Beyond the Realms

by Gill Mather

  He reflected that had he been sufficiently interested he could have spoken to Orielle’s house-mate Georgie to see what she thought. She seemed to have her head solidly screwed on. But he wasn't really that interested and also he wouldn't have dreamed of prying uninvited into Orielle’s background and private life in this or any other way. So he kept his scepticism to himself.

  Of course the tumour was almost certainly real. Tristram couldn't have easily faked that with all the resulting medical investigations. Presumably not but you never knew. People apparently did want to feign all sorts of illnesses to get attention. You couldn't rule that out.

  Whatever he thought or doubted about Tristram however, he didn't doubt Orielle’s honesty or sanity or belief in Tristram. He had been more than annoyed to overhear a few members of The Chambers talking in derogatory terms about her, using common expressions such as weak in the head to get involved with someone like Tristram. Normally he ignored gossip but he felt compelled to intervene and say that he hoped very much indeed that they would confine their speculations to other venues outside the office since he didn't want the risk of Orielle hearing such talk. If they thought he was telling them off and resented it, then he didn't care. He didn't, he told himself, feel particularly protective of Orielle for any special reason. He would have intervened had he heard members talking about any of their number in disparaging terms. So he told himself.

  Anyway, whether Orielle stayed on at The Chambers or not after qualifying, she was Hugh felt on the whole far better off without Triss than with him. And of course had Tristram done such an awful thing deliberately, taking her in, deceiving her and taking advantage of her and then abandoning her all for whatever reason, she was definitely better off without him. And whatever others may think about her she was certainly blossoming professionally after her initial collapse when he disappeared. Amanda was by no means quite so sure, but that Orielle appeared to be able to cope was at least a good thing; and she hadn't had to achieve that by running away as she herself had done.

  No-one of course knew that Orielle’s inner life continued unabated as before with Triss in and around her.

  SHE NEVER DID in the end tell her brothers how Triss had managed to get Will’s attempted murder charge dropped. After the disastrous and brief Christmas visit, her family steered clear of Tristram as a topic of conversation, reminiscence, enquiry or anything else. Her mother appeared to pull herself round and the family appeared reasonably jolly again when she visited. Orielle didn't want to open up any chasms into which they’d managed to ditch their collective grief by saying anything at all about Triss so the story of his intervention remained untold. She discovered after a time that her mother had fallen into the habit of putting some flowers in the church and lighting a candle once a week. No-one said so but Orielle knew this would be in memory of Triss. If he was out there, then he would know. If he wasn't then there was no harm in it if it gave her mother comfort.

  By and by she decided to move back to Newcastle and live at home once her training contract was over. Had her family failed to cease acting up about Triss, this would have been out of the question but as they were behaving themselves, she wanted to be with them. She wanted the solidarity and total reliability that only family could provide. Hugh said he would miss her but that he understood and would give her a brilliant reference and that she deserved it. They would they agreed keep in touch.

  CHAPTER 24

  PERFECTLY CONSCIOUSLY, Orielle was prepared to remain aloof from those outside of her immediate family and a few friends. Remoteness exuded from her and surrounded her like a physical barrier. If people she didn’t know well thought she cut a rather sad and lonely figure, then she didn’t care though her professionalism largely masked that impression. It was acceptable to be brisk and efficient and keep people at arm’s length if one was a professional person. People didn't expect to be “let in” in the course of a professional relationship or even in a working relationship. But as to the rest, how could you ever confide in others, potential friends, what had happened to her without lying or misleading.

  My boyfriend disappeared gave an inaccurate impression. Brought up to tell the truth, she didn't find dissembling came easy or was a possibility even. The toughness she had developed didn't run to actual lying. So it was easiest not to get involved and then nothing needed to be said.

  She became detached. She existed in this physical world but was not of it. She glided through making little impression at a personal level. Like a nun in a silent contemplative order, her real self was elsewhere, in a place she could never really understand or appreciate. She read Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and got through that OK. Then she tried Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” about superstring theory but, while very well written, to her having ditched the sciences at GCSE, the concepts it tried to explain became more and more complex. She found herself re-reading passages again and again to try and take them in and though she got to the end of the book, she had to read it over more than once. She signed up for maths and physics GCSE refresher courses with the intention of studying for A’ Levels eventually in the subjects hoping to gain a little insight into the forces that controlled the universe. Alongside her criminal studies and work, she had no spare time anyway for hardly any socialising.

  The time slipped by, almost like a physical object that could be pressed and crushed into a smaller space but still containing the same events. She got a job easily and she bought a flat near to the centre of the City and continued for all the world to be the young professional interested in nothing but the advancement of her career and the ever broadening of her knowledge.

  She knew it looked like the wrong thing to do and her family worried about her for it, but after she had been back in Newcastle for four years, she made an application to acquire the tenancy of a National Trust property, a small isolated cottage on an estate in Northumberland that needed a lot of work done on it. It was a listed building and if she got it, it wouldn't be an easy project, but the thought of being able to be out there in the wilds free to explore her own thoughts without interruption was so seductive. The age of the building also held a strange attraction she would have found hard to explain to most people. It was old itself, but was supposedly built on the ruins of a much older property. The thought of all those many centuries of goings on, the small people such as herself who had inhabited it, life and death taking place there relentlessly, the timelessness of it, helped her to understand and accept that life, this life, was transitory, almost a figment of one’s imagination really and that nothing material actually mattered. She felt she could be calm there, away from the bustle of physical life constantly trying to pull her its way, when she wanted to go the other way into nothingness. If she could sell her flat and release a capital sum, she might even give up work for a time and be on her own to think things through properly.

  At the same time, life did still exert an attraction. She had a physical body and it had needs as Triss had found. She couldn't help wishing for love, physical love at least, she couldn't help remembering Triss, thinking about his slim figure, his golden hair, his deep voice, his soft and gentle hands. The two opposing forces couldn't be reconciled and she decided that if she was to stay in this world at all, she would have to try to live both lives. The inner contemplative life no-one would understand and a separate rather superficial but nonetheless wholly physical life and make the best she could of this physical life she had been given.

  Inevitably she always dreamed that one day Tristram would reappear out of the mist as in a film or she’d see him materialise on a railway platform walking out of the crowd. It never happened. Sometimes on returning to Colchester to visit Georgie, she went to the park to the same spot where she had first met him. Nothing of course came of it. If she’d learned one thing from her reading about space and physics, it was of course that in the time that had elapsed since Triss had disappeared, she had actually travelled millions of miles through
space, possibly billions, and that even she herself was not completely the same being that he had left behind. She would have lost a good percentage of the cells in her body. They would have been replaced, renewed. Where the old ones and the molecules, atoms and particles that had made them up would be now she didn't know. Perhaps they had been left behind in other places in the solar system or even off in deep space. So therefore to hope to somehow be reunited with Triss in the park was no doubt ridiculous since it wasn't in the same position in the Universe at all as it has been those six or so years ago and much of the matter that made up her own self was different than it had been then. The same thing would of course have applied as well to the park, the trees, the shrubs, the boating lake Triss had drunk out of. Everything.

  But when all you have left is hope, hope will stick around for an awful long time.

  EPILOGUE

  ORIELLE RUSHED INTO the station convinced she was going to miss the train to London that she had booked and paid for. But it was still on the platform, doors open and she stopped, panting, about half way down the train and stepped on heaving her bag with her. She made her way along the carriage to an empty table and sat down facing forwards pulling a book out of her overnight bag and putting the bag on the seat beside her to discourage anyone from sitting next to her. Hopefully if it wasn’t a very full train, she’d have the table to herself for the journey. Not normally that manifestly superficially unfriendly, she was preoccupied with the fact that she was soon to reach her thirtieth birthday, a milestone she had set herself, and she didn’t want to spend her journey to Essex to visit her friends and relatives having to make or even listen to any small talk with or by unknown travelling companions.

  However at length an oldish woman came and sat opposite her by the window and soon after she noticed a scruffy middle aged man standing expectantly next to the table apparently wanting to sit on the seat occupied by her case and offering to put it on the overhead shelf. She could hardly refuse so she huddled deeper into her seat and stuck her nose further into her book.

  Finally as the train was moving out of the station a fourth person shouldered his way down the aisle and sat in the seat diagonally opposite Orielle. So much for having the table to herself. On the periphery of her vision she registered a tall dark-haired man about her own age with dark stubble, slightly swarthy skin and casually though quite smartly dressed.

  The book was called The Universe Between by Alan E. Nourse, a decades old novel she’d noticed in her dad’s study the last time she’d been to visit her parents. Intrigued by the title, she’d asked to borrow it. It was about beings from a parallel dimension getting damaged when humans invented a teleportation machine without understanding how it worked. These beings came over to do something about it. They all had the characteristic of violet eyes. She was about half way through the book and although she wasn’t finding it that engrossing, she couldn’t resist the story line and it would suffice for the journey and hopefully deter anyone from trying to strike up a conversation with her. However not so apparently. In fact as the train built up speed, the man next to her was already asking her about the book, unusual title, was she enjoying it, what was it about? Her heart sank. A strong smell of cigarette smoke came from him and, if she was not mistaken, the aroma of spirits too. Deciding to nip it in the bud she pointed to her throat and mouthed: “Sorry. I’ve got laryngitis.”

  This seemed to shut him up and she dug her face back into the book and thought about her predicament. For the last six years nearly, she had set herself smallish goals. Get to the end of this phase or that, and it would be an achievement and she could think of the next thing to aim for to keep herself going. It was things like getting to the end of her training contract, completing a probationary period in her first post qualifying job, staying there for a year and then moving on, buying her first property, a small flat, training for a marathon, learning a new hobby or craft, studying for A` level maths and physics. Negotiating to get the National Trust cottage in Northumberland. She managed to keep going that way. It wouldn't have been apparent to anyone watching her that she used these things as props. At work she had a reputation for being conscientious and studious. Everyone thought she did these things purely because she liked doing them. No-one would have imagined the emptiness inside her. Had they been able to, they would have been shocked to gaze into a void filled only with inexplicable images of a person who wasn't a person, tenuous impressions of beings who could pass through objects, people, space and time, conduits between this physical world and another place with no mass or substance.

  Now however she was approaching a major goal, the age thirty goal. After that, she was supposed to take her life in hand and cease to coast. She only had the one life. She should be out enjoying it instead of hiding away from people thinking about the past, just sticking to her job and her family and a few old friends, eschewing romance of any kind. If Triss didn't come back, which he wouldn't, she was supposed to open up after age thirty and let life take over again. The prospect frankly frightened her after all this time.

  Dwelling on this, she barely felt her mobile phone vibrating in her coat pocket and only just clicked to receive before it would have gone to voicemail. It was Georgie of course, fussing whether she’d managed to catch the train and firming up to meet her from the station. The conversation barely took a couple of minutes but it clearly upset the man next to her.

  “Got your voice back yeah? Too stuck up to talk to me eh?” he said belligerently. The old Orielle would have automatically apologised and made some excuse, but the changed Orielle who had emerged after Triss had left thought immediately why should she apologise. It wasn’t her choice to talk to anyone and especially not him. However before she could decide what to say that wouldn’t sound exactly cringing but wasn’t guaranteed to get his back up any more, a voice opposite said:

  “I suggest you leave the lady alone. She obviously wants to be quiet.” The voice was pleasantly deep and accentless.

  “Oh. You suggest do you. I’ll give you suggest! Come and make me then!”

  “If necessary. But just be sensible and go and sit somewhere else.”

  Incredibly the man got up and shuffled down the carriage to an empty aisle-side seat further along.

  Orielle nodded her thanks at the man opposite without directly looking at him and focused on the view of the countryside interspersed with towns flashing past outside. But he was getting up and coming round. Stooping slightly he was saying to her:

  “Do you mind if I sit here? The motion of the train going backwards is making me feel a little nauseous.”

  She nodded again without turning and tried to huddle closer to the window. She hoped he didn’t turn out to be some weirdo too. Once the train had stopped at Durham and Darlington and passed the built up areas, the countryside was suitably bleak, matching her mood. The exchange had upset her more than was justified or than she had realised. It had reminded her of the first time she’d met Tristram when he had prevented her from being mugged in the Castle Park in Colchester. He had intervened just like the man now sitting next to her. She had been trying to put Tristram to the back of her mind as her thirtieth birthday approached and persuade herself that she could form a successful relationship with another man if she gave it a go but she couldn’t deny that she still loved him overwhelmingly. Nevertheless, she was conscious of the man sitting beside her. From the edge of her vision, he appeared to be looking out of the window too, or possibly looking at her. And whether it was her imagination or not, she felt his presence there beside her, as though the fibres of her jumper and those of the sleeve of his coat were stretching out on end, straining to touch one another. Well, she thought, however much you tried to turn yourself into something different and slough off all your old habits, some of them must remain and for her it was obviously her innate tendency to be fanciful and whimsical even if she kept it well under wraps these days. Anyway, he was a man of her own age, a nice man by the sound of it. She started to r
eflect that there were worse ways of meeting someone than on a long train journey. Though she hadn’t looked at him directly, the overall impression she had of him was pleasing. She resolved to let a few more miles pass by and then try to strike up some sort of conversation with him. It shouldn’t be difficult. He had intervened for her in a potentially unpleasant situation. She could offer her thanks properly as a starting point. She sat and sat however.

  So what’s stopping you? she thought. She was shy she realised. Totally out of practice in the flirting arena, even in a minor way. So she chickened out and stuck her face in her book again, not taking much of it in but grateful for its presence to hide the blush of embarrassment that her thoughts had brought to her cheeks. It was so silly to think such thoughts. He was probably married or in a relationship already. She had to pull herself together and not imagine things. She let her hair fall over her face, concealing what remaining view of it the man might have had. The words blurred in front of her eyes. Maybe she would try to sleep to get through an hour or so. The man passed from her thoughts.