Twice The Speed of Dark. Lulu Allison

walking in patient companionship with the beloved old man. He had been showing him a new knife, that most prized of possessions for a young boy. His knife will be picked up and vehemently cherished by one of the men who tries and forever fails to make sense of what was left in this broken arena.

      A happy man, energetic and sprightly. He chats cheerily with the various food sellers, many he knows by name. He is on his way to a bookshop to collect an order, and plans to get flowers for his wife on the way home, to celebrate the birth of another grandchild. He tells the vendors of his good fortune. A girl with her dark hair neatly held under a pearl-grey headscarf. Her young and secret heart, her loves and friendships, her talent for maths. The girl stands in the cold, silent and afraid, framed by gateposts of beech. Anna tells her not to worry, she will be all right. She wishes she knew it to be true. A man whose life spins out before him, a mosaic of impenetrable design. A colourful, senseless, perhaps beautiful pattern. Fragments and tiles arranged, it seems to him, by another, mightier hand. He too is dead, his patterns dark forever.

      A young woman, nineteen. There she is; she tries to sneak in, disguised a little here and there. But she is too familiar, too close. Her long limbs, her eyes the indeterminate colour of a river. She bubbles up through the dead before Anna’s eyes.

      Anna stops, too close to summoning from memory rather than imagination. The shock of seeing Ryan has taken a sledgehammer to her defences. Damage has been done, walls are breached, doors cracked. Caitlin flits through the smallest chink, a wraith, a twist of pain.

      Anna leans on a broad trunk, glad of its steadying girth. She focuses on the tree beneath her suddenly feeble hand. The tree has decades of practice in not losing its place, its place right there, that piece of earth and that piece of sky, roots and canopy held together by the steady trunk. She leans in, borrowing its expertise in being still, solid, placed, marshalling her evasions. She swallows, waiting until her mind is clear of trespassing memory, concentrating on the solid print of bark under her hand, pressing hard for more steadying contact. After a small while she peels her gloved palm from the kind tree and once more resumes her communion with the dead of her own reckoning.

      *

       I sift the ribbons, follow – feel along them. I try to find the one that links the beginning to the end. I imagine the change of colour, the loss of lustre, the fray and warp and pull. It started so well. Golden. I have never felt happier than during that golden summer infused with the blessing of love, overwhelmed with it. Gilded months of clarity and certainty, crystalline, languid and plentiful. I still long for that. Not for the love of Ryan. For the love of love. I could still stroke that soft, golden streamer for the beauty of it, even knowing how knotted and ugly it became. But he made it so. He was the stain and the fray. Love is not a destiny that fulfils itself; it is a gift to be born and cherished. Love was given to me and Ryan as a gift. He beat it into a curse. Perhaps it is only us, the cursed, who serve out death in this spinning, chaotic reel through the blackness. Maybe death for others is a serene, wholesome arc. Sleepily adrift, they disappear in bliss. Perhaps.

       I brush past another sometimes, but they spin like me. I cannot gather enough of myself in to ask them what they know. I don’t even know, were I to find the mouth to speak, the lungs and throat to make the sounds, if sound is possible. Perhaps there are ways, new ways I will learn after millennia of spinning silently, new ways to make communion with another. Perhaps there will be things shared again. I sense them; we mingle, combine, rush through each other as we spin out alone to yet another far reach or dark and distant corner. Who knows if we yet have the option to communicate.

       I feel my fingerless way along the knotted snags, the gnarled and stained bandage, gruesome tapes that loop round and lead backwards from my ugly death. Ribbons threaded through wooden hearts. Crime scenes. I find my way backwards so that I may tell forwards. Memories can be hard to find; stories and understandings shiver, slide into view and are lost again. I know it is all there, and I will find my tale. Though it is a labour, a stagger up black, vacuum-formed mountains, pulling hand over hand through gullies carved into the cosmos, harsh channels sharper and more lacerating than any earthbound stone. I pull against the blackness that would once more fling me out past the centurion path of comets, further than the spacebound eyes of man can reach. I don’t want to disappoint, but there is nothing to tell. There is more of the same. There is still no place in which I may claim to be. I don’t want to disappoint, but I have seen nothing that seems to be a heaven. Only Earth, with her kind sky and her care-giving cradle of gravity and her beautiful sun. How blessed I am when I find her again. How hard I cling.

       I will try to tell it all, how it all happened. But you will have to be patient. I cannot say which bits I will be able to find, which will be torn again from my grasp before I can account for them, which I will miss altogether. We may have to wait for the giddy carousel to swoop round once more. I will try to make my remembered fingers grasp the streamer, pull it out of the blackness for you to see.

      Chapter 4

      Anna’s occupation with the shock of seeing Ryan, the narrowing and souring of view that his reappearance initiated, excludes other concerns entirely. For a couple of days she thinks of nothing outside of her home, nothing connected to the rest of her everyday life. She completely forgets about a meeting in London until a reminder on her phone triggers a jolting return to the concerns of the present rather than the enormous abstract legacies of the past. The meeting was arranged some weeks ago, not in deference to her own empty days but to suit the busy diary of Eva. They were meeting to discuss an offer made to Anna by a former colleague, Callum. Anna and Callum worked together at the university for over a decade. He moved into another role as the director of a small public gallery some years ago. Soon after she retired last year, Callum approached her casually regarding the possibility of her working alongside Eva as a trustee of the gallery. Two months ago he called her with a concrete proposal. Anna liked Callum but found him irritating. She was flattered by the offer and felt herself to be in need of worthwhile occupation. She knew she needed purpose, and though she was ambivalent, lacking her once clear interest in the art world, a world she had occupied her whole professional life, she was prepared to go along with meeting Eva, whom she admired.

      Though the weary anxiety of the last few days drove the meeting from her mind, she thinks hopefully that perhaps this is a worthwhile endeavour after all, a reinvigoration of old passions, a chance to invest in a new purpose. She tries to lift herself from the muddiness of the last week, going to bed early, with cocoa instead of whisky.

      After a brisk breakfast she dresses in clothes that help her define a sense of her own clear outline and she leaves for London. She turns out of the lane and heads for the motorway. First, she will catch up with her old friend Kay, who lives in Chiswick, where Anna can park and leave the car. Kay greets her warmly. They drink weak coffee, chat about what they remember of their time as students and as fledgling professionals. They fill out some of the details of what they do with themselves since they last were together, the shapes of lives; they spin the telling out for two pale cups. Kay is affectionate and welcoming, invites Anna to stay, to come whenever she likes, have dinner later. But she is accidentally intrusive. She talks of a time when they were closer, when Anna was happy, with a young family and an exciting job in a small commercial gallery. She knows that things changed for Anna and is warm and caring, but she talks of Caitlin too easily, perhaps thinking that Anna will enjoy her recollections. The two women have become distant enough for Kay not to have understood Anna’s dark reticence. It makes her seem crass and insensitive, when really compassion and kindness are in her words. Anna tells her if she has time after her meeting she will return for an evening meal, but she knows as she says this that she will invent an excuse that requires her to get back home, send a guilty text from the car, slink away without knocking on Kay’s door. Anna is glad she is parked a short walk away.

      Trampled wet leaves on the quiet London streets pattern the pavement like a grey-and-brown guesthouse carpet. She walks to the station and takes a train to the middle of the city. She walks across the river towards the Tate, a chimney, a box, a busy hulk. She has some time to kill so traipses dutifully through the