quietly sitting on her own, on a stool in her scruffy but beloved garden. Anna picked out these details with ease, with love almost. The woman from Baghdad seemed to appear in her mind, complete in the accumulation of random details. She has stayed within easy reach of Anna’s thoughts ever since, a mute companion. Filigree ghost-patterns of love and grief crept across Anna’s hollowed insides, like lichen, like salt crystals blooming on the innards of a calcified cave.
She imagined the others – a boy, men, women, a young girl. She saw in them ordinary beauty, a precious banality that at once made their deaths a terrible sadness. She saw curves of cheekbones, the sweep of a jawline, an array of clothing telling its own stories. The wonderful idiosyncrasies of ordinary people. She saw secret passions and hidden dreams, loves and pains, desires and hopes. She saw what was lost when they died. She imagined one of the men wearing corduroy trousers. It occurred to her that she didn’t know if men in a hot place would wear corduroy trousers, but realising how extensive her ignorance of their life was, she accepted a broad interpretation of differences and commonalities, accepted too that her own background would tell in the details more than it should. Her experiment must be one that remained ideally universal, and perhaps pragmatically crude.
Anna was taken unawares by her experiment – her anger was replaced by tenderness. As the characters came to her she felt a bond with them, and sadness at their death, a confusing mourning of dead people who did not exist. As she walked through the woods, wintery light drifting down through the leafless branches, she saw the people standing amongst the trees, waiting and still, silent in the unexpected cold, caught inexplicably for a moment in this English woodland.
She continued paying out in words and mental pictures what the numbers alone could not. She began to write them down. It was impossible and too gruelling to be comprehensive. But she kept to a steady, dutiful acknowledgement. Some of them, especially the first woman, she thought of often, in idle moments, enriching the picture she had made, thinking of her sitting calm and content in her garden, adding details to the story that she told for her. What had grown was a hushed but powerful love, a love built from recognition, from accepted kinship. People whose heartbeats and bones matched her own, people whose lives held nothing and everything in common with hers.
So today, as on many other days, Anna makes coffee then sits at the kitchen table and reads. It is quiet; the only sound comes from the clock on the wall and a faint murmur of wind outside. Amongst today’s stories, seven unnamed people have been killed in a roadside bomb. Holes left everywhere by the sudden absence of people that seconds before lived and breathed, families reaching for each other across craters of loss, a whole that has become less than a half, incomplete. Anna pictures seven people, how they look, what they care about, seven people to stand in for the ones who died in a town with a name she has already forgotten, a name she could not pronounce anyway. They materialise before her, easily and clearly; their lives run like a movie, ordinary and utterly beautiful. And she is hit anew by the terrible tragedy of their deaths.
She reaches for the latest volume, a worn exercise book, the dull green cover turning up at the corners. The book has been fattened by the dense writing covering most of the pages. She flexes the book in her hands, rolls her thumb across the edge to find the empty pages at the back. Those too will soon be filled; people die at such a rate. And though she cannot mark them all – the bombed, the drowned, the packed bodies suffocating in boat holds and locked lorries – she will keep adding to her tribe of invented ghosts. She writes quickly, stopping to think, finding in her mind’s eye the details that make the person real, real enough to matter, real enough to mourn. The first one she imagines as a plump girl of eight, in a flowered dress, passing by the hidden bomb on her way home, holding onto her aunt’s hand. She picks up her pen and starts to write the dead.
30 November
Seven people killed by a roadside bomb.
She is a girl of eight, warm with puppy fat and pretty dresses. She likes to eat teacakes, picking off the chocolate first with tiny nibbles. She eats all delightful treats this way so they last and last. A life so simple and so sure that a sweet and pretty cake is the greatest joy she can imagine.
Soft hair on a twelve-year-old boy’s head, the nap pushed into improbable freestyle licks. He has large top teeth, showing slightly whatever he does with his mouth. He walks with a Krazy Kat lope, chattering in the still-high voice of a boy. Every so often he pauses for a small moment, head on one side, teeth on his bottom lip, then resumes his joy-filled commentary.
This man has sad eyes, dark skin, and short receding hair, still black. He has a large and untidy moustache. He plays the guitar beautifully and sings not very well but with great emotion and commitment. He is in love with a woman who lives on his street, but knows almost nothing about her. He would not wish to impinge on her by finding out. For him, emotions are to be cherished, held, explored and examined. Unrequited love is the prize in his collection.
Four of seven is a man with a dainty moustache and smart, unattractive clothes. He is plagued by a need for particular neatness in all areas of his life. He clips and tidies, sorts and saves, orders all that he can, keeps the world at bay this way. He would be beautiful if this pernickety, slightly absurd and foolish carapace did not shield him so.
A young woman, her graceful head tilted to one side like a bird, hair a long sweep, a skein, brushed with early grey at the temple. She is tired, pregnant with a second child. Occasionally, in crowds, her hands sweep gently before her growing belly as she walks, a gesture ready to become one of protection for her child.
At home, this man’s children are meeting in furtive haste whilst he is out fulfilling errands, to discuss a surprise for his birthday. He has defined himself his entire adult life by the work he does to provide for his family.
A slight woman, dark and burnished by loss. She has black eyes flattened by the pain of losing her sister, her son, and her uncle to the actions of sky-borne military, another country’s flag glittering on a distant tail fin. She lost her husband subsequently to anger, to revenge. And so the chain stretches out. Her loss to be handed forward to new mourners, new carriers.
Anna puts down her pen and closes the exercise book. What was the ordinary happiness or boredom that was part of them, those seven, as they walked towards the last place that anybody should have been at that perilous moment? She wonders if they knew they died, if they felt the blast, if they felt fear. She wishes she could conjure them into life, preserve them, now that they are here, from the death that she invented them to enact. She pictures the young pregnant woman, the child she has left behind and the one she will never birth. She wishes she could sit her down here at the table, make her comfortable, then send her back home to her family after tea and a couple of biscuits, intact, unspoilt by death. She imagines going to the fridge, getting two beers, one for her, one for the lovelorn man, and watching him play his guitar, sympathising with his unfulfilled but loving heart as they sipped the beer in wordless companionship.
*
It wrecks me. Here I am, propelled, pulled by some arcane plan, or flung, an accidental gift from those strange commanding energies that cause my shape to shift in tune with their caustic black hum. Here I am, in my old home, the home of childhood and a certainty that I bleed to know again. I bleed nothing. But I yearn. I remember the sickness of yearning. I pull myself in; it takes enormous effort to gather. My mother sits in the same chair she always sits in, the chair she sat in when I was five, when I was doing my homework at fifteen, when the two of us looked at university prospectuses in quiet excitement. When I visited, came home, perhaps hiding a bruise on my hairline. When I died, when I was gone. The same chair, the same place, the same table. She sits there, so known to me. And here I am, so unknown to her.
Before I am flung into the darkness once more, I pull myself in enough to know her, to see her, to reach out. What I can muster, it cannot be nothing, for I feel the weight of it; I feel the shriek and the pull of it. I am made of voiceless pleading, but to no avail. She is blind to me.
Her head is full