‘I’m sleeping in here tonight,’ I said, ‘if that’s all right.’
He let out a quietly mocking laugh. ‘Make sure I don’t kill myself.’
I decided not to respond to that.
‘Last night it was Starling,’ Aaron said. ‘He was so drunk I could’ve done it ten times over.’
I closed the door, then took off my clothes and got into the camp bed. Downstairs, in the front room, Urban Smith was singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, a carol that could easily have been the Green Quarter’s national anthem.
‘I still think about her all the time,’ Aaron said after a while.
‘Think about who?’
‘Lucette.’
She had been his fiancée, he told me. He had loved her bony wrists and the way her knees almost knocked together when she walked. She had been clever too. A mind so sharp you could cut yourself on it. One night, while they were sleeping, policemen had burst into their flat. He would always remember the sight of Lucette struggling, half-naked, in the arms of strangers. One of them pointed a finger at him and said, Stay. As if he were a dog. The shame of it, that he couldn’t rescue her, protect her. The immense, excruciating shame. He hadn’t seen her since that night, but he knew she would never forgive him for not coming to her aid.
‘There wasn’t anything you could have done,’ I said.
‘I could’ve tried.’
‘It wouldn’t have made much difference.’
‘It would to me.’ Aaron lay still for a moment, then I heard his bedclothes rustle. I sensed that he had turned to face the wall.
I stared up at the ceiling, sleep eluding me. I had been at the Cliff for almost a month now, and though I had settled into the rhythms of life in the house my nights hadn’t been particularly restful. I woke too often, and had too many dreams. I would be walking through an empty building or caught in two minds on a street corner, or I would be running along a towpath, but whatever the location there was always something missing, something I had to find. I began to write my dreams down in a small green notebook, as if the process of transcription might reveal their truth, as if, once the dreams had been recorded, once they had been retained, they might be persuaded to give up their meaning. Sometimes I had the feeling that I cried out, as I had cried out when I stayed with John Fernandez, but in the morning nobody mentioned it, not even Horowicz, who slept in the room opposite mine. I wasn’t alone, perhaps. We were all troubled, it seemed, in one way or another. Once, I heard my own name being shouted in the middle of the night — Tom? Tommy? — and I sat upright in my bed and answered, Yes? but then I realised it was Clarise at the far end of the landing, Clarise calling for her dead husband in her sleep.
‘It’s never the things we do that we regret the most,’ I said. ‘It’s the things we didn’t do. Or haven’t done. Or can’t.’
I heard Aaron’s head turn on his pillow, but he didn’t say anything, and a curious, almost savage impatience took hold of me.
‘You know, there’s nothing particularly special about you,’ I said. ‘You’re just like all the rest of us. We’re all the same. Not because we’re melancholic — whatever that means — but because we’re haunted by the lives we could have had. The lives we never had a chance to live.’
I wasn’t talking to Aaron any more. I wasn’t even aware of him in the room — or even of the room itself. The air above my face vibrated like a cloud of midges. I remembered how I had tried to explain myself to Fernandez, and how, simply by talking, I’d made new discoveries about myself. Though Fernandez had listened, he had, in the end, become exasperated with me. You people who don’t know what you’re doing. Or perhaps it was because I had turned up on his doorstep. Because I’d seen through him, as he put it. But yes, I must have sounded delirious, frenetic. I had been suffering from shock, of course — I’d cut myself loose, left everything behind — and there had been exhaustion too. Now, though, I had more clarity. The authorities had deprived me of a life that was mine, and mine alone. They hadn’t asked my permission or given me a choice. They’d just taken it. By force. In a sense, then, I had been murdered. How I wished I’d shouted that at Dr Gilbert. You murderer!
A glass smashed one floor below.
I listened to the yelling and the helpless laughter, then I listened to people staggering to bed, doors slamming shut, the throaty flushing of the lavatory, and when all that eventually died down, I listened to the window creak with cold and the air sigh in and out of Aaron’s lungs. Thinking back to the night of the bomb, the moment I disappeared, it seemed to me that what I’d done was both defy those in power and take a kind of revenge on them. It had been my way of saying, No, I won’t accept what you offered me. And no, I’m not going to be grateful. Finally, after twenty-seven years, I had asserted myself. Twenty-seven years! That’s how long it takes sometimes. To make the connections, to determine what you feel. To realise.
Aaron fell asleep, and then, perhaps an hour later, so did I, and by the time I woke again, at nine in the morning, Aaron was already dressed and standing at the bedroom window, watching the snow.
A white Christmas, the first in many years.
And nobody had killed themselves.
In fact, nothing terrible happened, not unless you counted the bizarre events of Boxing Day night. Sometime towards dawn on the 27th I was woken by shrill screams coming from below. As I opened my door, Clarise thundered past in her quilted housecoat, a beige eye-mask pushed high up on her forehead. I followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen where we found Brendan Burroughs stretched out on the table, his naked torso slathered in flour, sugar and raw eggs. Starling and Horowicz were standing over him, beating him with wooden spoons.
When Clarise finally found her voice, she asked the two men what in the world they thought they were doing.
‘What’s it look like?’ Horowicz said.
‘I don’t know,’ Clarise said. ‘I’ve no idea. That’s why I’m asking.’
Horowicz came round the table and stood in front of her, his body swaying, and he spoke very slowly, as though he thought she was stupid.
‘Can’t you see?’ he said. ‘We’re making a cake.’
In the New Year I began to go for long walks after supper, partly because I wanted to escape the endless drinking sessions in the front room, which left me feeling irritable and jaded, but also because I was finally becoming curious about the town to which I had been sent. Iron Vale was famous for its trains. It was here, once upon a time, that locomotive engines for the entire country had been manufactured. During the last two decades, however, the foundries and rolling mills had closed, and all that remained of the glory days was the railway station, which stood high on a ridge with its own ornate red-brick clock tower. Certainly Victor would have known about the town, and during my first desultory walks I often felt his presence quite distinctly, Victor as a young man, his big head topped with unlikely corrugations of black hair, his eyes pale with enthusiasm.
I quickly settled on one or two favourite routes. I would often make my way out to a piece of flat land that lay at the edge of a housing estate. It was the strangest place. There were roads and pavements, there were street lights too, but there were no buildings. The roads turned corners, linking up with one another, forming orderly rectangles and squares, and yet the areas of scrub grass in between, where the houses should have been, were strewn with rubbish — umbrellas, condoms, microwaves. Crows sat on top of every street lamp like memorials to some dark event. I suppose the council had simply run out of money, but it always looked to me as if something sinister or supernatural had occurred. Other times I would wander out into the country, to a village a couple of miles south of where we lived. I would walk over an old stone bridge and down into a churchyard that stood right on the river. Though small, the church was exquisite, its walls built from a mixture of red and white sandstone, most of which had been quarried from the river bed itself, while the bridge, with its elaborate arches, seemed to hark back to a more dynamic era, when local people had been full of energy and aspiration. On my first visit I entered through a heavy iron gate that groaned loudly on its hinges. Moving among the tombs, I found the most beautiful surnames — Story, Eden, Raine. Towards the rear of the church, where the property had been allowed to go to seed, the dead became anonymous, their dim brown slabs illegible and tilting haphazardly among the weeds and tall grasses. Even here, though, there was a sense of release, a feeling of having been freed from time’s net. This wouldn’t be such a bad place to be buried, I thought. The river’s constant presence near by. Trees shifting in the breeze that lifted off the water. And, in the distance, a long low ridge — the moors — on which, that very afternoon, unearthly bright-orange sunlight fell. No, not a bad place at all.