is often ashamed.
It is curious, she thinks, the impetus to build empires. The playground games made large, the will to satiate the nag of inadequacy by demonstrating splendid power and dominion. Pared back, greed too is of course revealed. Or, more rarely, need. Need without trade, need without negotiation. Greed without care. The desire to own more than is necessary, more than you have. Does such greed come from a cold climate? Perhaps greed is a harshly rational friend in climates that set by stores for winter. Who can be cavalier about what is modestly enough when they do not know how long the cold will strangle the ground? None of us are such canny storemen that we can lay by exactly what we need. Weather soothsayer, seaweed and sixth sense, predict the winter and measure it in jars of jam and frost-cellar spuds. Excess may be canny in a land with wintertime that will not sustain more than the ounces of sparrows and robins. But the harrowing greed of conquest outstrips any demands of provisioning.
Yes, winter can last longer than you think. Longer than you thought, Anna. What should be carefully packed in the storeroom to ride out a winter such as this? Carefully wrapped, perhaps in a bit of those old spare-room sheets, the faded easy-care remnants of her marriage acting finally as a layer of protection. Somewhere in the garage, or attic, placed on a safe shelf. What is the thing that she should retrieve to sustain her through this long winter stretch? It would need to be a generous, giving thing. A sled, pulled by sapphire-eyed huskies, glorious vitality written by their bark and breath on the cold air, ready to pull her away away away. Away to the dry heat of a Baghdad garden where cold is not numbered amongst the many perils. She would arrive in Baghdad on her husky-pulled sled, the remnants of Arctic frost burning up, giving way to the smoke and dust of fallen buildings. Find that quiet garden, where nothing will go wrong; she will insist on it being safe – the power to control the world exists after all, in the imagination. Sit quietly and ask this woman: what was your life like? What ended when you became one of my ghosts? A chance to question, to uncover the value of a life, not revel in the death of it. And perhaps to be pulled away, distracted from the thin inadequacy of her own existence.
What relief it would be to escape, by hacksaw or key, walk free of the shackles that lead back to Ryan. If she is caught by him she cannot think that he wanted to catch her. They are caught together; the irons of their shared story are not ready to give all their weight to the ground. What act or magic can break such ill-favoured bonds?
That answer must be found another day. The chain of traffic drags across the land, stretches out and eases; she gets slowly closer to home. Eventually the road leaves the street lights behind, narrows between hedges. She shares the journey with fewer and fewer cars, and turns finally onto the quiet little lane towards her house. At home, she tries to ease the journey from her shoulders, tiredly, with a few shrugs. She pulls the curtains across the black windows, a small barrier against the fathomless squares of dark. Fine rain is still softening the night. It is a gentle visitor compared to the frost.
Gathering into herself, curled up on the sofa, adrift, she resumes refuge, thinking again about the woman in Baghdad. She pictures her in the garden, still and calm, a warm hand resting on each thigh. Anna worries that she is intruding. She wants to reach out, but she is nervous. She doesn’t know if she has a right to be here. She wants to say she is sorry.
*
Sometimes I have felt Mum’s grief pulling me, pulling me into her. I am on the end of a rope; she is the post to which I am tied. She is so firmly set, so deeply anchored in that place that however far I am, I start to circle, circle, circle, at first with a carelessness that seems to have no direction or destination, but as the circle winds in, as the rope shortens, I speed up, I feel the pull, I feel the reducing arc of my movement. I feel the dizzying rush as I am pulled and pulled until I move so fast and so tightly pulled that even without weight or body I am eviscerated by it. I become lost in a tunnel, a funnel, a wind-sucked shrinking spin that ends suddenly at my mother’s feet. I look up and see that she is as still as rock. Bound tight from head to foot by a million miles of grief.
Mum – I feel it spooling out from her even here – is reshaped by sorrow. When I died it broke her heart. Her heart has stayed broken; that break has handicapped the rest of her. It is terrible to see that pain-filled vastness inside her. She has pulled tight around herself to keep it all hidden, the sorrow that marbles her bones, coats her organs, decides her fate. She is diseased with sorrow. Yet I see her smile, talk, laugh. I have seen her with the usual group of old friends, laughing and having fun. It felt as comforting to me as if I were a child going to sleep in her lap. Those adult faces that accompanied my childhood, contributed guidance and steps and gifts to my growing up. And my darling mum, loved by them and laughing happily in their company. But I could still see her disease. It glittered through her skin like the darkness waiting. Sophie knows her so well; I think she sees it too. She is such a gentle worrier, such a kind and loving friend, she would know what is plain to see. I wish I knew what to do, to pull that blackness out. The blackness is for me. Not for Mum.
There. I catch, suddenly, a thread. A time when I was younger, sullen in that ordinary way of a teenager, but not opposed to walking in the woods with Mum. As we walked through the part of the woods where the bluebells were thickest, Mum suddenly turned off the path and walked into the middle of them.
‘Look, Caitlin!’
‘I can’t see anything.’
‘No, I mean just the colour, look at it! It’s wonderful.’ She stood with her arms vaguely lifted outwards to encompass the yearly manifestation of colour that billowed across the woodland floor, buzzing in an ecstatic hover between purple and blue. Her face held a blissful half-smile of idiot pleasure, and for once I could see what she meant. The colour was wonderful. For the rest of the walk and when we got home, eating our pizzas and cheesecake that Dad went out to buy specially, Mum was in a happy, almost elated mood. It was easy to absorb her joyfulness, and soon Dad and I were as elevated as she. It was a very happy evening. Today’s happy evening was brought to you by the colour purple.
She would do that quite often. She would stop to absorb the sight of something that she suddenly found irresistible. She would always offer up what she was seeing for us to share, but I knew that in those moments she was expressing part of herself that didn’t need company. As an art history lecturer, she spent her life looking at paintings, artworks, filling her eyes with arrangements that had been created, if not inevitably to please the eye, to fill it. To be made sense-full by the cast of a human eye. She was serious about her work, absorbed, critical, excited often, irritated or angry at least as often. But it was only with scenes that happened by accident, or without the human view in mind, that she seemed to have this welling-up of wonder. She rarely articulated any thoughts about what she was looking at, certainly never subjected it to the dismantling analysis that in her work life she applied like a knife to various artworks, both to revere and revile. But she did offer the chance to share in her looking. Look, Caitlin, how beautiful it is! It might be a distant view, the accidental coincidence of building materials in an old part of a town, a decaying leaf. It might be something I couldn’t spot at all.
It tears at me. To see my mum like this, to know how unhappy she still is. As weak as he is, as ineffectual in life as he is, he remade my mum. He tore her inside out and remade her. She is remade by the consequences of his acts. She is battered by my death. My death, my death, my death. Not even my absence, but my death. My death has killed something in her. As death has caused me to cede all of myself to hurtling and rushing, it has caused her to be bound in rigid stillness, held immobile under weighted coils of grief.
Chapter 5
The trip to London, though unproductive, was a useful escape from the confines of home. There was no expectation of seeing Ryan, and for that time, he was not the central black spot of her thoughts. Back at home, he once more takes up her whole view. She retraces her sighting of him so often, so minutely, desperate for clues that would tell her things are not going well for him, equally desperate for signs that he prospers. She torments herself with