Twice The Speed of Dark. Lulu Allison

out, painfully slow and thin, taut with misery. Endless. The wine, a second bottle, is a companion but not a help. Several times she picks up her phone, nearly calls Michael, nearly calls Sophie. Nearly calls the police, because surely it can’t be right. But they have said all there is for them to say. Their part in the story is over – unless she does kill him. She thinks she hasn’t the courage. Though he killed without courage, so perhaps it could be done. But no, she does not have the courage to be a murderer. Can it really be that nothing but her own death will scrape away the knowledge that sits in her now? It sits as easy as a penny on a plate. This fact has no problem with its own weight, meaning or power. It is just there. It is not damaged by its own existence. It is as bland a thing in its own terms as any other fact. The table is made of wood. It is cold outside. This ring belonged to her mother. Caitlin is dead. The man who killed her is alive. She knows because she saw him today.

      She cools her forehead on the window, staring out into the dark of night. She is sour with wine, her head fat, her body hollow. Torment is exhausting. She thinks again of calling Michael, but does not. She has been told so many times that she must leave this behind, that she must stop. That it is harmful, pointless, damaging. But they are wrong. There is nothing else. How can there be another way? How could she know that in spite of best intentions, in spite of ground covered, torments ignored, endless therapeutic conversations and bitter arguments, that she is not, after all, prepared for this? That she is not, after all, able to let it go? She cannot live with the knowledge that he is free, in all likelihood a few miles from here. This life, this land, this piece of the world. She wishes with impotent storm fury that she could prevent it.

      She bangs her forehead gently on the cold glass pane, rehearsing her arguments with the people she will not summon. She does not want to add anger with them to what she is struggling to negotiate now. She does not want to be shepherded and cajoled into a way of thinking that they make for her, a badly tailored coat that sits uncomfortable and restricting on her eventually passive shoulders. She does not want to be told that she is unreasonable, or that time will help, or that wishing him dead helps no one. She does not want to be told what is good for her. Move on – to what? There is no ‘on’. There is no forwards or next step or smart move.

      It is as if the remnants of Caitlin are being pulled from her. She has not learned a way to think of her daughter that is not framed by the disaster of her death. She is haunted to her core by that. But do not attempt to take it from her, because in that haunting is the ghost of the person she loves most in all of the world. Shreds of her beautiful, beautiful girl. She holds them tight and, though she cannot look at them, though she hides them, do not try to take them from her.

      The evening spins out and on, wraps tight around her, stretches back out. She drinks more. The house is overly hot. She must have turned up the heating. She is sitting on the floor, awkward in an odd gap next to an armchair. The curve of the armrest is in the wrong place for her head, so she lies down, an unfamiliar spot in the shadow of lamplight. There are at least seven places to sit and she is on the floor in a wedged corner. She pulls a cushion down and under her head, clasps her hands loosely in front of her face, touching on the skirting board and the bridge of her nose. She wonders if she might see a mouse. She is in the mouse’s territory after all, not her own. There is something comforting about being in the wrong place when all that is inside is wrong too. She feels the chair at her back, pictures her bumpy spine against the nap of rich brown fabric, the recently fashionable colour of hot chocolate, milky mauve-brown. Her thoughts are scratchy enough for pointless observations to mix in with the messy heartache. And she is quite drunk too. She imagines a mouse looking at the back of her head from around one of the fat chrome chair legs, enough animal intuition to understand she cannot possibly be a threat. But curious; if she were a mouse, she thinks she would be curious. The woman from Baghdad is there, sitting in the chair, trailing her arm over the edge and resting her hand on Anna’s shoulder. She sits, Anna lies, drifts away.

      ‘We are both lost,’ the woman says. The mouse sighs, and says, ‘It seems so.’

      *

      One time ago, I saw him. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I hadn’t grasped all my story, his fatal role, though I knew fear and fury; I knew all the things that face meant to me. But I didn’t know what I saw, and as I pulled it behind me, my trailing tail of shredded story, I didn’t know when I had seen it. I had a new memory: me, suddenly painfully full of my old self, tucked alone in the corner of a room of men, including the one who killed me. The feelings pulsed through me, iterations of new and remembered fear fanning outwards to the far reaches, to be kept forever in the waxy record of waveforms etched through the blackness. For me, the room pulsed with it, as if I had after all found myself on a sand dune and the sun’s heat was making sight shimmer. I felt myself move with it; now such dances work through me always. But the men in the room, though they moved before me, were steady within themselves. Movement started inside them, did not land from afar or from the memory of harm. The old man with a hand that shook and a head that nodded as he sat before his tray, even he was subject to movement that originated, though from the betrayal of disease, from within himself.

      I rode the seasick waves, the soul-sick fear, until I could accommodate them. I watched Ryan. He looked the same, though he was more contained. Moderated. It was as if he had tidied himself away and was trying to hold the cupboard door shut from the inside. He was wary, watchful. He was tidying away inside too – fear lurked squashed and hidden, forced into a small dark space as though not to see it would lessen its horrible power. Though adeptly he had created fear in me, he had learned nothing of its effect until now. Fear had flown out from his fists, released too quickly to be understood. But there he was, sitting at a table of six other men, learning the opposite of what his instincts thus far had prompted – learning not to be seen. Learning the love of the commonplace, unremarkable ordinariness. When we met, I thought he shone, but here he was, his gold transmuted in reverse, to beige, then the subtle grey of humble woodland creatures not troubled by the desire to shine.

      This memory, of course, came from the time after my death, the time of his imprisonment. It took me a while to understand it. So many little fragments. But I am starting to join them up.

      I have been back since. Another of those times when I sensed that my anger had pulled me in an arc back towards the Earth. I knew with a tremendous thrill that my thoughts had worked on my trajectory; I was, unaccountably at my own behest, heading toward s an encounter with my past. In a delicious rush of anger I swooped towards him again.

      The rush stopped abruptly. I pooled once more in a frustrating manner, as if drugged, conscious of what was around but unable to direct my gaze or order thoughts. He was there on a narrow bed. I could hear his thoughts, his memories – mutterings, anyway. How he muttered his dissatisfactions, his fears and worries, how he tried to tidy it all away, to stop thinking of how afraid he was of this or that man. Bigger, bolder men than him. Men whose violence worked its way out on other men. Men who understood violence without the certainty of weakness in another. How I tried to swim through the seas of his fear, to stir up the waves, make a storm of fear to savour as I watched him cower. But I do not know if I stirred even the cobwebs in his cell.

      *

      Anna wakes, slumped in the corner, feeling as though her bones have been turned upside down. A badly fitting skeleton. She is confused, then thinks, with the horror of fresh news, that Caitlin is dead. The thought batters her, and she panics. Slowly she realises that she has known this for ten years. She wrangles the misery back into the soles of her feet, or the points of her elbows. Back to the place to which it had been banished. All the lights in the house are still on, it is dark outside, and the curtains are open. She feels so very exposed. She eases herself awkwardly up from the floor, the house warm but no longer warm enough. She closes the curtains against the black slides of night. She pulls a warm shawl around her aching shoulders, sinks into the sofa. What is she to do?

      She