Twice The Speed of Dark. Lulu Allison

always does. She is to wind down and banish, hide within her the ragged wreck of her true self. So she gets up, runs a hot bath. She forces the dullness of the regime back into command. She soaks away the physical pain with hot water and ibuprofen. She sets her jaw. It is early enough to call night-time, late enough to be a new day. The bath is refilled with hot water several times. Even in this unhappy state, she relishes the delicious curl of heat from the new water. It pacifies, aids the process of restoration. She reminds herself that the only thing new is that she has seen that man, she has seen Ryan. She knew, had known, that in theory it was possible, but she never allowed herself close enough to make preparations. Knowing, incontrovertibly, that he was free was devastating. It destroyed a decade of heavily constructed strategies, rough-hewn and massy, relentlessly applied. When the strategies fell, they tore her open. And in the middle she found the thing she could not hide, the thing she thought that, against the odds, she had hidden – the absence of her girl. Still, she does not want to see that tenderness, the obscene, unviable frailty, tender as a featherless baby bird on a pavement.

       If I could only stay still.

      Understanding shivers, glimpsed briefly between slanted, slippery planes, then slides away. Understanding skids, finding no purchase on memories so faintly grasped. Understandings are slender and slippery, fine satin ribbons that slide through my fingerless hands. Just as part of the story seems about to shimmer into place, I am let go again. Upside downside, inside outside – it is any way round in death.

      Gravity has disowned me. I had not grasped what refuge she gave. I had not understood her subtle care. I have not been able to hold on as she let go. It takes enormous will to hold back the blackness when gravity is no longer your ally. She let go her embrace, and I am pulled away to tumble, inchoate, through the eternal dark.

       Gravity is the child of older powers. Those ancient parents, they have relieved their daughter of her duty to care for me. She no longer intercedes to keep me whole, to hold me. They are my guardians now. I hurtle and shift in this new vastness, an expression of direction rather than form. I see the patterns I describe without understanding the design. Sometimes, in the shimmer and the shift, I start to see the patterns of my own longed-for story, threading through the ancient blackness of my new and prehistoric path.

      If I am lucky I graze the Earth, with her soft cushion of sky. Gravity holds me briefly once more, her love not after all gone.

      When I can hold onto the Earth for a little while, I am full of nostalgic longing to stretch out my feeling body, to match her surfaces with my own. The ground is still a memory even as I am close enough to lie on it. I miss my body. I miss the body of the Earth. The soft moisture of grass over the muddy squelch of winter. Or to lie in the sticks and leaves of summer woodland. To have the skin that would be marked by sticks and leaves, marked with gentle indents. The ground scratchy and dry above a layer of secret damp. The runnels of bark under a pressed palm. A cool slab of porcelain at my back, still warming in a newly run bath. I remember sensations, surface memories. I try to find the memories of mind, turn the threads into something that my fingerless hands, my imaginary hands, can hold. A story that my spooling soul can reel in and tell.

      I see them, now and then, my loved ones. I see that they get older; it is the only mark I have of the passing of time. I see my family. And him. I see from the marking of time on them that I spent what must have been years in a chaotic, fragmented dream, glittering here and there in the dark. For years, a dark tumbling glimmer, fine soot dust down a chimney, or harsh shards of smashed smoked glass.

       As I flounder in these timeless fields, I gather chaffs of memory, try to find in the slender harvest an understanding of why Ryan did what he did. What made him able? What made his harm? I can’t be sure I know why I died, but I want that story. I want to tell it. Why did he kill me ? Why did I let him? How did I come to let myself be orchestrated by him so fatally? How did I come to be killed in a way that would have seemed risible, impossible, were someone to predict it ? I was a girl who knew this right from that wrong, a girl who had a clear way forward s. I was not lacking in self-belief or self-determination. I was a girl who, laughing with my friend, could not believe the flip-flopping foolishness undertaken by others in the name, apparently, of love. Now I understand – there is another kind of strength in losing oneself . A different strength is required for that self-abandonment. But it is not a strength worth cultivating.

      I became a girl who told lies to herself, learned them so deeply and secretly that it has taken the unrave l ling intrusion of the blackness to find them out. I don’t share blame for my death, no I don’t. But I became part of what let me die. He is the one who did that. Implicating me in my own death. That shame I put on him too.

       I need to find the story, to find what brought me here. I think I have enough to start.

      Chapter 3

      For two days Anna stays at home, ignores the phone. Ignores the voice that, like a concerned friend, suggests she call someone. Anna dismisses this friend and does not call others. She pulls curtains across the short days of winter, exhausts herself with afternoon and late-night drinking. The clatter of television and the taut thrum of a headache distract her as she writes in the bluebell-coloured book or gazes in mute distraction out of the window. She avoids the fatal impact of her thoughts by breaking them into small pieces, a burying, weighty gravel of fragments. If only she could block out the world, achieve some form of oblivion. The seedy realm of daily drug use promises a reliable form of unconsciousness, absence from here. That strategy provides a good thick and grimy wall between all of this and all of that, no details too distinguishable. Tempting maybe – but who is she kidding? The occasional heavy hand on the whisky pour, as evidenced by the last few days’ headache, is as far as she has ever ventured in that direction. She is too conventional, too afraid of death and too fearful of breaking laws, putting this reliable form of oblivion beyond her reach. Her imagination offers a retreat of sorts, a world where the sorrows of others require her notice and her compassion. She finds relief in offering them that small care, in wandering the now-familiar paths she has made, walking the woods, telling and retelling herself their lives. She retreats into the world of her shades, imagines how their lives would be if she had invented them as living people, not markers of the dead. There is at least space and calm in that sad realm. She ventures out to the woods, kept safe in their company from being haunted by her own memories.

      The day is crisp and cold. The air is brittle, frozen thin, the tree trunks like metal. Victorian cast-iron pillars holding up a shelterless trellised roof. Christmas is nearly here again. Oh God, she wishes there were a hotel underground somewhere. No phone signal, no eyes to meet, no friendly enquiries about well-being and plans for the day. Just reclusive efficiency and a decent restaurant. Just a place to hide. Last year, the card from Michael’s grandchildren (step-grandchildren, though he does not recognise the offset), she struggled not to burn it. What was he thinking? She doesn’t think she has even met them.

      She pulls away, sets her jaw again. Clenches her teeth and walks faster. There is a tart silence in the woods in this cold, broken only by small snaps of twig and freeze-dried leaves underfoot. Nothing, as she stops walking to examine her ankle, turned on a stone. There is pain but no damage. She walks on; leaves break again, small snaps under each step. She fills her thoughts with the people she will write in the new book later in the day. Twenty-nine killed by a suicide bomber. It is too many for her, too gruelling. She knows the limitations of her own accounting. But she sees some of them.

      A girl, slender as willow, about twelve years old, hair that clouds around a face not yet firmed for adulthood. Now she is dressed for school, hair braided and tucked away, neat schoolwork tucked in her bag. She is a diligent worker, when unscripted dreams don’t pull her away out of the classroom window to fly, storyless, with the birds.

      An old man, bent and fragile, curved like the corner of old paper. He walks each day, a slow shuffle through his now-tiny world. One of his grandchildren,