Twice The Speed of Dark. Lulu Allison

      Chapter 2

      A new day. A new uncertain morning. Time itself holds a danger, an anniversary. Christmas a few weeks away; soon after that, the day of her daughter’s death, followed by the day of her birth. Dead on the eve of her twentieth birthday. The wrapped present from Anna and Michael sat on the kitchen table, useless and powerful, until Michael flung it into the woods in a fury of grief.

      A new day. The calendar squares reduce by one again, pulling her closer to a perilous destination. She would set a path that scraped as wide an arc as the radius would allow; she would choose a distant view. She would bind herself to a long, slow curve. But time ropes her to the smallest circle, the closest path, and drags her, keelhauls her round the sun.

      Searching for distraction, she picks up her phone, checks emails and messages. There is a text from Sophie, her dear friend, saying Anna had left behind a cardigan after dinner the evening before. It was a happy gathering, perhaps designed by Sophie to fill these awkward days that loom before Anna. Sophie’s husband, Brian, cooked a wonderful meal, though Anna wished they didn’t need to talk about it quite so much. Over many such evenings, they had all made it clear they admired his prowess in the kitchen, but Brian never got tired of eliciting praise for his latest culinary adventure. Tony and Simon were there as well, full of the joys of a trip to stay with friends in Oslo. Moira, whom Anna had worked with at the university, gave the usual persuasive and enthusiastic chat about Anna writing something. She meant well, Anna knew, but she found it annoying, the way Moira made it sound as if writing a book was a sacred duty, or as if she thought it might save her. Anna had toyed with the idea of turning research into a book perhaps, because she missed working, being involved with something. But she could never find a beginning, and nothing had ever begun.

      Anna replies to Sophie’s message, saying, without a time or date, that she will call in for her cardigan. There are several messages and texts awaiting a response, from Michael, her ex-husband. She knows what he wants because he has been talking about it for a long time. He talks with blunt vigour, persuasive enthusiasm. He talks so as to take up the space that might otherwise be occupied by Anna’s doubt and resistance. He offers up the counterarguments before he stakes out the plans. Because he knows she will be unwilling; he has as much experience of her as she does of him, after all. What he does not know is that for her, his enthusiasm is not a warm persuasion but a bully’s cudgel. His expansiveness sweeps those around him into his own plans without him noticing whether that is where they want to be. He wants to make a celebration of what for her is buried torment – twisted midnight fear and sudden, solitary afternoon panic. He wants to celebrate this impending anniversary; he wants to celebrate a life whose absence Anna has still not learned to calibrate. Her strategy, once more, is avoidance.

      Michael’s emotions open up, pop like crackers, corn firing in a buttery pan. He makes himself bigger, bursts with a thousand tiny breaks, confronts head-on and wails. He breaks himself to be whole again. He seems whole now, and maintains his wholeness by revisiting, re-breaking himself in small ways. He thinks Anna can do the same. She cannot. If he wins the battle to take her with him, she will not be able to skate a wide arc. She will have to get close, a footpad’s gentle creep, Grandmother’s Footsteps across the tarmac that has been laid down over the years. Traversed in any direction it still represents a passage to the same destination. This is no playground game. It is enough that she knows what is there – does she need to tap it on the shoulder so it turns round and once more becomes the wolf? The wolf that, granted, though it may be tamer with age, is still a dark predator loping always just off the path.

      Anna sighs, turning away from the anxiety these thoughts feed. There are three empty pages in her green exercise book, room for a few more, but she will need to buy a new book when she goes shopping later in the afternoon, so she can continue with her accounting.

       2 December

      A boat has capsized, trying to reach Italy. Most of the people were rescued, but no one seems sure how many were not.

      A woman. Her hand aches from writing; she takes a break from marking papers. A break from the words words words, repeated ideas and occasional inspiring shimmers of illuminated thought glinting in the shoals. To one degree or another, she is always tired. But whatever the tiredness of hand and eye, she puts all of her mind into building up her students, constructing them in an act of will, despite their dragging self-deprecation. She hopes to hold them up long enough to inspire, long enough for them to catch sight of themselves, so that her timid, talented girls might say ‘look at me!’ and in a breath, take over from her. For she knows that what she does with wearying determination, they could, by rights and with a flick of will, do with immaculate ease for themselves.

      But, war began, her husband was killed, the girls have stopped coming to learn, there is no longer a school for them to learn in. She has a cousin who married and moved to Hamburg. She hoped she might be able to find her way to her.

      Anna closes the book, now full. She puts on her coat and goes out to the car. The car seat is cold, the steering wheel too. She turns on a stale blast of heat. Prehistoric heat, stolen from the ancient, only source, sun. Heat that fell on different shores millions of years ago, growing bodies and shells, to be spilled from the vents as a quick, uncomfortable blast smelling of plastic. How many tiny translucent bodies grew in the tepid salty shallows, whisker limbs gently probing the tide harvest, to make her warm this cold winter morning? She reverses out onto the lane, as always empty of other traffic. There might occasionally be the odd horse with a briskly effective rider, usually Marjorie with her straight back and empire-era opinions, or one of the athletic girls from the other side of the village. John Farnsworth on his tractor, willing to exchange no more than a wave in all these years of occasional passing. A wave not accompanied by a look – he knows she is there; he doesn’t need to look at her to prove it. They have spoken actual words perhaps three times, in the pub. Michael used to try quite hard to befriend John – he tries subtly to conquer everyone, she thinks, dismissively – but she is satisfied enough with a nod and a wave. She embarrasses John in some way, which does not make a basis for friendship.

      She drives the slender lane down the edge of the chalk hills. At the bottom of the steep escarpment it meets a busier road. The plane stretches out, flat winter fields gradually making way for the city of Oxford. It is early enough to find a central parking space. She drives into the middle of the city, nosing the car down into a small underground car park near the shopping area. She gets out to buy her ticket, looks attentively at a man locking up his car. He is tall, taller than her, well made. She feels a longing that she thought had emigrated. Sourness that she does well to keep outside of her waking mind is there too. It has been an age since longing led anywhere. It has been a long time. She thinks she is happy with that; she thinks that this absence is what she has chosen. She turns abruptly from her thoughts. Town and people pass her by, a new briskness in her step telling her that she is busy, that she has not felt longing for a man in a blue jumper, locking the door of his car in the small car park. She accidentally imagines how his shoulders might feel under the expensive commonplace blue of the jumper, how it might feel to lean into that shoulder. Impatiently she tears up that picture, screws it into a tight ball and briskly returns to her dishonestly busy life.

      In the bookshop she lingers, fingers trail and touch, flip covers to read reviews; all is pauses. Towards the till is a table covered with blank books, empty pages, journals and sketchbooks. One, covered in suede-like fabric, is the colour of bluebells. A picture of woods opens before her, the glory of April, the beautiful freedom of youth. A carpet of bluebells, the bitter sap that stays on fingers in the used-to-be time of gathering huge jars of heavenly blue. A childhood spent in chalk hills and beech woods, when late spring turns the woodland into a vessel of cathedral light. Her fingers smooth across and drop to open the cover. Bookshops invite touch quietly, the gentle ease of opening a book that you might not buy. This one has blank, off-white paper and look-at-me stitching, a book that self-consciously implies the hand that made it. She likes the heavy curve it makes in its soft covers, the petal-smoothness of the pages, the weight of it. She buys it then leaves, feeling the book banging against her hip in the large bag hanging on a long strap over her shoulder.

      Wishing