Morag Joss - The Night Following

Then I told Arthur it was not Ruth but I, the less beloved, who should have died. It would have mattered less. But although I was left still breathing, my life, too-that is to say any deserving I might have of my life-ended with the taking of hers. Her death brought to a close my daily enactment of a series of scenes, contained and infinitely repeatable, that for years I had been trying to string together into a semblance of a history that would bear the telling. My life’s course had seemed always a delicate, waning story about which it was natural I should be sad and other people absentminded; in conversation my name was always the one they tended to forget. Now my story was finished. I had killed the person telling it.

Hereafter I would have no story, only a dishonoured past. And what else could I do then, but begin to learn what it is to be dead before I actually was? I ended my own life in the taking of Ruth’s, and in search of expiation I took her life again. What could I do but enter her story, and with the stealth and self-effacement of a ghost take it to its rightful ending here, with him, on a shining hillside she could not herself get back to?

Not that I quite understand endings, or beginnings. How a story begins is not why it begins, and how or why it ends is no more fathomable. Reasons buried in the accumulated past may be forever hidden from those whose reasons they are, or perhaps there are none, after all. Perhaps there are no reasons but only things that happen, attached to nothing, events that loom out of the dark and leave sometimes a series of blurry afterimages of what we thought vital at the time-what it will please us later to call our stories-imprinted on our blindness.

I paused, stroking Arthur’s hand. The bitterness of his death was that it seemed a kind of absconding, a defection from one last neglected task. He would give me no shriving now; all the peace would be his.

The wind was sweeping shards of reflected sun across the reservoir like pieces of broken mirror, so sharp and blinding I could not see the water itself. And so it is that light passes back and forth over what I can’t see as well as over this world of dark and changing surfaces, cloud shadows go on scudding across the wavering and inexact shapes of all the unended stories, casting angles and colours and all interpretations out of true. The sky will be always crowded and the earth forever alight with them, these unmediated details, the incongruent blunders as well as the mystic, the epic conjunctions, with the drifting and inconclusive atoms of the sparsest, no less than the mightiest, human events. I may lament all I like the lack of it, but there is no natural law in this world that can take such fragmentary and capricious refractions and make of them anything explicable and whole.

I swaddled his head with tender and particular care, wrapping a scarf round and round his face and eyes like a bandage. I covered him with the blankets and folded them in tight under his limbs.

That’s how I left him, on the hillside with his face to the sky. I made my way back slowly along the path. On the curve of the hill I turned for one final look, and then I went on towards the rushing of the stream, shielding my eyes against the sunlight sparkling on the water.

All this happened some time ago. I drove away from the lodge. The roads were deserted and the garage near the Overdale turning was closed. I left a letter there saying I thought he’d had a stroke. I said they’d find him out on the hill and I hadn’t wanted to leave him but I’d wrapped him up safe against the wind and the birds. I didn’t say that the last thing he gazed on was the dark water with the moon shining on it and the last touch he knew was the warm body of his Ruth.

I drove until the fuel gauge was nearing empty, and abandoned the car at a railway station. I caught a train, where to isn’t important. It was only a matter of hours before I understood that a person out of place is sentenced to be out of place everywhere, yet she has no choice but to keep going. And that is how it is.

Going from place to place at least punctuates a day with the dots and dashes of making a journey: the hurrying, the arriving, the synchronized languor of the intervals between connections. Waiting in cafés, I stack packets of sugar and trace patterns with a finger on the tabletop and look out the window; towards the close of afternoons I will find myself in another obscure provincial town, and thinking about nightfall, I’ll start tapping on the doors of the kind of abject boardinghouse that is never very far from the stations of such places. Sometimes I look for a caravan, off-season, or a room above a pub where I might stay for a week or so if I wash dishes. But sooner or later I’ll begin again to study timetables, for precisely that purpose, to study time; and maybe also to assert, from my state of dispossession, a small degree of something akin to possession though it be of nothing more than the coming day, the passing of which I will determine and execute in measures of the routes between places I don’t need to go.

Of course it’s fruitless, the crossing and recrossing of these distances. How spacious the landscape between resting points, how unnaturally lengthy the days. And every twilight seen from the window of another temporary room confirms that the preceding hours have drawn me a little further from my mislaid life, for I never was going to find its vestiges here, nor there, nor anywhere visible.

When it’s properly dark, I go out. I don’t want to, quite, but it’s become a habit after all this time not to resist how the night draws me to itself. And I am drawn sometimes miles away, to the edges of towns and the mistakenly built and put-aside streets of houses where people seldom flourish, where lives seem always precarious and marginal and lived against tides of more robust and purposeful forces.

There’s a constant flow of vans and lorries to and from the garages and roadside mini-marts that thrum all night long on the borders of such places; the soft roar and sodium mist from bypasses and motorway interchanges muffle and cloud the darkness right over their roofs and pavements. There are a few people about on foot, some walking dogs but mostly they’re foragers in the all-night shops, out for cigarettes or cans of drink or junk food, including, I’ve noticed, surprising quantities of ice cream for the small hours. Occasionally they’re couples, more usually they’re alone. But the lone ones aren’t solitary in the entrenched way I am; something about them seems to say they’ve come lately from the company of another or are hurrying back to it. I watch them cautiously. It’s a matter of some pride to me that I do not look destitute, quite. But I think my loneliness can be breathed in, like an odour, and so that people won’t pass by me close enough to detect it, I will cross the road or find a wall or doorway and wait. Then, without necessarily meaning to, I follow.

No, I don’t really follow, not to begin with. I let my thoughts walk alongside them, that’s all. I concern myself. I wonder if, say, the man striding by on legs that seem shortened from lack of use has cause to feel as pinched and aggrieved as he looks, and why he may be dismayed in his heart. I worry that the slow, sentimental-looking pregnant girl carrying bags of sweets has nobody to listen to her cravings and go to the shop for her, and hurry back to run her a bath and feed her liquorice sticks or spearmint toffee, stroking her belly, as she lies in the deep warm water. I don’t follow them; I just need to know they are safe, the lost ones, the wanderers. I like to see them enter rooms that will shut out the night that’s lapping at the door. I’m anxious and hungry for their well-being, so I give in and let myself be pulled along behind them.