LYDIA RAN.
When she ran, things made more sense. The world slowed down around her. Her body with all of its errant desires and needs concentrated solely on putting one foot in front of the other, arms pumping, breath easy, smooth-gaited and covering the miles.
She used to run with her father, when she was little. They’d go running through the park, round and round the perimeter in a circle. Her father bought her proper running shoes, in blue and red and silver, and they both wore matching Superman T-shirts. Her little legs would get tired but it seemed like her father could run for ever. He used to run marathons. When she got a stitch he would scoop her up onto his shoulders and she would laugh, holding her arms up to try to touch the leaves of the trees.
That was one of the ways she remembered him best.
Lydia ran without looking at her surroundings. The pavements were smooth and wet after the rain and the air was cool on the sweat that filmed her forehead and her neck and legs. One house after another, street after street, Tennyson after Yeats after Coleridge after Browning. Her English teacher in Year Nine had made a map of the estate with little pictures of the actual poets and samples of their poems next to the streets named after them. They were all men.
If she could tell her father about how she felt, he would know what to say. He would know what to do. Her father would understand; he wouldn’t try to pretend that everything was happy or ask for reassurance that she was OK and everyone was normal. He would take her running and he would lift her up to brush the leaves.
And she was not looking at her surroundings, but her legs knew she was thinking of her father. They carried her past the houses into a tunnel of trees. The road inclined upwards slightly, and the air was hushed and cool. And then there was the bridge.
She liked running here sometimes. Her mother avoided it, didn’t even drive over it, would go miles out of her way. But Lydia thought it was peaceful. She stopped, breathing fast, and took her earbuds out.
The bridge went over a railway cutting. The sides were steep and covered with green, sloping down to the gravel bottom, where four sets of tracks pointed in either direction. In the distance was a bridge just like this one: an arch of red brick with black iron railings.
It was quiet here; something about how the cutting was made, or maybe the trees around it, meant that the normal neighbourhood sounds didn’t penetrate. Lydia put her hand on the railing and stretched, holding one leg bent behind her with her hand to ease out tightness in her quadriceps. She read the metal plaque attached to the bridge.
IN MEMORY OF
DR STEPHEN LEVINSON
3.9.1970–10.6.2005
The plaque was going slightly green at the edges. She stretched her other leg and ran her fingers over the words. She’d done it so often, over the years, that she could read it with her eyes closed.
‘I love her, Dad,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know how to let her go.’
Lydia brushed her palm over the plaque again. Looked out over the open air, the empty space between one bridge and the other, waiting for an answer that didn’t come.
She thought about the book she had borrowed from Granny Honor’s room this afternoon, the familiarity of the writing in it. Was it, as she suspected, a part of her father’s story? Was it something that could help her understand what to do?
Lydia lingered on the bridge, rubbing the words, until a train rushed by below her and disturbed the silence, and then she turned and started running again.
She ran fast enough so that her lungs burned and she didn’t have to feel her heart.