Twenty-Nine

Harry stopped the car for petrol halfway, at a garage high up on the downland in the middle of nowhere.

As he filled the tank, Lin walked to the edge of the forecourt. She leaned on a wooden fence and looked down at the huge scooped field below. The circular line of the hill ran like a vast arm for a quarter of a mile, dotted with scrub hawthorn that could resist the winter winds. Far below, trees appeared as a line of green. Sheep grazed the hill, a huge flock of more than two hundred, but spread out as little discoloured white dots on the landscape. A warm, sweet wind blew off the valley and washed the hilltop like a wave.

Lin closed her eyes.

She had stopped even questioning what was happening to her now. She felt so unbearably tired. As she let go of logic, reason, resistance, the shades of the world altered at will. The voices enclosed her at times, left her alone at other times, but were more claustrophobic than ever when they came. They no longer encircled her but entered her, filling her mind with thoughts of sublime strangeness, a sensation of euphoria, a feeling of being grounded in the roots of life.

Werth had told her that epileptics sometimes felt that they possessed the key to the universe. But she was sure that she was not epileptic. This was not a fleeting sensation; this was conviction that she was part of everything that breathed, and that everything that breathed was part of her. Even blank space rippled with a vibrant code.

The people came to her less insistently now. The crowds had receded, as if marshalled into line by some invisible steward. She saw faint outlines, passing imprints, in certain spaces and rooms: impressions only—spectators who wanted to be noticed or known but who held themselves back. Sometimes their feelings struck her with terrible poignancy. Some of them had accepted their sudden dislocation from life, and turned their yearning attention on those they wanted to reach, but only for seconds. But their agony seemed far away. They were like background music, or wind on a winter night shut out behind glass.

She ought to have felt afraid, but she was not. This had none of the disjointedness, the sense of out-of-place or delusion of a nightmare. She had fallen into place, onto the right track. Those that appeared now came specifically for her, with pictures for her. She had begun to understand that she was supposed to listen to them—and only them—and gently press the others to one side.

Of course there were still exceptions. She couldn’t control them all, or her response to them. For some reason that was too distant, too peripheral to grasp, Caroline Devlin—and Caroline’s kindliness and calm, and her cool, low voice—kept coming into her mind. And then there had been that man as they drove here.

As they had drawn up to traffic lights in a little village—no more than a string of houses, a pub and a tiny shop huddled around a crossroads—she had seen a man running down the side lane to the left of the moving car.

The main road intersected what was no more than a farm road that ran from left to right. She could see him running along, arms pumping, head down.

She had the impression that there was someone or something ahead of him, which he was chasing. As he ran clear of the hedge at the side of the road, the answer became obvious. A dog, a small liver-and-white terrier, hurled itself forward along the road. It looked to be barking, but she heard no sound. The man continued to run heedlessly after it. He was wearing dark breeches, a white collarless shirt. He was no more than thirty. And, as he ran forward into the centre of the main road, he suddenly turned his head.

She saw his expression freeze. Shock and horror distorted his features. In the next split second she felt, rather than saw, a tremendous impact throw him out of the road. She felt him fixed mid-air. Everything around him shuddered. She felt the joints of the day—the hour, the minute of his death—flex.

It was locked to the place. He had gone, but the image remained chained to that location. And she picked it up like a radio picking up a dozen transmissions: the road where two tracks had crossed for a thousand years. The echoes of old rains. The man hit by a vehicle whose shape and sound had since been erased. Animals and men and machines constantly re-crossing that point. The faint smudged broadcast of a house that had once stood there.

‘What is it?’ Harry had asked.

She had blinked. The echoes smoothed back to the traffic lights, the village street.

‘Nothing,’ she had told him.

She glanced back now and saw Harry wiping the windscreen of the car. If she tried hard, she would be able to hear the vibrations that pressed up to him as neatly and smoothly as a second skin. But she chose not to. Something else scratched at her sight, imposing fragments even on the outline of Harry on the black tarmac forecourt of the garage, the open doors of the little shop with its lazily swinging ice-cream sign.

She turned back to her view of the hill, as she waited.

There were no longer any trees. No hill, no road.

She stood at a window, early in the evening, and looked out at a city street. Opposite her were tall, redbrick Edwardian houses, each with three cream-painted front steps and black iron railings. There was a strip of garden where the roses were dusty.

She had got the number of the place from an ad in a magazine. Irma had given it to her, and encouraged her. Lin had rung the number. She had gone for a first interview. She had seen a doctor: a small Indian man who had seemed both bored and reproving. The angle of his arms, the spread fingers of his hands, the upright tilt of his head, told her that their business was a necessity but was not of interest to him.

The abortion cost £300, a huge sum of money. Half of it she had already earned at the Hunting Dog; half of it came from Michael. She would have liked not to take anything at all from Michael, but she had no choice. He had given it to her in an envelope, making a big show of patting her hand and ensuring that she put it safely into her handbag. He had told her not to lose it.

The thing that, irrationally, most upset her was that Michael had always claimed he had no money. He lived in a large house with his mother, and he drove a two-year-old car, and he had been on holiday to Spain—while Lin had never been out of the country—but he always claimed that his mother kept him short.

Now, when the time came, he could lay his hands easily on a hundred and fifty pounds—and would have given her the lot. He went to the station and bought her a return ticket to Manchester. A first-class ticket. She loathed him more for buying first-class than she could ever say. The ticket collector checked it twice, gazing at her as if she had stolen it. She had sat on that train hating Michael to the roots of her soul.

She had worn a cream jacket that day, short and woolly, the kind of thing she didn’t like but had bought from the market because it was cheap and looked “fun”, as if she were going on a jaunt or on holiday. She sat all the way there in the silly jacket, pulling at its bulky sleeves, trying to make it longer than it was. When she got off at Manchester, she felt outrageously visible in it; felt that everyone must be looking. She carried a little red-and-white case that, a century before, she had used to carry her only doll around when she was very small. It had held precious possessions, the little rag-faced doll and the doll’s overwashed clothes. She had picked it up from the seat and felt it accuse her with the whole innocent force of her childhood.

And now it had the address of the place in it. And three hundred pounds, her pyjamas, her slippers, and a pack of sanitary towels.

When she got to the clinic, she had to wait for a while in a reception area. Five other girls were there, none of them over twenty, and all of them alone. She didn’t catch their eyes. All their little cases were pushed under their chairs.

She was seen by the surgeon in a panelled consulting room. He had a very fine walnut desk, which she looked at far more than she looked at him. She noticed, from the ring on his hand, that he was married, and there was a photo on his desk of a woman sitting with three children. She had studied those children as he wrote her details in a file.

‘How many weeks are you?’

Twelve.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘Do you live at home?’

‘No, in a bed-and-breakfast.’

He had raised an eyebrow. ‘Why is that?’

She had paused, ashamed for no good reason. ‘My mother threw me out.’

‘Threw you out? Because of this?’

‘She said I had disgraced her.’

And she had thought of its ironic idiocy, the fury of her mother and brothers, the talk of shame.

‘What have I done that you didn’t do?’ she had demanded. Her mother had slapped her face. ‘It was the only time,’ Lin protested. ‘He raped me …’

‘You were in his car,’ her mother said.

Oh God, the empty street. Running to Irma in her little bedsit. Going to Social Services.

On the doorstep, her brother had said to her, ‘This house has been dirty since you came into it.’

Block it out.

Paint it away.

Make the space black.

The surgeon in the clinic asked her to undress. As she went behind the screen, he said, ‘Is this your first pregnancy?’

She had sat there frozen, naked from the waist down, a blanket tightly wrapped around her, uncomfortably high up from the ground on a leather couch spread with green paper. She had gazed at the panelling, at the carpeted floor.

‘Is this your first pregnancy?’ he had repeated.

He had come around the corner of the screen, having taken off his jacket. He was now wearing a pair of surgical gloves. She dare not look at his face, so she looked at the wood panel alongside her, whose edges were caked with polish.

‘Would you lie back and relax,’ he said.

She couldn’t move. She hugged the blanket tighter.

‘You must lie back so that I can examine you,’ he said.

She began to cry, but she didn’t make a sound. She was trying to stay rigid so that her very solidity and stillness would dry the tears up, but they came shamefully pouring down. She stuffed the blanket under her knees, gripped it bunched up in one fist, and wiped her face with the other.

‘Don’t you want me to examine you?’ he asked.

Her mouth wouldn’t work without shaking. When she tried to speak, she felt her lips make an ugly shape. The surgeon leaned against the wall, looking weary.

‘Would you like to go home?’ he said.

‘No,’ she told him.

‘Would you like to think about this a little more?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘You want me to do this operation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then, my dear, I must examine you.’

She lay down. He took the blanket away.

‘Pull your legs up, and then let your knees fall apart.’

She went away to another place. She looked at the panel, and tried to think whether it had been carved or made by a machine. She tried to think how old it was, how old the house was. He finished, turned away and stripped off the gloves, throwing them into a bin. While she got dressed, he sat at his desk. As she came out from behind the curtain, he gave her a piece of paper and told her to see the nurse outside.

As she had waited for the operation in the private room they had given her, she looked out at the dusty roses and the Edwardian houses.

There was nothing left to cry about, she thought. It was the sensible thing. She was brave to do it on her own. And everything would go back to being how it was before. She would be at university in six weeks, after the summer break. No one would ever know.

She had sat on the bed, her hands pressed flat to her stomach. It was her child. Her first child.

And it would be dead in less than an hour.

A hand settled softly now on her arm.

Lin looked up.

‘What is it?’ Harry asked. ‘What’s the matter?’

She gazed at him—back from the clinic bed, from the tall red houses beyond the window, from the sense of oncoming dread.

Looking intently at her, Harry fished a handkerchief from his pocket.

‘Use this,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, it’s clean.’

She smiled, and wiped her face.

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ he asked. ‘I might be able to help.’

She shook her head, gave him back his handkerchief, and walked over to the car.