The First Cut

by Peter Robinson

  “Well?” Sarah said, watching her. “Not changed much, has it?”

  “No, it hasn’t. I’m surprised.”

  “Does it upset you, being back here again?”

  “No,” said Kirsten. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure. It’s just a very odd feeling, hard to explain.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it. Just sit down for now. Do you want some tea? Or there’s wine. I got a bottle of plonk. Thought you might like that better than going out on the first night.”

  “Yes, that’s great. I don’t much fancy going out. I’m a bit tired and shaky. But some wine would be nice.”

  Sarah took the bottle from the small refrigerator and held it up. It was a pale gold color. “Aussie stuff,” she said. “A Chardonnay. Supposed to be good.” She picked up two glasses from the dish rack and searched for the corkscrew in the kitchen drawer. Finally, everything in hand, she filled their glasses and brought them through. “Cheese? I’ve got a wedge of Brie and some Wensleydale.”

  “Yes, please.”

  Sarah brought in the cheese with a selection of biscuits on a Tetley’s tray, liberated from the Ring O’Bells. They toasted the future and drank. Kirsten helped herself to some food, then picked up a book she noticed lying on the floor by the armchair. It was a thick biography of Thomas Hardy. “Is this what you’re reading right now?” she asked.

  Sarah nodded. “I’m thinking about doing my Ph.D. in Victorian fiction, and you know how I love biographies. It seemed a pleasurable enough way of getting back into academic gear.”

  “And is it? I mean, Hardy’s hardly a light, cheerful read, is he?”

  Sarah laughed. “I don’t know about a pessimist, but he was certainly a bloody pervert.”

  “How?” asked Kirsten. “I’ve only read Far from the Madding Crowd for that novel course in first year. I don’t even remember much about that except some soldier showing off his fancy swordplay. I suppose that was meant to be phallic?”

  Sarah laughed. “Yes, but that’s not what I meant. All writers do that kind of symbolism thing to some extent, don’t they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Sarah went on, “do you know he used to like attending public executions when he was in his teens? Especially when women were being hanged.” She reached for the book and turned the pages slowly as she talked. “There was one in Dorchester and he told someone about it when he was much older…ah, here it is…1856. Martha Browne was the woman’s name, and she was hanged for murdering her husband. She caught him with another woman and they got into a fight. He attacked her with a whip and she stabbed him. Hanging her was the Victorians’ idea of justice. Anyway, Hardy went along and wrote about it.” She pushed the book under Kirsten’s nose. “Just look at that.”

  Kirsten read: “What a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back.”

  “I mean, really,” Sarah went on, “the poor woman was swinging at the end of a bloody rope and Hardy makes out as if she was entering some kind of wet T-shirt contest. Would you credit it?”

  Kirsten read over the description; it was certainly tinged with eroticism.

  “Am I right?” Sarah asked, pouring more wine. “Don’t you get the feeling that Hardy got some kind of kinky sexual pleasure from watching the woman get snuffed?” She put a hand to her mouth quickly. “Oh. I’m sorry, love. I…I put my foot in it. Must be the wine going to my head. I mean, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to…you know.”

  Kirsten waved her hand. “It’s all right. I’d rather you say what you like than walk around handling me with kid gloves. I can take it. And anyway, you’re right, it is sexual.”

  “Yes. And what’s more, did you notice how he turns her into some sort of convenient image for a poem. As if her life was only important because he got a charge from watching her get hanged. She wasn’t even a person, an individual, to him.”

  “I wonder what she was like,” Kirsten said abstractedly.

  “We’ll never know, will we?”

  “I suppose not. But it’s not as odd as all that, is it? The way Hardy uses her, I mean. We all tend to see other people as bit players in our own dramas, don’t we? I mean we’re all self-centered.”

  “I don’t think so. Not to that extent.”

  “Maybe not. But you might be surprised.” She held her glass out and Sarah emptied the bottle. Kirsten was beginning to feel a little tipsy. After the journey and the disorienting effect of coming back to her old room, the wine was affecting her more than it usually would. Still, it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. She helped herself to another chunk of Wensleydale.

  Sarah shook the wine bottle, grinned and jumped up, ruffling Kirsten’s short hair as she passed by. “Fear not,” she said. “I suspected we might need more than the usual amount of alcoholic sustenance. How about some music? All right?”

  Kirsten shrugged. “Fine.”

  Sarah turned on the cassette player and disappeared behind the curtain into the kitchen. She must have been playing the tape earlier because one song was just fading out, and then “Simple Twist of Fate” began to play. It was the second track on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Kirsten remembered, and it used to be one of her favorites; now, as she listened to Dylan’s hoarse, plaintive voice while Sarah was busy opening the second bottle, she realized that the strange lyrics didn’t mean what she used to think they did. Nothing did anymore.

  Sarah returned with a larger bottle, lifting it up with a flourish. “Da-da! More your cheaper kind of plonk, really, but I’m sure at this stage it’ll do.”

  Kirsten smiled. “Oh, it’ll do fine.”

  “What did you mean,” Sarah asked when she had filled the glasses and sat down, “when you said I’d be surprised? What would I be surprised by?”

  Kirsten frowned. “I was thinking of the man who attacked me,” she said. “I wasn’t a person, an individual, to him, was I? I was just a convenient symbol of what he hated or feared.”

  “Would it have made any difference?”

  “I don’t know. Would it have made any difference if it had been someone I knew? I can think of one way it would have: I’d know who it was.”

  “And?”

  “I’d bloody well kill him.” Kirsten lifted her glass of wine too quickly and spilled some down the front of her shirt. She patted herself on the chest. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’ll dry.”

  “An eye for an eye?”

  “Something like that.”

  Sarah shook her head slowly.

  “I’m not crazy, you know,” Kirsten went on. “I mean it. Oh, there’ve been times…Sometimes I think it’s some sort of contagious disease he gave me, like AIDS, only in the mind. Or like vampirism. Can you imagine all those ripped-up women coming back from the grave to prey on men? Of course, I didn’t die, but maybe a part of me did. Maybe I have a little bit of the undead in me.”

  “That’s cuckoo talk, Kirstie. Or drunk talk. You’re not going to convince me you’re turning into some sort of vampire version of Joan of Arc.”

  Kirsten looked hard at her and felt the focus blurring. My god, she thought, I’m losing it. I almost told her. She laughed and reached for a cigarette. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m not. It’s all academic anyway, isn’t it?”

  “Thank god for that,” Sarah said. The music stopped and she got up and turned over the tape.

  As the two of them chatted, Kirsten glanced out now and then at the windows of the bedsits and flats over the street, just as she had in years past. At some point, she noticed “Shelter from the Storm,” another of her favorites, was playing, and her eyes burned with tears. She held them back.

  Around midnight, Kirsten began to yawn in the middle of one of Sarah’s stories about a retired brigadier-general who had strayed into Harridan by mistake.

  “Boring you, am I?” Sarah asked.

  “No. I’m j
ust tired, that’s all. It must be the wine and the travel. How about sleeping arrangements?”

  Sarah yawned too. “Look, now you’ve got me at it. How about I take the chair and you have the bed?”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t do that.”

  “It is your room, after all. I’ve just been caretaking.”

  “It was my room. No, I’ll put a couple of cushions on the floor and sleep there.”

  “But that’s stupid. You’ll be so uncomfortable. Hell, it’s a three-quarter bed, let’s share it.”

  Kirsten said nothing for a moment. The suggestion made her feel nervous and shy. She knew that Sarah wasn’t offering any kind of sexual invitation, but the thought of her own patched-up body next to Sarah’s smooth, whole skin made her cheeks burn.

  “I haven’t brought a nightie,” she said.

  “Not to worry. I’ve got a spare pair of pajamas. Okay?”

  “All right.” Kirsten was too tired to argue, and the idea of sleeping in what had once been her own bed was inviting. When she stood up, she felt herself sway a little. She really had drunk too much.

  They prepared themselves for bed and drew the curtains. Kirsten watched Sarah pull her T-shirt over her head and struggle with her tight jeans, then stand there naked and unselfconsciously brush her blond hair in front of the mirror. Her breasts bounced lightly with the motion of her arm, and below her flat stomach, the spun-gold hair between her legs caught the light.

  Kirsten undressed last, in the dark, so that Sarah couldn’t see her scars, and when she slipped between the crisp sheets, she found herself staying as close to the edge of the bed as possible to avoid any unconscious contact.

  But she needn’t have worried. Sarah lay with her face turned to the wall below the window, and soon her breathing settled into a slow, regular pattern. Kirsten listened for a while, feeling slightly dizzy and nauseated and cursing herself for almost telling Sarah everything she knew, not to mention what she intended to do about it. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep and dreamed of Martha Browne, that unknown woman in black swinging back and forth at the end of a rope in the misty Dorchester rain over a hundred years ago.

  The next day, Sarah went into the bookshop, and Kirsten spent the morning revisiting her old campus haunts: the coffee lounge where she had met friends between lectures, the library where she had worked so hard for the final exams. She even wandered into an empty lecture theater and imagined Professor Simpkins droning on about Milton’s Areopagitica.

  Though she had avoided it on her way over, taking the roads instead, Kirsten walked back through the park. As her feet followed the familiar tarmac path through the trees she felt nothing at all, but when she reached the lion, its head still spray-painted blue and the red graffiti still scrawled all over its body, her hands started shaking. Unable to stop herself, she walked over to the sculpture.

  It was a little after twelve. Children played on the swings and seesaw nearby. The clack of bowls came from the green behind the low hedge, and one or two people sprawled out on the grass, listening to portable cassettes or reading. But Kirsten still felt extreme unease, as if she had somehow stumbled on a taboo place, an evil spot shunned by natives. She couldn’t help herself when she sat astride the lion, drawing amused glances from two students playing cards on the grass nearby. It all happened so quickly. The fishy smell began to suffocate her and the world darkened at the corners of her vision. Then she saw him and heard his raspy voice and saw the blade flash in the moonlight. She leaped off and hurried on her way, trembling.

  As she walked on down the avenue of trees, she cursed herself for giving in to fear. She would need all the courage and strength she could get for what she had to do, and jumping at shadows was a poor start. Still, she told herself, somehow shadows were more frightening to her now than substance. That must be a good sign. It was time to go.

  First she went back to the flat and left a note for Sarah, then she went into town. After shopping for one or two essentials she needed for her trip, she headed for the bus station. About three hours later, Martha Browne arrived in Whitby on a clear afternoon in early September, convinced of her destiny.

  47

  Susan

  Like some shadowy female figure out of Hardy standing on a blasted heath waiting for her lover, Sue stood on the waste land in the thickening darkness and watched Greg Eastcote shut his garden gate and take the path toward her.

  Before he had got far, while Sue was still about sixty yards ahead, she turned her back to him and started walking along the rough path. When she got to the main road, there were few people about, but the street was well lit. Sensing him behind her, rather than seeing him, Sue continued along until she had passed the intersection with Bridge Street, where the road narrowed. This was the tourist area again, the cobbled street of gift shops, the Monk’s Haven, the Black Horse. At this time of evening, though, all the shops were closed. Polished jet gleamed in its gold-and-silver settings in the windows, and the enamel trays that had been covered with coffee- or mint-flavored fudge all day lay empty. All the happy holiday families were back at the guesthouses watching television, or they had managed to put the kids to bed and gone out to the pub for a quiet pint alone. Only lovers and vampires walked the streets.

  Hands in the pockets of her windbreaker, Sue walked on purposefully. She had known where she was heading all along, she realized, but she had known it in her instinct and her muscles, not in her conscious mind. He was still behind her, moving more cautiously now, not hurrying to catch up with her. Perhaps he was getting worried. When she got to the steps, she turned and started climbing, counting by habit as she went. It was dark and deserted up the hill, with no streetlights to light her way. But St. Mary’s was floodlit, like a beacon, and high above the church a waning three-quarter moon shone in the clear sky, surrounded by stars. At the top of the hundred and ninety-ninth step, where Caedmon’s Cross stood silhouetted against the bright sand-colored church, Sue turned through the graveyard of nameless stones. She could tell he was following her, that he would soon appear at the top and look around to see which way she had gone. She slowed down. She didn’t want to disappoint him.

  In the light of St. Mary’s, she followed the path through the graves around the seaward side of the church and across the deserted car park, where the world turned dark again. She found the coast path and stopped for a moment by the gate. Yes, he was there, just coming out of the cemetery and looking in her direction.

  She turned back to the path and hurried on. She was high on the cliff now, the sheer part known as the Scar, walking in the general direction of Robin Hood’s Bay. The raised boardwalk underfoot creaked in places, and she had to slow down in case of missing boards. A barbed-wire fence came between the path and the drop, but it had collapsed here and there where erosion had eaten the rock away.

  Now that she was further away from the church’s interfering floodlights, the moonlight shone more clearly, dusting the grass on one side and the sea on the other with its ghostly silver light. Sue thought she might lead him as far as Saltwick Nab and down the steps, out toward the knuckled rocks that pointed to the sea. But he was getting closer. She could hear his footsteps on the boardwalk, and when she half turned her head, she could see him outlined faintly by the moonlight.

  He was walking faster. She would never make it that far before he caught up with her, and she didn’t intend him to attack her from behind. As she walked, she reached her hand into her shoulder bag and felt for the paperweight. There it was, smooth and heavy against her sweating palm.

  He was almost so close now that she could hear his labored breathing. The climb up the steps must have tired him. When she could bear it no longer, Sue stopped abruptly and turned to face him. In the moonlight, she could just about make out his features: the low, dark brow, wide, grim-set mouth and the eyes glittering like stars reflected on the water’s surface. He had stopped, too. Only about five yards lay between them, and at first nobody said a word; neither of them even seeme
d to be breathing. Sue found that she was shaking. Suddenly, she remembered with perfect clarity all the pain she had suffered the last time she had seen this ghostly face in the moonlight.

  Finally, she found the courage to speak, “Do you remember me?”

  “You,” he said, in that familiar raspy whisper. “You were in my house.”

  “Yes,” she said, gaining strength as they talked, feeling the hardness of the solid glass in her hand.

  “Why? What are you trying to do to me?”

  Sue didn’t answer. Now that she had found him, she had said all she wanted to.

  “Why?” he repeated.

  She noticed that he was moving toward her very slowly, closing the gap as he talked.

  “You know what you are,” she said, bringing her hand out of the shoulder bag. Then she took a sudden step toward him and shouted, “Come on, then! Here I am. Come on, do it. Finish me!”

  She could see the confusion and horror on his face as she continued moving toward him. “Come on. What’s wrong with you? Do it!”

  But he kept on backing away as Sue edged closer, paperweight out in her hand now. He stretched out his arms before him as if to ward her off, and immediately she knew. She knew that he needed surprise to succeed. He was a coward. And what must she look like, she wondered, coming toward him with a fist of thick glass held out and all the rage of a ruined life in her face and voice? It didn’t bear thinking about. The miserable bastard was terrified and his fear unnerved her for a moment.

  He must have sensed her confusion like an animal scents its prey, for he began to smile as he slowed his retreat. In a moment he would start walking toward her again. But he had already gone too far. On his next slow step backward, one of the rotten boards shifted under him and he wobbled at the edge. He waved his arms like a semaphorist, a look of terror on his face, and Sue almost reached forward to help him. Almost. But he regained his balance and again she saw that other face, the one his human mask barely hid. She took a pace forward and kicked out hard at him. Her foot connected with his groin and he tottered back toward the edge of the cliff with a scream.