by A. S. Hatch
In the night I woke with a full bladder. I heard Alfred fluttering and somewhere the sound of shells scratching across the wooden floor. I saw a streak of light move across the ceiling. I heard an engine. I felt sick and dizzy. I stumbled to the toilet, drank from the tap, went back to bed.
The next morning, October the first, I went up the lane to get the milk and eggs. The anti-fracking sign had been stood back up. Must’ve been Gray, I thought. The gate was open too. I pushed it shut and heard the latch engage with a clack.
It was too cool now for yoga so in the afternoon I poured myself a glass of wine and read by the fire. I read slowly until a knock at the door disturbed me.
I was surprised to find that I was on my feet. I didn’t remember standing up. The chair was still rocking slightly. I held the book at my side and stared in the direction of the door. The fire crackled. I flinched. I didn’t want to make a sound. Had I imagined it? … There it was again! Three loud knocks this time. Not in my imagination. Should I answer it? Should I go to the door and call out Who’s there? I put out the fire and stood pressed against the mantelpiece, eye to eye with Diana. I slowed my breaths and waited. Then I heard the crunch of footsteps out on the shale. They stopped at the window to the left of the fireplace. I stayed as still as a dead thing. The grandfather clock marked off each painful second. Was it slowing down? The footsteps moved off again – crunch, crunch – along the rear wall of the cottage behind the chimney. They moved to the next window over and stopped. Then, after a moment, they moved off again. I crept into the bedroom on all fours and sat on the ground with my back to the bay window, out of sight. My chest was heaving painfully. Don’t forget to breathe. Who was out there? Constance’s lover? The motorcyclists of my dreams? Or, could it be …? Suddenly, my heart leapt, and filled my body with urgent energy. Victoria! She’s here! So I stood up, on wobbly legs, and marched to the side door. I threw open the door and crunched out onto the shale.
There was a car parked outside on the shale. A red Mini. Maroon in the dusk. Victoria couldn’t drive. Who had brought her to me? I approached the car and peered inside. A disc stuck out of the CD player. Tucked into the driver’s side door was a little dark book. An atlas? A safety manual? Or something else? This didn’t look like a car Victoria had ridden in. Where was the phone charger, for one thing? Where was the two-litre bottle of spring water? Crunching footsteps, somewhere behind me, slowed and then stopped. My throat tightened. If I spoke I would’ve stammered. I had felt this fear before, I knew it. Standing before my mother’s bedroom door, hearing those animal noises coming from within, sensing that something bad was happening on the other side.
‘You’re reading again.’ This was not a voice I knew. I turned, slowly, to face it. There, in the space between the cottage and the workshop, a woman stood before me. Short in stature. Compact. She seemed familiar to me in the way strangers sometimes are, and I stared into her face trying to wring from my brain a droplet of recognition.
‘What?’
‘In your hand. It’s a book.’ I looked down at the novel in my hand. I hadn’t realised I was still carrying it.
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘What is it?’
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’m sorry, who are you?’ The woman took a couple of steps toward me and stopped. I stared deep into her features. It was difficult in the half-light to see anything. She took another step and stopped. Only a few metres separated us now. She was poised, standing slightly forward on her toes, in the manner of a runner awaiting the starting gun. I could hear the tide, like a great pot boiling, beyond the trees. Suddenly, I knew who this was.
And I knew why she had come.
I saw now that she held an object in her right hand. Something long, about the size of a rolling pin. I thought about turning to run but I wouldn’t have got far across the shale barefoot and with the knee.
‘Ruby,’ I said.
‘Hello, Dan.’ There wasn’t time to process my thoughts, to sort them into any kind of order. She approached me now. My legs froze. I put a hand onto the roof of the Mini beside me, bracing myself for whatever blows were about to come. She transferred the object from one hand to another. She was standing within easy reach of me. She looked down at the thing in her hand. ‘I came here to give you this.’ She held it out in front of her and began then to open it out. It was not, I realised, a weapon; it was a roll of paper. ‘It’s you,’ she said. ‘Well it’s supposed to be you.’
I looked at it suspiciously. ‘You don’t like it,’ she said, rolling it back up.
I cleared my throat and said, ‘No, I do. It’s good.’
‘It’s yours.’ She offered it to me again and I took it. She thrust her hands into her pockets and we stood for a time in silence.
‘You’re out,’ I said.
‘Yes. A free woman for nearly a week now.’
‘And you came to see me?’
‘Well of course I did.’
‘But how –’
‘– did I find you? Easy really. It just took a little bit of googling. The place names may have been censored but there was enough detail in your letters to figure out where you lived. Wilder-on-Sea; interesting place. There aren’t too many remote woodland cottages in Wilder-on-Sea. I actually drove by last night but it was far too late to knock, and I had to be in Stoke this morning to see my Offender Manager, so I went back. Can I use your toilet?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. I led her through the open side door.
‘It’s kind of weird to be here. I mean, it’s like visiting a place in a novel you’ve read.’
‘The toilet is in there.’
‘Thank you. Oh, this is nice, very tastefully done, Dan.’ She went in and latched the door. I was alone in the corridor. I could easily have slipped away into the trees where I could use my knowledge of the terrain to lose her. But I did not. Something stopped me. When she came out of the toilet I was standing in the open doorway staring out across the shale. ‘Oh, you were standing right here the whole time. Could’ve been embarrassing. Are we going to have a cup of tea then?’
I led Ruby through the criss-crossing corridors into the living room where the doused fire still smouldered. She walked over to the books lining the mantelpiece. I continued on to the kitchen. I paused at the door to ask, ‘How do you like it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your tea.’
‘Oh, black please. They only gave us powdered milk so I’ve trained myself to like it black. Oh, and three sugars.’ I understood ‘they’ to mean prison. It was hard to reconcile this person running her finger gently along the spines of my books with the dangerous criminal she apparently was. Almost impossible. I filled the kettle and placed it on the lit stovetop. I opened the kitchen drawer for a teaspoon. Here was a choice, I understood lucidly even in that moment, between trust and death; teaspoon or kitchen knife. I stared at the blade while the kettle began to rattle. I heard Ruby call out something from the living room but I couldn’t hear her.
‘What?’ I shouted. She called again but the kettle was starting to whistle; soon it would be screaming. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t hear you,’ I said as I went through to the living room with two full mugs of tea.
‘I was just saying how wonderful it is that you’re reading all these books like you said you wanted to.’ I put the mugs down on the table between the armchairs.
‘I haven’t read any of them yet. Only this one,’ I said, indicating Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘God, I’m so embarrassed about all that Julia and Winston stuff I wrote.’ Now I was remembering the sweet words and the haikus and the shared secrets. She sat in the rocking chair. I gave her the black tea. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and placed it on the stone hearth. ‘It’s just,’ she paused, ‘everything there is so, suppressed. Externally I mean. My emotions. That’s just how you survive. So everything I felt inside became sort of concentrated, heightened, like in a melodrama. I suppose I’m trying to say sorry.’
‘You’re sorry? For what
?’
‘For putting you in an awkward position. For pressuring you. For confessing my undying love for you.’ She laughed a little, nervously. She grabbed her tea and blew on it.
‘Don’t apologise. I think maybe we were both a bit carried away. I was supposed to be the one helping you. Not the other way around. I’m the one who should be sorry.’ I was still standing, I wasn’t comfortable enough yet to sit. I crouched in front of the fire and got it going again.
As I worked she said, ‘I need to know one thing.’ There was a sudden change in her tone. A solemn drop. I squeezed the poker tightly in my hand. ‘Why did you vanish like that?’ I was crouched at her feet, I realised. I had put myself in a position of vulnerability without consciously intending to. I stopped working the coals and turned to look up at her. I saw her now, properly, for the very first time. The first and only thought that came into my head was: she is beautiful, as it had when I saw her picture on the internet. For a few moments, which felt like falling or floating, I thought this over and over. While I stared silently into her face it may have seemed to her that I was searching for some excuse, inventing a plausible reason for my betrayal, but I wasn’t. I was simply tracing the contours of her chin, her cheeks, her eyelids that seemed to swell and contract in the light of the flames, which were flickering slowly into life. I rose and picked up my tea, to buy some thinking time. I had to snap out of this. I didn’t really know her at all, or what she might be capable of. Something she wrote in one of her letters suddenly came back to me, about how she became too attached to her patients, that if they didn’t turn up to her clinic she’d sometimes visit them demanding to know why. I had to choose my next words carefully.
‘I just couldn’t write to you any more,’ I began, intending in that moment to tell her the truth: that all I had wanted was to save my relationship, that my feelings for her were confusing me, clouding my judgement. But she looked at me with such fierce hope in her eyes that it suddenly seemed impossible. And so I lied. ‘I wanted to. I intended to. I got your message, the one about … love’ – saying the word made us both look down into our mugs – ‘and I was going to reply to you. It was so nice what you said. I didn’t want to rush it. But then, well, things with Vic got … worse, and everything sort of went out the window. And then I moved here, alone as you’ve probably already gathered, and she took everything. And I do mean everything. I’m sorry.’ Ruby nodded her head continuously as I spoke. I saw in her expression that she wanted to believe this. I knew what I said had confirmed some optimistic theory in her head about me. She smiled and it was like waiting all the cold night for the dawn and it finally breaking. ‘But I remember what you said, about how I was making a mistake. Well, you were right.’
‘And with her personal trainer,’ Ruby said in the manner of a disapproving gossip, ‘what a fucking cliché. I’m sorry, excuse my French.’
‘No it’s fine. You’re right.’
‘So, you didn’t see any messages from me after that one?’ she asked sheepishly.
‘No,’ I lied, ‘I don’t have internet here. It’s actually been liberating. Why? Were there more?’
‘Yes. One or two.’
‘Oh Ruby, I’m so sorry. You must’ve thought I’d …’ I was surprised at how easily this performance came to me.
‘It’s probably just as well you didn’t get them. Anyway, none of that matters now. I’m free,’ she said, shaking her head as if to rid herself of some tiny invisible devil that clung to her hair, ‘and so are you.’
‘I suppose I am.’ There followed a moment of heavy silence. You could feel the air buckling under the weight of the past. We were both so wounded.
‘Here’s to our freedom,’ Ruby said suddenly, boisterously. ‘Charge your mugs!’ I smiled and raised my mug but I felt gloomy and tense.
‘To freedom,’ I said and we drank our tea. I lowered myself into an armchair. We sat opposite one another and quietly sipped our tea, both of us looking into the fire. I stole secret looks at her over the brim of my mug.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ I asked after an interlude.
‘Of course.’
‘I thought your sentence was seven years. How come you’re out now?’
‘Depending on the offence you generally only serve half your sentence behind bars. Less in some cases. The other half you serve outside, on licence. So you’re free but technically still under Her Majesty’s care so there are conditions. One of which is that I have to attend weekly meetings with my Offender Manager back in Stoke, which is where I was this morning.’
‘What happens if you miss a meeting?’
‘There’d be a hearing. My offence was violent, so they’d probably send me straight back.’ She was remarkably open and matter-of-fact about all of this. I got no sense from her body language or tone that she was suppressing any kind of resentment towards me. But still, it wasn’t clever to trust her so quickly.
‘So, and I hope you don’t mind me asking about this.’
‘No, go ahead,’ she said, settling back in the rocking chair.
‘Is how you described the … incident to me exactly how it happened?’
‘You mean Lee’s accident?’ There was something sinister in her choice of the word accident. Perhaps I’d been reading too much Orwell. But it sharpened me like a scrape on a whetstone. I nodded. She began to laugh. ‘Look at me. I’m five-three. You think I could throw an angry fifteen-stone man down the stairs?’ She rose then from the rocking chair and looked around the room. ‘It’s so traditional here,’ she said, steering the conversation into cooler territory. ‘Look at that clock. It’s beautiful. Everything looks so, I don’t know, old.’ I had to hand it to her. If she was pretending it didn’t show. ‘It’s kind of how I pictured it, this place, when you were describing it to me. You’ve done precisely what you set out to. You’ve made a home. You should be proud of yourself.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
We fell silent again. She walked to the window, left of the fireplace.
‘Do you mind that I came?’ She pulled aside the net curtain and peered out at the swaying pines.
‘Of course not. I mean, it is a bit of a shock to see you in real life. But I’m glad you’re here. You’re right, though, it’s like meeting a character from a novel.’
‘But one you remember fondly.’
‘You look different.’ I flushed with heat. I’d misstepped.
‘I do? Compared to what? I never sent you any pictures.’
‘I may have googled you.’
‘Oh. Fair enough I suppose. I had to google this place to find you. I’m curious, where did you see me? What did I look like?’
‘There was a write-up in a local paper. In the photo they used you were outside. Your face is the same but there’s something different that I can’t put my finger on.’ Ruby leant her weight on the windowsill and smiled.
‘It must be my hair. It’s red now. Ruby red. I got Jade to colour it for me. It was practically the first thing we did after I got out. I wanted a change. I needed colour.’
‘So you’re staying with her?’
‘Yes. She has a house in Staffordshire, in the countryside. Well, I say countryside but it’s nothing like as remote as this. She has neighbours for a start.’
What are we doing here? I thought. What is this? All the things we talked about in our letters swelled before us like a restless sea and here we were tramping about in puddles of small talk. ‘Out of curiosity, how did you know Victoria wouldn’t be here?’ I didn’t believe for a second she’d come just to give me the portrait.
‘I didn’t. But I’d have been surprised if she was. Things sounded pretty desperate in your letters. I’m sorry about your mother, by the way. I know that’s super late but I just wanted to say it in person.’
‘Thank you.’
Could this woman love me? Could it all have been true? I ached to know what went through her head.
‘My father died a couple of months ago.�
��
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘He left Jade the house. I was written out, of course. Disowned. The rest of his estate went to Camila, his Spanish wife. She’s younger than me. They thought he’d drowned because he was found face down in the jacuzzi but it was a heart attack.’ She looked out at the pines again.
I felt a surge of pity and then, immediately after, a stab of anxiety. Why was she looking into the darkness? Was there someone out there, someone she was waiting for?
‘Is it strange to be out?’
‘The only strange thing is that nothing has changed. Three and a half years feels like three hundred years when you’re inside. But everything’s just the same. And worse. I’m disappointed.’
‘What will you do?’
‘You mean with the rest of my life? I don’t know. I can’t practise psychotherapy any more. Jade suggested travel. She’s offered to sell the house and give me half. I’ve always wanted to travel.’
‘Where would you go?’
‘Somewhere green. Maybe India. I’ve always wanted to see the Taj Mahal, to see the bench where Diana sat in her red jacket. I’m not sure. Travelling feels like running away. I suppose that’s literally what it is.’ She paused for thought. ‘But I wanted to see you. I knew that. So I just did it. I came. And it feels good to see you, Dan. Perhaps that’s what I should do, just follow my instincts. When we ignore our instincts, that’s when we get into trouble.’
‘I think you’re right about that,’ I said, and I truly meant it. Ruby finished her tea and placed it on the hearth. She did not sit back down. She looked at me and smiled weakly. Were there, too, things she wanted to say but couldn’t?
Abruptly, she stood up straight as though to announce her departure. ‘Well, thanks for the tea.’
‘Of course,’ I said and rose too.
Now that she was leaving, I felt a strange sense of loss. I seemed not to mean very much to her after all. Not nearly as much as I’d thought. I wasn’t this great lost love that she needed to exorcise. I wasn’t an enemy to be destroyed. I’m disappointed, she said, and whether or not she was referring to me didn’t matter, because in my head she meant me.