‘No. I like it.’
‘Now someone is dying, thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star fell down, a soul went up to God. She rubbed another match against the wall. It became bright again, and in the glow the old grandmother stood clear and shining, kind and lovely.’
‘Her granny isn’t really there, is she, Mummy?’
‘She might be, in a special kind of way. If you believe in angels.’
‘I do. Do you?’
‘It would be very nice.’
‘She quickly struck the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother with her. And the matches burned with such a glow that it became brighter than daylight. Grandmother had never been so grand and beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms…’
‘Do you have to be good to become an angel?’
‘I think you have to be quite good. But really I think you just have to love someone very much.’
‘But in the corner, leaning against the wall, sat the little girl with red cheeks and smiling mouth, frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. The New Year's sun rose upon a little pathetic figure. The child sat there, stiff and cold, holding the matches, of which one bundle was almost burned.’
‘Is that what happens, Mummy, when you die? Someone kind comes to get you?’
‘I don’t know. I hope so. It would be very nice to think we could always be together, wouldn’t it? But you don’t have to worry about that. Not for ages and ages.’
For a long time afterwards they laid together quietly, listening to the wind and watching the weak lamplight swim over the tent walls. Eventually Beth reached up and dimmed it. Through the polyester the fire crackled and glowed. She wondered if Ruby was asleep, and what strange things must fill her head. She was only ever really alive when he was there; such a sullen, inward-looking child when they were alone. She thought of the weathered cliché about one hand being unable to clap alone. For the second time that evening she wept. She wondered if she would ever really know her daughter, and if she would ever be the mother she so wanted to be.
‘Mummy and Daddy are very different,’ she whispered. She closed her eyes. Her legs were too long for the short mattress and her feet hung over the edge.
‘That’s okay,’ said a small voice in the dark. ‘I think you’re the best mummy in the world.’
Late that evening Ruby would wake up. She would hear murmuring from the other side of the partition. She’d hear her mother giggle and then something else. She would listen carefully, trying to understand it. It would sound like her parents were passing something heavy between them. They must have put it down again shortly afterwards because it went quiet again, and she would listen to them breathing and wonder whose was whose. She would still be wondering that when she too was soaked away in sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ben was sitting on his bed, turning the letter over and over in his hands. It was creased where he had screwed it up. Fourteen lines, that’s all it was. Just 173 words. He read it again. Words are never just words, as some people like to think. How subtle and wry and treacherous they can be when they get together. An army of anarchists ready to rise up and overthrow worlds. He scrunched the letter up again and hurled it away, watched it scamper off and hide, trembling, under the desk. So you should, he thought, so you should.
‘I won’t ever ask you,’ Madeline had said, ‘that way you won’t have to lie. But I know you’ll tell me when it comes.’
Time was running out. They were awaiting his response and they wouldn’t wait forever. Maybe he could break his leg. That would make the decision for him. He imagined himself wedging a foot inside a rabbit hole and then falling sideways. The prospect terrified him. No, he wasn’t brave enough for that. But if he could sustain an injury naturally… Why did he never get injured, like other athletes did? He knew some people who couldn’t go a month without their bodies breaking down. How convenient that would be; a timely rupture or serendipitous stress fracture. He’d been hoping. He’d even stopped stretching, praying that a tendon might give up the ghost in protest. But no. His body, his finely-tuned, unbreakable, metronomic body just kept on going and going.
‘It’s your dream,’ his father had said. And it was. It had been. He had chased it with all the unswerving devotion of a zealot, he’d been that unshakeable shadow following the sun. But now? Now he wished that winning races was still the greatest climax he could imagine.
Suddenly he jumped off the bed and strode across the room. He changed back into the shorts and T-shirt that he’d discarded in a pile earlier and went downstairs. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table. Did she never move from there? She was facing away from him and he stood in the doorway looking at her. She was hunched forward, a pencil behind her ear. An unforgiving beam of light slanted through the window and singled out a strip of grey hair where the dye had missed. A song was playing on the radio and she sang along quietly even though she didn’t know the words. She always got the words wrong, even to songs she proclaimed to love. Ben thought it was deliberate, borne out of a deep conviction that she was always right and her way was always the right way. Suddenly she turned around and stared at him. ‘Another run?’ she asked approvingly. He pretended not to hear and went out.
He had no intention of going for a second run. He simply wanted to be out, away from things, from one thing in particular. He walked quickly away from the house, turned the corner at the end of the road and kept going. There were the gardens again. There was the front door with the banner still hanging. He glanced over his shoulder. It was following him. He turned around and walked briskly in the opposite direction, away from the park. Soon he was nearing the high street. There were more people here. He might get lost among them. He stopped, half-turned. He knew it was still there. He sat down and waited for it to catch up, to settle down alongside him. He’d read it so often – a hundred times, a thousand times. He knew each of its fourteen lines by heart. When it had first arrived he’d looked up the university on his phone, had imagined himself there, sauntering across the impossibly green lawns under a sun that, so the website promised, shone three hundred days a year. He’d read all about the coaching programme, the scientific approach to nutrition and the inter-collegiate meets. It had been made very clear to him that all he had to do was turn up and they’d make him into a star.
He leant forward and rested his elbows on his legs, cupping his chin in his hands. He studied the pavement in intimate detail. People were walking past. He looked at their shoes as they went by and listened to snatches of conversations.
‘Yeah, but when she does kiss him she’ll be shit at it.’
‘There’s something there. He’s not sure what. I’ve got more tests next week.’
‘Why is he just sitting there?’
He enjoyed looking through these slits into other lives, glancing beneath the Elephant Man’s hood. People’s uncensored selves revealed more in five seconds than their public masks did in a year. He secretly studied them. He sought out those tiny tremors in the skin where ancient shocks still reverberated, wanted to bear witness to the unguarded moments, when the sadness, the loneliness, the bitterness came out. He felt like a thief, but excused himself because he never judged them. Some faces had more of this and less of that, but each was cruel and kind and curious in its own way. He thought suddenly of that slogger in the park. Who was he? What was it about him that had made Ben give up like that? He had felt sorry for him, but it was more than that. Guilt. The word suddenly jumped out at him. Yes. That’s exactly what it was. Not sympathy. Guilt. But for what? Being faster, fitter, younger? No. No, certainly nothing like that. He revelled in his vitality. What then? Maybe in a past life they were… maybe in a parallel world he had… He shook his head. Next time I see him I’ll run him into the ground.
He was growing cold in his shorts and T-shirt. The air was damp and chilly beneath the overcast sky. Last week it was still February. He should’ve brought a jumper. He leaned down and picked up a broken bit of tarmac, rolled it absent-mindedly on his palm. Feet were still landing in front of him. He was on the outside looking in. He always managed somehow to find the periphery. Even running around the track or the park; even that was the edge of the circle. When he felt self-critical he thought he was better at observing life than living it. He flicked the stone away and stood up. And what of Madeline’s face? It hardly moved. The expression she wore was confined always within the tightly controlled parameters. But he knew better. He didn’t know her well, not really, but those telltale tics he searched for, they lived lavishly in the corners of her mouth, beneath her eyelids, at her temple. The stillness she affected was fake, was just the result of muscles always straining to suppress, to conceal. He thought of a rope made taut by powerful forces. He began walking home. He realised, with a shock, he’d never seen her smile. He would tell her. He couldn’t lie any longer. He would tell her that night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was 5.59pm. Madeline was aware she was awake. She opened her heavy eyelids and for a long time looked straight ahead at the pillow just an inch in front of her. Eventually she rolled onto her back and then sat up. A bright light came on behind her eyes and blotted out her room. She sat motionless for a moment until it dimmed and then disappeared to reveal the wall and the windowsill and the window. She looked around. Her duvet was crumpled at the foot of the bed and whatever had been on her bedside table was now on the floor. The ashtray had tipped over and there was a scratch down her arm that had bled onto the sheet. She reached down and picked up her clock. It was childish and cheap with a big hand and a little hand and a faded picture of Disney princesses behind a cracked glass frame. He would be there soon. He was never late. She liked that about him. It proved that he respected her. She put the clock back on the side and picked up her phone. There was a time not that long ago when her number had been passed around and scribbled on walls and inside toilet cubicles. Sometimes she’d answered the calls and sometimes not. Then one day it rang while she was walking home alongside the canal. She’d reached into her pocket and then watched transfixed as the handset sailed through the air against the blue sky. She watched the ripples ring outwards towards the bank until they’d all gone and the trees were again perfectly mirrored on the flat surface.
Madeline went into the bathroom and washed the blood off her arm and cleaned her teeth. Her short hair was matted and she tried to brush the knots out and then gave up. She began pulling the purple strands out from between the bristles and dropping them in the toilet bowl. She did that for a long time and then reluctantly raised her eyes to the mirror. The feeling of revulsion came back as strong as ever. Almost immediately she reached for the eyeliner to begin the process of covering up what she couldn’t stand to see, while in her mind she was saying hateful things to the creature in front of her. She was eighteen.
Ben had learned by degrees how sheltered his life had been. He had always known he was an innocent, but although Madeline told him nothing of her life or the things she had done and seen, he was only now beginning to appreciate the depths of his naïveté. ‘You will love it there,’ she had said, talking about the club she was taking him to that night, but the way she’d said it had made him nervous. He had felt, and rightly so as it turned out, that he would be tested.
She sat beside him now, crossing and uncrossing her legs as he drove the short distance into town. ‘I like your car, but you should hang something there.’ She was pointing at the rear-view mirror. He shifted in his seat so he could see her in it. He found it so difficult not to stare. He wondered if he would ever get tired of looking at her. When they were alone he wallowed in it, gorged on her. A look, a word – he loved hearing her swear – a twist of the body or the shape of her mouth; all these things, any of them, made the breath catch in his throat. But in public it was different. Walking beside her required a certain level of defiance, and sometimes he didn’t have the courage or the energy. Only two weeks previously they had been walking home when a car had stopped in front of them, all four doors swung open and a group of boys got out. ‘What did you say about my mother?’ They hadn’t waited for an answer. Ben and Madeline had hid behind a wall until they ran by and then made a dash for it, rushing onto the road to flag down a passing car while the group stood on the verge swearing at them. ‘I know them,’ Madeline had said, as if that explained it. Which in a way it did.
‘It’s just down here,’ she said now. They were in town. How different it appeared without the people and the cars and the bustle. He saw the place where he had sat earlier in the day, saw himself there again, with his bare knees and elbows. Such a glum figure, when he should have had the world at his feet. She walked in front of him. Her skirt was tight. His breath catching again. She turned down an alley that he hadn’t known was there. Halfway down it a door was open; a block of yellow light cut out of the dark, a weaker imitation on the opposite wall. A giant form in the shape of a person stood in the entrance. The bristles on the monster’s scalp tickled the underside of the cross-beam. Incredibly, the suit it wore was still too large. The form nodded at Madeline as she squeezed past, assessed Ben with mild curiosity, then quickly dismissed him.
‘Be good, children,’ the monolith said.
‘Where’s the fun in that?’
They were in a corridor. It was dimly lit by a bulb that twitched on the end of its cable like a body on the end of a rope. It threw shadows around them, demented gargoyles that circled in strange arcs and rushed silently at their backs as they departed. There was a thumping sound, a deep, visceral beat that came from inside the walls and up through a floor. They could feel it throb in their fingertips.
