from Baghdad is there, sitting in the chair, trailing her arm over the edge and resting her hand on Anna’s shoulder. She sits, Anna lies, drifts away.
‘We are both lost,’ the woman says. The mouse sighs, and says, ‘It seems so.’
*
One time ago, I saw him. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I hadn’t grasped all my story, his fatal role, though I knew fear and fury; I knew all the things that face meant to me. But I didn’t know what I saw, and as I pulled it behind me, my trailing tail of shredded story, I didn’t know when I had seen it. I had a new memory: me, suddenly painfully full of my old self, tucked alone in the corner of a room of men, including the one who killed me. The feelings pulsed through me, iterations of new and remembered fear fanning outwards to the far reaches, to be kept forever in the waxy record of waveforms etched through the blackness. For me, the room pulsed with it, as if I had after all found myself on a sand dune and the sun’s heat was making sight shimmer. I felt myself move with it; now such dances work through me always. But the men in the room, though they moved before me, were steady within themselves. Movement started inside them, did not land from afar or from the memory of harm. The old man with a hand that shook and a head that nodded as he sat before his tray, even he was subject to movement that originated, though from the betrayal of disease, from within himself.
I rode the seasick waves, the soul-sick fear, until I could accommodate them. I watched Ryan. He looked the same, though he was more contained. Moderated. It was as if he had tidied himself away and was trying to hold the cupboard door shut from the inside. He was wary, watchful. He was tidying away inside too – fear lurked squashed and hidden, forced into a small dark space as though not to see it would lessen its horrible power. Though adeptly he had created fear in me, he had learned nothing of its effect until now. Fear had flown out from his fists, released too quickly to be understood. But there he was, sitting at a table of six other men, learning the opposite of what his instincts thus far had prompted – learning not to be seen. Learning the love of the commonplace, unremarkable ordinariness. When we met, I thought he shone, but here he was, his gold transmuted in reverse, to beige, then the subtle grey of humble woodland creatures not troubled by the desire to shine.
This memory, of course, came from the time after my death, the time of his imprisonment. It took me a while to understand it. So many little fragments. But I am starting to join them up.
I have been back since. Another of those times when I sensed that my anger had pulled me in an arc back towards the Earth. I knew with a tremendous thrill that my thoughts had worked on my trajectory; I was, unaccountably at my own behest, heading toward s an encounter with my past. In a delicious rush of anger I swooped towards him again.
The rush stopped abruptly. I pooled once more in a frustrating manner, as if drugged, conscious of what was around but unable to direct my gaze or order thoughts. He was there on a narrow bed. I could hear his thoughts, his memories – mutterings, anyway. How he muttered his dissatisfactions, his fears and worries, how he tried to tidy it all away, to stop thinking of how afraid he was of this or that man. Bigger, bolder men than him. Men whose violence worked its way out on other men. Men who understood violence without the certainty of weakness in another. How I tried to swim through the seas of his fear, to stir up the waves, make a storm of fear to savour as I watched him cower. But I do not know if I stirred even the cobwebs in his cell.
*
Anna wakes, slumped in the corner, feeling as though her bones have been turned upside down. A badly fitting skeleton. She is confused, then thinks, with the horror of fresh news, that Caitlin is dead. The thought batters her, and she panics. Slowly she realises that she has known this for ten years. She wrangles the misery back into the soles of her feet, or the points of her elbows. Back to the place to which it had been banished. All the lights in the house are still on, it is dark outside, and the curtains are open. She feels so very exposed. She eases herself awkwardly up from the floor, the house warm but no longer warm enough. She closes the curtains against the black slides of night. She pulls a warm shawl around her aching shoulders, sinks into the sofa. What is she to do?
She is to do what she 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;
