Twice the Speed of Dark

by Lulu Allison

  For a long time they sit like this. She thinks at one point Karl is standing behind them; he talks to Estela then leaves again. Eventually, she becomes calm. Estela says nothing but sits calmly too, one arm still around Anna’s bent shoulders, her other hand, tanned, slim fingers wearing slender silver rings, resting lightly on the sleeve of Anna’s forearm.

  *

  Her head thrums, her mind still fogged, poisoned by alcohol. She feels sabotaged, uncertain, confused. She knows she has watched through dark and light again, at least that long. She is in her room. She has eaten some bread that was dry as a loofah, dipped in the oil that tasted of supermarkets, left in the bottom of a flimsy plastic pot once the olives had been eaten on a more lustrous day. She drinks water from the tap. She moves to the balcony, to peer and scowl, scans the beach, the edge of town, the sea. It is an unquiet day. Harried. Palm branches flick, shooing away a troublesome approach. A pesterer. Begone! She frowns in the cloudy brightness and cavorting wind. It teases her; she flicks at it like the palms. She goes back to the room, shuts the wind out on the balcony, plaintive Cathy, wheedling for entry. Bugger off, Cathy, Heathcliff must have thought sometimes. She gets into bed, pulls up the sheet and the thin blanket, tugs it over her eyes, over her whole head, and sleeps.

  Her room is crammed with the dead, her dead, not the fictional ghost banished to the balcony. Mine may be made up, but they are not fiction, she says. They rise from the pages of her book, slip out between the leaves and shift around each other, over, under and clean through. The room is a swimming pool made of the dead, a volume of liquid movement. From above, the surface might shimmer, glare in the light like the hotel pool, small waves bouncing into each other off the square sides, kicking back the sunlight in a charming web of brightness. But down here, it is tank-like, light softened by depth and algae; the movement is gentle, lulling. Soft shadow and pale light stirred in together. She has to concentrate to see them as individuals, her sleeping eye discerning only the movement and the pattern. Subtle motes eddying in the thick liquid air. Sometimes one stops its slow swirl long enough for her eye to locate it. See him or her, through the thin blanket and the sheet and the pylon thrum in her head. It is a little nauseating to be surrounded by such translucent paisley shifting. She pulls tighter under the covers, the fabric clenched in her hands. The tight pull of material around her head seems to steady her as she bobs around the bottom of this gloomy tank, noticing the odd recognisable feature, a known body, a limb that shows itself as whole in the viscous mass.

  At the bottom of her bed there is a stillness. A figure has sat on the end – it is the woman with turquoise trousers and a yellow top. She is her first. Anna tries to visit her in her garden and isn’t able to, floating around pathetically like an insecure deb at a cocktail party waiting for the hostess to come and talk to her. This time she has come to visit Anna, sitting with the same garden calm, not looking at anything, or perhaps gazing through the window to the beach and sky. Anna observes, not the woman exactly, but the sensation of her presence. It soothes her, and she drifts further into sleep. Later, in the full dark of night, the tank has emptied, the dead are gone, but the woman still sits on her bed. The fat darkness lies heavy upon Anna, a drug of sleep, a swoon into night-mind. The sound of the sea snakes through the balcony door, now open. By me, she wonders, or by the ghosts as they left? The curtain-ghost blows in the night-time breeze. She settles comfortably in the bed, curled on her side, exhales, slowly and without tension. After a while resting in thoughtless companionship, slightly adrift of the shore, Anna speaks.

  I’m sorry for all that you have lost. I wish I could have known you before.

  Yes, I am sorry too.

  …

  Did you know you were in danger?

  Life has been full of danger for many years, so yes, I did know. I didn’t know I was to die on this day at this time. This bomb. I feared it many times, and fear can feel like a rehearsal.

  …

  It had been a lively morning. My younger children are often fighting, and the noise of it fills our home. There is a moment of quiet each morning and, as you know, I like to sit in the backyard and feel the sun on my face. It is as if I collect the turmoil on myself, and to remove it, I have these breaths in the sun. Don’t get the picture from this that my family is difficult or that I am burdened by unusual demands. It is the ordinary way of a lively family living in a small, too small, space. Living too in a place that causes fear and uncertainty. My boys want only certainty, and being young, believe they have been able to find it. It is beautiful, the clear purpose of the young, isn’t it? But you can’t help wishing for them that they would not miss the often equally beautiful, less defined bits in between. Well, so I think about my sons anyway. They are clever enough, they will find it, I hope. And I understand the anger that fills their hearts.

  …

  Did it hurt you? Were you afraid?

  …

  I felt my life pulling out of me, fast, like a train leaving a tunnel. My body lived on long enough to feel the vacuum. To feel the blank emptiness, the eternal connection to emptiness. It didn’t hurt. But I was filled with ancient grief.

  *

  When Anna wakes up next it is in the pewter light of dawn. The sky, though grey, glints with small lustre, the promise of brightness. The woman from Baghdad is gone from the end of her bed. She can’t expect a night-long vigil after all. The loofah bread is gone, the plastic pot is scraped clean and on the floor. There is still water in the tap. She takes a long drink from the tap, then fills the bathroom glass. She sips from it as she shuffles through the tumble that has formed in her room over these last scattered few days, pokes her feet around in clothes and bedding on the floor, moves curtains this way and that. She’s got to think, or at least find order, pull it from the tatty muddle that has been her hiding place. She’s got to think. She’s got to grasp.

  She bounces off whenever she tries. That is the difficulty. Her fear is a bauxite sphere; gritty, unwieldy, squashingly large. Nothing to grasp; the girth is too wide. It hovers, an Earth-born planet, next to her at chest height, in the way; scratchy, rough, blocking. Not a thing she can hold or move or order. She puts her hands over her face, pressing in, willing to give up at the slightest difficulty, frustrated by her inability to proceed.

  She feels a keen sense of embarrassment at her unravelling, at her need for Estela to take care of her, at her drunkenness. But Estela’s gentle kindness assuages some of the pain – it seems ungracious to feel embarrassment as a result of such generosity. Estela stayed with her for a long time and would probably have stayed longer if Anna had not insisted that she was better now and in need of sleep. She feels a precious gratitude for the young woman’s generosity, but with that comes a poignant thread; a crystalline reminder rings through her of all that she has lost. She sees in Estela the beautiful blossoming of opportunities, a young woman poised on the threshold of making her mark in life, making the choices of adulthood with the carefree winds of youth still filling her sails. There is a terrible emptiness, a longing for the time when she looked on her own daughter with the same admiring wonder. She chokes back a sob. Holds onto the expression of sadness, fearing once more the power that might surge behind it. She is not ready for it.

  There must be, eventually, a right time. There must be a reckoning, an unpicking. A harassing, a harrying, a hunt and a chase. A death and a dissection, a bloody inquest. A hanging, a tale-telling, a laying down of the truth from which the myth was born. A slaying of the beast, a naming of the enemy. This pageant will need a great field, a heraldry of secrets, a change of horses. And once the pageant moves on, she will weave her way across the dewy field barefoot, collecting the clues, tucking fragments into muslin pockets, muttering words to make a web, piece together the story that she needs to tell of herself.

  Now is not the right time. She stays in her room to sit out a chunk of this wrong time. She hunkers down to wait it out, as the wrong minutes and hours tick by. Be in thi
s as-good-as-any place, filling up the wrong time.

  *

  I wait in the darkness. This soft inky darkness surrounds me like a cloak. The soft darkness of night – time on Earth is a refuge. It meets my boundaries with courtesy; it does not steal in and thread itself through my bones.

  She will find me here, soon.

  Remote-controlled bomb, four killed.

  A barrel-shaped woman with piled-up grey hair in an old-fashioned coif. She wears shiny black shoes on tiny feet, a flowing and colourful scarf. In fear of robbery, she clutches a black handbag, old and flat, under her arm, held tight by pudgy fingers brightened with gold rings. She feeds stray cats in her back garden, taking out pretty, cheap ceramic bowls of leftovers and cat food. She won’t have animals in her expensive silent house.

  The working day as a scaffolder is punctuated by songs sung in loops and snatches. He loves his son and wife with a fervour that is so animating he sometimes feels the need to walk it off. Amongst competing financial claims, he has secretly saved enough for a holiday at a place where his wife made happy childhood memories. He has been trying to decide whether to keep it a surprise.

  She takes a hurried trip across town to meet an old friend; she wants just briefly to see a part of the world that is distant and different, carefree. All told, a break of under two hours. Then anxious return to the hospital and her precious child, born in translucent frailty, all the feebleness of her innermost body somehow visible through her pale skin and huge, tarmac-dark eyes.

  A quiet, serious girl, absorbed by a determination to understand the underlying way of things. She has eyes the unresolved colour of a river. Her gaze is steady, her look intent, concentrated as she pieces together the workings of the world. Those steady eyes with their unresolved colour, they see nothing now. They will never be seen. All that they took in, understood, learned, studied, all that they beheld. All gone.

  *

  She counts these four, just four of how many? So many died today, so many killed. Drowned, suffocated, tortured. The countless dead amongst the numbered that appear on her news screen. There are always more dead, so many different dead. Likely none of them unmourned or unaccounted for in their homeland. Her accounting for them is not because she is an only eye, a stupid god. They don’t need her to do this. But she still feels she must. There is no shortage of stories. Nine people were killed on the same page, another bomb in another town, the other end of the same country. There are so many different ways of being ignored.

  Shut the book, drop it into the sluicing bottom of the boat, throw the mooring line onto the rickety quay and step onto the land. She has waved them all off on the other side. Goodbye, dear ones. I am sorry for your loss. I am sorry you have become lost. Goodbye. She lies on the bed still. She is still. What a grimy day. But nearly done. They will find their way as all others have before them. There’s no rush. She cannot say that all left here will find their way; after all, she does not seem to have found her own. She is wayless. She may as well wait until some other soul in a boat with a purple book tells her they have come to drop her off at the other side.

  She decides to leave the hotel, find a cafe or a shop somewhere, take a walk out into the morning. She guesses, at this hour, for breakfast. She realises that it is the start of a new year. The celebrations of New Year’s Eve had passed her by. In any case, she was indifferent to it. There is no refreshment in the prospect, no happy renewal, just a flat grey river-stone dropping into the pool of her belly. Another anniversary coming up. Breakfast first.

  Passing the reception desk, the woman working there hails her, calls her over – she has a note. It is from Estela, enquiring whether she is feeling better, giving her a phone number and an email address, saying Anna should get in touch with her if she wants to. Anna is very touched by this. She tucks the paper safely into her bag as she leaves to find breakfast. She walks the promenade next to the beach. It is still quiet this morning. Still early. She walks past shops and cafes opening. Racks of hats, sarongs and gaudy towels, beach balls in laundry baskets brought out from the inside. Ashtrays and salt cellars placed on outdoor tables, umbrellas hoisted. A woman hoses down the terrace in front of a small restaurant; a little tide of fag butts and sugar packets sluices into the gutter. Anna remembers a place she saw on an earlier walk, further along the bay, which advertised croissants and pastries. On the beach, she walks on the tide sand, firm and cool, rimed with a delicate, uneven scallop of small shells and dark seaweed threads. The high-tide mark holds more pungent charms, knots of old rope and mermaid’s hair. Sailor’s souls and mysterious hanks of sea-death. She keeps on the magic side, the Atlantis road that appears twice a day.

  The cafe is open and invitingly empty; there are baskets of bakery goods to choose from. She orders coffee, bread rolls and butter, and a pastry. As clouds still drape the sky, she sits outside on the terrace at the beach edge. She is still thirsty and asks for water. She is shaken by the last few days. But also grateful that she is unobserved and away from home. There should be nothing to explain. Estela may wonder what went so wrong. But she doesn’t carry a well-worn version of Anna’s bedraggled tale with which to explain recent events – we are all allowed a crisis in the present. It is only problematic if it hangs around, Anna thinks. Her problematic, dog-eared crisis; how it lowers her. The slow grinding of gears stuck always in the same glitch, caught always on the same burred and broken tooth. How it makes her head ache. She stretches her shoulders back, drops her head to stretch her neck, rub her eyes. She watches some of the local boys playing football on the sand. Spills the rest of the day quietly existing between the sea and the hotel.

  Chapter 14

  The days bled into one another. I felt implicated, imprisoned first by Ryan’s violence and then, after the third or fourth time it had erupted, by my lack of resolution in the face of it. It became, remarkably quickly, a matter of endurance, avoidance, secret pain and secret shame. I couldn’t bear the exposure of telling my friends or family, couldn’t summon the courage to confront Ryan on my own account. Hope, like a sturdy torch that had become heavy in my hand, had taken me so far into the woods that when its light finally died, I no longer knew the way out again.

  How did I make that escape? For I did go to London. I remember such joy at being there, beginning again with bridges and highways, building my own roads that would take me to wonderful freedom. How did I get there?

  It was the weekend of Dad’s birthday. We were spending the night at home with Mum and Dad, Uncle Paul and Aunt Marie. I dreaded it, but longed for the secret escape of being safe at home, in company. Ryan knew enough of his wrongdoing to understand he could not show it before others. He knew that, if he would not accept it from me, the blame from them would be inescapable. We went home to celebrate with Mum and Dad, Ryan genially handing over a bottle of wine and the gift I had chosen, playing out the charm of which he felt so certain. I eased off my jacket, explaining that I had slipped in the bathroom and hurt my wrist. My face was pale from lack of sleep, from dread of this evening’s demands. In the kitchen, Mum asked me if I was okay. Stolidly, without invitation to further questions, I fobbed her off – my job was stressful and dull, I didn’t have much aptitude for it. It’s fine, I’m just run down, I offered. Mum looked at me ruefully, but she didn’t get anywhere near the truth. I knew she had been disappointed by my university deferment. She believed, I think, knowing that something was a bad fit, that Ryan was resisting my moving eventually to London. She thought, with maternal, pragmatic tenderness, that it was inevitable I was finding the prospect of moving away hard, but I would get over it. I was in a difficult, but regular, part of growing up. But in that moment, set fair for enjoying the evening ahead, she didn’t want reasons to take my side; she wanted to welcome both of us, her daughter and her daughter’s chosen partner.

  Ryan did not consider that he would change my mother and father’s life. Though the final manifestation was an accident, he did mean to hurt me. Even to the secret point of
considering my death – there were moments in his rage, I see them now, when that illicit desire screamed piercing, distant inside him; he could imagine, with an ugly thrill, my death arriving at his hand. But he didn’t ever mean to destroy my father’s life. Such matey bonhomie, such a keen desire for approval. Almost to the point of obsequiousness, or flirting. Dad didn’t really notice, but I knew that Mum was pushed further away by his efforts, put off perhaps by the sense that he wanted to be liked and was willing to play a part to achieve that end. At the beginning, as he got to know them, I shrank, wishing somehow to pull Ryan back with me. Don’t, I thought. Just relax. Let her get to know you and you’ll be fine. Ryan, don’t show off. I loved him at that point without intrusion, and so wanted Mum and Dad to love him too. Dad was impervious to mistrust of those who try too hard. He enjoys good times and is willing to warm to anyone who seems prepared to invest in the same outcome; trust didn’t come into it for him. But eventually, betrayal did. My poor father felt so bleakly the times he had welcomed Ryan, helped him, drank friendly beers with him. He had let him slip through his fingers. By the time my father knew what he owed him, Ryan was safely shielded behind the protection of the law.

  Dad never felt he had been betrayed by Ryan; he heard betrayal only in the screaming trumpet blast of accusation that he levelled at himself. He felt he had betrayed me by not knowing, he had betrayed me with his friendliness to the man who had hurt me. He had betrayed me by not coming to our flat and insisting that I leave with him. Every pint, every smile, every back-walloping hug. But whatever my darling dad holds against himself, he was doing these things for me, not Ryan. He has learned to negotiate the blame. He has understood them as the workings of grief. He has understood that he feels guilt not because he is guilty, but because I died.