to find a birthday present for Sophie, she heads for a department store. The tasteful goods stand on islands between wide avenues, serene and well-tended. No racks of sale tops, jammed in and bedraggled, dangling from one end of the hanger by a now permanent bump in the cheap jersey shoulder, or garments trailing from skinny satin ribbon loops into puffballs of dust and hair under the display. Even on the busy days there is room to sweep in a direct line from the row of front doors to any department. She heads to womenswear, fingers a sea-green scarf, languid silk that slips between her fingertips, a colour she knows would suit Sophie. She takes it with her and selects some trousers and a few tops that she decides to try on. Anna likes clothes, enjoys the small tactical act of putting together an outfit that is subtle but distinctive. She has a wardrobe of tailored and stylish clothes – plums, umbers and dove greys, mohair, wool. Rich surfaces cushioning life. A statement necklace of black jet, a tactical proclamation of her individuality and status as a person with style. Something easy for which she feels she has gained much undeserved praise.
She rustles around somewhat petulantly in the changing room, glad for a solid door with an actual lock, not a too-small curtain that gets bumped open by her skinny behind as she bends to pull up trousers. She buys the trousers and one of the tops, as well as the scarf for Sophie. She leaves the store and walks down the pedestrianised street. The city is quiet. The drizzle that began the day has stopped, the clouds parted. Winter sun skims the tops of golden walls. On a whim, she makes her way up St Aldate’s to the river and walks along the river path for some way. On the way back, she stops at the terrace of a pub, not yet open for the day, where many lively and enjoyable summer evenings were spent, she and Michael and the colleagues at the university who had become friends. Coots glide by in formation, losing their squadron shaping as they string out towards the bank. She sits for some time at one of the puddled empty tables, marking sad memories of happy times, slender echoes from lost summer days. She sits still long enough to catch them as they bounce off the underside of the stone bridge and skim by.
Anna is angry with herself for succumbing to the past. She turns around to head back towards the town centre and the car park.
But she is halted mid-step. There he is. All of her blood disappears; she is drained of all connection to now. The world tilts in ugly, unhelpful planes, and she is about to slide off. She sees that he has seen her. He looks startled, a moment of uncertainty, hesitation, and then he goes past her. He hurries past; panic hastens his pace. He is gone. Her blood is gone. She catches a brief glimpse of a grey coat, his back, as the world swings briefly into line. She has to sit. She sits on a bench, a town drinkers’ bench, grimy and wet. Her new purchases drop amongst chewing gum and fag butts and damp. She feels sick. Her blood is replaced by gasoline, a petrol bomb churning in her belly. She feels sick. She feels vertigo, hanging off the world into the endless, endless drop of space. Gravity is skewed, no longer necessarily an ally, no longer connected to her at all perhaps. What is connected to me? What to hold onto in this unchained undoing? She holds the damp wood of the bench. Eventually, all the shards that this moment has become slowly shiver and slant back into place, slowly take a recognisable shape around her. She leans over her knees, begging gravity to hold her tight, pull her closer to the anchoring earth. She recognises the place, but she is lost, like one of the ghosts she sees, slow-blinking, unexplained, in the trees. What has happened to me? Why am I here?
Time concertinas in and out, sound wavers, sickness rises and falls. Time, squeezed or stretched, passes and soon she reckons the world with customary strategies. She notices that it is cold. She notices that she feels sick and that it is getting darker. Her body is connected once more, via this reckoning, to the world; gravity holds her, winter colds her, though her undoing hangs in the air like the ending chime of a bell, petering out into the far reaches of space. She gets up and walks, feeling the parch of her mouth, the weakness in her legs. Her bag, with keys and money, luckily already slanted across one shoulder by a long strap, accompanies her automatically, the book still bumping against her hip. The store carrier bag is left behind, soaking up the drizzle and the spilled Tennents under the bench. She fumbles for her phone. Who to call? What to say? She doesn’t know what to do. She might be sick. What does she do now? She can’t think of the person who would be able to answer those questions. She pauses, leaning for support on a lamp post. Her phone is dropped back into the bag around her shoulder. She wants to go home.
Back in the car she is shaky, breathless, uncertain of everything. Her hands in her lap clench the fabric of her clothes. She breathes, rusty-saw breaths that snag. Panic still flutters at the corners of her eyes. Her thoughts stumble, become uncertain, irrational. She is cold with the shock. Eventually she struggles with the car, the ludicrous pillars and turns of the car park. Miraculously she doesn’t catch a cement wall, or bump another car. The car stalls in the traffic, but finally she gets home.
Home, pulled around her like a parka, like a stone wall and a moat. She sits still, though there is a demolition derby crashing under her skin. Rages skid and screech, making tight turns around her organs. She sits it out. She sits still. Night cools further on the windowpanes. She sits at the kitchen table, makes tea, opts instead for wine. The discarded tea strengthens and cools; an oily slick forms on the surface. She thinks about calling Sophie. Sophie has helped her so often with difficult times. Yet she can’t bear to return to that claustrophobic care. She doesn’t want to be in the middle of a web of others. She already can’t move.
There is nothing she can do. Nothing at all to end what is real about this. There is no pretend, no alternative, no strategy that will change the flint-hard, flint-sharp truth. He has come back. He is here. And Caitlin is not. Her girl, her beautiful girl, is gone, and in this world there is still him. A shard of that flint shears off and starts carving her out from the inside. She is being hacked empty in small ugly chops by that savage blade.
The wine is disappearing, from bottle to glass to her. She tries to reason it out. What she wants now more than anything is to not see him. The rage she feels would make that true by securing his death, smash him out of the arena with one of the battered cars that race inside her. Run that fucker down. She grits her teeth and quells the anger, breathes hard through her nose, gritted teeth and flared nostrils. All other hates pale into a cross-stitch hobby compared to this. Every bad thing she has ever felt spins round and down onto that man, tightens around him, a winding sheet of sheer hate. Yet, his nasty surprise today aside, he is untouched, unknowing of the harm she wishes him. He will perhaps be shaken, count himself lucky that she did not manage to do more than stare; he may decide to avoid that part of town again. Then in minutes, he will probably be back to whatever life he has now, whatever brought him back here.
Maybe he is at his parents’ house, somewhere on an edge of that small town, just a few miles away, that she has scrupulously avoided for years, a blank in her memory, a map of avoidance. Somewhere in that boycotted terrain, a version of family life, for them, has been restored. Perhaps their nightmare is over. Their golden boy restored to them, their darling son, burnished by what he has had to endure to even greater preciousness. His blind, adoring, stupid parents, who stood by him, who did not believe his guilt. And if he has come back for good, how long until he comes back with another girlfriend? A wife? Grandchildren? Have they forgotten Caitlin? Made her no more than an inconvenience, the cause of an awkward gap in his CV? That dim couple who would not see what their son had done.
She has dreaded seeing them, has always hoped they had moved somewhere else. Her keen eyes looked out for them, a constant low level of anxiety, even as she expected them to have slipped away in shame. But perhaps they felt no shame. Perhaps they hold him faultless still. Anna has spent so much hate on them, and counselled herself out of it, so many times, reminded herself that it was Ryan, not they, who hurt Caitlin. But, tied to him so closely, they were implicated in his acts. They can drown in the turbulence of her hatred for their son for all she cares.
Are they being supportive, helping him get back on his feet? Will he be eating a nice meal with them, cooking for them? Or praising his mother’s cooking, hearty gusto acted out round the dining table? Will he tell them he has seen Anna? It does not signify, either way. What matters is that he is here; his life, his strategies, his habits be damned. He is here and her girl is dead.
The drab lumpen alloy of ordinary life is forged, beaten and stretched into a wire; the clinker falls heavy,