like Mr Klaeber was making it up as he went along.’
‘Doesn’t it just? A professor by the name of . . .’ the notebook again ‘. . . Sherman Kuhn makes the very sensible suggestion that aglæca should be translated as “a fighter, valiant warrior, dangerous opponent, one who struggles fiercely”.’
‘You’re about to make a point.’
‘I am. You see, Grendel and the dragon are clearly written as monsters, but there’s nothing in Beowulf to suggest that Grendel’s mother is a “monstrous hell bride” or a “troll lady”, or anything of the sort; quite the opposite, in fact. She’s a female warrior, an accomplished, powerful woman who’s every bit the equal of Beowulf. Then our Mr Klaeber comes along – this one man sitting alone at his writing desk, and with a few flicks of his pen, a few scratches of ink, he changes her. Turns her from one thing into something else. He reduces her into “a wretch”. A wretch. He steals her from every schoolgirl, from every young woman growing up in this world trying to understand what they can and cannot be, for the best part of one hundred years. Maybe for ever, because words have power once they’re written down.’
‘The Mary Magdalene treatment.’
Sophie nodded. ‘The Mary Magdalene treatment.’
I stared into my drink, unsure of what else to say. A Paul Auster line floated into my mind – a word becomes another word, a thing becomes another thing – but I didn’t speak. The second hand ticked around the large clock over the bar, the Thames rolled on, and the entropy of the universe steadily increased.
‘Why do you have notes on Beowulf? Is there going to be a book?’
I didn’t say ‘is one of your clients writing about Beowulf?’ but it amounted to nothing more than a slightly obscured version of the same question, and when I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I knew Sophie wouldn’t answer.
‘Someone has to keep track of these things.’ She shrugged. ‘Frederick J. Klaeber wasn’t really Frederick either, he was a Friedrich.’
‘In 1922? Well, we can’t blame him for that.’
‘No, we can’t.’ Sophie fixed me with her steady blue eyes. ‘But we can observe that he was a man who was fully prepared to rewrite the narrative, when he deemed it necessary.’
I took a sip of beer then set the glass down on the table between us. The head had completely collapsed by now, leaving a ring of white bubbles and a few little islands of foam gently fizzing themselves out of existence.
‘Sophie?’
‘What?’
‘What are we talking about here?’
Sophie leaned forward on her elbows.
‘Take it home and burn it,’ she said, quietly.
9
The Leaves of Autumn
I left the pub around nine p.m. and spent the next ten minutes standing outside a bus shelter on the opposite side of the road, happy to be outside despite the cold, my chin tucked deep into the zipped-up collar of my coat. A strong, wintry wind blew up from the river, gusts buffeting and breaking against me, full of the scent of rain.
Autumn had come early this year, the leaves turning quickly in the frosts. The change had taken me by surprise, as it usually did. I spent so much time inside the flat, and inside my own head, that I’d barely noticed summer running out of steam until I stepped out of my door that afternoon and found I had to go back for a jacket.
It felt good to be out in the world again, to be pushed about by the blustery wind. It felt good to be an anonymous small cog amongst the countless streetlamps, headlights, cars, passers-by, buildings, roads and noises of the city at nighttime. It felt good not to be talking to anyone, not to be thinking at all.
Is the world you live in every day made more from rocks and grass and trees, or from articles, certificates, records, files and letters?
I pushed Sophie’s question away, focusing my attention on things – on the hundreds of things made of matter, of chemical elements, of sound waves and light waves, standing or driving or strolling or rolling on all around me. Gloriously, none of it – in this city of millions of lives, and bricks, and lights – none of it had the slightest interest in me. None of it depended on my thoughts or ideas. The buildings and the traffic couldn’t care less if I replied to Andrew Black, or finished my Captain Scarlett script, or got a call from Imogen, or if there was a crossed line that sounded like my dead father talking nonsense from the answerphone. It didn’t matter. In the big, magnificent, busy scheme of things – it didn’t matter at all. I closed my eyes, felt the cold wind on my face and smiled deeply into the depths of my collar.
Minutes passed.
A light, ice-cold rain rolled in on the wind, stinging my cheeks and forehead. I didn’t mind at all. A group of teenagers passed by. I watched them weaving their noisy, flirty way off up the road. They were laughing and joking despite the worsening weather, happy and drunk, finding excuses to touch each other – shoving, tripping, fake pushes into the oncoming traffic. I thought about Imogen laughing, the way she’d suddenly leap on me in bed when the alarm went off, screaming think fast at the top of her voice. I remembered her breathless laughter and wild thrashing when I pinned her down and tickled her when we fought, and her hysterical giggling at a YouTube video of a dog called Fenton chasing a herd of deer. I saw her laughing until her eyes were bright and shiny and she couldn’t catch her breath to speak. Then – like an uninvited guest at a party – I saw Sophie’s bright and shiny eyes, her serious expression, saw her knuckles coming down on Andrew Black’s letter.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
The knocks were slower and louder in memory, like a Victorian ghost story, like the Ghost of fucking Christmas Yet-to-Come.
Jesus, I thought.
Sometimes, my brain won’t let me have anything.
A little way up the street, one of the boys had picked up one of the girls and was running off through the rain with her – ‘Fuck off, Craig! Craig, fuck off, you fucking, fucking . . .’ she screamed, punching him but not really punching him, as the others trailed behind, laughing.
I smiled and dug my hands into my pockets.
He didn’t dance me off a cliff. He did that to you. That’s what I’d said to Sophie.
Fucking hell.
I felt the familiar fluttering in the back of my mind, the old memories stirring again. You could tell her, said their fat, furry bodies and the bat, bat, bat of their dry, leafy wings in the dark. You could tell her, you could tell her, you could tell her, you could tell her.
After all these years, they still hadn’t given up on their freedom.
I scribbled my fingers through my
