Morag Joss - The Night Following

Later when I whisper his name there is no reply, but then I feel his mouth forming words against my skin and his hand tightens in the dip of my waist. He is asking me something.

Ruth, what happened? Tell me what happened.

I don’t know what to answer.

I say, Tell me something. Did you mean it? What you said you’d do to the person who did it, if you got your hands on them?

I said I’d kill him, he says. He sounds slightly embarrassed. I told everybody, I said I’d strangle him with my bare hands.

Surely that was just the heat of the moment, I say. You wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not you, Arthur. You couldn’t.

Arthur considers this. No, he says almost regretfully, you’re wrong. I meant it. I could do it. I would. I’d have to.

No matter who it was? Even supposing it was somebody very young, only a kid? Or suppose it was a woman, or just somebody who’ll never recover, somebody who’d do anything to put it right if they could?

I can hear fear enter my voice but Arthur doesn’t seem to.

Put it right? What the hell does that mean?

I just mean… maybe it’s someone who’ll never, who won’t be able to rest until-

He turns and presses himself down hard on my body, pinning me to the earth as if he’s afraid I’ll escape. His breath comes in hot, salty gusts.

I don’t care! Put it right? So they feel better? Why should they be able to rest? Think what they did to you! They shouldn’t even go on living, not after that!

All right-no, they shouldn’t, I say. It’s just I hate seeing you so upset. Please don’t be upset. But I know, some things are too wicked to be forgiven.

He is silent. He releases me and eases himself back. Then he says, That’s what I’m saying. And you do know. You put it in that story. Uncle Les, the bad fella. He was asking for it, a bad end.

It was only a story, I say. But I expect he got it.

Now Arthur is lying on his back. His eyes are closed and his face is rumpling with the effort of holding back tears.

And the child. Tell me what happens to the child. The baby girl in the story, Ruth. What happened to her?

I kiss his mouth softly and I say, Don’t worry about it now. You’ll find out tomorrow. As soon as it’s light again. I’ll tell you everything.

You promise, he murmurs.

Soon I hear his breathing slacken into an unsteady, rasping sleep. I lie in his arms, knowing that I will tell him everything. As soon as it’s light. There will be no peace until I do. I feel, I think, a kind of welcome sadness at the idea that then at last his rage will rain down and spend itself on me, but I fear pain as much as anyone. I wish he were stronger or that he had a proper weapon. I hope oblivion will come quickly.

He wakes one more time and whispers, Ruth, I don’t care what happens now. We’re safe here, aren’t we?

I don’t know what to answer. Safe from what? In the morning I shall make sure the knife I brought is within his reach. I lie awake, afraid. For who knows what stalks us at a distance, circling in the dark? Who knows how inquisitive they will prove, how close they will come to see if we are lost children, if we are living or dead? What would they say to us? Suppose there are people still shambling along the path in the moonlight, and one strays from the others, and watches the distance grow between herself and her companions, and say that all in a rush she understands she will not see them again but no matter, for she has always known herself quite able to leave them? So she lingers at the gate and does not call out, nor even wave at their swaying backs, but turns her attention instead to the dark indecipherable shape on the hill. Suppose she has enacted this estrangement every night, in anticipation of us. Would we move to greet her? What would we tell her?

I don’t know what to answer. But Ruth knows, somehow, and my grandmother knows, and all the others, the counted and the numberless, the remembered and the unremembered dead. They are around us now in their habitual, dreaming way, murmuring reassurances in the voices we know so well, and since we would not feel them if they touched us they stroke through the darkness with fond hands and stir the air into little vortices, sending flurries through the orderly night that shift the folds of our blankets by a fraction, or shake loose two or three leaves from the stunted trees on the ridge and cast them down the hillside into a wind that’s no longer cold but soothes us in dull waves, and carries the scent of old vines and honey. By such tricks and currents they draw us on with kindliness, and though invisible they are not wholly unseen, they are not vanished.

I don’t know what to answer. I lie awake shivering. I don’t know how much strength there is in his hands. But I’ll no more resist his vengeance, whatever form it takes, than I turned away when he reached for me and burrowed lovingly into my body.

Arthur’s face was damp and yellow, I thought first of all with dew and the first light, but when I touched him his skin slid a little under my finger and it shone with a layer of some cool sweated oil, like putty. The wind had blown the blanket from the side of his head and a few leaves of hawthorn were fluttering against his hair. His mouth lay open towards me as if he had turned to speak. His eyes were half-shut and without meaning. The eyelids had become simply that, lids: a pair of formal, diminutive covers of skin interrupted in the act of blinking, but whether they had halted when his eyes were closing in sleep or opening under the glare of morning sky it was neither possible nor important to know. His arms were locked around me. I didn’t move at once. I lay watching the little rags of birds in the sky over the reservoir, listening to their cries, and then listening to the silence beside me, wondering if it meant something more than not breathing, something more than absence, whether it could mean that a parting, perhaps this one, might be absolute.

I sat up and pulled myself clear of his arms but kept hold of his hand. How long could I stay; how could it ever be time for me to leave him? I pushed back his sleeve and watched the sparse hairs on his forearm rising and falling. His finger ends were turning blue and clawing at nothing. The lips of his moist monkey mouth were fluttering as if he had strange dead words to speak to the wind. Soon his face would sink in upon itself. All there was left to wait for now was the flecking and wrinkling of his skin, darkening into hide.

I closed his eyes. I rearranged his clothing and straightened his body. From the rucksack I drew out the pages of Ruth’s unfinished story and placed them securely on his chest under his folded hands; I set his walking stick and maps close against his side. I kissed his lips and his forehead, and I settled myself close to him and placed a hand over his. I had promised to tell him everything and so I began to talk, and I did not stop until I had told him all I knew.

I began with what he also had known, that on that brittle spring day some force within her had marched Ruth right up to where the last moment of her life was waiting, a few minutes before noon on a country lane canopied by blossoming trees. There had been nothing she could do to prevent it, any more than I had been able to disarm whatever force in me had gone about its work that morning in delivering me to the time and place I would kill her.

The horror of what happened may mask, a little, its utter simplicity, or perhaps its very simplicity is part of the horror. Of course, if only we had known: if only I had been delayed by another minute, if only it had rained and Ruth had decided not to cycle. But all the if onlys in the world are grapeshot fired too late against the fact that on that day not one second’s pause, not one extra breath nor the merest passing thought, had pushed themselves between our attention to some obscured notion of what life required of us from moment to moment, and the brutal second that death occurred. Ruth’s life and the instant of my ending it were not separated by so much as a single additional beat of either of our two hearts.