‘This is the place,’ she said, half turning. They entered into a living thing, a thing that pulsed like the inside of a vital organ. It was dark, moist, sticky. He couldn’t keep up with her, that was the problem. He tried, but, unlike her, he didn't have inside him a great heaving beast that snorted and charged. Ben found a wall to stand against. She was with him. No. She had gone. He waited. He watched the sweating stinking mass bounce in front of him. The strobe lighting froze them in a series of twisted poses, like characters in a film that kept jumping on the reel; this one with an arm up and hand limp like a wilted flower, this one with head thrown back and arms wide – he thought of Gallipoli – this one leaning right forward, straining, staring at him. Ben tried to affect boredom, as he had done as a schoolboy when he couldn’t fit in. He was too young to be here. Or too old. Could you be both at the same time? Madeline was there.
‘No one is looking at you,’ she said.
He felt they were, was sure his awkwardness must show through. She put her tongue in his ear and he recoiled in embarrassment, saw her hurt expression, grasped for her hand as she pulled it away and allowed herself to be sucked back into the throng. The wall was moist. He felt it wet on his back. Or maybe it was his back that was wet. This music… But they must like it. He tapped a foot and nodded his head, felt foolish and stopped again.
‘I'm going to make it so easy for you tonight. You’ll thank me one day.’ She was shouting at him to make herself heard, almost laughing. She grabbed his face, spat, ‘See? Who wants this mess?’
A man appeared behind her, reached round and grabbed her. Her small body fell back into his. She stuck her tongue out again and let him press something onto it. Ben was frozen. It was disgust and awe. She twisted loose and spun away across the floor in a blind, directionless daze. He wanted to leave, to get out of there. He didn't belong in this place. He pictured her life, and his with it, glimpsed the chaos of it. It made him shiver. Suddenly he longed for the solitude and silence of the track. Of his own footsteps.
‘You need this,’ she was saying. She was in front of him again. Her top was open and a bare breast was hanging out. She reached down the front of his trousers. Her eyes. What was wrong with her eyes? Giant glassy moons bounced about in their sockets. Save me. Save me. Who said that? Had he heard it or only thought it. He reached to hold her but she ducked away and vanished again. This is fun. This is so much fucking fun I can’t stand it. He pressed his face into the wall. His cheek stuck to whatever grime had accumulated on its surface over the course of months, years. Where even was this? That grim, barren hallway with its bulb leaking desolate light. The music still screamed at him. He thought for a dreadful moment he might cry. A big hand on his shoulder, a man’s hand. It spun him around off the wall.
‘Your girl.’ It was the man who had grabbed Madeline. ‘She looks different not bent over a sink,’ he said. He opened his mouth in a leer. He had no teeth, not a single one. His thick tongue flapped about in an empty cavern. Bent over a sink? What did that mean? Was she ill? There she was. She was dancing. No, she wasn't dancing. She was shaking. Or being shaken. That beast inside her, it had come thrashing to the surface. Someone touched her arm and she lashed out, lashed at everything, clawing and scratching the air in wide erratic swipes. People drew back, some were shocked. The toothless man grabbed her again, restrained her in his huge arms. He looked at Ben. She was screaming into his shoulder, but the music drowned her out. No. This can’t be right. This isn’t me. This will never be me.
Ben was running. The creatures in the corridor whirled around him again. Something clutched his ankle and he fell. His face flat on the floor. He saw the scum and filth that had attached itself to loose threads of a carpet wasting away beneath him, colouring it the brown of cloudy water in sunlight. He scurried on his hands and knees like a rat made mad by experiments. The thumping beat stamped behind him, a large suit draped in the doorway. He pushed past it and turned left, towards the light and the empty street and the cold night air and the silence. His ears were ringing. He was sweating. It was behind him. She was still there. He tried not to think about that. He began to walk, he knew not where. Away. Away and away.
‘Ben?’ That voice. It was her voice, but it was a little girl’s voice. It was trailing him. ‘Ben?’ it said again. He slowed down. He could outrun her if he wanted. He could run and she would never catch him. ‘Don't leave me behind,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He put his hand against a lamppost. Who was that man? I’m going to make it so easy for you tonight. That’s what she’d said. She was behind him now. He stared in the opposite direction, at the black glass fronts of closed shops. He waited for her to do something. Finally, his pride gave way and he looked back. She was sitting cross-legged a few paces away. Between them on the ground had been placed a tiny plastic trainer, pale blue apart from white toecaps and laces.
‘It’s nothing really,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like it. For your new car.’
‘Jesus, I don’t think I can handle all this.’ He leant against the lamppost and slowly slid down onto his haunches. The trainer was on the ground at her feet. He pictured the moment she had seen it on the shelf, saw her slender fingers wrap around it. For the second time that night he felt he might cry. ‘Who was that man?’
‘No one.’
She allowed herself to fall backwards. Her skull hit the ground with a thud that made him wince. She stared up at the sky showing in the gaps between the silent buildings. ‘I hate him,’ she said. ‘I hate all of them.’
‘Please don’t take me home yet,’ she said.
The pale-blue trainer swung happily from the rear-view mirror as they drove. Eventually they pulled into a lay-by beside the motorway and climbed up and over the verge. Fields of rapeseed unrolled black and still in front of them. They found a narrow path and followed it away from the road. The ground was uneven and he put his feet down carefully. Very quickly the sounds of the cars disappeared. They stopped and listened to how quiet it was. After a while she sat down on the hard sand. He sat opposite her. A million stalks rose above their heads, enclosing them in an impenetrable thickness. Nothing moved. The longer they sat there the more the stillness pressed down on them. From two feet apart they couldn’t see each other’s faces.
‘You don’t know me,’ she said. ‘Do you want to know me?’
She flicked the lighter beneath her chin and her face was suddenly illuminated in an orange light. She was staring straight ahead. She was concentrating. He got the odd sensation she was watching something. She looked so young. As he watched, her expression changed. Her face hardly moved, but the youthfulness faded and something else appeared that frightened him. He was about to reach out for her when the flame died and she vanished. The switch flicked again and he saw unmistakable terror. He thought of the bulging eyes of a wounded deer on its side on the road. Then she was gone again. The darkness lingered longer this time. When the flame burst into life a second time she was someone else. She was making a face, cross-eyed, puffed cheeks, head skew, but there was nothing comic about it. It was out of sync. It didn’t look like her. The flame died and the stillness returned.
‘No one is ever just one person,’ she said in a voice flat with weariness. ‘I know you’ve heard from them. You must have. By now.’ She lit the flame again and her face glowed. ‘So, when will you leave me?’
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I got the letter. And I’ve been accepted.’ The flame burned her finger. She swore and dropped the lighter. In the dark he added, ‘But I’m not going. I’m staying with you.’
How big and bright the moon shone; it made the skin on her arm whiter than it was. She didn’t go inside immediately. She pretended to, she walked to the door and then hid in the dark of the porch until he’d driven away. Once she was sure he’d gone she walked back down the path and stood on the side of the road wondering what to do next. It was cold, but she was too excited to sleep, and too hopeful to enter that house again. She turned to look at it. All the things that had been done to her were inside. Not all the rooms, but many of them bore ghosts, holes in the air where their two figures had once been. Imprints of those people would always be there now, trapped in the act, repeating and repeating and repeating. She would look at a chair, and in front of the chair, on the carpet or against the table, the scene, faint yet ghastly, would be always playing out. Even her room, with its latch and its view into the gardens, wasn’t completely exorcised. No, she wouldn’t go back into the house right now, not while she still believed that he meant what he said.
‘I’m not going.’
‘You’re just trying to convince yourself,’ she’d said, but only to hear him deny it.
‘Just believe that good things can sometimes happen,’ he’d replied, smiling.
She began to walk. What would they do instead? They had a car. They had driven to many places already and the next time they did they could simply not drive back. She liked how she said ‘they’ instead of ‘he’. She sat down. She was still in the road but didn’t mind that. She stretched out on her back. There was a drawer in a room that she had been in many times. She hadn’t been back there for months, but she was sure she’d be let in again. Inside that drawer were rolls of £20 notes. She’d asked him once how much was in there and he’d slammed the drawer on her and pushed her back until her heels hit the mattress and she fell.
‘Watch your mouth,’ he’d warned, but later, when he was more relaxed, he’d said there was more than £2,000. He’d shrugged. ‘That’s nothing. More most of the time.’
She began to calculate how long £2,000 would last. They could rent a room, get jobs. Or she could get a job while he learned a trade. How long did that take? She began to laugh, imagining him as a plumber, bent under a sink or with his hand down someone’s toilet. Maybe not. He could become a gym instructor instead, or a PE teacher. And once they’d saved more money she would quit her job and get a degree. Or she could study in the evenings. The question of what to study hadn’t even finished forming in her mind before she had her answer, although she’d never once considered it before. History. She was surprised to discover that she loved history. She examined this thought a little deeper and realised she particularly liked finding out about subjugation and war. She wasn’t interested in the politics behind it, the reasons and ramifications, but it was fascinating how cruel people had been to each other. It had nothing to do with the age, the nation, the notion of being civilised or not – all people, at all times, were cruel. It comforted her, that knowledge.
A huge roaring wind blew up from nowhere. A great blast of it rushed past her and then receded. She rolled onto her side to see the red tail-lights of a car disappearing down the road.
She guessed that it would take five to seven years before they would be ready to start their real lives. By then, all this would have been forgotten – not forgotten, maybe, but irrelevant; she would never have to think of it again, but if she did she would think of it as someone else’s history. She would be Madeline the graduate, Madeline the taxpayer, Madeline the functioning part of society. She would wear long-sleeved blouses with the top button done up. She would have debates about feminism and foreign policy and cook Sunday lunches while listening to the radio.
Another blast of hot wind. She didn’t bother to look after it this time. She stared up at the moon. It must be a supermoon, to be this big and this bright. Why had they not seen it earlier, in the field? Maybe there was cloud-cover then and now it was clearing. She smiled at the obvious symbolism. She closed her eyes. Inside her eyelids were the walls of her room. She gasped and opened them quickly. No. Stop that. Focus. The graduate, the taxpayer, the debates – she closed her eyes again. The walls were still there. She let out a short yelp. Above her the sky seemed very high and far away. Apart from the moon, there was a band of stars in the middle of it, twinkling in the dark space between the two rows of streetlights. She took a deep breath and then closed her eyes a third time. The walls were right in front of her now. ‘Remember who you are, Madeline,’ they mocked, ‘you’ll always be her.’ She stared straight up for as long as she could. She began to see the walls even with her eyes open. Eventually she accepted what she’d always known and had only briefly forgotten, that she was the house, that the house was her.
She felt a tear forming and blinked, sending it rolling down the side of her face. She wiped it away roughly. Of course he will go. Who are you kidding? But despite that, or because of it, she realised she need never return to that house. She could just pick a star and stare at it, she could just stare at it and think how wonderful it was to dream of this wonderful life with this wonderful man, looking up, waiting, waiting and wishing for the wind to return and carry her away.
CHAPTER NINE
For Tim and Beth, a day was coming. It would start with them kissing impatiently at the door and then walking out of it and moving inescapably to the hour, the minute. Behind them, in an empty house that would be emptier still by nightfall, a cup of coffee would go cold on the windowsill, a sock thick with dust would remain undiscovered beneath the couch, blinds would tangle and untangle against an open window. After this day they would scavenge among these things for clues that weren’t there, had never been there. It would be the randomness of it that would make it so impossible to accept, that would leave them, in the half-gloom of a room that had darkened around them, staring at each other over the table in disgust.
Tim was at the nursing home. He’d not planned to stop there on his way back but his grandmother’s phone call earlier had nagged at him.
‘Oh, Tim,’ she’d said, ‘I think I’m on my last legs, and I’m so happy.’
She was ninety-nine and for nearly a year each time he’d visited her he’d wondered if it would be the last. On recent occasions he’d even found himself pausing in the doorway on the way out, looking back into the tiny flat to see her one final time. She was by now too breathless to walk them out. She would say her goodbyes from the chair that had been oddly placed in the centre of the room, and before they’d even crossed the carpet and heaved open the heavy door she’d be alone again, sitting fretfully on the shore of that black, black sea, listening to the waves licking higher and higher up the sand. Any moment now she was going to stand up and wade out into the dark waters where who knew what waited beneath the waves.
He wondered what it must be like, being on the edge of this vast, unknowable thing that occupied her thoughts so completely now. He’d felt it even while they’d been there. Large parts of her mind possessed by this thing that was so mighty it couldn’t be ignored for long. What, in comparison, could he have seemed to her? Brief images flashing up from a reel that had run its course. Things left over.
