Being Here (7 page)

‘Do you think we would have been friends in the past?' I continue. ‘Or is our friendship now just another consequence of ageing? That we share the same space and have no choice.'

She thinks about this. Another thing I admire about Lucy. She won't give the unconsidered response. She knows I deserve better.

‘I don't know,' she says finally. ‘Maybe not. Does it matter, Leah?'

‘No,' I admit. ‘Probably not. It's just that I get strange thoughts, Lucy. I get such strange thoughts.'

She considers me for a moment. ‘I told you. You've read too many books.'

Yes. I have read many. My mind drifts and I am reminded again of Adam, how he appeared to me in the barn all those years ago. He wore clothes I had never seen and therefore could not imagine. Adam talked in ways I had never heard. He used words as old as time. How could I have created that? If we spin fiction, we must do so out of materials we have to hand, and my reading then was in its infancy. They were my salad days of literature. Looking back, Adam appears to me now as a transfigured boy from the fiction of the fifties. But when I brought him into being, the words that gave those boys life had not been written.

So how can I explain him?

I have a theory and it is plausible. As far as it goes.

I view the past through the strange kaleidoscope of time and see it distorted, as we all do. Yet I know I was a child driven and derided by loneliness. It is natural to fill our particular vacuums with the stuff of the imagination. I made Adam out of need. I made him well. And he survived, became someone who didn't need my belief to continue his existence. He chose his own path. He was like a child who had grown and taken on his own identity, his own independence, as children must.

Is that possible?

It is a good question.

Increasingly, I believe that when I have poured my story into the child, I will find the answer.

Perhaps.

CHAPTER 4

M
Y DREAMS ARE THIN.

I see Adam step down from the cross above mother's bed. His forehead is dotted with crimson. The dog. What is the name of the dog? He twitches, then is still. It is an electrical charge. There is a burning smell. Drool, thick as syrup, stains my dress. An apple. Green and polished, reflecting the sky. I have to look closely to spot the worm. It wriggles like my thoughts.

Arms stretched to the side. A diver gathering himself. All the world spins into that moment, the split second before the plunge. A spin of images. The face of a woman. She is dressed in black. Features are sharp, carved by severity. Only the eyes. Only the eyes. Something is there, a memory of what used to be. This woman is everything to me and I am something to her. She fades, churns, becomes lost in the maelstrom.

Faces, places, sounds. Some are now. Some are then. I cannot sift them. One face looms above me. It has red hair and I should know it. I'm sitting in a dusty corner, reading a book. The words don't make sense. That is Mrs Hilson over by the table. She is old. One of us is old. She looks into my eyes and her mouth moves, but if there is sound it is blotted by the air. Red hair. Something snakes from my arm. There is a container above me. Snakes. The garden. Apples. Green and polished, reflecting the sky. I have to look closely to spot the worm. It wriggles like my thoughts. There is a book.

‘It's okay, Leah. You're fine.'

Whose are those words? Are they directed at me? Leah. That is my name. I grab hold. My name is a life jacket, or a thin strip of wood afloat on the choppy seas of my mind. I must keep hold. But there is a whirlpool and it sucks me down. I cannot resist it. What is the name of the dog and who is the boy and there is a woman and there are fingers around her throat and she chokes and is afraid …

* * *

A different woman, with clouds for hair. I lie in a bed and she holds my hand. I think she is my friend. I hear words.

‘I am here, Leah.'

‘You are going to be fine.'

‘Can you tell me my name?'

There is much more. Sometimes I try to reply, but I don't know where words have gone. They are buried and though I search and search they elude me. I think days pass. There is also the woman with red hair. Most of the time I stare at the ceiling. It has stains that make patterns. They appear to be telling me a story, but I can't identify with the characters. I am so tired …

‘Do you remember me, Mrs C?'

I have to think for a while, but it comes to me.

‘You're Carly,' I say. ‘You've been listening to my story.'

She smiles. I remember the bright braces, the flash of blue and the dog-eared photograph. They were part of the cascade and tumble in my mind, but now I separate them, see them in context.

‘You had me worried for a while there.'

‘You shouldn't worry,' I say. My words are emaciated. While I've been away, everything has lost weight. ‘Worry about the living.'

‘Hey, Mrs C. Feeling sorry for yourself?' Her voice scolds, but I'm too old to be punished by people anymore. Particularly by a child barely out of the womb.

Memories are a different matter.

I suppose feeling sorry for myself is the way it would sound. But it is not self-pity I feel. It is exhaustion. And something more. Impatience. I am a shadow in the land of the vibrant. Time will not lend me substance. It will relentlessly strip it away. Why? Why bother when what I suffer from cannot be cured, can only degenerate? They say that when you face a momentous journey, the anticipation is worse than the travel itself. That it is better to get it over with.

For once, they do not lie.

‘I've been rambling,' I say. The girl doesn't reply, but then it wasn't a question. I've been lost. Now I've returned, but the journey has made both the present and the past vaguely unfamiliar. I'm caught between two worlds and can't fit comfortably in either. ‘How long have I been gone?'

She twists the metal in her eyebrow.

‘Not sure. I think … three days.'

‘Prop up my pillows, please,' I say. She does and I catch the sharp smell of young flesh. It reminds me of apples and salt water. She offers her arm as I wrestle myself into a more comfortable position. My neck hurts. Most of me hurts. Carly lifts a cup of water to my lips and helps me drink. It softens the sharp edges of my throat.

‘Do you want me to continue with the story?' I croak.

‘Hey, no. No. I just came in to see how you were getting on. You need your rest, Mrs C.'

I do not want to rest. I tell her so. What I don't tell her are my reasons. One is obvious. My moments of lucidity are becoming fewer and I worry that soon I won't be able to find the words. They'll slip and squirm. Or they'll dance in my head, like motes of dust, and never form pictures. This story needs to be told. It has been buried too long and I think … No. Think is far too strong a word. It is not even a feeling. But I cannot rid myself of this pale belief: that something will be achieved when my story is brought from the dark corners of my mind and placed into another's. Something special.

I also believe something else. That the end of the story will also be my end. As if I have been hanging on to life for this one purpose, that as I turn the last page so I will reach my own blank sheet where all words are spent.

I do not tell the girl this. She wouldn't understand and it would frighten her. Anyway, she has already sniffed at my self-pity. And I do not want to burden her with the notion that her ears or her blinking machine are signposts to death. Nor would I risk her refusal to listen because of misplaced guilt. Because I know, with illogical logic, that this story must be told.

‘Are you sure you're up to it, Leah?'

My nurse is bustling around the bed, tidying, fluffing pillows that don't need fluffing. Her hair is alive against the white walls of my room. It glows like fire. I can't quite place her name. I will later when I have stopped trying. Memories are best approached this way, kept in the furthest reaches of your perception, glimpsed from the corner of your eyes.

‘I'm sure,' I say.

My nurse and the girl exchange glances.
What can we
do with her?
they seem to say. Then the child with the hidden story takes the machine from her bag, places it on my bedside table. She leans back in her chair, curls her legs beneath her. I lean back into my too-fluffed pillows and close my eyes.

The story takes shape, but I cannot fill the character. The girl I was is far away in time.

CHAPTER 5

T
HE GIRL KEPT THE
boy away for hours.

She fanned the flames of her indignation, made the heat of her anger into a barrier. But all fuel must be consumed and she hadn't the will or energy to replenish it. As day faded into night, he returned and she was glad. They sat side by side against the padlocked barn door, legs stretched out before them. The boy put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. Outside, the dog whined. She rested her head against the boy and they were silent.

Shadows lengthened and the interior of the barn changed shape. The familiar bulk of a packing case became inked in, forms merged together. Night changed the scene, invested it with mystery, charged it with menace. Her eyes were drawn to the stain on the wood opposite, the site of her father's last thought before explosion and metal blew it out of existence.

What was that thought? Suddenly the girl was filled with a hunger to know. Memories of her father were diluted almost to nothing. She remembered faded nights and a voice that grew from darkness. Faint at first, tapping at the door of sleep, forcing admission. Sitting in bed, a blanket wrapped around her, listening to the discord of words from a buried room. Her father, muttering sounds that refused to resolve into meaning. Except …

From Hell.

From Hell.

A litany that punctuated a rising pitch of agony. And she knew that whatever came from Hell tortured her father in his sleep, pinned him to a sweat-soaked mattress. His words tumbled now, rose in volume, were studded with screams. And her mother. Her mother's voice murmuring comfort, a quiet counterpoint to the crescendo of terror. The girl stared at the void of night, held her blanket closer, waited for Hell to make its final attack, as it always did. Only then would it retreat.

The assault culminated in a scream that chilled her blood and made her flesh crawl. Silence. And then sobs that soaked through walls, her mother's soothing murmurs. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Until the night absorbed the dying whispers and she lay down, stared through the window, waited for sleep to creep back, reclaim those it had deserted.

From Hell.

The distorting mirror of memory?

Perhaps.

All people were stories. This was something the girl understood. It was the fabric of her world. But for the first time in her short life the girl considered this: that when people were gone, gone too were their narratives. Some ghosts might linger in the memories of those left behind, but they are doomed to further fade in time, as all must fade. Thereafter, nothing. She felt the ache of not knowing. She longed to visit the page of his mind and read the story written there.
A glimpse into his world
, she thought. That would do. That would suffice.