Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

She bawled them out in her usual mild way, exasperated rather than furious. They agreed that they’d call it a day rather than dig themselves in deeper, but would schedule an extra rehearsal to make up for it. Dispirited, they packed up their instruments and decided not to go for a coffee, since all they’d do would be mope about their crappy performance.

Nina decided to take a stroll around the university grounds, something she liked to do whatever mood she was in. Three years ago she’d graduated, but although she had no postgraduate connection with the University of Virginia she loved it like a home: its carefully preserved beauty, the way that everywhere you went you sensed the history that had soaked into the very walls and boulevards.

She’d passed the Rotunda when the heat flared at the back of her neck.

Nina had learned not to turn suddenly when that happened. Whoever was watching would be gone and she’d feel — and look — foolish. The trick was to pretend nothing was amiss, then try to catch the watcher out of the corner of your eye. Sometimes they were still there when you looked, just for an instant. Usually they weren’t.

As nonchalantly as she could, Nina shrugged her shoulder as though hefting the violin case slung across it, turning her head slightly as she did so. Her glance took in the Rotunda. Students milled in small groups on the steps, but there was nobody looking in her direction. Nobody doing so overtly, anyhow.

Heart hammering, her mouth like ash, she turned her back deliberately on the building and set off across the lawn, passing Jefferson’s statue with its blank stare.

*

Nina had formed the string quartet shortly after graduation, together with two other alumni and Joe, their cellist, who was older. Ruth, their manager, was a former tutor of Nina’s and still taught at the university. She was as supportive of Nina as ever, while making it quite plain that she believed her former pupil was destined for greater things than a small-town quartet and needed to stretch herself a bit.

Then again, Ruth didn’t know everything about Nina.

Since graduating Nina had lived in the same tiny rented apartment downtown. She’d had offers from potential flatmates, and would have been able to afford a bigger place had she chosen to share, but she preferred to be on her own, needed her own space. Her grandmother, with whom she’d lived here in Charlottesville since she was eleven, had died a week after Nina’s graduation ceremony. It was as if she’d hung on until her granddaughter had reached the point where she could fend for herself.

Her grandmother had left her enough to live modestly but comfortably for ten years, and now Nina had a small but growing income from the quartet, which was getting highly favourable notices in the Charlottesville press. Enough money to be content with, a place to call home, a small but close circle of friends, her music, and her violin. Nina would, if asked, have said truthfully that she was happy.

Her pulse had slowed by the time she was halfway across the lawn, and she decided to meander down the pavilions and enjoy the ingenuity of their serpentine walls. It was almost lunchtime and students were starting to spill out of classrooms and congregate in couples and groups. They looked, for the most part, scarily young.

Twenty-six, girl, and they see you as old.

Overhead the sky was a flawless expanse of cornflower. The air held the merest bite of coolness, something that would disappear for good in the coming weeks as the spring heat settled in. The sinuous walls separated the pavilions’ individual gardens from each other. Nina tipped her head back and drew in the scents of honeysuckle and rose.

A man stood on the path ten yards ahead, facing her.

Staring at her.

He stuck out because of his height — six feet four, perhaps — and the dark suit he was wearing. He had his hand to his ear and was talking into a cell phone. As Nina approached — her stride hadn’t faltered; she’d learned to avoid doing that, too — she realised he wasn’t looking at her, was simply gazing off into the distance as people sometimes do when on the phone.

She drew near and, as she passed him, glanced at his face. He was maybe forty, deeply tanned, his skin seamed by thin white scars which stood out in contrast.

She caught the liquid flash of his eye as he peered at her.

Once again terror choked her throat, though she walked on.

This time you have to look back, she told herself. He’s real. He won’t disappear.

Nina took six more steps. Then turned.

The man was gazing back at her over his shoulder.

She held his stare and after a second he glanced away, continuing his phone call. Nina walked backwards, keeping her eyes on him, but he didn’t turn again.

Despite herself, Nina broke into a stumbling run.

*

The leaves on the maple trees were flat hands grabbing for her, the unbroken dome of the sky a lid keeping her prisoner.

Of course it was possible the man had turned to look at her because they’d made eye contact and he was wondering if he knew her. Of course his might have been the normal reaction of a man noticing a young and reasonably attractive woman passing by. But Nina knew the difference between the feel of a man’s interested gaze and that of a Watcher.

This was definitely the latter.

She ran, and the cool lunchtime air sucked at her, trying to slow her, turning viscous. Ahead the perimeter of the campus beckoned and threatened, the anonymity of the city beyond. It was a small city, Charlottesville, and she wouldn’t be able to lose itself among its forty thousand souls the way she would in New York or Chicago.

She didn’t look back, even when she felt the footsteps pounding at her heels, even as the hand descended on her arm to slow her. Except it didn’t; that was imagination intruding again, bleeding into the real word, its thick strokes smudging the boundaries.

Time for meds, a crazy voice inside her piped up. Time at long last to start taking the pills, girl. And the hell with your violin playing.

Nina erupted on to the street, where suddenly young people didn’t predominate and elderly ladies with shopping baskets shuffled past harassed mothers with bunches of bawling kids sprouting from their hands. She weaved and jostled, the sidewalk like a combined minefield and obstacle course. Downtown reached for her in the near distance. There was her apartment, her haven. And while part of her laughed at the idea that she’d feel any safer there — the Watchers, after all, wouldn’t be deterred by the simple locks she’d had installed on the door and windows — another part shielded itself behind the atavistic power of the notion of home .

Three streets on, after a hair’s-breadth dodging of a car bumper and a forest of raised middle fingers, Nina slowed, her chest finally tightening in protest and her legs cramping.

She turned, swept the street left to right and back, ready to run again.

There was nobody. No tall tanned man striding in pursuit, no slowly cruising car with tinted windows and bald man in mirror shades presenting his granite face through the window.

No voices.

Nina sank to her knees, the crack of the sidewalk against bone sending unnoticed jabs of pain up her legs. She clasped her face in her hands.

It hadn’t been as intense as this for a long time. Six months, maybe.

When she felt ready to stand she did so, rising with a straight back, not trusting her balance to cope with the heft of the violin on her back and avoid toppling her over. She took her hands from her eyes, blinked at the garish glare of the noonday light around her.

A woman pushed an infant-laden stroller by her, smiling happily into Nina’s face.