by Lulu Allison
She fills the coffee pot to the top with strong coffee. She forces herself to eat toast and boiled eggs. There is a grim determination in her actions; she has decided that action is required. The reasoning escapes her, but she knows she must see Ryan. Not to speak, but she must lay eyes on him. See what he is. She cannot bear to have him constantly in her mind, so perhaps if she sees him, places him, she can expel him too. Find him, that dandy ogre, that slender streak of monstrous trouble. She needs to look at him.
Upstairs, she dresses and dries her hair roughly with a towel. Taking her iPad to the dressing table, she tries to remember where they live, hoping for once that it is still the same house, in the same neat street, the same small town that she avoids on her route into Oxford. She hopes for the first time that they haven’t moved away; she hopes that her prickly, uncomfortable sense of them all being too close, so rigorously ignored all these years, is a trustworthy sign. She knows the approximate location, near the bypass. There is a block of streets that looks right, a deliberate pattern of streets in the right area. She searches her memory from over ten years ago, remembers a quiet street with a town-planner’s curve, a front lawn leading straight onto the pavement, a hedge between the grass and paved driveway. Which road it was she can’t remember straight off, but she feels certain of finding it. She will find it.
The drive does not take long. But the whole of it is taken up with argument. Interrogation overridden by barked command. I am just doing it. That is all. No, I don’t really know why, but I don’t care either. She is alert, tense with negative excitement. There is no relish in her conviction, just grim purpose.
She turns left, following what she can of a ten-year-old memory. The same process takes her left again and finally into a cul-de-sac. All of the houses are similar, if not identical. She remembers the hedge between the lawn and the driveway, a flower border beneath it. Many of the houses could be the right one. The roads are quiet, children at school, people at work. She idles by at slow speed, eyes scanning the house fronts. She stops outside one that pricks at her memory in some way. It looks empty. She pulls up, sits watching the house. She fidgets; now and then her head wheels round to investigate any movement caught in the mirror. Nothing happens but her ticks and jerks of anxiety. She still feels ill with hangover. There is a man walking along the pavement towards her. She wonders about asking him if he knows the Edwards family. Audrey and Charles and Ryan. She hangs them before her mind’s eye, paper targets. But she feels in the wrong for being here, so she does not become further implicated by asking. After all, what is she doing? What is she going to do?
The quiet harmony of the residential street lulls her. She waits but stops looking. She tries to remember what she can about them, Audrey and Charles. They can only have spent a few hours in each other’s company. Charles was boring. Nice but boring. Audrey was self-effacing, small, soft, she thought. Anna had not been that interested in either of them, when they met socially. After that, she could not exclude them from some responsibility for their son, and thus she felt repulsion. The car heater warms the air, and the fug of headache drags her eventually into a sleep, her head balanced back on the headrest. She is woken later when a subtle movement nudges her head forwards and it falls towards her chest, pulling her back to confused wakefulness. Nothing has changed but the time. She has been there for a couple of hours. It could be many more before she finds whether this is the house or not. And if it is not, many hours again to watch the next. She knows she did not keep their address, but suddenly thinks that perhaps Caitlin might have done. She remembers an address book amongst the books and papers. Starting up the car, she heads hurriedly back for home, suddenly hungry again as the hangover begins to recede.
She shuts the door behind her; a haven, but a strange one, with its dangerous, uncharted territory, the open door upstairs. Both refuge and peril. Her eyes and head ache with the fat throb of residual booze. She goes to the kitchen for painkillers and turns on the kettle for more coffee.
Back in Caitlin’s old room, she surveys it with something like revulsion, intent on making the search as clean as possible. She looks in the boxes that contain books and folders, the slim harvest of Caitlin’s four months at university. Cautiously, she leafs through the notebooks and papers.
In the second box, she finds the address book. It is small and black, still freshly new. Newly copied-over addresses for student life, the promise of efficiency in the slim dark book with the word ‘Addresses’ in gold on the cover. On the inside cover is Paul and Marie’s address and the nearest tube and bus numbers. The thought of her editing her important information, enjoying the fresh start of new stationery is painful to an almost unbearable degree.
The address she seeks is the second entry under ‘R’, after Ryan. She feels agitated, daring, uncertain. She asks herself again. What does she intend? Just to see him. To look at him. To know her enemy. She hesitates, looks at the number written beneath the address. Could she find out so easily that they are still there? Her heart beats; she takes the address book to the kitchen. Her arm rests at the midpoint of taking the receiver of the phone out from its place on the kitchen wall. Hurriedly, she taps in the number, knowing she won’t speak, dreading what she might hear. There is no answer but a standard phone-company recorded message. She puts the receiver down hurriedly, horrified suddenly by the possibility of connection. Does she want connection? No no no. Keep me distant from those people. But let me see them. Let me master something. Let me understand my need.
Or just follow that need. Let it uncover itself, let it make its own sense. Weariness intervenes, and Anna lies on the sofa. She sleeps again, fretfully, shallow dreams in which images float like weeds below the surface of a moving river. Threads anchored somewhere, deep and secure, seen in murk as they ripple under the surface. A thread of pictures, a stream of images too partially seen to elicit understanding. Held fast in the ancient riverbed, the downward reach of the centuries-long water’s journey. She is the walker on the grassy bank, not reading the subtle play on the moving surface. She is the dark and dredgy deep, the binding riverbed where disquieting weeds take hold.
Chapter 23
The next day she delays, fidgets, wheedles her way to and from the car. Now that she may have the address, she is not sure she has the courage. With the excuse that she must go out to buy food, she gets into the car and drives. Into the supermarket, then, as she knew she would, out heading north. She makes a couple of false turns, but soon she is in the road, three or four houses down. It is about three streets away from where she stopped yesterday. The house is very similar to her memory. The grass grows uninterrupted to the start of the pavement. There is the neat hedge, as she remembers, between the drive and the lawn, immaculately kept, with flowers planted at the base. Though it is the middle of winter, there are a few pansies and cyclamen with carefully weeded soil between them, a show of year-round care and effort. She wonders if it is from Charles or Audrey. Does Ryan help? He has that choice, to help maintain this prissy neatness, this immaculate façade.
Words from Ryan’s letters rotate in her mind. I’d do anything for you I love you why don’t you listen to me? She wonders what ten years in prison have done to him. What have these years done to him that has not been done to her a thousandfold? Can you beat me for the fucked-up way life has gone, Ryan? Can you match me for a shitty life? Can you tell me one single thing, one little story, one horror, that has made your ten years more of a prison than my own? Can you account for the absurdity of counting us equal now? The gasoline begins to roar inside her again. The crash and screech of it is a huge cost. She sees suddenly that repression was the only option, for to feel so much simply could not be tolerated. Perhaps she would not have minded wearing herself to death, but bodies have their own agenda. Feelings mean nothing to them, in the end. Her body would betray her soul, if threatened by it.
Sometimes she wished for death, but her body, through the passive, dead weight of its own life, fought her.
She is glad now that she has what feels like strength both to bear her anger and to augment it. She feels the power of it. But there is, after all, just a quiet street and a mid-range car, its engine running idly. There is no arena and no reckoning. No Ryan. She sits longer; she waits. After some time, the need to use a bathroom intervenes, and she heads home. She ignores two calls, paces the rooms of her house. She eats, she drinks some wine. The day passes. She sleeps.
She wakes, her anger idling like the car engine. Ready to spring back to life, waking her to a quick start. Mercifully free of her recent hangovers, she showers and puts on warm clothes. She makes, though she feels somewhat absurd, a thermos of coffee. She goes to the loo and gets into the car, noting on the drive the nearest shop that probably has toilets as she is intent on a long wait. This time she stops opposite the house, with a view into the large front room window. Nothing appears to move inside. She waits. She drinks the coffee. She waits.
After a long and patient stretch, she sees, in silhouette behind the glass, that there is someone moving, someone inside the house. She can’t make them out – the soft light and shadow works with the reflection on the glass to smudge the interior with indistinct purple-greys. There is a shape, noticeable primarily because it moves. Anna sits up straight, trying to see as much as she can. But the movement stops. Shortly after that the door opens and a woman walks to the car on the driveway, unlocking it remotely on the way. She looks older than Anna; she looks like a soft, slightly plump grandmother. Anna strains to see but can’t recognise her definitively. Audrey must be around ten years older than Anna, so it could be her. Before she can work it out, the woman has taken something from the passenger seat, a jacket perhaps, and gone back inside, shutting the door. Anna peers curiously around the whole scene, agitated, expectant. She watches the window for further movement, stares at the door, willing it to open and let her see whether she is in the right place. If she were to trust her chest and the beat of her heart she would say it could only be the right place. Time passes, and she returns to calm. She pours another little cup of coffee and settles down to wait. It is not a long wait. After some fifteen minutes, Anna turns from looking down the street behind her and there, standing in the open doorway as though framed, is Ryan. He holds his phone up to his ear, smiles as he talks, car keys in his other hand. Anna’s mass is suddenly fluid. She feels giddy, nauseous.
She finds herself again in the clench of her fists; her weight forms behind those two points of condensed fury. There he stands, laughing now, relaxed, talking on his phone. Anna spills the last dregs of the thermos coffee on her lap as she casts it to the side and gets out of the car. Her strides across the street and lawn are long and rapid. Her whole body is straining now, like her clenched hands and the tight passage of her throat. Ryan notices her immediately. He turns back to the door but Anna halts him with a ferocious command that he wait. He is cowed, as he always has been, since the first day they met, by Anna, by her certainty – then by her indifference to him, now by the force of her will.
‘You… you shouldn’t be here,’ he tries tentatively.
‘Me? It’s you that shouldn’t be here! You think for a minute you’ve paid for what you did?’
‘I have.’ He tries to pull himself up, tries to look resolute and injured. ‘I have paid, for a terrible accident, because that’s what it was, and if you don’t leave I’m going to call the police.’
‘You pathetic little shit. You bullying, feeble little shit. You killed her, my beautiful girl. God knows how many times you hit her, frightened her. God knows how many times she should have called the police to stop you. You disgusting, pathetic man. I could do the same to you now and not give a damn. You haven’t paid. We are the ones who’ve paid – my whole family has paid for you. Have you any idea how much you destroyed?’
Ryan looks at his phone and starts to dial. Anna knocks his hand and the phone flies out of it and into the bushes. ‘I said, have you any idea how much you destroyed? You tricked her. You tricked her and then you killed her. And there you are, standing in front of me, wondering how you can get some protection?’
‘Look, I’m really sorry that you—’
‘That I what? What is it that you think you know about me? You’re too stupid to know anything about me or anyone else. I saw you in that court room, you fucking pathetic man, with your simpering scared looks. The best thing that ever happened to you, the biggest gift any man could have dreamed of, was my beautiful, wonderful daughter loving you’ – Anna’s voice cracked with tears, but the hefty mortar of anger repaired the break – ‘and you destroyed her life. And now you think you’ve paid? You have not. I hope you’ll be cursed forever with knowing the terrible wrong you have done.’
Anna breaks the torrent of words; she notices that Audrey has come to the door, her face showing anxious distress. Anna turns on her. ‘What, you don’t like it? You don’t want me to curse your son? Do you think he’s paid his dues too? What a family. Did you forget to teach him that bullying is wrong? Did you forget to tell him he has no rights over the lives of others?’
Audrey reaches out towards Anna beseechingly, with a small raise of her left hand. Her face implores Anna to stop. Ryan is frozen between the car and the front door.
‘Look at it, your nice little house with your nicely trimmed hedge, all those pretty flowers and the little fucking vases on the windowsill, as though everything is good, as though you belong with everyone else. But you don’t.’ Anna turns back to Ryan. ‘You think nine paltry years and then a return to this lovely, safe little world, this respectable world, perhaps your own family, grandchildren for you’ – she points at Audrey savagely – ‘and nothing more said about it. You think that will work for you? I will keep reminding you, forever, of the harm you have done.’
Anna turns abruptly, deranged with fury. Her movement is spiky, verging on incoherent. She walks back to the car, drives away with her foot too heavy on the gas, swings the car round and, in a kind of holy blindness, revs hard and points it across the lawn where briefly it hurtles towards Ryan and Audrey. At the last minute, she turns the wheel and drives through the hedge, backing up on the front lawn and slamming the car a second time into another section of the hedge. As she negotiates the reverse, with the broken shrubbery caught on the underside of the car, she sees a look of frozen shock on Ryan’s face as he watches her powerlessly, and behind him a kind of flickering sinking as Audrey falls downwards.
She gets the car half onto the pavement and half on the road, wrestles with the gears to find forwards and leave. As she tries to move in too high a gear, she turns and sees Ryan rush over to his mother, hears him call for help. She waits a second, desperate to leave, certain that a neighbour will respond, but no one does. She looks over and sees Audrey lying awkwardly across the steps, a trickle of blood on her forehead, Ryan bent over her and in a panic.
She breathes deeply, calms herself. Ryan is still calling for help She sees that he is torn between staying with Audrey and standing up to find his phone; he cranes his neck trying to see where it may have landed. For all the fury that Anna spat only moments earlier, for all the harm that she wished, she can’t leave that horribly pale woman lying in that awkward way. She thinks suddenly of the two hunched figures, pulled like magnets into each other during the trial, the pity she recently felt for them. She gets her phone out of her bag and makes her way over, stepping over broken foliage and muddy tyre tracks on the once immaculate square of green.
She calls an ambulance. She sees that Ryan is too upset to be wary of her; he is anxious and frantic, concerned only with helping his mother. She looks at Audrey, quieted and confused by the sudden shift of mood. Audrey is breathing a little noisily and she seems to have a cut on her temple. Anna indicates the door and says, ‘Shall I find something for the cut?’ Ryan nods. He is trying to lift and hold Audrey in a more comfortable position so she is not angled down the steps. Anna goes to the kitchen, certain of finding a clean tea towel. There is a neat s
tack of them in the second drawer she tries. She gets a glass of water too. When she comes back out, Audrey’s eyes are flickering open. Ryan is awkwardly cradling her head and shoulders, keeping her off the cement step. Audrey puts a tentative hand to the cut on her head, then gestures with a pointing finger and says, ‘Up… up’ in a quiet voice.
‘Don’t worry, Mum. Just lie still. The ambulance will be here soon.’
‘No… up.’ She starts to move, awkwardly at first, but her strength seems to gather. Anna notices with a feeling of shame that Audrey has a graze on her forearm, tiny spots of blood, where she must have caught it on the step when she fell.
‘Sit me up, Ryan,’ she says. He is uncertain. Anna presumes he is afraid of doing the wrong thing, but Audrey is trying to lift herself up to the level of the hall floor instead of being spilled down the cement steps. Anna puts down the water and goes to Audrey’s side to help. Audrey sits awkwardly, her legs and feet splayed out, her back rounded as her head hangs down.
‘Take me to the kitchen, please. I want to sit down,’ Audrey says. Ryan wants to refuse – Anna can read the uncertainty in him – but he has little choice but to comply as Audrey seems set on getting there herself if he won’t help. Anna feels a stab of shame that she has caused this harm. Perhaps she could have embraced the sight of a bloodied Ryan, or perhaps not; she is suddenly unclear. She goes once more to Audrey’s side, helps Ryan to lift her up and supports her as she walks slowly along the hall to the kitchen. Holding Audrey under the armpit, feeling the heat of her soft body through the cowl-neck jumper she wears, looking at the spots of blood where the step pulled the skin off part of her delicate-looking forearm, Anna feels horrified.