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 collection. It looks tired, more tired than her, even. Twentieth-century art; it should be in a museum, she thinks. She is depressed by it. It does not bode well, she realises, for the prospect of working at a different, smaller gallery. She sees in that moment that her passion for art has gone; what remains are the habits of a working lifetime. For a long time, she has hidden this by railing angrily about the problems with art. Like a failing marriage, she has disguised her own lack of love by finding fault in the other, imagining that her criticism is a form of love, imagining that she attacks because she loves, not because she no longer does.
But she goes to the members’ room for her meeting with the trustee, Eva, a woman whose passion remains vibrant and expansive. When Anna first met her, she used to make quite beautiful paintings, small and entrapping. Now she puts her considerable energy into working with Callum and concurrently running a valiant arts organisation, its many tentacles reaching out to prove that art does not belong in the elitist cul-de-sac it seems to have exerted so much effort to achieve. A good address, exclusive decor, crumbling foundations. Anna is no longer beguiled by the thick cream layer of pseudo-intellect, the slap, the greasy cover-all of invented meaning. For Eva, if you scrape that back, scrape it off, there is a vibrant, animate being, an expressive face underneath. For Anna, now, in her less forgiving years, if that greasy layer is scraped away, all she finds underneath is a plastic pot. Yet she used to love it. She used to believe. Anna feels depressed by her own indifference, feels further trapped by it. She likes Eva very much. She feels momentarily that perhaps she could follow her, let Eva’s spark relight her own ashy fire. But she does not feel that she can stand next to her and match her. Let me watch, not contribute. She tries, out of a sense of duty to some kind of action in life, to keep her options open. But they are done, and she will say no. She is glad to leave.
It rains, small drops that seem to arrive rather than fall, lightly slicking the surfaces, enough to make the dark pavements shine in the street and shop lights. She travels the weary Underground, back to the car, sends her furtive text and leaves with thousands of others, clotting the huge roads out of the city. A slow procession home.
Thoughts drift to the ongoing struggle of finding a way to fill her time. There was hope in the morning that this meeting would signal the beginning of a new phase, time once again filled with worthwhile, distracting work, a mind occupied with problems to be solved and ideas to be made manifest. But she could not summon any enthusiasm. She feels herself to be emptying out, leaving infinite space for further emptiness.
The mantras of remaining occupied, finding things to be interested in, have fallen from the lips of anyone who ever tried to offer solace in the years of Anna’s struggle with grief. She knows that a stoic determination to help her students at the university accomplish their goals provided her with a kind of relief. She knows it would be better for her to find something engaging, exciting even, to occupy her thoughts. At the very least achieving the compensation
