Pulling myself together I quit the place and went into town, where I acknowledged Mr Drake, much to his obvious annoyance, which wasn’t helped by my saying that I would be seeing him again soon, and bought myself a shoulder bag with a great silver buckle in the shape of a lozenge, from a market-stall-holder for a fraction of the price I would have paid in Camden Lock.
*
I asked my delightful hairdresser whether she would ever marry, settle down, have children. She stopped what she was doing – the spirited sprint around my hair, the scissors moving so quickly as to be invisible – and gazed at herself in the mirror. For a moment she was transported somewhere. I rather regretted the question because she lost something of her eccentricity standing rapt like that.
I guessed she must have been imagining herself in the role, not of wife but bride, in a bolt of ivory, her two-tone hair as vivid and singular as always, set-off beautifully against the subtle shades of the gown. She must have been seeing herself stepping towards the altar, imagining the man waiting for her. Was he of the same crop as her current boyfriends, or would those adventures have ended, to be replaced by an altogether more solid animal?
As I gazed at her, lost to her own thoughts, I craved admission, but for that to have occurred we would have to be more than purchaser and provider but friends, and that really can’t be.
Judith Salt is a good customer, but an old woman, slightly batty – certainly in no need of such grooming – her life belongs to a different time, a different era, the substance of it to a different geography, though parts of me object to such assertions. I would love a moment of friendship with that valiant girl, that jigsaw piece in the crazy, cut-up individuality of modern London. Or is it that I just feel motherly towards her, shyly concerned, mildly shocked and surreptitiously jealous? I would hope not. Besides, I am old enough to feel grandmotherly about her.
At that moment I considered confessing. I would tell her about the substance of my life, the terrible crime, the long punishment, my motives, my vision, but would that have bought friendship or merely notoriety? Would I not simply have become an example to be cited of never judging a book by its cover, an exposition to be returned to from time to time with her other paying clients? The risk was too great. Besides, I had no right to intrude onto her world.
She addressed me with a look of genuine sadness, perhaps tenderness. No, she did not see herself married – certainly not that, meaning the institution, presumably, which she reinforced with a sharp smile – did not see herself with any man particularly, but the prospect of no children was horrifying.
I sagely nodded my agreement. But why not a particular man, even if not the trappings of ivory?
Because, she said, as if it was an admission rather than flippancy, she saw herself as a little mad. After all, she talked to mirrors all day about hair, holidays and him indoors. Was she not a little too frivolous to be the marrying kind?
I told her there was nothing remotely frivolous about her and that she had affected the most courageous of all acts, a lifestyle. I suggested that if the world was not of your making then all you could do was confront it the way she did, and then, following a brief pause, I went on to add that it would never cross her mind that she might exist through the virtues of others.
She shrugged dubiously. This was not hairdresser talk. If it was in her training it was certainly on the afternoon given over to difficult situations. Of course, I didn’t do her justice and as so often she was quite equal to it. She fearlessly threw it back to me. What about me, what did I have to say about men and children, surely I should have been giving her advice?
I nodded and smiled, but said nothing. She shrugged and apologised, and said, of course, if I would rather not, then made to carry on with her minuscule trim.
No, I said immediately, halting her work, though without any idea of how I would follow up that prohibition. Eventually I made a short statement, as if I were in a court of law, not the domain of my delicious hairdresser, at all.
We don’t ever forget the past: we change our relationship to it; sometimes it is friendly, more usually fraught.
She waited for more, eager, unashamed and comfortable, and, which is very fanciful of me, though I’ll forgive myself because I am at that age, took on a look of Abby, quizzical and visionary, capable of seeing through walls.
Would Abby remember herself? She ran along the lane, turned, waved, ran sideways until the corner and was gone: except she was never entirely gone. An outline remained carved invisibly in the invisible air, despite her running through it, time after time, spreading and reforming herself, a woman and child tied together in infernal togetherness.
I whispered, Ms Sempie, I love you – not wanting anyone to hear and so get her into trouble – but even if I shouted it she wouldn’t hear, so what kind of protection was that? Who could ever have predicted such a dead-end?
I smiled and shook my head.
It was an invitation to talk to mirrors.
Nothing was unfriendly.
*
When Abby returned she was the same and different. We were teenagers then, not exactly women but not children either. We were still sisters, but I think somewhat estranged.
Grace was pretending she wasn’t deaf, which gave Seamus some hope, though deep down he suspected it was a lie. She was working in a thermometer factory and Phillip was with her. They were a pretty couple and got on well enough, despite Grace’s failure to persuade him to stop using sign. He just laughed and teased her, calling her a snob, though we all knew by that stage that it was more fundamental than that.
I was working in a bakery, six days a week with early starts, so I couldn’t see Abby, not as I would have wanted, though I did have two half-days a week. I would try to be with her then, but it wasn’t always easy.
Sometimes I couldn’t find her, though I wasn’t aware she had found any new haunts, only that she had resumed the old ones. She didn’t prostrate herself before the angel anymore, though, simply sat there, indeed, more often stood, gazing at her, as if making inquiries the angel wasn’t equal to answer. Her preference remained the shoreline, though she did go to the tower quite regularly, which I took to be a grownup preference for shelter. I guessed at times she was in The Shed, lured by the promise of silent films and boiled sweets, forgetting entirely that she never had taken Mr Drake’s sweets.
Of course, I didn’t know about Stephen then.
My mother told me she had returned home under something of a cloud. I assumed that was inevitable. Harold and Agnes could hardly have been pleased by her return. Somehow they’d managed it that she hadn’t even been home for holidays. She might as well have been dead, except there was no mourning, no sadness. They lived as if she had never been. The last thing they wanted was to have her back. My mother said it was more than that, though: something had happened at the residential home.
Abby never gave any hint of it, but nor did she deny it. Then I found them together. They were on the beach, sitting close to the water line, slumped down, looking across the dark surface, hand in hand, Poppy across both of their laps – I had kept her safe for Abby for all those years. Abby had taken possession of her as if it had only been a matter of minutes since they were separated. Time could never dull her.
I was surprised and a little annoyed. My first instinct was to tell him to let Abby go, but quickly realised she wouldn’t have thanked me for that. In fact, they both ignored me. In the end I had to sit down directly in front of them, an obstacle between them and the horizon, to gain any res„ponse, which in Abby’s case was to actively look away and in his to smile.
After a moment’s hesitation I smiled back, then the gestures became fixed and ridiculous, the two of us simply smiling.
It was Stephen who had the sense to break off that communication. He looked down at Poppy, placed her more fully in Abby’s lap, then jumped to his feet and ran back to the shingle and began throwing stones into the oncoming waves. I think, once upon a time, Abby would hav
e deplored that, but she simply watched them land, Stephen behind her, with a look of quaint forbearance on her face.
Later, Stephen let me understand that he had walked a long way to be with Abby. I smiled at his gesture of exhaustion. He had no idea where he was going to stay or what he was going to do. They just wanted to be together. It was a touching, if hopeless story. It struck me that it wasn’t a Sempie story at all, but a Shaughnessy story, so everyone was bound to disapprove.
He told the tale in primitive signs, because he couldn’t speak at all, had no recourse to the beautiful and intricate word play Abby was capable of, but he was a wonderful interpreter. He read Abby’s poetry with all of its complex metaphor and intricate syntax as if it were the simplest of human utterance. He thought her brave, defiant and eloquent. It took me a while to realise that those things meant love, that an abstract word is made up of so many component parts, some complementary, some contradictory, but each one needed: so love has no dictionary meaning, no discrete meaning, only relative and dependent meaning. They loved each other and they were full of images.
I tried to help. He slept in the tower and washed in the pond. I brought him bread and rolls, but it was difficult to find anything else. The situation was as ludicrous as it was romantic. He might have slowly starved if Harold hadn’t spotted them together, hand in hand, lovers wandering along the lane to St Bridget’s.
Harold didn’t give it a second thought but thrashed Stephen on the spot, despite Abby’s attempts to save him, and her success in tearing Harold’s left cheek with her nails, only just failing to gouge out his eye. Harold threatened Stephen with worse, much worse, if he ever saw him again, and then dragged Abby back to the pig farm, which wasn’t as easy as it once had been. Surprisingly, he didn’t hit her but locked her in a shed, putting a crowbar across the door, where he kept her for the next ten days.
When she was released Stephen was no where to be found. Foolishly I thought he must have taken Harold at his word, despite the fact that he wouldn’t have heard any of what Harold had said, and decided to leave her alone. (I knew that despite her incarceration he would never have believed her capable of abandoning him.) Abby knew differently though, knew he must have hidden himself away, as she had so often done herself, nursing his wounds, nursing himself back to health. I discovered her in the tower with Poppy aimlessly drifting round the room as if it had some secret passage hidden behind the wall that even she couldn’t penetrate, her expression fixed into a stare of hypnotic determination.
It dawned on me then, that she rarely said her name anymore, so rarely insisted on identity.
Chapter Seventeen
I reckoned I had one chance with Harold and one alone, after which I would be dead-meat. I knew that many things had to come into play at once, many pieces of luck, which in itself was an archaic thought.
Of course, he might not come at all, deliberately shunning the opportunity, or inadvertently unable to keep the appointment. I don’t for a second think he doubted my sincerity. He was too arrogant not to think I meant it – a poor, deluded invalid, still capable of giving him what he wanted. I hadn’t thought of him as arrogant before then, a bully and a thug, but not necessarily arrogant, but since seeing the way he had eyed me I had changed that opinion. Certainly he reacted to everything on impulse, but that didn’t exclude arrogance, not as I had thought, anyway.
I had to trust to surprise and belief. He had to believe in my intention, the certainty that the weapon I had fashioned was destined to slice through his entrails. Otherwise he might just snatch it out of my hands, break it across his thigh and deal with me as he felt fit. The prospect was terrifying. I felt my guts wrench, and on a number of occasions thought my bowels were going to empty. I told myself, over and over, I hadn’t done anything yet; I didn’t need to do it. I could turn around and return to London, leaving the weapon behind, a strange, mystical object to be discovered at some point in the future. Then I remembered the bond of sisters, the obligation, and my guts froze up and became heavy and I didn’t fear shame anymore.
I needed moonlight, the brilliance of a three-quarter moon, a waxing moon. I had to be able to see him in the doorway, because I certainly couldn’t listen for him, hear his step, his whispering. The moonlight had to come through the square openings. The forecast was favourable, clear skies, frost, moonlight and stars, but forecasts are so often incorrect.
Above all, I had to do it, had to perform, had to set in motion the sequence of actions I desired, or else his expectations would remain in existence, and how would I defy those? If, at the last moment, I panicked, I was doomed. I had to know that, had to believe it. It was the spur that would keep me focused, keep me true.
Of course I went to the tower far too early. Agnes didn’t go to Aidan and Hazel’s before six. Harold wouldn’t appear before quarter past at the earliest. I couldn’t stop my mind running wild with the idea of his reaching the tower before me, couldn’t stem an image of him holding my javelin, its point towards me, his face creased up with pleasure. It was nonsense, naturally. I had said to come when Agnes left. He couldn’t come at any other time. Why would he? Nevertheless, I was there at dusk.
The day was circular, beginning and concluding with the same crimson intensity at the fringes, blood-red daubs outlining the jagged earth, a slate-grey density above, with tendrils of whiteness sketched through. I guessed it had sequences of sounds, call and answer, but I made no attempt to listen, indeed I refused the possibility. The world was a surface, but sound was inward, a succession of names, Abby’s name, hammering inside me with its own dreadful music.
I was relieved I’d brought a blanket as I’d promised, otherwise I would have been too cold to move, too cold to act. I’d had no intention. The very thought of it was repulsive, but at the last minute, I’d thought better of it. For show, I told myself, though without defining just what show that was going to be. I lay it on the clay floor, sat on it with my knees up, and brought it up around me, keeping my hands wrapped in it, the weapon clenched between them, raised in front of my face, the shaft cushioned by the fabric. I was a soldier, a sentinel, an ancient guard watching the gate, ready, no retreat possible. I just had to wait.
He was later than I expected. I’d begun to assume he wasn’t coming, my whole being relaxing at the thought. Different ideas went through my mind, the uppermost being that he’d decided I wasn’t worth it, maybe had never been worth it and he’d being playing a game, like me.
Then, just after a quarter to seven, he appeared in the doorway. The moonlight lit up his face, a pale, luminous grey, his expression amused, playful, uncertain, I really couldn’t say. It was important that his expression was always beyond my comprehension. That was the only way it made sense.
Although everything happened very quickly, within seconds, it was all very distinct and clear to me. Luckily he didn’t stand in the doorway simply putting his head through, but kept coming. As soon as he was halfway across the threshold I leapt to my feet and jabbed the blade at his neck. He reeled back against the door frame, but I went with him, pressing him against the wall, the blade resting comfortably along his left scapular, the point just at the skin. A smear of blood appeared beneath the blade where I had obviously nicked him. He twisted his head back trying to keep away from the point, his eyes flashing between the weapon and me.
I told him to lie on the floor, face down. He didn’t move. I screamed the order. Slowly he inched forward, all the time the blade pressed heavily across his shoulder. I kept on shouting my orders, instructing him to his knees, then down onto his belly, his hands behind him. He moved as slowly as he could. I shook the shaft, drawing a new spurt of blood. He winced in pain and anger, and began shouting back, swearing at me, threatening. I sliced him more deeply. With a yelp of pain he lay flat. I kept on shouting all of the time. I wanted his hands. This was the moment I was dreading.
Keeping my left hand firmly on the shaft I reached out for my tool-bag which was alongside the blanket. I took the
string and lay the end across his back then made him lay his two hands over it. I told him that I was going to tie him and if he tried anything I would kill him straight off, his only chance being to humour me. I repeated it so that there was no doubt, impressing on him the fact that if he didn’t humour me I would certainly kill him, I was so scared.
Still with the spear at his throat I began to wind the string in and out of his clasped wrists, a tight figure of eight binding them together. When I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to seize me, I eased my left hand over, still trying to keep the blade in position and held the string with it, and cut it with the dress-making scissors with my right hand. After that it was relatively easy knotting the end.
I stood up, put both hands onto the shaft, and stretched my back. He began to moan and wail, certain I was about to thrust the weapon deep into his throat. I made no attempt to pick out words. I snapped at him to shut up. After all, I was only relaxing, trying to rid my body of the strain of taking a prisoner. The fear, the expectation, in his expression was wonderful to see.
I lay the weapon to the side, within easy reach, then took the string and with both hands wound it tightly around his wrists, the first lot not likely to be enough, just a holding measure. Then I wrapped his ankles together. When I was happy with the knots I took the electrical tape and wrapped layer upon layer around his wrists and ankles. Then finally I bound his fingers together on each hand, so he couldn’t pick at anything. When I was happy he was securely trussed I told him to roll over and sit up. I gazed at him for a moment, enjoying the look of hatred apparent in his face. He said something, presumably threatening me again, but I simply smiled and signalled my incomprehension. I took the string and leant over him wanting to tie him around the knees. As I did he kicked out but didn’t manage to unbalance me. In a fit of temper I picked up the weapon and slashed him across the cheek. He screamed in agony. I screamed back that he shut up, just shut up.
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