‘It’s all moving a bit too fast for me,’ he’d decided he’d say, selecting a well-used phrase from the standard lexicon. ‘I just think we need to pause a bit and take stock.’
That would be enough for the moment, wouldn’t it? It would buy him some time and prepare the ground as gently as possible for more. And, after all, he couldn’t be sure that this wasn’t really the case. Maybe they were moving too fast. If the sphere could turn once, perhaps it would come back round again in due course, and maybe even this time come to rest? Who could say whether how he was feeling now would prove any more permanent than how he’d felt in Ellie’s car?
Perhaps this sudden coldness I feel is really just panic, he said to himself. Like people freeze up after accidents and things like that. They go numb, don’t they? They know what’s happened but they can’t experience it, because it’s just too much to process. Which wasn’t so different, now he came to think about it, from a computer freezing when you asked it to do too many things at once. If he and Ellie slowed down a bit, and he felt more in control again – who knows? – those feelings might all come back.
It was always a bonus, if the things you said were actually true.
But none of these thoughts stopped him, as he took out his phone, from leaning forward a little so he could see, through the glass door and down the carriage, the red-haired woman with the fiery eyes.
Jane saw him look at her and turned away. Her initial elation had already faded. It no longer seemed to her, as it had done only a few minutes previously, that anything was possible, or that somehow, magically, she had ended an alliance that had lasted more than two years, and yet escaped the price to be paid in loneliness and grief. And what had seemed, when she entered this carriage, to be the elation of freedom, now looked in retrospect more like hysteria or shock. A kind of dazed blankness had replaced it now, but grief would soon follow, she knew: bitter, unremitting grief, cold and hard like stone. And then for a long time, for many months quite possibly, she’d have to beat like a prisoner on that cold implacable wall.
There was a ditch running along beside the track. It was separated from the railway by a single low wire, hung between concrete posts. She watched the wire numbly as it disappeared into clumps of vegetation, emerged briefly, and disappeared again, sometimes for many yards at a time. But that bare grey metal always came back in the end, running along by itself next to the train.
When Thomas made his way back down the carriage, his face was taut. He resumed his seat without even glancing at Jane. Ellie had wept and shouted and called him names. He turned to the window, but didn’t even register the world outside.
After a time he noticed his own reflection. It was very faint, almost transparent, a wispy, insubstantial thing that was barely there at all.
7
The Kite
Darius strode across the park on his way to the pub. He was a big man, over six foot tall, solid and broad like the rugby player he’d once been. His great thick mane was just beginning to turn grey, and grey hair spilled out from the open neck of his shirt.
It was a blowy evening. With each new gust of wind, a row of big chestnut trees to Darius’s right began to dance, the great round clumps of foliage swaying back and forth across the trunks like the massive breasts and thighs of giant women. Over on his left, beyond the open grass, was the town hospital. All his daughters had been born there, as Darius himself had been, and three of the group of friends he was going to meet that night.
In the middle of the park, a father and his young son were flying a kite. Darius had flown kites here too, when he was a boy himself, and when his own daughters were growing up. The girls had a big red one, he remembered, and the oldest had a pink one of her own with a pony on it that never really worked. This kite now was bright blue. When those big trees began to dance, it strained so hard towards the sky that the father and son together had a struggle to hold it down. Darius remembered how that felt, the string as hard as metal wire. The boy yelled out with excitement at the power he felt in his hands. The dad glanced at Darius and smiled.
The pub was right on the edge of the park. It was called the Live and Let Live, and when those giant tree-women danced and the kite string turned to wire, its sign creaked and swayed on its rusty hinges. In the bright, windy evening, Darius put his hand to the door.
He stepped through into the body of a living creature. Softly lit, humming with activity, pungent with hot meat and fermentation, it was tightly packed with lumps of flesh in many shapes and sizes, some of them oozing bile, others storing fat, others again pumping out the precious fluid on which the entire organism depended.
As Darius looked round for his friends there was a certain weariness in his eyes, but he banished it at once as soon as he spotted them.
‘Hello there, fellers, sorry I’m late. Chris was going to drop me off, but then something cropped up for her and I had to walk instead.’
‘No worries,’ said Roger. ‘We’ve got your pint ready.’
‘Room for a small one on the bench there, Bill?’ asked Darius. ‘Did you see the news this evening? This bloody government just gets worse and worse.’
And then he was off. They were all off, but especially Darius. From their table in the Live and Let Live, he and his friends strode out together across the world, seeking out injustice, absurdity and cant, and flinging it fearlessly aside.
But halfway through his third pint, Darius’s mood suddenly changed.
‘Look at us. Still drinking in the same old pub we’ve been coming to since we were fifteen years old. What have we done with our lives, eh, lads? Let’s be honest, for all the lot of us have seen and done in this world, we might as well have been canaries in a cage.’
It was an old refrain, but the others tried their best to look interested.
‘I could have played for England,’ Darius told them, although this wasn’t news to any of them. ‘I was good. I was really good. I had that sports scholarship offered me, remember? I had a career offered me on a plate. But like a fool I turned it down.’
He’d gone to the local college instead, and ended up working as a draughtsman in this same little town, with its park, and its boating lake, and its small but award-winning folk museum.
‘A sports career would just have been the beginning, too. You all know how passionate I am about politics. Well, I could have gone down that road. I would have had a platform, wouldn’t I? I could have made my mark.’
The others waited stoically, like animals enduring rain, keeping their minds a blank until the dark clouds pass. They knew Darius, and they knew that sometimes he couldn’t feel complete until he’d summoned up this shadow, this alternate self, and brought it to stand beside him.
Outside, darkness fell. The park was empty. The boy and his father had gone home. But the dance of the chestnut trees was constant now, as if those tree-women could hear some urgent drum so deep that it was beyond the reach of human ears. Wisps of wind-torn cloud blew from time to time across the rising moon.
‘Of course it’s a lot to do with Chris really,’ Darius declared. ‘Bless her, you couldn’t wish for a kinder heart, but she was never the right woman for me. She really wasn’t right at all.’
His friends looked uncomfortable. They disliked this part. All of their wives were friends of Chris’s, and so indeed were they themselves.
‘And by the same token of course,’ Darius added hastily, so as not to seem to be putting Chris down, ‘I wasn’t right for her at all. We were just too young to realise it.’