Imagined Slights

by James Lovegrove

  She lowered herself to the ground, David providing gentlemanly assistance.

  "Lie back," he said. She heard him settling down beside her. A small voice cried out in the back of her head, What are you doing, girl? This man could be a rapist! A sex fiend! But she believed - no, she trusted - that David was not like that at all. He was above such things.

  The cold of the packed earth beneath her penetrated the fabric of her dress and chilled her skin, but in every other respect she felt comfortable. For a while there only the sound of their breathing. Then David said, "Hear that? Perfect silence. Perfect darkness. Perfect peace. This is what it's like to be dead."

  "It's beautiful," Alice sighed.

  "Here."

  She heard a scratching, and a moment later felt David's fingertips at her lips.

  "Try this."

  "What is it?"

  "You want to know what it feels like to be dead?"

  "Yes."

  "Then open your mouth."

  She parted her lips, and a sift of soil dribbled into her mouth.

  "Best get used to it," David said. "You'll be eating nothing else for eternity."

  Fighting back the gag reflex, Alice rolled the soil around her tongue and found to her surprise that the taste, though acrid, could have been a lot worse. It reminded her of the smell of forests on damp afternoons, of lakes and rabbit holes, of falling over as a child face-first into dirt, of carrots raw from the ground. With a gulp she swallowed down the gritty paste and cleaned a few lingering granules from her teeth with her tongue.

  "I've coined a word for people like you and me, Alice," David said. "'Thanatophile'. I thought the term already existed, but I looked in Chambers and the OED and it wasn't in either. Perhaps there are some concepts society just can't bring itself to name."

  "What does it mean?"

  "It means 'a lover of death'. Not somebody who likes to fuck corpses. There've been no problems about naming that state of mind. It means someone for whom death and dying hold no fear, someone who actively welcomes the concept of death into their life. I'm not talking about martyrs or people with terminal illnesses. I'm talking about sane, healthy people who make a conscious decision to befriend the Reaper - people who feel calmer within themselves because they're looking forward to one day hearing the swish of his scythe."

  "I do," she said, but David didn't seem to hear. "Sometimes."

  "You see, what Plato and Wittgenstein and Nietzsche and Sartre and all the great thinkers throughout history were flailing about looking for was the answer to the problem of how to live a pure and honest life, a life free from fear. They didn't find it because they were approaching the problem from the wrong end, examining life itself, seeing life as the be-all and end-all, not seeing it as a preliminary to the ultimate purpose of being, which is to die. The Tibetans almost got it right, but they insisted on introducing reincarnation into the equation, a get-out clause, a second chance. We don't come back. When life stops, it stops for good."

  "And beyond that, there's only peace."

  "Only peace," he echoed approvingly. "I know that's what you want, Alice. I know that's what you've wanted ever since you were old enough to formulate an independent thought. I can tell just by looking at you. You've begun the process already. Gradually wasting away. Feeling your body getting lighter on you every day, becoming less burdensome. Letting your flesh erode and your joints atrophy. Letting your bones show through your skin. Letting the truth emerge from beneath all the trash."

  "It's true," she said, like a sigh. And it was true, and she wondered why she had never realised it before. She wasn't punishing herself at all. She was shaping herself, making herself into what she most desired to be. "And what do you want, David? Don't you want it too?"

  "I want you to be happy, Alice. I want you to be free."

  She heard his shoes grating on the soil as he pulled himself up to a kneeling position, and she braced herself for the coming kiss. He grasped her shoulders and laid one leg over her thighs, but the kiss did not come.

  "I can free you, Alice," he said. "The question is, do you want to be freed?"

  Freed from what? From uncertainty? From feelings of rejection? From loneliness? Oh yes, she wanted to be free from all of those.

  "I do," she said.

  His hands moved to her neck in a dry caress.

  "Then let me free you," he said.

  She felt his fingers squeeze an instant before they actually did so. It was as though she detected the electrical impulse travelling down his arms before it reached the nerve endings and delivered its message to the poised muscles. It was not much of a warning but it gave her time to twist her head away and at the same time bring her legs up in a foetal reflex.

  She did not mean to knee David in the testicles and incapacitate him, but that was what she did, far more effectively than if she had actually been trying to. The air whooshed out of her lungs and he rolled away from her, gargling and wheezing. Next thing she knew, she was on her feet and stumbling gropingly backwards.

  "Alice?" David croaked through the pain. "Alice what did you - Christ, what did you do that for?"

  Alice backed up against something hard that scraped her calves. Her fingers found a ridge of smooth, dust-coated wood and followed it until they were sufficiently convinced that it was, as she had thought, the rim of the lid of a coffin which rested on the stone ledge she had glimpsed earlier.

  "I thought we ... understood each other," David went on in a voice filled with such agony that it almost brought tears to Alice's eyes.

  Which way was the door? Her sense of direction had been completely thrown. She thought it must lie somewhere to her right, and keeping her calves in contact with the ledge she shuffled sideways in that direction. At any moment she expected a hand to come out of nowhere and grab her ankle. Wherever David was lying in the pure and perfect darkness of the mausoleum, he could only be less than half a dozen short paces away. She might even be passing within inches of him now and not know it. She struggled to keep her breathing under control and continued to move crablike alongside the ledge.

  Her right shoulder butted a wall, and she reached out to the side and a little to the front, and to her relief felt the rough flaky texture of rusted iron. Her fingers danced as delicately as a spider over the surface of the door but could find no handle. Of course not. Why would anyone put a handle on the inside of the door to a tomb? But there had to be some other way of opening it. David wouldn't have shut both of them in there if there wasn't a way of letting them out again, would he? Would he?

  "Talk to me, Alice. Where are you?"

  The door was not solid iron but a sheet of iron moulded around a frame, overlapping at the edges to leave an even, inch-wide strip of spare metal. Alice inserted her fingers and braced herself.

  "Alice?"

  She heard David behind her getting unsteadily to his feet, and she put everything she had into the heave, knowing that if she didn't make a gap large enough on the first attempt she probably wouldn't get a second chance. The door wrenched stubbornly inwards, juddering against stone and soil. The sudden glare of daylight screwed her pupils painfully tight, and the edge of the iron overlap dug into the joints between the pads of her fingers, but she kept pulling, jamming her knee into the aperture to speed the process.

  "Alice!"

  A hand grabbed the shoulder of her dress. With a shriek Alice let go of the door and squirmed through the opening she had made, praying feverishly that it would be wide enough. The edge of the door ground against her ribs and hips, the stone frame scraped her spine, and then she was through and diving free with a rend of tearing fabric.

  She fell headlong on to the grass and immediately struggled to her knees, only to discover that the hem of her dress had snagged on the inside of the door. Turning to tug it loose, she looked up to see David worming through the gap, a scrap of black velvet clutched in his outstretched fist. His face, whiter than ever, was wedged between the door and the frame, and his hazel-
and-jade eyes stared at her with a mixture of pain and incomprehension.

  "What's wrong?" he said. "You wanted to be free, didn't you?"

  Giving vent to something that was both a grunt and a scream, Alice jerked her dress free from the door and set off across the grass, stumbling between the headstones. She went about ten yards before realising that David was not chasing her, and glancing back she saw that he was stuck in the doorway and trying to extricate himself in reverse so that he could haul the door further open.

  After that, she did not look back again until she had reached the gates of the cemetery.

  Monica came home to find Alice bathed, in her pyjamas and in bed. Alice said she was feeling a bit under the weather, you know, time of the month due and all that. She lied with a fluency that surprised and mildly ashamed her. Monica heated up some chicken broth and sat by her bedside and spooned it into her mouth. Alice drank half the bowlful, which pleased them both. Then she dozed for a while, waking up at around ten p.m. to find Monica sitting in the armchair in the corner, examining some sheets of A4 paper. It didn't take Alice long to recognise David's letters.

  "What are you doing with those?" Alice asked, softly but with an undertone of unmistakable menace.

  "Who is this David?" Monica turned one of the sheets over and frowned. "Whoever he is, he doesn't sound like a very nice person to me."

  Alice shunted the bedclothes aside and said, in a venomous whisper, "Give them back."

  "In fact, he sounds a bit sick."

  "You have no right to be reading them."

  Monica looked up then, and her eyes were righteously wide. "I have every right, Alice. The last thing someone in your condition needs is some boy playing games with your mind."

  "It's private correspondence." Alice lowered her bare feet to the carpet, testing her left ankle, which she had twisted during her flight across the cemetery. There was a faint corona of bruising around the joint, but it didn't appear to have been sprained badly.

  "As long as you're living under my roof at my expense, Alice, nothing of yours is private. Did you go and see him this afternoon?"

  "Nothing happened."

  "That's not what I asked," said Monica, though it more than adequately answered her question.

  Alice took a few short limping steps across the room. "Give them here."

  "'We are born to degenerate and die,'" Monica read out. "If you ask me, this fellow sounds deeply disturbed."

  "He might be, but at least he's not an interfering old dyke," Alice snarled, and made a grab for the letters, but Monica was quicker. She leapt from the chair, holding the pieces of paper defensively behind her head, out of Alice's reach. Her expression was sad, not angry; cold, not hot.

  "How dare you talk to me like that, Alice Beckett!" she hissed. "How dare you! Aren't I the one who's looked after you for going on two years now? I took you in when no one else would, when even your parents had given up on you. If it wasn't for me, you'd probably be lying in some mental hospital right now with a drip-feed in your arm. I've been mother, sister and nurse to you, and this is the thanks I get?"

  "You're evil," Alice hissed back. "Poking around in other people's belongings. That's what evil people do."

  "I will not be spoken to like that in my home."

  "Your home, your home! You keep shoving that down my throat, don't you?"

  "I have to shove things down your throat, Alice, because that's the only way you'll take anything in!"

  "That was a cheap shot, Monica, even for you."

  Monica tried to appear wholly reasonable. "You're not well, Alice. How many times do you have to be told that?"

  "I am the way I am because that's the way I want to be," Alice replied. "Because it's about the only thing in my life I can still control. The only thing you or my parents or the doctor can't have any say in. And if you can't accept that, well then, fuck you."

  They glared at each other for several moments, chins jutting, nostrils flared, eyes as big as boiled eggs. For a time it seemed that they might even come to blows. Then, abruptly, Alice turned away.

  "Go on then," she said. "Take them and burn them. I don't care."

  Monica peered lamely at the pieces of paper in her hands. "I never said anything about burning them."

  "Well, do whatever you want with them. I don't care." Alice crawled back into bed. "I'm too tired to care." She pulled the bedclothes up over her head. "I'm too tired to care about anything any more."

  They had had arguments before, of course. It was only natural. Two people sharing a flat together were bound to disagree now and then. This time, however, Alice had felt something break between them. The slender bridge that had connected them - constructed from her vulnerability and Monica's need to protect - had collapsed, and she knew that it was gone for ever and could not be rebuilt. She knew she had no choice now but to leave. But where would she go?

  After the television had gone off in the living room and the light had gone out in Monica's room, Alice waited a further hour until she was certain that Monica was fast asleep, then stole a five-pound note from her handbag, phoned for a cab, and went downstairs to meet it outside the front door.

  "Where to, love?" said the cabbie.

  "The Riverwood Cemetery."

  "At this time of night?' The cabbie bounced his eyebrows up and down a couple of times. "S'pose you want to reach your grave before dawn, eh?"

  "Shut up and drive."

  "I knew you'd come back."

  Alice stood shivering on the gatehouse doorstep. David was wearing just a T-shirt and black briefs, and his legs were stippled with gooseflesh. He moved aside to allow her to enter. She climbed the spiral staircase and found herself in a long vaulted room equipped with basic second-hand furniture and a small kitchen unit. A door at the end led off to what she presumed was a bedroom, another to a bathroom. There was a raw cosiness about the place. A twin-bar electric fire glowed on the floor beside a desk on which books, files and sheaves of paper were loosely stacked. A desk-lamp provided the only other illumination.

  "You were working?" she asked.

  "I always write at night. Sunlight shrivels my inspiration. About this afternoon..."

  "It was a misunderstanding," she said. "You thought you knew what I wanted, and you were nearly right, but things have changed. Would you - would you like to go for a walk?"

  "Right now?"

  "Right now."

  Armed with the same blanket as before, they stole through the night-bound necropolis. The brown sky offered them a handful of stars and a singed moon to see by. Headstones, crucifixes and angels loomed around them, white as ghosts. The stillness in the cemetery was deeper than the background rumble of a city usually permits: it seemed to come from the ground itself, an exhalation of silence, a communal open-mouthed sigh from the airless, earth-choked windpipes of the thousands buried beneath the damp grass, those for whom the suffering was over, for whom all disappointments were past.

  In the mausoleum David laid the blanket out on the ground and Alice lay down, hoisted her skirt up around her waist and see-sawed her knickers down her legs. They made love without much in the way of prelude or preamble, David forcing himself into her in the same manner that he had forced his way into the mausoleum, with one brutal shove. Somewhere in the back of Alice's mind, somewhere away from the pain, a warning clanged like an old school bell: shouldn't they be taking precautions? But she reasoned that, surrounded by so much death, no life could possibly take root. And if David's jism happened to be carrying a fatal disease, well, what else would he be doing then but granting her deepest, darkest wish?

  It was over quickly. A squirting shudder from David, and then he was clambering off her, pulling up his jeans, buttoning up.

  "Alice?"

  She nodded, but then, realising he couldn't see her in the dark, croaked, "Yes?"

  "Will you stay with me?"

  "For ever, David. For ever and ever."

  His living space, though small, was large enoug
h for the two of them - a kind of private mausoleum of their own which Alice had all to herself during the day while David was out caretaking. To occupy her mind she bought a very cheap second-hand typewriter and set to work typing up the two hundred or so longhand pages of David's magnum opus, to which David added nightly, gradually unfurling his unifying philosophy, his grand plan for the mind of Man. And after dark, when he wasn't writing, he and Alice would slip out into the cemetery and flit between the memorials to the dead, two thin figures with skin so white it was almost luminescent. Sometimes they would make love in the open air or in their secret second home with the rusty iron door, or else they would sneak up on other amorous couples and observe their antics with the quiet, rapt air of unseen elves or sprites. They frightened drunken tramps, too, whispering in their ears to wake them up from their methylated slumbers. The tramps took one bleary look at the pair of skeletal faces hovering over them and scuttled away, vowing never to sleep off their hangovers in the Riverwood Cemetery again. And slowly the cemetery gathered a reputation. Tales of ghosts and ghouls in the graveyard spread through the local schools and the housing estates nearby. Even David's fellow caretakers began to get a little anxious around the place towards dusk.

  The Argus and Recorder ran an article on the rumours, and three old women in the waiting room at Dr Muirhead's surgery nodded knowingly over that particular edition of the newspaper - not the same three old women as before, another three, any three. They were all alike, these white-haired sibyls. They all looked and thought and spoke the same, and they all smiled the same shop-bought smiles: gleaming plastic grins that would remain, like the Cheshire Cat's, long after the rest of them had faded away to dust and nothingness.