Suddenly This Night

She’s got her brother’s old air rifle.

“What are you doing?” Toby asks, sitting down next to her on the grass. The lawn slopes away from them, away from the house and down to the high brick wall at the bottom of the garden. When they were young, the bottom of the garden had a swing in it, but it grew rusty and her father pulled it down; re-turfed the bald patch in the lawn where feet had scraped and pushed; filled in the holes where the swing’s tubular steel frame had been sunk.

Now the bottom of the garden was a smooth swathe of impeccable lawn with flower beds around its edges.

She raises the rifle again, closes one eye, squints through the other. A pop; a metallic ping; another can falls off the wall.

“I’m picking off memories,” she says.

He thinks she might be drunk. The sleepless nights have made her look older; more tired. Her skin looks tight. She has lost weight. Toby looks at her profile as she shoulders the gun again and aims it at the motley array of soda cans and soup tins she has rescued from the recycling box.

Toby knows better than to ask her which memories she’s picking off. No distinction made between good and bad; each is as painful as the next now. The loss of all that was good; the sorrow that it ever had to be bad; the pain that they caused each other.

Sarah had been his friend first; Toby’s friend. Daniel had been the outsider. Toby, always the fair one, had befriended Dan and brought him into the circle of two, loosening its bond. Sarah, aged ten, had seemed indifferent to Daniel’s existence. On odd occasions she had stooped to mildly bored hostility.

Twenty years on, Toby knew now what it meant when a woman, even a ten year old woman, behaved like that.

It had begun with the words, “Well, I suppose he can have a Jaffa Cake, too.”

Toby looks at her. No longer ten. Thirty now, that impish controller of the Jaffa Cakes. Thirty, bored, possibly drunk, and armed with an air rifle.

She squints along the barrel and her finger squeezes the trigger. She is focused and concentrating, momentarily oblivious to his presence beside her. Toby can see the fine lines at the corner of her eye; the faint puffiness from too many tears. The sun catches the faint hairs on her cheek and jaw. She is squinting down the barrel and her finger is poised to make the final squeeze. Suspended animation.

Sarah is so still that Toby wonders if she has died. She is unmoving, fixed on a point a few metres in front of her.

She maintains her pose and speaks.

“I need more cans.”

Toby stops looking at her; looks instead down the garden and sees the naked wall, devoid of targets.

He stands, as though to cross the lawn and reinstate the fallen soldiers of steel and aluminium, but she puts the rifle down.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. Then she looks up at him. “Sit down again,” she says.

Toby obeys. He sits closer this time and puts an arm around her shoulders.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she says.

“Where?” Toby asks her.

“I don’t know. Anywhere.”

She puts her hand on his knee, which is raised from the ground. She pushes down with her hand, pushes herself up from the grass. She stands towering above him with the sun directly behind her, so that she appears to be in darkness.

“Come on,” she says.

“Sarah…”

She’s impatient. She turns away from him, looks across the grass, over the top of the wall, at the fields beyond the house. “I want to get out of here,” she says. Her voice is low. She says the words to the world in general. Not to him, particularly.

She turns to him again. “Well?”

“What?” he answers.

“Are you coming?”

“Sarah, we can’t just get up and leave.”

“Why not?” Her face is still; expressionless. It’s a question full of the innocence of childhood.

“Because I have to go to work. Because you need to sort yourself out. Because people will worry.”

She’s impatient again. “Fuck people,” she says.

“Your mum and dad…”

“Fuck them.”

“Sarah…”

“What?” She rounds on him. “Sarah, what? What do you fucking expect, Toby?”

He doesn’t look at her. Sarah is still towering above him, while he sits on, one leg raised from the ground, bent at the knee. He’s wearing his dark tan leather jacket; the one that makes him feel like Owen Wilson playing David Soul playing Ken Hutchinson. He stares at the sleeve of one arm, the one he faces when he doesn’t look at her.

She tuts and walks past him, into the house.

He leaves it a couple of minutes and then follows her in. He finds her sitting at the kitchen table, eating a slice of cheesecake. The cheese is shockingly pale against the biscuit base and the fruit topping. She pushes her fork down, slicing off regular portions, methodical in the way she eats it.

Toby sits down opposite her.

“Maybe we can go away at the weekend. Maybe we can go on a City Break, or something.”

She doesn’t speak. She continues her methodical way of eating. She keeps her eyes fixed on the cheesecake, her attention entirely consumed by it.

Toby lets the silence fill the room. He sits back in his chair and watches her. She’s like a sulky child, her face set in stubborn refusal to acknowledge that he has spoken, and he looks at the way her dark, mascara-ed eyelashes flick and brush against the rise of her cheeks; he watches that deep pink pouting mouth open and close around forkfuls of dessert. The table sits immovable between them.

“I’ll book something over the internet at work tomorrow,” he offers.

She says something under her breath.

“What’s that?” he asks.

Sarah looks up at him then. “I said fuck off,” she replies.

The dessert is finished and she pushes the plate away from her. The fork lies across it at an angle, and there are a few biscuit base crumbs abandoned against the whiteness of the china. The fork tines point at him accusingly. He stares down at them, fully aware that she is staring across at him.

Toby pushes back from the table, the better to stare down at the kitchen floor and avoid her gaze. He feels her eyes boring into him. He feels the heat of her anger and her hate.

He wants to help her, but he no longer knows how. Something has changed. Something that makes him feel uncomfortable. Toby knows that everyone has their own way of dealing with grief, but he had expected Sarah to be a more traditional kind of grieving widow. He had expected more sorrow, more tears shed openly. He thinks that’s what everyone had expected, and yet here they were faced with anger and hatred.

It doesn’t even seem to be directed anywhere. It just exists. Anger is the fulcrum of Sarah’s being now, and Toby doesn’t know what to do with it.

Toby can’t look up. The floor seems the safer option. He doesn’t want to face that anger and be so ill-prepared for it. Even when Sarah’s chair scrapes against the tiles on the kitchen floor, Toby can’t bring himself to raise his head and look at her.

The chair is pushed backwards; Sarah stands up.

“Drive with me,” she says.

Toby looks up as though that’s what she’s commanded him to do. He’s helpless. He can’t even form words to respond. He feels like he’s drowning in the maelstrom of her will; it pulls him that way and this and he’s helpless to know what the best thing to do is. To be played along by her whim, or to resist.

They both hear the noise of car tyres on gravel. Her parents, returning from the tactful trip out to wherever it is that parents go when they want to leave two people alone, in the hope that the one will sort out the other. Toby feels panic, although he couldn’t have explained why, had anyone paused to ask him. She sees it in his eyes, and her own are calm, cold and considering the options.

“Do you want more of this?” she asks him. “Do you want more sitting here, drinking tea, wondering what to do with me, how to help? Do you want to be co-opted onto a panel of three who cluck and worry over how I’m doing?”

He can’t reply. She stares at him.

“Come on, Toby. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” he says, half hoarse, his voice cracking for no apparent reason.

“We can go anywhere,” Sarah says quietly. She looks behind her, towards the door out into the garden at the back of the house. “We can leave now, before they even open the front door.”

“Your car’s out front. So’s mine. They’ll know we’re in. They’ll hear us leave.”

“So?” She stares him down, and he has to seek solace in the kitchen floor again.

“So they’ll be hurt.”

She laughs. It’s sharp and full of pain. It sounds like a bark. He looks up at her. Her eyes are full of tears that she is refusing to shed. Her face is hard and angry.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You always were useless,” she tells him, then she turns and walks out of the back door into the garden and the beginnings of twilight.

He listens to her walk around the side of the house. The back door closes behind her just as her parents put the key into the front door to let themselves back into their home. He sits in his dark tan leather jacket, awkwardly angular in the kitchen chair, and hears them murmuring to each other in the hallway.

He knows that he can’t face them. He hasn’t heard her car engine start yet. He pushes his own chair back, hearing its feet scrape against the floor tiles. He reaches the back door just as Sarah’s mother opens the door from the hall into the kitchen. Before she’s even had chance to enter the room and start to ask him questions, Toby is out of the door and walking round the side of the house to the driveway at the front.

Sarah is leaning against the wall. He thinks at first that she’s smoking a cigarette, but he realises that it’s her breath condensing in the cool evening air. He looks at her and sees that she’s laughing.

“What is it? What’s funny?” he asks.

“I’ve left my car keys in the house,” she says, still laughing.

He feels in his jacket pocket and pulls out his own car keys. She sobers up.

“I wanted to take mine,” she says. “I didn’t want to have to come back.”

“You can’t drive anyway,” he tells her. “You’re drunk.”

Sarah takes a step towards him and slaps him. Toby looks at her, then walks to his car, releasing the central locking as he does.

“Are you coming, then?” he asks her, without turning to look at her.

He gets into the car and waits. She stands where he has left her, undecided. She has never been able to cope with not being in control, and by walking away, by saying she was drunk, by not reacting when she slapped him, Toby knows that he has taken control from her. He watches with interest as she fights herself, standing there in the twilight. Her options: to get in the car; to walk away from the house; to return to the silent questioning of her parents. He closes his eyes and tries to visualise which box she will pick.

The passenger door opens, and the car sinks on its suspension slightly as she gets into the passenger seat. He turns the ignition key. The engine starts. Her parents exercise discretion and don’t come to the door or look through a window.

“Where do you want to go?” he asks, without looking at her.

“The sea,” Sarah says.

He turns the car around and leaves the driveway. He knows which sea she means. He knows the place well. It takes three, nearly four hours to get there.

The sun has disappeared completely by the time they arrive, and the sky is an inky purple, flecked with stars. The sea beneath it is twice as dark and highlighted with silver where the waves peak and catch the moonlight.

They park on the new car park, just behind the sea wall that was much higher when they were children. Neither of them speaks. They sit in silence for a while, looking out at the sea.

Finally, Sarah opens the passenger door and gets out of the car. She looks starved, dressed as she is in jeans and a t-shirt with no jacket, not even a jumper. She walks briskly to the sea wall, steps up onto it and down the other side onto the pebbles. Toby hears them crunch and slide against one another beneath her feet. He watches her legs, body, shoulders and head gradually disappear from sight, as she makes her way down onto the beach.

He can’t hear anything except the gentle sound of the waves now. He thinks he ought to get out of the car and stand where he can see her. He doesn’t think she’ll do anything stupid like try to drown herself, but he knows he’ll feel happier if he has her in his sight.

She looks small and distant, standing at the edge of the sea. From time to time her arm goes back and then forward again, launching something into the air so that it curves up and up as far as its momentum will carry it before gravity takes hold and pulls it back down to land with a splash, he imagines because he can’t hear, in the sea.

He waits on the wall with his hands in the pockets of his dark tan leather jacket. He thinks about counting the stars, but they blink too quickly, or his eyes play tricks on him, and he can’t keep track of them.

When she’s finished throwing things out to sea, Sarah turns and makes her way back up the beach and onto the pebbles. She climbs the steep embankment made by the beach digger pushing the pebbles closer to the sea wall.

“What were you throwing?” he asks, when she is standing in front of him. She’s shivering, so Toby takes off his jacket and puts it around her.

“His phone. His wallet. His keys. His pager. His fountain pen.”

She doesn’t look at him, just stands with his jacket around her shoulders, head bowed and smaller than him.

Toby wants to pick her up and put her in his pocket. In the moonlight, it’s hard to make out the features of her face, but he knows that whatever expression he’d find there, he would love.

“What next?” he asks.

Sarah looks up. She shrugs. His jacket rises and falls. She looks as though she’s wearing a cape.

“Find somewhere to eat?” he says. “Somewhere to sleep?”

She looks at her watch. There’s nothing there. She laughs.

“I was wearing his,” she says. “I threw that in the sea as well.”

Toby checks the time. “It’s ten,” he says. “The chip shop by the laundrette should still be open at this time. Shall we walk down?”

She nods. She pushes her arms into the sleeves of his jacket. It drowns her. Toby takes Sarah’s hand and they walk towards the shops, along the road that runs in a straight line from the sea front out of the village.

It takes them twenty minutes to walk to the parade of shops. Café, post office and Spar are all closed for the night. So too is the butcher, the newsagent and the greengrocer’s. They reach the chip shop just in time to buy the last of the chips in the fryer. They are well cooked. Crisp, and mostly bits. The woman doesn’t charge them for them.

“They would just have gone to waste,” she says. She doesn’t ask why they are there at this time of night. She knows she hasn’t seen them amongst the holiday makers this week. She knows they don’t live in the village. That’s all she needs to know in order to decide not to ask.

They take the chips outside and walk back to the car, eating them with their fingers because they are too hard to drive the blue plastic fork through.

At the car, Toby asks her again, “What next?”

He means does she want him to drive them home; does she want to find a B&B they can spend the night in. She doesn’t answer at first. She just stares out through the windscreen at the inky black night sky.

Then, “Make love to me,” she says.

“What?”

Sarah looks at him. “I want you to fuck me,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because.”

They look at each other, no expression on either of their faces.

“I can’t,” Toby says eventually. “It wouldn’t be right.”

“What’s right got to do with it?” Sarah asks.

Toby has no answer to that, but he knows that he can’t fuck her. She’s still wearing his jacket, and she’s just thrown most of her dead husband’s belongings into the sea. Something about those two things combines to keep his ardour down.

Sarah sighs, and pulls on her seatbelt. Toby does the same and starts the car engine. Neither of them says anything else. He turns on the headlights, and the anti-tank defences suddenly appear, lit up in halogen. He reverses the car slowly and drives off the car park and out through the village.

People are leaving the pub, not expecting there to be a car on the road. They step back onto the pavement in surprise, and Sarah looks at their pale faces staring into the car at her.

“They look bewildered,” she says.

“They’re probably too drunk to know where they are,” Toby replies. He drives carefully until they are clear of the pedestrians, then he drives fast, too fast at times, taking them back to where they began, not wanting to linger in this new place too long.

Sarah fiddles with the radio, but can’t find anything that doesn’t seem to mock the silence, rather than remove it, so she chooses silence again. The sound of the tyres against the road sends her to sleep, and Toby is glad of the respite from awkwardness.

They have known each other for most of their lives, and suddenly this night has made them strangers. Toby no longer knows who she is. Sarah no longer wants to know who Toby is. As he drives, Toby is aware that they will never drive like this again. They will never be alone in each other’s company again.

He’s driving too fast, he knows it. Sarah is sleeping in the passenger seat, her head moving with the swing and sway of the car. He knows this road well, has driven it many times, but tonight he is driving on instinct, knowing that it will let him down.

Sarah sleeps on, oblivious to how fast he is driving, and when he misjudges a roundabout, clipping the kerb, losing control of the wheel, she continues to be oblivious to the speed at which the car spins and rolls and comes to rest in a ditch, its front end caved in by a tree.

Toby’s eyes stare out at nothing as the car, upside down, creaks and groans at rest. His eyes are dull and unseeing. If he were able to wish anything, he would probably wish that he had fucked Sarah at the seafront.

Sarah was right. She understood. Right had nothing to do with it at all.

She hangs now, held in by her seatbelt, her eyes still closed, still sleeping. It will be hours before anyone comes and finds her. Suddenly, this night has changed her world a second time.

Suddenly this night has given her the freedom she desired.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006