We drove last night. We were aimless, our trajectory unplanned. She sat beside me in the aching interior of my ancient Audi. We listened to Leonard Cohen and I drove us along back lanes in the blackness of this winter night. In the distance I could see a red glow. There was no other light in the sky, the moon was too new and the stars were obscured. I drove towards that red glow and as we rounded a corner we saw that it was a building, set ablaze by accident or design, with a crowd of people around it.
“Too close,” she said, her chin buried in the neck of her jumper.
“You what?” I asked.
“They’re standing too close to that fire. When it goes, they’re going to get hit.”
She is old and she is wise, this faded beauty. Turning into her mother.
I paused the car at a t-junction, yards from where the house was burning to the ground, consuming itself from the inside out. We watched the flames lick around the edges of the building for a while, sparks occasionally puncturing the sky. She stared dispassionately ahead. I turned to look at her, the red glow of the fire adding colour to her monochrome face there in the darkness. I thought about the things she must have seen on her mad dance through life. How many fires and how many survivors? Her arms were folded across her stomach, her left hand resting lightly on her right hand. The silver of her wedding band glinted in the light from the fire, the ring loose against her slender finger, only seven months since it was placed there. Time can pass quickly or it can drag on in what feels like years. In next to no time, though, she seemed to have lost who she was.
“Are we going to sit here all night?” she asked.
I put the car into gear again and set off, turning left, down another lane, away from the fire. As we drove past, some of the watching heads turned to see who had come to this place and not stopped or offered to help. One head in particular turned and followed the passage of the car, his eyes boring into the side of my head as I drove slowly past. Even from the corner of my eye, I recognised him. I knew, even as I drove away, I knew exactly what was going to happen.
She is not precisely a former local beauty queen. She has a notoriety, more like. People have an idea of her, an idea which she fed for a time. I have seen her take the pills. I have seen her fly. I have seen the blankness of death in her eyes and the sparks of mania too. I have watched as the flesh on her bones has come and gone and come again.
I drove on, away from civilisation, out into the wilds to where fir trees surrounded water, to the place where bombs were bounced in a long distant past which is almost beyond living memory, these days. She said nothing as she sat there beside me, shuffled down in the seat, chin tucked in jumper and eyes fixed on the passing scenery outside the window.
The glow in the sky behind us began to fade as we moved further from the burning building. I crossed a bridge and took another left turn, putting houses and people even further behind us. She unfolded her arms and instead clasped her hands loosely in her lap. She sighed once and pushed a stray tendril of hair back behind her ear. The cd stopped playing and I allowed the silence to drift on.
She has seen some things in her life, in the brief portion when she would say that she was truly living. Lines chopped with the edge of a cd, snorted through a fiver on a dining room table in a rented house in Chorlton. Fish and chips eaten in a basement flat, high as a kite, and suffering carpet burns as a result. Frisked too many times, and too intimately, by butch female bouncers at dodgy clubs where drink was cheap but air was not. Sitting and waiting for the party to start at aftershows the length and breadth of the country. She has seen some things that turned out not to be very much after all, in the wider scheme of things.
And now she has settled. Which made it all the more unusual that we should be driving in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter on a moonless night. She had rung to tell me that she had been to a seminar that day. The seminar had been held in the building where she had got married. She was thrown by this, but she didn’t know why.
“Every room that we used,” she said, “they used them too.” She paused, and I listened to the tiny sounds that told me she was alive. “It cheapens it a bit, really. Seeing the place you got married used for an event like that.”
It was the shabbiness that she had noticed. Bound up in the excitement of her big day, she had not noticed the peeling paintwork, or the chips in the wood. She had not seen the damp stains on the wall paper, had failed to notice the fraying edges of the upholstery. But more than that, it was the idea that people she worked with, people she shared a profession with, people with whom work was the only connection she had, were walking around in a building she associated with something else entirely.
It had jolted her.
When I picked her up, she looked gaunt. An over-reaction, I thought, to a simple fact of life. She was wordless as she stepped into the car, closing the door behind her and fastening her seat belt.
“Anywhere in particular?” I asked.
“Just drive,” she said.
I can see that the skin on the back of her hands is no longer as smooth as it used to be. The veins stand out more prominently, the blue of their walls iridescent beneath the pallor of her skin. She has grown into her face, though. The leanness of age suits her bone structure better than the fleshiness of youth. Her profile is particularly fine these days. She wears only silver jewellery. Her wedding and engagement rings on her left hand, a chunky banded ring on her right, and three bangles on her right wrist which clink and jingle each time she moves her arm. Her earrings are silver and also the simple pendant at her throat. Her eyes are level and a greenish grey. They look black in the dark, as the pupils widen to let more light in.
I saw him first, standing at the side of the road, beneath a solitary light. I don’t know how he got there so quickly. He probably knew a different route. He probably took different back roads to the ones I had been driving along in the dark. She saw him too. She couldn’t miss him, he was on her side of the road, and she had to stare at him as I drove past, her eyes fixed on the passing scenery outside the window, of which he now formed a part. She remained silent, and I didn’t want to broach the subject.
He was just standing there, beneath the light. I didn’t see a car, or any other kind of vehicle. It was as though he had teleported himself there.
“Did you see that?” I asked, wanting to check that my eyes hadn’t deceived me.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” I left it.
I took a right turn, up the narrow road that runs alongside the double reservoir. There were no lights here, and I turned on the full beam of my headlights. Nocturnal creatures used to their privacy jumped back startled from the glare of the lights, taking refuge deeper in the woods on either side of the road. We reached the larger car park, with its spaces for coaches and its cafeteria, but I didn’t stop. I knew where I was headed.
I thought about him standing there, a solitary figure under a solitary, displaced light. I thought about how he had watched as we drove past the burning house earlier, his head almost swivelling on his neck like an owl’s to keep me in his sights. I remembered in a flash the way he always manipulated a room, and I remembered a story she had once told me, of sitting on her doorstep watching flying ants in the back garden, waiting for him to come home. Long before she married, back when she was young. I remembered how she said he had held a cold bottle of beer to the back of her neck, and as I remembered, I shivered. As though someone had held a cold bottle of beer to the back of my neck.
I remembered what she had said about meeting him in a pub one night, a night with a full moon and rain on the pavement. How she had known, but chosen to ignore her instincts, preferring instead to be swept away into infatuation. This still long ago, before she married, before her youthful beauty began to fade into something more refined.
I began to wonder if I had imagined him, standing at the burning house and then again, standing beneath that out of context street light. I began to wonder if she was a figment of my imagination, sitting there so silently in the passenger seat. I started to develop the idea in my mind’s eye that if I reached across and pulled her hair back from her face, I would see nothing more than a skull. Like I said, time can sometimes drag on and feel like years are passing, but sometimes things seem to happen in a flash.
“Are you asleep?” I asked. Instead of moving her hair, instead of taking her pulse, instead of touching her cold lifeless skin.
“No,” she replied. “I’m not asleep.”
We had reached the point I was aiming for. The destination I had chosen those moments ago as I turned the car into this dark and narrow lane. Without the moon, the water could not glisten. Only as the road had turned had my headlights caught the surface of the reservoir and played with the waves that moved across its surface.
I parked.
“We’re here,” I said.
She stirred in her seat, then unfastened her seat belt and opened the car door. I did the same, and we stood beside the car together, looking out between the trees across the water, our eyes following the path of the headlights’ beam that reached into the darkness.
“Why here?” she asked.
I started to answer, but she had already moved away from the car, walking towards the edge of the water. The shore of the reservoir at this point was sandy, like a beach. She stood on that tiny bay of sand and looked at the water. It was as black as the sky. I walked over to join her, and we stood there together as though nothing was wrong.
After a while, I went back to the car. It was cold, and there wasn’t much to see. I put Leonard Cohen back on the cd player, started the engine and turned up the heater. I watched her standing there for a while, but gradually my eyes grew heavy and eventually they closed.
I didn’t see her die, although I knew he was coming, and I knew what he would do. He must have taken my soul as I drove past him, as he stood beneath that Lewisian street light. Not so gentle as Tumnus the faun, but just as much a devil. How else does a man move so swiftly from place to place. How else does he place a cold bottle of beer against the back of your neck without you even noticing.
She is cold now. I have brought her back into the car. Her colourless skin is tight against her bones, her beauty changed. I can see her skull beneath her skin, beneath her hair, and I remember a time in a toilet somewhere, looking into a mirror together. She was laughing, and moving her head from side to side, looking at her face.
“I wonder what my skull looks like, underneath all this skin,” she said.
© J R Hargreaves 2009
