Her Living Image

by Jane Rogers

  “Coming out?” asked Mandy.

  “In this?”

  “Yes – it’s amazing in a storm, it’s like being under a really strong shower, it won’t be cold –”

  “But we’ll get wet.”

  Mandy pulled a face.

  Carolyn hesitated. “Well – what are you doing – are you going home after?”

  “‘Spect so. Yeah. Come on.”

  “Um – I’ll ruin my sandals.”

  “Don’t be so pathetic. You can dry them can’t you?”

  “But my Mum –”

  “Oh for God’s sake –”

  Subdued, Carolyn neatly began to pack away her books. “Have you got a coat?”

  “No, you berk, that’s the point.”

  Carolyn nodded. Carefully she folded her mauve cardigan and tucked it away in her bag. ‘OK.”

  Mandy led the way through the empty library, the quiet mid-lesson corridors, to B block door. They went through the first set of swing doors and stood staring through the second, listening to the roar of the rain.

  “You going to run?” asked Carolyn.

  Mandy shrugged and laughed. “Come on.” She pushed the door and ran out into the rain. Carolyn watched her curly hair suddenly flatten to her head. Then she went out. It took your breath away – not because it was cold, but because it fell so hard, stinging your bare skin, falling like blows on your head. Gasping and laughing, she and Mandy ran down the drive, half blinded by the streams of water running down their faces. When Mandy cut off along the path home, Carolyn settled into a more carefully paced run, head down, mouth half open to breathe through. The rain was running down her neck, inside her blouse, making her shudder. She looked up quickly, blinking, when she had to cross the road. At Leap Lane, which was one-way, she glanced only to the left. As she jumped the flooded swirling gutter a noise made her swivel her head to the right where she took in instantaneously a red coming-closer wheel-splashing van and in mid-air time faltered, hesitated long enough for her to see herself and the red van hurtling forwards in a mad race to occupy the same spot of road, and herself still in mid-air suddenly reversing her pumping legs like a cartoon character who’s run off a cliff and backpedals desperately – and all the revolving world of mother father Alan school Mandy all stopped still like a frozen film, broken down oh no and she landed, stumbled – here no – not – me.

  The lad driving the red Post Office van was in a state. It was the first time he’d done the collections on his own, and this bloody weather had fouled everything up. Visibility was awful, he’d driven right past two boxes and had to go back for them, although he knew where they were. He was soaked to the skin and shivering, from fiddling with keys and heaving sacks of letters out. He’d even dropped one and been scrabbling in the gutter for pale sodden envelopes, hoping no one had seen. He was very late. And all the roads looked different in the rain – what you could see of them through this bloody windscreen, whose wipers moved at one sweep per minute. At a familiar junction he peered through the underwater screen and managed to glimpse the main road, away up there to the left. So he turned left into the narrow empty lane and accelerated thankfully towards it. As he touched the brake to slow down, a thing jumped out of the air from the left – and hit the van. Like lightning he hurled the van to the right, foot flat on the brake. When the van had slithered slowly across the road and stalled in a final juddering jump, he could almost pretend he’d been quick enough – in minus timing – not to have hit it. Let it not be a person. Sitting in the blind streaming steamed-up van he was oddly unable to move – got his right hand on to the door lever but couldn’t seem – didn’t seem to have any – force. He gave up after a bit and sat with his head resting against the wheel, weak as water.

  At last a policeman opened the door, asked if he was all right and pulled him out. An ambulance moved straight across in front of his eyes with blue lights flashing and a crowd of people’s heads moved round towards him so it seemed everything was moving, slipping, sideways and he had to lean forward, supported by the policeman, to be sick which slipped away quickly too carried in lumps by the swirling rain. When he was sitting down he said to the policeman, “Are they – are they –”

  “What, are they what?” said the policeman patiently.

  “Dead?”

  “I don’t know sir,” said the policeman.

  After the ambulances and crowd had gone, a policeman got into the red van and carefully wiped the steamy windows. He drove slowly the right way back down the street, muttering to himself, “Bloody hell” at the slowness of the windscreen wipers.

  The rain, driving down on to the convex gritty surface of the little lane, washed out and swirled away the last traces of the spreading red stain which Carolyn Tanner had made on the road.

  Chapter 3

  Coming towards and from behind too is darkness pressing up against pressing hard hard I can see you blackness my eyes are wide open. It presses like a weight against the wide open eyes hurting me, pressing till the eyes don’t take it in

  not the sight of blackness extending in through the eye from outside to inside the head, not the eye a channel a hole for blackness to flow through no more

  because pressed and squashed by insistent blackness it bursts to colours, each melting and oozing, flowing to the next, under the constant black pressure on the liquid film of the eyeball. It shows purple with yellow glowing bars and flickers of red, pressing harder shows stars which melt to dribble down midnight blue with coloured shooting pains.

  Carolyn found herself in a desert. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Bare sands stretched away to the far horizons, and the sky above was so pure that she looked straight through it to outer space, to stars and planets and deep space beyond them. Everywhere was open and led the eye on. The air, she noticed with pleasure but without surprise, was fresh and cool. People pretended deserts were hot. The flat sands were yellow as children’s seaside beaches. She saw that the desert was perfectly clean, as if it were new. Like a million sheets of blank white paper, or a country covered by fresh snow, without a mark. But as she turned slowly around to take in the perfect remote circle of the horizon, she thought to herself that this was better than paper, or snow. Paper would be written on, filled with words, each of which was one choice among thousands, and the combination of whose singular choices made one meaning among hundreds, specific and limited. The writing would confine the blank paper, narrow all its possibilities down to one. And in the country where snow fell, children would rush out with boots and sledges and criss-cross the white with tracks. Men, women and children, all of whom delight in making marks on white snow, in making their mark, would score and scar the snow, and desecrate its clean white face. At least, she thought, the snow will melt.

  But here in the desert the firm sand holds no marks. She imagined that she stood on the spot where the stone had proclaimed, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” And all around the lone and level sands stretch far away. Even his stumps of stone have gone.

  She was happier than she had ever been, with a feeling of exultation like something growing and swelling inside her, joy, wanting to burst out, of her throat in singing, of her eyes in light, of her body in dancing. Alone in the desert, she danced.

  When she was tired she sat on the sand, which was firm and warm, like the reassuring touch of a friend’s hand. She was thirsty. Looking around she could see nothing to drink, and so she started to walk. When she had walked for a while across the unmarked sand, she stopped and laughed. “You’re walking through a desert looking for water! What are you doing?”

  And her own sensible head replied, “There is no water in deserts. You’ll die.”

  “Ah no, not now I’m here, now I have arrived here at this perfect place. Don’t let me die.” She was scared, the change from joy came cold over all her flesh.

  “This is where there are no marks. Boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  “But,” she cried like a chil
d in a tantrum, “I’m not going to leave any marks. I don’t want any marks.”

  The sand led her eye away across its emptiness, its perfect cleanness, and the wind scoured in her ears, “You are a mark. You. You.”

  She looked down at her body, and the squat black shadow it made on the sand, and she thought that it needed food and water, and shelter from the sun and wind. She was pierced by prescient disappointment. “Can’t I stay here then?”

  If you die. Boundless and bare, you can join the lone and level sands, stretch far away.

  Stretching her with impossible longing to stay forever in that pure and empty place, stretching her taut as a bird-pulled worm, her body called her back to its living, moving, hurting, drinking, eating, excreting needs.

  Chapter 4

  It called her back to a world of horrors. Of random senseless pains and a rain of things which hurtled down upon her, determined to crush and confine. She saw the wet red metal charging at her, dark ceiling coming down on her, hands briefly winding a bandage which blinded her. People – shapes moved above, between her and the light, hovering like birds of prey. Once as she lay half drugged, floating on the surface of pain, a dark shape interposed itself between her and the light and fell right down on her blackly, smothering her with its hot breath, awakening pains that shrieked like alarm bells.

  Meg, who’d just been told that they’d taken Carolyn off the critical list, had gone into the room weak with relief. When she saw her daughter’s lips move, knew that she would live, she couldn’t help but embrace her, trying to hold in the sobs that were choking her.

  All the time, it seemed, they were tormenting Carolyn. They would never leave her in peace. One after another they grabbed and pushed and pulled, pierced her skin with needles and her throat with tubes, bound her down with tight white blankets like bandages to the bed so she could not escape. They moved near her, spoke, clanked instruments. She could get no peace.

  In between waves of panic she was floating, still and lethargic. Heavy timelessness and helplessness, nothing to be done. No energy to burn, just keep still, hold together. The blank peace was interrupted by pain, or an insistent voice requesting – requesting something, God knows what –

  “Do what you want!” Her first feeble querulous words in response to her mother’s daily greeting. The nurse had told Meg that Carolyn had been more wakeful this afternoon.

  “Carolyn! Oh Carolyn!” Meg burst into tears and Carolyn closed her eyes again.

  While she was critical, and for a time afterwards, she was kept in an ante-room on her own. Once it was clear she would live, and that healing would take a painfully slow time, she was transferred to the end bed on Women’s Surgical. It was a long dim high-ceilinged ward with two large windows at the opposite end. She did not ask what was wrong with her until so many days after it had happened that her mother couldn’t believe she didn’t know. The whole hideous sequence was etched vividly in her own brain, and repeated so often to friends and relatives, that it had become a chant:

  “In a coma for two days, fractured skull, broken ribs (five), fractured right femur, severe bruising and laceration to right side of body, twenty-seven stitches –” and, most poignantly horrible to one who remembered playing “This little piggy went to market” with Carolyn the baby’s tiny perfect toes, “three crushed toes on the right foot.” The doctor had said, “I doubt if we can do much for them. We’ll probably have to amputate. But it’s not the end of the world – after a few months, she won’t even notice. Just a question of adjusting her balance slightly. They’re not enormously useful things, toes.”

  Carolyn spent a short time absorbing the information, then said, “I could be dead.” She thought about the toes when Meg had gone. It seemed to her that she could feel them, that they were all right. The van must have run over them. She remembered quite clearly the sudden closeness of the hot engine, and thinking (or had she thought it since?), “It’s going to run over my head.” But it had only run over three toes. Idly she considered which bit of your body could you most easily do without? Apart from inaccessible bits like tonsils and appendix, toes came top of the list. She supposed she must be very lucky.

  The toes were amputated later that week. It made no difference at all to the way she felt, or to the pain. She wanted to see them, but refrained from asking out of a sense of embarrassment. The doctors would think she was peculiar. But they are my toes. Were. She wanted desperately to see them and worked herself up into a state of sweaty frenzy to ask, never mind what they thought, as the anaesthetist bent over her. She heard the doctor laugh. “We’ll have to see,” he said. She realized that her embarrassment had been pointless because of course he wouldn’t show her them. When she woke up in her own bed again she didn’t even bother to ask, though her memory later cradled the pathetic image of three squashed little toes in a sauce of blood in a kidney-shaped bowl as tenderly as if they had been a stillborn child.

  She was more and more awake, lying still and dull-headed, not in control of her body. All she could do was stare. She could half turn her head and stare through lowered lashes at the thing in the next bed. She watched it without interest, just as she would have watched a tree or dog or anything else that happened to be there. It was soothing to watch because it lay quite still. There was a metal thing over its face, a sort of cage stuck on to its head. It was rather horrible, but so inhuman that it didn’t matter. Its hands were bound round and round with bandages. It was always propped up on its pillows and had a contraption like a music stand across its bed, upon which rested a book. Clumsily yet delicately, with its bound paw the monster turned the pages of the book. Carolyn watched it sometimes succeeding easily, sometimes having to move both stiff paws to the elusive page, turning its caged head to left and right as it started and finished each line of print.

  One day as she lay staring at the paws she noticed them become still around a half-turned page, and moving her eyes on up, saw that the thing was facing her.

  “Hello.” The voice was muffled. Carolyn realized that it could not open its mouth properly. Its cage was stuck into its teeth.

  “Hello.”

  “How’re you feeling?” asked the voice kindly.

  There was no point in replying. Instead Carolyn said, “What happened to you?”

  “I had an accident.” The voice was very dry, the accent peculiar. Carolyn stared at the metal contraption – it looked like nothing so much as scaffolding – and began to laugh. She stopped straight away because it sent fire through her ribs. The monster seemed to snort.

  “Me too,” said Carolyn.

  The thing nodded. “Clare,” it said, using a paw to point at itself. “Does it hurt?”

  “When I laugh,” Carolyn whispered helplessly.

  “I had two hundred and thirty-five stitches,” pursued the disembodied voice.

  “Poor you –” Carolyn started to giggle again. “Don’t make me laugh –”

  “I’m not.” The thing’s voice was indignant but still humorous. “Two hundred and thirty-five stitches isn’t my idea of a joke.”

  “Why?” said Carolyn.

  “The stitches?”

  “Mmn.”

  “Cut. All over.”

  Carolyn spat out “Why?” again.

  “Glass.” The monster nodded sagely. “Sharp glass.”

  Carolyn in control now; “Where?”

  “Well, everywhere, really. I walked on to a roof of it, fell through it, smashed my face on a ledge and landed on a broken heap of it. Silly really,” it said reflectively. As Carolyn continued not to be able to speak, it added, “It was a conservatory. I was trying to repair the roof.” Then it asked Carolyn for the details of her accident. “Less ridiculous. Less messy. You should have seen me when the ambulance came. I was coated in blood – like a used Tampax.”

  Carolyn’s weak hilarity was checked by this image, which she found shocking. The funny accent, she realized, was American. The acquaintance developed in little hysterical bursts
, from which each sank back into her book or helpless weakness respectively.

  Carolyn’s mother visited her every day. Arthur came with her on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Meg brought grapes, oranges, chocolates, peppermint creams, magazines, freesias, fruit cordial, knitting, books of puzzles, talcum powder, Carolyn’s old teddybear, a transistor radio, a little photo of herself and Arthur, and a new turquoise blue bedjacket which she had crotcheted. Carolyn seemed so weak and weepy that Meg didn’t know how to treat her and tried anxiously to think of things that would amuse or console.

  “You will be all right, love, and that’s the main thing, isn’t it? In a few months time this’ll just be past history. When you come home we’ll go for a little holiday somewhere nice and restful, by the sea for a few days. Whitby or Scarborough. That’ll be a tonic, won’t it?” And “Father and I are thinking of getting a new carpet for your room for when you come home. Would you like that, love? I went down to Whitefields and that nice woman, you know the one with the grey streak in her hair, well I told her what I was looking for and how you were you know, in hospital, and she said, ‘Well you take the sample book to her, Mrs Tanner,’ she said. ‘I’m not supposed to let it out the shop but if you promise to get it back first thing on Friday why don’t you take it and let her choose herself.’ It was nice of her wasn’t it, thoughtful, people often are you know when you have trouble. So here it is, careful, it’s a weight, I’ve lugged it all down Plantain Street off the bus – but anyway, let me show you. This is the one I was thinking about, but what do you –?”