Legs very sore. Nurse says they need bandaging. This kind of thing takes time to heal, she says, she’ll be popping in to keep an eye, or it might be somebody else, all depends on rota. She left leaflets about support hose and hot meals. I put them with Carole’s about loss.
But how long is all this meant to go on for is what I want to know, and of course nobody’s got a leaflet about that.
Or about the dreams I get. Maybe dreams are more vivid if you sleep in daytime, I don’t know. The latest one was me following a man who’s got his back to me and I was following him because I was going to kill him with my bare hands. Quietly and calmly, but quite certainly, I was going to kill him. I couldn’t see his face, but it was the driver of the car.
Well that’s all
Arthur
Cardigan Avenue was the kind of place I would never have just happened into, even in daytime. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere else. The road beneath the moon swayed in shallow intentional curves between trees set at intervals along the pavements, its nonchalance contrived for what would no doubt be labelled residential charm. The houses, set in large competitive gardens, stared out through luminous windows. There was something about them that would deter loiterers, an atmosphere of settlement that was not the same as neighbourly. I moved carefully from tree to tree, pausing under each one. Up ahead of me somebody’s feet were stopping and scraping on the pavement; a chain clinked and I heard whispers urging a dog to hurry up. I waited in the dark. After a while there was more shuffling and then from further away more words to the dog and the sound of a door closing, and I moved on.
Number twenty-seven, its number and name, “Overdale,” spelled out in looping black wrought iron fixed to the wall, sat quietly among its neighbours. But it didn’t quite match up to them and their immodest embellishments; everywhere along the avenue were conservatories, jutting extensions, gazebos, many of them floodlit in the dark. The front windows of Arthur’s house were black and all the curtains were closed.
Earlier that evening I had studied a follow-up piece in the paper under the headline TRAGEDY DEEPENS. The report heaped new and wretched detail upon the case, as if the woman’s being merely killed would not interest the readers for long. It outlined the hope and waste, the ruined plans. Arthur and Ruth had been about to go on the trip of a lifetime, a world cruise ending in Australia where they were planning to spend at least six months, and possibly settle for good, in order to be close to Ruth’s bedridden brother Graham and their nephew and his family. There was a picture of retired engineer and widower Graham (74). He was propped up in bed wearing short-sleeved pyjamas. His face was swollen, and he was wincing gamely at a small burning forest of candles on a cake on a trolley, watched by a cluster of people, including some nurses, holding Styrofoam cups. The caption said:
HAPPIER TIMES. Arthur, Ruth and friends mark Graham’s 70th birthday in 2000.
And there she was: Ruth Mitchell in spectacles and a pale trouser suit, a practical, drip-dry Down Under outfit. Her hair was cut sensibly and a scarf, loosely held in a scarf ring, hung around her neck. Next to her, Arthur stooped towards the camera with his cup in one hand and a bottle in the other, proposing a toast. He was square-shouldered, gaunt, and spoon-jawed. His grin revealed a row of sheeplike teeth that met his upper gum in a row of high arches. His present devastation was analysed under the subheading DREAMS SHATTERED.
The garden of his house was not as tidy as the others. A dustbin sat out on the middle of the drive near the end, under a tree. The grass was uncut. There were dark stains in the drifts of fallen petals on the front path and the smell that exuded from them was the familiar sweet stench of dying flowers. In the borders, unidentifiable stalks stood skinny and naked as pencils among sparse flower heads, spent and weather-battered.
I made my way up the drive close to the boundary wall. I was intending to wheel the dustbin further up, nearer the garage doors, where it would be more convenient. Just as I reached it, something made me turn my head. It was something that eyes weren’t much use for, not a figure nor quite a shape nor barely a movement, but something under a tree on the other side of the garden, more like a shimmer near the ground. It was the aftershock of a tiny disturbance, the merest righting of the surface after a departure just accomplished, the air closing again around an absence. And while I couldn’t tell that it wasn’t caused by something quite ordinary and solid and swift such as a cat, I couldn’t be sure it was, either. Perhaps it was just the passing moon shadow of a branch lifted by the wind. I waited, shivering, for what might come next.
Then, from deeper in the garden over at the side of the house came sounds actual and unambiguous enough, the crick-cruck of a gate latch and the scrape and squeak of hinges. Footsteps sounded on the path, and receded. I stepped silently over the concrete in front of the garage and crossed the front lawn. I trailed through the long wet grass, tugging up strands and soaking my feet. I dared not follow at once into the gully between the house wall and the boundary fence so I paused at the side gate, which stood open. There was a faint, human sourness of sweat and exhaled breath lingering there, I was certain of it. I peered up the gully. Something was moving away from me into the darkness of the back garden. I saw no shape or outline. I knew this presence in the way a bat would; I sensed a greater density, a different dark in the dark, swaying ahead of me. I waited for a while longer and then, making no sound, I followed.
At the corner of the house, I crouched against the wall and that’s when I saw him, limping across the lawn, stepping in and out of white light and shadows cast over the grass by the moon. He was tall and rather tottery; in the moonlight his hair and clothes gleamed palely. He was clutching what looked at first like sticks and leaves for the compost heap but was actually a handful of broken flowers picked from the front garden.
Though he was unsteady on his feet and his progress was unhurried, he moved rather fast into the shadow cast by the house, shrugging the light from his back as he would discard a coat. He mounted some shallow steps up to a patio and from there he passed into a long, leanto conservatory built against the back wall. The interior was unlit and I watched him make his way along it, neither furtive nor afraid, merely discreet, solitary.
I could not bear to see him go. There was a shed set deep in a curve of shrubs against the garden’s back wall and I moved towards it across the grass, becoming, like him, only a swift, darker presence in darkness. It was a small wooden pavilion with a window on each side and a shallow porch; I settled myself on the steps and leaned against the low balustrade. A white lilac tree swayed above and all was quiet but for the rasping of its branches on the asphalt roof. The drowsy, creosotey damp mingled with the sharp sweetness of lilac blossom. I sat shivering with cold, and the house before me was still.
Suddenly lights came on in an uncurtained upstairs room. In the glare of four overhead bulbs that beamed into all the corners, I could see him, carrying armfuls of papers to and fro. His mouth was working, talking to his dead wife, Ruth, I supposed, and when he paused near the window I caught glimpses of his face wretchedly pained and channelled with deep lines. Once or twice he stopped and covered his eyes, and his body shook with weeping. But he kept doggedly at his work, his moving shadow split by the angled lights across the yellow wall. Although it was bright, the room seemed colder and bleaker and lonelier than out here where I sat on the damp step.
I realized that all my pointless roaming was at an end. Who better than I to ease the burden of the poor man’s distress? My being the cause of it bound me intimately to his suffering; surely an obligation to witness and relieve it must be the reason I was still alive. He needed comfort. He needed me, or he would, eventually, and perhaps with urgency and at a time not of my choosing. And it would be a fitting, if only a small beginning, to keep vigil until I could be of use to him. I would have to be here every night. If I failed to watch, his loneliness would increase; if I ceased watching, I would surely find myself responsible for some new disaster. I would stay here, all night if need be, watching his shadow pass forward and back across the room. I would no longer notice the cold. That would be as much, for the moment, as I could do.