by Helen Slavin
* * *
… could not be found for luncheon. Yelland organised a search whi not uccess. I joined the ladies in the merhouse and we said not a word inously silent. There was a ment, just a second of time when Miranda ied to speak ceived a kick in the shin der the table from Edi I could not disguise my shock at eemed not to hey all hold some secret knowl…
Which would never be revealed to me as the pages were fused together. The next in a broader stroke, as if she hurried. …Monty! Oh, unex cted knight, rth for her. His rage is ail, and his protests hav en him harried ouse. oices raise calling up the fo men to arm th pokers…
Further on. Calm. Stark.
… Now it is revealed the ave eed the p chase as if were livestock. We return to Kite House on the morrow.
The surgical steel blade slivered on. To blank pages. On. On. Blank upon blank until I thought the water must have washed away the years, and then, centred onto the endpaper of the last Chas. Goodrich notebook, blotched and spotted by mould and twisted with time, one final furious, broadstroked, entry.
Who am I if I cannot regard my own image in the glass? What stranger is this, hanging her head before me? Evil only prospers if good men do nothing. All that remain to me are Shame and Fury. Let them embolden me. Let them end this punishment.
There was a twisting in my gut that was not the knicker thief. This twist was for Mary-Ann. This was the beginning. Whatever was going on at Hazard’s house was the beginning and the end for Mary-Ann. I looked at the art knife I’d been using to slice between the damaged pages. It was not a time to be around knives.
No, I was not afraid of what I might do to myself. I am not a suicide. I have been to that edge, taken there by someone else and I’m telling you, it seems a long way down.
I had not yet completed the task of scanning the photographs and only this week we had received another ten archive boxes from the University. The faces and landscapes were piling up around me. It seemed that afternoon that they all looked out at me very precisely. They all knew. These strangers and ghosts. I wandered amongst them, those who were company but could not be touched, biding my time amidst the scan and flash and hum.
Scan. Flash. Hum.
* * *
Out on the streets again that night, I left nothing to chance. I had brought my clothes to work and changed before leaving the library. Mr Machin did not appear to see me as I crossed the lobby in my black garb. I hesitated in the revolving door. Mrs Atkinson could be seen crossing the road, loaded with grocery shopping. I watched her move along the street towards the bridge. And then, suddenly she seemed to vanish. The bus had passed her and she was gone. Not on the bridge. Not turned back. Not over the bridge. Gone. My gasp steamed up the window of the revolving door.
Out I spun like a roulette ball, rolling into the street. I headed straight for the bridge, scanned the stonework. There, at the edge was a gap and a twisting flight of steps. I dodged the bendy bus as it tried not to ground itself on the arch of the roadway. As the bus passed, a woman was cutting down the flight of steps with a scottie dog on a retractable lead. Peering over the stonework I was surprised to find the canal. I picked my way down the steps onto the dirt track towpath.
It was quieter down there. If I looked backwards, under the bridge, I could see, just beginning at the curve of the canal, where the new Canalside development took up the floorspace. But here, this was old and overgrown, the path not tarmacked or gravelled, just worn through. There were others there with dogs, the scottie woman passing the time of day with another red-haired woman with a red setter. On the other side of the water abandoned warehousing waited. Ivy had grown over and around it all, and Russian Vine was making swift progress through the broken windows. Pigeons flew from the roof-space. There was an abandoned dock, rotted and bending into the water. I could just make out Mrs Atkinson and the back end of a narrowboat.
I began to walk. It was more deserted here, more left to the wild, the steep banking at my side was thickly overgrown with bramble and ivy. Up above were the edges of town. The backs of the shops, the ends of the long thin yards, piled high with boxes and vats for vegetable oil, pallets stacked, workshops crumbling. In one the building had come to the edge of the banking, the wall sprawled at by ivy, a ventilation unit blasting out noise and hot air and the sound of clanking dishes and water. It was the back of the pub. The Saracen’s. Beside it a breezeblock shed, the windows blocked out with cracked and peeling whitewash.
Mrs Atkinson had vanished again, a magic property of her white conservator gloves.
But no, the light came on through the cabin doors of the nearest moored narrowboat. Mrs Atkinson, at the sink, unloading her shopping. She moved to the kettle, reached for an earthenware mug, one of the ones Brid had made for the book club. Then she reached up and shut the small slatted wooden blind.
I kept walking. It was cool and shadowed by the water and, let’s face it, I had nothing better to do. I had walked through the streets over the last two years. On daring days I had tested out the boundaries, finding my way to the new canalside development, drawn by the brightness and the water and the vertebraic bridges cutting and dashing across the water. The boats moored there. The people together by candlelight checking over menus and the four-storey warehouses redeveloped, their doors torn out and windows put in. The evenings I had spent watching the boxed up, stacked up lives.
I had not crossed this bridge. I’d stood in the bus stop sometimes on the opposite side of the road from the library, my back to the green bank of lawn beside the church and the noticeboard advertising God’s services and wares. I had watched the traffic pull over the hunched back of the bridge and drive down through the buildings. There was nothing much at that end of town, the bones of industry waiting to be picked over. The signs were up. To Let, For Sale, Prime Location in all the broken windows. Clinging to all the chainlinked security fencing.
I had walked a couple of miles and now it was crossed by a wide concrete bridge. Beneath, in the abandoned canalscape, a pair of teenagers snogged earnestly. I was the lone spectator, everyone else it seemed was trundling above us, on their way in their cars and lorries. I couldn’t have moved past the bridge anyway, teenagers or not. It was a boundary.
I felt ravenously hungry suddenly and I struggled to think when I’d last eaten. I had thought of eating out the other evening and been distracted. Now I was determined. I could go to the American style place that had opened at the furthest lighted edge of the canalside development. It was brown leather and cosy looking, with neat booths where I could be private. All I’d have to do was walk back the way I had come, continue on and I would wash up, canalside.
Before the first of the moored narrowboats I was aware of a sudden scorch in my senses. Something. Someone. I didn’t stop but I swivelled my eyes into the back of my head. It’s easy to do, as you’re going forwards you think about all that you have just passed. The path. The patch of weed. The moorhen scuttling out of the way. Scuttling. Before I had reached it. The banking. A rough scuffed escarpment through. Into the hedging at the top. Into the hawthorn.
There was someone in the hawthorn above me. What was beyond that? I tried to orientate myself again. It was derelict land, where they had cleared the old supermarket to build a multiplex cinema and the money had fallen through. Whoever-it-was moved at the boundary of the hawthorn and the wasteland.
Where was I? There was something up ahead I knew I had to be aware of. What was it? What had I seen on the way, on the edge of my sight?
Steps. Wooden steps and a rickety white peeling-paint handrail cutting up into the hawthorn, up into the narrow short cut of a path. A miniature and more dangerous version of Darley Cut, another path to Harm’s Way. Of course. I knew who it was by now. There was not much time between me and the first of the narrowboats. And I thought, You do it. I dare you. Come and get me.
As I reached them the steps were nearly in darkness. Aware of my own black clothing, I thought it was going to be difficult for him to spot me.
I could pass by unmolested and invisible. If I wanted.
I didn’t alter my pace but I altered my heartbeat. The pounding in my head muffled his steps behind me so that instead of hearing him, instead of sensing the vibration of him through the packed dirt of the pathway, I found my face crumped against a wall of dirt before I was even aware I had been felled. There was no falling. Just the full stop of my body against the earth. As my face stung and my front teeth rattled in their sockets I was briefly dazed, and then horribly aware of his hands, coarse hands, hot, clammy, pushing my hips into the dirt. His nails scratching, catching in my tights and the laddering nylon rippling as it ran up against my skin. It felt as if I was coming apart. I tried to breathe in underneath the weight of him. The dirt and the panic clogged my throat.
No. Not this, not now Ruby. Now is the moment, now Ruby, do something now.
His nails digging into my skin as he curled his fingers around the elastic of my underwear. I tried kicking out but, oh for christ’s sake laugh out loud, my knickers were twisted around his hands and my legs. Don’t, don’t get your knickers in a twist Rube. Don’t. My own underwear the weapon of my destruction.
In a confusion of grunts and manic laughter I arched and reared against him. I was like some oversized tench he had landed, flippering and slippering beneath him. He was a human clamp pinning me to the damp ground. Small pieces of stone embedding themselves into my skin, dirt in one of my nostrils. I heard low animal grunting that I thought was him. It was me. I could feel all the anger and courage starting to drain into the earth. I was cold. I was afraid. He was tugging at my underwear and his nails caught my skin. I could feel his breath against my neck as he wrestled against me. Now Ruby. NOOOOOWWWWWWWW.
He was heavy as a fallen tree, crushing down on me, my legs unable to move beneath him. As he yanked and yawed at my underwear my legs were yanked and yawed and tangled. I could taste nothing but dirt and blood. He rolled and shifted, leaning his knees into the backs of my legs to pin me as he righted himself. No. I could see the firmament of black stars imploding inside me.
Panic. No. Never. Fury. Fury. Say it Ruby. Never again. Never again.
I arched backwards, fighting not to be beached on that towpath and as I did his balance faltered. Now we were both flailing and the blood seemed to flood into my mouth. Hot and bronze. This time I made a spear of my elbow. Launched it at him. The pain shimmered through me and lit all my nerve endings like tapers. I became a wild creature. Not caring which pain was his and which was mine. Pushing against the mass that was him, digging my own nails deep into his flesh until he yelped and tried to pull away, but I was not letting go. Battering at me. But I was not letting go. Standing upright to shake me off. But I was not letting go. Reaching round me, punching at my back until my breath stopped. But I was not letting go. Punch me. Punch me. Punch me. Punch me. There is nothing you can do to me. I am not letting go. Not this time. Never again. My legs rigid with fury, now curled around his legs making him stagger. This is the last time. The last time, now and forever.
And the index finger and thumb of my left hand reached up and pinched into his eyeball. His arms flailed upwards, as if signalling. He gasped agony.
This is the last time, I thought, as he jaggered backwards a step, a step and down into the waiting daggers of the brambles. I felt the thorns hook into me as I was hooked into him. Thorns taking charge of me. And then there were lights. Moving lights. Glow worms. Faeries. I fell deeply downwards.
* * *
I was freaked out to wake in the subdued lighting and soft pillows of the incident centre. I opened my eyes to see an Ikea sofa in the corner and a woman police officer waiting with a victim-support face on. It was as if the last two and a half years had been rewound. I had not been a librarian. I was still there and it had all been a dream. I shot off the lounge sofa I was draped over, knocking over a side table. A glass jug of water splattered all over the neutral rug and Martha jumped up to catch me. I heard her voice first, even before I felt her strong reassuring hand on my shoulder.
‘Ruby. Ruby it’s okay. Ruby, it’s me. It’s Martha. You’re safe now.’
Koto ni naru, yo ni naru
Come about, come to pass
It was an predictable headline. Local Woman Gets Knicker Thief in a Twist. I did not want to brag it up, I preferred to run away from it but this is a small town and I had become ‘heroic’. If they only knew. I was purposely obtuse in posing for the photographer. I did not want to be in the paper; however I was also going to have to be in court at some point so I thought it the better part of valour to scowl at the camera and bear it.
Charges, of course, would be brought. It had not occurred to me in my quest for vengeance that I was putting myself into danger. There had not been danger, somehow, in the fumbled wrestling match on the towpath. There had only been my vision of retribution and justice, and Retribution and Justice were, indeed, on their way. Let’s face it, they were always headed for me. I had known all along that the two years at the library were borrowed. Now, just like all the books, it was time to return them.
* * *
That morning, as I walked into work after a sleepless night at the flat I had seen a flight of geese in arrow formation above me. They flapped steadily onward, going, I knew where. Where I could not.
Home.
* * *
It seemed to me the library was stone cold that morning. Martha peeled off her chunky wool cardigan, her face flushed. Mrs Milligan joked that her flush was the hot flush of being too flipping far over forty. I was the only person to shiver that morning. I had spent half the night squatting on the pergola trying to inhale all I could of the night garden. In the end I had not been soothed or eased, I had only become bone cold.
I looked at the vibrant burnt orange of Martha’s cardigan as it draped sloth-like over the back of her chair, daydreaming, thinking that if I could just slither myself into the sleeves of it the world would somehow snap into colour again. As if the world was as easy as Oz. My mind was a piece of paper caught in a draught, unable to settle. So I loaded up the returns on the trolley and started to shelve.
I did not see him enter. It was more that I scented him, the old and everyday aroma jolting me as it breathed into my nostrils. The undertone of olive oil soap, layered with cotton shirt and the sappy green of sweat, beaded, caught in his chest hair. I looked up. I could see a couple of the French teenagers in the reference section, busy together with a project. Joaquim was busy at the computer. He was wearing a white shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. There seemed to be explanations all around. I took a deep breath. Because, of course, it wasn’t possible, was it.
‘Hello, can I hel…?’
Martha wasn’t allowed to reach the end of the greeting. The click of a photo onto the counter.
‘I’m looking for this woman.’ He cleared his throat and my heart paused, took in and held a breath. As if it had to remember…something that it used to do at a signal from this voice. What was it?
Ah. Yes. Panic.
I knew. I did not have to look, I knew. But my head turned, I stooped slightly so that I would have the slim letterbox view of the desk from behind the shelves. I saw the back of his head. The hair neatly shaved. The collar of a white shirt just visible above his dark raincoat.
I expected to see all my blood soaking into the carpet as it drained out of me, leaving a white hot molten metal of adrenaline.
‘This was taken about four years ago. She might well have changed her hair.’
Martha is leaning forwards to look at the photo. What will she see there? I am not breathing now; my heart has halted. So I am, if anyone cares at this point, clinically dead. Only my brain is functioning.
‘No…I don’t think…I can’t remember seeing her here.’
He doesn’t respond, except to nod. A nod of gravitas and authority, his eyes half closing. Martha steps to one side.
‘Harvey?’
As Harvey turns around I am lowering myself to the
floor, crawling, movements as slow and controlled as I can make them without the benefit of synapses. Except where is there to go?
If I try for the staffroom door it is visible from the desk. I can smell him. The musk of him. I lean against the bookcase. Above me, the sky unzips.
‘Is there a problem then?’ Harvey asks outright.
‘I’m a detective.’ I hear the slick plastic flip of ID. ‘I’m looking for this woman.’
Harvey is studying the photo and looking puzzled. Shaking his head. He would do that. The photo isn’t of me, Ruby. It is of a much thinner, much blonder woman wearing shoes that look good but pinch. She is standing by a bay racehorse, for those were the days of colour, of blonde and bay. She is wearing a linen suit that cost almost as much as Ruby the librarian gets paid in a quarter. The blouse underneath it is silk, smooth and cool as lake water over her bare skin. She smiles out at the world, thinking whatever she was thinking on that day.
Mrs Milligan looks vaguely at the photo of this stranger as Martha informs her that the gentleman is a police officer. Mrs Atkinson is coming out of her office. I hear, from my hiding place, the door click shut. Exactly like a gun, cocking.
Mrs Atkinson takes a long look at the photo. Makes a face over it. Puzzled. Shrugging.
‘I’m sorry. She doesn’t look familiar. My colleague said you are a detective…can I ask what this is to do with?’
‘She’s missing. She’s an out-of-hours favour I’m trying to do for an old family friend. Any help you can offer would be appreciated.’
‘Yes. I understand. Well, we might have her in our borrower register if that would be…’