The Night Following

by Morag Joss

  He turns and presses himself down hard on my body, pinning me to the earth as if he’s afraid I’ll escape. His breath comes in hot, salty gusts.

  I don’t care! Put it right? So they feel better? Why should they be able to rest? Think what they did to you! They shouldn’t even go on living, not after that!

  All right-no, they shouldn’t, I say. It’s just I hate seeing you so upset. Please don’t be upset. But I know, some things are too wicked to be forgiven.

  He is silent. He releases me and eases himself back. Then he says, That’s what I’m saying. And you do know. You put it in that story. Uncle Les, the bad fella. He was asking for it, a bad end.

  It was only a story, I say. But I expect he got it.

  Now Arthur is lying on his back. His eyes are closed and his face is rumpling with the effort of holding back tears.

  And the child. Tell me what happens to the child. The baby girl in the story, Ruth. What happened to her?

  I kiss his mouth softly and I say, Don’t worry about it now. You’ll find out tomorrow. As soon as it’s light again. I’ll tell you everything.

  You promise, he murmurs.

  Soon I hear his breathing slacken into an unsteady, rasping sleep. I lie in his arms, knowing that I will tell him everything. As soon as it’s light. There will be no peace until I do. I feel, I think, a kind of welcome sadness at the idea that then at last his rage will rain down and spend itself on me, but I fear pain as much as anyone. I wish he were stronger or that he had a proper weapon. I hope oblivion will come quickly.

  He wakes one more time and whispers, Ruth, I don’t care what happens now. We’re safe here, aren’t we?

  I don’t know what to answer. Safe from what? In the morning I shall make sure the knife I brought is within his reach. I lie awake, afraid. For who knows what stalks us at a distance, circling in the dark? Who knows how inquisitive they will prove, how close they will come to see if we are lost children, if we are living or dead? What would they say to us? Suppose there are people still shambling along the path in the moonlight, and one strays from the others, and watches the distance grow between herself and her companions, and say that all in a rush she understands she will not see them again but no matter, for she has always known herself quite able to leave them? So she lingers at the gate and does not call out, nor even wave at their swaying backs, but turns her attention instead to the dark indecipherable shape on the hill. Suppose she has enacted this estrangement every night, in anticipation of us. Would we move to greet her? What would we tell her?

  I don’t know what to answer. But Ruth knows, somehow, and my grandmother knows, and all the others, the counted and the numberless, the remembered and the unremembered dead. They are around us now in their habitual, dreaming way, murmuring reassurances in the voices we know so well, and since we would not feel them if they touched us they stroke through the darkness with fond hands and stir the air into little vortices, sending flurries through the orderly night that shift the folds of our blankets by a fraction, or shake loose two or three leaves from the stunted trees on the ridge and cast them down the hillside into a wind that’s no longer cold but soothes us in dull waves, and carries the scent of old vines and honey. By such tricks and currents they draw us on with kindliness, and though invisible they are not wholly unseen, they are not vanished.

  I don’t know what to answer. I lie awake shivering. I don’t know how much strength there is in his hands. But I’ll no more resist his vengeance, whatever form it takes, than I turned away when he reached for me and burrowed lovingly into my body.

  Arthur’s face was damp and yellow, I thought first of all with dew and the first light, but when I touched him his skin slid a little under my finger and it shone with a layer of some cool sweated oil, like putty. The wind had blown the blanket from the side of his head and a few leaves of hawthorn were fluttering against his hair. His mouth lay open towards me as if he had turned to speak. His eyes were half-shut and without meaning. The eyelids had become simply that, lids: a pair of formal, diminutive covers of skin interrupted in the act of blinking, but whether they had halted when his eyes were closing in sleep or opening under the glare of morning sky it was neither possible nor important to know. His arms were locked around me. I didn’t move at once. I lay watching the little rags of birds in the sky over the reservoir, listening to their cries, and then listening to the silence beside me, wondering if it meant something more than not breathing, something more than absence, whether it could mean that a parting, perhaps this one, might be absolute.

  I sat up and pulled myself clear of his arms but kept hold of his hand. How long could I stay; how could it ever be time for me to leave him? I pushed back his sleeve and watched the sparse hairs on his forearm rising and falling. His finger ends were turning blue and clawing at nothing. The lips of his moist monkey mouth were fluttering as if he had strange dead words to speak to the wind. Soon his face would sink in upon itself. All there was left to wait for now was the flecking and wrinkling of his skin, darkening into hide.

  I closed his eyes. I rearranged his clothing and straightened his body. From the rucksack I drew out the pages of Ruth’s unfinished story and placed them securely on his chest under his folded hands; I set his walking stick and maps close against his side. I kissed his lips and his forehead, and I settled myself close to him and placed a hand over his. I had promised to tell him everything and so I began to talk, and I did not stop until I had told him all I knew.

  I began with what he also had known, that on that brittle spring day some force within her had marched Ruth right up to where the last moment of her life was waiting, a few minutes before noon on a country lane canopied by blossoming trees. There had been nothing she could do to prevent it, any more than I had been able to disarm whatever force in me had gone about its work that morning in delivering me to the time and place I would kill her.

  The horror of what happened may mask, a little, its utter simplicity, or perhaps its very simplicity is part of the horror. Of course, if only we had known: if only I had been delayed by another minute, if only it had rained and Ruth had decided not to cycle. But all the if onlys in the world are grapeshot fired too late against the fact that on that day not one second’s pause, not one extra breath nor the merest passing thought, had pushed themselves between our attention to some obscured notion of what life required of us from moment to moment, and the brutal second that death occurred. Ruth’s life and the instant of my ending it were not separated by so much as a single additional beat of either of our two hearts.

  Then I told Arthur it was not Ruth but I, the less beloved, who should have died. It would have mattered less. But although I was left still breathing, my life, too-that is to say any deserving I might have of my life-ended with the taking of hers. Her death brought to a close my daily enactment of a series of scenes, contained and infinitely repeatable, that for years I had been trying to string together into a semblance of a history that would bear the telling. My life’s course had seemed always a delicate, waning story about which it was natural I should be sad and other people absentminded; in conversation my name was always the one they tended to forget. Now my story was finished. I had killed the person telling it.

  Hereafter I would have no story, only a dishonoured past. And what else could I do then, but begin to learn what it is to be dead before I actually was? I ended my own life in the taking of Ruth’s, and in search of expiation I took her life again. What could I do but enter her story, and with the stealth and self-effacement of a ghost take it to its rightful ending here, with him, on a shining hillside she could not herself get back to?

  Not that I quite understand endings, or beginnings. How a story begins is not why it begins, and how or why it ends is no more fathomable. Reasons buried in the accumulated past may be forever hidden from those whose reasons they are, or perhaps there are none, after all. Perhaps there are no reasons but only things that happen, attached to nothing, events that loom out of the dark and
leave sometimes a series of blurry afterimages of what we thought vital at the time-what it will please us later to call our stories-imprinted on our blindness.

  I paused, stroking Arthur’s hand. The bitterness of his death was that it seemed a kind of absconding, a defection from one last neglected task. He would give me no shriving now; all the peace would be his.

  The wind was sweeping shards of reflected sun across the reservoir like pieces of broken mirror, so sharp and blinding I could not see the water itself. And so it is that light passes back and forth over what I can’t see as well as over this world of dark and changing surfaces, cloud shadows go on scudding across the wavering and inexact shapes of all the unended stories, casting angles and colours and all interpretations out of true. The sky will be always crowded and the earth forever alight with them, these unmediated details, the incongruent blunders as well as the mystic, the epic conjunctions, with the drifting and inconclusive atoms of the sparsest, no less than the mightiest, human events. I may lament all I like the lack of it, but there is no natural law in this world that can take such fragmentary and capricious refractions and make of them anything explicable and whole.

  I swaddled his head with tender and particular care, wrapping a scarf round and round his face and eyes like a bandage. I covered him with the blankets and folded them in tight under his limbs.

  That’s how I left him, on the hillside with his face to the sky. I made my way back slowly along the path. On the curve of the hill I turned for one final look, and then I went on towards the rushing of the stream, shielding my eyes against the sunlight sparkling on the water.

  All this happened some time ago. I drove away from the lodge. The roads were deserted and the garage near the Overdale turning was closed. I left a letter there saying I thought he’d had a stroke. I said they’d find him out on the hill and I hadn’t wanted to leave him but I’d wrapped him up safe against the wind and the birds. I didn’t say that the last thing he gazed on was the dark water with the moon shining on it and the last touch he knew was the warm body of his Ruth.

  I drove until the fuel gauge was nearing empty, and abandoned the car at a railway station. I caught a train, where to isn’t important. It was only a matter of hours before I understood that a person out of place is sentenced to be out of place everywhere, yet she has no choice but to keep going. And that is how it is.

  Going from place to place at least punctuates a day with the dots and dashes of making a journey: the hurrying, the arriving, the synchronized languor of the intervals between connections. Waiting in cafés, I stack packets of sugar and trace patterns with a finger on the tabletop and look out the window; towards the close of afternoons I will find myself in another obscure provincial town, and thinking about nightfall, I’ll start tapping on the doors of the kind of abject boardinghouse that is never very far from the stations of such places. Sometimes I look for a caravan, off-season, or a room above a pub where I might stay for a week or so if I wash dishes. But sooner or later I’ll begin again to study timetables, for precisely that purpose, to study time; and maybe also to assert, from my state of dispossession, a small degree of something akin to possession though it be of nothing more than the coming day, the passing of which I will determine and execute in measures of the routes between places I don’t need to go.

  Of course it’s fruitless, the crossing and recrossing of these distances. How spacious the landscape between resting points, how unnaturally lengthy the days. And every twilight seen from the window of another temporary room confirms that the preceding hours have drawn me a little further from my mislaid life, for I never was going to find its vestiges here, nor there, nor anywhere visible.

  When it’s properly dark, I go out. I don’t want to, quite, but it’s become a habit after all this time not to resist how the night draws me to itself. And I am drawn sometimes miles away, to the edges of towns and the mistakenly built and put-aside streets of houses where people seldom flourish, where lives seem always precarious and marginal and lived against tides of more robust and purposeful forces.

  There’s a constant flow of vans and lorries to and from the garages and roadside mini-marts that thrum all night long on the borders of such places; the soft roar and sodium mist from bypasses and motorway interchanges muffle and cloud the darkness right over their roofs and pavements. There are a few people about on foot, some walking dogs but mostly they’re foragers in the all-night shops, out for cigarettes or cans of drink or junk food, including, I’ve noticed, surprising quantities of ice cream for the small hours. Occasionally they’re couples, more usually they’re alone. But the lone ones aren’t solitary in the entrenched way I am; something about them seems to say they’ve come lately from the company of another or are hurrying back to it. I watch them cautiously. It’s a matter of some pride to me that I do not look destitute, quite. But I think my loneliness can be breathed in, like an odour, and so that people won’t pass by me close enough to detect it, I will cross the road or find a wall or doorway and wait. Then, without necessarily meaning to, I follow.

  No, I don’t really follow, not to begin with. I let my thoughts walk alongside them, that’s all. I concern myself. I wonder if, say, the man striding by on legs that seem shortened from lack of use has cause to feel as pinched and aggrieved as he looks, and why he may be dismayed in his heart. I worry that the slow, sentimental-looking pregnant girl carrying bags of sweets has nobody to listen to her cravings and go to the shop for her, and hurry back to run her a bath and feed her liquorice sticks or spearmint toffee, stroking her belly, as she lies in the deep warm water. I don’t follow them; I just need to know they are safe, the lost ones, the wanderers. I like to see them enter rooms that will shut out the night that’s lapping at the door. I’m anxious and hungry for their well-being, so I give in and let myself be pulled along behind them.

  Not that I try to see into houses. I do not go searching for uncurtained rooms. But there are so many, and it is impossible not to look in through lit windows, for since I now truly know the dark, I want equal knowledge of its absence. I have to observe the places where darkness has been disallowed, where its opposite reigns apparent. Such brightness! I admit the brightness does enthral me, though I gaze in dread because I can’t separate it from what it illuminates: people in houses moored like toy lightships on the surface of the night, people tending futile little eternal domestic fires the way I used to and the way Ruth and Arthur did. I can hardly bear to see them so lit up, so impossibly vulnerable yet oblivious, as if they thought their puny flares of artificial daylight could prevail, as if any tiny guttering yellow flame could ever withstand the encroaching black.

  For hours at a time I watch them dappled by the light of television screens, heavy and unmoving in their chairs. I watch them at tables and mirrors, filling plates and eating with their hands, flipping through papers, brushing their hair. They stand at sinks, lift telephones, open and close cupboards. Children are put to bed and babies bundled on shoulders are carried from room to room. I watch as they leave off talking and little by little grow dreamy and inattentive, and fond and slow. How I envy them. Lights go out.

  I want more. Now when a house goes dark I draw closer, right up to the windows. I want to hear breathing. I like to picture people in their beds and unaware that the day has run out on them, that sleep is suspending every crisis, every flawed, unfinished striving, every word said and not yet said in their particular small lives. I want to hear their steady breathing because then I would know that until they wake their stories are collapsed and upturned, dragged along in the depthless currents of dreams. I’d know that for a while at least their stories are as lost to them as mine is to me.

  So what harm would it do if at such a time, for such a short time, I came closer still? I wouldn’t invade anyone’s dreams just by coming within the walls. Nor would I try to steal anyone’s story and take it for my own, but may I not borrow it, during a few hours of darkness, in order to affect it for the better? I see enough i
n all these lit-up houses to know I could do some good; there are always dozens of practical ways of making a difference. I long to help, as I did before. And I wouldn’t take more than I give. I’d attach to another life to improve it, not to end it or suck it dry. I’m not parasitic. It’s symbiosis I seek, that poise and purity and balance. I’m starving for it. I whimper at people’s windows.

  Yet I shy away. I haven’t yet tried an unlocked door or unlatched a low window and stepped in, though I think I’m bound to; it’s only a matter of time. I don’t know what inhibits me, but I turn away long before it’s light.

  Tonight I wander back the way I came along the quiet roads but I’m not ready for sleep in the rented room that smells of bar dregs and disinfectant. I’ll stay out even though there’s a prickle of frost in the air and I should be in warmer clothes. Beyond the houses, the pavement widens and leads into a park with a few swings and a roundabout. I set the swings going as I stroll past and then walk on quickly so I won’t hear their empty creaking. I slip through a line of trees on the edge of a recreation ground and strike out across playing fields. Ahead and around me in the dark I can make out the leaning white ribs of goalposts. When I’ve crossed to the far side I stop and stare back at the park and the houses under their yellowy bloom of cloud, looking for a sign that I ever set foot there. There is none, not so much as a dent in the grass. In front of me now is a fence and a scrub of bramble bushes and beyond that, over a metal gate, a stretch of ploughed earth curving upward into faraway woods.

  Once I’m through the woods I roam further, across a patch of thin pasture and more fields. Then it gets steeper; paths end at stiles or slide over the horizon through gaps in hedges, land drops away behind scraggy stands of bushes and falls into hoof-rutted gullies. The wind rises. Darkness lies trapped in the trees like black veils snagged on the branches, it ripples ahead of me and spreads over the swell of the hills. I follow it, climbing an old sheep path almost to the top of a hill high above the glow of the town, where moonlight strikes through the clouds and silvers the grass.