Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

A WEEK LATER, there was a knock at the door, and Clara was sure it would be Belle. She had been thinking all week that Belle would call to explain herself, to ask for forgiveness, to say that she had been frightened, or even uncertain, and that the uncertainty had made her cruel. Clara had rehearsed their conversation in her head. She would listen, she had decided, patiently and kindly, though she would not forgive her lover too quickly.

But when she opened the door it was only her daughter, Alice.

“Belle sent me a message,” Alice said. “Your Belle. How did she even know my name?”

“I don’t know,” said Clara.

She had told Belle about Alice, of course. She had offered up the story of her lost, wild daughter as a kind of intimacy. Or in order to make herself seem more interesting, more strange and unfamiliar than she otherwise might have seemed.

“She wants to come and talk to me,” Alice said. “What’s the matter with her? What does she want?”

“We had a fight,” Clara said, wondering if that was true, after all.

“Does she want to punish you, by talking to me? Or have me convince you to forgive her?”

Clara shook her head. “She’s not like that,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if it was true.

“I’m going to meet her at the café,” Alice said. “It’s closed, but Belle says we can sit in the garden and talk. I’ll send you a message afterwards and tell you what happens.”

Clara tried not to pay too much attention to the time. Several hours passed. The day ended. She sat in the library, not reading the book they were planning to discuss at book club. She turned the pages one at a time, then in batches, going backwards, going forwards. It didn’t seem to matter.

It was almost morning by the time she decided to walk to Alice’s house. She had no idea what she would do when she got there, but at least the walking would give her something to do.

As she walked, she tried to remember, and silently recite, the lines of the rhinoceros sutra. Only fragments of the already-fragmented text would come to her. She remembered that there was something about a kovilara tree that has shed its leaves. She could remember that one of the sutras was: Seeing the danger that comes from affection, wander alone like a rhinoceros . And another: Give up your children, and your wives, and your money, wander alone like a rhinoceros .

She walked down the long drive towards Alice’s house, which was lined on both sides with overgrown black bamboo. There were no lights on in the house. She could see that all the windows were open to let in any cool breeze.

Clara looked in at the windows and saw that Alice had left the children she cared for alone, and the doors unlocked. None of them woke and saw her looking in at them. Some of the creatures were unfamiliar to her; had they come from other reserves? Other continents? Were they all, like Alice, the last of their kind?

Clara found an open door at the back of the house and went in, closing it behind her. She lay on the cool stone floor of the living area. She lay still, listening to the snuffling and breathing of the children, until she heard the birds outside the house waking. She was stiff and tired. She got up and opened the front door, looking up the driveway for a sign of her daughter. Nothing.

She could not quite identify what she was feeling. She was restless, but wanted to be still. She was impatient, but did not want to hear what Belle and Alice had had to say to each other. She longed for the feeling she was already having trouble recalling, of being in the long, cool channel of the library. With light behind her, and light ahead, and this moment, this now , always just a thing she was passing through.

She went from room to room looking in at the children. How carelessly they slept, with the windows open and the doors unlocked. They lay tangled together, sleeping. So fearless. When had she last slept that way?

Alice appeared at the door behind her, looking in at the sleeping babies. “I told you they were beautiful,” she said.

Clara did not answer. She could barely remember the conversations they had had, so many years ago, about Alice’s decision not even to try to have children of her own. She tried to pretend that Alice had not come home yet, and that as the children woke – they were starting to turn and itch in their sleep – they would come to Clara, climbing up and over her. She would prepare breakfast for them, and watch them play on the wide back lawn.

“She didn’t say anything, really,” Alice said. “We had a bottle of wine and Belle said that she wasn’t sure what had happened between you, but that she hoped it would be alright again soon. She said she thought it was too late now, for any of us, to hold grudges or fall in love.”

She said. “Mum, listen. It’s nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. One day, you’ll forget her name. We’ll have to call her That Woman From The Café. We’ll laugh about it.”

Then, “Mum, what are you going to do? There’s nothing you can do. It’s done.”

One of the children came sleepily out of their room and leant against Alice, then clambered up onto her back. Clara smiled at the way Alice moved to accommodate the child; at how natural and easy it seemed for her to do so.

“I have to go,” Clara said. She felt disconnected from all of it, now that she had seen the house with Alice in it, and all the children sleeping so quietly together. All these years there had been a kind of wire connecting her to Alice. A twinging in her ribs whenever she thought of her, and what her future might contain, and now it was gone. Things were exactly as they were, exactly as they were supposed to be.

Clara never saw Belle, or Alice, again. She left Alice’s house and went home, walked through the rooms in which she had spent her life and did not recognise a thing. Even the library, with its walls of unread books, seemed unfamiliar.

So she left the house and started wandering, alone, like a rhinoceros.

The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club were due to meet in a few months’ time, and if she reached them, that was fine. And if not, that would be fine as well. She got a powerful sense of pleasure out of walking away. She was pleased with herself, with the controlled and deliberate way in which she managed it. She scraped Belle out of herself, all those tangled and uncertain emotions, and found that the hollow that was left behind was a good and simple thing.

She saw that she had been living in a false equation: she had believed, like Belle and all the others, like Janet and her husband, that love and futurity were connected. That without a future, love was no longer possible; without Walden as their destination, there was no reason to jettison the hatchling, and no reason not to.

But love does not require a future in order to exist. And the future exists, whether you furnish it with love or not. The second rhinoceros sutra, after all, was clear: Renouncing violence for all living beings, harming not even a one, you would not wish for offspring, so how a companion? Wander alone like a rhinoceros.

Clara turns onto an unfamiliar path. She has passed, finally, beyond the reserve. She does not think about the future, or love, as she walks through the waist-high grass, with its smell of summer and heat. Past the kovilara trees, past the view of the mountain washed in late afternoon light. She doesn’t think about Belle, or Alice, or her husband. The path is shaded, but warm. She can see where it disappears ahead of her.

As she wanders, she thinks about being in the library late in the day. The light from the forest lying complicated, shifting patterns on the floor. And herself, passing through, from one end of the story to the other.