by Tara Guha
He pushes upwards, the last part of the track curling before him like a tabby’s tail. He resists the temptation to look backwards at the patchwork hills fanning open, wanting to preserve the surprise until the last possible moment. As he reaches a grassy plateau he sees it’s just as it was; two sets of swings, still flaking and wonky, with a pock-marked red slide like a witch’s nose in between. Only now, stepping out onto the grass, does he let himself turn and behold. It stops his breath. A magical storybook of miniature trees, roads and rooftops is spread out below him. Ancient creviced hills stoop over it, skirts adorned with a giant jigsaw of rush-green fields, faces still streaked with morning mist. This is no false grandiloquence of childhood memory. More than ever it deserves its name, the name he gave it nearly a quarter of a century ago. The playground on the edge of the world.
He wishes he could broaden his eyes, pan back like a movie camera, but instead they have shrunk, squinting in awe, reminding him of how tiny he is. How is it possible that this enchanted lookout has remained unspoilt? He inhales pine and feels the answer prickle deep in the pit of his stomach. Fingers interlock in front of him and he allows his eyes to close.
At first there are no words, just presence, his presence in this moment. No reflecting or regretting. It’s a technique they showed him, a way to switch off the jet of his mind, or at least turn it down. He presses his fingers together and breathes all the way from his toes to his scalp. Once he would have mocked such an image, made sarcastic observations about the function of lungs. But it’s a different sort of breathing, and this air is purified energy streaming in to fill every molecule of his being.
There’s another presence now, expansive and orange, buffeting him in buoyant waves that take his weight and lift him off his feet. His body is surrendering but his mind holds on. Always holding on. One day he will let go completely and allow the waves to sweep him away, body and soul. He breathes up from the soil again, leans back into the waves, but the tug of his mind still resists like the rope anchoring a hot air balloon. It’s okay, this is good, this is enough for now.
His lips twitch into murmured words once alien, now familiar: Thank you, help me, Lord. At this his mind, straining in the wings, bursts back onto centre stage. Thank you for helping me make this decision, for showing me a new path. And, more burningly, Thank you for saving me.
You could call it a coincidence, of course. A year ago he would certainly have named it such. A neighbour who’d locked himself out came banging at the door, wanting to use the phone. The neighbour’s knocking swelled and dipped like waves of sound, each one trickling a bit closer to him until something in him woke up in air too viscous to breathe. Realisation dawning on him. A groping hand found the phone and they traced the 999 call when his voice wouldn’t work. He was pumped full of salt water and shame.
It’s the shame he needs to excise now. In his head he knows he is forgiven. But he can’t always feel it. The Devil pops up at every unguarded moment, springing from the ground or hanging from the rafters like a bat, leering and laughing, cajoling and carousing, until at times he covers his ears and tries to shout over it. Meditation is a better defence but harder for someone so primed for conflict. He has a lot to learn.
He thinks of the others, Catherine, Charles, Rebecca, José, Anna, and regrets his harshness. The heat is gone, the fire left unstoked to fade into gentle warmth, an occasional flicker and glow. But the other one, the missing one, is too closely bound up with the leering sprite, the sprite who still holds out his hand from time to time to draw him back. There is too much fear for forgiveness yet.
He tries to focus on his breathing. Deep peace is ultimately what he’s after but he’s sure God will also smile on this hopping excitement as his mind veers off again. He has a new purpose, one that is born out of the crisis he survived. Teaching is not his vocation, or at least not teaching in schools.
“It’s all very well to trust in God but He’s not going to give you a monthly pay cheque, is He?” This was his mum over lunch yesterday. Well, maybe He will. It’s only two months since he found faith and yet conviction burns inside him that he is meant to share it, that the restless animal in his belly can at last be harnessed and put to use. He will spread the flame, ignite others with passion and purpose. Reveal to them the true meaning of passion; how much more it is than the modern definition of sex. He shudders slightly, drenched again with relief that he can leave this issue behind, dedicate himself to higher things.
And when the Devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
Smiling, he opens his eyes and sees the world almost as he left it. The haze over the valley is starting to thin; dense clumps of conifers have moved into sharper focus but the sandy, mottled moorlands above them are still in the clouds. A car potters by behind him, followed by quick, tripping footsteps. He turns to meet the curious gaze of two little girls who giggle like dormice and run off to the slide. Someone is clipping his hedge a few houses down and he hears distant sounds, a village starting to wake.
It’s time to make a move.
Scene 24
Rebecca exits the restaurant into a different London. At first she thinks it’s the light. There’s a late-afternoon haze floating over the city, blurring its edges into commas and question marks. The people passing her are meandering rather than striding, or maybe she’s slowing the whole thing down in her head, so their bodies bob like puppets.
The magic portal. Follow me, Alice. Maybe Seth has disappeared into this alternative universe. If he even existed at all.
She smiles as she joins the pottering throngs, floating along where only hours before she was jarring and jolting. A couple of people smile back, confused at the warmth of greeting from a stranger, wondering if they know her. Despite the wine, she feels lucid for the first time in months, years, seeing the world pass in slow motion, its beauty revealed to her in a series of urban freeze-frames. Girl with a bandaged arm, a new tattoo. Three Japanese tourists on the way to Piccadilly Circus. Butch man carrying a tiny, trembling Yorkshire terrier. Lights of all hues guiding the weak and weary inside, offering food, drink, massage. She sees it all and embraces it.
Is she dead, an angel, in the world but not of it? She laughs. If this is dead, she’s never felt more at one with her body. She breathes into its solidness, holding her like a bear hug. The hungry ache she’s learned to live with is gone. She feels sated for the first time since Seth disappeared.
No, for the first time since she met him.
It’s a light-bulb moment that stops her in her tracks just off Oxford Street. She’s been associating the restlessness, the gnawing hunger, with his disappearance rather than his arrival into her life. How long was it before she was constantly craving more? Living for the next fix and never satisfied?
Because that’s what Seth did, made you want more. More from life, people, yourself. That line again: Oh, I know there’s more. For people like us, people who know how to feel. And she was flattered but she’d felt it too. It was as if he shone a light into the cracks and dark spaces within her until he’d unearthed a bellyful of gaping yearning. But sometimes she wasn’t sure if the hunger belonged to her or to him, if she was vibrating with his unrequited desires or her own. She had believed this was due to the special connection between them. But more likely this was the effect he had on all of them, the deep hole inside of him sucking them in.
They were never going to be enough to fill his emptiness. That’s why he would need to move on to more people, more experiences, more more more.
She starts to feel sombre. The streets have closed in again and everything has sped up, normal service is resumed. She’s not far from her old flat but scuttling back immediately would feel like a defeat. The wide avenues of Regent’s Park are only ten minutes away, benches where she can sit and make sense of it all without interruption. These are important revelations and she needs to hold onto them before they fly away.
She sits upright, serious, the hold
er of knowledge, flung out of Eden and newly self-sufficient. She knows the dark side now, the dark side of her, she has traced its snaking paths and found her way back again. She can take care of herself. Empowerment swells like an orchestra inside her but there’s an underlying shimmer of sadness, a single violin. She thinks of beating her parents at Scrabble for the first time, feeling thrilled and triumphant and then, later, after the packing away of the tiles, the feeling that one had dropped to the pit of her stomach. Sadness, eight points. A rite of passage moment, the beginning of independence, maturity. Aloneness.
But she isn’t lonely, that’s the distinction. She has people, friends, more than she needs, even. She doesn’t even need a boyfriend; she can be by herself and enjoy the space. She has a vocation she loves, something precious and life-affirming. She thinks of Catherine, drudging away in her firm of accountants, narrow shoulders bent over a task she doesn’t care about. Poor Catherine. Compassion takes her by surprise, sprinkling tears that make the picture run a little, so that Catherine and her desk start to melt and slide towards the ground. I’ve been a bitch. She closes her eyes. She won’t dodge it, she’ll stay with this, take responsibility. It was rivalry for Seth’s attention that made her put Catherine down. She swallows. She can fix it. Right now anything seems possible. She’ll buy a present for the baby, something nice.
She barely notices that she has got to her feet, zigzagging like a drunk, veering towards the dwindling dapples of sunlight. The wind takes the weight of her hair in delicious bursts and the goosebumps on the tops of her arms are stroked away by the next patch of sun. Something is lifting, loosening again. The ache has left her legs and each long breath draws in rippling energy. She thinks again of Anna and José and her unexpected discovery that they could still be friends. In a different way, a better way. Perhaps she is ready to base herself in London again, persuade Shaz to rent a new place, somewhere a bit nicer, where they could have dinner parties of their own. Then she’ll have a big break, get famous, do photo shoots for magazines. At the point where she’s moved into one of the mansions on the edge of the park she smiles, reins herself in. But not too much. Anything is possible, just as her parents always said.
She inhales to the perimeters of her new solidness, where something is perched, fluttering like a bird back from a faraway summer.
Hope.
Scene 25
Catherine lifts her voluminous white blouse so that the baby can sunbathe a little while she reads. She’s got at least an hour to sprawl across the sofa like a Rubens painting before Charles gets home. In her one brief foray outside it had been quite chilly, but inside the window serves as a solar heater and she basks in it.
Rebecca is back. Charles is seeing her today, with Anna and José. He invited her along but she isn’t ready yet, not willing to wheel out her pale, veiny, distended body and spread it out next to Rebecca’s long, lean, lovely one. Not ready for the feelings that seeing her may unsettle.
She has a pile of papers in a green folder and she lies back to read them one by one. She does this quite a lot. Charles doesn’t know, in fact none of the others know that she has copies of Seth’s poetry, at least the stuff he chose to share with her and the group. And maybe a few other bits she found for herself and copied down when she’d finished her piano practice and he still wasn’t home. It comforts her that part of him is still in her hand. Sometimes she reads aloud to the baby, although a lot of it isn’t suitable.
The baby is big now, protruding from her small frame in comical fashion. Sometimes it tries to push its way out of her stomach, pummelling her with tight fists, looking for the exit. Charles reassures her she looks more beautiful than ever. She has breasts for the first time in her life and suspects that’s part of her new-found beauty. She’s got no experience in finding supportive bras so goes to a maternity shop where the sales assistant straps her into a beige number with plenty of lace and no wire. Her bras used to get lost in her underwear drawer. Now they take up most of the space like granny girdles.
She rifles through to the last of the poems, appropriately called “Endgame”. This one isn’t good to read to Baby, isn’t really suitable reading for her either, but she’s drawn to it over and over, his last message to them. She scans the familiar words, absorbing more than reading.
Endgame
Orphaned in the lockjaw of
Elongated evening smiles
Dreaming of a death, the boy
Is watching his mother’s slender hand
Peel away from the soap-smooth rock
Unable to scream as he
Sips bilberry juice.
Then she stares. How could she not have seen it? Her heart bangs against her raised ribcage. She doesn’t know much about poetry, but isn’t that the oldest trick in the book? The first letter of each line, read vertically.
Oedipus.
She racks her brain through school classics lessons. Killed his father, slept with his mother. Her hand trembles and she sits up straighter to try to pull in some breath.
She sees the narrowed, darting eyes of Julia Rothbury as they looked at each other through a glass screen. The smell of prison, layers of bleach with something rotten underneath. Her last-ditch attempt to find out where he was.
She knew she had made a mistake almost at once but she was shut in now, guards stationed all around to catch her if she bolted, as if she were the guilty one.
It was him, of course, who killed Clive. You know that, don’t you? Of course you do, you wouldn’t be here otherwise.
She clutches her stomach, trying to reassure Baby, cover its eyes and ears. Julia Rothbury was a liar. She’d felt it through and through; those fidgeting hands, that whine, those crocodile tears.
He was trying to protect me. He’d always do anything for me. Afterwards he went to Lucilla, raving and delirious, calling out for me. A sudden cloud of confusion passing over Julia’s face. But he wouldn’t have set me up, he’d never do that. God knows who he was, that man.
What man?
The one who taped me saying I’d consider using a hitman to kill Clive. Entrapment, they call it. Big man, broad London accent. Funny blonde streak like a racoon. Of course I didn’t mean it, I was angry, he was buying me drinks and flattering me. Goading me. Chatting me up. I would never really have done it.
Catherine is starting to hyperventilate, like she did at the time, and it’s bad for Baby, robbing him of oxygen. There’s some lukewarm camomile tea at her side and she takes a ragged slug.
Feeling queasy, by any chance? When’s it due?
Too sharp to be deceived by a big jumper. July.
Not his, is it? My boy’s? You’re not expecting me to become Grandma?
A violent blush. Of course not. I haven’t seen him – Seth – for nearly a year.
Nasty laugh, high pitched and nasal. I was kidding. You’re not really his type.
Even in navy prison clothes she drips disdain over Catherine. And lies, dreadful things about Seth, her own son, so she wants to press her fists into her ears to stop the poison seeping into them. But the next minute she calls him my boy, claims she would do anything to protect him. And isn’t he handsome, doesn’t he break hearts? Her mouth twists as she takes in Catherine’s ankle-length skirt and shapeless jumper. I suppose you’re in love with him too.
Tears of anger. What makes you think you know anything about him?
Touched a nerve, have I?
Whatever you did to him, it was bad enough for him to tell people that you were dead.
That takes the wind out of her, for a minute. Then she lifts her head. I made some mistakes. But he’ll come back to me. And he’ll get me out of here.
Catherine shook all the way out, like she’s shaking now, terrified she might shove the guard as he led her back to the entrance and end up being locked up herself. Outside the gates she put her hands on her knees and breathed the clean air.
She takes another sip of camomile. Julia Rothbury has been tried and convicted for her hus
band’s murder. There had been no doubt. She stabbed him, took out his eyes and was incriminated by one of those long, coarse red hairs. The judge had said something about a terrible crime planned meticulously. So of course she’d been lying. It was sick, trying to implicate your own innocent child.
She takes the copy of “Endgame” that she has allowed to drift to the floor, battling to reach over her own stomach. It’s a fantasy, of course, another fantasy from a traumatic childhood, like the poems Charles found. Killed his father. Well, he might have thought about it but he hadn’t done it. Slept with his mother. She shudders, thinking of the curling wisp of ginger she’d found on his pillow. It must have been Rebecca’s. Hairs like hers got everywhere; she’d even found one on her own jumper once. No, the whole Oedipus thing is poetic licence, a joke even – that sounds more like Seth.
She lies back and flips to another poem.
Scene 26
Charles finds her fast asleep on the sofa. She’s curled on her side, one hand cradling her bump, the other tucked under her head. He’s late and she’s conked out. Her mouth is open and she rasps and heaves like his own, adorable beached whale. He’ll start cooking supper and let her sleep. He notices a piece of paper on the floor and goes to pick it up. A quick, sharp twist of his guts when he sees what it is. His hand itches to rip it into shreds, bury it in the kitchen bin under junk mail and potato peelings. Instead he places it carefully back where he found it. He must be reasonable. He can’t expect her to forget about Seth straight away.
Which poem is it, anyway? He glances down, barely interested, he’s seen too much of Seth’s poetry recently. He misses the title but letters jump out and arrange themselves vertically and he blinks. Oedipus. Of course, how very Seth, an obscure reference to Greek mythology, an in-joke between him and Sophocles.
But… someone did kill Seth’s father. He frowns as more details of the story come back to him. Oedipus blinded himself. Clive Rothbury had his eyes gouged out. Surely, though, it should be Seth being blinded in that case?