Now and then, a classmate invited her for a friendly drink and a gossip. Prue, a recent divorcée taking the home-repairs course in Hereford, asked what Tooly did besides work at a bookshop, and heard of her daily hikes. “Should get a bit of a walkabout myself,” Prue said. “Lazy since the kids.”
She arrived at World’s End one morning, buying a romance novel to be polite. Tooly drove them to the priory and marched upward, her acquaintance keeping up only till the foothills, then battling bravely in the middle distance. Tooly waited at the top, admiring the countryside, as a human dot clomped closer, expanding into a woman. “Brought the.” Wheeze. “Brought the wrong.” Wheeze. “Brought the wrong shoes.”
“It’s flat from here on,” Tooly said, continuing down the ridge.
“You walk!” Wheeze. “So!” Wheeze. “Fast!”
“Not that fast. Do I?”
Afterward, Prue thanked her. She never asked to come again.
Partly, Tooly had engineered it this way. Friends required a life story. Your past mattered only if others sought to know it — it was they who demanded that one possessed a history. Alone, you could do without.
That was why she and Fogg got along so well. He accepted her evasions, never pried.
“What are you mastering tonight, then?” he inquired.
She held up her ukulele.
“To be brutally honest, I’m not familiar with a large oeuvre of ukulele compositions,” he said. “What led you to pick up the instrument?”
“Just decided one day,” she replied. “When you lock up, bring in the barrel, I think.”
Already on the drive to Monmouth, rain poured down. At the home of her teacher, she rushed from the car, ukulele and sheet music under her shirt. On her request, they practiced “The William Tell Overture.” She played one part, her teacher accompanied, then they switched. What delight, this synchrony, the development, leaning into the phrases, a melody emerging from black dots on the staves, marks inked there in 1828, communicating across all this time! It was such excitement that, at times, she could barely strum.
She drove home jerkily fast, foot tapping the rhythm on the gas pedal, singing at full voice—“Dada-dum, dada-dum, dada-dum-dum-dum!”—accompanied by the flapping plastic sheet over the passenger window. At the parking lot across from World’s End, she nosed the car around for a free spot — at night, the place filled with patrons headed to the Hook.
What about dropping in there for a glass of something to amplify her good cheer? She took a wander up Roberts Road, the rowdy banter growing as she approached the pub. A group of laborers — faces worn by sun, dirt, and cigarettes — sat at the picnic tables outside, gripping sloppy pints, eyeing ladies out on a hen night, heavy gals in stilettos, ankles tattooed, thighs goosebumped, floppy bosoms held up with underwire scaffolding. On the opposite side of the road was the legion bar, reserved for veterans of foreign wars. Now and then, a boy who’d fought in Iraq or Afghanistan took a break from darts and glowered at the pub across the way, at the wobbly girls giggling over spilled cider.
As Tooly passed between these two drinking holes, hawkish men on each side registered only her short haircut, pale lips, and sexless fashion, which rendered her invisible to them. If ever a man fancied her these days, she suspected him of low standards, of being a goat in heat. Were she to enter the Hook, she’d find many such goats. A tipsy one might make for brief amusement. But in a village you couldn’t avoid your mistakes. Best to return home. She wanted only a glass of mild intoxication tonight. A bottle of Pinot Noir was already open in the kitchen.
She filled her glass too high and, lips to the brim, slurped it to a more seemly height, then nibbled crackers and cheese, humming “The William Tell Overture” with wine-purple lips. What a marvel, this drink! Past a certain age — about twenty-six, was it? — after the last flickers of the younger self, a pressure grew inside her during the course of each day, butting against the limits of her existence. Until, at her first nightly sip, she dilated, the tightness eased, and she floated in thoughts, outside time. She cupped a hand over her brow and gazed out the latched window at the farmland beyond Caergenog, all blackness at this hour. She took a pace back, watching a reflection of the kitchen and of herself, wine level decreasing over the minutes.
Down the stairs she went, treading tipsily through the darkened shop. Within arm’s reach were so many sublime minds — she could awaken them off the shelf (no matter the hour, they were more alert than she), bid them start, and encounter a soul fitted with perception like hers, only sharper. But tonight it was the computer that lured her. She cradled the keyboard in her lap, giving a little shiver as the machine blinked and whirred, icons populating the desktop, her face lit by the screen.
Tooly had long shied away from computers, associating them so strongly with Paul. And she’d managed to avoid them better than most, living as she had, disconnected from wires, traveling city to city, job to job, taking positions that required minimal technological skills. The longer she’d gone without a computer of her own, the more mystifying all the digital hubbub became.
But World’s End, for all its bound paper, came with a few microchips, too, in the form of this clunky old desktop, a senior citizen at age four. Fogg had taught her how to enter sales on it, and had insisted on showing her around the Internet, too, extolling its marvels and scope by searching for her name — though he was rather crestfallen to discover no results whatsoever.
For more than a year, Tooly had remained aloof from that computer. At most, she tried simple Web searches like “ukulele,” nearly scared at the landslide of hits. Then, gradually, she explored a little further. Eventually, hours vanished there. Like a black hole, the Internet generated its own gravity, neither light nor time escaping. Cats playing the piano, breasts and genitals popping out, strangers slandering strangers. The lack of eye contact explained so much of what happened online. Including her own new habit: prowling through the past.
In recent weeks, she had started searching for names, old ones, of lost friends, former schoolteachers, fellow pupils, acquaintances from cities she’d left years before. Through the online murk, she spied their lives, piecing together what had happened: colleges, employers, married to, activities, interests. An employment history on LinkedIn might suggest a glittering start — Trainee to District Manager to Vice President — followed by an unexplained Self-Employed. The “Lives In …” on Facebook provided unexpected locales: Oslo or Hanoi or Lima. If she and they had maintained contact, the progressions from school to career to family would have passed so gradually as to be unremarkable. But online profiles converted the increments of life into leaps, transforming schoolchildren into graying parents in an instant.
How odd to have quit so many places and people, yet be preoccupied with them now, as they were surely not concerned with her. Still, Tooly never contacted those she peeped at, conducting her compulsive searches under the pseudonym Matilda Ostropoler, which combined her proper first name with the last name of a former friend.
All this nostalgic prowling — invariably after a few drinks — promised gratification yet left unease. It was as if a long spoon had been dipped inside her and stirred. Unlike in books, there was no concluding page on the Internet, just a limitless chain that left her tired, tense, up too late.
Time to switch off. Time to go to bed, look at the rafters, restore the memory of her music lesson. If she closed her eyes thinking of the fingerboard, would her brain practice while she slept?