useful. She harasses herself half-heartedly about what the possibilities are. A question of filling up time or of being valuable. A matter of not crumbling to dust with brittle boredom. But she does not attack the problem with any vigour, accepting bleakly that useful may no longer be a thing that she will feel. She feels suddenly very lonely.
The heat of recent anger is cooled to turgid bitterness. She didn’t choose this parched and wasted life. It is the subplot of another story. Small acts of authorship tumbling outwards, unfolding relentlessly and becoming historic, sweeping harms. So much havoc wreaked by such a weak, callow man. And he has paid, what, less than a quarter of the life he had already been given; the rest, the future, comes free. He paid so little it amounts to nothing. The bitterness is poison. She swallows it back down once again, a repeat dose, an endless self-administered prescription.
Traffic slowly snakes along the shiny black road. The rain persists, scattering taillights in red bursts. Wipers whining across the screen labour relentlessly to pull the lights, for brief seconds, back into shape. The traffic creaks, a heavy chain dragged through the country. It is slow but still frenetic.
Anna’s thoughts turn, in a swift move of self-preservation, onto a familiar bypass. The woman from Baghdad with the turquoise trousers and yellow top might be sitting in her garden now, calm under a warm sun, enjoying a moment of quiet. Where is eternity spent otherwise? A calm garden is as good as anywhere. Anna wishes she could join her there. She pictures the house behind her, filled out in idle moments over recent months. She presumes it was most often busy with the noisy love and tumble of family, and that the pleasure of quiet in an empty house is cherished. She regrets knowing nothing about the life of an ordinary, happy, harried woman sitting in a garden in Baghdad. She doesn’t know whether the dangers make ordinary life, ordinary happiness, impossible.
Imaginary friends were not one of Anna’s childhood strategies. She had always been content in her own company; if real friends were not available she did not substitute an invention. A tall girl, self-contained and clever-clogs sharp, in the slipstream of schoolyard life she made durable friendships and sometimes bound less self-possessed girls to her in a way she found quite thrilling. Not a gang that had tangible status in the playground hierarchy of that bare-kneed world, but a small principality, usually ignored, occasionally strategically useful to those more involved with the statecraft games of dominance and triumph. A small principality of which she was definitely the prince. She had no swish or swagger but was forthright, and unafraid of the girls who did. And as so often is the case, these brash and needy girls, unable to manipulate her by invoking fear or envy, were enfeebled and, perhaps, privately somewhat afraid themselves.
The playground consisted of a patch of tarmac next to a Victorian red-brick school building, a patch of grass and a small, ungainly tribe of countryside children with brutal haircuts and noses red from cold. She was a child on her own at home, a child who learned her survival strategies at school. Her sense of outrage and fearlessness served her well, though it was years before she accorded her relatively unscathed school years to those qualities. She just knew that she could set her jaw, withstand people, defy them until they were no longer a threat. She liked that. Though to say she was fearless is an exaggeration. She had the will to force herself to confront wrong and was confident enough to believe she knew when wrong was being done. Where is that Anna now? Packed in the loft with the old blankets and interminable school-years diaries.
She has friends now whom she values and loves, kind people, clever, interesting and valuable people. She has more social life than she knows what to do with. But it is not enough; there is a chasm that they cannot fill. As though to compensate, she is inexorably, greedily drawn to reach for people she has invented. She reaches out as if she wishes to be friends with them. And strangely, these invented people have been accorded most of the power.
Though this woman may not be real, she stands for a real person, someone who was beloved, someone who slept, ate, stretched in the morning, someone who rubbed tired calves, or maybe rolled tired shoulders. A person whose life ended when they were shopping or walking in a market. A person whose life, in the middle of its most ordinary enactment, was taken by somebody who believed they had a right to make that choice. And what of them, the ones who did choose? The cyphers, the fools, the lost-soul assassins who walk into the midst of people like themselves and share out death.
A queasy anxiety laces these thoughts. It is a private affair, death. Not something for casual public consumption. She devoured them, these people, these deaths, for a thought experiment, then finds they have stuck in her, a sickly marzipan weight lying in her belly long after the cake has gone. She has more in common with the politicians who ripped into that country and made a hole big enough for such violence to thrive. Being from the same place, she can make a pretty good guess as to the layout of their gardens, the type of clothes they would wear. Does she have the right to disown that connection and claim affinity with a woman – dark, lovely, a mother and wife – who died in the bombing of a market place?
She feels bound to people whom she invented at the precise moment of their dying, hobbled by a tangled yarn, thickened with complicating knots. It is not, perhaps, so much wanting to become a friend, more that she is compelled to delve, to unravel, to try to understand the meaning of their death. It is uncomfortably presumptuous. She feels the guilt of her Englishness heavy on her shoulders. That young girl in the playground, now a woman, the inheritor, the beneficiary of Empire. A land that she loves and a history of which she is often ashamed.
It is curious, she thinks, the impetus to build empires. The playground games made large, the will to satiate the nag of inadequacy by demonstrating splendid power and dominion. Pared back, greed too is of course revealed. Or, more rarely, need. Need without trade, need without negotiation. Greed without care. The desire to own more than is necessary, more than you have. Does such greed come from a cold climate? Perhaps greed is a harshly rational friend in climates that set by stores for winter. Who can be cavalier about what is modestly enough when they do not know how long the cold will strangle the ground? None of us are such canny storemen that we can lay by exactly what we need. Weather soothsayer, seaweed and sixth sense, predict the winter and measure it in jars of jam and frost-cellar spuds. Excess may be canny in a land with wintertime that will not sustain more than the ounces of sparrows and robins. But the harrowing greed of conquest outstrips any demands of provisioning.
Yes, winter can last longer than you think. Longer than you thought, Anna. What should be carefully packed in the storeroom to ride out a winter such as this? Carefully wrapped, perhaps in a bit of those old spare-room sheets, the faded easy-care remnants of her marriage acting finally as a layer of protection. Somewhere in the garage, or attic, placed on a safe shelf. What is the thing that she should retrieve to sustain her through this long winter stretch? It would need to be a generous, giving thing. A sled, pulled by sapphire-eyed huskies, glorious vitality written by their bark and breath on the cold air, ready to pull her away away away. Away to the dry heat of a Baghdad garden where cold is not numbered amongst the many perils. She would arrive in Baghdad on her husky-pulled sled, the remnants of Arctic frost burning up, giving way to the smoke and dust of fallen buildings. Find that quiet garden, where nothing will go wrong; she will insist on it being safe – the power to control the world exists after all, in the imagination. Sit quietly and ask this woman: what was your life like? What ended when you became one of my ghosts? A chance to question, to uncover the value of a life, not revel in the death of it. And perhaps to be pulled away, distracted from the thin inadequacy of her own existence.
What relief it would be to escape, by hacksaw or key, walk free of the shackles that lead back to Ryan. If she is caught by him she cannot think that he wanted to catch her. They are caught together; the irons of their shared story are not ready to give all their weight to the ground. What act or magic can break such ill-favoured bonds?
That answer must be found another day. The chain of traffic drags across the land, stretches out and eases; she gets slowly closer to home. Eventually the road leaves the street lights behind, narrows between hedges. She shares the journey with
