The Girls Beneath. Ross Armstrong

want to, but I need to.’

      ‘What do you need to talk about?’ she says.

      ‘I just need to talk, and hearing your voice isn’t bad either. Not too bad I suppose.’

      ‘How’s your new job going?’

      ‘It’s going,’ I murmur.

      I know that she senses the tension of it. Anger or the unsaid can so easily sound like flirtation but that’s not what she wants. She doesn’t want any of it. She wants to get on with her life and to not feel bad for wanting that. She feels that as it was me who called, the onus is on me to drive beginnings, otherwise it’s like someone insisting on coming to your house in the afternoon only to lie dormant on your sofa. We both feel the silences take on different forms, which is one of the miracles that everyone has felt since the advent of the telephone call and has been repeated thousands of times all over the world since. It’s a kind of telepathy. We’ve picked up where we left off.

      ‘So what’s happened since we last spoke? Anything big?’

      ‘You could say that,’ I say.

      ‘You sound different,’ Anita says.

      ‘I am,’ I say.

      ‘What happened?’

      Amongst the many fragments of advice that Ryans has given me, talking to someone I knew well before the accident stood out. He would even like to meet with somebody who can attest to certain changes in me. ‘It’s difficult to know where you’re headed if we don’t know where you’ve been’, he says. But there is only really one who knew me before and I don’t want her talking to him about me.

      I should talk because I’m told that it will help. But it stings.

      ‘The fundamental requirements for my work. Do you remember I read them to you?’ I say.

      ‘Yes. I think so.’

      ‘Inspire confidence with your presence. Don’t jump to conclusions about what you see and hear. Win co-operation through good-humoured persuasion. Display good stamina for working on foot.’

      ‘So… how are you doing?’ Anita says

      ‘Well… my stamina for working on foot is good.’

      ‘Ha.’ She laughs her laugh.

      ‘Don’t laugh.’

      ‘I wasn’t laughing at you. Have you lost your sense of humour?’

      ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Can’t find it anywhere. Also, I’ve become impulsive. Also, you’re subtly slurring, which indicates you might soon get a migraine. I read a new study. You should take magnesium tablets.’

      ‘Seriously, none of this sounds at all like you,’ she says.

      ‘So you’ve said. I should tell you, a thing happened. There was an accident, a bad one. It happened to me. Don’t you read the paper?’

      ‘No. What accident?’ she says.

      I breathe. Quick ones. Three in and three out.

      ‘I won’t bother you with it. I needed to talk. Now I have.’

      ‘Are you okay? You seem so different.’

      ‘People change. Goodbye,’ I say.

      ‘No, I want to see you. Please. I’m worried. I still… I do love… ’

      ‘I don’t want to hear that. And no, I won’t want to see you.’

      ‘I’m going to come round. Stay there. I’m coming round now.’

      ‘Please don’t. That might make me very angry. People change. Good luck.’

10

       ‘Can’t. Dah dah dah dee door, dah dah, dee dah…’

      I see a girl, when I say a girl this time I mean a woman, mid to late twenties. My age. She wears a green dress. There is a song playing. She is walking away from me towards a car near a forest. I follow her. She knows I’m there. She looks behind her to check. When she sees me she doesn’t smile and nor do I. Smoke rises from the forest. But it doesn’t seem to be on fire. It smokes majestically, like a cigarette. She has blonde hair.

       ‘Can’t. Dah dah dah dee door, dah dah, my head…’

      She slides into the car and waits for me there. I lift my pace. I take a look behind me. Around the corner comes a man. He also has blond hair. He has something in his pocket. I turn forward again and speed up but don’t want him to know I’m scared. I don’t want him to know I’m up to something. I get faster, incrementally, but I’m getting no nearer the car she lingers in, her seat pulled back so she can lean into it languorously.

      The car seems further away with every step I take, and I can see she’s waiting, not dreamily now, somehow agitated. She pulls her seat forward and starts the engine. I’m so far away.

      I turn. He’s right behind me. He’s so close. It ends.

      It feels like a dream. And this time, it is one.

      *

      When I wake it’s 2pm, I stayed up most of the night ‘reading’ and thinking. We’re on the night shift this evening. I do a couple of half-shift nights in the week to mix things up. Then I take Saturday off and do only five hours on Sunday.

      I rearranged the spread of my week when I came back as my priorities had changed. I want to work pretty much as many days as possible now to keep up my routine. Bartu wanted a different rota but I said I ‘like my way’, and he’s stuck with me for now, so we left it at that.

      I lock eyes with the cat. He’s probably pretty miffed that I haven’t spent much quality time with him thus far. I’ve fed and watered him well though and we already had a cat flap from a brief stint with a feline named Muffin when I was young, so he can’t deny all the facilities are there.

      ‘You okay, cat?’ I say, solemnly, unsure of my method of approach.

      He gives me a certain kind of fuck you look and takes a seat on my ankle. The naming issue is becoming a significant one for him, I infer, so I set off on a trial run.

      ‘You okay… Dean?’ I say. Nothing.

      ‘You okay… Chris?’ Nonplussed.

      ‘You fine, Mr… Chair,’ I say, having looked around for inspiration.

      ‘You okay, Mark?’ A meow. This confirms a suspicion I had earlier. I knew he was a Mark.

      I thought of the name as soon as I saw him and considered how interesting it could be to try to dictate a story about his life if it were so. ‘Can I ask you a question, Mark? Question-mark.’ One section would go. I wonder whether technology has developed enough for an app to decipher this sentence. I realise it’s an odd thought but I have copious alone time and the mind does wander. An excess of which is exactly what Mark is supposed to combat.

      I stare at him and urge myself to connect. It would be good for me, Ryans had promised.

      ‘Can I ask you a question, Mark?’

      I take his quiet as compliance.

      ‘What sort of person has that many fireworks in the boot of their car?’

      He breathes out and deflates almost entirely. I jettison the possibility of conversation and do my exercises. He watches disapprovingly, silently judging me with his smart arse eyes, waving at me mockingly every so often with his smart arse tail, tasting every bit of himself with his smart arse tongue.

      The buzz of seeing the car go up took a while to fade. To our surprise, when we reported it, what came out was the truth: ‘We saw a car on our way home and thought it seemed suspicious. I was a