Asylum Road

by Olivia Sudjic

  ASYLUM ROAD

  ALSO BY OLIVIA SUDJIC

  Fiction

  Sympathy

  Non-fiction

  Exposure

  For Miša and Seja

  CONTENTS

  MOUSEHOLE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  SPLIT

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  ASYLUM ROAD

  10

  11

  12

  13

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn’t, there is much more space than one thinks.

  Ivo Andrić

  A specter is haunting Western culture – the specter of the Balkans.

  Maria Todorova

  MOUSEHOLE

  1

  Sometimes it felt like the murders kept us together.

  I’d suggested taking a break, which turned into the holiday, to remedy our real problems – but I knew we’d need one more for the road. They distracted me from my thoughts, from his silences. Murders and holidays were a quick fix that worked.

  We drove through London as another body disintegrated, reaching the tunnel at dawn.

  Maybe it was ghoulish, my fixation with true crime, but I hate tunnels, and being underground, and the channel one is fifty kilometres.

  He knew that about me almost from the start. On our first proper date I went to meet him at the Olympic Stadium. It was 2012. He had tickets for the opening ceremony. Since moving to London I’d avoided the tube and it was July then so I walked, following my phone north across the river, a route which turned out not to be a bridge. That tunnel was designed to curve so you can’t see light at the end – so horses wouldn’t bolt. As the ceremony began he asked if I wanted his sweater, he could see how badly I was shivering.

  Inside the tunnel, the episode ended. We got out, ignoring signs to remain in our vehicle, into the throat that had swallowed us beneath the waves. There was a loud rumbling, but it didn’t feel as if we were moving in any particular direction.

  Luke hunched over, then pushed his chest out several times. Something cracked. He was stiff already and we hadn’t reached France. The complaint was directed at me because I couldn’t share the task of driving. I said nothing, showing him alleviating stretches, manipulating him with my hands. The people in the car behind seemed to be staring at us. I felt Luke constrict as he became aware. Maybe they were listening to something as well, I reasoned, their intense concentration focused elsewhere. But I felt paranoid, post-homicide, and we shut ourselves back in the car.

  When’re you going to learn again? I mean actually take the test.

  I sighed and shut my eyes.

  I’ll pay for it this time. Start when you’ve got the thesis done.

  It was him behind the wheel and I did not have a licence, true, but it was really me who was actually driving. I remember being set on happy-ever-after. It amuses me now, how I thought about it as a physical place at the end of a long road. A place where I could unpack, lie down and never have to move again, and the future became an ending.

  Eventually everything stopped, quietened, the car rolled forward a little. We drove out into pale sunshine, a sparse landscape, exposed. He grimaced and tapped the visor down but the brightness came from the road. A shining white fence rose on one side of us and, along it, dust from the ground, or mist. A delicate velvet sheen hovered just above the muddy fields as the sun spread out and silhouetted grey factories. It was peaceful after the tunnel, quiet but for the gentle drone of articulated lorries far-off. Little lakes flashing with white birds. Allotments. A few glinting skylights in the attics of strange homes.

  The holiday had begun. I would be on my best behaviour from now on.

  I looked over to see what kind of mood he was in.

  Luke avoided short-haul flights for environmental reasons. He said he preferred scenic drives. So far, the view was emptiness. The occasional wind turbine standing still, little metal boxes moving up and down the belts of asphalt.

  We stopped for coffee at a service station. I waited in the car, staring at a lay-by for HGVs, watching their drivers get out to piss or smoke, remembering the man who’d abandoned a truck crammed with people and left them trapped in there to decompose by the road. A pink rosette of what looked like ham printed on the side, a mysterious beige sauce, a grey lock on the outside of the doors.

  Moving again, I opened the window, let the headwinds pummel my cheek. In front of us a truck swerved across the road. Luke shook his head, then slowly, deliberately, switched lanes.

  Without knowing the rules of the road, his driving always struck me as exemplary. With other drivers I felt nervous as a passenger, a hand on the door keeping me in but also so I could be ready to jump out. With him I did that very rarely, and then only when another car came too close. He was confident but never reckless. Driving, at least, he never gave me any reason to doubt his ability to read the intentions of others or communicate his own.

  Now I concentrated on the gentle incline on one side. When it thinned, or the road rose, I concentrated on the endless brown fields beyond, the outlines of slender trees in rows.

  OK Loris? You’re very quiet.

  I nodded.

  Carsick?

  Loris was one in a series of names. The cute primate, which at one time colonised parts of the internet, clutching a tiny umbrella or stretching their arms into the air. The people who buy these creatures illegally don’t realise the saliva is poisonous. Even with their tiny teeth removed, the venom can be deadly.

  We passed names on the map that made me think back to school exams. The mist disappeared. I could make out steeply pitched roofs – pitched, he said, for snow.

  They’ll get flatter as we go south. South of Lyon the climate changes.

  I admired how he knew these things. These invisible rules of the land, like the road. Or not quite like the road because they were innate.

  My skin felt greasy and I closed the window. The silence between us grew. I resisted the impulse to play another true crime episode and rubbed my hand beneath my chin. We passed memorials and where Charles de Gaulle had lived, my fingernail grazing back and forth along my jaw.

  Luke rarely commented on this now, but initially he’d compared the habit to stereotypic behaviour. I’d thought this meant stereotypical but in fact it’s a kind of death drive:

  The mysterious, repetitive range of actions displayed by captive animals such as pacing, picking without purpose, and even self-harm, indicative of psychological distress in artificial environments since it is not observed in animals in the wild.

  I never said what I was actually doing, which was feeling for the sharp hairs that surfaced there. An insurrectionary beard I was always monitoring. I forced myself to stop now and examined my hands. My knuckles would need shaving.

  I knew other women who’d given up that unwinnable war with their bodies, even the jawline razor wire, but I’d now concealed my natural state so long, why spoil things when I’d succeeded?

  Of the things I cared too much about then, one was appearing civilised. In ethical terms but also in aesthetic ones. I had read the right books, bought thrifted designer clothes, gained several degrees at elite institutions and, in Luke’s flat, arranged an elegant mise-en-scène that in fact held no emotional resonance. They were props, these objects I combed from life, smooth pebbles that had once been cliffs.

  I love that first bit out of a toll station, unmarked, where you can move away on clean road. Those were the times it seemed to me I might like to drive myself.

  *

  We reached our stopover in the aft
ernoon and eventually found the hotel. The small dining room was all couples, none of whom spoke much. Cutlery on china, teeth on glass – I saw Luke going inward to escape it. He said he was too tired for more than one course, leaving before I’d finished.

  When I came back to the room, minutes after, it was pitch-black and I could hear him breathing. I moved toward the bed, tapping the mattress in the dark, and climbed, in facing away. A few minutes passed before he turned, curled round, and, after momentary resistance, I hooked my foot behind his knee.

  I waited for his hands to find me, but gradually his body lost tension until he jerked. I turned over – his dark shape like a hill faraway.

  My phone said it was midnight, which meant it was our anniversary. On the first one I remembered feeling warm, insulated from the outside world. The second, I kept sensing what I thought was a phantom draught. The third I saw a detailed map of hairline cracks spreading out across the table between us. I did not mark our fourth but waited to see if he would. He did not. Today was our fifth. I’d reminded him when we booked the holiday.

  Christopher said it was a natural response to capitalism, these tensions in what he disparagingly called monogamous, cishet relationships – particularly my sense that sex was a job, and not doing it the one way I could hold power.

  He often referred to a friend who lived in a commune. They seemed to have a lot of sex. Feeling square, anxious just thinking about it, I reminded him my parents were communists. But it was true that nostalgia had replaced hope. When we did have sex now it was usually followed by a feeling of dissolution that seemed more intense than normal post-sex loneliness, at least for me. Solving a murder was a better way for us to feel connected.

  I woke up and knew he was gone before I saw it. I listened for sounds in the bathroom and tried to remember whether we’d had an argument at some point in the night.

  Our arguments were mostly silent, or silent on his side. Often in the dark, lying in bed so neither face could see the other. Not an argument then, but a pressure. A malignant quiet that sank into the mattress until I couldn’t bear to lie there. I would get up in a dramatic fashion, go down to the sofa, then crawl back in a few hours later when he was sound asleep. Once he’d left for work in the morning, an email would usually arrive with a link he knew I’d like, and it was as if the night’s events had been the product of my imagination.

  He would have gone running, I told myself as I lay in the hotel bed. There was a path along the perimeter of the hotel grounds that cut through woods. Someone had tied colour-coded ribbons onto branches to mark two routes. Blue led you in a circle round the property, green took you on another path out of the grounds. We’d walked the blue route together soon after arriving the previous evening, ending where we began after half an hour or so. He’d said then he might wake early to do it.

  I told myself I had no reason to feel rejected, dressed, then went back to the same table we’d eaten at.

  I put my book down, split open, and watched as the other guests began to notice me. Last night’s wine had sedimented in my lower lip and without thinking I peeled away a strip. I could taste the sourness of my own blood, pulsing.

  After a while I realised breakfast was self-service. Standing by the buffet table, I held a napkin to my lip and made a show of examining the pastries wrapped in heavy cloth. I cut a slice of breakfast cake with slow precision. The other tables emptied and I became more self-conscious. The blood was still blooming into the napkin. I could not touch my food, except to cut it into smaller and smaller pieces, as if I were the kind of lonely, greedy woman liable to choke while eating. When I couldn’t cut anything in two again, I left the knife at an inconclusive angle, as if to say I was still considering what I might do with it.

  Two maids began clearing. I finished my glass of cold green tea and got up with what I hoped looked like nonchalance, as if Luke was never supposed to join me. I held the book to my chest, feeling my heart begin to thud against it, and went back to our room.

  Not there.

  I opened the shutters, looking around as if I’d lost an inanimate object that could not reveal itself. The sun was high, bars of it crossed the floor. The bedcovers were still thrown back on his side, his boxers and shirt on the floor where he’d shed them.

  It was habit to think of crime scenes. I told myself to concentrate, looking around slowly and noting his phone, dead on the bedside table. The table was actually a bookcase of warped paperbacks and crisp hardbacks never read. My eyes rested on a title about survival. I drew it out. On closer inspection, a survival A–Z. The novelty kind with illustrations. I’d owned something like it as a child, or perhaps even the same one. Dangers were illustrated in a way that felt calming, like the sedate line drawings of airline safety manuals. I’d remembered one instruction, in particular, that if you fell down a waterfall you were supposed to close your legs to prevent internal rupturing.

  I looked at the dust jacket with the uncanny sense it was my own copy transplanted here. The spine cracked as I opened it. Quicksand. The trick with that I knew already. Lie very still and flat.

  On no account struggle or attempt to pull yourself out.

  I plugged his phone in, switched to my canvas shoes, then went to find the pool, hoping I would see him swimming or reading. The sun was hot as I marched along the passage that led away from the main building, shielding my phone to check the time.

  At the pool I swore under my breath and circled the loungers. No sign. I stood over my reflection at the deep end. A dead scorpion swayed on the bottom. I told myself this was not a sign of anything. I was reading into things again. This was simply absence. Absence with an absence of meaning.

  I went back to reception. The same woman who’d cleared the breakfast and observed my solitude. I asked her in French for a bottle of water and she extracted one, unsmiling. I bared my teeth gratefully as she handed it over. She checked my room number, wrote it down, then went back to a game she had been playing on her phone.

  *

  I stood in the shade of the front gates and watched time creep closer to something categorically wrong. He knew how I hated to be left, with or without warning, but would’ve decided to forget how this went. He liked to assert his freedom by doing it I guessed. While he was gone I’d go through all the best-case scenarios, pacing like someone under house arrest. The narrative becoming ever more complicated. By the time he returned I’d be hysterical, then livid, then contrite. I would find myself apologising to him, neck bent, applying pressure to some part of him, begging forgiveness for my offence.

  Our walk the previous evening had taken maximum forty minutes at a slow pace. I hesitated at the other external gate that marked the start of both routes – the simple choice now fraught – before embarking on the blue. I would retrace my steps. I would find him reclining somewhere along the path in the shade. And if not, he would have taken the green route into town and settled somewhere picturesque. I imagined a large white umbrella in a concrete stand and a glass ashtray into which he would have deposited wet olive stones. The same light that had suffused my vision of this trip. He would greet me with a bemused expression, to remind me I did not own him.

  The wood was dense and the way obscured by branches. Alone, I had to focus harder on following the route. The path was sandy and my calves began to burn. I could feel blisters rising behind my heels and sweat prickling beneath the hair against my neck. Occasionally something Luke-sized would appear – the reptilian markings of a shoe – but these would slip away into sandy crests which went off in all directions.

  It seemed safe to assume no other guests would be walking in the heat and that it would be possible now to shout his name. It was an ostentatious thing to do. If he was nearby and could hear me, I would feel humiliated. The silence, on the other hand, felt oppressive. I tried it out but couldn’t raise my voice above a whisper. I stood still, panting, trying to summon something louder. Sweat crept into my eyes. The heavy glass bottle was now empty, sliding in my han
ds. No sound.

  In the distance then, a bell. I strained, trying to decide if it was coming from ahead or behind, moving back and then forward again, then running, steps erratic on the sand. The bell grew louder and at the next turn, the trees thinned. I stopped, my throat thick with dust and saliva I couldn’t swallow. A dozen horses stood in front of me in a clearing, tossing their heads in the shade. The bell hung from the neck of the most magnificent. It rang each time the horse moved its head or passed the heavy air through its nose.

  I sank to my knees, heart at my temples. I knelt in that pose as a child, waiting for absent people.

  From kneeling I soon lay down, thinking not of happy endings to this situation, but what it would be like to hear the worst. The horses snorted and kicked the air, perturbed. My nose stung, as if I was about to start crying, but then, as the minutes passed, the pain faded. It began to seem like another thing I might survive and my breathing slowed again.

  I grew quiet, save the occasional gasp, and eventually very still, feeling the heat of the earth against my back, staring at the branches swaying. From survivable it became tolerable. And from tolerable, gradually, something else. My heart soothed inside my ribs. I felt a kind of unity with my surroundings. The old trees, the rocks that had endured. The horses grew accustomed to my presence, and I with them, until I realised the worst now felt desirable, like release.

  2

  After my brother died, my father said a suicide could be hard to detect because the person, having decided on death, has accepted the worst and may feel more at peace. They might seem happy even, the struggle and indecision lifted, an end to the tunnel near.

  But when Luke returned from his solo excursion he was agitated, packing without meeting my eyes, paying the bill in a hurry, then driving us further south for hours in almost total silence. I decided he was not suicidal, he had simply wanted a morning alone to see the town, but I felt my body brace, like the drawing of the woman before the waterfall, everything sealed to protect against the rupture.