Twice the Speed of Dark

by Lulu Allison

  Not so Mum – she still hears that clarion-call of blame. You didn’t hear your daughter’s need; you didn’t see her peril. And though I would do anything to unthink it now, I remember so well the disgusting sense of furtive betrayal I did indeed feel. They didn’t know; they didn’t know, and I almost hated them for it.

  I mustered a happy enough performance through that evening. I was truly glad to be at home and relieved not to be at the flat. I would have chosen for myself a small room far away, a retreat of my own, distance from all. Distance, peace, space. Above all, distance. But I didn’t know how to avoid this terrible proximity. I wanted to keep intrusive concern at bay. Worse still, sympathy, that deadly destroyer of strategy. With effort, I managed to keep control, wrapped up enough to be quiet but seem happy. Wrapped up enough to deflect unbearable, loving intrusion.

  We stayed the night. The large bed of the spare room was occupied by Uncle Paul and Aunt Marie. We had already agreed we would be fine in my old single bed. By bedtime, Ryan was drunk, had forgotten that his bonhomie was faked, had forgotten the tension we arrived with, had forgotten, probably, his violence of the previous evening. I lay in the small familiar bed in my old room, along the edge. My back turned to Ryan, who drunkenly, with recent memory hazily deleted, nuzzled and fumbled at my back. I lay stiff and straight, a coffin, a cell block, my teeth and jaw clamped shut on words of disgust for his greedy, inelegant hands and wine breath. Luckily the wine told on Ryan before either memory or conscience could. He snored behind me. I cried without sound or movement; my bones howled like prisoners through the night.

  In the morning I woke early, unrested. The scrabbling of rodent thoughts had kept me awake through the darkness. Only as light began to appear did I snatch at sleep. As soon as I was awake, I eased stealthily from the bed. I dressed with creeping caution, careful of the pain in my wrist and fearful of waking Ryan, of bringing his presence into the precious emptiness of the early day. The kitchen was quiet, somehow the sleep of others in the house tangible, contributing to its peaceful ambience. An idling engine, not yet fired up for the activities of the day ahead. I remember a sad nostalgia, feeling so right in the familiar warmth of home and simultaneously so wrong in my own skin. I remember the wish to grasp for familiarity, retreat into my family. I made, as I always had done, a large cup of tea in my old mug, leaned back against the cupboards and gazed through the window.

  Being at home caused such internal friction. It made me feel so deceitful; it made everything feel so wrong. I often avoided home because it upset me so much. I avoided upsetting myself in the same way I avoided anything that would upset Ryan. Any kind of balance felt safer.

  I tried to make sense of it all as I stood in the kitchen but, as usual, could see no recipe for harmony. I turned from these thoughts in frustration, resting my forehead on the cupboard, scrunching the fingers of my pain-free hand into an unsatisfied fist. What to do, what to do. How to see. How to understand this hideous tangle. I turned, sighing, as I heard the door open and my mother coming in, her old towelling robe and fat slippers a soothing familiarity. Mum’s short hair, tufty from sleep, tickled my cheek as we gave each other a quick greeting hug. I felt a new protectiveness for Mum, felt implicated in a wrong done to her of which she was not yet aware. How devastated she would be to learn of the harm to her daughter. She would feel such terrible sadness if she learned all that she had not been told. We two women stood next to each other as Mum waited for the kettle to boil. I leaned over, shorter by a few inches, resting my head on my mother’s shoulder. I remembered these unfastened embraces from smaller days, leaning against my mother’s leg, a stillness, contact and balance. How much I would love to revisit that stillness, how much. As usual, Mum reached an arm around me, pulling me in.

  I was swayed in that moment by my responsibility to the welfare of others. Not wanting to bear any longer the disgusting betrayal of the people who loved me, I understood that, for them, I had to change things. For them I could find the means to act. I closed my eyes. In the calm familiarity of home, the balance of innate and thoughtless understanding, I felt an unexpected lifting of my mood as a possible future was glimpsed and a solution became evident.

  ‘I’m going to go to uni, Mum. I know it will be for the best. I’ll just have to work out a few things, but I’ll definitely be there to start in September.’

  I remember that little bubble of hope that rose. It lifts me even now.

  ‘Yes, good, definitely the right choice, darling.’ Mum leaned over and kissed the top of my bent head. ‘You’ll see when you get there that it’s the right thing. So much will open up for you. And if you want to keep part of your life the same, or you know, stay together with Ryan, that’s fine, you can do that.’

  The mention of Ryan caught the gossamer drift of my mood. My escape snagged, and I was slowed.

  ‘Mum, don’t say anything to him yet. I mean, I guess he’s expecting it, because I haven’t said I definitely wouldn’t go, but we haven’t talked about it for a while, so I just need to tell him myself first.’ I had seen freedom in a jump, a skip to a new time, had seen the result and floated serenely, briefly, towards it, but had not yet imagined the strategy to bring about its achievement. But though I felt my heart sink a little, it was in a new, more buoyant medium, not the empty well of night – time. I knew it could be done. Relief swelled within me that if I did ever reveal what had happened to me, I would also be able to say that it had ended. With new optimism, I sat at the kitchen table, chatting about arrangements for the day ahead as Mum brewed fresh coffee.

  It is a point in my story that matters, a point when the weights swung, changing the pendulum arc. How near that change came to saving me. So I try to pull it all to me. To remember how it happened. I find lots of it, knowing perhaps how much I want to tell you that I nearly saved myself. I will tell you all I can.

  Aunt Marie came down from upstairs, dressed in pyjamas and a jumper. The long plaits still in her hair from last night were fuzzy and her face pale. She complained good-naturedly about a headache, held her coffee in both hands. Mum told her I would be moving up to London after all. Marie leaned over and gave me a delicate, cheery hug, her voice croaky with hangover.

  ‘Remember, love, I said you would be welcome to start off in our spare room. We can see how it goes, but definitely come and stay for the first few months while you work things out. It’s small, but there’s plenty of room about the house if you want to keep away from us!’

  ‘Thanks, Aunty Mar, that’s really kind of you. Don’t mention it to Ryan yet though, will you?’ Mar mimed a zip across her mouth and smiled at me. How precious that shared complicity, for reasons that at that moment she did not understand. With it, I felt greater certainty in the prospect of a safe future. I pictured myself, without Ryan, living in my aunt and uncle’s house, free of this present painful anguish. Expediency gave me the excuses that my heart and self-interest lacked. Too much to expect them to take two lodgers, after all. Space, distance, autonomy. I saw that it was possible, it was possible just to leave this horrible difficulty behind. I thought perhaps with that separation, I need not go through the trauma of saying goodbye. Perhaps all we needed was a little distance.

  Distance, direction, motion. Terms that can be understood on Earth. I don’t think I can tell one from the other here. I can’t tell a distance because I don’t have the edges from which to measure. Distance. A mighty curve. A flat line forever. A sickening rush. But back then, it meant those meagre miles between home and London, the narrowed measure from one edge to the other of a bed for one instead of two. My courage and resolution, sitting in the beautiful, ordinary harmony of family women, grew big enough to count on. Though I wasn’t bold enough to test my resolution on Ryan, so I left to visit my oldest friend, Mel, who still lived at home on the other edge of the village, before he emerged from his hungover sleep.

  There had been so many times I had nearly revealed to Mel the dark secret of my relationship with Ryan. But like with
Mum, I let her believe that my lustreless moods were the ordinary boredom and weariness of badly paid work and uncertain times. She had never fallen for Ryan, seeing in him then what I can see now. His weakness, his dangerous vanity. So she was not sad when I told her, even in my face-saving, tentative way, that we were probably moving apart.

  We had seen so little of each other that she had had few opportunities to see behind my clumsy evasions. But I knew that her sharpness, her smartness, her fierce care would not have left my secret hidden for long. So both Ryan and I had put distance between us. Our beautiful friendship, so undeserving of that neglect. I am sorry, Mel, I am so sorry that I didn’t come to you, that I didn’t let you pull me from this stupid fate. I am sorry that your wonderful love, your strength, all that you would have given me, was not called upon to save me.

  I felt embarrassed by my unwillingness to hurt Ryan, and though it takes this backwards view to recognise it, I felt shame because of it. I have already said I will not feel that now. There is no blame I hold against myself now. Shame came with me, like luggage. But I understand the girl whose story I am telling, and I won’t keep what she does not deserve.

  Leaving him because of what had passed between us would hurt him, perhaps less in the loss of me than by the revelation that his own failings were to blame. The exposure of his own failure, in the glaring scrutiny of blame, seemed so heavy a retribution and potentially a danger to me. Though I understood it was not as damaging an assault as his own, I felt compelled to protect him, and thus myself, from the knowledge of how badly he had failed. Quietly, without being entirely aware of this knowledge, I understood, I think I always had, that failure was Ryan’s great fear. He was afraid of being inconsequential, afraid of not living up to what he imagined for himself. There was no true self-love mixed up in his high self-regard.

  What I wanted was to leave an unhappy (and, though I did not truly admit to it, frightening) situation, with Ryan’s illusions still intact. I wanted to be absolved of a role in the story. Who would not wish to creep quietly away, without a sound, from something that had already caused them such harm? And to hurt back, to accuse, that is not a silent action.

  I played down the increasingly commonplace occurrence of his violent outbursts. Unprotected by experience, unarmoured, I had absorbed enough of Ryan’s needling, his slow poison disguised as remedy, to feel responsible for his actions to a small but significant degree. I was lacking indignation and self-righteousness. I was trusting, believing. And he had carefully unpicked me. When Ryan told me that he loved me so much it drove him to extremes, I felt hurt by the unfairness but longed to help him, to prove to him that if I caused him pain, it was a mistake on my part. I baulked, in spite of everything, at causing him to feel a failure, to be hurt by his own mistakes.

  It would make too, for an easier exit, played as a slow extrication, a slipping away, but it wasn’t only because there was danger for me in blaming him, in making him angry.

  Collusion is such an ugly accusation. Black-and–white news reels showing the shaved heads of French women, the shearing making them distinguishable for all to gleefully join a crowd that pulls and pokes at them. Hanged, sackcloth bodies on ramparts that now protect new tenants. Collusion ends with shame. There it is again, glinting strongly, woven into the fabric of my tale. This terrible darkness did me at least that one service. As a result of this complete unravelling I saw and caught that glinting, ugly thread and pulled it, pulled it out to straggle shapelessly behind me, burned off finally like my own comet tail. It wasn’t part of me. I carried it for another.

  But then, at that uncertain, difficult time, in my propaganda – handling I felt the shame of collusion. I was only trying to make my story more manageable, but in so doing, I lessened the damage, I reduced the harm. I excused, to a certain, confusing extent, his actions. I wanted to be free of the intrusions of all and so minimised the truth of what was a part of my life. I didn’t know how to account for it. How to answer the questions it prompted. Why, Caitlin? Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you come home? Why didn’t you leave? I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.

  This grand and terrible darkness, when I can stop the words from sliding from my fingerless grasp, has given me a chance to make right with myself again. The strange effect is that though I no longer have a vessel in which to hold what I gather, I am finding all the self that Ryan caused me to lose. I find myself in the undoing. But at that time, I shrank. I skipped from under the responsibility of responding to what he had done to me by pretending that he had done little. I colluded with him.

  I shudder at all the intimacies that enveloped us. I don’t know. Do I shudder? It is hard to say. Perhaps I am bobbing in the memorialised waves of shame, still seeking me out even at this distance, a billion widths of a bed.

  I feel the sickness, the fear I had when, later that day, on our own but still in the safety of Mum and Dad’s house, I told him of my decision. I was scared. I dreaded his reaction. But I longed, in quiet, secret excitement, for that narrow bed in Paul and Marie’s little spare room. Later they offered to swap it for a double, but I claimed I wanted the floor space for yoga. I was excited too by the distant prospect of returning to my dreams. I was filled once again with blessed, if tentative, optimism. Bit by bit, it strengthened me, lifted my sights, made me resolute. My wrist stopped its nagging pain as if his hold was loosening.

  He had never said he didn’t want me to take my place, only implied that in doing so I would leave him behind. He pretended to understand from this that leaving him behind was the very thing I had wished for all along. And finally, he was right.

  How meagre his view, when all sights must loop back onto him, when all acts have him as their reason. How compromised his understanding when the only sense he could make of anything was in relation to himself. And yet, in insisting on that pattern, he had created truth. Where once I longed to go to university because of what it would give me, now I longed to go, as he had ever thought, as a way of leaving him behind. He had tailor-made his truth. He had been so maliciously set on predicting my departure that he had brought it about. I would have travelled penniless with him. I would perhaps have given up dreams of highways for good. I would have done so much to coddle the love I had felt for him. But now, hurt and confused by the way the story had changed, I wanted to leave him behind.

  I haven’t, even now, left him behind. Comet paths, planetary orbits, the unmeasurable distance between life and death, and I still have not left him behind. When I began to try to gather up my story, to take with me a form that would tell me who I am, I had not wanted to make him a part of me. He is there, bound inside a knot of fury that stretches and screeches, elastic, scorching, through my core. But I will find the glinting, ugly end of that knot too and, like shame, will pull it out, the sickly exit of a parasitic worm. A horror-pull, disgusting and necessary. I do not want him part of me. I have seen him, lost at his own hand; the violence done to me has worked equally hard on him. What waste. What a terrible waste.

  Sometimes movement is a bouncing skim; a flat stone I am, skipping over the black mirror depths of a still lake. Sometimes I drag like a crippled anchor through knotted rope and kelp on a deep-sea bed. The knowledge of what little shifts were needed to save me weighs me down. How close I came to knowing nothing of this dark world.

  If he had been angry when I told him I was going to London, then my story would be of the kind that takes place with new friends, over a drink. I was going out with this guy called Ryan, but it was difficult. He didn’t like the idea of me going to university, so I broke up with him, I would say. Perhaps in the intimacy of a new relationship, I would have eventually been able to put aside such bold insouciance and tell of the disembowelling effect of his violence. But he wasn’t angry. He was pitifully sad, humble even. He blamed himself for his failure and once more cherished me. He turned back the clock to the summer of gold, became gentle, caring and loving over the next weeks. He invested once more in my happi
ness, I see now only for the purpose of impressing me..

  I have seen now, too, that in the middle of his bones, it plagues him, the knowledge that he did wrong. Perhaps not for any nobler reason than knowing he will be tainted with that in the eyes of others. He didn’t mean it, he thinks, pathetically. My fury howls with me as I speed towards him. I lose my thought as the directions and speeds of space make holding on impossible.

  And, inexplicably, here I find myself. Inarticulate, my fury spent in the stomach-turning telescopic rush that brought me to Earth to sit, stagnant, surfaceless, unable to touch, move, react. I sit here as if in a further penance, in the air around him, slowed to a pace when fury acts like a sickening deep bass thud, making me nauseous and static at one and the same time. I can do nothing but feel this ghastly stillness of being around him. I can meditate forever on my rage.

  *

  It becomes harder to tell. The memories are elusive. Perhaps having had less time to be held, they were not as strongly kept. Memories get stronger with use, like muscles. I have to work harder to find the ones that didn’t have time to become strong. When I died, all that had recently happened had not been rightly processed, had not been assigned its place. Like leaving home in a rush with belongings thrown together into a large bag. Though I notice, as I grow used to my new form, sometimes I have made directions out of my wishes. Taken towards what I am thinking of, not by an articulation of desire exactly, but in some way influencing the direction of my own black odyssey.

  I know that I hoped for an easy end. Entropy, not destruction. But at least I made steps. I moved to Paul and Mar’s to begin my studies and to escape my harms. Dad drove me. Oh, how happy I felt as he drove me out of Oxford, away from the flat, to a new start in London. How instantly uplifting safety is. Ryan was so carefully repentant and so embodied the act of loving me that it was easier than I had anticipated. But yes, I strategised a little. I left some things – clothes, some books, belongings I didn’t mind losing – making a show of things being unresolved. Enough of my possessions to seem lightly hostage to the future. Nothing was officially ended, so no fight was needed. He was sad, obsequious, accepting. For weeks this went on, weeks enough in the mayfly life of a teenage girl to seem that all was now certain, the world had changed. I had made it to London, started the course, settled with great, quiet joy into the little spare room at Paul and Mar’s. I began to see those sweeping roads, to think in cambers and spans. I began to think of myself as an originator of new possibilities, not a component of someone else’s dreams.