Tennents under the bench. She fumbles for her phone. Who to call? What to say? She doesn’t know what to do. She might be sick. What does she do now? She can’t think of the person who would be able to answer those questions. She pauses, leaning for support on a lamp post. Her phone is dropped back into the bag around her shoulder. She wants to go home.
Back in the car she is shaky, breathless, uncertain of everything. Her hands in her lap clench the fabric of her clothes. She breathes, rusty-saw breaths that snag. Panic still flutters at the corners of her eyes. Her thoughts stumble, become uncertain, irrational. She is cold with the shock. Eventually she struggles with the car, the ludicrous pillars and turns of the car park. Miraculously she doesn’t catch a cement wall, or bump another car. The car stalls in the traffic, but finally she gets home.
Home, pulled around her like a parka, like a stone wall and a moat. She sits still, though there is a demolition derby crashing under her skin. Rages skid and screech, making tight turns around her organs. She sits it out. She sits still. Night cools further on the windowpanes. She sits at the kitchen table, makes tea, opts instead for wine. The discarded tea strengthens and cools; an oily slick forms on the surface. She thinks about calling Sophie. Sophie has helped her so often with difficult times. Yet she can’t bear to return to that claustrophobic care. She doesn’t want to be in the middle of a web of others. She already can’t move.
There is nothing she can do. Nothing at all to end what is real about this. There is no pretend, no alternative, no strategy that will change the flint-hard, flint-sharp truth. He has come back. He is here. And Caitlin is not. Her girl, her beautiful girl, is gone, and in this world there is still him. A shard of that flint shears off and starts carving her out from the inside. She is being hacked empty in small ugly chops by that savage blade.
The wine is disappearing, from bottle to glass to her. She tries to reason it out. What she wants now more than anything is to not see him. The rage she feels would make that true by securing his death, smash him out of the arena with one of the battered cars that race inside her. Run that fucker down. She grits her teeth and quells the anger, breathes hard through her nose, gritted teeth and flared nostrils. All other hates pale into a cross-stitch hobby compared to this. Every bad thing she has ever felt spins round and down onto that man, tightens around him, a winding sheet of sheer hate. Yet, his nasty surprise today aside, he is untouched, unknowing of the harm she wishes him. He will perhaps be shaken, count himself lucky that she did not manage to do more than stare; he may decide to avoid that part of town again. Then in minutes, he will probably be back to whatever life he has now, whatever brought him back here.
Maybe he is at his parents’ house, somewhere on an edge of that small town, just a few miles away, that she has scrupulously avoided for years, a blank in her memory, a map of avoidance. Somewhere in that boycotted terrain, a version of family life, for them, has been restored. Perhaps their nightmare is over. Their golden boy restored to them, their darling son, burnished by what he has had to endure to even greater preciousness. His blind, adoring, stupid parents, who stood by him, who did not believe his guilt. And if he has come back for good, how long until he comes back with another girlfriend? A wife? Grandchildren? Have they forgotten Caitlin? Made her no more than an inconvenience, the cause of an awkward gap in his CV? That dim couple who would not see what their son had done.
She has dreaded seeing them, has always hoped they had moved somewhere else. Her keen eyes looked out for them, a constant low level of anxiety, even as she expected them to have slipped away in shame. But perhaps they felt no shame. Perhaps they hold him faultless still. Anna has spent so much hate on them, and counselled herself out of it, so many times, reminded herself that it was Ryan, not they, who hurt Caitlin. But, tied to him so closely, they were implicated in his acts. They can drown in the turbulence of her hatred for their son for all she cares.
Are they being supportive, helping him get back on his feet? Will he be eating a nice meal with them, cooking for them? Or praising his mother’s cooking, hearty gusto acted out round the dining table? Will he tell them he has seen Anna? It does not signify, either way. What matters is that he is here; his life, his strategies, his habits be damned. He is here and her girl is dead.
The drab lumpen alloy of ordinary life is forged, beaten and stretched into a wire; the clinker falls heavy, burning her feet. The long night stretches 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
