Peter Robinson - The First Cut

Sarah nodded. “I’m thinking about doing my Ph.D. in Victorian fiction, and you know how I love biographies. It seemed a pleasurable enough way of getting back into academic gear.”

“And is it? I mean, Hardy’s hardly a light, cheerful read, is he?”

Sarah laughed. “I don’t know about a pessimist, but he was certainly a bloody pervert.”

“How?” asked Kirsten. “I’ve only read Far from the Madding Crowd for that novel course in first year. I don’t even remember much about that except some soldier showing off his fancy swordplay. I suppose that was meant to be phallic?”

Sarah laughed. “Yes, but that’s not what I meant. All writers do that kind of symbolism thing to some extent, don’t they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing,” Sarah went on, “do you know he used to like attending public executions when he was in his teens? Especially when women were being hanged.” She reached for the book and turned the pages slowly as she talked. “There was one in Dorchester and he told someone about it when he was much older…ah, here it is…1856. Martha Browne was the woman’s name, and she was hanged for murdering her husband. She caught him with another woman and they got into a fight. He attacked her with a whip and she stabbed him. Hanging her was the Victorians’ idea of justice. Anyway, Hardy went along and wrote about it.” She pushed the book under Kirsten’s nose. “Just look at that.”

Kirsten read: “What a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back.”

“I mean, really,” Sarah went on, “the poor woman was swinging at the end of a bloody rope and Hardy makes out as if she was entering some kind of wet T-shirt contest. Would you credit it?”

Kirsten read over the description; it was certainly tinged with eroticism.

“Am I right?” Sarah asked, pouring more wine. “Don’t you get the feeling that Hardy got some kind of kinky sexual pleasure from watching the woman get snuffed?” She put a hand to her mouth quickly. “Oh. I’m sorry, love. I…I put my foot in it. Must be the wine going to my head. I mean, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to…you know.”

Kirsten waved her hand. “It’s all right. I’d rather you say what you like than walk around handling me with kid gloves. I can take it. And anyway, you’re right, it is sexual.”

“Yes. And what’s more, did you notice how he turns her into some sort of convenient image for a poem. As if her life was only important because he got a charge from watching her get hanged. She wasn’t even a person, an individual, to him.”

“I wonder what she was like,” Kirsten said abstractedly.

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“I suppose not. But it’s not as odd as all that, is it? The way Hardy uses her, I mean. We all tend to see other people as bit players in our own dramas, don’t we? I mean we’re all self-centered.”

“I don’t think so. Not to that extent.”

“Maybe not. But you might be surprised.” She held her glass out and Sarah emptied the bottle. Kirsten was beginning to feel a little tipsy. After the journey and the disorienting effect of coming back to her old room, the wine was affecting her more than it usually would. Still, it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. She helped herself to another chunk of Wensleydale.

Sarah shook the wine bottle, grinned and jumped up, ruffling Kirsten’s short hair as she passed by. “Fear not,” she said. “I suspected we might need more than the usual amount of alcoholic sustenance. How about some music? All right?”

Kirsten shrugged. “Fine.”

Sarah turned on the cassette player and disappeared behind the curtain into the kitchen. She must have been playing the tape earlier because one song was just fading out, and then “Simple Twist of Fate” began to play. It was the second track on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Kirsten remembered, and it used to be one of her favorites; now, as she listened to Dylan’s hoarse, plaintive voice while Sarah was busy opening the second bottle, she realized that the strange lyrics didn’t mean what she used to think they did. Nothing did anymore.

Sarah returned with a larger bottle, lifting it up with a flourish. “Da-da! More your cheaper kind of plonk, really, but I’m sure at this stage it’ll do.”

Kirsten smiled. “Oh, it’ll do fine.”

“What did you mean,” Sarah asked when she had filled the glasses and sat down, “when you said I’d be surprised? What would I be surprised by?”

Kirsten frowned. “I was thinking of the man who attacked me,” she said. “I wasn’t a person, an individual, to him, was I? I was just a convenient symbol of what he hated or feared.”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“I don’t know. Would it have made any difference if it had been someone I knew? I can think of one way it would have: I’d know who it was.”

“And?”

“I’d bloody well kill him.” Kirsten lifted her glass of wine too quickly and spilled some down the front of her shirt. She patted herself on the chest. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’ll dry.”

“An eye for an eye?”

“Something like that.”

Sarah shook her head slowly.

“I’m not crazy, you know,” Kirsten went on. “I mean it. Oh, there’ve been times…Sometimes I think it’s some sort of contagious disease he gave me, like AIDS, only in the mind. Or like vampirism. Can you imagine all those ripped-up women coming back from the grave to prey on men? Of course, I didn’t die, but maybe a part of me did. Maybe I have a little bit of the undead in me.”

“That’s cuckoo talk, Kirstie. Or drunk talk. You’re not going to convince me you’re turning into some sort of vampire version of Joan of Arc.”

Kirsten looked hard at her and felt the focus blurring. My god, she thought, I’m losing it. I almost told her. She laughed and reached for a cigarette. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m not. It’s all academic anyway, isn’t it?”

“Thank god for that,” Sarah said. The music stopped and she got up and turned over the tape.

As the two of them chatted, Kirsten glanced out now and then at the windows of the bedsits and flats over the street, just as she had in years past. At some point, she noticed “Shelter from the Storm,” another of her favorites, was playing, and her eyes burned with tears. She held them back.

Around midnight, Kirsten began to yawn in the middle of one of Sarah’s stories about a retired brigadier-general who had strayed into Harridan by mistake.

“Boring you, am I?” Sarah asked.

“No. I’m just tired, that’s all. It must be the wine and the travel. How about sleeping arrangements?”

Sarah yawned too. “Look, now you’ve got me at it. How about I take the chair and you have the bed?”

“Oh no, I couldn’t do that.”

“It is your room, after all. I’ve just been caretaking.”

“It was my room. No, I’ll put a couple of cushions on the floor and sleep there.”

“But that’s stupid. You’ll be so uncomfortable. Hell, it’s a three-quarter bed, let’s share it.”

Kirsten said nothing for a moment. The suggestion made her feel nervous and shy. She knew that Sarah wasn’t offering any kind of sexual invitation, but the thought of her own patched-up body next to Sarah’s smooth, whole skin made her cheeks burn.

“I haven’t brought a nightie,” she said.

“Not to worry. I’ve got a spare pair of pajamas. Okay?”

“All right.” Kirsten was too tired to argue, and the idea of sleeping in what had once been her own bed was inviting. When she stood up, she felt herself sway a little. She really had drunk too much.