They'd taught me how to feel the fundamental excitement of being. I felt hungry, but not for blood. I felt hungry, and I was glad to be hungry, although I'd never been a hungry person before.
I got back to Hall just in time for lunch. When I walked into the dining room everyone looked up. There was one of those strange momentary silences when all conversations are briefly suspended. People I knew by sight and people I hardly knew at all looked at me, and asked me how I was.
I felt uncomfortable, not because I'd become a celebrity but because I'd become a celebrity for such a bad reason. There's something slightly off-colour about becoming famous because you've been attacked, because you've had your throat half cut. I'd walked into that dining room more than a hundred times without attracting more than the slightest flicker of recognition, and had almost always been allowed to take my tray to an empty table, or to the furthest corner of a partly occupied table, so that I could eat alone. This time, people came to join me, to crowd around me. They were people I knew—mostly girls from my corridor—who naturally felt entitled to reckon themselves my acquaintances. Their motives were impeccable. They really were concerned for me, and they really wanted to gather round and pledge their moral support, because they knew that it might have been any of them.
They wanted to be my friends, now—and they wanted to pool their horror over what had happened to Cynthia's daughter, to close ranks in the face of something monstrous and ugly. No one mentioned Gil. Perhaps they thought that their lamentations should be kept within reasonable bounds. Perhaps they thought that one and a half cut throats equalled a tragedy, but that throwing
in a suicide as well would make me out to be a real bird of ill omen, deadly dangerous to know.
'If you need anything,’ said Karen, the girl who lived next door to me, ‘I'm only next door. Come ‘round any time.'
'Thanks,’ I said.
After lunch, I walked the familiar path to Wombwell House.
The new fence was absolutely hideous. It was made out of some kind of powder-grey metal alloy, each strut folded sideways to a near-right angle and curled over at the top like the frond of a fern. It was, as Sharon had said, exactly the kind of fence that local councils or British Rail set around dangerous installations, to keep trespassers at bay, lest vandals should wreak havoc or little children electrocute themselves. I hated it. It didn't make me feel any safer; it just made the little wood seem desolate and forlorn.
Dr Gray was in his office, reading a book. He seemed as world-weary as ever, but distinctly ill at ease. In all his years at the university he'd probably never had a tutee who'd been attacked, and he'd certainly never had a tutee whose daughter had been murdered. He must have felt that the flow of everyday circumstance had abruptly turned against him, malevolently determined to disturb his languid boredom and subvert his fanciful play with abstract ideas.
'I want to catch up as soon as possible,’ I told him. ‘I want to make up all the work I've missed. I might stay on after the end of term to do the essays—I can't do them at home during the vac because I don't have access to a proper library. It'd just be for a few days. I don't want to leave it until next term because I'd always be one step behind, always struggling. I like philosophy, but I don't find it easy. I'm not very good at it, as yet.'
'You're better than most,’ he assured me, with a sigh which signified that the remark was a condemnation of the rest rather than a compliment to me. ‘I could lend you some books, if you like. It seems a pity to stay behind, when everyone else has gone.'
'I'm not afraid,’ I said, baldly. ‘I'm going to be here for three years. I have to get used to walking around the campus without being petrified with fear by the thought that someone might grab me from behind. Even when it's dark. Even when it's deserted.'
'They should have done something about that wood a long time ago,’ he said.
'It's a very ugly fence,’ I said flippantly.
'I talked to your parents,’ he said. ‘I told them you were doing well—that you were genuinely interested.'
'Mum told me.'
'I'm sorry all this had to happen. What happened to you would be quite bad enough in isolation. To have something worse happen to Cynthia's daughter, and then to have that young man kill himself so ... well, it takes things far beyond the ordinary limits of misfortune. In a way, I might feel more reassured if you seemed to be more frightened. It's paradoxical, I know, but the better you seem to be taking it, the more people will worry about the possibility of a delayed reaction. It's pointless to keep asking you whether you're sure you're all right, but people will. Even me.'
'It's all over,’ I told him, although it was a plain, straightforward lie. I couldn't resist adding, for a joke: ‘They say these things always come in threes, don't they? Nothing else can possibly happen now.'
He knew it was a joke, but he didn't smile. ‘I'll do what I can to help,’ he said. ‘I'm always here anyway, so it wouldn't be any trouble to do a couple of extra tutorials. I feel more at home here than I do at home, and you know how much I like the sound of my own voice.'
'Do you live on your own?’ I asked, because I was interested.
'Yes,’ he said, and added, almost absent-mindedly: ‘I was married once.’ He didn't go on to say ‘but it didn't work out', the way a lot of people would have done. He disapproved of meaningless formulas like that, and avoided them when he could.
'What's Monday's topic?’ I asked him. ‘I'll try to get an essay done over the weekend.'
'The emotions,’ he said. ‘There's a reading list on the handout you got at the beginning of term.’ Still in his faintly confidential mood, he added, with another sigh: ‘I'm not looking forward to it.'
For a moment, I thought that there was something about the topic that he found depressing, but then I realised that he meant something else.
'Will Cynthia be there?’ I asked, already having guessed that she would be.
He nodded. ‘She phoned in,’ he said. ‘She's as determined as you are to get on with things. I know that it's the fashionable view these days—if you fall off your horse, get straight back on again, otherwise you'll be a pedestrian for life—but sometimes I wonder whether it's asking a bit too much. It's perfectly all right to take time to recover. Will you be seeing her, do you think?'
'I thought I'd go ‘round this afternoon,’ I told him. ‘I thought I ought to.'
'Tell her that she doesn't have to come in, if she finds when the time comes that it's too difficult. Tell her that she can have all the time she needs. Tell her that.'
He was trying his hardest to persuade me that it was only concern for Cynthia's welfare that moved him, but I knew there was a little bit of cowardice in there. He was frightened of having to face her, of having to face us both. The thought of having to talk to us clinically and sceptically about emotions was intimidating him, in a macabre sort of way. He was scared that there might be too much emotion pouring out over his eccentrically carpeted office floor.
'I'll tell her,’ I assured him before I left.
As things turned out, though, I didn't tell her. I didn't say a word about the impending tutorial. The opening simply never arrived, and there were far more important things for her to worry about than Dr Gray's anxieties.
Cynthia lived in a tower block—one of the ones they always put on the front page of the Guardian's ‘Society’ supplement to symbolize urban decay and deprivation. There was the usual graffiti in the lift and the corridors, and the usual gangs of children hanging around looking as if they were plotting to go out and mug somebody in order to buy their daily ration of glue. It was all illusion, really—just the way I'd been taught to decode the images.
Cynthia seemed both pathetically pleased and desperately alarmed to see me. ‘The place is a god-awful mess,’ she told me. ‘I'm such a slut, sometimes. I just haven't ...’ She didn't bother to enumerate the things she hadn't, or the reasons why.
The social preliminaries were as awkward as I'd expected, but I got her through them. She made us a pot of tea before getting down to the serious business of self-criticism.
'I meant to come to see you in the hospital,’ she said. ‘I really did. I just couldn't face it. It was so terrible, what happened to you, but I just couldn't think about it after ... it was my fault, you know. I should never have left her alone like that. It wasn't the secretary's job to look after her ... but I hadn't the slightest notion that it could happen again, so soon, in broad daylight. Lightning isn't supposed to strike twice like that, not in the same place ... but it does, of course. That's why there are lightning conductors. They wanted me to go on TV, you know, to make an appeal. They say it helps to encourage informers to come forward. I did it ... of course I did it. How could I not do it? I was awful. I knew what people would think. Single mother—single lesbian mother—letting the child run loose in a place where somebody had been attacked and nearly killed less than a week before. God ... and then your boyfriend doing that, so that the police began to think it was him who'd done it all ... the questions, the reporters, the suspicions ... I always wondered, you know, almost in a fascinated way, how mothers felt when something like this happened. You can't help it, when you've got a kid of your own. You always see them on the TV, don't you? And you can't help but wonder, what if it were me? What would I feel? You try to imagine feeling as terrible as it's possible to feel, but you know you can't really imagine it, because you know that if it really were you, feeling it for real, it would be far more terrifying than anything you can imagine.
'Actually, the most terrible thing of all is that when it is you, you don't feel like that, because you
don't know how to feel like that, because you haven't ever been able to imagine feeling like that, and you just feel so horribly numb and empty, as if you're not able to feel anything at all ... and you think you're going crazy. You know you're going crazy, because otherwise you'd feel something different, something worse, something with all the right kinds of pain in it ... but you can't and you don't, because you don't know how, and you wish it was you, you wish it was you that was lying in the hospital or the mortuary, you that had your throat cut, because then at least you'd know what to feel ... not because it would make Janine be alive again, but simply because it would let you—off the hook. This isn't making any sense, is it?'
She was weeping, but not sobbing.
What could I say? How could I say ‘I know how you feel’ when that would be an absurd contradiction of everything she'd just said? How could I say ‘It's all right’ when it patently wasn't? How could I say ‘It isn't your fault, it's mine', even though that was the truth of it? I brought Maldureve out of the borderlands; I willingly became a vampire; I made Gil into a vampire too, and didn't tell him what his hunger was. How could I say ‘I am the Frankenstein who made the monster which murdered your child in the throes of its terrible confusion. I did it. It's my fault'? I couldn't say it; she'd have thought I was mad, madder even than she.
Nor could I say ‘Don't despair, it's not the end'. I couldn't tell her that it was possible to live after death, and that the dead could sometimes come back, into and through the borderlands, and that I had the power to help them through.
I couldn't say any of it, even though it was all true.
'I didn't love her enough,’ said Cynthia, wiping away a few of the tears without stemming their flood. ‘I didn't care enough. I wanted to do things for myself. I didn't want her to get in my way. I'm not sorry enough now that she's dead. I don't feel enough. I'm dead inside.'
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