Imagined Slights

by James Lovegrove

On the bus rumbling home, Alice took out the newspaper again and reread the advert. Well, what harm could it do? He never had to see her. It could be a purely postal relationship. Penpals. And if, after the exchange of several letters, she thought she knew him well enough to trust him, then she might - only might, mind - propose that they meet.

  She would ask Monica's advice when Monica came home.

  But by the time Monica came home, Alice had already written the letter. She had gone through three drafts and thought she had it perfect.

  Dear "Dark Man of My Dreams",

  If I start by saying that I'm not the sort of person who normally does this sort of thing, would you believe me or would you think I was protesting too much? I just don't want you to think I'm someone who regularly turns to the Lonely Hearts columns in a constant, desperate search for affection. I'm not, and on the strength of your advert I don't think you are either.

  My name is Alice, and I am not slender (at least, I don't think I am), but I am morbid, I am pallid, and I do prefer black clothing. So when I first saw your advert, as you can imagine I thought I must have placed it myself. From somewhere on high I heard a voice say, "Snap!" That was how it felt, and that's why I'm replying. From what I know of you - and I know almost nothing, and yet I feel that I know you very well - I think we have a lot in common. Not just interests in common, but a similar, for want of a better phrase, spiritual outlook. I could be jumping the gun here, and I don't want to presume to tell you who or what you are, so instead I will tell you about myself, and if any of it strikes a chord then perhaps you will consider writing back.

  I am 22. I don't have a job. I was taking a degree in Social Sciences but dropped out in the second year for medical reasons. I live with a friend called Monica, who is much older than me and a health visitor. I like rock music, the darker the better. I adore The Cure. I prefer winter to summer and autumn to spring, and I am at my happiest sitting alone in a curtained room listening to the sound of my own heartbeat.

  Of course I may be wrong about you and you may find all of the above a complete turn-off, in which case I'd be obliged if you didn't go to the trouble of replying. Your silence will be your answer. If, on the other hand, you're interested in continuing this correspondence, then I'd be very happy if you did so.

  Sincerely,

  Alice

  And not wanting Monica's opinion on the letter, because if Monica was anything less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic then all that work would have been for nothing, Alice sealed it in an envelope, checked she had addressed the envelope to the correct box number, and went down to the postbox and mailed it.

  She spent the next three days in an agony of uncertainty and regret. Not one minute went by when she didn't wish she could turn back the clock and pluck the envelope out of the postbox the instant before it disappeared. She even contemplated telephoning the sorting depot to ask if the letter could be stopped. What had she done? What had she done?

  It was only on the fourth day that a sense of resignation set in, moving across the country of her mind like a cold front on a TV weatherman's map, and when a fifth day passed without a reply, and then a sixth, she accepted that she had made a fool of herself. Somewhere, someone was laughing at her. It was nothing new. It was no less than she deserved for taking matters into her own hands. Her life was so much easier when she left the running of it to other people, and she had been mad to hope otherwise.

  A week after she answered the advert, the reply came. Monica handed the envelope across the breakfast table without a word. Alice knew Monica expected to be told whom it was from and what it contained, and surprised her by not opening it there and then. Instead, with a coolness that astonished even herself, Alice sat and drank her tea (no milk, no sugar) and read the newspaper and studiously ignored the scrambled eggs Monica had made for her and even more studiously ignored Monica's searching glances. She did not know for sure that the letter was from the Dark Man of Her Dreams, but then when was the last time she had received a handwritten envelope? Besides, the envelope was addressed simply to "Alice". (She had deliberately not given her surname, fearing - as demons do - that names have power.) Who else could it be from?

  Monica had to go to work and was angry that Alice was keeping something from her. She slammed the front door. When the clacking of her heels on the pavement had faded away, Alice took a table knife to the flap of the envelope. Inside were two sheets of feint-ruled A4, folded into quarters.

  The Gatehouse

  Riverwood Cemetery

  Dear Alice,

  You know me. You have always known me. There is no other explanation. If you did not know me, you would not have known how to sell yourself so well to me. I do not mean that to sound pejorative, but what else do we do to each other all the time but sell ourselves? Our clothes, our habits, our mannerisms - these are the methods we use to advertise our souls. Most people window-dress to a ludicrous degree, gift-wrapping their true selves in tawdry tinsel lies. They are terrified that, if they don't, the merchandise will seem bland and dull. You, Alice, are smart enough to realise that the only way to avoid the inevitable disappointment we cause to others when our true ordinariness becomes clear to them is by not heightening their expectations in the first place. That is good. You have saved both of us the effort of tearing down one another's artifices. Honesty begets honesty, and so I shall give you nothing but the unadorned, unvarnished truth about myself.

  My name is David, I am 25, I live alone and work alone. I have no friends. There are some acquaintances from school I see every so often. We drink in a pub and they reminisce about the only time they were happy, when they were children living under the wing of their parents, the real world a place far beyond the walls of school and home. They are sad and bitter now because nothing they have encountered since matches up to the blissful security of that time. I, on the other hand, was blessed from an early age with the knowledge that life is cruel and pointless and hard. For no reason that I can pinpoint, other than that perhaps I was simply born old, I entered adulthood with my eyes fully open. Nothing could surprise me. I knew - and nothing I have seen yet has altered my opinion - that every day of my life is no more than a tick on a calendar marking my progress towards death. Why deny that fact? Why not embrace it? To think otherwise, to treat life as a journey towards some worthwhile goal, some great reward, is to delude oneself. We are born to degenerate and die. Accepting this liberates.

  Alice, I have to say that your letter has excited me. I feel that I may have unearthed a kindred spirit, a fellow bearer of the Cross of understanding, and that my lonely vigil may be at an end.

  Yours,

  David

  Alice went for a walk in the park, taking the letter with her, and after ten minutes of strolling beneath the black-leafed trees sat down on a bench to rest her aching legs. There, she took out David's letter and read and reread his words until she knew them by heart. What a mind he had! He had taken the raw stuff of thoughts that were only just forming in her mind and spun from it a single coherent strand, making sudden sense of almost everything that had confused and perplexed her these past couple of years.

  And she felt justified, she felt vindicated, and the feeling thrilled her. The courage it had taken to reply to the advert was now a permanent part of her. She would never need to screw herself up to that pitch of bravery again.

  Fizzing with new-found confidence, she wrote back to David.

  Dear David,

  I can hardly believe I am about to do this, but then we are not strangers, not now. Somehow we have skipped that awkward phase.

  Will you meet me?

  The time and the place can be of your choosing. I am flexible. Lunchtime, evening, whenever. I am always free. At least, there aren't any appointments I can't cancel.

  Perhaps at your home address? The gatehouse?

  Yours,

  Alice

  Over the next few days Alice was a different person. Though she still only picked at the meals Monica cooked f
or her, eating perhaps one floret of broccoli or a few forkfuls of green salad and pushing the rest around her plate, in every other respect she showed, and felt, a relish for life which, when she thought about it, made her habitual state of despair and self-loathing seem absurdly, pointlessly blinkered.

  Monica couldn't help but notice the change, though she commented on it only obliquely, when she heard Alice singing "The Lovecats" to herself one morning: "Been at the happy pills again, have we?" She was still sore at Alice for not confiding in her about the letter, and Alice felt guilty about that and promised herself that when the time was right she would tell Monica about David. But that time was still some way off, if it ever came at all, and anyway she could see Monica was secretly pleased that she was not moping around as usual, and this, undoubtedly, was a bonus for both of them.

  "Your anonymous correspondent," Monica said dryly as she handed Alice David's next letter.

  Alice took it to her room to read.

  Dear Alice,

  Next Friday, the 17th, 1 p.m. Come to the gatehouse. I'll supply the lunch.

  Yours,

  David

  She was going to meet the Dark Man of Her Dreams.

  The face in the bathroom mirror that Friday morning startled her. She almost didn't recognise herself. Her eyes were hollow in their sockets, her forehead was unnaturally large and domed, her cheekbones loomed like angels' wings, and she could see the ridged outline of her teeth beneath her thin skin - their roots seemed to reach all the way up to her nose and all the way down to the bottom of her jaw. When had this happened, this transformation from girl to living skeleton?

  She hid it as best she could with make-up, which she hadn't worn in ages, but the crimson of her lipstick only served to draw attention to her outsized teeth and the shadows cast by her blusher only accentuated the cavernousness of her cheeks. By the light of the small strip-bulb above the mirror she looked ghastly, haglike. If she repelled herself, God knew what David would think of her.

  She decided not to go.

  At midday she cleaned up the smeared mascara around her eyes, wiped her nose and decided she would go after all.

  In her best black velvet dress she walked to the bus stop and boarded a bus that took her through the heart of the city and out the other side to the Riverwood Cemetery.

  This was not the first time Alice had visited the Riverwood Cemetery. During her first year at university she had spent many an afternoon there wandering alone, undisturbed, untroubled, uninhibited. Among the gently curving pathways and white headstones, with all the quiet dead beneath her feet, safe under two yards of soil, she had felt utterly at peace. The crosses, tombs, small mausoleums and penitent marble angels held no threat for her. Rather, they promised release. Soon, they whispered, it will all be over. It was the only guarantee she had had at the time, and she had clung to it as though nothing else on earth mattered.

  Stationed between two long stretches of spiked iron railings, the gatehouse arched over the southern entrance to the cemetery, rising to red-brick crenellations. Its windows were leaded in a diamond pattern, and ivy crawled across one flank like broken veins in an old man's face. It had never occurred to Alice that anyone might live there - the purpose of the gatehouse had always seemed symbolic rather than functional - but now that she thought about it, as a home for one person it wouldn't be at all unpleasant, assuming you didn't have a problem with graveyards. It was the sort of place where she herself could quite happily have stayed.

  The bus dropped her off right outside. She hesitated only briefly before pressing the ceramic bellpush set into the brickwork beside the bolt-studded wooden door.

  Footsteps descended a spiral staircase, and the door opened.

  "Alice."

  She looked at his eyes first. The eyes could tell you so much. His were hazel, with stars of jade-green about the pupils, and stared at her as though her face was a computer screen filled with mesmerising information. They were set in heavy lids, with faint purplish crescents beneath them that suggested pain and sensitivity. The rest of his face was pale and tapered to a chin that was more pointed than squared. He had full lips, maroon like a Slav's, and a long fine neck in which the jugular veins lay proud against the lean muscle. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt which hung loosely on a frame that was, as he had promised, slender. His hair, too, was black and, if the uneven fringe was anything to go by, self-cut. But it was his eyes Alice returned to and met with a steady gaze of her own, not only because she didn't want to appear to be avoiding them but because they fascinated her and were, in turn, fascinated by her.

  "You're everything I thought you'd be," David said. He was carrying a rolled-up blanket and a lightly laden supermarket carrier-bag. "I've got the picnic things. Shall we go for a walk?"

  He led her through the cemetery gates and along the narrow streets of the necropolis, choosing his turns confidently, until they came to a spot Alice knew well, where a semicircle of silver birches cast their skeletal shadows over two raised tombs that sat side by side like solid stone tables, their surfaces encrusted with saffron lichen. Autumn rooks croaked overhead. David made a cushion of the blanket on one tomb and beckoned Alice to sit there, then settled himself down on the other, facing her. Their legs dangled, knees not quite touching, toes not quite reaching the lawn.

  "I don't eat much," he said, offering her a thinly cut tuna and salad sandwich, which she nibbled politely. They drank bottled water, and the sun, a cold yellow pebble, rolled across the sky.

  David told her that he was writing a work of philosophy that was going to unite all the philosophies of the world, a massive undertaking which had so far consumed three years of his life and looked set to take up another seven or eight. Alice hoped he was going to discuss the work-in-progress with her, sound out her opinions, but instead he moved almost immediately on to another subject, explaining how he earned a living as a caretaker for the cemetery, one of a team of five who mowed the grass and pruned the trees and clipped the hedgerows and swept the pathways of leaves and generally saw to it that the homes of the dead weren't neglected even after the bereaved had long since ceased coming to pay their respects. He did not dig graves because Riverwood had reached capacity several years ago and new land had been found elsewhere for the newly deceased. One of his other duties was to make sure that the cemetery wasn't vandalised or despoiled, and at dusk each evening he patrolled the grounds to check there was no one loitering inside before he locked the gates.

  This prompted Alice to ask, "Do you walk around in here at night? Just you and the moon and the wind?"

  "Sometimes. When there's enough light to see without a torch. Then I can sneak up on couples without being spotted."

  "Couples?'

  "They come here to fornicate. Even though the gates are locked, there are still ways to get in, if you're desperate enough."

  She could barely bring herself to ask the next question. "Do you watch them? I mean, everything they do?"

  "Sometimes." He shrugged and smiled. "The unvarnished truth. Wouldn't you?"

  "I don't know. Yes, I might, I suppose."

  "Here." He tapped her knee. "Come on. I've got something to show you."

  They gathered up the unfinished picnic and set off across the grass between the parades of headstones, David running at a gentle lope, Alice doing her best to keep up. Normally this kind of exertion would have been beyond her, but David's sudden burst of energy was infectious, and her legs and lungs did what was demanded of them. She found herself laughing as she ran, and she didn't know why.

  David came to a halt beside a mausoleum of pale, weathered stone, with a sloping roof, gables, eaves and a low chain fence surrounding it. When Alice caught up, the first thing she said was, "A home."

  "It is a home," David said. "A little one-room house. And look." On the iron door there was a bolt secured by a rusty padlock. He undid the padlock with a key from his pocket, shot back the bolt, put both hands to the door and shoved. The door s
craped inwards a few inches. "Want to go in?"

  She hated herself for hesitating. "I don't know. Is it ... right?" She peered into the gap between door and frame and could see nothing within but blackness.

  "They're dead. They're beyond caring." Using his shoulder David shunted the door slightly further open, creating a space through which a thin person could easily slip. "There's nothing in there but dust, cobwebs and bones."

  "All right." Alice swelled with bravado. "All right. Who cares?'

  She eased herself through the gap. Pure and perfect darkness engulfed her, a darkness that smelled of damp and earth and age. Ahead she could make out a stone ledge of some sort and what looked like a brass handle, tarnished but glinting. Turning round, she saw David following her in, squeezing himself through a sliver of daylight that was weaker than she expected, as though to be contained by the interior of a tomb diminished it. Then David grunted and the daylight narrowed to a thin line and disappeared.

  "David..."

  "Don't worry," he said. Alice couldn't tell where his voice was coming from until a hand softly took her hand. "It's only darkness. It can't hurt you."

  A part of her ached with fear; another part was quietly thrilled, and this part seemed to have the upper hand and made the fear its passive consort. She marvelled that her eyes could be wide open and yet useless, showing her nothing except the gibbous green afterimage of David's silhouette in the doorway.

  I am in a tomb, she thought. So this is what it's like.

  "Why don't we lie down?" David suggested.

  "Lie down?"

  "Here, on the ground. To see how it feels. How they feel."

  She didn't need to ask who "they" were. They were all around her. The very air she was inhaling was infused with their decay. Close by, an arm's reach away, they were pinned in their narrow beds, dressed in their rotting best, hands clasped over their breastbones - a family, generations, a dynasty, reduced to dust and ashes. If she wanted to join them, they would not reject her. They were nothing if not accepting.