Morag Joss: The Night Following

She turned to gaze in the direction Daphne had taken but she couldn’t see her. After only a few yards the walls and pavements of Station Road melted into a thick blur. She rubbed her eyes and set off towards Roper Street, protesting inwardly at Daphne’s words that were still echoing in her head.

It wasn’t true that getting married meant ending up somebody’s unpaid skivvy. She wouldn’t. It wasn’t true that men were all the same. Stan was different. Stan didn’t want a skivvy. He was principled. He believed in equality and the rights of the working man. And this January was different from other Januarys, not freezing and colourless at all if you only looked a little deeper, beneath the cold, ashy surface of the world.

27 Cardigan Avenue

The whateverth May

Dear Ruth

I’m not sure these letters are right. Carole says there isn’t a right or wrong, the idea is I just write what I want, whatever I’m thinking. I can express anything I feel. Including anger, she added.

Write what I want? What does that mean? I said to her, You don’t appreciate the situation, Ruth’s the one for the words, not me. I’m no good with words. Not the letter writing kind, anyway. Oh, give me rainfall bar charts for Derbyshire since the second world war or an ornithological distribution map of the British Isles and I’ll bore for Britain on those, I said. I’m on safe ground there. But as I told Carole, you were the English teacher, I was only Geography. I looked out some Overdale photos and showed her. Even found some Overdale poems your kids did.

Carole won’t let it go though, she says of course I don’t have to if I don’t find it helpful, but she’d like me to persevere with the letters. Just write whatever I’m thinking, express anything I’m feeling. It’s well known, she said, to be a useful tool in grief management.

Huh, I can’t even think straight so how can I feel straight? Let alone write it down? I told her, Ruth’s the one with the words, or aren’t you listening, I said.

Maybe you are angry, she says. You don’t need qualifications or special language to say you’re angry. Or to write to your wife. Just use ordinary words.

Use ordinary words to say what? I don’t see how telling you about window cleaner, pressure cooker etc can be a useful tool for anything. I never was the writer. Nor the talker. You were. What would the listener have to say after all this time?

Carole says whatever I write it’s for you, not her, but I asked her toread this just the same. She thinks it’s a start. I asked her to leave. Told her I was tired.

Well, no more for now.

Arthur.

Ps later- STILL no sign of pressure cooker yet.

I would rather omit this. I observe it now only reluctantly and without hope of forgiveness, because nothing should be omitted. Though I have braced myself time and again to go back over it, as I might make myself watch a film with shocking scenes that I thought I ought to try to understand, I don’t remember, to begin with, that I did actively decide to close the garage doors behind the wrecked car. Until that day I had always left the garage doors open for Jeremy’s return in the evening, but this day was unlike any other, and certainly I was now quite unlike myself. So I can’t know if my reason for closing them was to conceal my shame, or the evidence of the collision, or because some part of my mind had already planned what was to happen next. Was I at that point angry or frightened, rational or deranged? I must in some way have chosen to do what I did next but I have no idea if I was in control of my actions or not. I can’t locate a memory of anything as deliberate as motivation, so any finer distinction such as the shading between compulsion, intention, calculation, and desire simply has no meaning for me in this instance.

I was aware nevertheless of a single swift moment of puzzlement, and intense regret, that I should be reaching up to pull a hammer, a crowbar, and a heavy chisel from their hooks on the garage wall at roughly the same time as I would ordinarily have been lifting this or that delicate paintbrush-a tiny, fairylike bunched tail of sable, itself so exquisite-and stroking another smoky, barely pigmented sweep of colour across one of my diluted studies of petals and stamens, or butterflies. But that was all. I did not pause. I did not consider, let alone reconsider. I wasn’t thinking at all.

I didn’t stop until the bonnet was hammered in, the doors were smashed, and my feet were crunching through the orange and red chips of glass littering the floor from the busted lights. The front bumper was split and hanging off, the grilles were shattered, the tyres ripped. The windows and windscreen had gone except for a frill of broken glass. I was gasping and sweating, and when I paused to rest I caught my reflection in the window in the back wall. I could see I had changed. My eyes were larger and brighter but I wasn’t sure if that made me look younger and prettier, or just insane. Then I noticed a smell of fruit and petrol, and a chinking sound, quieter than silence, as a few bits of glass dripped from the windscreen like little cubes of melting ice and landed on the bonnet and dashboard and shopping bags. I took a deep breath and thought, Oh, thank God. It’s over, thank God. Whatever it is, it’s all done now. It’s all stopping.

I was wrong. I raised the crowbar in my hand and lowered it gently, gently. Then I heard myself scream. I lifted the bar again and smashed it down hard again on the bonnet, a number of times, and I followed that with several blows of the hammer. Then I doubled over and yelled, but I couldn’t hear myself above the din I’d made. It was like standing inside a splitting bell. I straightened and tossed the bar and the hammer onto the roof of the car. They banged across it, slithered off, and clanged on the floor. Then I reached in through the ragged passenger window, opened the glove compartment, found the condom wrapper, and placed it carefully in the center of the pitted roof. I could hardly see. After a few moments the noise changed into a kind of fuzzy echo that set my skull vibrating and shivering under my hair. A distant ringing started up from even deeper and lower inside me. I stood watching the loose bits of glass hanging in the windscreen until they stopped swaying and glinting.

When all was still and quiet again, I wheeled from the corner of the garage an old barbecue we hadn’t used for years (too basic for Jeremy now, just a metal basin on legs) and brought it to the middle of the floor. I returned to the shelves and rummaged until I found what I needed and then, using some sticks of kindling and a slosh of liquid lighter fuel, I set a small fire going in the barbecue.

Then I reached into the back of the car and gathered up the pages I’d picked off the road. I began automatically to put them in order, as if my destroyed, methodical self was struggling obstinately to discover some system at work in all this mayhem. I concerned myself only with the numbers. Whatever the words were about, I didn’t have a complete set. The beginning was missing; the first page I had was number 94 and was headed Chapter 15: 1962 Christmas Eve.

One by one I fed them into the flames and watched them flare and blacken and turn fragile and silvery. The garage filled with hot smoke and a choking smell, but the rhythmic lift and turn of each page as it met the flames soothed me. By the time the last one was collapsing into the pile of rectangular grey veils, I was quite calm again.