The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  And that was the way to do it, to pretend to be Martha. I stepped into her shoes in my head, the victoriana boots she was wearing that morning with a deep purplish bronzed sheen to the leather and the small stubby heel. There was one desperate moment when I envisioned myself wearing only the boots and my mouth went dry. I thought that I might faint too, but Harvey materialised before me with a mug of tea.

  ‘Where you are sitting is Geography. Who you are, that’s Anthropology, or even Psychology…So, perhaps it’s time to introduce you to Mr Melvil Dewey, the man who cut us a set of golden keys to libraries all around the world…’

  It seemed to go as well as any attempt at education ever does. The ones who are interested listen, the rest pick their noses and smirk. It was the most wearying hour I have spent in the library. A sullen girl at the back kept drawing my eye, but rather than wonder what black secrets might be in her head I concentrated on holding them in thrall until the time was up and the minibus would arrive to take them away.

  It was almost closing time. As the teenagers filed out they seemed keen to be released early for good behaviour. I saw the smiling arrogance of Beggsy and I wondered if he had the foggiest notion of what heat-seeking missiles life was going to throw at him.

  ‘Don’t you think?’ The teacher said, reiterating something I hadn’t heard.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It went okay? I thought you did very well under the circumstances.’

  His smile was more nervous now.

  ‘Yes. Well, I’ve heard Martha’s version enough times.’

  There was a silence then, broken only by the noise of Beggsy trapping one of the girls in the revolving doors. She squealed like a culled seal and two other girls set upon Beggsy from the street side of the door. The teacher seemed unaware. It was as if we were in a bubble running on extra slow speed as they whirred and spun around us.

  ‘You don’t remember me do you?’

  I struggled with the controls of my face, veering suddenly away from the terror I felt, aiming vaguely for stupid, careless; hoping that at the very least I could manage bored. For just one second I flashed back to the lecture and saw the vision of me wearing only Martha’s victoriana boots and my skin.

  ‘In the supermarket. A while ago. Singles night?’ He did not try to make his voice sound encouraging or fakely upbeat. He simply stated the facts. I didn’t remember him. In the supermarket. And then of course I did.

  ‘I’m Judd. Mr Pennington to the students, at least within earshot.’

  I could feel all the nerve endings in my face beginning to spasm as if I was going to be felled by a stroke at any second. My breathing was too shallow, some internal refrigeration unit was overcooling my sweat again. I could see Judd Pennington’s mouth moving but I wasn’t translating the words. I should have taken his face as a focus and concentrated on that. The scrapy, mown-bristle quality of his skin, the well-ordered cut of his hair, could have anchored me properly, let me breathe.

  But this is my problem. I can’t see his face. I can’t see the every-morning shower cleanliness of his hair or the school-boyish nervousness that lights his smile.

  What I saw was that I was hemmed in. My back was to the wall, cornered in the worst possible way and each second that I stood there more people seemed to be leaving the library, abandoning their keyword catalogue searches and their reference tomes. Abandoning me. I couldn’t see why he was here, why he was doing this. I don’t know you. Go away. My spasming face muscles unable to form the words.

  I struggled to keep my face a bored blank. A woman was trying to move through the tide of teenagers, trying to get into the library. I stepped forward.

  ‘The library is closing,’ I said, hoping that when I stepped back he would be gone, cuffing Beggsy into the minibus and setting homework.

  ‘If you’re finishing here, you know…perhaps we could meet up later…’ And then Beggsy set off the fire alarm and we had to evacuate the building.

  Outside on the pavement I avoided looking at him. When all the fire alarm protocols had been gone through I was first up the stone steps. As I turned back into the library to collect my things I saw Judd Pennington glance my way before turning to deal with Beggsy and the wrath of Mrs Atkinson.

  I had set off towards the Tech before I remembered there was no Intermediate Japanese tonight. Rattled, I stood at the bus stop.

  I let three buses go then adjourned to the coffee shop across the road. I say road, it is more like a square, the parish church, a Victorian Gothic edifice, firmly plonked between the road into town and the road out of town. Seated in the far left edge of the window, I had a decent view of the doors of the library but anyone caring to look in would probably not notice me. Mrs Milligan and Harvey left together, turning into the gates to the park. As they moved along the tarmacked path past the council gardener and his barrow of winter prunings Harvey put out his hand and Mrs Milligan, without hesitation, took it.

  Winter prunings. I had to look down into the surface of the cappuccino and remember where I was. I curled my finger tightly round the cup and lifted it, scalded my lips. Safe.

  Martha left next. She revolved out of the doors, shrugging into an ultramarine blue velvet forties-style swing jacket with three round black buttons like coffee cup saucers. It had a stand-up collar and big turned-back cuffs. She was wearing a long, thin black wool skirt and those victoriana boots, all laces and heels. Her hair was coming a bit adrift. She had pinned it up that day but it wanted to be free. I had ambition to be Martha’s hair, wild and free, an undomesticated creature.

  Tierney seemed to peel himself from the bark of the tree in the concrete shrubbery that landscaped the taxi rank. I saw him, as slinky and evil as a satyr, and then he and she were obscured from view by the church.

  I was out of that coffee shop like a gust of wind.

  * * *

  Martha was a trusting fool in that she made her way home via a small hedged-in ginnel that cut between the back of the old red brick technical college and the carpark to the civic centre. The ginnel is marked on all the maps as Darley Cut but is known locally as Harm’s Way. It is a muggers’ paradise. The raincoated flashers all favour it.

  Darley Cut ran for a dangerous and narrow half a mile before coming out on Harper Road. If you looked at it with other eyes, it didn’t seem dangerous at all. It was mysterious and magical, a leafy, fragrant slot in the red brick and concrete maze of town. It was literally no more than shoulder width and to enter into it was to disappear from view. It was a beech-lined wormhole where you could imagine you were somewhere else, somewhere greenified and distant.

  I didn’t catch her. She had already moved through into the walkway, down into Harm’s Way, the burnished bronze of the beech hedging, and who knew what thoughts were in her head. No thoughts of Tierney in pursuit. I felt the paving pound against my feet as I sped towards them, trying to fly and always finding I had to push against the tug of gravity. Always finding that gravity won.

  Tierney was about to slither into the pathway. His stride was long and I estimated that he would have caught up with her somewhere in the centre, too far for her to run out. Too hidden for anyone to hear or help her. The streetlights were blinking on. It seemed they lit before me as I ran, like torches marking my way. I skidded on wet leaves at the corner of the civic centre and scraped my knee across the rough brickwork. It only made me faster. Then I almost slammed into the back of him as he halted, a brewery lorry making a delivery, nearly backing over him.

  I darted back the way I had come, skirted the building, grazing my hands along the bricks as I careened around the far corner. Ahead of me I could hear the delivery lorry’s reversing warning beeping out like a robotic chicken. And Tierney was suddenly nowhere to be seen. My heart was thick and meaty in my mouth as I saw the upturned sole darting through into the walkway. There was only one way to catch him now.

  He did not see me. The light had faded into the gloaming. I scuttled out of range of the lorry headlights
as they winked on. I was moving so fast my bag strap snagged on the shrubs as I cut through the children’s park, but I was determined and yanked it hard enough to break the branch. The boughs of the bare shrubs clabbered and clawed at me as I ran onwards towards the side gate that led into the special needs primary school. I could see the padlock but I didn’t care. I made an almost vertical take off, up onto the bench, jab foot into loop of plastic coated chain, swing right and onto the metal frame, grab the top of the gate and swing over onto the dumpsters at the back of the school kitchens. My landing echoed down into the body of the dumpster with an empty pbom sound. I was level with the hedged walkway, could see some movement through the crisped leaves.

  A flash of blue like a kingfisher. Martha. Still going. Still safe.

  I was crossing the school playground now, heading towards the climbing frame that looked over into the walkway. I was up and over, crouching at the top as I waited for Tierney. He was dressed in earth tones and as the light faded and the yellow streetlamps blinked on I almost missed him. He was striding, not hurried but horribly graceful. And he was catching her up.

  I launched myself off the climbing frame, over the hedging, nothing in my head that connected me to Martha or the crunching reality of where I might land. I saw only those thoughts that connected to Tierney. To bringing him down. Flying. Invisible. I was of a piece with the darkness. I skimmed the top of the hedging, felt the harsh winter of the branches scratch at me as this time gravity lent her hands for me and plunged me earthwards. Hard. It was a confusion of bronzed leaves, yellow streetlights, brown moleskin jacket. My head connected with his head as I dived and yawed against him. Floored him.

  There was a scrapping snarling tussle, a brutish wrestling, before my hand curled into a grenade that exploded at his face. My mouth watered, salty, as the pain rivered through my hand. Tierney stumbled, the hedging bouncing him back into the fray. As my hand snapped back in readiness to meet him, all I aimed was instinct and he toppled, treelike. A moment stretched until he breathed, groaned; did not get up.

  The sky was clear as I walked the long way back to town. I had left Tierney on the narrow, broken and mossy tarmac path and turned towards Martha. As I cleared the hedging at Darley Cut I saw her reach the corner. A battered VW Beetle was parked across the way and as I looked Martha picked up her step and Iris flashed the headlights.

  The battered green car drove off and I made my way up Harper Road. It led back towards town in a long, gracefully curving route of Edwardian villas and pollarded trees. They looked like fists, raised in defiance, gnarled and knuckled against the darkening sky.

  * * *

  Back at the coffee shop they had chucked out my almost untouched cappuccino. That seemed to be a last straw somehow. I found I was shaking so hard I could hardly open the door to let myself out. The world seemed to glint, very sharp, very metallic. I twitched and burned inside as if I had been struck by lightning. I had. I had let go of something in myself.

  Chizu o kaite kudasaimasen ka?

  Won’t you please draw me a map?

  I couldn’t go back to the library. I couldn’t go back to the flat. I could only walk.

  The cold damp of twilight became mizzle and then a slow but steady rain. It seemed everyone had deserted town except for me. I was alone with my footsteps and then I could hear it. The metallic chink. I looked round, afraid. Blinded briefly by headlights passing, refracting and distorting in the rain. But no, there was no one behind me.

  As I took a step the metallic sound pinked again. Something, tapping against the zip of my pocket as I walked. What was it? And then the universe contracted down to the bright star of the coin. The twenty pence piece still safe in my pocket.

  It had been so long, so long. I felt as if the world had emptied and I just couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t move through it. It had rained about seven times since I imprisoned the coin there. Each time I had pulled the jacket on I had felt the zip’s closedness. The forbidden zone.

  Now I was cutting quickly through the shopping centre, a concrete blocked walkway of shops that they tried to revamp last year by putting on a glazed roof and fitting lighting so dazzling it scorched your retina. If you cut up and through you come out at a little back street. It’s beginning a renaissance. Where it was a closed up Post Office and a furniture store, now there are some Bohemian arty cafes and a craft studio and the small boutique, Norsk, with their temptations.

  But I did not care about that. What was important to me that night, has always been important, is that at the end of the street stands the last phone box.

  The door was stiff, rusted over with urine. The rain whipped in now under the sides and door. I stood there for an age listening to the rain and let the tinny metal urine smell sting my nose and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself this time.

  The receiver was very cold and it made an echoey click as I lifted it. I was so close, just a few numbers. My heart was in overtime, using up all the beats of my life it seemed, as the chirrup sounded at the other end. I could see the room where it would be ringing out. The view through the window. The angled, open door. The sofa. The piano.

  ‘Hello?’ He sounded normal, everyday. I felt the world tilting suddenly, blurring me.

  ‘Hello?’ A tinge of uncertainty. ‘Hello?’ I couldn’t speak because I didn’t exist.

  ‘Hello?’ one last try. Then a silence to match my own. Then a moment or so later, the click as the phone hung up.

  I listened to the dial tone until the recorded woman said, ‘The other person has cleared. The other person has cleared.’

  I began to cry then. Raining inside the phone box.

  * * *

  I used my key to get into the library building, clicking on my torch so I wouldn’t have to use the lighting. I stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the archive rooms, and as I did I knew she wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t a great absence of snoring—after all, it was only early evening—it was absence itself.

  In the little storeroom I saw the gap in the shelving where she’d been holed up these last few weeks had been carefully filled with stationery boxes and cartons of toner cartridges. There was no sign of her sleeping bag or her bed roll. What I should have felt was a lifting of weight, a sense that I wouldn’t have to be quiet now, I had the run of the library. But that is not what I felt. I felt the old panic make a butterfly of my heart.

  In the staffroom I could see by the light from the memorial gardens beyond the window. Everything was suffused with the pale sulphurous orange, bitter and bright. I made myself a pot of tea and sat down on Mrs Milligan’s sofa. It was lower than my usual spot at the window and I couldn’t see out from there. Equally, no one would see in.

  I sipped at the tea in the dark, only now aware of the sharpness in my chest, the scoured feeling of breathing too hard and too fast. I took a couple of long deep breaths, the first deep breaths for years, as if tonight, on this sofa, I was suddenly safe. It was just me. I gave a shudder, my eyes aching after the tears. If I could just close them for a moment, just lean back in the dark. Beatrice, Lady Breck, put a gentle hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Ruby?’ she said softly and there was a green, dank scent of water and weed. Cooling. Soothing.

  ‘Ruby?’

  Only it wasn’t Lady Breck. It was Mrs Atkinson. I was slumped over on the sofa. The greenish winter morning light was streaming in through the staffroom window. I sat up feeling crumpled and caught. My left eye hurt. I’d slept awkwardly and clearly that side of my face had borne the brunt of the bouclé.

  ‘What happened?’ Mrs Atkinson’s brow furrowed as she looked at me. I looked blankly back, my mouth still full of dream marshmallows.

  ‘Here.’ She touched my arm gently, I looked down at a hot cup of tea.

  ‘Drink this. Give yourself a couple of minutes.’

  She hoiked herself up from her kneeling position beside me and moved to fetch her own cup. She came to rest on one side of the sofa, her eyes still anxi
ous, regarding my face intently.

  ‘I must’ve…must’ve fallen asleep…I’m sorry.’

  I mumbled an apology as I struggled to get up, impeded by the bundled layers of coat and cagoule I was wearing and the sagging springs of the aged sofa. Mrs Atkinson touched my arm again, shaking her head,

  ‘No, it’s fine. You’re not in trouble Ruby. Just tell me what happened.’

  Where to begin? I sat there struggling with the fraying edges of my face much as Mrs Milligan had done once upon a time. I could feel how weary my nerve endings were becoming, constantly defying fear and guilt and bone weariness. Mrs Atkinson said nothing. She moved to fetch the first-aid box out of the cupboard. Then she tugged gently on my arm, steadied me to my feet.

  ‘Let’s sort you out.’

  Mr Machin was mopping the cubicles as we entered the ladies’ toilets. With a nod from Mrs Atkinson he cleared out, giving me an odd wincing look as he moved past with his galvanised bucket. It was the look you might give a boxer after they’d lost a fight.

  It had not occurred to me that there might be anything untoward about me. Peeling myself out of the claggy cagoule, I turned and caught sight in the mirror of a scarecrow wearing my coat. Mrs Atkinson turned to fumble about in the first aid box and I had a moment to take in the view.

  My hair was whorled and twisted in places with broken bits of twig, bark and leaves, alternately crispy and slimy bronzed, from the hedging at Harm’s Way. The top left shoulder of my coat was torn away and the jumper underneath crusted with an armour plating of mud. The front of my coat was muddied and there were long grazes, the fabric fraying and snagged where I had landed heavily and skinned across the tarmac of the alleyway.

  But the clothes and the hair were nothing to the purple and slate blue of my left eye. It had nearly closed up on itself, which explained why I felt so half asleep and bleary. It was as if Joan of Art had painted me while I slept. I had been scraped and grazed. Blood was crusted and smeared from forehead to neck. Mrs Atkinson ran some hot water into the lone sink and soaked a handful of cotton wool.