by Jo Baker
Then he says, “Billie.”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“What?”
“How are things? You know, at home?”
She nods without looking at him. “I’m okay. It’s all okay.” Because it doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters now but this.
Then Madeline’s eyelids move. Billie gestures to Terry, urging him to look. Madeline’s eyelids flicker; beneath them her eyeballs slip and shift. They sit, together, watch her dreaming.
Above London
October 6, 2004
BILLIE LOOKS DOWN at the city in the rain. The damp square blocks of offices, houses, trading estates. The plane turns, rising into the grey hard haze.
If she could see it, as the city falls away beneath her, the pattern of her life trailing through the streets like a coloured ribbon—tracing the way alongside Luke’s thread for a while, down the high street and in and out of neighbourhood cafés and the park and cinema, and spinning off from his to dip down into the Underground and back out again at Edgware Road for work, and then the snarled tangle of this last year, the kind of knot you just can’t unpick but have to take a pair of scissors to, and the thread trampled into the oily London mud, and Luke’s peeling off to coil itself round Sophie’s, and Billie’s own now drifting up and off into the air—if she could see that, it would help, because eventually she could trace it back to when the line ran clear and clean and silky, and wind things back to there.
The plane lifts into cloud. The thrum of the engines shifts and changes as they climb. She tucks her earphones into her ears, flips through her iPod, looking for something.
It’s daunting to think of what’s to come. Of what waits for her when she returns. Her things are still in boxes and bags in the spare room at Norah’s new house. She’ll have to talk to Luke. Talk properly. They’ll have to get divorced. She’ll go back to what there was before: Norah’s spare room, shopping for one, finding things to do.
Granddad always used to say, Don’t look beyond the next ten yards.
And the next ten yards are good. They are the best ten yards there’ve been for a long while. The next ten yards are the first bright patch in a dim, grey, unfixable year. The whole residency thing had slipped so far out of sight that she’d almost forgotten that she’d applied for it. The envelope had landed on the mat while she was packing up her books; it had seemed like a letter from another world.
She’d stood there, in the empty hallway, looking at the printed page, the letterhead, the signature, failing to take it in. Then she’d thought: my passport. I’ll have to get my name changed back.
The island is red-gold. It swims up into detail: a cell structure of stony dusty fields. The towns are like patches of lichen growing on the water’s edge.
When she steps off the aeroplane in boots and jeans and shirt and jumper and coat, she feels how much closer to the equator she has come. She’s adrift between seasons: it’s still like summer here, but her body’s in the sleepy drift towards winter. She shrugs out of her jacket, peels off her jumper, slumps them over the top of her case. She will wake up.
She emerges into the arrivals hall blinking in the brightness, and she spots a name, written on a piece of card. W. Hastings. The man scans faces as they pass. For a moment, she thinks, Dad’s here, and then she thinks, Granddad. She catches herself. Winter boots hard on the polished concourse floor, she crosses over to the man. She holds out a hand to be shaken.
“Hi,” she says. “I think that’s me.”
The short sleeves of his shirt flap in the still air as he lifts her hand up and down. He’s John; he runs the Arts Centre.
“Ms. Hastings? Wilhelmina?”
She laughs. “Billie.”
“Billie. Welcome to Malta.” He commandeers her case and wheels it along, ushering her towards the car park.
“If you’re not too tired, I’ll show you round the studio first. While the light’s at its best.”
They enter the building through a tiny sally port. The steps are wide and sweep up in an unbroken flight underneath an arch of golden stone. The steps go on and on and on, straight up into the heart of the building, into the deep weight of golden stone. The place is vast.
A door opens onto a long vaulted room, spare and beautiful. The windows are small but there are many of them, and the openings are flared to make the most of the light. The walls are painted white. Her footsteps chime off the floor. Here and there are echoes of previous tenants: paint-stained rags, jars of brushes, driftwood, worn seashells, fragments of torn masking tape still adhering to the walls. He sets about opening cupboards, heaving drawers out to show her materials, equipment; talking about the rest of the facilities, and who they’ve had there over the years. Names she recognises. Artists she respects. She feels herself expand within this space, as if some kind of pressure is released.
“But of course you’ve brought your own things. And if you need anything else there’s a good little shop on the—”
“Yes,” she says, nodding, not really hearing. “Yes.”
She crosses to a window, touches the chisel marks in the sill. This is hers, all this. For a while it is hers.
“So this is it,” he says.
“Yes.” She looks up at the ceiling, the layers of vaulted stone. The ancient work of it.
“Is it okay?”
From below come voices, faint with distance. She tries to pick out the languages. She catches a few words of Italian, then English, then what she thinks must be Maltese.
He clears his throat. She glances back at him.
“Sorry, sorry.” She shakes her head to clear it, grins. “It’s amazing. Thank you. Thanks.”
He drives her to the accommodation afterwards.
Valletta is a city in miniature. Narrow streets, high baroque buildings, the sky a strip of blue.
“It’s quiet,” she says.
“Out of season.” He shrugs. “And no-one lives here. They come here to shop, to work, but it’s mostly old people live here nowadays.”
“Why’s that? It’s amazing.”
“People want space. They move to Sliema, St. Julian’s. No-one wants these tiny apartments.”
Her place is on the top floor, up four flights of ringing stone steps. John swings her case up like an inflatable toy, telling her about the best bars, the quietest beaches, the buses, the bad parts of town.
He unlocks the door on a high narrow room, tall windows. There are stairs up to a mezzanine floor where the bed and bathroom hang suspended. It’s cool, quiet, calm.
“Thank you.”
When John has gone she showers, and the shower tastes of salt. Afterwards, she feels as though she’s just out of the sea.
That night, window open on the dark space between this building and the golden stone of the one across the street, fly screen like a haze of smoke over the night, she can’t sleep. She feels like she’s adrift on dark waters. It’s strangely comforting. When she finally does slip under, she dreams of the room in Norah’s new house, her boxes stacked in the centre of the carpet, and Ciaran—whose room it had been until he finally bought his own flat a few months back—leaning on the tower of boxes, because in her dream it’s still his room, and it’s still got all his clothes and books and cameras and equipment and he’s shaking his head, and saying, I don’t know where we’re going to fit all your stuff.
She gets up, picks her way downstairs in her nightshirt. She drinks water from the tap, and it leaves her thirsty.
Morning, but it’s still dark out. She thumps down the stone steps in her running gear and pushes out of the door. It clumps shut behind her. The noise echoes up the stairwell. She thinks the other flats are empty, but doesn’t know—hopes she hasn’t disturbed anyone. Six fifteen and it’s mild as a July morning, but October-dark. Votive candles glimmer from the open door of the church.
She tucks her earphones into her ears, puts her iPod on shuffle. It comes up with “Seven Nation Army,” which is perfect, just ma
de for running to.
She tucks the iPod inside her vest-top, stretches out her calves, dips down into lunges, pulls each foot in turn up behind her. She sets off in an easy loping run down the hill. Footfalls drop into the rhythm of the song. Her route, sketched in from the map at the back of the Rough Guide, will take her out to the harbour, then up to the city walls; she’ll follow them as far as that little park—the Barrakka—then cut back through the city streets to the apartment building. A wedge of city.
The great crunchy guitar riff makes her feet hit the pavement to its pace; but she hadn’t reckoned on the flights of stone steps that make her skitter half sideways down, and it’s difficult to find her rhythm on the steep descending streets which stretch out her step unnaturally, but when she’s out on the harbour road she hits her stride, falls into the pattern of breath and footfalls, mindful of the juncture of sole and stone. She’s just passing a messy queue of schoolkids waiting for their bus in the early dark. They bundle together, nudging, laughing, and one of them shouts something at her but she doesn’t catch it; she tugs out an earphone, but then another kid lurches into her path, pushed by his mates.
“Sorry,” he says.
She grins, dodges him, not yet breathless.
He was beautiful. Sharp contrasts of clear skin, dark eyes, in the early morning dusk. Bone structure. Something familiar.
What’d he be like to draw?
She slows, turns. The music motors on. She steps backward, along the empty street, looking at the jostling crowd of youngsters. They’re handsome kids, the lot of them, but he stands out. He’s laughing and jostling with the other boys, an easy physicality. Not too beautiful to be interesting. He’s young; he looks like Matty, she realises, though his colouring is utterly different. Like a negative of Matty: dark against his fair.
Then the bus pulls up, and the kids surge towards it, and heave themselves on, and she stumbles, and catches her step, and runs on.
The light is growing, the sky brightening. The road is lined with trees, the leaves dull and dusty. Her trainers crunch over fallen olives. Climbing back up the steep streets and flights of steps here stretches at her hamstrings, makes her chest tight and her breath raw. Her body’s not used to this; it’s used to the gentler slopes of the streets and park back near the flat. She’ll find a new circuit, round Norah’s area. There’s a park, Norah said. A lido.
She pushes through the ache, the burn, and climbs up towards the Barrakka, the public garden built right onto the city wall, that marks the point to turn for home. Up ahead, not far off now, there are trees, and she catches the honey scent of jasmine. Billie slows to a lope, hand to the stitch in her side. Beyond the fence a fountain flings itself up into the air, trees haze the morning. The place looks empty, cool with shadows. She takes her earphones out, pushes in through the gate. Beyond the trees is a wide blue distance. She heads along the gravel paths, past the pattering fountain and between the borders and under the olive trees and right up to the wall. She leans out, her breath still heaving.
The Grand Harbour opens out below her like a miracle. The water is a perfectly calm deep blue. Fishing boats lie still at their moorings, their painted eyes dark against white-painted keels. They paint them there for good luck, she knows; to ward off the evil eye: she read it in the Rough Guide.
Beyond the harbour lies the open sea, the sky meeting the water.
Matty is not too far away from here, out there in the desert. With his straight back and his cropped hair and his sweet sudden smile. When he gets back, he’ll marry Gemma, she reckons. Far too young, but not actually too young because it’ll be right and good, and they’ll have married quarters, and before you know it they’ll start having babies and she can be an auntie. And that will be good too.
She looks down at her hand on the golden stone. The two wedding rings. The sleek wedding band that Luke bought for her, still new; the thin, battered ring around the base of her thumb that her granddad bought for her grandma nearly seventy years before. Both glint in the sun. At first she’d thought they’d formed a set; one’s battered fragile permanence somehow substantiated the new one. She glances back out again to sea. She twists the newer, fatter ring off her finger. Weighs it for a moment in her palm. Then she skims it out into the blue.
A gift to the deeps and distances. An offering to the Fates. For Matty’s safe return.
It is still very early—the street is quiet. She has bought bread and ground coffee and bottled water from a corner shop. She makes coffee with bottled water, the drip and hiss of its percolation familiar and soothing. Sunlight shreds through the blinds. She tears off fragments of bread. The bread tastes of salt.
The first channel is Maltese, and is showing a news feature on a yacht race. She flicks over, and picks up an Italian channel.
Her Italian is basic, but she doesn’t really need to understand the words. The pictures are enough because she knows what’s been happening, just like everybody else already knows. An establishing shot: the desert, and the twisted carcass of a car, blood in the dust. Then there’s an interior caught on a grainy digital camera. Each time it is slightly, horribly worse. The shot is framed so that the captors themselves seem headless—you can only see their torsos, the longbladed knives, like machetes, held diagonally across their chests. The man sits, hands tied behind his back. He speaks. They’ve overdubbed him into Italian. His lips move but she can’t understand the words.
She fumbles for the remote. Her hand shakes. She switches the television off.
The sun has not yet penetrated the depths of the street. She climbs the cobbles in sandals, her arms bristling in the chill. It’s still early. She’s not sure when the Arts Centre opens. She turns a corner and she’s facing the cathedral; a wide sweep of golden stone. The Caravaggios are housed here.
She presses up against the door, listens: silence. She pushes cautiously in.
The interior is dark and quiet. Candles flicker in raked banks. Death’s heads grin from the arches. She follows the signs for the side chapel.
She is alone at first, and just stands dead centre of the dark floor, and looks up at the painting. As the room fills, she moves into the empty spaces, finds new lines of sight. Her toes grow numb. The small of her back aches. Her neck is stiff. It doesn’t matter. From the left side of the room, she can study the expression of the handmaid, the glint of gold off the platter that she carries, the deep shadow of the folds in her skirt. From the right, Billie can better see the prisoners peering out through their cell window, straining to get a view of the drama in the inner courtyard. From right up close against the security barrier, she can see the victim’s pallid face, the wound, the blood.
She has been playing, she realises. Like a child she has been playing with her inks and her paint and her pencils and her paper and her pens. With her skulls and her bones and her shells and her scrap of human leather. You do learn through play. You try things out.
It is time to stop playing.
The picture is The Beheading of St. John the Baptist. The beheading is performed in the Arabic fashion: a long-bladed knife is sliced back through the throat, severing artery and vein, trachea and oesophagus, splitting the links of the spine. The handmaid waits, platter ready, to carry the severed head away to Salome and Herod. We don’t see them. We don’t need to see them, with their veils and cushions and dishes of figs. The powerful are not what matters here. What matters is the blood and flesh and bone.
The victim is already dead. His wound gapes like a second mouth. The blood pools scarlet on the floor, and then trickles out to scrawl, as if by its own volition, F. Michel. Michelangelo da Caravaggio. It’s the only piece he signed.
The gallery fills with Americans and English and Scots and Irish and Australians, becomes dense with noise and trainers and bodies and rucksacks. She’s kept here, kept looking by the sense of something connective, expansive about this picture. She can see it in every figure, in all the absences, in the way that primary focus is given to neither the e
xecutioner nor the victim, so that the gaze shifts uneasily between the other prisoners, the guards, the handmaid with the platter who only stands and waits. That’s what matters here: everybody shares the searching light; they share the act, the state of being. Everyone’s complicit in this death.
You can’t switch off. You can’t walk away. You have to look.
Polstead Road, Oxford
November 6, 2004
IT HAS RAINED ALL DAY. It has rained for weeks. There are pools of water between the gravel. The lawn looks like a swamp. The lights are on upstairs, which means the Canadian couple are in. Will rattles his key into the door. He has a bottle of wine tucked under his arm. His mouth tastes of old sherry.
He dodges through the front door, then through the hall and into his flat. It is cold. He takes off his wet overcoat and hangs it up. He goes into the kitchen and opens his wine. He will drink half the bottle. Half a bottle is a reasonable amount. Up fresh tomorrow morning, because he’s promised Billie he’ll pick her up from the airport.
God knows she needed the break, as in time off, as in bit of luck. After the year that it was. Mads. That utter shit Luke. All surface gloss, no substance. Leaving her when he did, at the very worst time; but at least they didn’t have kids. He shrugs the thought off. Doesn’t do to pursue it.
In fact, he goes on to drink the whole bottle, finishing it off over News at Ten, stumbling through to his bedroom and climbing into bed in his pants and shirt. He wakes, stark awake, at three. He doesn’t know what wakes him, but he gets up and limps to the toilet for a piss.
His right hip is hurting him now, which seems like a final bloody betrayal. But then with all the years of favouring the bad leg it’s done far more than its fair share. He can tell it’s not far off complete breakdown: the loose grind, the sudden shocks of pain. He’ll go private this time. But what will he do about the convalescence? Could Billie be persuaded to camp out with him for a few weeks? They could go through those boxes properly then.